God, 'The Current Thing,' And Apple — With Antonio Garcia Martinez

Antonio Garcia Martinez is an early Facebook employee, author of Chaos Monkeys, former Apple engineer, and writes the Pull Request on Substack. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion touching on what he learned about Apple's ad platform in his short tenure at the company, how he's navigated being held as a symbol for new-right politics and then pushed back on its pro-Putin narrative, what the meme about Ukraine support being "the current thing" really means, and why he's converting to Judaism if he disdains dogma. 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?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Antonio Garcia Martinez. He's the author of Chaos Monkeys, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year. An early Facebook employee, a notoriously former Apple engineer. He's currently a senior fellow at the Lincoln Network and author of Pull Request on Substack. He also has a podcast by the same name. Antonio, welcome to the show. Thanks, Alex, for having me. Yeah, so I think we should start with how we met because, I don't know, it was kind of an interesting interaction and it may set the stage here. So I had written this story for BuzzFeed News when I was there, but how I had bought

• 2:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  an AR-15 using Facebook, which was against Facebook's policies to do a private purchase of an AR-15 there. You had tweeted the story or something and said that like, you know, this is, the tweet's gone now, but I think it was something along the lines of like, this is everything that's wrong with, you know, the media today.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I wouldn't say I didn't say it's entirely possible I was that much of an asshole in 2016. But I don't know that I would quite heap all the sins of tech journalism on your forehead, Alex, and that one piece about wire. Because I think in retrospect, I think we had a conversation about it later and I kind of respected the fact that you actually bought a firearm and you kept it and you kind of did the do, so to speak, rather than just talk about it. But I'm not denying I said it either. It's entirely possible I did.

• 2:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think the thing that happened afterwards was, you know, I slid into your DMs and was like, you know, let's talk about this. Because, you know, for the piece, I did use Facebook to buy the firearm and it was part of the gun control discussion at the time. And you're a gun owner. And so, you know, I was expecting a reaction. But also, like you had mentioned, I kept the gun because otherwise it would be a straw purchase. And there were plenty of reporters that had like bought guns and like handed it to the cops or like returned it right away or then returned it, but they sold it to someone else right away. And you saw, you sign on the form that you're the ultimate acquirer. And if you don't plan on keeping the gun, you can go to jail because it's a straw purchase. And so I had made the point of doing that.

• 3:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And when I pointed that out to you, it was interesting because like we were then able to have like a pretty constructive discussion about it. And I thought that was valuable.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and for those who don't know what a straw purchaser is, because it's kind of a gun term, it's basically, you know, felons in most states, I think all states can't own or buy firearms. So they send somebody with a clean record and that person effectively resales the guns, which is totally legal. And for all the talk of ghost guns and this and that, how guns end up in the hands of the wrong people is typically a straw purchaser with a clean record who goes to a state where you can buy whatever. And then you'll often go across state lines and then sell it to somebody informally for cash who should not be owning a gun.

• 4:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. But Antonio, it's interesting because like you're like, it seems to me that you're like anti-dogma. And, you know, I also am wary of dogma. You know, I don't think we should spend the whole podcast on this, but, you know, I grew up religious and I'm still spiritual and, you know, you're... And so like, but there's definitely like a skepticism in me of like people saying, oh, this is how it is and this is how it should be. Don't question it. And that comes back from my background. And it seems like you have something similar, but you're also in the middle of doing a conversion to Judaism and becoming religious. So how do you square those two?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Well, so I'll get to the religious thing as a second thing, just in terms of contrarianism. I think one thing, this whole Ukraine situation, I think, has dropped kind of like a bomb into what was the quiet, like, post 2020 media scape of discourse, right? And I think what it's shown is that a lot of people that we thought were sort of independent thinkers are actually just contrarian assholes, right, who will just flip against the existing sort of narrative, which maybe has a high level of social function. It doesn't make them particularly good people. But I think that level of sort of knee jerk, media contrarianism starts to serve its purpose less and less when there's like an outside thing that actually exists in reality. And that thing is, for example, civilians getting bombed or brutalized in various ways. And then

• 5:35Speaker 02

  at that point, the sort of ironic semiotics of whatever the thing is, is a little bit less important than actually getting the story straight. And if you're in a society, or if you have enough influence and an audience to actually move the needle on public opinion, in some sense, you do have a duty, in some sense, to move that public opinion in what one would consider to be a morally good, or at least, you know, socially beneficent end, rather than just sitting there ironizing endlessly about, again, very real world events. And so in some sense, my patience for that level of contrarian asshol-ness, I think, dropped a lot in the context of the Ukraine story.

• 6:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, which is something we're going to get into in the second half.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, address the religion thing.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, wow.

• 6:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I'll leave the conversion questions out. I'm just a personal curiosity to me, but how do you square those two things?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  But again, that's the thing. I mean, calling bullshit on something is like the most Jewish thing ever. I mean, literally, if you read the Talmud, I mean, the Jews invented Reddit before Reddit, obviously. If you read the Talmud, particularly as it's typically formatted, which is the text in the middle, and then a bunch of reply guys, like literally the comments right on a Twitter thread, all around it, all of them trolling each other, right? So, you know, Rabbi Moshe said so and so, and then Rabbi so and so, I don't know, he's utterly full of it because of this, this and that, and then referred to some other place with like a link to some other place in the text, right? And so that, I think, again, I think, when people think of religion in the United States or in, you know, the Western world, Christianity is kind of the spiritual backdrop, even if those people aren't Christian. And in that world... Doctrine and dogma can be very important.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And not to say that I was raised Catholic, not to say in Catholicism, there isn't a a culture of intellectual debate, there certainly is. But the enforcement of rigid dogma of, you know, and I think, I think Catholics are unfairly tarred as always being inquisitorial. I mean, that was a long time ago and doesn't express the entirety of the religion. But there was an inquisition and a chase of heretics and the enforcement of faith norms of what you believe and think, not just in Christianity and in Islam and whatever, is very, again, is very important in what a theologian would call orthodoxic religions, right? Religions that are about correct belief and correct faith rather than correct practice, right? There's kind of a quip in one of the conversion books I read that was like, you know, Jews,

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Jews agree on what, on what every Jew should do and therefore they're free to think whatever the hell they want. And so I think, although, again, it's

• 7:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, I don't know if that's true.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Well, but, well, but it's, I was gonna say, it's within a very sophisticated legal tradition that stems from a level of legal argument. So, yeah, it's certainly not anything you can do, but, but look at, but look at the various strains and branches of Judaism that all call themselves Jews from Reform to, to, to the Heretics. And there's a big spectrum there, way bigger spectrum than you would find within Catholicism, for example, in my opinion, in terms of what is true, what do we actually believe? Not within level of practice, because there's like weekend Catholics, Catholicism, of course, but I don't know. I think there's a lot more debate in Judaism than there is in Catholicism, which has a catechism, which is approved by the Vatican, doesn't change very often. And it's like, basically, this is the way it is, right? So, I don't know.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  To me, it doesn't seem like taking on an enormous amount of, of dogma and doctrine. I, you know, I think religion, I think Walter Benjamin has a quote, in which he said, or, no, it's William James, sorry, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, that religion is, is the belief that there's some unseen order to which human society should be converging towards, right? Like, that at its highest level, in my opinion, is a definition of religion. And, you know, the Jews have one vision of that and Christians another.

• 9:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Oh, I really disagree with that statement.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 9:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, yeah, because I feel like when you get to the more stringent levels of religion, it's not, it's not that. And it's more so just like, you know, a practice of, of serving God through certain

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Certain mechanisms and a belief, a, an orthodoxy of belief, which is where you get orthodox, you know, religion from. So anyway, we could, we could go on forever about this, but

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Well, but I mean, but, but James's definition would include, well, you've got to put on the Tefillin every morning, right? That's also part of the unseen order, right? And, and Habad is there to make sure that every Jew does that, or tries to make every Jew do that, right?

• 9:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, they definitely do on my, my block in Brooklyn.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Oh, do they? Oh, you, you probably, you probably get snagged all the time.

• 9:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, I do. I'm like, all right, guys. Anyway, I've made my choice. So, so, you know, I was gonna, I, I do want to cover Apple versus Facebook and Elon Musk thing. But, but since we're already into it, I, I feel like it's worth like getting, you know, you talked a little bit about contrarianism. So I'm going to flip the, the script here on this show, and I think we're going to go with, you know, your politics first and the reaction to some of the stuff that's happened to you. And then we'll move into the more brick and mortar stuff of

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Oh, I have, I have a politics, Alex? I don't think I have a politics.

• 10:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, yeah, and that's what I want to hear. Because you, you may, you may or may not have a politics, but you've certainly been held up by different political, you know, systems as, well, yeah, look, I want, I, let, let me ask you about it.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Sure, okay.

• 10:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then we can talk about it.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, look, I, I feel like it's important to talk about your firing at Apple first. You know, one of the questions I've had is, you know, it, it's interesting to me that it became so surprising. I mean, I think you've mentioned that, that you wrote the book not expecting to ever have, you wrote Chaos Monkeys, which is inevitably what the uprising at Apple was about. You wrote the book not expecting to be able to work in tech again. And, you know, I know that you, your belief there was that, you know, it was because you exposed some of the frivolity in the tech world. But it's also, I mean, it has to be all encompassing. Like, you must have written that book. You know, knowing that, you know, that, that if you were to go back into a tech company,

• 11:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  let's say, Apple or whatever it is, that, you know, you would face a potential of some sort of uprising. And we did have, you know, Chair Scarlett on the show a couple of weeks ago. And like, she talked about like, this passage about you comparing Facebook to legalize crack and a mother, you know, killing her baby because, you know, Farmville was so addicted.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Hold on.

• 11:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  So addictive. Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Just to be clear, I was commenting, I was commenting on a news report that came out just then about a mother who had, I forget the exact details of the story because it was ages ago. And it was one of these lurid gossip things. But it was a mother who had somehow injured her child or something. Because, yeah, she was playing Farmville too much or something. Just to be clear, I wasn't describing this in a normative way. I was quoting a news article that came out at the time.

• 12:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah. But you said such a company could certainly figure out a way to sell shoes. Twitter was cute and all, but it didn't have a casualty rate yet. No matter how much this Lady Gaga person was tweeting, Facebook it was.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  And the Lady Gaga was there because, again, it's part of the drama of it. But I went to like, one of the M and A meetings. My little failed startup got bought by Twitter. And in one of the meetings, like, Lady Gaga showed up. And I'm so uncool and so out of it. I'm like, wait, who? And like, they made a big deal about the person being there and it was just totally lost them. Anyhow, there's a lot of context in your statement you're quoting.

• 12:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, good, good. So, so yeah, that's what we're here for.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Okay. So.

• 12:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Were you that surprised when it all went down?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, of course. Like, I just tweeted, look, I, again, I'm not, I'm obviously not a cool person who's big into popular media, as you could tell from not knowing who Lady Gaga was in 2011 or 12, or whenever it was. I just recently watched my, my full, a full Seinfeld episode for the first time in my entire life.

• 13:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, right. Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  I've, of course, seen scenes of it. And I get some of the references, right? Like, osmatically, how can you not know about Seinfeld? But I never actually just like, sat down and watched the 30 minutes or whatever. And I did, prompted by the girlfriend. And I don't, it was a random episode. I don't think it was even like, the saltiest or anything. It was just like, some episode she was watching that I tuned into. And it's just amazing, right? I mean, Chaos Monkeys is like, a Mormon picnic compared to like, an average episode of Seinfeld from whenever, I don't know what year that episode came out, but the show was big in like, what, the 90s? And so, I would just say that. Many things have changed, right? In the before times, and by before times, I mean as little as four years ago, right? One can write sort of hyperbolic, very gonzo works of narrative nonfiction. And it was not necessarily seen as a bad thing.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Everything wasn't this hypersensitive quest to make everyone feel good about themselves, right? Which is what most cultures actually become. And again, if you see any, again, not even particularly edgy stuff like Seinfeld, which was like the most popular show at the time, one of the longest running comedies. I think people nowadays would be absolutely shocked by it. Anyhow, I'm not making a normative projection about the world. I'm just saying, uh, social mores have changed radically in even very few years. And so getting back to your point, I think I have made this point publicly before that I thought Chaos Monkeys might be a little bit spicy and hot, but it wasn't, wasn't because of, and again, most of the book is about the startup game. It's about modern digital advertising. It's like super wonky business-y stuff told in this kind of slightly gonzo tone.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Almost none of it is about personal life, dating and same for any of that stuff. A lot of that stuff was included because my editors thought, and I agreed, that injecting a little bit of personal stuff into it makes it a more salable book and less of a like wonky tech fest, which let's face it, is kind of a snooze fest. The book was marketed and framed as like, like a Michael Lu, like an early Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker type romp through a field. And it was, it was written as such, but the things I thought it would get me into trouble is because, A, again, it's, it's much less so now, but there used to be this sort of code of silence that hung around startups in tech. Techies, I think because tech journalists, uh, you know, present company, either excluded or included, are often very antagonistic to tech.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  And so the thought of like spilling the beans has, has a very negative connotation and it also just seems frivolous. Before Chaos Monkeys came out, I tried thinking of like, what's the last like insider tech book? That's not some dumb like LinkedIn, Thon Fluence or bullshit, like an actual interesting piece of literary nonfiction. The only one I could think of is a book called Startup by Jerry Kaplan that came out in like 1998 or something, which is actually a pretty good book. I went and reread it before I wrote Chaos Monkeys. But you know, it feels, some of it is timeless because it's the human predicament. Some of it feels very, very dated because the tech world in the late nineties obviously is completely unlike today. And so what I thought would get me canceled was just. A snide look at, look, I compare Facebook's culture and I use Facebook as a proxy for Silicon

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Valley more broadly. Like, I don't think Facebook is uniquely evil. In many ways, I think it's a better company than most. But, you know, this bizarre cultish fascination with the company's origin story, the belief in this great leader, the headquarters covered in posters, everyone wearing what seemed like uniforms, I almost joked it seemed like some weird techno-communism. Of course, life in real communist countries like Cuba is nothing like Facebook's campus, but it does have this bizarre sort of totalitarian, it's a mix of a totalitarian state with like a hippie commune in one package, right? And so that's mostly what I made fun of in the 400 or whatever plus pages of Chaos Monkeys. And that's what I thought would get me into trouble. I actually wrote it in Europe, thinking, well, I might have to reboot my career. I have a, you

• 16:45Speaker 02

  know, I can, I can live and work in Europe. And so I thought, oh, I might have to reboot my career in Europe. And so I actually wrote the beginning of Chaos Monkeys in Berlin. But I eventually decided to come back. And again, that's what I thought would get me into a little bit of hot water. But I'm like, eh, at the time, I was like, so angry about everything and just pissed off and just in a place of just like, okay, I'm gonna write the biggest satire ever. And that's what produced that book. So.

• 17:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And the stuff that actually, you know, did end up getting you in trouble, you've, I think you've mentioned that if you were to do it again, you would pull it back a bit.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Uh, probably. I mean, just because it's distracting. Again, if, if the only lesson you take away from Chaos Monkeys is some throwaway joke comment that we've all made, by the way, about, oh, dating in the city is so terrible, or whatever, right? That's it. That was the joke. Like, if that, if I knew that would overshadow what I thought was the actual goal of the book, which is documenting how kind of weird and crazy Silicon Valley life is. Yeah, I mean, it just, it wasn't worth it in the end, some throwaway joke.

• 17:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I'm actually more interested in, in what happened to you after the Apple situation. I mean, the book, you've talked a lot about the book. But, you know, it seems to me like you've, you've kind of been held up by the right, or at least by, you know, the very vocally anti-woke as like this kind of symbol and.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Eh, I don't know about that.

• 17:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think? I mean, I've seen it. It's definitely happened.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 18:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  It must be. Yeah, how have you felt?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  The Apple thing, A, I think it's, I don't think it's that, I don't think it's that interesting as, as an episode. It was very short. It was one, it was one weird little chapter in a, by tech standards, kind of long career in tech with lots of ups and downs and various things to it. So to me, it's not this all consuming thing. And I, you know, I don't even like talking about it much because, again, to me, I don't think it was that interesting a thing. I mean, I, the only way my story is interesting is that I think it was part of a cycle within the bigger tech community. And you saw it in other companies, Shopify, Coinbase, where, you know, employees would sort of rally, create a Slack mob about some issue, either try to get somebody fired, or try to get the company to make a statement about X. And I think in the context of that, I was one interesting footnote in that. So that thing I find kind of interesting.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  But yeah, the, the me part of it, I don't know. I don't find it that.

• 18:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, I, I also find it interesting that like, you know, that, so take James DeMore, for instance, like he tried to play, and, and I wouldn't, I don't think your situation is, you know, similar with, with James, but like, you know, he had, he had like, you know, he was made a symbol and just played all the way into it. But I find something that's really interesting to you. And we were talking about the current thing in the past is that like, you, you know, whatever groups want to hold you up, you've kind of said, I'm just going to say, you know, what I think about things. And you've actually been kind of, you know, battling back against some of this reflexive, like, pro Russia, pro Kremlin thing. And like, you know, there's this meme about like, what can you explain, first of all, like, and I want to get into that because it's interesting to see that, like, you know, instead of riding with

• 19:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  that, you know, you've pushed back a little bit. And, and so I'd kind of like to hear like, you know, what, what that's been like. And, and also if you could explain like what the current thing is, because there's this thing that like, I'm for the current thing. And it's like, you know, all these like popular social causes and the Ukrainian flag. And kind of making fun of people who are like pro Ukraine because, you know, they're, they seem to like get a bar board all social causes. And you've actually said, hey, wait a second, like, you know, we actually should be pro Ukraine here. Stop being like reflexively anti, you know, anything that like a certain group of people says. So unpack that for me.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I mean, I not only, you know, pushed back against, I mean, I went to Ukraine. I wanted to see it for real. I mean, I think that's what's missing here, right? That I think we're all of us are so wrapped up, myself included, by the way, I'm not, I'm not exempting myself. But I think all of us are so wrapped up into the mediated nature of reality through these, you know, quote unquote, black mirrors in our pockets, that I think we, particularly in a country like the United States, where a lot of our crises of any stripe of both sides, whatever, right? I'm not just pointing to one side here, are frankly kind of made up or, you know, blown up in ways like, look, bombs aren't falling, nobody's dying, right? You're not, you're not wondering your next thing of food comes in. And it's easy to relevise against tragedy, but I think doing that at some point gives you some perspective, right? And the reality is that the United States has been like careening between perceived,

• 20:53Speaker 02

  you know, existential threats that weren't really existential threats for like five or six years. And all of it mediated, you know, via Twitter, such that the identity politics of who you are are no longer about some political manifesto, and this is the way the world should be, and this is my slate of public policies. It's like, do you believe in this thing and who else believes in this thing? And how you identify your tribe via that mechanism, right? And I think that's, that's basically eaten everybody's brain, at least everyone who spends too much time on Twitter. Right? And something, what the Ukraine situation, I think, highlights is that, guess what? It's, you know, we, you know, the singularity hasn't quite happened, right? We're not living in a purely pixelated reality. There actually is a real, real out there, right?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Where people, where civilians get shot and killed, or, you know, women get raped in wartime, or there's a massive battle going on, or an entire country mobilizes. There actually is a real thing out there, right? And that we, even if indirectly by molding public opinion, or by donating our time or money, or whatever, can actually impact that real thing somehow. And I, and I think irony is like the most corrosive, or one of the most corrosive things in the world. This guy, Ian Bogost, who's like a columnist at The Atlantic and a professor at Georgia Tech. He wrote a book about games, but he has this like chapter long riff in it about the dangers of irony, which is the favorite, my favorite part of that book. And ironic detachment is, is basically the, the, the, in my opinion, the smug cowardice

• 22:18Speaker 02

  of someone who's not willing to take a position on things and actually engage in the real world because it would be too emotionally painful or would actually require something in the form of real, you know, mental or physical sacrifice. Right. Um, it's, it's, it's a little bit of the too cool for school sort of reality, but it doesn't actually make you too cool. It just makes you detached and dissociated and frankly, kind of irrelevant, right to the greater world. And so I, I think the current thing, thing, I, which, you know, is itself a current thing in the sense that, and this has been, this has been cited by other, by McLuhan, by Neil Postman, by Douglas Ruchkoff, right? The, there's this sort of eternal present, I think is what Ruchkoff called it, or maybe I coined that, I can't remember. But there's a sort of eternal present of the internet, right? There's always the heated, hot thing that you're focusing on today that you're going

• 23:03Speaker 02

  to forget tomorrow. And you live in this state of constant anxious, you know, absorption into this ever-changing thing and it's driving us all crazy. And so I think talking about the current thing, I think is a very politically laden way of referring to that, which, you know, I think is real. It's hardly, I don't think it's wrong, but I think, again, the current thing is itself a current thing. Right? And like I just tweeted, irony is unlike negative signs, right? If, if you, if you study irony ironically, right? If you look at ironic detachment with a level of ironic detachment, it doesn't suddenly make you a sincere realist with a, a truer view of the world, right? It just drives you deeper down the rabbit hole of irony and all the ills that, that irony can cause. So I'm not quite sure.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  And again, never mind the sort of, in my opinion, the moral cost of ironizing what is very real human suffering that this country and us collectively, again, as a nation. Can maybe do something about. And so I think it's a it's a dangerous form of irony. And again, you could and you could ironize about the irony because, oh, well, but what about this other thing that we should be worried about? But it's like, well, okay, but who cares?

• 24:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me put, yeah, let me put a finer point on it, right? So, you know, this current thing thing is basically like, I feel like it's coming from like folks who are like, you know, trying to point out like the woke, trying to put like being anti woke, saying, you know, these people care about BLM and LGBT issues. And they're holding a Ukraine flag and it's like woke to be pro Ukraine. So therefore we should be pro Putin. And you've come out like pretty stridently, you know, against that stance, saying, hey, wait a second, this is not part of the US culture war. So I am curious and and yeah, I'm curious, like, you know, you definitely have a hold with with those folks because of the Apple thing. And because of probably your writing afterwards. So what's it been like, you know, basically telling them to shut up on this issue?

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, this new right, I mean, they're very pissy. They're very loud. They have practically no electoral constituency whatsoever. But um, um, I don't know. I think it's also wrong, right? Like, it's just not true that Ukraine is a current thing. Like, sorry, I'm in the heart of the current thing, which is San Francisco. And for a bunch of reasons I won't go into, I've been looking at places to maybe live here or rent here, whatever. Like, I walk around. Sure, you see a couple of Ukraine flags, but you still see way more BLM posters. And it's not like they swapped that one for the other. Like, I I fully agree that things like critical race theory, the pronoun thing, wokeness, like, there's definitely like a woke board that has taken over more and more of society. I wouldn't deny that exists. But to claim that, oh, no, now Ukraine is like, like, no, that's not even true.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Like, I'm sure if you actually looked at Twitter stats of like, how many people are tweeting about Ukraine versus historically over the same period? Tweeting about the BLM rights and all the rest of it, it would seem small in the in the scheme of things. Like, I don't think it's even an accurate diagnosis of the reality. But even assuming it was, let's say it is, then it's it's still wrong, right? Because Ukrainian cause is still the right type to think in that in that conflict. By the way, I, you know, I wouldn't give this right. Perhaps the, or I'm, the support there for Russia, I think, is maybe not quite as after the fact and reflexive as you're describing it. It is the case that, that many of these people were actually pro Putin sort of before this even happened, right? Of course. And, because, because Russia, and again, I think this is where, and I wrote a piece in Barry Weiss's thing about it, this is where I think a lot of the new right resembles the old left, right?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  In that, A, they're very critical of America and what the American government can do in the world. Two, they, they hold the US responsible for everything that happens in the world, right? Apparently, Zelensky is in power, not because he won an election on a landslide, but because, you know, the State Department made a few phone calls 15 years ago, or whatever, right? Which is the same conversations I was having with Berkeley hippies about Chile and Pinochet, for example, 20 years ago, right? Oh, the US controls everything and is responsible for everything, but the US should control nothing, but American values should take over the world. It was this bizarre schizophrenia, and you see it on the, on the right as much as you do on the left. In any case, they, they're fans of Putin because, you know, Putin isn't into gender pronouns, and he's anti-woke or whatever, and he's seen as some defender of trad Christianity. Never mind, never mind that the church attendance in his country is super low, the marriage

• 27:03Speaker 02

  rate is super low, the birth rate is low, like, all these things that these people on the right tend to obsess about. You know, Russia isn't exactly delivering on, and at the end of the day, again, it's, it's hard to look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and see some wonderful defense of Christian society, when in fact, it's like a total violent butchery is what it is. But again, I, I think that, that's the problem, that I think you've, you, you stew in perpetual irony, and you live in this blizzard of images, and you lose connection to the reality of it. It's, it's shocking, I mean, one of the things that shocks me about these people, none of them actually go to Poland or Ukraine to see what it's actually like. Like, I went, right? And I, I don't know Slavic languages, I don't know the area, I literally just pick up and went, kind of improvising as I went along. Nobody actually goes, nobody actually lives there. Again, it's like the same thing with, like, the hippies talking about how great Cuban

• 27:47Speaker 02

  healthcare was 20 years ago, it's like... You know, motherfucker, get on the plane to Havana already. Go live there like a Cuban, not as an American tourist with dollars. Go live there as a Cuban and see what it's like. Of course, nobody ever did. And of course, none of these people are actually going to pick up and leave the the blue cities that they tend to live in and actually go live in Minsk or Moscow, right? It's the game. It's the same. It's a LARP. It's an act in a way. And so I don't know. That that sort of LARP hypocrisy just drives me nuts. And so, yeah, yeah.

• 28:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I do think that like this, and there's some great stories about it, but this has really exposed like some people who are like, just, you know, doctrine, contrarian, so will always be against the quote unquote current thing, or whatever, or anything that's popular. It's like, OK, they get some stuff right, but like, they just look like complete idiots right now. I mean, there's massacres going on in Ukraine and people.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, they look like fucking morons. And the thing is, I mean, their audiences are big enough, right? And they have, you know, they've got their little solar system of sims around them that like auto like things on Twitter. So they're probably not aware of it. But yeah, but they look basically like morons. And like, it's hard to take these people seriously anymore. I should say, in the defense of some of the new right, I think the new right is actually an interesting movement. And there's there's some interesting authors there. They actually do have what, you know, it's not just like alt right Channer is coming up with memes. There actually is an intellectual vein there that I think is worth mining and thinking about and talking about. People like Patrick Deneen, you know, even Adrian Remuel, who's a Harvard professor. I mean, they do have actual intellectual there. I don't want to tar that entire movement with like, oh, they're all just Putin stans engaging

• 29:12Speaker 02

  in stupid little Twitter games. Like, there is something to that movement that is worth, and I hope to write about it more in the future, actually, as a teaser. But yeah, for many of them, I think they don't they don't rise to that level. And yeah, they were always just knee jerk contrarians. And now they're stuck, right? Because as it turns out, if you look at most polls, the Ukraine cause is pretty popular in the US, not just among coastal elites, right? Again, they're characterizing it as like the next BLM. But I saw a Ukraine flag flying with an American flag in Virginia City, Nevada, outside a house that I have in like, the reddest county where people walk around open carrying guns on their hips and stuff. And they've got Ukraine flags flying. In fact, there was a poll that AP, I actually linked to it, AP did a poll, and across the board, Republicans, even more

• 29:56Speaker 02

  than Democrats, thought that Biden wasn't strong enough on Russia and Putin and felt that the US should do more about Ukraine. And so, again, I think the most vocal members of this new right, people like Tucker Carlson, J D Vance, kind of finally got the got the memo. And dialed it back, their rhetoric back a little bit, right? JD Vance certainly did. Not least of which, because Ohio has a very large Ukrainian-American population. That wasn't very happy about his comments about Ukraine. But you know, it's hard to be a populist if your views aren't very popular. And the reality is that many Americans are actually very sympathetic. I mean, I, you know, I live, you know, I live in Nevada and like, this is like Thomas Friedman style anecdotes, but whatever. Like I talked to random people, I picked up my cat. So I disappeared for a month in this Polish Ukraine, like literally packed my bags left and like didn't know when I'd come back.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  And my poor cat, I mean, it was a very nice kitty hotel, but she was there for like almost a month. And I got back and you know, these are common, you know, everyday American people, you know, outside of Reno. And I'm, and she's like, you know, we were worried about you. We thought, we thought maybe you wouldn't come back because something happened in Ukraine. I'm like, no, no, it's okay. Like it wasn't that dangerous. She's like, you know, it's terrible what's happening over there. That Putin guy, man, what a monster. And, you know, unprompted by me, just random comment while I'm picking up my cat. I don't know what media she watches, probably CNN or Fox or something mainstream. But, you know, random woman on the street and she's like, yeah, this is, this is horrible. What's happening here? Like, like I, I don't think, a lot of this new right claims to speak for the common man and I don't think, or man or woman, and I don't think they actually do, to be honest.

• 31:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And they've also, I mean, they've also been wrong so much, like on vaccines, for instance, on Ukraine. And, you know, I mean, I personally want the right to be rational, to push the left to be, you know, I don't know, to push the left so that there's like, um, you know, a real debate of ideas versus what's going on now, which is just kind of depressing. Okay, I have to get to a break. Antonio Garcia Martinez is with us. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys. He's a senior fellow at the Lincoln Network and author of Pull Request on Substack. You can find him there. You can also find him at Antonio GM on Twitter. I have one more question about this and then we're going to get into the Apple, Facebook stuff and maybe a little bit of Elon and Twitter if we have time. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point.

• 32:09Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 34:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Antonio Garcia Martinez. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys, an NPR Best Book of the Year, an early Facebook employee, a former April engineer, which we've covered, and also author of Pull Request on Substack. He also has a podcast by the same name. Antonio, let me lead off the second segment with a question I've been wondering. You've said a lot about journalists. Do you consider yourself a journalist? Like, where do you fall on that spectrum?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I remember one of the spats I had with Cara was her claiming I didn't do reporting when it was weird because I actually had two reported pieces in Wired. And I can't think of the last time Cara did any reporting. Not to ding Cara, I actually like her and consider her kind of a friend acquaintance. But I think it's my way of saying, I think it's hard to define. There's no journalism badge that you wear, as you know. And I think journalism itself, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, spans the full realm from like reporting on county zoning hearings, which is boring but very factual and vital for local communities, to things like opinion, to things like narrative features that read more like novels or nonfiction books. And it's all stamped as journalism.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  And as you know, I mean, we're both examples of it. The notion of journalism has changed over the time, and it's changed most recently with things like Substack. So you've got people that unquestionably would have been called journalists if they had been working for one company who have very successful careers in Substack. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, look, I did reported pieces for Wired. Like, I actually reported from Cuba. I went on the road in 2018 Texas midterms and was canvassing with a bunch of progressives using text. Like, I've done the reporter thing, fact-checked. I just went to Poland, Ukraine, interviewed a bunch of people, audio, photos, the whole thing. So it's hard to look at and say, well, no, I'm not a reporter. I'm not a journalist. It's like, well, if this isn't journalism, then what is?

• 36:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  But on the other hand, you know, a lot of what's on poll requests is in that more nebulous area between, sure, there's some factual basis. I'm not writing a serialized novel, obviously. But on the other hand, there's a lot of AGM in there, just to refer to myself in the third person as like a brand. Right? And then in some sense, as you know, that's part of why people sign up. They sign up to hear your voice. The world parsed through your voice is what they're signing up for.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Which is what journalism traditionally was in the past. Like, one of the pieces I did at Wired is one of the more viral ones. Was the headline, the head was pretty good. It was something like, you know, Benjamin Franklin would have been a Twitter shitposter or something along those lines. And it's true because he would have. I mean, if you look at Ben Franklin's life, or even John Adams, who was a journalist. Or was it Sam Adams' brother? I can't remember that. No, I think John Adams was the lawyer, Sam Adams was the journalist. In any case, you know, a lot of the early founding fathers, in terms of their quote unquote journalism, they were pamphleteers, right? I mean, Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer with the equivalent of a Substack of his time, right? And he was one of the most prominent sort of thinkers and writers of the time. So it's hard to, it's hard to have a definition of journalism today that would, that would have excluded, right? Most of what passed for journalism before like 1870.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, no, I think to that degree, but, but you know what? A lot of people that wouldn't consider them journalists are journalists. For example, a lot of the Substacks that talk about like tech topics.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Like, you know, somebody like Paddy McCormick, for example, who's like a web three investor advisor, whatever creator. He has a Substack I follow and, you know, I, I think that's as, well, better than any journalism on web three. He's, I mean, if that isn't journalism, I'm not quite sure what is, right?

• 37:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  And you can find other examples. So I don't know. I, I think, I think we need a more expansive, you know, definition of journalism with a full understanding that occasionally it is opinion. You're coming at it with a point of view. I think what, you know, it's funny, America's, of the many, of the many worlds I straddle, right? One is that I think the US is an exceptional nation in both good and bad ways. And often it's so exceptional and so big, it doesn't understand how weird it really is. So this American Anglo-Saxon tradition, or American tradition really of objectivity, of both sides-ism, of separating op-eds from reporting is pretty unusual. If you look at the rest of the Western world, if you look at other countries like France, Germany, Spain, there isn't such a harsh division.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Like someone writes a story that's like reported, there's quotes, there's facts, but then there's, there's a point of view, right? Which is, well, that's part analysis and part op-ed and it's, it's in the same section. There's not like a separate section for it. And I don't know, I, I'm personally more of a fan of that. I think it's, I think it's personally more sophisticated. And in Europe, like most even large countries that have sophisticated media markets have at least two or three papers spanning the full political spectrum. And if you want the right wing view on reality, you've got it. If you want the far right wing view on reality, you've got it. You've got kind of the centrist view, it's there. And if you've got some far left commie view, it's also there. Right? Um, and I think the sophisticated reader can read one or two newspapers and figure out what reality is. And I think that's a lot better, frankly, than, not to name names, but papers like the New York Times or Washington Post, for example, claiming that like,

• 39:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  just named names.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Well, I just named names, whatever. Democracy dies in darkness. And then they don't cover the Hunter Biden laptop story because whatever, right? It's like, well, clearly, it's not, like, if you look at fraud in newspapering, right? It's not like they make shit up that can't, that can't be independently confirmed because that would be easily denied. It's more like, what do you choose to focus on, Sean? What do you choose to cover? How do you choose to frame stories?

• 39:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I, yeah. And I would say that, like, coming at it with a point of view is good. Um, it can build trust. Like, right now, trust in the media is so, is so low, um, that a lot of their good work is, is for naught. And, and I know I'm optimistic about this Substack thing. People get to know us. Um, they, and, and they can, you know, and, and look, you're not gonna get trust from a reader. You're not gonna have readers opening. Um, we're coming back to podcasts, for instance. If you, if you routinely are intellectually dishonest and hide facts, like, you know, you could say, these are the facts, and these are how I interpret them. And I kind of find that interesting.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I mean, the weird thing is, though, I, I totally agree with it. And I think even the ever unsolvable local news problem, because local news is unprofitable, could, could be solved via some Substack model, where I'm less, and again, I love Substack, and I'm super pro it. I know the founder is like, I'm super pro Substack. But I think one area where the Substack model either breaks down, or at least can't handle right now, is like, I just retweeted today, there's, I'm not one that easily praises the New York Times, but credit where credit is due. They had this phenomenal piece on the atrocities that happened in Bucha, in the, the suburb of Kyiv, that the Russians occupied for a while, and turned into like, a literally a living hell. And

• 40:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Horrifying stuff, yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And they, they literally mapped out every death that they can confirm, something like a few dozen people. They mapped it out. They tracked down each individual story. They talked to the families. They looked at physical evidence. They talked to Ukrainian sources on it. I don't know how many people were involved in that byline. I'm guessing it had to have been half a dozen, plus all the data and, and technologists. People don't realize, New York Times hired, hires as many technologists and data scientists as like, a large tech company does these days, right? There's probably a cast of dozens that made that piece. Um, and I, I thought that was very valuable. And I'm not quite sure how Substack manages to cover that ground. But I'm, I'm mentally picturing Hamish and Chris, the founders of Substack, somewhere, saying, but no, Antonio, we've got a plan for that. And they probably do. But at least right now, there's no way to reproduce that on, on Substack.

• 41:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Um, so there, there we go. You're a blue check journalist, like one of us.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  God damn it.

• 41:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it kind of goes to show that I don't know. Anyway, sometimes the broad criticisms can miss some of the nuance. Okay, I can't let you leave here without getting into some of the Facebook, Apple stuff, some of the actual like, you know, nuts and bolts of what's going on in the tech. Actually, I wanted to start with this, but we got derailed into some really interesting territory. So definitely wanted to cover that. But you know, you were hired at Apple to build an ad system there. And I find it so interesting that Apple has like, cut off tracking for Facebook, you know, outside of the apps if they're outside of, outside of, yeah, their own apps if Apple is itself building a ad system. So and how it's sort of been, you know, fairly undercovered and

• 42:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  people are holding Apple as the, you know, head of privacy and this, yeah, this beacon of privacy, you know, whereas like they've cut Facebook off and they're trying to build a similar product. So you, you were in the inside briefly, but you were there.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's going on? What is Apple up to?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, you know, I can't, I know, but I can't talk about what I worked there.

• 42:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Say as much as you can say.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I have published about it. And, you know, and you can look at the public statements or what's going on in companies like Google and kind of figure out what's going on if if you know how this world works. And I have, if you go back to Poor request, I did some pieces like in June, July of last year about this new privacy model that's on device. And we can get that in a second. I think it is worth maybe summarizing just briefly. Like, I know you have a sophisticated audience, but I've talked to many sophisticated audience and it's, it's amazing how people will actually know how things like ads and attribution actually work in the modern world. Let me maybe do like a 30 second mini lecture.

• 42:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it'll be good for me too.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  On what the Facebook thing was. So this thing is called ATT Ads Tracking and Transparency. And what happened? This has been brewing for a while. This was not like a surprise announcement, but they actually did pull the trigger on it. What it means is that any app, not, not just Facebook, but it obviously impacts Facebook, any app that can't get their users to opt in, won't be able to individually track users on iOS devices, on iPhones and iPads. Why is that important? Why does it matter? Okay. There's a whole world that's actually quite interesting and unsolved and super important, like literally what underlies like literally trillions of dollars of market cap and billions of dollars of revenue called attribution. What does that mean?

• 43:42Speaker 02

  You go and see an ad for a thing, you see a newsfeed post, you watch a video, whatever, you interact with media and possibly prompted by that, you click on a thing and you install an app and you use the app and then you upgrade to their paid service and you spend money, right? You have just transited what's called the marketing funnel, right? Meaning it's wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. You saw a bunch of stuff, a bunch of people saw a bunch of stuff, you clicked, you engaged, you spent money. If you're the owner of the app that you interacted with, what does that person, other than knowing that you spent money, which is good, they want to know, okay, like, how did this person get here? Was it because of a Facebook ad? Was it an Instagram post? Was it a TikTok video? Was it a billboard on the 101? Like, what was it? Right?

• 44:24Speaker 02

  And that business of tying in the money that you got through the media you own and operate, right? That's money coming in and the money you spent on media that your user saw upstream of that, right? That's money going out. The ratio of those two numbers, the money coming in and the money going out, is the most important number in the ads world. That's the ROI. That's how much money you, like, you put in a dollar to the advertising digital machine, how much do you get out? Is it a buck thirty or is it eighty cents? Right? Because if it's a buck thirty, it's a lot better than if it's eighty cents, right? You know, there's this sort of apocryphal quote from Stalin that I like quoting because it's kind of macabre, which is, you know, it's, it's not who, it's not who votes that matters, right? It's who counts the votes that matters, right? Which is a very cynical, sort of Stalinist thing to say.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Well, in the ad tech world, it's not who clicks or where they click that matters, it's who counts the clicks that matters, right? And who assigns credit to those clicks, right? That matters. And so, for example, there was a recent example of this that I won't summarize because it's too long, but basically, Google considers, if you click on one of their ads, they'll take all the credit for all the downstream sales for that thing. Even if you just enter the name of the company and Google, it'll like navigate there because you're lazy and you don't know the URL, so you just Google for it. Google will claim that whatever, however much you charge, they charge you for that ad, all of, all of that value accrues to them, not the fact that you watched. You know, 10 Facebook videos about it and that's where it hints to you, right? So that's how the sort of kingmaker role of attribution comes in.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so the end of lecture on attribution. How does the ATT Apple thing play into that? Well, if you can't connect, if you can't connect the person who just spent 30 bucks in your ecommerce store with the person who saw the ad three weeks ago on Facebook, if you can't make that direct connection, you can't do the math. You can't figure out that, oh, Facebook ads are actually working, you know, targeted this way, are actually working really well. You can't tell, you just don't know.

• 46:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  And you can't optimize.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  And you can't optimize.

• 46:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  More importantly.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  So it's like, I don't know, I made money, but I don't, I don't know. I don't know what this person saw. I don't know whether to correct credit an Apple search ad or a Facebook feed ad or a Twitter promoted post or whatever the hell else.

• 46:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what makes the Facebook ad process great is that you can run, you know, basically unlimited ads and then just double down on the stuff that's working.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Right, right, which is what is the sort of iterative process of advertising. Right. And so, so Apple, which I, I do think, by the way, I don't think it's a purely cynical tactic, does believe in privacy and all that. There's a massive privacy work inside, Tim Cook has made public statements about it.

• 46:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, my reporting bears that out too.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Right, right, I don't think it's a cynical ploy, although it just so happens to line up with their strategic interests. But because of that, they're making it that all this form of identity tying together, attribution, targeting, all that is on a purely opt-in basis. And of course, what are the opt, you know, lack of opt-out is not the same as presence of opt-in. Obviously, the presence of opt-in is a lot less than, than, you know, the reverse of those who opt-out. And so the opt-in rate, it's been variously reported, but it's low. It's like anywhere from 15 to 30%, who knows? But it's very low. And so that means that, you know, Facebook or any other company, to be clear, can't actually tie together those experiences. That means Facebook can't run its optimization engine, which is typically pretty good, at showing you the right ad. And so, you know, Facebook had, I think it was this past quarter, you probably know

• 47:36Speaker 02

  because you, you watched the earnings calls probably, but I think it was this past quarter that they reported for the first time a decrease in usage. And also, they actually publicly declared that ATT is actually hitting revenue, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, Alex, but I think they actually said that in their call. And so, Facebook stock took a big hit, probably the first big dives ever because of that. So, yeah, I mean, seen from a cynical point of view, I mean, and by the way, Facebook always had this fear, right? Like, they've, they've been reputed, and I won't deny it, to have been working on a phone in the past. And why is that? Because Zuck's great fear is that at the end of the day, Facebook is just another app on... Two companies, app stores, right? Ultimately, at the end of the day, seen from app, you know, from Tim Cook's perch, Facebook is just one more app in the App Store.

• 48:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's the most vulnerable big tech company without a

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Right, without a question, it's right, because they don't actually own the user, right? That's the problem. And so now, Apple is turning the screws for a bunch of reasons. Again, I don't think it's just cynical, but they are turning the screws. And yeah, they're creating, again, if this is publicly reported, I'm not revealing anything private here, but they're, you know, they have ads, they have ads inside their Apple News product, they've got ads in their search product, and they have an ads team, right? That I was hired at. And so, yeah, the fact that Apple is no longer just a hardware maker, right? I mean, they're making, it's not just ads, right? There's a bunch of software now that Apple makes, and it's actually pretty good. It used to kind of suck, and Google's was better, or whatever, but I think now it's actually pretty good. And so, yeah, they're getting into the ads business, which, again, I think is, is interesting.

• 48:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  But isn't that cynical then, for Apple? I mean, cut off your, your number one competitor there, and then actually run the same product? And also, how serious is Apple about, like, it's right now like a small line item, but how serious is Apple about expanding this?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I can't, I can't get into those details, Alex. I think, I, I don't think it's a hobby, put it that way.

• 49:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Um, I, I, again, I think, you know,

• 49:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, they hired you, so it accounts for something.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Oh, well, right, well, yeah, not as if like somehow I'm like the biggest hire in the history of the world or anything, but yeah, sure. Yeah, and not just me, I mean,

• 49:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's so weird that you built a thing for Facebook, and then they went in and said, Facebook doesn't respect your privacy, and then hired you to build the same thing.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  I, you know, you're weaving this, this very interesting, ready for Netflix narrative around it, I don't find it that strange. I mean, finding people who have created ad systems from scratch is not that easy, there aren't that many of those people, right? Those that there are, are super senior, older than me, and are so rich, you can't hire them to do anything. I am not that, and I'm not that old, and so they're, you know, they got me, but

• 49:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm trying to say that if, if Apple had, really stuck to its guns, or was really all about this message, then they would just say, okay, we're going to cut off the tracking for Facebook, and we're not going to do it ourselves. And we're not going to do ads.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, they're doing this whole thing about like, you know, I don't know if this is the exact words, but sort of like if you don't pay for it, then you are the product or, you know, but now they're now they're getting in the same business.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  I think that's I think that's saying it's a little reductionist. I mean, look, the reality is, well, the ad ads pays for lots of things that wouldn't exist otherwise. Again, people see ads as a necessary evil, you know.

• 50:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm pro ads. I mean, you know, I'm pro ads. I'm big technology is ad supported. But like, I'm not out there making these big statements about like how, you know, this ad ad supported businesses are the end of the world.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Okay, right. Well, Alex, you're going to force me to the opposition of putting my my Apple hat on again. I think if you look at the way Apple is doing it, and again, you can get this from their public statements, you know, there's they're doing published research on this now. So it's not it's not confidential. The way they're engineering this, and they're not the only ones doing this, by the way, Google is doing this. The company I worked at a branch is also doing this. There's there's a number of like the industry as a whole is moving in this direction. It's not just Apple, although I think Apple's one of the more interesting players. The way this this world is moving, like the old paradigm you and I have lived in for the past 15 years, where like, you do things on a device and then all your data goes into this nefarious cloud, weird stuff happens and then you get ads and experiences and all the computation and all the data lives in

• 51:18Speaker 02

  the cloud. That world is going away. More and more computation to the now that most interaction on mobile app on on mobile phones is actually via the apps themselves. Like you're not going mobile web is not where most people actually spend money and interact with the world. It's through the native apps themselves. That's native code running on the app, talking to local data very often. More and more of that's going to happen. And so what a lot of these companies are doing for privacy reasons and also for just optimization reasons, is putting a lot of the data and the models on the app itself. Right. And that makes the models run better for a bunch of reasons, although they're a lot harder to engineer. And then two, and again, I don't think Apple's lying here when it says this or or being deceptive, it's saying, well, it's more private, right? Like the data never leaves your phone, right? If you really want to opt out, throw away the phone and that's it. The data is gone. And that's not true.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  With the way things have been engineered thus far, where you're relying on delete buttons and opt outs that you never quite know if they're true or not. So I think, yeah, I think there's several trends converging here, right? One, Apple is deciding to actually write software and have a media business, right? I mean, they have iTunes, they have Apple TV. They're not just a phone maker anymore, right? They might make cars, who knows? Apparently there's a car program. I only know about that because it's been publicly reported.

• 52:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, there is a car program.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. And so, you know, they're getting into that business and they're thinking, and then there's also the privacy thing, the on-device privacy thing. More and more, Google's doing it as well, will be moving on-device and your device will be storing your data. And yeah, you'll have more privacy control. Again, as another thing, it just so happens to benefit those who control the device, right? Google and Apple have an advantage. If everything goes on-device, Google and Apple are definitely in an advantageous position compared to apps like Facebook and others.

• 52:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. You think Facebook is screwed?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Uh, no. I mean, come on. WhatsApp is massive. Instagram is still popular.

• 53:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's user, that's user stuff. This is about making money. I mean, the stock did go down a tremendous amount after their earnings came out and said they're going to make $10 billion less because of this in a year.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, screwed is a very binary term. I think Facebook, look, if there's one thing I think that Zuck is, should be praised for, is always taking a very long-sighted view on things. I mean, he, you know, it sounds a little ridiculous, but he sees himself as like, you know, this Roman emperor figure or whatever. And, you know, they were very far sighted about things, at least when I was there. And I think his big, he realizes that Facebook user growth has to stop at some point. I mean, in the last chapter in Chaos Monkeys, I warned that like, growth is so, has been so high for so long. At some point, you just run out of humans on the internet, right? And I think I predicted when it would happen, and I got it roughly right, because if you just, if you just project it out, like, at some point, you just run out of people. And so, you know, Facebook

• 53:58Speaker 02

  has run out of people. And he, and people at Facebook knew this was coming. And so I think the VR bet, Oculus, is a bet on the future of media, right? It's like, okay, the next way that humans are going to intermediate their social lives is not going to be through this phone. That cycle is over. We dominated it. It's over. Um, you know, the next thing is actually literally bolting the phone to your face and creating more immersive virtual reality experience. And if so, then we're there. Right. And so I think that whether Facebook is screwed or not is A, whether that transition happens. And if it does happen, if Facebook actually dominates it. So that to me is like a more high stakes thing than, yeah, sure. I mean, Facebook revenue might take whatever it is, 10, 15% haircut going forward because of this ATT thing. But if they don't, if they don't jump on whatever's next, and, you know, recently they've not been very

• 54:42Speaker 02

  good at jumping on whatever's next, then that really is like Facebook is fucked territory.

• 54:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you make of the theory? I think Zach Coelho has brought this up in your podcast with Jason Calacanis recently, but of the theory that Apple sees Facebook as the its main competitor in virtual reality and augmented reality, which it also wants in, and is taking a stab at its revenue in order to prevent it from becoming mature enough to compete?

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I don't know. That would, that would require a level of insight into Apple management that frankly, I don't possess. I don't know. I think it's an easy story to say, but I have no idea.

• 55:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's say hypothetically, you know, I was a reporter that was going to cover where Apple, no, sorry, we're a device manufacturer that was cutting Facebook's ability to track off of Facebook and working on its own ad product. Where's the story going next? Like, what do you think the questions are that's worth, that are worth asking? Where do you think it's worth focusing on when it comes to Apple's ad play? What are the next big interesting stories going to be?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's, I think it's the, it's the evolution of this idea, right? Like the transition to on-device, right? Again, changes everything. And if, if they really do engineer their ad system along the lines of this on-device trend, a lot of things will, will change, right? There's this thing called federated learning where you train models on the device and in the cloud, the model of privacy around it changes. I, I often say, this doesn't sound ads related, but it's somewhat in, in this purview. There was this whole story, it was several months ago about their, you know, Uh, CSAM, child pornography material, you know, filtering system that came out a few months ago that caused a lot of a big hiccup because if you recall the story, right, they

• 56:20Speaker 02

  shipped this new thing that would basically scan your phone for evidence of, you know, CSAM, which is the term of art that basically is child pornography. And I think what freaked out a lot of people is that it exactly embodied this on-device paradigm where like the code was running on your, was on your phone. And again, it supposedly only scanned things that would have been backed up to iCloud. So it's only things that would have made it to the cloud, but the code wasn't running in the cloud, at least per Apple. And so I think, and it's weird because again, like if you buy the story that on-device is more privacy safe, you, you should have been pleased by this. Like in some sense, it's better that it's on your device and in the cloud. That's not the way the public reaction went. There were, people felt more violated and objected to it even more because of that.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  And so if that's true, like more broadly, like, I know child pornography is like loaded for 100 different moral reasons, but if that's true for everything, like ads targeting, usage data, like more normal, less polarizing stuff, if people also have that reaction, huh, that whole vision might get threatened, right? If you can't build on device, then the whole thrust of this argument kind of goes away. And yeah.

• 57:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But no, I, I think it was more that like Apple had been so long telling us that like, what happens on your phone stays on your phone. And, and that, you know, it was the privacy company. And then it was like, we're actually going to be scanning your device. I don't think people gave a shit about like the actual process that they used. It was more the act.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  I, I guess so. But then, but then, you know, then project that story out. Let's say, I'm not saying they are, but let's say they do ship like an on-device ad system type thing that runs models on your phone, looks at a bunch of data on your phone, like say, you know, things you do on random third-party apps end up on your phone and Apple uses that data. How are people going to react to that? Are they going to be like, oh, this feels better because it's on a device that I control? Are they going to feel also intruded upon like they did last time?

• 58:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh my God, how could they not feel intruded upon after Apple's been through this whole campaign of like, you know, advertising is bad. And now they're going to be like, our form of advertising is bad because we do it is better because we do it in a slightly different way. You know, to me, it seems like an argument that's not going to hold much water. You think it will? Antonio, you're also like way more pro-Apple than I thought you'd be. Maybe, and this is leading me to believe that maybe I should be.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  I don't hate the company.

• 58:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But it's, yeah, anyway, sorry. I'll let you talk.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I just, I just dropped $3,000 on Apple products. I just, I have like an aging MacBook Air that it's like on its last legs. So I went and bought a MacBook Pro and a, and a, and a iPad Air and I haven't owned an iPad in ages. It's really quite cool. Anyhow, so I'm not anti-Apple. I think, I think their management was total chicken shits and, and panicked frankly, in the face of a revolt that wasn't very popular. As I've said more than once, I think it was something like 1%, maybe not even of Apple employees that signed this petition, right? Like, that's what hap- like a lot of these can- and again, I only see myself as part of- I only see my, as a part of a bigger phenomenon, but if you look at, you know, the Rogan thing or the Coinbase thing or like, all these places where there's like a supposed revolt, you realize it's like 30 people in a fucking channel who are just hogging the debate and making themselves seem big.

• 59:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  But if you just slowed the roll a little bit and kind of calmed down and looked at what's actually going on and what's actually being asked, you'd find that like 90% of like people in the trenches making your company work, either don't give a shit or actually opposed to the politics and just want these people to shut the fuck up-

• 59:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I know.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  And get out the door.

• 59:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm not even talking about like you're, you're firing. I'm talking more about like, I don't know, like as an ad guy being like, "Yeah, well, you know, you know, Apple, I, I guess like, I wasn't expecting you to hold up." And I know we're getting close to time, so we can, we can close on, on, you know, on this note and, or maybe we can, you know, let you respond here. But I wasn't expecting you to be like, "Yeah, Apple is like, you know, doing this virtuous thing." I was kind of expecting you to kind of shrug your shoulders and be like, "Yeah, it's advertising and, you know, this is ruthless competition. This is capitalism." And, and there they go.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Okay, but how, but how could I, how could I hold that view and then have agreed to work there?

• 1:00:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Obviously. I mean, if I, if I would take more issue with Apple, I mean, their labor policy in China, for example, just to raise another specter, is something that I would maybe, and I did think about it when I joined, actually, and I didn't like it. And it left a little bit of bad taste in my mouth, but I, I took the offer anyhow. I can't say I didn't. And so i- if anything would piss me off about Apple would be that. It wouldn't be the fact that they're following a broad industry trend. Again, it's, it's not just Apple. It's, it's Google, it's brand, it's a bunch of companies, right? They're following a broad industry trend that probably will deliver more value to users and probably is more privacy safe, to be honest. Right? Like, I, I can't, I don't know. I can't argue against that just because that company and I, and I had like a tiff, right? Like, it's still true. So, yeah.

• 1:00:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you think we're all better off with this on-device tracking versus- I'll be honest. And look, I've been covering advertising. I worked, I sold ad tech, I bought ads. So, you know, I've spent time in the industry. It kind of seems like a, you know, way to make the companies feel a little bit better about what they're doing. But ultimately, the same, the same thing in the end. And also, like, I'm not entirely opposed to, like, targeted advertising. And, and so it's kind of, the whole thing seems a little strange to me.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  I think it's, it's an easier pill to swallow or argument to buy. If you focus yourself to think about, well, what's the alternative? The alternative is all your data living in the cloud, often held in good faith by first parties that know you as a user and want to keep you and aren't going to do totally sketchy shit. But very often not held by third parties who don't give a damn about you and see you as a lemon just to be squeezed for data and money, right? And who might superficially comply with certain data privacy rules or not. And it's, it's difficult to confirm. And so compared to that world.

• 1:01:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, it does sound better.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  I don't know. This is, I, yeah, I mean, right. Like, like, again, compared to that third, like, literally all your data is just being funneled, just spewed into the world. Some people are good, some people are kind of in between, and some people are total fucking sketchy. Compared to that world, putting all your eggs in one basket called Apple that, again, I'd be the first guy to shit on Apple if I had to. But it's a company that more or less is above board, at least not as regard to this labor policy, and is trying to keep you as a long-term customer. I don't know, I would trust the device manufacturer more. And, um, and also as a technol, and I know techies do this all the time. They, they justify a policy because, oh, well, the technology is inevitable. But I, I think it's inevitable that more and more computation will move to the edge and on the device rather than being in the cloud.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Even as network speeds get faster and 5G comes in, like, it's never going to be as fast as code running on the device. It's just never going to be that fast. And so I think this is kind of inevitable. And so trying to engineer a world that's just going to happen and try to get the world's mind around that and to get legislation and privacy norms around that, I think is the best way to go forward.

• 1:03:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I just want to state for the record, I don't view Apple, I, you know, I don't view Apple as, I'm not an Apple hater. Um, you know, I, but I also think that the company skates by oftentimes without any criticism of what it does. Um, even when it's doing sometimes the same thing in parallel as other companies. But, you know.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's definitely true. Like, we used to constantly joke at Facebook, like, all the heat we're catching, like, do you know what Google does with your data compared to Facebook? Like, they're the ones who, uh, yeah, that's, that's true. But, you know, it's also a form of whataboutism. It's like, oh, well, but what about, it's like, which is, in my opinion, a weak argument. So.

• 1:03:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, it's a good point. And I will say that, like, you know, I'm a business reporter, and I love a good bare-knuckle fight, you know, when it comes to two companies, you can get out against each other. And so, like, I find what Apple's doing somewhat cynical, but I also think that, like, hey, you know, this is, this is what capitalism is. This is what the market economies are. Companies see advantages and they, um, and they go for it. They, they try to exploit the weaknesses in the other companies. And I think that's, that's a really super fun to watch. And when it comes to, um, you know, Apple's words, that's where I think it's time to, you know, it's better to hold them to the fire. Nobody's an angel in this world, especially, you know,

• 1:04:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  a multi-trillion-dollar company. Um, but man, you know, it, it's kind of like, this is, this is what it's all about. You, you seek out your competitors' weaknesses, and then you go full steam ahead. And, you know, it is a little cynical, I think, what Apple's doing, but this is, this is business.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, it, it is a little cynical, but, you know, these companies all hate each other, right? They're all constantly trying to undermine each other. Like, the best antitrust is three very smart, ego-driven people just trying to all murder each other. That's the best way to, to keep them in check. Yeah.

• 1:04:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, the, the argument that Facebook's a monopoly now seems so ridiculous to me. Um, but yeah, you think they're a monopoly? You think they're a monopoly?

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, interesting. Um, not a global monopoly, because again, they don't have ultimate, they don't ultimately own their user, but, and I, I think the popularity of things like TikTok or the continued popularity of Twitter makes it a less strong statement. But I don't know, WhatsApp, I mean, the combination of WhatsApp and Instagram is pretty powerful. And I've, I've written pieces in the past arguing, not exactly for antitrust, but at least rationalizing and saying, well, it's not the craziest, like. And again, you can make the statement at two levels. One is within current antitrust law, is antitrust justified? The answer is almost certainly no. But I would say that that's because antitrust law is dated and dates from the age of like railroad tycoons. And so like, it doesn't, it doesn't even play in a world in which the product itself is free, because most of current antitrust laws are on consumer harm.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  And pricing and consumer harm, you can't claim that there's any consumer harm in a thing that's basically free. But I would frame it as like, lack of consumer benefit, while also giving enormous advantages of scale to the company itself, which I think having Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook under one roof absolutely does give to Facebook and doesn't drive particular value. I mean, you can, you can even see it in like, again, I still bleed blue and kind of like Facebook, but some of their gestures to prove that like, the cross app thing is valuable is a little pathetic. Like, like I remember right when this whole antitrust thing started, when you started WhatsApp, like a little message that by Facebook would stay under it. So people understood that like, oh yeah, you're getting value because this is by Facebook on the WhatsApp thing. Or right after they tried integrating on the backend like Instagram's messaging with Facebook to show that there's some sort of cross app synergy there. Anyhow, it's clear that they're trying to kind of like word off the antitrust threat

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  by merging those apps, which, hey, maybe I shouldn't be so cynical. Maybe, maybe this was the plan all along. But anyhow, um, yeah, I, I agree though, that with the ATT move, it's hard to claim that Facebook's as big a monopoly as say, Apple or Google, right? Like Apple, and this is also a sign of their brilliance, right? They literally designed the chips, the hardware itself, and the software and pixels we're looking at, right? Like, it's hard to point at any other company that is so completely vertically integrated and successful at everything as Apple is.

• 1:06:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And also a bit like, you just mentioned you bought all these Apple products. I'm using Apple products, like to start to take aim at that integration is going to end up harming, probably harming consumers in the end, because, you know, the devices work well, so.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're, they're clearly trying to create a network effect of devices. Like, I set up my new iPad Air and I, I literally didn't have to touch it. I just brought my iPhone within proximity of it and it just kind of worked. And it's like, wow. And then, you know, the way that, yeah, even dumb little stuff like they share Wi-Fi passwords to each other now, so I only have to enter it on one device. They're clearly trying to create a network of devices to keep you locked within the Apple mold. But you know, that's also where I think it gets a little bit monopolistic. I mean, I think it becomes monopolistic where they use an advantage in one domain, the privilege of your project and that product in another domain where that product is actually inferior. Right. It's kind of like Internet Explorer, like the product kind of sucked, but Microsoft was just pushing it because they controlled the desktop. When Apple gets to the point that like their iPad actually sucks compared to the competitor, but you're only buying it because they've literally baked into the fact that it only works well with another iPhone.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  That's where I'm like, eh, antitrust. But so long as the iPad Air is still like the market lead, like it's still good independent of the rest of it. I don't know. Yeah, you're right. It is pretty good. Like I have to say, I had a delightful user experience as a user of Apple products recently.

• 1:08:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Damn, Antonio, we've covered a lot of ground today.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  I talk fast, so it helps.

• 1:08:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's good. No, no, just the right speed. I think we can, I don't even know what to call this episode, like God, the current thing and Apple or something like that. Maybe that's the title.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  So you're repeating yourself. You're repeating yourself.

• 1:08:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on. Do you want to let people know where they can find you online to engage with your stuff or yell at you?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm a total very too online person. So AntonioGM on Twitter has links to everything. You can just go to thepullrequest.com, goes to my Substack. I'm on an app called Callin, which is really great. It's kind of like Twitter Spaces, but better. And I have a podcast on there. You can also listen to me anywhere, you know, find podcasts or download it. It all streams to Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts and Stitcher and all that stuff too. So a lot of places. And then I occasionally also write for more conventional normie publications every once in a while or other Substacks. So yeah, a lot of places you can find me, but Twitter is kind of grand zero for it all.

• 1:09:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, you can see Antonio on Twitter, taking down my stories and tweeting a bunch of other stuff.

• 1:09:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're a good place to find them. I enjoy the follow. All right. Well, listen, Antonio, thank you for coming on. It's always great to talk. And you know, you always do press my thinking. So I appreciate that. Cool, Alex. Thanks for having me on. Yep. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Nick Guatney, for doing the editing and mastering the audio. Appreciate it. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of the Podcast Network. Excited to be working with you guys. Thanks, of course, to all of you, the listeners. Appreciate you coming back week after week. We have another great show coming up next week. Charles Duhigg is going to be on to talk about what happened to SPACs. He recently wrote a story about Chamath Palihapitiya when he was pushing SPACs less than a year ago. It seemed like the hottest thing. We will talk about what the heck happened because

• 1:09:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  it's definitely not that anymore. So thanks again for being here with us. Until next time, we will wish you a great week.

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