TikTok Sale Or Ban Moves Forward In U.S. — With Mike Solana

Mike Solana is the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the potential forced sale or ban of TikTok as the U. S. congress voted to pass a bill requiring it. Join us for an in-depth discussion of the arguements for and against banning the app, and how big money is influencing some of the key players. We also talk about Elon Musk, the state of X, Temu and Shein, the power of social media algorithms, and Devin, the first AI software engineer. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology Premium? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mike Solana from Founders Fund and Pirate Wires joins us as the US House of Representatives votes on whether to force TikTok to sell itself or be banned. We'll discuss the push, the rationale, and the results right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:51Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you with a great guest. Mike Solana is here. He's the CMO at Founders Fund and the Editor-in-Chief of Pirate Wires. And we're going to talk about this potential TikTok ban from the House of Representatives as Congress votes. This is the first time we're going to actually do a podcast with C-SPAN open in the second window. It's very exciting, and I'm thrilled to open, I'm thrilled to welcome Mike to the show. Mike, welcome. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. So, obviously, a big vote, seems like it came out of nowhere, but reading Pirate Wires, it seems like there was actually something that happened that's been really under discussed, that you pointed out, that I think we should begin with, that

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  sort of precipitated this whole event. So, you write, "Last week, following a classified hearing with officials from the FBI and the Justice Department," which we still know almost nothing about, "for which a bipartisan group of lawmakers resurrected Trump's attempt at TikTok divestiture." So, yeah, lead us into that.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know much about it. We do know that it happened and this was like, but the people who were who first sort of went forth with the information included this one straight piece of information, which is accurate and no one knows really anything else about, which is that there is some kind of intelligence thing happening that has been shared with lawmakers, which triggered the entire thing, which should have been shared. I believe there was more information. I'm not sure in the exact timing, but but there was another brief today with the Broad House. I'm not sure how much was shared, maybe part of the classified information, maybe none. Who knows? Again, like this is like wildly underreported and nobody, I've not been able to get my hands on the information. All of my contacts in Washington know that that had a major part of the triggering. And then someone else pointed out on Twitter that like

• 3:00Speaker 01

  the entire thing coincided with a handful of high profile spy cases. In one in tech, one was the Google AI guy who got taken down, but all of this within like a few day period. Regardless of what was shared with them, we know that TikTok has had this data problem for, you know, years and all the way, including, including after Project Texas. It just, that wasn't enough to really, I think, get the Democrats going. And then suddenly it was, something happened and it was. And all of this came together within a week.

• 3:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the timing is incredible, especially there was a Wall Street Journal story talking about how TikTok leadership basically went back to China. And said, all is clear. Joe Biden is on TikTok and I think we've made Pat made it past some of the big hurdles. And then I guess

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Which just happened. That was the Super Bowl, right? That was like not long ago.

• 3:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And then clearly they they didn't understand something and it does sound like this, this intelligence briefing probably, I mean, must have triggered it. So you mentioned data, right? That there was this Project Texas that was supposed to handle the data partnership with Oracle, that Oracle secures the data. And I wonder, so, you know, this is something that's been known for a while, like the way that the data is going to be stored. So I'm just trying to think about like the possibilities of this intelligence briefing, like what could have sent this off? Now, maybe it was mishandling of data, but it also, I mean, we have an election coming up and I think the biggest fear for me and others around TikTok has just been like, it's a black box algorithm. Yeah, we have no idea how the people there are controlling culture here. And I'm curious if you think it's

• 4:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  it's more of that that precipitated this. I mean, I know we don't know or a data thing.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  The cra- the crazy thing about, and I think the problematic thing about the TikTok.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  The pro argument for TikTok divestment is that it seems to be driven by people with a million different reasons for wanting it. Like, there are no shortage of reasons for people to not like TikTok, and they're not really all in agreement on just the American user data going to China, even though that seems to be the reason that the bill is happening. And so I want to give, I'm pro divestment, but I want to give the anti-divestment people, especially the sort of anti-divestment people suspicious of government power in general, a little bit of grace here, because the truth is, it is like, very chaotic. And as you mentioned, there are arguments totally focused on the propaganda component, and that does

• 5:27Speaker 01

  seem to be one of the major motivating, motivating forces here. I think there's, from what I've seen, there is less proof really on that side. There is no, like, smoking gun, where we do know the data's been sent over, but surely both of those are being used, both of those reasons are being used to justify forcing divestiture. And on the propaganda side, it's kind of like, we don't know, but also, why on earth would we take a risk like that? Then, of course, you get people who say, well, our own companies do that as well, and we also don't know what those algorithms look like. And I think that's a fair critique, to a certain extent. Like, I just am not personally moved by the argument that Mark

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Zuckerberg is a greater threat, or an equal threat, to Xi Jinping. And I do genuinely see people making that argument, and it, I guess, again, like, that's something that I maybe understand coming out of the last election, but I just, yeah, I just, it's tougher for me. I'm not, I'm not sold completely.

• 6:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and even Trump is making that argument. And we'll get to that in a minute, and Facebook in a moment. But I think it's important just to sort of set the table here and talk a little bit about what this bill is. And, you know, obviously, the House of Representatives should be voting on it momentarily, and, oh, they're voting now. So, okay. So, we'll talk about the result as we're on air. But the bill is not, you know, TikTok has referred to this bill as a bill to ban. It's not exactly a bill to ban. So can you describe exactly what the bill says? And, right, and what happens if it, yeah, and what happens if it makes it out of the House of Representatives?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  So it's a divestiture bill, which means that TikTok is going to be forced to sell and not even necessarily to an American. It just has to sell to someone that's not one of our, uh, uh, what is it adversarial powers or whatever. I forget the exact phrase they use in the bill, but that's an actual, that's like a, you, you like, there's a list of four countries that have been determined by Congress to be, you know, these adversarial powers. So if you're not controlled by one of those four powers, um, you know, you can buy the, you can buy the app. I think that that is honestly also a bit of a, a pickle for TikTok. It's forced to sell. Like who do they sell to? You know that like Lena Collins not going to allow Facebook to buy it or TikTok. God, no. Is Elon Musk going to be allowed?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Not even, I don't even know that Elon could buy it right now, but like he would, it doesn't even matter. It's a moot point. It'll never be allowed. So there's a question of who has to buy it, but certainly the, the letter of the law of this bill is if you are a company, an app specifically, maybe also has a website and you are controlled by one of these four powers. And there is a national security risk as determined by the president. And like, that's kind of a wishy part where it's like, I don't know. That seems like a, a problem to me to give that much power to the president, but you have these, the powers too. So it's not a super broad, it's not nearly as broad as the detractors are saying.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  If these things line up, divestiture can be forced. That means they have to sell. They have six months to do so. I believe it's six months. I'll have to double check. And, um, and then it would be removed from the app stores and things like this and shut down. But, uh, you have six months to sell and there are no shortage of buyers. It's just a question of, I do wonder who is going to buy it.

• 8:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And Biden has said that he'll sign it if it comes to his desk. We still don't know what the Senate's going to do. So.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, from what I've heard, that's a slam dunk. It's just like, they're going to pass it. Um, so if it, if it, if it, the vote in the House, works, it'll go to the Senate where I've heard it's much more likely to pass. Right now, this vote, I think. I've been, it seems like it's gonna pass, but you never really know in the house. And from what I was just watching before we started, there seems to be, it's interesting to see bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition. We rarely see things like this where it's like, it's not, it seems to be, I don't know, cross ideological in both directions.

• 9:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and it's right now forty-five, seven yay in terms of passing. So it has to get two thirds, but we got eleven minutes left, so we'll see how it goes. But early lead to ban, which is, which is wild. We'll obviously keep you posted through the episode.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Well, to divest. To divest. The ban thing is, this distinction is important, I think, because a ban really is, that's way more aggressive. That's like, you know, we don't want this thing to exist. And when we talk about reasons that people are supporting divestment, and I said, you know, the two big ones are, certainly the reason that is being argued in today's hearing is the information and we hear a little bit of the propaganda. But there are a million reasons, and one of them is people just don't like the app, right? There are a lot of people who are just like, I fucking hate TikTok and I want to ban it. And that's crazy and wrong and not a good reason to ban something. And then there are people who are like, you know, they want more control or they want less control or things like this.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  There are people who just think it's degrading society, again, not a good reason to ban something. There are people who think it's digital fentanyl and addiction, which, I mean, maybe. But so is, you know, that obviously implicates every social media company to a certain degree. And also, I think like television, you know, granted, this is television that lives in your pocket, so it's much worse. And it's designed to find exactly what you want to see and give it to you. But these are things that, these are questions where like, we don't really have good answers yet in terms of what it's doing to you. And I think that you need more information before you act. Like this is cigarettes or something. I don't know that we really know that.

• 11:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I totally agree. And I, you know, so I said ban, I must have slipped because it sort of leads into my next question, which is whether this is going to be a de facto ban and whether it is what that says about the whole TikTok operation in the first place. And that of course is, you know, it comes to China and whether they actually are willing to divest.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  So first of all, CNN story from 2023 says an outright divestment isn't in the cards. Not least because the Chinese government views TikTok's technology as sensitive and has taken steps since 2020 to ensure it can veto any sale by its Beijing-based owner ByteDance. And then as we get closer to the vote today, you have a, someone who, who used to be basically is a Chinese government propagandist. He used to work for China State Media. He's actually kind of an interesting follow on, on X. His name is Hu Jijin. He writes, I support TikTok's tough response. Either it is ByteDance's TikTok or the government might as well shut it down. But ask the 170 million, ask the 170 million TikTok users first, do they agree?

• 12:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Basically, he's saying, if you're not, if you're gonna force the divestiture, we're gonna just shut this thing down. And a lot of people have pointed this out, like, that's kind of a tell, like, that's interesting. I'm curious what your response is to the fact that this is the position.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's interesting for a couple of different reasons. The first one is ByteDance TikTok comms is going overdrive, saying that this has nothing to do, this app has nothing to do with China, no control, like, it's all misinformation. And then you mean to tell me that China is like, whatever Xi Jinping wants is how this is gonna go? Like, if Xi Jinping doesn't want to sell, then it can't be sold, then they're in fucking control? Like, what are we talking about here? Like, it's just a complete lie that they're not in control. But let's table that. And then I think you're getting at something very interesting, which is why wouldn't they want to? Why would you go on it? Why would you want this to go to zero? Right? It's such an important, it's like a huge, successful company, like, why zero?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  And it's because you don't want people to find out what is there. We all lived through what happened when Twitter changed ownership and how much information was released and what was revealed. And I think that is the reason. I think it's like, it's worth 80, 100 billion dollars to China to not.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  To not reveal anything. It's just, it's just, it's like an easy, it's like an easy, it's an easy buy for them. Like they're, they're buying secrecy. Um, and that again, yeah, I agree. It's a tell. It's like that alone. Just like, it's just crazy thing that they wouldn't, that they would rather go to zero than sell. Um, but I mean, it's crazy until you, you think about what must be hidden. And then it's like, okay, well that makes sense. And it's another really good reason to, to, uh, force divestiture.

• 13:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, the one thing that I'll say is it could, it's first of all, it seems like a red flag to me. I mean, it's definitely a red flag. It could just be positioning. Like basically like, you know, saying, all right, if you're going to ban us, we're going to shut down. And then there's going to be political consequences for you. And I, I do want to ask you about the political consequences because, um, what do you, so people do love TikTok. What do you think happens to the party that ends up banning, uh, uh, or the politicians that vote to ban TikTok? Because we do, we did see their, their offices flooded with all these calls from kids and maybe parents saying, don't ban the app.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  You got a lot of mentally ill teenagers who TikTok encouraged to call Congress. That did happen. Um, I think.

• 14:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Come on, they, the people, there's definitely mentally non-ill teenagers that also called.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  It's true that people use TikTok. We see that like four hours a day. It's clearly, I mean, I said, we don't know that it's an addiction. I think we should definitely look into the effect of social media on people.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I think that people want to be able to afford rent. And I think that like, that is the thing that people are going to vote on. It's going to be the economy. It's going to be rent. It's going to be probably things like abortion and stuff really motivates people. I think these are the things that persistently move people to the polls. Um, it's very hard to mobilize people on this tech stuff unless it really impacts their life. The, I saw a vote on, the last time I saw this was, um, maybe the closest comparison would be like, uh, the California anti-ride sharing bill and that.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Was shut down by voters, but it costs so much money to get people to vote in a way on that bill that would lead to rideshare apps kind of remaining in operation. And I, that's something that people use every day. That's an app that actually makes their life easier. They maybe needed to get to work or whatever. This is entertainment and it will be very interesting. I highly doubt, I think people will be really upset and like yell about it. And then it's like, well, where are they going to yell about it? Because TikTok's gone. If TikTok's actually banned, where are they going to yell about it? And I don't think they're voting on it. I don't think they're voting on like, oh, this one streaming app is gone. Meanwhile, they, you have YouTube Shorts, you have Instagram, you have, you

• 16:16Speaker 01

  know, whatever else emerges. And again, that's if it, that's if it, if China shuts it down, which

• 16:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  At that point, who cares? If China is so willing to shut it down that like, there's something nefarious, you're like, confirmed something nefarious going on.

• 16:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Then it was definitely the right choice.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  How upset they are. And I think the average American won't care either.

• 16:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. We have a CNN story that just showed up. TikTok content creator says the bill could, that could ban the platform would influence her vote on election day. Like, you might get some influencers who will make their vote based off of that. But, but I doubt it will extend, although who knows? It's, it's interesting how people

• 16:53Speaker 01

  One other thing that's interesting is that TikTok's going to influence the vote on election day, one way or the other. Whether it's, whether they are forced to divest and they choose to be banned instead, or they go live and the content continues to shape the electorate in ways that we don't understand for years to come. Like, there is a certain amount of shaping that is, to be honest and fair, true of all social media platforms, right? Like, our opinion is being shaped. We just don't know how. And the question now is like, do you feel comfortable with it being shaped by someone in Beijing? And I personally do not.

• 17:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. All right. Three and a half minutes left. It's currently 137 yay, 22 nay. So we still have 273 votes that are about to come in.

• 17:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  The vote to divest is is leading right now. All right. So let's actually talk about TikTok's official response to this. This is from Semaphore. TikTok says the concerns are baseless. It notes that about 60% of the company is owned by global institutional investors, including financial giants, Susquehanna International Group and BlackRock. It also says there are three Americans on its five-person board, and it spent more than a billion on a plan that stores sensitive US data, US user data domestically on servers operated by Oracle. Is that convincing at all to you?

• 18:16Speaker 01

  And yet, one man, and one man only, is able to decide if the company divests or not. And that man's name is Xi Jinping. So like, what are we talking about here? It's just, it's very silly to even entertain it for a second. If what they're saying is true, this wouldn't be an issue.

• 18:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk also about the First Amendment, right? Because that's going to be, so let's say they do, you know, we go through the whole process. They're voted, the divestiture bill goes through. TikTok's obviously taken it to the courts. And they're going to say it's a First Amendment issue. And you know, it's been interesting is that I think there has been, you know, obviously debates bipartisan, but people who I've like been surprised on the Democratic side have basically said First Amendment shouldn't apply here. Here's Tim Wu. He says TikTok, while amusing, is also a national security vulnerability hiding in plain sight. Basically, a foreign-owned spyware installed in millions of phones. I think Congress would be right to direct divestiture from ByteDance on pain of an app ban. The idea that the First Amendment would stand in the way

• 19:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  of a directed sale of TikTok in the USA is unserious and would take an already overstretched amendment into new territory. The First Amendment is not the right to spy on people nor a suicide pact.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Well, I agree. And as someone who kind of came up in anarcho-capitalism and like hardcore libertarianism, there is a principle, I do see some principled pushback on an extremely liberal interpretation of the First Amendment, which is, you know, basically maximum, not only freedom of speech, but freedom of association, like to the point where, you know, if I want to be spied on by the Chinese government and, you know, I want to opt into a situation where I'm, I, it doesn't matter that, let's say that Xi Jinping is openly running, he's got, I mean, he's running the algorithm himself, right? He's got like a little laptop open and he's deciding exactly what we see.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  There is a certain kind of libertarian who would say, well, that's my right. I am allowed to be, have my opinion shaped by, you know, 150 million Americans are allowed to have their opinion shaped by Xi Jinping specifically. They're allowed to spy on us. We're allowed to spy for them. I think that this argument could also be applied to literal spies, like they have a freedom of association. Americans should be free to send trade secrets from different companies or whatever information they pick up from the US government to China, like you should just be allowed under, I don't see how that argument is much different. And I just am like, there are trade-offs everywhere that you look.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  I actually, I do acknowledge that there is a slight trade-off to a sort of libertarian's maximum concept of liberty here. You are, there is some, some trade-off. Whether or not the app successfully divests, it's just that I am comfortable with that trade-off in this case. I'm comfortable with trading off some amount of freedom of association when it comes to national security.

• 21:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, which is like, there are, there are always exceptions to the rules, right? And, and this sounds like it might be a reasonable one. There's also the question of, Retaliation or like our values, right? So this is from Anupam Chander from Georgetown. He's a professor there. He goes, he says on X, for those supporting the ban on TikTok, did the Chinese get it right decades ago by banning Twitter and Facebook? And should they not also ban Apple and Microsoft under the same reasoning? I mean, that's, I think the second part is interesting. Like if this does go through or let's say this, the bill fails, but we still, I mean, that's another possibility is the bill fails, but we still have this persisting in the US. There might be, you know, there might be retaliation at some point.

• 22:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  For instance, we already know China's encouraged like government employees to go away from iPhones and towards Huawei phones and Apple, iPhone sales have dropped 24% in the first six weeks in 2024 in China, while Huawei is up 63%. So what is the risk of blowback here?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Well, I would say that first, you know, we've done this before. This is not an alien concept. Grinder was forced to divest and for good reason. Like you do not want the Chinese government to have access to like every Americans weird sexual stuff. It's like, it's like, obviously blackmail waiting to happen. But on the question of retaliation, like in a sense, this would be like, like in a sense, if you want to talk about this, the business, the trade dynamics of this. If they're already banning all of our social media apps, this is reciprocity. This is like, like, yes, we're doing it too. There you go. If they want to escalate beyond that and, you know, really get into a trade war

• 23:05Speaker 01

  and you're talking about, well, you know, Apple's going to take a hit. Probably Elon Musk is going to take a hit. I think these are the dangers probably that a lot of people are thinking about. And we can really sort of judge their public opinion on this bill based, I think, in to some extent on how. Much people have to lose if China and the US get into a real trade war. And I think that like for some people who have a lot of manufacturing over there, it would be very bad. For the average American consumer would mean really expensive iPhones, probably like we're talking $10,000 plus more. It'll be exorbitantly cost for a while. Meanwhile, for China, if they want to get in a real trade war, we just, they lose all of the US business and you know, food, food, food trading and things like this.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  It's like we are at risk of very expensive phones and they are at risk of starving their entire population. I like their entire economy is built on trade. I don't think they really want an all out trade war. Uh, I would be very surprised if, if they went to that length. And if they did, we would survive it and they would have a hard time surviving it.

• 24:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And India, I mean, you're right, because like she was just in San Francisco speaking with Biden about, you know, potential economic deals and giving us the panda backs, very, very important. We need those pandas. Um, so.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Did it happen? I know that we asked. I wasn't sure that it actually.

• 24:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  They are, yes, I think they're kind of, they're either already in San Diego or I, or, um, on their way. It's, it's interesting, the DC zoo, really where it hurts, right? There's no pandas there anymore and the whole zoo is just pandas, you know, panda pancakes and panda everything. So.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can feel the ire right in the nation's capital. So, uh, you know, it's also interesting to think about, oh, well, one other point about that is that India did ban TikTok and everything seems to be fine on that front.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yep. People get on with it. It does not matter. I think that if they ban the, the, this, there's like a maybe broader thing here where like, I think about social media in general, not just TikTok. I think about, you know, what if Twitter was banned? How would I feel? I'd be, I'd be outraged on first amendment grounds. If the government came in and just shut it down because they hate it, whatever. Obviously that's a clear massive violation of our first amendment and that is like, it's a US company. It's a US, it's under US control. It's clearly political. That's crazy. Um, but if you could separate the politics from it and like, just get emotional about it, like how would my life change? If I no longer had access to Instagram and Twitter? And I would be happier. I think that probably most people would be happier.

• 25:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  And that's what places it in a very different context than something like if Amazon Prime were banned or ride sharing were banned, things that actually improve your life. Social media does not do that. You can make really abstract arguments for its importance, which I do agree with on information sharing and learning the truth about things and, you know, individuals investigating stories on their own. And all this stuff is true, but on the other hand, like just emotionally, it is, it's these, they, these digital spaces suck and they suck the life out of you. Certainly me, someone who writes professionally and is like very involved in the media. Like I would love a break and I think on some level, probably most people will.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I, that's why I find it kind of very unconvincing that people are going to be so outraged if this happened. If she forces the ban to take place, they'll be so outraged that they're what? Who are they going to vote for? Which, which side are they going to vote for? But they're both sides support it. Who are you voting for?

• 26:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And not to, not to mention, I mean, we have exactly, like they're not as good, but we have competitive products on Instagram, for instance. And, you know, it's, it'll suffice if we're left with reels. I think that we'll, we'll be able to get here, like you, like you said, get along with it.

• 26:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I want to talk to you about Trump because Trump obviously like was for the ban. He pushed, pushed a ban really, or he pushed a divestiture when he was president, said, did this whole thing. Now, now he is anti-divestiture and he was on CNBC this week. He said, frankly, there are a lot of young people on TikTok that love it. And there are a lot of young kids that will go crazy without it. And banning it would give a leg up to Facebook.

• 27:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Facebook is the enemy of the people. And you called his flip flop on this an incredible scandal. So talk a little bit about what's happened with Trump on this issue and sort of the money circulating in the background that's influenced his position and some others.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Right, so the man's name is Jeffrey Yass, and this is a billionaire Republican donor. He's very important and very influential in Washington politics. He is also a like major enormous investor in ByteDance. This, I've tried to figure this out. The, there's a range of estimations from like 22 to 35 billion dollar stake that he has in ByteDance, which presumably could go to like close to zero if she forces the ban. And so he's, and that's like most of his wealth is tied, I think, I'm pretty sure. So fact check me on this. I'm pretty sure most of his wealth is tied up in this at this point.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  So he is all in naturally on preventing this divestiture from going through. And in a way that I think is, I'm almost grateful that it's just like an understandable motive. It's like a clear money motive. I was in DMs with people who are all trying to be like, these are, they're like Chinese assets and they're being run by the government. It's like, it's just money. You just like, just look at the money, look at the financial interests. Like Jeffrey Yass has an interest to keep this alive. So he's been lobbying hard. He has a standard set of people who he's lobbied for in the past, including like Rand Paul, who's one of his favorites. But then you have Trump, who he's been at war with for months and months and months.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  He was like a, you know, never Trumper kind of person. And now, about a month ago, that relationship started to thaw. And the very week that the TikTok divestiture dropped, he

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Trump spoke before Club for Growth, which is Jeffrey Ass's super PAC. They became friends. Trump talked about them, bridging all bonds. So like within days, it's like that happens. TikTok divestiture drops. A couple of days later, uh, Trump comes out and um, and in, and in, uh, he equivocates on the issue of TikTok, which is a divestiture that he kicked off in the first place. Um, there is clearly, he's getting paid, he's like clearly taking money from Jeffrey Ass. And that is clearly, uh, influenced his new, I would say, you know, pivot-ish on this issue. My sense now, while there are some that are clearly all in on stopping divestiture,

• 30:09Speaker 01

  who are getting money from Jeffrey Ass, Rand Paul is one of them, Vivek is one of them.

• 30:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  While there are a bunch of-

• 30:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Points on Vivek and your story are just amazing.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, the Vivek stuff is crazy, but it's like, he, he's obviously less important than, than the others. Um, you have, uh, people in Trump's sort of circle who are now working for ByteDance or close to ByteDance, including, uh, like Hope Hicks most recently. You have, uh, what's her name?

• 30:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  But she's working, isn't she working for Shein? Or she's also working for ByteDance?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Maybe, was it Shein? Okay, sorry, I might've gotten that wrong. Then Marjorie, Marjorie, uh, not Marjorie Taylor Greene. Kellyanne Conway is, um, working, not working, she's getting paid now for, by Club for Growth. Again, this is like the Jeffrey Ass connection, so like you're not getting money from-

• 30:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Aren't these the America first people?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, and I do want to talk about that. I just want to say that I want to give Trump something here really quick, which is that Trump could, I think Trump could have really turned like the entire Republican Party against this bill. Um, he could have gone all in. He could have done sort of what he did during the immigration bill and just really put weight behind this. Instead, he kind of, his statements have been ambivalent to a certain extent. They're, they're clearly not supportive. They're clearly drawing false equivalencies between Facebook. He's clearly saying, you know, we don't want Facebook to have more power or blah. But he's calling it a ban, which is a propaganda sort of talking point. Um, but- He hasn't done as much as he could, and I think he's trying to sort of have it both ways, kind of correctly understanding that he doesn't have to make a decision right now. This is in Biden's court.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  But yeah, these are the America first people. And that brings us to, I think, a point that has been raised quite a bit in tech, which is like, let's get rid of the question of the First Amendment. Let's get rid of the question of the data sharing, or the espionage, or the propaganda, whatever. Like, if you table all of that, and you just talk about the trade issue, which is a sort of nationalist, America first issue. This is a major thing that Trump and Bernie Sanders have talked about. Just like, there should be reciprocity. We shouldn't have these crazy trade deals where we're getting screwed. This is classically one of them. This is one where like, we have products that we cannot sell in China, that they have, the sort of comparable products that they're selling into our market.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  And that just doesn't make any sense. That's not an America first position. That's like a populist, right-wing position. It is a position that you could only really have if you were like a principled libertarian, which is not what the sort of globalist, national, or anti-globalist nationalist people are. Or you're getting paid. Those are the two reasons that you would, that you would change, that you pivot on this issue.

• 32:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I just want to jump in quickly to say the bill's passed. So it's a landslide right now. There's still 26 votes left to be counted, but they matter only to the extent of the margin. It's 343 to pass this divestiture bill to 63 nay and one present, which is remarkable. Your reaction to that?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  That's more than I thought.

• 33:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Same here.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I thought it would pass, but I, especially while watching this morning,

• 33:19Speaker 01

  there were a lot more nays than I realized. Maybe they just really wanted to talk, and the others were like, I don't need to talk, shut it down. But I am surprised, and I think it will be passed by the Senate, and I think that- Divestment is coming and TikTok is going to have to sell.

• 33:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pretty big margin. I mean, you're right. The people against were very loud, like the Vivek's, the Trump's. Marjorie Taylor Greene made a big speech impassioned in favor of keeping TikTok on, on, uh, well,

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Let's talk about her reason.

• 33:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry?

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Let's talk about her reason.

• 33:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was interesting because she gave like, kind of like the Democrat reason. But yeah, you go ahead. Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Well, she said her fir-, I don't know that she did. It's interesting. I mean, there are so many different reasons on the, on the, on the nayside and the yayside, but on, on the nayside, what she said, she opened with, "I was banned from Twitter." That's where she opened. So Twitter, years ago, run by someone else, did something to me that I didn't like. That's where she started. And then she said, you know, "This should, this should affect, like, you say you care about China, but then like, why are you allowing the Chinese to buy US farmland?" Which is a, that's true. We should not do that either. Like, that's another thing that should not be allowed. Whenever they're like, "You're not serious about China." I'm like, "Try me." How many things do you think that I want to be divested? Because I would like broad divestiture on anything critical. Like, you should not be owning

• 34:38Speaker 01

  seaports, you should not be owning farmland. Like, you should not be owning, I don't think that you should, if you're a Chinese citizen, US citizens are not allowed to buy single-family homes in China. If you're a Chinese citizen and you're not like a dual US citizen or something like that, why are we allowing you to come over here and buy property? Like, like, doesn't make any, none of those things make sense to me. So try me, Margie. Um, but she certainly, you know, she's saying shit. It's like, uh, she wants to draw some kind of, uh, then false equivalence between US tech and, uh, and TikTok, which, uh, her, the Democrat from California immediately followed with a more explicit, parallel drawn. He was like, you know, "This bill should affect all tech companies," which of course it does.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  It's just, Facebook is not run by China. So it like, it does affect them. Um, but what he really meant was like, this other thing is on the table that Democrats really want, which is some kind of like, I mean,

• 35:37Speaker 01

  It's there. I feel the left especially has been pushing for some kind of quote content moderation or like truth monitoring in some way, making sure there's like that facts are facts and things. And that of course is just, I mean, in my perspective, like completely insane. It's obviously an attempt at censorship and we already saw what their version of like the truth looked like over the past few years. Some people agree, some people disagree. The point is, we shouldn't even have to have conversations like this. And that's where I saw like Democrats kind of opposing wanted more. They wanted, they were like, you know, we gotta go after all of them. And Republicans opposing were a

• 36:19Speaker 01

  mix of libertarian principle and just like clearly paid off by Jeffrey S. In my opinion, don't sue me.

• 36:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So I gotta ask you about Elon. Elon has also come out against this. This is from Semaphore. Elon Musk, whose firm Tesla could be collateral damage in a US-China commercial conflict, came out against the bill on X Tuesday. This is a law. This law is not just about TikTok. It is about censorship and government control. If it were just about TikTok, it would only cite foreign control as the issue, but it does not. This kind of puts you in opposition with Elon, which it hasn't happened very frequently recently. So talk a little bit about it.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  It happens all the time. People just don't listen. People don't read me. You gotta read my, go to pirawires.com and subscribe. I disagree with Elon.

• 37:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  About where you and Elon are in conflict. So I want to talk about that. But okay, so let's talk about this one at least.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  I think he's wrong. And I think that he is, I think he is like one of the most important entrepreneurs in American history. I think that he is a force for, despite like whatever you think about his tweets, I think he's like, he himself has done something tremendously important to the discourse by having a different set of rules on one of our major speech platforms. I think he's opened the Overton window in such a way as everybody is having a harder time censoring now. I think he's really beaten back on something that I found to be very frightening under COVID, when you couldn't talk about things like COVID, for example. I am a huge Believer in what he has done so far, like the actions that he has taken over the past

• 37:54Speaker 01

  few years in terms of what he'll do in the future or whatever else, who knows. On this issue, I think he's wrong. I think that I give him grace to a certain extent because he's done so much good in the world. I think that it doesn't really matter fundamentally what he says. It matters what our politicians have to say about this. And I think that when you see huge tech people opposing this, you just kind of have to look to where they do business and what they need to survive. And you gotta take it with a grain of salt, I think. I think it's unfortunate, but also, I mean, what do we want him to do? Do we want him to say fuck China and then Tesla goes to zero? Like, this is like, we forget how everybody, China, it wasn't like for 10 years, we've been talking about China.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  For our entire life, up until a few years ago, we were supposed to work with China. You know, the relationships were thawed and manufacturing in China was great and yay globalism. And then COVID happened and we realized how at risk we were from, and how vulnerable we were because of the manufacturing outsourcing and things like this. And not just in terms of it's great when we manufacture at home, but just national security risk innate of exporting all of your manufacturing. And I think everybody's struggling to catch up and there are some big tech players that are and yeah, that's all I gotta say about it. He's just wrong about the issue, but I'm not gonna like beat him to death because of it. I'm focused on the politicians who are actually in power.

• 39:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we just had Gruber on talking a little bit about how Apple is kind of in a similar position where they also put a big investment into China. And now, I mean, I'm sure both parties regret it to some extent because it does box you in.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  I mean, what are they gonna do?

• 39:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  No, that's what I'm saying. It's a crazy situation for them.

• 39:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Okay, so let's end this segment with a couple of big questions that I have, you know, now that we've seen that the, uh, the House has banned, or did not ban, sorry, voted to divest TikTok, forced the TikTok divestment. What do we, okay, so Rich Greenfield, we talked about this on the Friday show, Rich Greenfield put a tweet out last week showing that the top, three of the top five apps in the US were Timo Shein and TikTok and in the free charts. What do we do with Timo and Shein?

• 40:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you do the same thing?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I believe that there should be reciprocity and I think that we should, yes, I do. I think that, I think that, this is controversial, but I just, I really have changed. I'm not a libertarian anymore. I don't believe in a, so separate from this national security piece, the trade piece is very compelling to me. I don't believe in a world in which US companies are not permitted to compete in China, but the entire world is permitted to compete in America. It's never made any sense to me. Actually, it did, it has not made sense to me for years. And kind of once I think that question bubbled up in my head, I've not been able to let it go.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  I've never heard a compelling reason that we should persist in this, in this state. And I think China specifically is dangerous. And so I think certainly you start with the, like the sort of giant social media type things.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And then we see probably, I think maybe you wait and see what, how China, how China reacts to that. But like generally, I'm, I'm in favor of divestment.

• 41:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm. Okay, big question number two. This finally seems like an admission that social media algorithms really do shape the discourse and can influence politics. So we're, do you think the press is right now to focus so much on the political influence that social media companies can have behind the scenes with their algorithms?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Well, who didn't, who, I wouldn't say it was a press argument. I would say that was like, who didn't agree that these things were super influential? And so that was the entire motivating argument behind, if you think back to like the right wing pushback under like the sort of dark years, like 2020, 2020, 2021.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  It was all, these giants have total control of what we're seeing. And like, I agree it was bad then, I agree it's bad now. I think the press has wavered on what they think is bad, depending on who is in power. Right? Like, you hear more of it now that Elon has some very small say, by the way, comparatively, when you compare it to how much traffic like Facebook is getting.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I want to be, maybe that's not a problem in a world where lots of people have lots of different algorithms that are clearly run in lots of different ways. It's a problem when everybody agrees and you have a de facto sort of giant censorship apparatus.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  But some insight into how these things work and what we see and why we see it, I think, would be great. I would like, I would like to know more about why we're seeing what we're seeing.

• 43:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mike Solan is here with us. He is the CMO at Founders Fund and the editor in chief of Pirate Wires. On the other side of this break, we're going to talk a little bit about Twitter, and then we'll see what else we can get in before we have to go. All right, back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data,

• 43:40Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 44:15Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 45:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 45:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Mike Solano. We're talking tech talk. Now we're going to talk a little Twitter. Okay, so first question for you about Twitter. Just a broad question about Elon. It seems like Elon can clown on everyone, but then when people clown on Elon, there's a lot of sensitivity around it. It's the kind of, he's the toughest person to talk about because, you know, if I praise Elon or say something negative about Elon, I know there's going to be like one segment of society that's going to like freak out. So, but, but I want to ask you specifically about, why is it so out of bounds for people to criticize Elons and make jokes about him? Like, it feels like there's a real sensitivity among him and his supporters around that stuff.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't think there is. I think that you can criticize Elon and everyone should be allowed to. And in fact, I've seen him say that himself. Like, yeah, maybe I just disagree slightly with the premise. Obviously his fans, I mean, you're talking about fans of Elon. Elon has fans the way like Beyonce has fans or Taylor Swift has fans. So like those people are, yeah, they're going to react to it. But like celebrity, like fans of celebrities react that way. In terms of like the ethics of it, I just don't, I don't disagree with you. People should be allowed to criticize anybody.

• 46:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So let's talk a little bit about his handling of Twitter.

• 46:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  You mentioned that Elon has sort of loosened the speech rules on Twitter and sort of pressed the issue with a bunch of other companies that I agree were too quick to take content down. I'm curious what you think about the way that the product is working, because, and I'd love to run through like some of the issues that I have with it. I do think that the product has degraded under him, and I just wish that there was like a broader focus on the user versus the sort of political aims of the ownership.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  I don't actually see any, like, I would need proof that he has some kind of like actual active political aims. I think that you see, there's a product that is very open now, where people can talk about things that previously they were not allowed to talk about that are, and that's politically disadvantageous to people who are really benefiting from a culture of censorship. And then there's Elon's own personal opinions, which people find, some people, especially on the left, seem to find extremely distasteful, and that has led them to this belief, this like conspiracy in which he is making certain kinds of, he's amplifying certain kinds of content in a way, and opinions that we never would have seen. But in fact, that's just like American opinion, and it's been silenced for a while, and people got really used to a state of censorship. So that's like, that's

• 47:46Speaker 01

  a separate question. I just don't agree with that. I think that it's not true. I don't see any evidence that he is shaping the algorithm the way that's changing people's opinions. I think we're seeing people's actual opinions now.

• 47:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But what I'm saying is that there was like a political purpose to buying the app. Like, he didn't buy the app for a business reason, as far as I know. Like, he didn't like buy Twitter because it was a great investment that was gonna like, you know, 10x with his ownership. It was more of an ideological, he wanted to change the way the platform.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I think it was partly, it was, you know, I think, my read of it is that that seems to have been a big part of it, the fact that he wanted the openness. But also, he's always had this ambition to do X.com, or the everything app, or whatever. I think it is this like... Younger, he had this from when he was very young, he wanted to do something that would just be quote everything. I think that was maybe part of the motivation too.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think probably when you do something for ideological reasons, it's always gonna be a little bit of a mistake. And the reality of, on the product side, is, I guess it depends on what you think the product of Twitter is. So for me to be able to share my opinions without fear of being erased is a good part of the product, but the actual use of it, so links for me are like way worse now. And as a writer, obviously that's important. And none of the products offered in place of that have even come remotely close to what I was able to do previously. And in fact, it doesn't seem to be something that the product team

• 49:24Speaker 01

  really cares about improving beyond those first early initiatives, like the enthusiasm's gone, but the links are still fucked because whatever, for whatever reason on their side, they learned that keeping people on the app was really important. And so they're sort of like, you know, robotically pursuing that goal, which I would say doesn't actually make Twitter an outlier. It makes Twitter the same as every other social media company now. And I just happened to personally really hate those other companies and really like using Twitter for both personal and professional reasons. That's like the big product change. It's just that it's more like Instagram in this respect now. And I just don't like that personally. And it's not useful to me personally.

• 50:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So, okay, so here are some things that I've noticed that have changed under him. And I'm curious what you think about about this list. So the removing of headlines under the article on articles has made it

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  difficult for me to find links. And in fact, like, I think Elon's response when headlines went away was like, you, you trust these people? Like, it was clearly like, kind of motivated by a dislike of the press. He's also banned Substack, which is like, I don't know, sort of, I mean, I understand they were competing with the newsletter product that he shut down. But like, to me, that just seems like, again, it's gonna, it made the, degrades the user experience, which is not, not ideal.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  So he didn't ban Substack. He dramatically reduced the rate at which you would see links from Substack, and that has since been applied to every link. So I'm not on Substack anymore. We have our own sort of CMS and we publish from firewires.com and there's been no difference from the move for me at all in terms of how links are affected, which is something that I hate. And the article thing that you're saying is also something that I really hate, but I don't think, you know, he says it's like, oh, like you can't trust the media.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I think the truth is just that they're looking at what happens when people leave, when people leave the app, and they're losing money because of it. And he's trying to get to profitability, and they're stripping away the thing that I personally found valuable there. And it's slowly becoming a place that I find less useful professionally, but still very useful in terms of like learning about, you know, kind of what's going on. But yeah, I hate those things. I really hate those changes. I don't have insight into what's happening on the backend that would motivate those changes. And so, and my sense is it's really a very strong business motive.

• 52:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I guess like, that's also sort of, that app feels to me less timely now. Like, the algorithm seems further behind. I remember the Sam Bankman-Fried conviction, and it was like trying to find news on Twitter was real tough for me. I think it's improved a little bit. But if you add like the fact that they've, and we have a dispute on verification, but remove verification from reporters, that they have, you know, buried the headlines, killed links, made the algorithm a little bit slower, seemed to have favored ChatGPT influencers over like, you know, what's happening in the moment. It's a big shift, not only in terms of like the type of speech that you're going to allow or remove, but also just the function of the app. Like, one of the things that I think Jack Dorsey actually did well when he ran Twitter, and it's

• 52:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  not a huge list, but he said, "We're a news app. Move the app from social media to news", and sort of it was growing under him. Again, both in terms of users and in terms of revenue. So that's to me the thing that I've mostly noticed.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  The first is the Sam Bankman Fried story was broken by autistic capital on Twitter. So like all of the early report, everything that I knew about that story started on Twitter under Elon. And then, you know, I think about October 7th and the Hamas stuff and then all of the Harvard President Gay stuff, like these are just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I went back and looked at others, I would find more. But those cases, like, I would not have known what the actual story was if it were not for Twitter. What you're, I agree that what you're, it is very bad out now is finding like a link to a thorough story on something. Once you kind of know, once it's, the story is established. But when it comes to like, what is immediately happening today, there is still nothing better

• 53:50Speaker 01

  than than that app. And that's why I think we're all living on it still and why we're all still addicted, because we do know that like, that's where things are happening live. It's just that, it's like that well put together thoughtful analysis type stuff. It's the reporting, it's like the longer form record of things is harder to find, much harder to find on Twitter. And then 200 Jack, I would say like, yes, there was a switch to news type stuff and it was growing. I, I don't have the numbers for me. I'm just taking your word for it. I believe that makes sense to me. That was also under Trump, when everything news related was growing. People were just obsessed with it. It was like Trump, it was COVID, it was like, it was news. We were living inside,

• 54:31Speaker 01

  looking at the news. I don't know where that company would be today. I know that their ad products always sucked. It sucks today. It really sucked then. They, it's been, it's just never been nearly as good as its competitors and it was facing a lot of problems separate from any of the ideological things. And you can't run the experiment twice. So you don't know. But in general, yeah, I mean, I prefer, I want to agree with you. Like I preferred it for me. Uh, when you were, it was easier to link to your work is the main thing that I'm going to get.

• 55:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, and as a user to find, find work. But I don't know.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Well, our users, I think that what we don't want to listen to, well, we don't want to believe, what I certainly don't want to believe as someone who writes long form content, is that people don't want it. But I think the revealed preference, like people are kind of robotically following the revealed preference of users, which is for shorter form, jokes and pieces of information and headlines and pictures and things like the average person just doesn't want this other thing. And

• 55:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  That sucks, but that is maybe just.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  What people are.

• 55:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But if that was the case, usage would be up and usage according to most third-party data, including some that I reviewed, show that it's down anywhere from 13 to 20% since Elon took over. Now, it could potentially be like a post-Trump hangover, but also, you know, if he's moving towards the content form that people want, wouldn't there be a bigger bump?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Is readership like up on all the other things? Like readership on Facebook or readership on the New York Times or things like that?

• 56:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you're right. I mean, news sites have definitely dropped as well. And yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  I'm asking, I don't actually know the answer. I think it's, I have no idea. I bet that, I think that there probably is some amount that you, I think there's some amount that probably has taken a hit because of Elon and some amount has taken a hit because of just like COVID years were different and people, we forget, I think, how super-plugged in people were. But on the Elon side, there is also like, it's undeniable that he's taken a hit based on the ideological perception of Twitter, which I would say, I mean, I followed this very closely. I wrote about it every step of the way. There was a concerted effort from the second that Elon took over, before he even had control. He just showed up with that fucking sink.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  The stories were like, this man is propagating, you know, hate speech, hate speech is up X amount since Elon took over. He had not even taken over, right? Like, there is a huge drive to say, this is the right-wing app. And really, what he was doing was allowing very sort of, what I think left-wing journalists believe to be very unsavory types of people back on the app, many of whom I also, by the way, can't stand. Like, there, I see horrible things now all the time. I'm like, oh, God, like disgusting. Like, I don't want to see this shit. That's kind of a hit that you're willing, someone like I was willing to take for ideological

• 57:27Speaker 01

  reasons in a more open environment, but many people are not. And, and they have gone elsewhere. You know, I think that there's been some amount of that. I think there's been some amount of just general information. Disinterest.

• 57:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay, last thing, we're running out of time. I feel like we could do this for hours. I'd love to bring you back also and have you debate like someone with one of these new Twitter books. That would be fun. But yeah, let's, let's just talk about one thing which I found was super interesting and just came out today. I'll put a tech hat back on. There's this company called cognition. They have introduced this thing called Devon, which is the first AI software engineer. It's completed real jobs on Upwork. It's past practical engineering interviews from AI companies. It also uses its own shell code editor and web browser. It seems fascinating. Look, it's a tech podcast. We've talked a lot about like content, stuff like that, but I have to end here

• 58:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  because it's such a fascinating story. I'm curious, like, is this the next generation? Next, next step you think AI is going to take is being able to complete code in this way? It seems fascinating and quite promising, but also somewhat scary technology.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  I hope, I really hope, I hope, I mean, I think it's ironic that people who

• 58:47Speaker 01

  are in jobs that are not working or told as a pejorative to learn the code. And now engineers are being replaced potentially, a certain, a certain kind of engineer. You know, you're, there's always going to be, you know, room for really advanced people. But like a lot of the sort of bricklaying type stuff.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I want it. I really want it here. I really want it in a place like law. You know, being able to get help, legal help for a very small amount of money. I think this stuff flattens the landscape in a way that I think this empowers people broadly. You know, anything that removes a barrier of entry to people producing things or defending themselves or creating companies or whatever I'm in favor of. I think that it will have a huge effect. I, it's just unclear. I don't, I hate making predictions like this. This is a big one, too. This is like a world altering. I think nobody, the truth is just that nobody knows how any of this stuff is going to shape the world, which is why so many people are so frightened of it. Because people just generally fear the unknown and you kind of, when you don't know anything,

• 59:51Speaker 01

  you're, I think the evolution of this is we've, we've, we've grown to expect danger. Because that's what helped us survive. And so that's, the fears are just metastasizing right now. But I think, generally speaking, great thing. I do think it will have, I think it will work. And I am excited about a future where people have access to these tools for not a lot of money.

• 1:00:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. One last thing, though, I had to note there was this tweet that you you put out about someone. They were there as a headline about people talking about AI extinction risk and how it was coming and very scary. You're right. The messaging is insane. What are you guys doing? I agree with you on that. I think the the doomer, I mean, look, there's there's real reason to be concerned about this technology. Any powerful technology has downsides, but this like one to one brain of like, oh, AI can talk to us. Therefore, nuclear, you know, incineration by bot is imminent, has always seemed a little bit nuts to me.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Well, all this comes from the rationalist community, which is, I'm not saying they're rationalists. It's what they call themselves insanely.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  And their overall point is like, this is an X risk conversation, existential risk. So if there is even a 1% chance of human extinction, that's a huge risk. That's an insane, incalculable, you should never take a 1 in 100 chance that all of humanity is destroyed. They would say that probably for a 1 in 1,000 and a 1 in 10,000, like it just, that's too big of a risk.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And I think that you have to take risks to grow, and if you don't grow, you die. And everything good in the entire world is a risk. I think that's just the cost of living in an age of wonder is like you're taking risks. Technology is risk. Yes, everything changes, but it's the only way that you grow. And it's the only way that you progress, and that's the only way that you can create a better world. Like, you have to take risks. I don't think, I just happen to not think that the risk is as big as they say. But then again, I'm not a rationalist, so could be wrong.

• 1:02:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mike Solan, great having you on. Thanks for being here.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Happy one.

• 1:02:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  You too. All right, everybody. You heard it here first. TikTok bill passes the House, next stop Senate, and then potentially the president's desk. We'll be back on Friday talking about it and more on our news recap show. And see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

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