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

Ranjan Roy of Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the week's tech news. We cover: 1) The OceanGate Sub 2) Whether we should celebrate or condemn 'risk' 3) The Media's focus on the sub vs. migrant deaths 4) Mark Zuckerberg vs. Elon Musk's impending 'cage match' 5) The Walrus 6) Spotify's podcasting struggles 7) TikTok COO V Pappas leaves the company 8) Reddit's path to conflict -- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ 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?

  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 way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:08Alex Kantrowitz?

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

• 1:49Speaker 01

  It's good to be back. I had a week off last week, but ready to talk a little Musk and Zuck. Among other things, of course.

• 1:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's start this week with this missing submersible that has now unfortunately been found destroyed. So it was called the Titan. It's a submarine from Ocean's Gate. And it was this experimental sub. Of course, the news has been populated by the story of the sub all throughout, but there are some secondary stories. I mean, people, people listening probably know exactly what's going on, but there's some like, the broader story is something that's really worth going into. So first of all, what's, what do you make of what happened in this, in this whole situation?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  It is a terrifying tragic situation, and I will admit, I got caught up in following this kind of minute by minute, tweet by tweet. I think, again, for listeners who may not have been keeping up, a submersible was going down to the deep depths of the ocean to try to see the remnants of the Titanic. It lost connection with its, with the people running it. And then about in just 15 minutes later, it should have been a two and a half hour voyage down. And then for a few days, there was a rescue operation. We were trying to find it. They were, there was theoretically about four days of oxygen for the passengers.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I believe it was five passengers, exactly. And now we just found out that it is confirmed that the sub imploded in what sounded like a very quick and painless death versus a lot of the other scenarios that were being thrown around. And there, there's a lot to this. I think around this company that has been trying to kind of cut corners, cut costs, innovate very quickly to create something using materials like carbon fiber, rather than, you know, the traditional materials used in these type of devices that James Cameron seemed very unhappy about. I think there, there's a lot to this story.

• 3:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  So this is why I wanted to talk about it, because there's been an undercurrent in the tech industry in favor of the makers of the sub. Let me read you something from Mike Solana, who writes Substack Pirate Wires, and he's actually going to be on the show coming up in a couple of weeks. So I'm excited to hopefully speak about this with him. But we should talk about it right now. He's basically pointed all, all the people who said this sub should not have taken risks as kind of losers. And basically said that without risk, what do you have? Here's a selection from his newsletter. So he talks about how Stockton Rush, the CEO, is quoted, this is quote about the lack of safety. And it's sort of emblematic of like the real Silicon Valley mentality. So Stockton Rush, who was the CEO of Ocean's Gate, who did die in that, in that submersible,

• 4:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  said, "At some point, safety is just a waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything." And Solana says, "And yes, this sounds very bad in the context of what happened, but here's the thing, isn't it also true? There's no man alive today descended from the first men who foraged for first mushrooms, fruits, and vegetables, sorting out for the rest of humanity, which were poisonous. But thank God, those crazy ancient caveman era hippies." He talks about Marie Curie discovering polonium and radium, and unfortunately dying as a result of the radiation exposure, the explorers that have died, before we charted the ocean, and the men that have died in

• 5:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  combat, fighting to protect the country, or the fishermen that died. So you can have crab legs at your supermarket. Basically, what he's saying is, anyone who said this was a reckless risk, think about all the other people taking reckless risks in the past and where we would be without them.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yes. So I see where he's going with this. And I agree. Like, there were moments at my, where I was like, "Yeah, you want to go two and a half miles down to the depths of the sea and see things that no other human has seen. Obviously, you know you're taking a risk. However, this is not positioned as a high-risk thing. It's positioned as essentially tourism. That's like, every time I get on a plane, should I be thinking, "Well, if it goes down, I guess that's okay, that, you know, we're pioneers, we're explorers, we're cavemen, we're trying to make this happen." So I think the idea of what is true exploration and what is actually just

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Tourism and everyday passenger business. I mean, I think separating those two out is incredibly important. My question is, did Stockton Rush, was that part of his pitch to the passengers? Did he start the ride by saying, hey, guys, safety is just a waste. Don't worry. Let's think about the cavemen and radiation poisoning.

• 6:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So there's parts where Solana is definitely right in terms of people need to take risks in order to have discovery. But there's parts where I think are completely wrong. One of the examples he gives in this piece is about solo climbing. Think about Alex Honnold as he climbed El Capitan in Yosemite without ropes. His decision was reckless, right? But he never said anything the likes of what Stockton said about safety. In fact, if anyone watched the movie Free Solo, you see that it takes years of painstaking preparation bit by bit where safety is actually paramount. You put safety at the front. I think the idea of being reckless about safety and taking risks conflating those two is actually ridiculous.

• 7:16Alex Kantrowitz?

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

• 7:58Speaker 01

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

• 8:42Speaker 01

  exploratory forum where you're trying to make it mainstream? Because think about full self-driving, the idea that let's push the entire industry forward. Let's cut corners. Let's try to actually make this a thing. And we're going to say that we are the road to actually making it real. But instead, what happens is now everything is much messier from a regulatory perspective, because, you know, it was pushed in such a way. And that's, I think, what you're seeing here.

• 9:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  You think that full self-driving in the Tesla cars, do you think that's led to more accidents and more crashes than actual human operators? Because I've read the statistics about full self-driving. I mean, this is sort of a tangent, but let's talk about it. Because I gotta push back on you here a little bit. It does seem like there haven't been as many accidents as I thought there would be.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  No, my, my argument about full self-driving, I, I would guess, and I do believe that it will be safer than human drivers in the long run. However, to get it to achieve widespread adoption, there has to be some cooperation between the National Highway Transit Safety Authority or regulators or who the people who built the highways or the people who build infrastructure. Like, there has to be some coordination and accepted behaviors and norms around how you're pushing this technology to make it acceptable and work across everyone, everywhere. Because again, the first time, or I guess an Uber self-driving car had already killed someone. And of course, that's going to happen. But understanding who's liable, how are they liable?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  This stuff, it can't just be pioneers and cavemen eating mushrooms and, uh, or whatever else, or Marie Curie, you know, exposing herself to radiation. That's all great. But if we're gonna create some kind of like widespread adoption of technology, the whole Uber, just go in, guns blazing, regulators be damned. I think we saw that that just did not work over the last decade. And I think it slows down innovation and technological adoption versus the alternative. And I think, I mean, I was, I will admit, this actually made me, this whole thing made me more interested in going in a submersible, I'm not gonna deny.

• 10:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't really know it existed that well, so.

• 10:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Me neither, but it's, this is a thing. I think that what you're talking about is actually kind of a disproof to some of the things that you've been saying, because.

• 11:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  You need, at least I think, you need some of the recklessness in the beginning, if you're going to make progress, because they push the standard forward. And then eventually, industry followers, follows and regulators make it safe. You know, it's sort of like, God, I'm going to say the example that we always get that I think is so ridiculous. But there's some truth to it, that cars came first and then came the seatbelt. But they first were like, let's get these cars on the road. And then they're like, ah, okay. When they crash, people go through the windshield. Let's try to figure out how to stop that. So I think it's a one-two process.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but again, I would say aviation is a different approach, right? So yes, the very, very first people who are flying, it's, are the cavemen eating mushrooms? As Mike Salata would say, that's good. That's just stuck in my head right now. The first men foraging for the first mushrooms. But the moment it becomes any kind of business, the moment you start going beyond the first men and the first mushrooms and to everyday people and saying, like, this is a business, we have a service. At that point, it has to be safer. It has to be, if you're going to actually make it an institution, if you're going to make it in an industry, it's got to be safer.

• 12:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I agree. And that's probably what's going to come now. I mean, I don't think anyone's getting in a tin can submersible anytime soon until they, they read all the fight in print, which I don't think the people who went in this actually did or didn't consider enough, obviously. There's another side of this story that's actually quite fascinating, which is the media side of the story. And you dropped this in our notes before the call, but the New Republic actually had this story. I thought it was really good, talking about how that, you know, we've seen so much. I mean, it was a full week story covering this submersible. Meanwhile, there was a boat filled with refugees and migrants off the coast of Greek with 800 people that sank earlier in the month, and there was almost no media attention. In fact, I'll say, I have a pretty broad consumption of media, you know, a part of the job.

• 12:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  I didn't even know that this, the ship went down. And it's sick that the media, this is the sort of the critique, it's sick that the media has been covering this submersible so intently and can't pay attention to the ship with the migrants. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I'm first going to turn it over to you and see what you think, Ron, John.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  I think I'm not surprised that a story, you know, involving 800 migrants off the Greek coast is not getting the same airplay as a four billionaires and a captain on a submersible, especially the, like, part of me almost was wondering, who took over from Chris Licht at CNN?

• 13:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's a handful of people.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Okay, but obviously, good for them, for CNN, I'm sure, has been on this nonstop. I mean, I think it's just a reminder, again, that this is the type of story that is just made for summertime American media consumption. This is like, all the, especially, four days of oxygen left, how long are they gonna make it? How is it gonna go? I mean, it's almost sad, but you can just see how well this, well structured this is for ongoing media consumption, like the Malaysian plane.

• 14:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So I had a few thoughts when I first saw this. First of all, I was like, you know, it is true that the media should be paying attention to other tragedies and likes to just chase after this type of thing. And there's really no excuse for it. So I thought that that was a good critique. I think there should be more coverage. The one thing that I will say about it is that, or the other thing I will say about it, is that this is a supply and demand marketplace, which often gets lost in the discussions of the media, right? And so, media are responding to their audiences. And if people will not read stories about tragedies off the Greek coast with migrants

• 14:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  in a ship, then they're just gonna have less of those stories that will come out. And if people are gonna click like crazy on this submersible thing, then they will put out more stories. And that is what happens. I think that the audience-driven side of media decisions really does get left out often. And I'm sure what happened in this case was that people just went bananas. So it's sort of like, is it a media problem? Yes, but it's also really a society problem. Like, for all the people saying, we need more coverage of this, like... Effectively, it's just not getting attention from folks. And at a certain point, how long do media companies, you know, I mean, of course, like, I think, of course, there should be coverage here. But it's also like, you, in some ways, the media companies

• 15:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  will always listen to their audience, because those are the people that are reading and consuming, and they're going to produce the stuff they're interested in.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  That's a tough, tough segue into what the next story is then. Musk v. Zuck.

• 15:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So, speaking of stuff that media likes and people are interested in, we have a potential huge fight coming. I mean, God, it was, that is, dude, I think that's the worst transition in the history.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  In the history of podcasts, but we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. We're going on that. We were debating earlier, do we cover this? But we're gonna do it.

• 16:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think this is an important story to cover. So for folks who are just learning of this, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might fight in a UFC cage after, effectively, what happened was Mark Zuckerberg is trying to build a Twitter clone within Facebook, and his executives have said that this could be the same thing as Twitter, but just run by saner management. And Elon Musk took exception by that. By the way, Elon has a long history of disparaging Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. So, he tweeted earlier, this is from CNBC, earlier this year, he tweeted that Instagram makes people depressed, and that Facebook was lame. And then he also tweeted, "I don't use Facebook and never

• 16:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  have, just don't like Facebook, gives me the willies, sorry." And he's also tweeted about WhatsApp that it cannot be trusted, which is like against the entire selling proposition of WhatsApp. So, effectively Musk and Zuck, they do not get along at all, which is interesting. I didn't think that this would be, I kind of thought there might be some, some, you know, collegiality between the two of them. I don't know why, but they obviously hate each other. And Musk suggested that he would fight Zuckerberg in a cage match. And then Zuckerberg posted that to Instagram and said, "Name a location." And I'll just say what's happening now. So this is actually, we're actually talking to the UFC about doing this. So Dana White told TMZ Sports, he said, Mark Zuckerberg hit me

• 17:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  up first and said, is he serious? And then he reached out to Elon Musk and Elon said, yeah, I'm dead serious. So White is surmising that this could end up bringing in over a billion dollars in pay-per-view revenue if it actually happens. So I'm curious what you have to say about this, Ron. John, first of all, handicap for us, who would win? Second of all, is this thing actually going to happen? And third, who are you rooting for?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  It's a tough one on the handicap because again, Mark Zuckerberg, we've gone over this on this show, has posted a number of photos of him winning and crushing other people. We've never actually seen any of the combat. We've never actually seen him. We've never seen him lose. So

• 18:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, that's not true anymore. There is a video circulating of him getting basically knocked out by somebody or technical lockout or the ref stopping the fight.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Okay, I had not seen that. I'd seen the New York Times, I think it was Joe Bernstein, had a piece where apparently it was reported that he had lost consciousness during one of the matches. But then they tried to clear

• 18:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  But yeah, that video was out. Once Joe wrote about that in the Times, that was coming out and that video is now out, shared by the person who beat him. His wife actually posted it to Twitter or shared it with someone who tweeted it. So if you tweet Mark Zuckerberg, sorry, if you search like something like Mark Zuckerberg Wrestling or Mark Zuckerberg, you know, knocked out or something on Twitter, you can find that video. If you want to, if you're trying to figure out what to do with your weekend, this is potentially a good, good plan for you.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I know what I'm doing right after. Okay, I'm going to try to find the serious angle to this story. And here's what it's going to be. The fact that this is being covered by the way it's being covered by CNBC, by Bloomberg, the tweets about it. I've been kind of keeping notes about this around, again, people are advertising this as though it is WWE or UFC or as though this is like, you know, in the cage, Zuck v Musk, who's going to win? What? And, and it still absolutely blows my mind. One quarter, or maybe two quarters now for

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Meta of a comeback, and Zuck is jumping all into this. Musk obviously will take any attention he can get. But the question is, here's what I'm gonna ask. What's Musk trying to distract from? He's the king of anytime there's something else going on, he goes over the top with some kind of other thing that grabs everyone's attention, the diversion. I feel there's something, again, that he is, the fact that he, how much he's been leaning into this, and I think he is the world's greatest tweeter, and he knows exactly what he's doing, and this is fun to push for a little bit, but I feel he's only going to lean into this, this heavily, if there's something else coming out.

• 20:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I disagree. I think that Musk is talented at getting attention. We know that, we understand that's why he became the most prolific tweeter, the most popular tweeter, and then eventually bought the platform when he didn't like the rules. So I think that this is just an example of Musk seeing that there's some energy and interest, and then just going all the way in to try to exploit that to his best ability.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Well, how far is going all the way in?

• 20:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I do hope they fight.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna handicap the fight. I wanna handicap, does the fight happen?

• 21:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would say no, I would say there's probably 25% chance that it happens. What do you think?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  I would take, I would take the under on that. I would say significantly less. I feel this is, again, this is drawing attention, this is pulling it, again, like the quote that we had in here from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, "This is real bad blood. This is a beef that has lasted over years. It's getting more and more nasty, and it looks like the only way it's gonna be settled is in the cage." This is a guy who's supposed to be a serious analyst on CNBC, who gets the credibility to talk about Tesla seriously in every instance, yet this is the kind of stuff that's being said right now.

• 21:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  But maybe Dan knows about this, and this, I mean, the anemity between the two of them, the fact that Musk has been bashing Facebook for so long, and Zuckerberg's ready to fight him, maybe Dan is on to something. I know this, if this fight happens, you and I, we gotta do a live YouTube show, where we, we watch this fight and just, you know, we'll do the courtside announcing as it goes down.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I'm in, I'm in for that because I know it's not happening.

• 22:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, listen, I will handicap it. I think Zuckerberg would obviously win, but Elon has this move. He says, I have this great move that I call the walrus, where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing. So I think that if Elon was able to get Zuckerberg in the walrus, then that would be, you know, challenging to get out of, but.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I'm already trying to think. I think Andre the Giant way back had a move where he ran back and forth and just sat on the person. So, or maybe that was Earthquake, if you remember it. I don't know. That was a long time ago, but.

• 22:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't remember Earthquake. I mean, Rikishi from back in the day would, would definitely do it.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Oh, he had the move. Okay, I guess, I guess it, they, it evolved over big men in the WWE.

• 22:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But I, I, anyway, I would not, I don't think Elon lasts around with Zuckerberg, to be quite honest. I think he lasts maybe a minute until.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  No, not, not even a question. Yeah, again, I, again, what, what, what was the, the, Zuckerberg Murph post where, what did he say he can do for Memorial Day where it's like running some amount, doing some amount of pushups? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 23:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was something like the, it was named after one of the fallen servicemen, like the Murph or something like that.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he gave a time that seemed almost impossible.

• 23:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Under 40 minutes.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then it came out that he actually stopped in between every exercise and did, and then he was like, well, it's more of a circuit training. So, but again, he's in shape. He's, he's, I'm not denying, he clearly is putting in the effort and putting in the time, unlike Elon. So, yes.

• 23:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  I'm with you. I would take, I would put the odds on Zuck significantly higher than Musk.

• 23:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  The best possible fight you could see is the fight starts out, Musk immediately jumps on Zuckerberg, does the walrus, and then Zuckerberg turns it on him.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think I would take Tim Cook in all of this, because that man has talked about waking up at 4 a.m. to go to the gym. I read this somewhere, I remember, and I was like, I think Tim Cook secretly, he's a killer.

• 24:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think Tim would, would, he would be able to take Musk out, but I think Zuckerberg, Zuck, remember, part of fighting is rage.

• 24:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the amount of stuff that Tim Cook has done to Zuckerberg's business, you think that Zuckerberg is gonna not channel all that rage and his training?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Tim Cook has been crushing Zuckerberg in the business realm. Now I think, I think that would carry over to the cage.

• 24:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Listen, I think, speaking of will this happen, Tim Cook would never fight. It would be terrible for Apple, but I think Zuckerberg-

• 24:41Speaker 01

  You don't understand, you don't understand Tim Cook. He's secretly a killer.

• 24:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Clearly, I have to do more research.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  To any listeners, that is completely in jest. I would know confirmation that Tim Cook is actually a killer in the cage.

• 24:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  What I'm saying is Zuckerberg versus, versus Musk could actually happen. Tim Cook would watch it.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 25:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tim Cook would really enjoy it secretly. He would.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 25:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Speaking of, speaking of fights, there's a really interesting fight brewing between Spotify executives and Harry and Meghan. So first of all, Spotify has been on this, this much better segue than our last one. Spotify has been on this like, real kick recently, well, over the past couple of years, trying to buy podcasts like the Joe Rogan podcast, Call Her Daddy. And bet that those hits would end up creating like a really nice business for it. It hasn't worked, and this is from The Verge. In the world's, in the world of podcasts, a series from an acclaimed filmmaker, bestselling author, or even a former president can barely register on the charts. And after years of chasing this hit making strategy, it all seems to be falling apart.

• 25:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I just want to pause and say, you can put all the former presidents and former royalty you want, they're not going to stack up against big technology podcast Friday edition. It's just not going to happen.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  But sorry Barack, sorry Barack.

• 26:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry. But it is very interesting to see how Spotify has sort of done an about face on this strategy. And it really has kind of come to a head with Harry and Meghan. And I'm going to get into Bill Simmons, who's a podcaster and a, and a Spotify executive. I'm going to get into his comments after this, but first a moment to react to on John.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the really interesting part of this story, again, Spotify was at $230 million for Gimlet in 2019, The Ringer for $200 million in 2020. I think Joe Rogan, they paid $100 million to just pouring money into this. I think this is yet another business situation that totally captured, you know, the rise of pandemic consumption and extrapolation out from that consumption and just being completely wrong about it. It, you know, this is basically Clubhouse is the microcosm of what happened to Spotify in that everyone thinking, okay, podcast usage, utilization is up this much. People, this time spent listening is this much, revenue is up this

• 27:08Speaker 01

  much. So let's extrapolate that out at consistent growth rates for the next three to five years. So we can justify these kind of investments and it just didn't work. And I think it makes sense that it should have been a very strong part of the business. It makes sense that, again, becoming your go to audio platform, personally as a person who, as someone who's subscribed to Spotify since 2011, I always wished that they'd actually split out the app like Apple does into a separate podcast app and I would have been a happy subscriber. It's made the app experience a little bit messier for me, but it should have been a reasonable decent business. Again, also the idea of podcast advertising being done in network. So you don't have to buy

• 27:52Speaker 01

  your own advertisements, but you can actually just be part of the network and then actually get ads delivered through the overall network. That actually is very valuable. And I mean, as you as a podcaster, it's less lucrative per ad, but at least takes all the selling and that part of it away. So, so all of this should have been fine, but they just went in too big. They were, the, the expectations were too high.

• 28:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And you start making bets. This is what happens, right? When you start to spray money over the, all over the place, you end up making a few bets that like work out. Okay. Lots of bets that had potential, but were disappointing and some bets that are absolute disasters. And Harry and Meghan was an absolute disaster. And I want to read just a few comments that Bill Simmons made about them. It's pretty unbelievable. So this is,

• 28:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, he just, he just said this recently about, about them. He says they're effing though, the effing grifters. That, that's the podcast we should have launched with them. I gotta get drunk one night and tell the story of the zoom I had with Harry to try to help him with a podcast idea. It's one of my best stories. He also talked about them in January 22. I completely missed this. This is what he said about Harry. Shoot this guy to the sun. I'm so tired of this guy. What does he bring to the table? He just whines about stuff and keeps giving interviews. Who cares? Who cares about your life? You weren't even the favorite son. You live in effing Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares about what you have to say about anything. Unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain about them.

• 29:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, they had a contract with these people for $20 million. It's unbelievable how badly that it went.

• 29:34Speaker 01

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

• 30:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Bends towards history, bends towards justice.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Arc of history bends towards justice.

• 30:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  And then we went there and Harry and Meghan being called effing grifters, I think.

• 30:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Is a sign that we're there.

• 30:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Folks, we're live here on LinkedIn this week, and we did just get a comment saying that they're still all in on, on Harry and Meghan. So, you know, the man is popular, but you know, it's interesting because hit the experience that they had with Spotify. And there was a great New Yorker article that was written by his ghostwriter, which is just a bus read. It's such a good story. One of my favorite stories this year, talking about how much of a pain he was to work with. I mean, I guess that sort of comes with the territory, the territory though, you're part of the royal family.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  He's a prince. But he's a prince. He's royalty. Like, is anyone thinking that, uh, yeah, just for producing a regular podcast, that he would be, you know, super diligent and hardworking and, uh, I don't know. I think again,

• 31:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think maybe they left the royal family. You would imagine that that they would, but no.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, just get Harry, give us something interesting. Join the podcast. Come on next Friday and and let's talk about tech.

• 31:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Harry, we know that you love podcasting, but you probably hate scripting. So we're just giving you the floor here on

• 31:25Speaker 01

  That was the problem. That was the problem. Yeah, he, he didn't like the scripting, the scripted nature of the show. We will give him a free rein to speak his mind about technology news.

• 31:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Love it. All right, Harry, you're welcome. We're here on Big Technology Podcast, Rajan Roy of Margins. Great first half. A lot of very interesting consequential stories. In the second half, we are going to get to some more great stuff. We, we might cover Amazon and the FTC if we have time, but we're definitely going to talk about some leadership changes at TikTok. So more on that when we're back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, 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

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• 33:01Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 34:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast. Ranjan Roy is here with us. Welcome back, Ranjan. We've missed you the last week. It's nice to have you back. Let's talk about the fact that V. Pappas, who was the COO at TikTok, is leaving. Very important executive. Basically, their number one US person is gone. One of the things that I found that was really interesting is they replaced them with a Disney executive, former Disney executive, Zanyamucha, who became their chief brands and communications officer and not their chief operating officer. To me, that just suggests that TikTok, you know, the US operation is largely an offshoot of what goes on in China, and they just think that they need better comms. But I'm curious what you have to say about it.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the exactly correct observation. It's the idea that all of the TikTok US and the entire approach from its brand and communications, it's trying to say over and over and over again, as many times as possible, no, we have no connection to our parent ByteDance in China, while your operations, your algorithm, your infrastructure is still tied to the parent company. I think this is an incredibly important story because if we look at the rise of V. Pappas... Do you remember Kevin Mayer, his two-month stint as CEO of TikTok back in 2020? It was incredible. He came in, you know, senior exec at Disney. I think he was supposed

• 35:31Speaker 01

  to succeed Iger, didn't get the job, so left.

• 35:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And then announced and become CEO of TikTok is going to make, turn this into, you know, a formidable opponent against Facebook, whoever else, and then just leaves two months into the job. And then V. Pappas comes in and cleans it up and to her credit, you know, continues the growth and like turning it into a real operating business successfully. But then Shou Tzu Chu, who came in as CEO, I think in the last year, he very quickly, Singaporean-based, very quickly became the face of the company, testified in front of Congress, did reasonably well, I think, by all accounts. More and more, he's even been

• 36:15Speaker 01

  getting more of a remit. Lemon 8 is the new social app from ByteDance. He's been given authority over that app as well. So clearly he's becoming like the, you know, the boss, clearly becoming the most important player in this. And obviously that pushed her out. But I think, what does that say about where, how TikTok is trying to position itself in America and in the American market? Every time they try to seem like they're moving more towards becoming an American company or integrated in America or cut off from the parent, they get tied more closely.

• 36:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll share my, my one interaction with V. Pappas, who commented after the, the hearing that Cho Chu had in Congress. They said, "We're committed to providing a safe, secure platform that fosters an inclusive place for our amazing diverse community called home. It's a shame today's conversation felt rooted in xenophobia. Thank you to our employees who worked tirelessly to protect our platform and our community." So basically saying, "Any member of Congress who had questions about the safety and security of TikTok was being xenophobic." Okay. "I tweeted this, calling real concerns about data security and content filtering xenophobic is certainly an interesting approach to take." Right? I was, I mean,

• 37:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  could have been, was more charitable than I probably should have been. They respond, "Happy to, happy to discuss, Alex." Okay. So I say, "All right. Is this an opportunity for dialogue here?"

• 37:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  I said, open invite to the podcast, want to do it there, or we could talk privately. And I never heard back. So I have to say that, go ahead.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  That that whole line of narrative narrative around the idea that any questioning of TikTok's relationship with ByteDance is xenophobic, I think is crazy. I think it's the idea, it's like, it's a very real concern. It's a very real question. They do nothing to actually effectively disprove the fact that they are connected, but then using that as a defense. I don't know, it's the most disingenuous thing I could imagine. But, I mean, her career, it was really interesting because she came up through YouTube. She basically create, she like built the entire creator business and made YouTube the place for creators and did such an incredible job of that and did

• 38:40Speaker 01

  an amazing job of that at TikTok as well, that she really has delivered in these places and really built out the creator side of these businesses as something enviable to everyone else in the industry. So I think that side is impressive. But, I mean, yeah, obviously, or hopefully more of the story comes out over time and we learn more about this kind of corporate drama. But I think it means to me that TikTok is going to continue this kind of route of saying we're separate, but not doing anything. In fact, moving in the opposite direction and just becoming closer and closer to the parent company ByteDance. Again, the fact that Shochu

• 39:21Speaker 01

  is getting remit over another ByteDance app, how does that not show that clearly, you know, this is a ByteDance company, it's a ByteDance show?

• 39:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and that's what I thought. The idea that V. Pappas leaves and the communications head comes in, it's like, well, that tells you all you need to know. So.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Well, not just a communications head. Apparently Zenya Mucha, according to an old New York Times profile, was called the Director of Revenge. I think she had worked it for Pataki at the time for the New York governor. So, so I am curious to see how she takes, where she takes the company. It should be fun and interesting.

• 40:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, I don't know if this, this whole like taking revenge method is going to play very well for a company that's as embattled as TikTok. I mean, of course, there's a degree of pushback, but you can't, you're not, you're not the same as you were when you were Disney. It's just a very, very different position. Beloved American company, a company that's potentially on the outs with members of the regulation, regulatory body in the US and members of Congress. Why don't we end? We, we actually covered the Reddit situation a little bit.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I, I, one more thing on that. I was just thinking about, I kind of wish corporations actually openly had a Chief Revenge Officer, a VP of Revenge. I was just thinking about that. I mean, Twitter, if anyone, Elon, if you're listening, if anyone would do that, I think it would be him. But at a certain point, when, if corporations just started openly and honestly naming their executives for what they do, I think the world would be a more fun and interesting place.

• 41:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I'll say that our, our summer intern Doug is our VP of Revenge here at Big Technologies. So I just want to let you know that if you're, if you're going to mess this summer, there's going to be retribution.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Watch out for Doug, summer intern VP of Revenge.

• 41:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  By the way, thanks. Doug is here with us. He's helping to put the titles on for LinkedIn and YouTube, and we do appreciate him being here. And if you mess in the comments, Doug is going to have, fulfill his duties here in the revenge department of, of the podcast. All right. Let's go to the last story, which is Reddit. We touched a little bit on Reddit last week with Sarah Fisher. But Ron, John, you've been actually covering this Reddit stuff for a while. And I'm curious to get your perspective on whether the company's business will continue to succeed as we move forward.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I had written about this actually in September 2021 and Reddit. I think what's really important to the story right now is looking at its its journey and how it lived in a really, really interesting way and lived and developed. So Reddit, again, founded as I think one of the original Y C companies or maybe in the second class, sold very quickly to Advanced Publications, which is the home of Conde Nast, magazines like Wired and a bunch of others. But what happened was they had bought it at a time when, you know, they wanted to show some bona fides in being digital, but then never did anything with it, never had real pressure from a revenue or profitability standpoint, a growth standpoint.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  And Reddit just kind of lived in the background at Advanced Publications for years, all through the late 2000s into the early 2010s. And to me, that is such an interesting, like, almost scientific test of how to build a really community-driven platform when it's almost essentially operating as a nonprofit. Now, fast forward a number of years, and this is what I wrote in September 2021. I had, remember, I started seeing on the design side so many more aggressive prompts to download the app. Oh, right, yeah. Endless suggested, like, half of the app became suggested posts and suggested subreddits rather than what you're already subscribing to. And I'm a very, very avid Reddit user.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Endless videos and photos in the feed on the mobile app. So you saw it starting to happen, but now we're at a point, right? Reddit was valued at $10 billion in their 2021 funding round. Again, similar to Spotify's podcast, another story of pandemic era behavior being extrapolated out. And last year, Reddit's revenue rose 38% to 2022, but we're already way behind forecast. It was to 670 million. It was supposed to be at 1 billion. So right now, we're at a point where Reddit was supposed to IPO. Investors are supposed to get out last year. They don't. Market freezes. Now Reddit is doing as any by any standard measures is doing great as a business.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Thirty eight percent growth, but is nowhere near that $10 billion valuation. Fidelity already marked it down 41%. So everything from a financial standpoint is slowing down, increasing pressure. So of course, the CEO Steve Huffman, when they're cutting off API access to third-party apps like Apollo, they have to, they have to start, you know, trying to extract every penny that they can, which completely runs counter to the entire ethos of Reddit and the entire reason people love Reddit. And I think this is a really, really bad place for the platform. I think it's such a sign that having a massive valuation and massive fundraising rounds

• 44:35Speaker 01

  for what's supposed to be a purely relatively low-tech, community-driven platform that worked really, really well. It was always the moment they raised that $10 billion valuation round from Fidelity and everyone in December 2021, it was almost the death knell of the platform.

• 44:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, that's a great point. And it just does, it does go to show you that sometimes when you try to put like IPO level expectations or VC level expectations, it just doesn't work for every business, even if it's a technology business. And it could end up being counterproductive. It's probably what we have here.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's building out a solid advertising business. Reddit should be able to, everything should by any measures, again, $670 million in revenue last year is not small, but relative to all its peers, especially relative to its traffic, it is small. So I don't know. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this goes. And Steve Huffman's behavior. He's clearly been coached or has chosen himself to triple down on these actions and say, like, you know, we're willing to lose all these moderators and people who spend their own time to make this stuff happen. Again, from like a unit economics perspective, this

• 45:54Speaker 01

  also should be the most profitable business on earth. You provide the infrastructure and people spend their own time moderating these communities and growing them. It's one of those, it's, I don't know. I'm sad. If I lose Reddit, I don't know where I'm gonna go. I guess blue sky or something, but.

• 46:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, one day you'll have to do a session where you teach me how I use Reddit. I mean, I use it the old fashioned way, write Google stuff and then read the Reddit comments, but I feel like really knowing Reddit is a superpower.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  I, it's funny. I've thought about this in the past, like Reddit is what Reddit does the best is radicalize you about specific interests, even productive and positive ones. Again, like cooking, once you go on Reddit, it goes from like, oh, I'm just gonna make a meal to I'm like sharing pictures and being critiqued about the like grain of my steak and how I'm cooking it. Or yeah, no, it basically, it gets you connected to other people who are just really intense about interests. So yeah, I think it's an incredible place. And I'm sad if it gets killed and thanks to my greatest nemesis overfunding and inflated expectations.

• 47:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  What an optimistic show we've had this week, but seriously, Rajan, it was great spending time.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  No, no, Harry, Harry, Harry and Megan, Harry and Megan had been seen properly. So, so the world is okay.

• 47:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, sounds great. Thank you for joining Rajan. Great talking with you as always.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yep. Good to be here.

• 47:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, folks. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks again to Rajan. Thank you, Doug Gorman, our VP of Revenge and Head of Graphics here at Big Technology Podcast. Thank you LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. We'll see you next Wednesday with Meredith Whitaker, who's the CEO of Signal. And then Rajan and I will be back next week. We will definitely be talking about this Amazon lawsuit from the FTC and hopefully more. I'm going to try to get Jason Del Rey to come on. He has this great new book about Amazon. If he doesn't do it next week, we'll definitely have him on sometime in the future. All right. Thanks so much for listening and we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 48:06Speaker 02

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  When the world gets you down.

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• 48:56Alex Kantrowitz?

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