Apple's Problem With Jon Stewart, Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimism, Middle East Misinformation

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) A quick review of Michael Lewis' SBF book 2) The impact of effective altruism on the tech industry 3) Why Apple and Jon Stewart are parting ways 4) China's Belt and Road Forum 5) How a multipolar world impacts Apple 6) Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimism manifesto 7) Max Read's rebuttal to the manifesto 8) Twitter to charge $1 to some users for essential features 9) Twitter users decline since Musk took over, according to new data 10) A new era of misinformation in the middle east --- 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.

• 0:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Jon Stewart and Apple are splitting up, possibly over some China content. Marc Andreessen is rallying the techno optimists. Twitter is shrinking, according to some new data I just obtained. And let's go even deeper on misinformation coming out of the Middle East. All that and more, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic 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

• 0:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  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? 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.

• 1:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Ron John Roy is here with us once again. We just looked through the agenda of today's show. You're going to love it. We have a lot to cover and it's great to have you back, Ron John. Welcome to the show.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  It's good to be back, but sad we had to cut out some of the news. There's so much this week.

• 1:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And we'll do a tech earnings show next week. So if you're here for tech earnings, maybe stay tuned and hear what we have in store for you. But the big tech earnings show is coming next Friday. In the meantime, I got to say, Ron John, I have been reading the Michael Lewis book on SBF and I like it.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  And?

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's you. Wait, sorry. What was that?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I like it. I mean, here's the thing.

• 2:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  You like it. Look, it's all the problems that we identified with Michael Lewis journalistically are there. He's way too in favor of Sam, but it's actually pretty interesting. Like, it's a very interesting book and you go through, I'm halfway done, and you go through these twists and turns of Sam's life. And, you know, he doesn't hit you over the head with it every moment. He had trouble with people. You could see this eventually reflected, you know, when FTX collapsed. He like very carefully like lays out, and I will see the second half is important, so I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I'm learning a ton, both about SBF, but even more about the effective altruists. And Molly White was just on the show and we talked about this effective altruist community that Sam Bankman-Fried comes out of.

• 2:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think they're obviously a force within the tech world right now. Dario Modi, who's the CEO of Anthropic, which is a big AI company that we talked about here, he's a member of this community. There's many, many more members of this effective altruist community all over the place. And just digging into Sam's relationship with them and their bolstering of him and their way of thinking, to me, is absolutely worth the price of admission on the Michael Lewis book.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  All right, well, I started Number Goes Up by Zeke Fox, and it is a fantastic read. I highly recommend it. I'm about a third of the way through right now. But, but Michael Lewis, I think, to me, and I'm very curious, and we should definitely talk about this again, once you're done, is are people going to walk away with the impression that, you know, he is a great writer, no one's ever questioned, he's a great writer and a storyteller, but is his credibility as actual truth telling journalist, is that going to go away?

• 3:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's one of those books that's probably bad for the author, good for the reader. I mean, that's what I have to say. And Molly White actually was fascinating, breaking down the effective altruist community on the podcast on Wednesday. And she, you know, you know, remember a couple of months ago where we were wondering why there were all these AI letters coming out with like Dustin Moskovitz, who's an effective altruist backing them?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, tracing the funding.

• 4:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  It turns out, it's kind of, it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't regulatory capture, from my understanding, now, having read the book and speaking with Molly, it's. These folks are like dead set about saving lives in the future, she said, even if it costs in some cases, lives in the present. I don't want to say every one of them believes it, but some of the group does. And that's why they're so crazy about like the AI threat, even though it doesn't feel present to us right now. It just aligns with their ideology. And maybe some people are exploiting that and saying it would be great for regulatory capture also. But it's just a mind boggling thing. Once you get into this community.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I have a hard time even starting to grasp the idea again. Again, having worked on Wall Street, the idea that I'm going to make as much money as I can as fast as possible, no matter the cost, and then maybe down the road, like people would say, I don't give to charity because I want to make as much money as possible and then I'll give some away when I die. So this stuff is to me, it's not new. It's just a kind of a easy way to mask greed, which is fine if that's what you're into. We'll certainly talk about the techno optimist manifesto very soon.

• 5:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah, it's interesting. Your experience on Wall Street. It is. I mean, I'm sure hearing this ideology, like apparently they didn't fit in.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  This stuff, it just mirrors it. So it's a, it's like, uh, that's what's always, that's what is always frustrating. I mean, I've written about this a lot, that so much of the what is communicated in the tech industry exactly mirrors culture on Wall Street in the 2000s. The only difference is there people were just honest about being self-interested and greedy versus trying to kind of mask or cover it in terms like effective altruism.

• 5:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Just be honest about who you are. That's all I ask.

• 5:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, definitely. And apparently likes, I mean, in Michael Lewis book, you hear about these effective altruists like handing loans out and the interest is 50% on them. And apparently like he goes into like, you'd think they would be chill about money if they're all giving it away anyway, but they're actually more intense than most people. So it's just fascinating. Speaking of companies that are more intense about money than others, I mean, Apple, right? Right in the middle of the headlines. Again, this was late breaking news yesterday. Jon Stewart, who had this show on Apple TV called The Problem With Jon Stewart, which talks about the news, goes into politics all the time, really doesn't shy away from much. Not going to be renewed. He's part Jon Stewart and Apple are parting due to creative disagreements. This is from the New York Times.

• 6:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives. And now that partnership is done. I mean, it is interesting because we know that Apple had been sensitive about its relationship with China. That China has different rules than we have here in the U. S. In terms of the way that they manage the technology when it comes to Apple. But, you know, to to and then Apple had also been very careful in terms of Apple TV, trying to not anger China. But now it has this moment where it has this host, Jon Stewart, who wanted to talk about China, it seems like, and now we can't. I mean, what do you make of this whole situation?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  This whole situation has been very difficult for me because I was a massive Jon Stewart fan through the 2000s when he was on The Daily Show. I I was very excited when he came back to Apple TV. I was like literally waiting for him to resurface. And was always disappointed during the Trump years that he was not there as a leading voice. But myself, among others, did not really watch this show. Apparently only 40,000 unique households watched it. On average, the show did badly enough, this is according to the Bulwark, that it was labeled Apple TV plus's worst performing show of the second half of 2022.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  So it's it's tough because I don't know if it was the format, if it was just whatever it was, it did not catch fire. So then you combine that with the fact that, and I think this is a really important thing to think about is how Apple has really kind of structured its media content strategy as the Ted Lasso company. You know, the Ted Lasso feel good, not too controversial, maybe a little boundary pushing, but that's all they want to do. And they've done this very well, and it's been working incredibly for them. It sells more Apple TV plus subscriptions. It sells more devices. So they obviously don't want to ruin that and turn into any kind of semi political organization.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  So, I mean, for them, it's almost a no brainer, and I hate. Saying this and thinking about it, but when a show is doing that badly and it presents a very high risk, this is clearly what the direction is going to take. I'm a bit excited because I actually think it always felt like Jon Stewart was a little bit, I don't want to say caged, but just, you know, something had changed versus who he was before. So I'm actually excited to see where he goes and what he does with this.

• 9:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know. He felt a little bit out of touch to me after spending, you know, so much time away. It seems like he just lost the pulse. And also his show, I mean, he did some good segments. I mean, his interview, he did some interviews with Bob Iger, one that was terrific. But his, his, um, his show was just poorly formatted. It just didn't flow in the way. It seemed too long. It was droned on a bunch. It got too cute. It just got away from the format that made him funny. And he wasn't as funny.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  I agree, that out of touch. I felt it as well. I definitely felt a lot, a lot of topics that, you know, it had a very like mid 2010s where his mind would have been or where everyone's mind was. And then things kept moving. Whether it, even positions I agreed with him around Zerp or crypto, or where we kind of had similar end visions of what was going on. I agree. It could have been a bit of out of touch. But, but I think Apple, like, what does this mean for mainstream media? And now recognizing Apple TV plus is a central part of mainstream media. But when it's not even presenting, pretending to be a genuine news organization or very, very openly kind of positioning themselves

• 10:24Speaker 01

  as safe and okay, almost they're more Disney right now than Disney itself. I think what's that going to do to mainstream content, I think is, I'm curious what you think of that.

• 10:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't really see it even as safe and okay. I see it as a company that's bending the knee to China. And, you know, obviously, easy decision to not have Jon Stewart come beyond anymore if the show wasn't doing well. But it is interesting that China is first and foremost in terms of the areas of disagreement there. And, you know, we know that Apple doesn't speak out about human rights in China, you know, but happy To do it elsewhere. And we know that Apple will do what it can to please the Chinese Communist Party, because so much of its business is there. I mean, 20% of sales is there. And a large part of its manufacturing is done there. And so what I thought was most interesting was that this is happening in the shadow of this Belt and Ton... Oh, sorry, the Belt and Road

• 11:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Forum that Xi Jinping held in China. So it's also from the New York Times. With Putin by his side, Xi outlines his vision of a new world order. It says, "The leaders of China and Russia hailed each other as old and dear friends. They took swipes at the United States, depicted themselves as building," and this is crucial here, "a fair, multipolar world, and they marvelled at their country's deepening trust." Okay, to marvel at this multipolar world. So you have, it puts Apple in this very, very weird position. By the way, the people that were in attendance there, Vladimir Putin, the President of Indonesia, the President of Serbia, the President, the Prime Minister of Egypt, the Pakistani Prime Minister, leaders of Sri Lanka, the Republic

• 12:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  of Congo, and Nigeria, right? This is what Xi Jinping is setting up as a counterweight to the United States in the world. And it just leaves Apple in an awkward position because it is obviously so reliant on China. And China is setting itself up as a check and almost in opposition to the US, building its power. Taking those photos that look exactly like the ones that you see in the G8, where it's like the US and Canada and Britain and France, and they're doing the same thing in China. And that means, you know, there's going to be, if it's a multipolar world, there's going to be some pulling apart. And who's in the middle when that, you know, when that's pulled apart?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  I can, I agree, and I think we could, I could spend hours discussing, as a former political science major in college, and someone who's read a lot about this, and I do think Apple is, every business is going to have to start kind of taking these considerations. Tesla, in their recent earnings call, the Chinese market definitely came up. Every single retail company, luxury goods, all of these companies are definitely going to be caught right in the middle of this. On a slightly lighter note, and I've been wanting to kind of throw this out. When it comes to, because with Apple TV plus on the, on the table here. Have you watched any of the Lionel Messi games?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Are you an, are you an Apple TV plus subscriber and/or an MLS add-on subscriber?

• 13:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm in and out on Apple TV plus and I haven't watched any. Trust me, I watch enough sports as it is that I just can't get into football or American soccer.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  It would really be the end of me. Like I would get divorced within 10 minutes.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Huge soccer fan, as a massive soccer fan. It is amazing and I don't, how brilliant the Messi move was because for context, and this has been reported. Lionel Messi gets a cut of every Apple TV plus subscription or every MLS add-on. So this was worked into the contract. And then he came in and just, I mean, some of the, like his very first game in injury time, makes a free kick to win the game.

• 14:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  That I saw.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  One after the other. It was incredible and it brought, everyone I know starts talking about this, starts subscribing. So, so I actually think like, Apple, again, as a reminder, and this is actually, you know, it feeds into this Jon Stewart topic very well. How well they're able to kind of structure their contract and their businesses with the talent and, you know, like, invest in the talent and actually make the economics of the service relate to the talent itself. It's, it's very interesting what they're doing. So, I don't know. I think this whole space, we've talked a lot about streaming is going to be a tough business. Um, I think, uh, Apple TV plus is not in a bad situation right now.

• 14:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  I guess like your perspective is just let G dictate your content slate and you're in good shape.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I mean, he's already doing that. Have you, Disney is.

• 15:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Has the same thing going on. It is interesting, though, you talk about these live sports. And Netflix reported earnings this week, just as a side note, they reported earnings. They they beat on subscribers, had eight million new subscribers, it's the biggest jump since 2020. And they are raising prices, Wall Street loved it, sent the revenue up. But they, you know, it was kind of interesting thinking about it, where Apple has their sports package with the MLS, Amazon has their sports package with the NFL. Netflix has a quarterback documentary. I mean, it's nice to know about Kirk Cousins' personal life, but you know, it seems like-

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Netflix basically brought F1 to the US, like the entire documentary series around F1, Formula One, like it's, it's, that drove popularity. And they could have, if they had started moving into these areas earlier, they could have, before it became this popular, been the center point, the center channel of this sport in the United States. So yeah, I agree. I think it's a huge missed opportunity for Netflix.

• 16:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  How long till-

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I think they're gonna-

• 16:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  How long till they go after sports rights?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  I think pretty soon, but the thing is, like, which sport and where? Because again, the NFL has already chopped itself out for the Thursday, or Sunday, or Monday.

• 16:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't you think it's-

• 16:19Speaker 01

  NBA, is there something-

• 16:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's gonna be the NBA.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  All right, yeah, Netflix and the NBA, that, that's an optimistic take. Yeah.

• 16:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's my thought. Okay, so Mark Andreessen this week came out with a post, very long post, 5,000 words, it's called the techno-optimist manifesto. And it goes deeply into, effectively, it's a case for why we should celebrate tech, why we should allow tech to grow without any guardrails, why the people who are getting in the way of tech are getting in the way of humanity's progress, and basically, it's time to build. Did you read this post? I'm curious what you came away, made it made a big stir, I feel like people weren't 100% sure what to make of it, but it basically, with almost everything Andreessen does, there was like half of a group celebrating it and

• 17:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  half a group criticizing it. What's your nuanced take on the techno-optimist manifesto?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  My nuanced take is I did not read it in its entirety. I started to. I did not complete it. Did you finish reading it?

• 17:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  No. Okay. So here's the thing. I read a lot of it, probably more than half, but then I just could not finish it. And it just, it was kind of mind numbing trying to read it because if anyone who's, if you haven't read it yet, it's just kind of like a bunch of tweets strung together. It seems like 5,000 words of tweets. I feel like half the sentences start with, we believe. It was just extremely difficult to follow.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Imagine if it was a Twitter thread that started with one slash 534, two slash 534.

• 17:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's what it felt like.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  That's what it felt like.

• 17:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's interesting because like Andreessen is kind of talking a lot about how basically like we need to celebrate tech and not get in its way. And it's only going to lead to human progress. And then there was this post from Ezra Klein, talking about how effectively, it was interesting to watch Mark Andreessen. Okay, here it is. There's no starker proof of McLuhan's, the medium is the message thesis than the way the medium of Twitter has colonized the way Mark Andreessen thinks and expresses these thoughts. That he seemed totally unaware of this and his tech optimist manifesto repeatedly states that humans are the masters of their technologies and there is no way in the technologies have

• 18:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  become the masters of their humans only sharpens the lesson. I mean, it really did feel like, I like reading Mark Andreessen. I like listening to him. I think he's brilliant.

• 18:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  And even if I don't agree with everything he has to say, I feel like it's worth listening to. But watching him spit this thing out was just quite surprising.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I like reading, I like reading Mark Andreessen when he talks about technology itself, not technology vis a vis society, its role in democracy and the future of humanity, when it's simply about here's what I think is happening about AI stacks going into the future or whatever else it is. But to me, and this has come up a lot over the last couple of years, especially with margins, because we're always like, we're skeptical about a lot of technology. But we're both, John and me, who writes with me, we're very, very positive and lovers of technology and like, like we, everything, I get excited all day long about trying different

• 19:41Speaker 01

  services and apps and gadgets or whatever else it is, I'm obsessive about it. But the thing with Marc Andreessen, and it's very clearly outlined in this piece, it's technology in the way that I express it, or in the way that my circle and I want to like, express our views, our models around technology. And there's a lot of kind of inconsistency in it, because there's a whole line around, like monopolies and regulatory capture are bad. However, dominating markets to the point of monopoly is something that's been core to many of the companies that Marc Andreessen has run, or I mean, invested in and, you know, like been a cheerleader of. So I think it's very clear that it's like, this is not

• 20:26Speaker 01

  about, should you be excited about the next iPhone, or should you be excited about whether augmented reality in the Vision Pro, or Facebook's helmet does well and changes the way we can all use technology, or agricultural AI can actually feed more of the world. No one is arguing against that. It's simply that maybe a very small group of venture capitalists located in one place, who are all friends with each other, should not dominate the entire ecosystem and claim it as their own, versus making people who think differently and approach technology differently accessible for everyone. I think that's, as you can tell, this is something that I've thought about a lot.

• 21:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I agree. Like, I agree with a lot of the central points that Andreessen is making. I mean, I've written about them. This has been in Big Technology, even published about in the Boston Globe. Like, here's the beginning. We are told that technology is taking our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything. I mean, I've written about the fact that like, AI, you know, these hysterias about AI taking our jobs, like, they just do not materialize in the way- That a lot of the critics happen.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  You shouldn't even have to, you shouldn't even have to answer to that.

• 21:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of course.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  The we are being told is already get turning and as you said, your point around the Ezra Klein kind of Twitter hive, like Twitter mindset. You don't need to say that, like some people are saying that and some people don't say that. It's like, I mean, it's not that we are being told. It's that some people make certain nuanced points around how, you know, inequality is increasing or certain jobs are being taken. But it's not some that the entire world is against Marc Andreessen and technology and trying to push this. But to me, the more interesting part about this was I had this weird flashback where

• 22:24Speaker 01

  if it was summer of 2020, I would have been really, really interested in this piece and the debate. It had a COVID feel to it, like a pandemic era.

• 22:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Dude, I came away with the same thing. I was just like, this reads like COVID broke his brain.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's feel like we're still in the pandemic and, and I would have been very into this and the surrounding debate, and I would have spent hours analyzing every think piece and response to it because I would have been locked inside. It's, we've moved on and that, that's actually the more interesting part. Like is, is he and who else, I always wonder this, is still in pure COVID brain? Cause that's what this read like for me.

• 23:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let's just talk about one more part of that. And then I want to go to Max Reed's response to it. So this was the thing that caught everybody's attention. It was his enemies section. He goes, we have enemies, our enemies are not bad people, but rather bad ideas. By the way, it's just kind of crazy to call, I mean, bad ideas, enemies, like enemies are people usually. Our present society, and sorry, that was me, let me get back to Andreessen. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades against technology and against life under varying names like existential risk, sustainability, ESG, sustainable development goals, social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, precautionary principle, trust and safety,

• 23:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  tech ethics, risk management, degrowth, and the limits of growth. The demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past, zombie ideas, many derived from communism, disastrous then and now that refuse to die. It does seem, Rajan, like he's speaking directly to you.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  I mean, yes. The thing, what makes this so ridiculous is like, you can have problems with the UN Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the United Nations, which is where that term comes from. But the term sustainability, when he's talking about technology feeding humanity and coming up with new novel solutions, that is sustainability. When you're talking about risk management, to grow, to group that into, again, any of these other terms, risk management, do we not want that in companies? Do we not want companies? Like, it's one of the, it's just a reminder that, again, going back to the COVID mind, all of these things get grouped in very oddly for him in like really targeted

• 24:50Speaker 01

  personal ways versus the idea that, as in quotes, risk space management, end quote, is a enemy of you and your business and people and is going to hurt humanity is just weird to me.

• 25:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like SBF would agree with him.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  SBF. What a beautiful business that turned out to be.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Definitely, risk management was a massive enemy of Sam Bankman-Fried, and he vanquished that enemy. And he never, that enemy never stepped foot in his, his operations ever again.

• 25:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, Michael Lewis got that right. So, one of the responses that I did want to read and go through was from Max Reed, who has a newsletter on Substack called Read Max. I thought it was a very interesting response to it. So, first of all, I'm going to read part of it, but this is a parental guidance moment. So, if you have, if you have kids who are listening, maybe it's a good time to pause and return because, anyway, I'm just going to go on. I've made the warning. Okay, so Max talks about, I'm just going to read the beginning. "I would say the, my main question about the techno-optimist manifesto and essay by the prominent venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, is whether or not the goat

• 26:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  seed was intentional. The manifesto, published to the website of Andreessen's fund, A16Z, Monday, it currently occupies the entire front page of the fund's site." Oh, by the way, Ron John, did you see this? It's the whole webpage of A16Z is this manifesto. You go to A16Z.com, all you see is manifesto.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  I am laughing a lot in the background and trying to mute myself. So it's not coming through and dominating the sound right now.

• 26:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so he says it was originally accompanied by the following digital illustration, which many readers will recognize immediately. And if you're listening, the illustration is basically some news clips in the corners, and then a big orange circuit board, and then two disembodied hands pulling a light, pulling the middle apart with like a light shining through.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Pulling a hole apart in the middle, the two hands.

• 27:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. Okay. Look familiar? All right. So, I mean, I'm gonna try to get through this part. Okay, does this image of a cybersphere pulled apart by the two strong hands, revealing a pixelated heaven inside, look familiar? Did Marc Andreessen, a man who certainly would like to be known as a funny online guy, familiar with the folkways of the internet? Was he able to cut it up with regular shit posters on East Streets? Mean for his grand statement? Okay, did he mean for his grand statement of purpose to be illustrated by the abstract version of the internet's most famous and beloved shock image? Okay, this shock image, I just recently learned about this, by the way. I guess I've been living under a rock.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Wait, you just learned about goatsy?

• 27:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Within the past year. Apparently goatsy, for those at home, goatsy is an image.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Are you gonna say it?

• 27:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say it. I feel like people should know what it is, so they understand.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  I always go with the, my goatsy philosophy is always a casual, go look it up, make sure no one else is around, but I'm ready for it to hear you.

• 28:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  I've never even seen the image. I still haven't seen the image. I'm not looking at the image.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Oh, all right. You gotta look at the image, but anyways, continue, continue.

• 28:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  What goatsy is, is it's two hands pulling the part.

• 28:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  The I don't even know how to say it.

• 28:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  The back end of a human being and it's a photo of it and it's apparently very disgusting and stretched out. And so that's exactly what Mark Andreessen's story art looks like for this techno optimist post. And so now Max Reed is trying to figure out whether this was intentional. He goes, and by the way, everybody saw it and was originally immediately like that to go to even I who didn't has never seen the image knew exactly what this was. And he goes, sadly, probably not. The image has since been changed. The hands are moved. The resemblance gone. It's too bad because before it was swapped out, the goatsy was about the only surprising or intriguing component of Andreessen's manifesto. Okay. So now that we've gotten past that.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  All right. We made it through listeners. We we made it through the goatsy segment.

• 29:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, it was just so crazy to see it illustrated that way.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Likely and hopefully the only goatsy segment for the rest of 2023.

• 29:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we're not touching on that ever again.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Maybe 2024. We'll see how things go.

• 29:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  If you are legendary VC and you illustrate your post like that, then we will talk about it. But what Max goes on to talks about, talk about is in 2020, this is like you said, it's a it's a redo of time to build. It's time to build, which was during COVID and we had all these societal problems and Mark Andreessen was telling us, okay, build our way out of it. Right. And so, you know, this is what Max says. He goes, what are you building? One reason that three and a half years later, Andreessen is reiterating that it's time to build instead of writing posts called, here's what I built during the building time I previously announced was commencing, is that Mark Andreessen has really not built much of anything. In

• 30:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  the years since he's determined that it was time to build, his fund invested tens of millions of dollars in a video game Ponzi scheme that amiserated its players and a company that sells blockchain transaction records said to reflect ownership of ape cartoons. To me, what really stuck out for me, and I think we can move off of this after this, but what really stuck out is this, the the push by Andreessen Horowitz to make Web three happen. And like Molly said on the podcast on Wednesday, then to subsequently reportedly cash out a lot of those tokens and leave the retail investor holding the bag without building some of the crucial things that Mark Andreessen talked about us, us needing. That is something that you can't quickly talk away. That's not something that quickly goes away from your venture capital firm.

• 30:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's not something that people are going to likely forget anytime in the near to mid future. And it's obviously, you know, something that like, like you said, maybe beforehand, before all this craziness. You know, we would have paid a lot more attention, but it just seems to show how seriously the, the cachet that this firm has, has had, has degraded over these past years. And maybe, maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I'm sure reasonable people can see it differently, but, but that's, that was my takeaway.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, to me, it's trying to do this again. It's time to build had an incredible amount of energy behind it. Everyone was, you know, let's do this. Let's, this is the right direction. Let's really rebuild infrastructure in the United States. Let's try to set ourselves up in the future. And as you said, when, uh, what was the token for the video game called again? It was like smooth love potion.

• 31:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, there were so many.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was called SLP coins, smooth love, in a coin called smooth love potion that then, you know, uh, as you said, fleece retail out of a lot of money. But the other thing, again, like all of these kind of, there's so much in this manifesto, at least in the early parts that I read around how government is the enemy, regulatory capture, uh, over like, uh, the private sector being run by the public sector is the enemy. Whereas A16Z is moving more into defense tech, which is good. And if there's a lot of money to be made and, you know, a lot of, uh, like it's an opportunity, but that's directly contracting with the government and, uh, the public sector.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  So there, there's just inconsistencies in all of this that are hard to reconcile, but.

• 32:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's an interesting post. I mean, I, I don't know, kind of think that like, I'd rather have people write what they have on their mind and read them, like a lot of people were killing the writing and yeah, the writing made it difficult to get through the whole thing. But I'm also just like, I guess you can write it the way that you feel like.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Just, it's time to get an editor. That's all I say.

• 32:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I disagree.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Just get an editor.

• 32:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Write the way that you feel, but write better stuff. I don't know. I just, uh, I guess it is an, in just an interesting moment. I think Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most fascinating stories because they've been right about so much and they are so smart and Andreessen is like a standalone personality in the tech industry. They've done a lot of good, um, but. They're searching for, it seems like, a second act or trying to ride a wave of, you know, interesting forces and not quite sure where it's going to go and we'll see what happens. But they do make the LPs happy. So, there's that. Okay. After the break, we're going to talk a little bit about the new data that I have from Twitter and then after this topic, we are going to talk about the Middle East, which I'm sure will be

• 33:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  less controversial. 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, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales

• 34:19Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 35:04Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 35:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. Ron John Roy, Ron John of Margins, you can get it at readmargins.com. Okay, Ron John, so first of all, Elon Musk started to run a test that you can pay a dollar. He's in a couple of markets that you'll be paying a dollar to use Twitter. I initially was like, oh, this is actually a good idea because it will weed out the bots. But then I thought, oh, man, like, maybe this will actually cause even further degradation of Twitter's user base. What's your read on the dollar plan?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  It's funny because this is exactly the type of system that I advocated for back in 2017. Again, some small payment just to verify, just to, you know, like, add some kind of incentive or monetary connection to the platform. And again, it's a dream for a platform. Once you have that credit card connected, then actually upselling on different types of services or even e-commerce, it could present a huge opportunity. It's just funny that now that everything is framed in, you're giving Elon Musk $1, the entire equation changes. And I can imagine it's just not going to work.

• 36:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, but you're agreeing with Elon on the idea in principle?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think.

• 36:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, our listeners, their heads are gonna explode, man. This is your, like, first moment of kumbaya with Elon in months.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  I'm saying it's the right idea, wrong execution. But if you think about it, because, same, something minimal enough where it does not exclude a massive proportion of the population. Obviously, you would still need some level of free service associated with it, but just, you know, creating a paid level around the most basic parts of the service, it just makes it so it's not, bad actors can't build entire bots of, you know, armies of bots without at least having to pay for that if they're going to. But I think, yeah, it's, it's the right idea, right direction. I just don't think it's gonna work or happen. And it's certainly, it's, it's a starting point for a business that was already in

• 37:46Speaker 01

  a good and strong place to try to build this thing or to build it from the beginning, like potentially a blue sky or someone should maybe go down this road. But I think. At Twitter's level with the debt, like with interest payments are going to have to try to come up with the cash for, this is definitely not going to solve the problem on that side. And if you think about it, Snap, again, we've talked about this in the past, Snapchat Plus is at 5 million subscribers and you know it works because it's just in, it's through Apple, they're paying the Apple tax, it's $3.99 a month, but clearly it's a very, and that's per month, not a year, the Twitter proposal is $1 a year, but you already have

• 38:27Speaker 01

  5 million people. So really kind of like low level payments on a recurring basis, whether that's a month, whether that's a year, I think that's the direction platforms are going to be going and I think it's the right one.

• 38:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And it's kind of interesting because it comes at the one year anniversary mark of Elon taking over Twitter. On October 26th, I believe, 2022, Elon walked into Twitter headquarters, then Twitter headquarters with a sink. So we're almost at the anniversary now. He took over the company on the 28th. What's happened in the years since? I got some new data from Aptopia and we found that Twitter has lost 13% of its users. So they approximate that the estimated daily active users have gone from 140 million every day to 120 million. And it really accelerated around the rebrand. We had months of Twitter

• 39:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  losing daily active users, more than 5% month over month in August and September after the rebrand and negative reviews went up 2,000% there. So, okay, so you see that and you're like, all right, that actually seems like Elon's lost less than you'd imagine, given a lot of the hand wringing about his use of the platform. Obviously, it's still a pretty powerful platform. Some other data that the daily active minutes per user is about consistent and power users are still making up the vast majority of the time spent on the platform. So obviously like work to do, it's shrinking under Musk. It's not shrinking, you know, it's not halving, it's still relevant and it still will have staying power.

• 40:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  The interesting thing that I saw in the data that really stuck out to me was how Threads is doing compared to Twitter. Threads was, first of all, only about 10% of Twitter users have tried Threads and Threads was...

• 40:16Speaker 01

  10% of Facebook users.

• 40:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, 10% of Twitter users. So you have 90% of people who are predisposed to this type of product who haven't even signed up for Threads. And it went from around, you know, above 20 minutes per set, per day on the app at its launch to under five minutes per day now, where Twitter's like around 15%. So clearly Threads isn't catching on. To me, this just kind of signals that this need for people to be in a short form app where news is breaking and they get to see everybody yell, you know, it was novel and it appealed to people, and certainly appeals to some percent of people. But by and large, this is not something the population wants, not on, the broad population wants, maybe niche but not broad. They don't want it on Twitter and they

• 41:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  don't want it on Threads. I don't think they want it on Blue Sky. They certainly don't want it on Mastodon and they don't want it on Substack Notes.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that was always, to me, again, I'm gonna give Elon credit on another one, that premium subscription for Twitter power users giving more features was always the business model to me, that you have in the hundreds of millions of users as the total addressable market, who are excited, willing to use it on a daily basis, like any of us, like you or me, I mean, like, so easily being willing to pay for things. And I remember when they first, Paragon Crew first launched Twitter Blue, and I was actually a happy subscriber to get bookmarked folders and, and even the undo tweet feature where you can, it basically

• 41:50Speaker 01

  just didn't post it for eight seconds or 10 seconds or whatever. Like, I think that was always the real opportunity, or taking all the Twitter firehose data and selling it and packaging it to hedge funds or other social media marketing, monitoring companies. Like, these are all the things that Twitter would kind of get into that I think they should have leaned more into, but... Again, the idea that they were ever going to grow the average Twitter user or the everyday, daily active user to hundreds of millions or billions never really made sense to me. And now, again, once it becomes, once a platform itself is degraded, and once it gets inextricably tied to Elon Musk, you kill any chance of that.

• 42:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, so let's go one level deeper and talk about how frustrating of an experience it can be to follow the news on a platform like a Twitter, like a Threads even. And that is what's happening in the Middle East this week. I mean, over the past few weeks. Last week I was here on the show and said that, a few things. First of all, I said, they should separate from news. I think I'm going to rephrase that. Obviously, news is going to be a core part of any platform like this that will give you up to the minute information in short text bursts. So for news organizations to completely go away may not be wise, simply because you want to have good actors who are steering the conversation

• 43:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  and, you know, putting their analysis in the feeds. That being said, to fully embrace and go whole hog on the feeds is, I think, a little bit too much. Like, you know, these feeds will never be the main way you reach your audience. They'll never be the main way that you build an audience. They'll never be the main way that you gather news. And so that's why I think there should be a little bit of distance between news organizations and social media platforms. I also said that I found it pretty, I also said I found it pretty easy to follow or possible to follow the news on these feeds. And this week obviously proved that to be much more difficult than I anticipated.

• 44:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was so much misinformation flowing around Twitter about the hospital that was bombed, or the hospital parking lot that was bombed in Gaza, not only on Twitter, but within the mainstream news publications. I mean, places got it obviously wrong, you know, putting headlines and images up there that seemed to indicate with certainty things that had happened that had not happened or were under dispute. And, you know, I don't know necessarily whether...

• 44:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Whether I have to fully revise it, I mean, I still was able to follow the discussion in real time and was able to make my own assessments, but it's certainly a lot messier this week than

• 44:40Speaker 01

  it was last week. I think you have to fully revise it, Alex. I think it's time to fully revise it.

• 44:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Go ahead, go ahead, make the argument.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was listening, I was away last Friday and I was listening and I definitely heard that idea that Twitter is still the best place to get breaking news and to try to keep up with it. I would say for people who are very active and open-minded and nuanced around it, it's still, I have been on Twitter in the last two weeks, probably more than I had in the past few months, but what really worries me about this is, is two parts. It's one, as you said, mainstream news organizations, we all know, every journalist still spends all their time on Twitter, so it makes them knee-jerk and the whole editorial process

• 45:30Speaker 01

  try to move potentially faster than it should be, and we saw that with the hospital. Whatever happened, and which is still not definitive, and it's clear that it's not definitive what happened, is that the New York Times posted a headline right away when they shouldn't have, and I feel in a previous era editorial processes wouldn't have jumped the gun that quickly. So I think that's one side, is that mainstream news organizations have to break away from the Twitter pace of breaking news, like, and as much as they want to be at that pace and as much as each journalist is still processing things at that speed.

• 46:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, oh, I agree with that completely. That's definitely point one. The first point that I made was that, for sure. News institutions need to, you know, have one or two degrees of separation from these feeds. They're extremely unhealthy for journalists to be on all the time, like you said.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 46:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  But that being said, I do think that there, being in the feeds, it's possible, if you have discernment and news judgment, to learn what's going on from them. Do you disagree with that?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yes and no. Yes and no. Because I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time digging through, and I give myself some credit around. Being able to parse through information. But what I had noticed that was really different about this versus the past, and this is where Elon's degradation of the platform really plays a role, is that the core economic structure of the platform is now one where anyone can get the blue check, is incentivized to for clicks and views to potentially be paid out, that everything about the platform pushes bad actors to actually spread misinformation

• 47:13Speaker 01

  or more salacious information. Again, I mean, it almost became a joke that the belling cats of the world that really brought this interesting way. And for for people unfamiliar, it's like, you know, using digital knowledge and data and understanding to be able to bring, you know, geo located coordinates or other image analyses to verify information or debunk it. Now, literally, my entire feed was like, anyone with a blue check suddenly turned into an OS int expert, like a military expert and is just like, all you would have to do is throw out random coordinates and say like, okay, verified, here's a thread

• 47:55Speaker 01

  and people will click on it. So I think that when the entire platform is now incentivized for anyone to get a blue check, pay eight bucks a month, and then make themselves available, be allowed to be paid off of that, all incentives point towards spreading misinformation versus in the past, the blue check was still around verification by the platform, however opaque that process was. So anyone on there, there's that had nothing to do with how much money you could or could not make on the platform. In fact, you couldn't make any money on the platform. So the only real incentive was to build trust and following. So it scared me. It scares me right now. Like, if this is happening one week into

• 48:39Speaker 01

  this conflict, two weeks into this conflict, where this can go and how much worse it can get, as long as this is still knowing this is still the central place where news starts. I don't know. It's a little bit terrifying.

• 48:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, you're right. That is the the supply side. I would say demand side, it's a little different. Like, demand side, if you're using it as a user, I think you can still get a lot out of it. And it's a useful tool. However, like, You know, I'm starting to question the merits of being in there so often. Like, maybe it is better to just wait and read it on news sites. You know, because it's just, it is, it is, um, it's, it's not as much for me, the misinformation. It's more of like the partisanship and everybody's like out there just like yelling their talking points and, you know, skewing the information in the way that conforms with their agenda. And that drives me nuts. And I actually, I put a thread about this, uh, this week. I guess it was also a tweet. I did it, no, not threatened. I put a, I did a thread about it.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Wait, a Twitter thread or a?

• 49:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  A thread post, Facebook. And I put on both platforms, anyway.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 49:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  I said, basically, like, it was, it's frustrating to me.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  This is my weekly check in to make sure you have threaded.

• 49:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's frustrating to me because what I'm seeing is there's so many people are on these platforms. The whole dialogue is they did this and they did that and they're bad and they're worse. And can you believe it? It just drove me nuts. And I think that one of the key things that I, I put out there was that like, maybe instead of just talking about the problem all the time, we should speak about the solutions, even if it doesn't fit in the feed. Like, no one's talking about solution. And it's just, and it's embarrassing, I think, the state of.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  What do you mean, solutions in this case?

• 50:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  To this conflict.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  I, that, that's a tough one, I feel, in terms of, again, yeah, Twitter.

• 50:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Think about this.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Short form.

• 50:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Think about this.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Short form, metrics-driven content is not where.

• 50:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Anyone is gonna have.

• 50:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  But how much energy?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Podcasts, however.

• 50:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we can do it. I mean, how much energy is being put to splitting people apart versus bringing them together? And maybe that's me being naive, but it's just absurd.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  No, but that's where, that's again, what I'm saying. All incentives of the platform are around doing exactly that right now. If you want to make money on the platform, that's the easiest way to do it. And it's the best thing you can do. Like, it's the, if you're, it, it's like the Macedonian teenagers in 2016 with Facebook pages. Now the economic incentives point towards that, which they didn't before. So that's why I think this is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

• 51:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and I, I wrote this in our document, but this is almost like the anti-soundbite war. It's so frustrating because it's impossible to put, uh, any, anything into a soundbite here because there's so many years of context that really, that are important for every little bit of the situation that's happening. And. You know, I just, it's frustrating to me because like people are trying to shoehorn this into like 280 characters and be like, you know, this side is right because or that side is right because and it's like, you know, you have people in Gaza who don't like Hamas. You have people in Israel who have been marching in droves to overthrow the government there. I mean, not, not like with a coup, but like calling on the president to resign, large

• 51:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  portions of the prime minister resigns, large portion of the country. And so like, it's just, it doesn't lend itself to social media. It really is frustrating.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Well, no, but and then think about this. I've seen so many people, I've talked to so many people who already, you know, are like either the antisemitism or the Islamophobia is so apparent in all of the replies to anything I've said. Of course, every bot army right now is going to be in there, mixed with real people as well, but it's like the easiest opportunity for any bad actor to just get everyone feeling like division is all there is because there's again, both the geopolitical incentive, the economic incentive, everything is incentivizing splitting people like that based on how the platform's structured right now.

• 52:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  And right. And it does, by the way, it spills over into newsrooms and we just touched on this, but I think that mainstream newsrooms really did have been doing a terrible job covering this conflict. So there's been some good, but some of it's bad, including folks that should know better. You know, people who might touch on covering disinformation, sharing clearly wrong numbers about numbers of casualties and not using that to walk back and not examining, you know, the roots of, of why those numbers were shared and why they shared those numbers. To me, that just, it's not good.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Just don't tweet.

• 53:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  That, that's the lesson.

• 53:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Don't tweet, don't read Twitter. I don't know. It's tough.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Last question, should I go to Web Summit?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Explain to listeners why that's a question.

• 53:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, right now, there's all these... So, Web Summit is one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, and it's in Lisbon every year. I go almost every year. And Patty Cosgrave, who runs the thing, and I know him, made a bunch of statements about this conflict, you know, basically winking at the fact that Israel's committing war crimes without naming any specific war crimes, and also just, I think, tweeting somewhat insensitively on October 7th before any of the bodies in Israel were really cold. Okay, I'm just gonna say it because it's important to draw it out. After the Israelis were massacred on that

• 54:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  day, he published a chart, tweeted a chart that showed the differences between Israeli and Palestinian deaths in the conflict year by year. It's an accurate chart. It's a chart worth discussing and not worth ignoring, but to share that on the day that so many innocents were killed gave the impression that it was like, well, this day deserved this, or like, you know, no big deal. I think that's what the impression was given, and lots of Israelis pulled out of the conference. Meta, oh, let's see, oh, Meta's out now, Google is out now, Intel is out now, Siemens is out now. I mean, basically, all of their key speakers have

• 55:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  withdrawn. I'm struggling with this, to be honest. I think people are entitled to make mistakes, and he did apologize. I don't know if what Patty did was, he wasn't like, I mean, I've seen so many instances of worse on, you know, both people who support Israel and support the Palestinians, who've used worse language than he did, far worse. And it hasn't really, I guess I'm still planning to go. It didn't really come to the level for me that like, it's, you know, worth having Web Summit destroyed over, although like, I understand where the concerns come from. But I don't know what to do. What do you think?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, the most kind of odd

• 55:54Speaker 01

  part of this whole story was I saw certain people saying because they took money from the Qatari

• 56:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Investment Authority, that that's a reason to come out. And to me, again, I mean, separate from, I think, again, the topic of what people are posting and when. This is where you had mentioned Apple in China and all the kind of like difficult decisions that's going to create for people. I mean, the vision fund, sorry, like, I mean, will division funds through the Saudi Investment Authority? Like, you know, MBS and Saudi Arabian money in every venture capital fund or tech company. There's going to be more and more and more of these very, very complicated and messy connections and situations that I think

• 56:42Speaker 01

  that none of these questions are going to be answered anytime soon, and it's only going to get messier.

• 56:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know Patty, so I think that's sort of,

• 56:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  you know, what's shaping this for me in some way. And I mean, I also don't think that, I mean, again, like, I think his statements were bad and in poor taste, but

• 57:03Speaker 01

  No, this is where, oh, sorry.

• 57:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  It just seems to me that to have all these companies pull out over them is, I don't know. It's it's it's bold. Go ahead.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  No, but I, this is where to to bring it all back to Jon Stewart. Why I became such a Jon Stewart fan in the 2000s was I remember living here in New York in the post nine 11 era, especially in the buildup to the Iraq War. He was one of the only voices on any kind of network television, even though it's still cable, but like on any easily accessible television that actually was in a smart, and I think that's where comedy was really important because he was able to get out the message that maybe this is not a good idea, but do it with humor. So people allowed it and listened to it. But otherwise, that message was just not allowed anywhere.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  So I think like it reminded me like a lot of these kind of things that you can potentially see as a Overreaction. I think that's where John Stewart managed to thread the needle very well back in the day in terms of like, in a very heated environment, still trying to bring a nuanced view to a very difficult situation.

• 58:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And his context mattered, by the way. I mean, he was a New Yorker. This war was being fought.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I mean, in terms of nine 11 victims, I don't think there's been anyone who's taken the cause as much as John Stewart.

• 58:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so like, I think that he was stepping up and saying effectively like, in my name and the name of my city. Like, I mean, obviously it's the whole country that was involved, but you know, he had some authority there. Patty grew up in Ireland, of course, and Ireland has its own problem with terrorism groups. And he immediately drew a line between the two. Unfortunately, it's just, you know, it is not the same thing, you know, and I do think that's been a real problem in the US where a lot of people are trying to put their like, you know, their context of how their political ideology works and just neatly fit it on top of what's going on inside Israel and Gaza. It just doesn't work that way.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I was actually going to say, I disagree that people are even trying because it's so convoluted and twisted and messy that, again, I don't think there's a way, you know, like the far right, which side do they take in this, this conflict? Like, I feel it's, it just, there's been so much complexity in all the different connections and where people stand in different ways that it's a reminder that, again, this is all messy and complex and people aren't able to, only very limited people are able to confirm all their priors in terms of what's going on.

• 59:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no doubt.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  At some point, it gets messier.

• 59:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  That will do it for us this week. Next week, we're going to talk about big tech earnings. A lot on tap, including Amazon. So stay tuned for that. Okay. Who do we have on tap next week? Meredith Whitaker is the CEO of Signal is scheduled to come on next Wednesday. So that should be an interesting discussion. Maybe I'll go even deeper with the, about the techno optimism with her. So if you like this conversation, stay tuned for that one. And that's going to do it for us here. So thank you, Ron John. Thank you, everybody for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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