Twitter Founders on Musk’s Tumultous Takeover

Emily Chang visits Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Jason Goldman to get their perspective on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the future of the platform and social media.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Emily Chang and this is the circuit.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh, I'm talking about tweets. I have a weird relationship
with Twitter. Yeah, we all do.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
It's one of the most influential and controversial social networks today,
and for years it struggled to make money and moderate content.
Then one of the world's richest men stepped in. To
some he was the Knight and shining armor. To others,
he was Twitter's worst nightmare. I wanted to get some
perspective from two people who know Twitter better than almost anyone.

(00:31):
Here's my conversation with Twitter co founder and former CEO
of Williams and one of the most critical members of
the founding team, Jason Goldman.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
All right, so let's just start with like, tell us
who you are, tell me who you are, and.

Speaker 4 (00:43):
What was your goal on a Twitter story?

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Should we do each other instead?

Speaker 5 (00:47):
Yeah? Yes. So this is Jason at Goldman on Twitter.

Speaker 6 (00:52):
Jason worked with me on Blogger when I was six
people and three of them were named Jason. Three of
them were name Jason, so we started calling him Goldman.
And then Blogger went to Google, we got acquired, we
worked together there. I left Google, Jason took over Blogger
bus and I left to start Audio, which became which

(01:13):
Twitter came out of, and Jason was like that audio bs,
I'm not buying that. But then we did Twitter. He's like,
I'm in. And then he came over and ran product
and did a bunch of other stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
Yeah, you guys have been friends for a really long time.

Speaker 5 (01:28):
Indeed.

Speaker 7 (01:29):
Yeah, it's actually like the twenty year anniversary of this
month I was selling Blogger to Google. Is that when
we started?

Speaker 5 (01:36):
You're right?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, that's like, so that's like when we met.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Wow, Yeah, who knew what the next twenty years were told?

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yes, and so.

Speaker 7 (01:43):
Evan Williams Uh was the creator and founder of Pyra Labs,
makers of Blogger, and I joined during the second phase
of Blogger.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
There had been a version with.

Speaker 7 (01:54):
A founding team and then the dock crash happened, and
ev kept it alive essentially through force of will yes,
which is which is pretty crazy, and then slowly built
up the team of six people, three of him were
Jason's sold the company to Google, which was their first acquisition.
He was the first company that Google had ever bought.
This is the first like aqua hire in the history

(02:15):
of Google. Was V's company and he worked there, and
then Guest started Audio, a podcasting company because of his
deep love of podcasts.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
Has a lot of there's a lot of history, a
lot of insur.

Speaker 7 (02:31):
Yeah, and then and then yeah, and then once Audio pivoted,
created Obvious to be a holding company for Odio and
this nascent product, Twitter, and uh, then Twitter was spun
out and he eventually became CEO of Twitter and was
on the board until what twenty seventeen, nineteen nineteen.

Speaker 5 (02:52):
It's a while, it's a while.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, and you were CEO.

Speaker 6 (02:56):
Until I was CEO from October two thousand and eight
to October, Yeah, October twenty ten, two years exactly.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
So there's been a lot of changing of the guards
at Twitter. When Elon burst onto the scene, were you
both just like, what, like.

Speaker 4 (03:15):
What was the first reaction?

Speaker 3 (03:17):
Uh?

Speaker 5 (03:18):
Yeah, it was surprising.

Speaker 6 (03:19):
I mean, I'm trying to remember the first bursting on
or if I was even aware of it.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Were you?

Speaker 7 (03:24):
He clearly was addicted to the service, and so you know,
I was aware of him from that perspective, the idea
that he was going to either join the board or
then eventually make an offer in the company.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
The joining the board happened so briefly.

Speaker 7 (03:38):
I didn't really react strongly to that, but the idea
that he was going to buy the company to me
initially seeing like, oh, he's not gonna be really serious
about this. It's going to be like the way you
sort of, you know, put in a reservation on like
a fancy sports car if you're having like, you know,
kind of some some sort of like crisis and you're
just like, ah, like, I'll like see if this I'll
see if this is something I want to buy later.
But it turned out he was serious about it for

(04:01):
a minute and really signed a binding contract that he
later tried to get out of.

Speaker 4 (04:06):
I mean, Elon Musk owns Twitter.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, is that idea takes some getting used to, Like,
I mean, are.

Speaker 5 (04:11):
You it's really bazy. It's very bazy.

Speaker 6 (04:14):
I don't really think about it on a daily basis,
but there have been a couple of moments where I'm like,
I started this thing with some other people a long
time ago in this little office and then the world's
richest man bought it, and it's this big news stories
like how did how did that happen?

Speaker 7 (04:34):
That's weird and it's also like someone like you know,
like I don't know Elon personally, but it's like someone
who's been in like the orbit of like I've known
Elon yeah a long time.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Well, when he burst onto the scene, like, was there
any part of you that was like, well, this is
interesting maybe something?

Speaker 5 (04:49):
Yes, And I mean for sure I was somewhat excited.

Speaker 6 (04:55):
I was like, oh, I like interesting things to happen, right,
I'm not a fan of things stay in the way
they are. I mean, that's why we do tech, that's
why we start new things. So you know, Twitter had
been pretty much the same. I think it had been
getting better and better. Actually, the trajectory of improvements in
the year or two prior to Elon. I thought the

(05:17):
team was great at that the exec team was like
probably the best it's ever been. They're making product improvements.
So it was on a good trajectory, I thought. But
then it was like Elon, Holy, Holy Holy, he does
crazy things.

Speaker 5 (05:29):
This will be interesting and fun. We'll see what happens. Yeah,
we made differ on this.

Speaker 6 (05:36):
But.

Speaker 7 (05:38):
Yeah, I mean I was just concerned because like everything
he was talking about that he wanted to do with
the products seem pretty lightly considered, like you know it
was it was it was like, oh, there's you know,
we got to defeat all the bots, and you know,
there's all this stuff about like the culture wars that
we need, you know, we need to get rid of
the wokeness on this.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
It's like he doesn't really mean that this is like some.

Speaker 7 (05:57):
Sort of you know performance in the early days of
what he thinks he wants to do, but it became
clear over time that no, that is his primary interest
in owning the platform.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
It's to kind of push on these particular.

Speaker 7 (06:08):
Cultural issues and his own personal use of the product
he wants to make better, which you know, I guess
you know, if you're the world's richest man, as he
was at the time, and you want to have the
product tailored exactly for your use, then you can buy
it and just really make it fit in the niche
that you have.

Speaker 5 (06:26):
It's a thing you can do.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
That's the thing you can do.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
So how do you feel about what he's done so far?

Speaker 5 (06:30):
I don't think he's dialed it in quite right yet.

Speaker 6 (06:33):
I don't spend as much time on the platform, and
I like that he's willing to try things. But yeah,
I don't know if he's figured out when you spend
more time on Twitter these days, well, it's.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Gone pretty poorly.

Speaker 7 (06:46):
I mean of just subjectively speaking, you know, I mean
one of the things people say that have sort of
you know, echoed a bit of which is that well,
at least he's gonna try things, He's gonna do things
with the product. The moves fast sort of it is
blied by that most of the things that have been
pushed out the door were there things that existed previously,
like Twitter Blue or view counts which were just you know,

(07:08):
existed in the product but hadn't been turned on, or
there things that the stuff that he pushed out that
was really kind of bespoke is make sure you.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Amplify my tweets so that everyone sees them, which is again,
if you own the product, you can do that.

Speaker 7 (07:22):
It's just a curious way to product manage a global platform.

Speaker 5 (07:25):
And I also want to like the just trying things.

Speaker 6 (07:28):
I agree, like it's not that alone, isn't that impressive
or useful? And like I said before, that team that
was in there, there's also a lot of things killed
from what I understand, that were actually really interesting things
in the works.

Speaker 5 (07:43):
That I know from the former execut team, and so.

Speaker 6 (07:49):
Just want to note that because there was there were
things being being worked on that you know, maybe they're
taking a long time, but it's a big service.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
For years Twitter, which criticized for not innovating fast enough,
not making enough money going to get users, did something
have to happen?

Speaker 6 (08:04):
My main feedback that I recall given on board is
we need to do more things, more innovation, more bigger
boulder bets.

Speaker 5 (08:13):
And that's much easier said than done.

Speaker 6 (08:16):
And so it's not like board members saying that is useful,
but that was my primary feeling during those years.

Speaker 4 (08:24):
Did somebody have to shake something up?

Speaker 3 (08:25):
I mean right that you know people are at least
these moving fast breaking things, but shipping things.

Speaker 7 (08:30):
I think there's a totally fair criticism on Twitter that
there wasn't enough innovation and there wasn't enough new direction
of it in the last you know, let's say decade.
A lot of that effort, though, was going towards making
the platform more safe and dealing with a lot of
things that have been overlooked for a long period of time,
including you know, harassment, abuse like manipulation by non state actors,
all of these problems that are really not just real

(08:51):
in the sense that they exist, but have real effects.
And you look at what happens when you don't tackle
those problems, whether it's genocide and mean mars is. In
the case of Facebook, you're talking about real problems that
they had to clean up and deal with. So I
respect the fact that they spent a lot of time
on that as opposed to shipping new features. But I
do agree that Twitter didn't do enough in the last

(09:11):
decade towards building features that resonated for the set of
users who already got what Twitter was. And I kind
of take that back to when we were there, which
was we were always really focused on the top of
the funnel. It was always it was this relentless focus
on we've got to get more people in the top
of the funnel.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
We've got to grow the overall.

Speaker 7 (09:27):
Universe of users on this, and there wasn't enough focus,
in my view, in hindsight on But we've got some
people for whom this really works, and that includes you know,
journalists and entertainers, and you know people in the media,
and and and you know politicians, and you know people
who are good at the product, who are funny at it.
Even though they're not famous anywhere else, what can we

(09:47):
do to deepen their experience of the product. I think
that could have been prioritized a lot more and would
have produced a different result. But yes, it's totally fair
to say that something needed to happen, and given what
we know now about how twenty twenty two played out economically,
something probably would have happened.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
Right.

Speaker 7 (10:05):
You know, it's unlikely that Twitter would have just sailed
through this worst tech downturn since two thousand without massive layoffs,
without some sort of activist interest in the company. Something
probably would have happened because Twitter was in a vulnerable state.
I just don't think it needed to be quite this silly.

Speaker 6 (10:23):
I completely agree on folks and depth rather than breadth.
I have the same view in hindsight about Twitter and
a whole bunch of the tech world, and I think
that's very related to the business model in selling advertisers.
It's like, there's breadth is a number of people you
can reach is important, where as a consumer paid service

(10:44):
or an enterprise service you have to have depth, and
so figuring out the right combination of those things is
an important strategic consideration.

Speaker 5 (10:53):
The other thing.

Speaker 6 (10:53):
I would say, though, if you look at most other
major tech companies, it's not like their core thing that
made them big.

Speaker 5 (11:01):
They dramatically changed down the road.

Speaker 6 (11:03):
They incrementally improve it forever, whether that's Facebook or Apple
or Amazon or whoever, and then they add new things.
And so Twitter is one of the few companies of
its size that didn't acquire something significant that became a
second line of business or a major other product. You know,
sometimes you start those things, and Twitter tried to start

(11:25):
a few things.

Speaker 5 (11:26):
That's very hard, very unusual. Gmail was started internally.

Speaker 6 (11:29):
Most of Google's other successful products were acquired, at least
the seed of them was acquired.

Speaker 7 (11:32):
Including the entire advertising business.

Speaker 6 (11:35):
Yeah, and YouTube and Android and all those major things
obviously Instagram, Facebook, all this, and so that is the path,
Like you have massive growth for consumer and then you
plateau and you try to keep making it better and
you add things, usually through acquisition. And Twitter made some
very smart acquisitions very early, but in a lot of

(11:58):
talent acquisitions. But there's no like second leg of the
stool that was ever brought in.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Yeah, do you wonder like who's actually working there anymore?

Speaker 7 (12:07):
It's almost down to the number of people that were
there when we when when.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
I left, like in twenty ten.

Speaker 7 (12:11):
I think when I left it was like eight hundred,
So we're within like a two acts of it being
around the same size. Yeah, it's it's gotten pretty it's
gotten pretty tidy, and that.

Speaker 5 (12:21):
Goes to those people who were keeping it going.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
The way in which the deal.

Speaker 7 (12:25):
He tried to back out of the deal even though
he sound signed a binding contract that had a specific
performance clause, And in general, his approach to contracts seems
to be it's a starting point for negotiation as opposed
to this is something I'm actually obligated to do.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Well. Speaking of the industry, is there something about his
hardcore approach that's shaken the valley up?

Speaker 7 (12:44):
Well, I think the fact that interest rates are going
up and there's the greatest economic downturn for the industry
since two thousand has more.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
To do with why the industry has shoken up.

Speaker 7 (12:53):
I mean, like you know, I think that like this,
there really is like sort of a c change in
terms of what the economic environment is for startups and
big companies as well. And I don't think that Facebook
and Google are doing massive layoffs because they saw that
Elon could get people to sleep.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
On the floor and whatever.

Speaker 7 (13:11):
I don't think that really figures into Zas and Sundar's
calculation as much as the street is demanding like a
different level of performance than it was a year ago,
because the environment.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Is completely different.

Speaker 7 (13:23):
So I don't want to give too much credit, but
there you can kind of sense there is a particularly
among like the VC world, this hunger for this era
of austerity.

Speaker 8 (13:32):
Everyone wants these goddamn lattes running us out of business,
can't sell enough ads for this kombucha on HAP and
and like now that air is over and you know
people are gonna have to buckle down, there's that there's
a hunger for that to be true.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
I think it.

Speaker 7 (13:46):
I think it's important to remember that the employees weren't
the ones asking for the kombucha. They were happy to
accept the kombucha, but like once it was once it
was main available, but there was a talent shortage, and
so companies were bending over backwards to try to hire
all these people. And as I'm in which economic booms
seemed unending, and now that the economic environment has changed.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
That story has changed as well.

Speaker 7 (14:05):
I don't think Elon has created that reality but it
is certainly emblematic of the narrative that people are using
to justify those changes.

Speaker 4 (14:13):
The tables have turned.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
The austerity of Silicon Valley begins. Okay, Jack Dorsey, who
co founded Twitter with you, said Twitter is the closest
thing we have to a global consciousness solving for the
problem of Twitter being a company.

Speaker 4 (14:28):
Elon is the singular solution.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
I trust. This is one of the worst age tweets
of all time.

Speaker 7 (14:33):
Like I mean, like this, this is honestly one of
the worst tweets that's ever been put on the platform,
and there's a lot of them. Jack has been very
consistent on this from the beginning. Is that he really
was interested in Twitter as a protocol. Twitter as like
a communications protocol, like a public good that could be
used in the same way that civic infrastructure exists. Like

(14:56):
Jack was very interested in maps and civic infrastructure, and
that was that was like a lot of his interest
and he is the reason he's I believe, you know,
a Bitcoin maximalist, is because he sees that as this
decentralized version of technology that can't be controlled by one company.
He's very committed to the idea of the open web.
And you know, which is a tradition that we grew
up in as well. The problem was with Twitter is

(15:20):
that from the beginning we committed to a completely different
path with the company. We were inherently not building a
public good. We were building a for profit enterprise that
took VC funding and was going to be a different
type of a different type of company. So this notion
that Twitter was ever going to be a public service
really is a historical It.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Was never that was never going to happen.

Speaker 7 (15:41):
But I think with Elon he convinced himself Jack did
that Elon shared this ambition for Twitter, which is interesting
on two notes. One, the idea that Twitter could become
that at this late stage seems questionable but maybe interesting
to pursue. And two, there's literally no evidence whatsoever heard
that Elon agrees with this vision for Twitter, that Elon

(16:03):
believes that Twitter should be a public good. It seems
much more the case that Elon wants Twitter to be
his personal playground, in which he sets the rules and
determines how it works. It's the exact opposite of an open, decentralized,
uncontrolled product.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
It's a very centralized product, controlled by one person.

Speaker 6 (16:22):
I agree with Jason. Twitter was never going to be
an open protocol. Jack has been very consistent, and I
will say Jack has a beautiful mind that is very
conceptually driven, and from the very first moment I met him,
we would have these discussions where the trick was figuring

(16:42):
out what layer of abstraction we were talking at. And
so I love the idea by the way of an open,
decentralized protocol, and I had debates when I was running
the company with Jack and other people in the company
about whether Twitter could or should be that, and a
lot of our efforts around the Twitter Api early on
were to.

Speaker 5 (17:04):
Enable that idea.

Speaker 6 (17:06):
The conclusion I eventually came to is that it was
not just the architecture of the system we built was.
I mean, by definition, it's not an open protocol and
we would have to completely remake it for it to
be so, and it was unclear how to do that
and with funding. I think Jack agrees with this point
that once it was we took venture capital, it couldn't

(17:28):
be that. He may regret taking venture capital, but I
don't because it helped us fund this amazing, cool thing
that has been very successful. It's just a different thing,
and I don't know what Elon wants it to be,
but it doesn't seem like it's heading in that direction,
at least there's no evidence of that. What I think

(17:50):
is interesting and exciting is that it's opened up a
space for potentially other platforms or other protocols to emerge,
and people may pay attention to them because Twitter maybe
has less of a gravitational force for everybody's attention.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Do you, I mean, there are a lot of folks
out there who are angry at Jack, Like I think
some folks feel like Jack's fed Twitter to the Elon wolves.

Speaker 4 (18:14):
Do you feel that at all?

Speaker 7 (18:15):
Or I do like the I mean, if you look
at the timeline and how the deal was put together,
it's pretty clear that Jack was instrumental in both recruiting
Elon to be initially on the board and then wholeheartedly,
as he said in the tweet, endorsing Elon as the
sole solution you trust for the future of the company,
which is to the detriment of the hand pick CEO

(18:36):
that he put in, you know, like the previous year,
like he had only.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
Been on the job for six months or something like that.

Speaker 7 (18:43):
And then above and beyond that, it was also clear that,
you know, employee, there was gonna be massive layoffs, the
culture of the company is gonna dramatically change, and you know,
there are people who felt like Jack was with the
last caretaker as the last founder who's full time employed
in the company to kind of look out for those
people and felt abandoned by that.

Speaker 5 (19:00):
I'm not mad at Jack.

Speaker 6 (19:01):
I think he made a mistake, but I'm very grateful
to Jack for for I mean, he cares so deeply,
and I know he's Jack is is says what he believes,
and he did the decision he thought was correct, and
I think he really wants that future.

Speaker 5 (19:22):
I think it was was probably not going that. I
don't know.

Speaker 6 (19:24):
I haven't talked to him recently. I would love to,
but I'm guessing it's not going the way he was hoping.

Speaker 5 (19:30):
I think one of.

Speaker 6 (19:31):
The coolest things Jack did toward the future he wanted
was starting Blue Sky Smart.

Speaker 5 (19:36):
Blue Sky is really cool.

Speaker 6 (19:38):
Blue Sky was the decentralized Twitter project that he funded
or Twitter funded, I'm actually not sure which he funded,
and actually he's they're very smart people, a Blue Sky
working very cool like architectural solutions to a decentralized network

(19:59):
and unfortun I think perhaps it was underfunded or just
hasn't gone far enough. But that is more interesting to
me than like, I think the notion that was wrong
is turning Twitter into that.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
So let's take the other part of the tweet. Twitter
is a global content. What is Twitter? Is Twitter the
global town square? Is it the global consciousness in your view?

Speaker 6 (20:22):
Oh gosh, no, I think the global consciousness is the
global consciousness. We have a global consciousness. It's not Twitter.
I think that's not right. It's conceptually sort of like, oh,
let's connect all the people in the world and have
a communication mechanism. Like that's the conceptual part that we
talked about in the beginning, not just of Twitter, but

(20:43):
of the Internet that was mind blowing. It's like, oh,
my gosh, how cool will it be to actually connect
each other's brains in real time through language and like
time and distance, eliminate time and distance for communication. That's
still very exciting, like just an amazing Twitter is a
pretty distilled.

Speaker 5 (21:02):
Version of that.

Speaker 6 (21:03):
But it's not dramatically different than you know, the telegram
and then the email and the webinar. It's just like
a particular I mean, the Internet is that you could
say the Internet is maybe the closest thing to connecting
it not Twitter itself, but that's a that's like detailed.

Speaker 5 (21:21):
What is Twitter?

Speaker 2 (21:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 5 (21:23):
There are many metaphors that one could play with.

Speaker 7 (21:26):
I think the easiest way I think about Twitter is
that is the world's leading marketplace for tweets, like it is,
it is unmatched, specific, it is unmatched and delivering tweets
to people. Uh, and I think that's better than the
global I think the global town Square stuff is not
good because you're co opting a public good into inherently
a private enterprise. And the global consciousness thing is not

(21:48):
good because, as says, there is a global consciousness like that,
like there is something that exists out of private enterprise
that binds people together and that you know, shares common experiences.
Even at Google with the best technologist in the world,
people who are building the bleeding edge of the Internet
in early two thousands, those people, including the founders, fundamentally
did not understand that the web was a platform.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
For self expression.

Speaker 7 (22:12):
That the most interesting thing in the Web itself was
not that you could get information out of it. It
wasn't a library which you could check out infinite books.
It was that you could put anything onto this canvas.
And that's always what excited us, what led to a blogger,
and what you made me want to work on it,
what made me want to work on Twitter, was that
this was a way of using the web as this
portal into other people's experiences, in other people's lives, and

(22:35):
that really is seductive and interesting and interesting. I think
the problem is just that you have to distinguish between
You have to accept the fact that if you're doing
it in the context of a for profit enterprise, you're
inherently building a certain type of thing. And it's not
going to be a public good, it's not going to
be a metaphysical construct.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
It's going to be a company. But that could still
be really cool company.

Speaker 6 (23:00):
Yeah, And I think there is a notion that one
could slip into here is like, because we made it
a company, it's just like this you.

Speaker 5 (23:08):
Know, capitalistic thing.

Speaker 6 (23:11):
It could also be of tremendous service, and I think
it has been and you know, debatable, but what is
it to some extent, platforms, once they reach a certain scale,
do kind of work like governments, even if they are
for profit, because you have all these constituencies. You you're
trying to make them all happy. You have to enforce

(23:31):
you have to have rules, and you have to enforce rules,
I believe, or else you have anarchy. I mean some
people would choose anarchy. I think we've learned through civilization
that is probably best to have rules and reinforce those rules.
And I think the same applies to platforms. Where it
gets tricky is then there's like how much do the
platforms take versus Right?

Speaker 3 (23:51):
Well, this is the hardest question, right, Like what makes
it amazing also makes it assess pool and how do
you take the best without the worst?

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah? Right?

Speaker 6 (24:00):
Interesting point on that front, though, is there is a
view in the decentralized web rhetoric that the problem with
centralized platforms or for profit platforms is they they take
all the money that all the people create. But Twitter
and its history has never made money. Like there's been
profitable years, but overall there's no money.

Speaker 5 (24:22):
I mean I've made money, I mean, thank.

Speaker 6 (24:24):
You, but but like as a company, there's like if
you spread all that money around, it's not like this
it's just money. Yeah, it's just like there was some
people who funded this thing that and they did very well,
and some people work there did very well. But that's
the other aspect of this that I think is often confused.

(24:44):
That may not be true Google, It's a makes a
lont of money, but maybe that's why something different had
to happen.

Speaker 3 (24:50):
Well, there's this question of sort of is Twitter justice
social network or should it be held to a higher standard.

Speaker 7 (24:55):
I think as a point about governance is a good
one because it does become the case of these platforms
do become you know, transnational, They have to exist in
multi markets, they have different rules in all of those markets.
They have a board of governance that's either internalized or
externalized in the case of Facebook, that tries to review
what they're doing, and in some sense, regulation has been
trying to catch up to what these platforms have done,

(25:17):
and in its vacuum, things like the terms of service
for how you get included in the Apple App Store
become the most important law in the land. Whether or
not you can be in the app store matters way
more than what the EUS said, what regulations the EU
have passed here too for or what the US does
in a congressional hearing about Twitter, like.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
That is the law of the land. But it probably
shouldn't be that way.

Speaker 7 (25:41):
It probably, in my view, should be the case that
these platforms have to adhere to a certain set of
values and that are held to account when they trespass
against those values by democratic systems.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
So you were the White House Chief Digital Officer, do
you think Twitter should be regulated?

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (25:57):
Definitely, Yeah, I think absolutely. I think regulation is has
been long overdue domestically, it's already happening around the world.
The type of the type of regulation I think is
almost in arguable that anyone ought support or you know,
that's even from a technologies perspective, is just greater transparency
on how these things work. Because the thing that people

(26:18):
don't understand is there is this naive perception similar to
the money making thing, which is that these companies will
do anything to twist the knobs and squeeze a few
more dollars. The reality is that no one running these
companies actually understands what's going on that well. That I mean,
like these are we're talking about stochastic systems that are
amplifying content according to a set of rules that some

(26:39):
human wrote, but the output of those rules is unpredictable.

Speaker 5 (26:43):
Increasingly some human didn't Yeah, exactly exactly.

Speaker 7 (26:46):
And so you don't even know you don't even know
what people are seeing or why, and unless you have
some third party ability to audit and review what are
the impacts of what people are seeing?

Speaker 2 (26:55):
What are people seeing?

Speaker 7 (26:57):
I think we, we, including the people who built these systems,
can confidently say they understand the effect of what they've felt.

Speaker 6 (27:04):
I will add also this will sound self serving, but
I'm actually really proud of.

Speaker 5 (27:09):
How Twitter has governed.

Speaker 6 (27:11):
Yeah, over since we started it, and Jason was a
big part of this in the early days, and then
Alex mcgilvory, Vigia, most recently del Harvey. There's a whole
department of people and I think across trust and safety
industry wide, who take their jobs very very seriously, are
very values driven and very thoughtful and really experts on

(27:34):
these issues in a way that people outside have no
idea the complexity and the thoughtfulness that goes into these
decisions about what can stay.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
On, what right?

Speaker 3 (27:44):
I mean, what was it like being behind the scenes
of all of that, what stays on, what comes down?

Speaker 7 (27:48):
Yeah, I mean it's crazy, like because people think, like
to as point, people think it's like, why don't you.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Just remove the Nazis.

Speaker 7 (27:54):
It's like, well, the issue is that there's some guy
who's not exactly a Nazi but is like cosplaying as
like a Nazi tinged frog, And how do we feel
about like Nazi tinge You know, it's this very like
edge case stuff. There's this guy named Noah who was
a Twitter troll very early two thousand and seven, two
thousand and eight, and he was creating a bunch of
accounts on Twitter and having using the API to have

(28:16):
them all talk to each other and when occasionally use
them to brigade like other people with weird art projects
that he was building.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
I've got a bit of, like, you know, an anarchist
in me as well. It's like, oh, let's just see
what you can do on this canvas of the web.

Speaker 7 (28:27):
I was like, yeah, we'll see what happens when you
like put a bunch of art projects out there and
have all the bots talk to each other. What will
it be That I thought it was cool, But on
the other hand, you had users writing in and be
like I just like, my whole thing got messed up
because this guy targeted me with a bunch of weird pictures.
And so I remember I was having a conversation with
him was like, could you just, like, you know, be
more chill.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
You know, He's like, well, what does that? What does
that mean?

Speaker 7 (28:46):
I was like, well, we're trying to figure out how
to write the rules, but you're just you're just doing
a lot right now.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
And like he just it just he just wouldn't be
kept in a box.

Speaker 7 (28:54):
There's a lot of things like that that don't fall
in a bright line category.

Speaker 5 (28:57):
It reminds me of different metaphors that.

Speaker 6 (29:01):
You're like, you're like hosting a party, yeah, and like
someone's ruining the vibe, yeah, or I mean maybe they're
putting someone in danger. And then it's like police, but
someone's just ruining the vibe. You're like, be more chill.
I mean that's ideal. Like if you want to have
a good party in a good environment, you need to
make it comfortable and say for everybody, but there could
be different vibes and different conversations, but you you try

(29:25):
to do that for the whole world, and then it
gets very hard and it's very very nuanced, and I
believe you want to host a good party not just
say like do whatever you want on the streets. We
just pave the streets, and that's all we do, right, right,
because it's and that's proven with lots of parts of
the web where people don't govern and they turn horrible.

Speaker 5 (29:49):
It turns horrible.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
Okay, well what about former President Trump?

Speaker 4 (29:52):
Would you a band Trump?

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (29:54):
I mean those are those are the things that, like,
those kind of decisions get a lot of outside attention
because it's like the president of the United States or whatever.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
Well, it's also a metaphor or like the broader problem.

Speaker 7 (30:05):
I do think, like the harm like and actually like
just to give back, like I do think Jack deserves
a lot of credit in the post twenty sixteen environment
for dedicating more resources to figuring out these hard questions
of like of of how should we mitigate harm? More
like obviously we've backed ourselves in a corner somehow where
the platform is being used in new ways that.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Are causing harm for users. What do we do about that?

Speaker 7 (30:27):
The empowered leaders like Vija to figure that out and
drive those teams, and it led to a decision making
process that people can, you.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Know, question the results of.

Speaker 7 (30:35):
But that's the governance structure is more important than anyone.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Decision of you know, should we ban Trump or not?

Speaker 7 (30:42):
It's like, Okay, how does that decision get made, Who's
who's involved in it? Like, how does that decision be
made transparent to other people? I mean to give you
just a specific answer, since ye have I definitely would
have banned Trumpty incided, you know, insided a coup against
the United States, Like I think there should be a
no coup policy. You should be not be able to use,
like you should not be able to use the service
to inside a coupe.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
That would be that would be something I'd be comfortable
standing behind.

Speaker 5 (31:05):
I agree with that.

Speaker 6 (31:06):
I think that's where it gets really, that's where it
gets really murky, because there is it's then you go back,
but it's not actually a house party. It is actually
this very important service that the world communicates and worldly.
And should you ban the president of the United States,
even if you believe that individual is doing harm to

(31:26):
the world. I think I don't know the answer my question.
I'm actually I was on the board during that time,
and we didn't talk about, you know, whether we should
ban Trump. Maybe there were a few conversations, but there
was much more conversation about how do we decide these things?
And I think that was an incredibly hard thing to decide.

Speaker 5 (31:47):
But my take on that is like, it's not actually clear.

Speaker 6 (31:50):
If these rules were super objective, we could just have
the computers moderate it.

Speaker 5 (31:55):
And maybe we're getting.

Speaker 6 (31:56):
Closer to that with AI, but at least up until now,
the rules are subjective. And that's why there's a whole
infrastructure of humans. I don't think they can be made
completely objective. And the same way the law that we
that we live by isn't completely objective, and that's why
we have judges and juries and the whole process to
figure out like where things fall.

Speaker 5 (32:17):
The same thing is true in you know, in on
this platform, how.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
Does Twitter survive eat? Long does Twitter survive us?

Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well, we tried to kill the product a lot.

Speaker 7 (32:28):
I mean we we I mean it didn't work very
well for a while when we were working there.

Speaker 5 (32:33):
So I mean, there seems to be anti fragile.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
There's this joke, there's this joke about.

Speaker 7 (32:39):
You know, not joke, but there's a standard in the
industry of you know, you got to have like.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Five nines or how many nines of uptime do you have?

Speaker 7 (32:45):
You know, you up like nine nine point nine nine
percent of the time, And Google was like you know
a seven nine company, right, it never went down And
I remember when in like twenty eight Twitter was like,
can we get a nine? We can we buy a nine?

Speaker 4 (32:58):
I saw it failwell a few times.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, so it didn't work really well.

Speaker 6 (33:01):
Yeah, but it'll survive. I mean, things that big don't die.
And Yahoo's still a company, my Space is still a thing.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (33:12):
I think that's fine.

Speaker 6 (33:13):
I mean, and look, I think it's way too soon
to tell whether or not it bounces back. I don't
even know what the numbers are. Maybe it's thriving, but
reputationally it's very different, at least.

Speaker 5 (33:26):
Amongst people I know.

Speaker 4 (33:28):
Does the brand recover?

Speaker 6 (33:30):
I think that's hard. I think brand recovery is much harder.
And now the brand is very linked to Elon. There's
all these influencer companies that are like very personality driven,
and now Twitter after the fact became one.

Speaker 5 (33:42):
Is very interesting.

Speaker 6 (33:43):
But I just think I think the reason to be
optimistic right now is related to your question before it
should be a company?

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (33:52):
Should the Internet be a company?

Speaker 2 (33:54):
No?

Speaker 6 (33:54):
And guess what anyone can make a new Twitter, or
a better Twitter, or just a whole new paradigm on
the Internet, and lots of people are trying right now,
and that's really cool. And I don't think there's going
to be a Twitter replacement. But for a long time
there has been not that much innovation in consumer internet,

(34:15):
and because it was very hard, because Twitter, Instagram, et
cetera had sucked up so much of the attention and
if you need want to build critical mass of a network,
you had to get people out of these things. There's
a whole bunch of people working on new concepts and ideas,
and some of those are going to thrive. And I
don't think I think Twitter will be one of the

(34:38):
many things we look at to communicating online.

Speaker 7 (34:40):
The brand question, I think I share, I share your optimism,
which is rare for me, but like you know, because
because like we're in you know, we're in like a
really bad market right now, and that's when the coolest
stuff is always happened. I mean, we met up in
the thepost dot crash era, right we were like in
a detective's office on Market Street, like you know, it

(35:03):
was like there was no one was building companies in
San Francisco, and that that kind of that kind of
collapse and resetting of expectations is really healthy and is
what drives new possibilities. The other thing that drives me
possibilities is platform evolution, and.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
There hasn't been one in a long time in tech.

Speaker 7 (35:22):
The last platform evolution was the mobile, the mobile revolution,
and the and the and cloud computing revolution. And it's
been for in terms of tech, just a very long
time since those And you know, it's a long time
by how thirsty the industry is to believe in anything else, like,
please let it be Web three, Please let it be
the VR goggles. There's got to be something. There's got
to be some new land out there, and now like

(35:44):
everyone believes it's gonna be AI and and that one,
at least as opposed to the other two, looks like
it might be something like you can do stuff with it,
which is and it's getting better faster, which is.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
A good hallmark of technology. But you know, it's it.

Speaker 7 (35:57):
It all that leads me to believe, as ev does,
that there's gonna be people trying stuff now and there's
an opportunity because of the brand collapse of Twitter. The
brand collapse of Twitter is particularly sad because it was
self inflicted and the decisions that he made around verification
are kind of indicative of that because by choosing to
charge for verification, that wasn't really verification. This was just

(36:20):
sort of a way of inflicting harm on journalists and
celebrities that he didn't like and who's who thought he
could extract value from, whereas in fact having those people
on the platform was the brand value of the platform.
Those people being on the platform and being identified as
they were allowed people have trust in participating in conversations
on Twitter, and so that brand value is eroded.

Speaker 4 (36:42):
What about Elon Musk's brand.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
It's really suffered. I would say, I.

Speaker 9 (36:46):
Think he's he's a wild man, but he's also a genius,
and he's an engineer, and he's I think he's brilliant,
but no one's brilliant and everything.

Speaker 7 (36:57):
This is this is the fundamental This is the fun
mental problem. This is one of my view Silicon vallees
fundamental sins is the sin of genius, which is that
you see someone who's made a ton of money, and
this is just sort of an American problem where you
believe that someone's made a ton of money must be smart,
like they couldn't have just there wasn't you discount luck

(37:18):
and you overvalue skill.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Had any feel right now looking at something that you
created kind of going through this, Is there any sadness?

Speaker 4 (37:26):
Is there any anger? Is there any feeling of regret?

Speaker 5 (37:29):
I'm very zen, but.

Speaker 4 (37:33):
We don't want to send you to therapy after this interview.

Speaker 6 (37:35):
But I was sad when the purchase actually went through.
I was surprised, Like up to the last minute, I
thought it was not going to happen, and then when
it happened, I was like, oh, I no longer own
any Twitter and it's not a public company. I was
a little sad about that. I wasn't sure why. It
was a nice check, it was a good prize for

(37:57):
my remaining shares. I really felt for the people who
were there who went and you know, I had a
lot of turmoil and lots of really great people. But
I also am always a fan of creative destruction. And
you know, what's new in Jason's point earlier that something
would have happened anyway because of the financial picture.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Of the world.

Speaker 5 (38:17):
It's also just you know, social media was not perfect,
you know.

Speaker 6 (38:23):
But like what's what's important about maintaining Twitter as it was?
And like maybe there's maybe it's the wrong idea. Maybe
we just had the wrong idea with Twitter. Now it's
time to move on to some other idea.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
I mean that's a big thing to say coming from
the founder of Twitter.

Speaker 6 (38:41):
I think it was the right idea for the time, right,
But I don't think that means it's the right idea forever.

Speaker 5 (38:45):
I mean, what's the right idea forever? Especially in technology?

Speaker 4 (38:48):
Is it TikTok? Is it mastered on?

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Is it their Snap?

Speaker 2 (38:51):
There's TikTok's pretty great, that's pretty great.

Speaker 5 (38:54):
It's just a completely different thing.

Speaker 6 (38:55):
And there's so one thing that's happening social media. I
think the idea of social media is probably the thing
I'm questioning the most right now, because social is really cool.

Speaker 5 (39:08):
Everybody's social.

Speaker 6 (39:09):
People are interesting, people want to connect with each other.

Speaker 5 (39:13):
And then there's media. Media is also very interesting.

Speaker 6 (39:16):
For a minute, we thought, oh, the best would be
if we got media from our friends. TikTok and some
other places are showing the media from your friends is
probably not as good as the media from some super
talented person who's you've never met before. And you could
just enjoy that media, and then you might enjoy talking
to your friend that's social and maybe they don't have

(39:38):
to be the same thing.

Speaker 5 (39:39):
And there's a lot of trends like on.

Speaker 6 (39:42):
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, where fewer and fewer people are posting.
That's been the trends for years and because of the professionalization,
and but those who do post are building bigger audiences,
they're making businesses out of it, the whole creator economy
blah blah. And then so for a normal person putting
posts out into the world, thoughts is both higher risk

(40:05):
and lower reward than it was before. So that's no
longer where one time thought, well.

Speaker 5 (40:10):
Everyone's going to do everyone's going to do this. Everyone's
not going to do this, Why would they? Why would
they do it? Everyone's going to talk to their friends
online and off.

Speaker 6 (40:18):
And I actually think there's tons of interesting things now
if we think about how do we use the internet
to help people be more social without consuming or creating media.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Maybe the future of social media is a separation of
social and media.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
Really interesting.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
What are the chances that Elon does pull this off?
What are the chances he creates a Twitter that's a
better version.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
I wouldn't rule it out, Yeah, I wouldn't really.

Speaker 6 (40:40):
I think it's definitely too soon to tell what's going
to happen. I think if they keep trying things, which
they almost certainly will, there's going to be some interesting
discoveries and opportunity to say, oh, that was a thing
that Elon did, whether or not he did it or
someone on his.

Speaker 5 (40:57):
Team did it.

Speaker 6 (40:59):
But but I also think generally the new thing does
not come from the old thing.

Speaker 7 (41:05):
Yeah, it would be surprising also if the thing that
like sort of turned it around that made it a
win was there's some feature that they have to launch, right.
I mean, like, I don't think this is like a
we have a roadmap of three features, and if we
ship them, Twitter suddenly.

Speaker 6 (41:21):
Becomes there were a lot of people think about features
for a good decade and then at software they're infinite possibilities.
There's new AI possibilities, et cetera. I mean, it's probably
pretty fun to own Twitter. I owned it once. It
was it was it was interesting. It's like what a
canvas to create from. If you have the pressure of
and oh my god, we're losing billions of dollars, maybe

(41:44):
that it limits your creativity a bit, which is why
I think Jack was feeling a bit stuck being a
public company, and the Elon solution is making a private company.
I don't know how comfortable Elon is with losing billions
of dollars. Maybe it's fine, maybe he can get to
break even and then just play with it. And I
do think that is actually important. I do think being

(42:06):
a public company and having it's the classic innovator's dilemma.
You can't do anything interesting because you have to keep
this revenue growing. A certain to zig when you just
have to make these numbers go up is very, very hard.
So that does increase the chances.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
Actually, you haven't tweeted in a while, you haven't been
tweeting much.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
What the hell? What would it take?

Speaker 4 (42:29):
What would it take to get you back?

Speaker 6 (42:32):
I just I don't enjoy it as much as I
used to. I haven't tweeted that much for years. I mean,
I'm mostly probably ninety percent of my.

Speaker 5 (42:39):
Tweets in the last five years, we're just medium links.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
But is the bar higher now?

Speaker 6 (42:44):
I just I'm like those regular people who I don't
want to be an influencer necessarily, and the the it's this.
I have been on masted on and using that at
dot DM unmasked it.

Speaker 5 (42:59):
On and it's been it's been fun.

Speaker 6 (43:02):
It's a bit more freer as I feel more comfortable
just throwing stuff out there. But that's what part of
what got me think is just like social media, do
I have the need to just like, hey guys, I
had a thought, let's throw it out there in the world.
What do you think. I love doing that. I love
having conversation, exploring ideas. A lot of the drive for

(43:22):
me that's gone is like, can I put something out
there that people are going to positive respond to? Like
the dopamine hit of doing that just doesn't catch me.
Like you used what about.

Speaker 7 (43:31):
Just like a nice eating a taco for nostalgia saying tweeting?

Speaker 5 (43:36):
I think I did that, and within within the last
few months.

Speaker 7 (43:39):
You hit on this and this is like one of
the things that like, I think actually we were wrong
about going back to like a blogger time.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Which was the people at Google didn't understand why.

Speaker 7 (43:48):
The web was a canvas and a participatory medium, and
I think they were wrong about that.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
But we believed everyone was going to do it.

Speaker 5 (43:54):
I kind of believe everyone did even a blog.

Speaker 7 (43:56):
Everyone was gonna have everyone everyone will have a blog,
And they're like, well, what will people write these about?

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Whatever they're interested in the right Yeah, their life, share
their ideas.

Speaker 7 (44:03):
The problems that come with deciding you want to be
a content creator and putting yourselves out there.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
It's just you have to be willing to like kind.

Speaker 7 (44:11):
Of opt into a certain model, and so as a result,
Twitter has become less fun, you know for that type
of user.

Speaker 5 (44:19):
Yeah, you know what it's like.

Speaker 6 (44:21):
It's like lots of people like playing guitar and a
very few of them, you know, or maybe many of
them aspire to be famous musicians, but it's just the
path to get there.

Speaker 5 (44:30):
Everybody knows. It's just like crazy.

Speaker 6 (44:33):
There's not like this huge disparity between the people who
were good at it or right.

Speaker 5 (44:38):
I mean really, creators aren't even on Twitter.

Speaker 6 (44:41):
They're on TikTok where they have these massive, massive audiences.
If you look at that and think, well, I'm going
to step onto that same stage and play my guitar,
then you're like, no, I'm not. Yeah, I'm like and
but it used to be the stage wasn't that big,
so it's like, oh, yeah, hop up on stage with me.

Speaker 5 (44:58):
We're all just hanging out jamming.

Speaker 6 (45:00):
That was when we thought, yeah, everybody will do this,
and then the stage changed, So.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
What would your advice be for Elon Musk right now,
what would your advice be for anyone, for somebody running
Twitter or somebody running a social For.

Speaker 7 (45:15):
Elon in particular, I would you know, it would be
the classic. You should really go on like a listening
tour and like go around the world.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
You've got a plane, go around the world.

Speaker 7 (45:26):
And meet with some users in different parts of the
world that use the product or power users of the
product that derive value from doing it, that are outside
of this very specific bubble in which you exist, that
are this very strangeness of like right wing you know,
right wing agitators that you reply to a lot. Go
meet with the folks in India who are sort of

(45:46):
being prosecuted for the use of Twitter. Go meet with
dissidents who are like you know, opposed to the Chinese
government using Twitter in Hong Kong or Taiwan. Go use go,
go meet with people in all these parts of the
world that are you know, walle on Twitter to do
different things.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
It doesn't all have to be politics.

Speaker 7 (46:03):
You meet with people who are you know, weird music
creators and in parts of the world that you know,
we don't get a lot of visibility into here and
understand why they value the service and what they get
from it.

Speaker 5 (46:13):
I don't feel like I have advice for Elon.

Speaker 6 (46:17):
I would just say my hope is Elon keeps doing
important work that impacts the world and in really amazing ways.

Speaker 5 (46:26):
As he has for a lot of his career.

Speaker 6 (46:29):
And I don't know if it's about getting more of
his tweets.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Sam.

Speaker 7 (46:35):
Yeah, Like if you took like the philosophy that led
him to open up like the Tesla supercharger network to
other vehicles, and said, like, what is the equivalent move
for Twitter, That's great, That's an interesting idea.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
I mean, this is obviously more personal, but like I
feel to your point, like if Twitter went away or
materially changed, like, it makes me a little sad. I
feel like I don't have a platform to go out
there on or it's for some reason, it feels more
vulnerable out there.

Speaker 4 (47:03):
I feel more vulnerable out there.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
You do have a TV show. I have other ways
of being hurt.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
True, not everything rises.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
To the level of the top that I'm meeting down
the street.

Speaker 7 (47:14):
Right.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
That's why I think as a user it is a
little sad. I mean, I'm sure there's other people who
are super excited, right about the problem.

Speaker 5 (47:23):
A lot of people love Twitter and don't want it,
and it was pretty good. It's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (47:27):
Is that you're saying, well, maybe people just don't want it,
but it was pretty good.

Speaker 5 (47:33):
It's yeah, I don't.

Speaker 7 (47:34):
Know as a person on this couch who's most addicted.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
And like loves using camp pull myself away.

Speaker 4 (47:44):
You're still tweeting.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
I tweet a bunch.

Speaker 7 (47:47):
There's constantly things on the service, even in this somewhat
sadder time that I'm like, this is the service is
never going to die. This is delighte. Even though I
believe my own personal experience is that it's less volume
than it was, that it somehow feels more dead. You
still see those those occasional ones that make you're like,
this can never go away.

Speaker 6 (48:07):
This interactually a great And by the way, I don't
tweet a lot, but my timeline's great. There's amazing stuff
on there. And even if most people don't want to tweet,
if one hundred million people in the world share the
most interesting idea, thought, or piece of media they found today,
which is small percentage of the population, and the computers
could algorithmically give you the most interesting slice of that possible.

Speaker 5 (48:30):
That's a hell of a media service.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Yeah, and so we might not be losing as much.

Speaker 7 (48:34):
We're really we're losing more of a vibe than we
are losing a vibe.

Speaker 5 (48:38):
Yeah, it's about the vibe.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey did not respond to requests
for comment. Thanks so much for listening to this episode
of the Circuit. I'm Emily Chang. You can follow me
on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can
watch full episodes of the Circuit at Bloomberg dot com
and check out our other Bloomberg podcasts on Apple Podcasts,
the iHeartMedia, or wherever you listen to shows and let

(49:02):
us know what you think by leaving us a review.
I'm your host and executive producer. Our senior producer is
Lauren Ellis. Our associate producer is Lizzie Phillip. Our editor
is Sebastian Escobar. Thanks so much for listening.