December 1, 2022 • 47 mins
Casey Newton is one of the best reporters in the world when it comes to getting an inside look at the triumphs and tragedies of the Silicon Valley elite. Lately he’s been something of a scoop machine about all things Twitter. From mistaken firings to panicked midnight emails, Casey has been tracking all the nasty details of Twitter’s flop era — so who better to clue Josh in to what the future may hold for the social network you love to hate. Discussed: Christianity, Excited CEOs, the Cuomo brothers, Diet Coke.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hey, and welcome to what Future. I'm your host, Joshua Zapolski.
So for many weeks I've been talking about thinking about
skirting around and perhaps even delving into the issue of Twitter,
which is ever present in the minds of all people
who are on Twitter and it's new owner, Elon Musk,
and all of the madness that has been sort of
(00:38):
unleashed on the general population. I have touched on it
here and there, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Sometimes I wasn't
touching on it at all, and you just thought I
was because you're a very confused person. But there's so
much that has happened with Twitter, the social network, and
its owner, Elon Musk, and the users of it that
(01:00):
it felt worth exploring in a more direct and sort
of plain manner. And I would say just in the
last week, just in the last few days, there have
been things that have been happening that are just seemed
totally surreal at this point. For instance, Elon Musk is
tweeting a Tim Cooke, the CEO of Apple, about how
he's going to go to war with Apple because they
don't want to advertise on Twitter, because Twitter is now
(01:22):
full of Nazis and racists again. They're no longer going
to flag COVID misinformation or even attempt to stop the
spread of misinformation on the service as it relates to COVID.
No other social network in the world is doing that.
Everybody's trying to stop the flow of and stem the
tide of miss info. They're like, no, we're not doing
(01:42):
that anymore. They fired all of the team that was
tracking child sex abuse on the platform, or most of
the team. Bloomberg's headline was they decimated the team tackling
child sexual abuse. So just really normal stuff for a
social network with two million users, it just becomes such
an ongoing, rolling story. I thought, you know who, who
(02:05):
can you talk to you about this? Who really understands
the inner workings of it, And immediately I thought of
Casey Newton, who is an amazing journalist and writer and
has been, along with his partners Zoe Schiffer, has been
writing to Scoop after Scoop in the last few weeks
about what's going on inside of Twitter, and they broke
a ton of stories. I think they broke the story
about all these people quitting Twitter. They've broken all of
(02:26):
these stories about these panicked emails that Elon Muskus send
him because nobody can write code there anymore. And just
it's been an amazing kind of example of what I
would say is the finest journalism around this topic and
kind of exposes the the chaos and the insanity of
this moment inside of Twitter. And so I thought, let's
(02:47):
get Casey on the show. Let's talk to him about
what the state of play is at Twitter. And so
that's what we did. Okay, let's get after it. As
(03:12):
Chris Cuomo used to say before he was canceled and
fired from CNN. Sorry, it's a dark memory from just
the recent past. The Cuomos, they didn't fare too well
as the pandemic was closing up. They really didn't knock
it out of the park. Okay, but we're not here
to talk about their weird bad behavior. We're here to
talk about the weird bad behavior of another guy. Yeah, uh,
(03:37):
who's not a Cuomo Elon Musk So okay, So first off,
you cover this, you are a top of the class,
top shelf. I can't think of anything but a top
sort of you know, you're a top when it comes
to coverage. I can't speak on to every subject for you,
But when it comes to coverage of the Internet and
internet companies, in particularly Twitter, you're the best. You're You're
(03:59):
on top. What thanks man? Thanks? You have many many, many,
many sneaky ass sources screring around whatever remains of Twitter
h Q delivering truth bombs to you on a regular basis.
Would you say this is all accurate? The thing is,
I have never really thought of myself as as a
great reporter, But in that case, I don't believe that. Well, look,
(04:20):
I think I'm a good writer. I think it was
a pretty good thinker, But like, I've never been the
scoopiest guy. But with this particular story, Josh, I'm not
kidding when I tell you, like, for two or three weeks,
I would wake up and every single day I would
just open up Signal and people were like, here are
like four more things that no one has reported yet.
There's just so much going on at that company and
it just kind of needed to go somewhere. So it's
been an amazing month, the reporting that you've been doing.
(04:41):
And you and Joe Schiffer. Am I saying that right?
Is that the correct pronunciation? Yeah, my colleagues, She's wonderfully.
You all have been doing some great, great reporting. It's
made me. I've been glued to Twitter kind of yeah,
I don't think do you have a Master Dawn account yet?
Are you on that? Dude? I'm in it, but I
just look at that thing and I just feel like
it's dead on arrival. No, dude, Taylor Lareen's already has
sixty thou followers on Massadotic. You need to catch the
(05:04):
funk up by day. Okay, I'll see what I can do.
She's like, actually, I don't even know, like maybe she
has box. I'm not really sure. Are there sixty people
on masted on. I'm not entirely sure. I've heard they
have like eight million almost. No, it's kicking as I
love it. I think it's terrific. But anyhow, it's that's
We'll talk about that at another point in time. So
so let's talk about Twitter for a second, okay, And
we don't have to recap all of the Twitter news
(05:25):
because obviously I've been talking about it here and there
on the podcast, and and I think the people who
are listening to this, the sick, sick people who listen
to this podcast have heard, you know, some something about
what's happening on Twitter, but you know you're hearing from
people who are currently working there, correct, Like, I don't
want you to I don't want you to to give away
any sources, but let's just say people who are very
very close to the inside mechanations of Twitter. Is it
(05:49):
as crazy to them or does it feel as off
the rails to people who are actually working there as
it does to human beings like us that are on
the outside. It absolutely feels off the real You know,
people will tell me some things, but there's a lot
that they won't tell me, and instead they'll say, like,
I will tell you the real story in like three years.
You know, it's like once enough time has passed that
(06:10):
you know what I feel like. But they're like, it's
crazier than you can even imagine. Yeah, So there's obviously
the people on the ground. There's Twitter, there's people, a
lot of people have been laid off, there's people who
have quit. There's like four people who currently work at
Twitter now and one of them Ze lot Mosque. But
I assume you're also talking to your have you spoken
to like vcs and investors and people who are outside
of this. Yeah, I get this weird impressure. Then maybe
(06:32):
a lot of them are like, Ellen is showing everyone
how it's done. Do you is that what's going on
out there? Yes? Yeah, some people are so excited about
what Ellen is doing because over the last ten years,
tech workers gained so much power, right, there was a
lot of competition for the best engineers. The companies were
printing money, they were making you know, like a million
(06:52):
dollars plus off of every single employee that they had,
and so workers just had all this freedom and they
you know, they had to serve them lunch, and they
had to give him great perks, you know, backrubs, laundry.
Then it actually give them backrubs. That's actually illegal. I
think that that it would have been happened not the manager.
They would bring people into get back. They would bring people,
they would bring in professional Okay, they're getting them backrubs
(07:14):
and lunch in the backrubs. That's a date. A BackRub
and lunch is like, that's a thousand dollar date. And
that's what it was like to work in Airbnb. So
you know, this all is going on. But instead of
saying thank you, my capitalist master, what do people do?
They say, like, well, we should also make this place
more diverse, right, Like we should improve the working condition.
(07:34):
We should actually treat our contractors as well as we
treat the full time employees. And this drives the CEO
is crazy. And so the moment that the economy starts
to turn and Elon takes over Twitter and just starts
slashing and burning, there are a lot of CEOs and
b c saying this is the way we need to
remind these workers what their true places. And that's licking
our boots. Wow. I mean to me, there's sort of
something about the Twitter stuff that is obviously it's Trumpian
(07:57):
in many ways because of Elon's I think Lawn's personality
on Twitter has become increasingly more trump like. Like I mean,
actually a lot of people have said to me recently,
they're like, can you believe this is the guy you're
asking about? Like, you know, are we living in a
simulation like not that long ago? And it is funny
because I used to think about Ellen and like, I'm like,
he's a little weird. He's kind of got some like
edge lord equalities, but not really. He's more just like
(08:18):
a super interesting guy and he's doing really interesting stuff.
And it's like so we're now so far afield from
this other version of Elon Musk that I used to
think of him as, and it he does increasingly have
more in common with like a Trump character. Like Trump.
It feels like this is one of those situations where
is he just gonna do all of the things that
(08:39):
are terrible and bad and everybody's like, that's the worst.
This is terrible and just nothing is going to stop.
But no reality can intersect with his like master plan.
So reality has already intersected with him in the form
of many of his advertisers pulling up and running out
the door, right is you know, Apple was his biggest
brand advertiser. They're spending like forty eight million doll it
(09:00):
was a quarter. They're just gone now, and he needs
that money, like you know, they saddled this company up
with something like thirteen billion dollars in debt. They have
to pay a billion dollars a year just an interest
on the debt. Twitter is making about five billion a
year before all of this happened, and now they've lost
a significant amount of their advertising. We reported this week
that in Europe their ads are down like forty nine
percent week over week, So that's reality for him. I mean,
(09:23):
how many advertisers have actually pulled out do you know
the dollar amount? Well? Sadly they don't text me when
they do it. You know, what we've what we've heard
is that it is just many, many, many millions. You
said Apple was their biggest advertiser. Is that? Yeah, their
single biggest brand advertiser, because apparently Apple doesn't advertise on Facebook. Yeah.
Interesting apples like increasingly finding no friends in the social
(09:46):
media landscape, which is like kind of makes sense. I mean,
given their business model and what they're trying to do.
But if Apple was their largest and they're doing you
said forty eight million a quarter, yeah, I mean, sure
there's somebody who's working on the back of the envelope
math on this. But I the thing that I always
thought was most striking in the early days of the
Elon Musk is gonna buy Twitter conversation? I think I
want to say, maybe Mike Isaac, maybe it was a
(10:06):
group of people did a story at the Times that
was like, here's what musques like plans are, or maybe
it's just a reblog of your story. I don't I
never never know these days, But did you get those
I think I think they broke up. They broke some
You're like, I'm willing to admit that maybe someone else
is broken news, but they were like one of the
parts of the plan was like he's going to eliminate
the reliance on advertiser revenue. He's gonna have it by
(10:30):
five or something, and the other you know, revenue is
gonna be derived from like subscription and payments and all
this other stuff. But the company's revenue, right I believe
is the number is derived from advertising in two, like
in the Year of Our Lord two. So if that
goes away, do you know what happens? Do you have
any ideas anybody spoken to you on like what that
(10:50):
looks like if suddenly he can't afford to pay people
and can't keep the lights on. Yeah, I mean, it
just looks like a company going out of business, right,
you know, one must but more sifically, what must took over?
He was like, we we can't rule out that this
company is going to go bankrupt. You know. That was
sort of his opening pep rally to the troop was
like we're fun. He's like, I'm glad, yeah, But but
(11:14):
what's amazing is that after telling everyone that instead of
being like, you know, here's my my five point plan
to return as to profitability, he was like, We're going
to piss off all the advertisers, We're going to restore
sixty accounts from the worst Twitter users of all time,
and we're gonna start a fight with Apple, which we
literally call it a war. Right, So, I mean, the
man is not making rational decisions. See, that's what I believe.
(11:35):
But then you've got these like weird Mr Mosque people
who are like, who are like that is truly what
they are is the Mr must people. They're like, either
don't understand the long game he's playing, and I'm like,
I don't know, my dude, I feel like there's a
lot of ways to play a long game that doesn't
look this stupid. Like isn't it so amazing too that
that is an exact replica of how people treated Trump, right,
(11:56):
because it was always you know, Mr Trump, you know
you're here to say no matter what, like the cree
easiest ship that Trump ever did, there were always people
there to tell you that it was nine dimensional chess. Listen.
I hate to say this, but I think people need
Christ back in their lives. That's what this podcast is about, right,
this is actually a pro evangelical Christian podcast to Jesus people.
But there is an argument. I think, doesn't it feel
(12:17):
like the climate out here is you've got these people
who are so like devoted. I mean, Elon Musk Today's
abstractions on the devotion to this guy is crazy. Like
I mean, it's is sort of like the Trump thing
where Trump, you know, early in his campaign, was like
I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and they'd love
me for whatever. It's like, yeah, you were right, Like
I hate to admit it, but I don't understand it.
(12:38):
It's like, you know, you like his car, maybe you
bought some stock, you know, you want to go to Mars.
Like that's all fine, those all our normal things that
people may engage in. But like when it's so clearly
the guy's blowing it, it's like Kanye, Like he reminds
me a lot of Kanye right now. And in fact,
I ironically d m you on Twitter about this, but
I was like, haf has met. It's like it kind
(13:00):
of one of those situations where it does seem like
it's so far afield from like the Elon Musk character
that proceeds this, even for the other stuff that he's done,
even for the Peto the Peto guy comments or whatever.
It was like a sporadic sort of flare up. Now
he's like, here's my weird nightstand with diet cokes on it, caffeine.
You know who I know who drinks caffe free diet coke.
(13:22):
My parents drinks caffee free dico. They're like, we love
to taste of diet coke, but we hate the energy
it gives us. So yeah, we we don't want to
be all hopped up after three pm. What's he afraid of?
Like I thought, he's the guy who like sleeps on
the floor at the office, and he like sleeps one
hour a night, and like you would think he'd want
the regular diet coke. He's like, I need every chemical,
but the one that actually will help me stay awake,
(13:42):
Like that's just how happen. So that's how I've got
to roll. Also, the one that's actually natural. I don't
want that. We're all watching the car crash, right, we're
like kind of rubber neck and like I just looked
at my feed and I can't even think of anything
to talk about on Twitter anymore except Elon Musk being dumb,
Like you know, it's like I don't there's no other
topic that seems interesting, and like people like little world Cup.
I'm like, who cares. We're watching the World Cup of
(14:04):
Guys flaming out right now? You know? Yeah, he really
does feel like not just the main subject but sort
of the only subject sometimes, and he'll tweet literally anything.
You know, He'll just be like I put tooth raised
on my toothbrush and people will be like, uh, oh well,
I hate to tell Elon Musk, but and then you know,
go on with a ninety part thread or they're like
by by cryptos get yes exactly, here's an of the
(14:27):
tooth brush, but this idea that it's like, oh well,
it turns out I'm a little bit smarter than Elon Musk.
So I think I'm gonna quote tweet him and just
let my followers know that I've got him clocked, buddy,
Like low does yourself steam have to be for you
to want to stunt on Elon Musk? On the timeline?
Have I done this? Everyone has? I feel like I'm
the only person who hasn't. At this point, you have
(14:48):
to maintain the credibility of a neutral reporter. You need
to be able because if he decides to grant an
interview with somebody, Casey, don't tell me you haven't been
thinking about it. If you decided to grant an interview,
it'd be such a nightmare. The John he's gonna grant,
He'll grant an interview with the Daily Wire. That's who
he's going to grant an interview that is going to happen. Ye. Yes,
he's not gonna be talking to me anytime soon, I imagine,
(15:09):
although you know, Elon, if you're listening, call me. But
the thing is, like those interviews suck. If every single
question is it like, tell me about like this genocide
that you directly cause people are like you are a
simple you know you're you're keeping from this guy, and
it's like, you know, like I just hate being in
that position, So I'm fine to not be doing that
sort of thing. My opinion is like I am stunned
(15:30):
at how insanely bad this looks like. I'm not like
Elon Musk is a total idiot. I think he's smart
in some ways, sure, but there are so many ways
this could have gone better. I believe in every intersector,
every you know, crossroads he got to it was like, well,
you could have driven down the road and made it
(15:50):
not so horrible, but you decided to hit this off
ramp for reasons that honestly, only edge lords can explain.
And the only way they can explain is like, you
don't get he's playing chess in nine D chess or
whatever it is. It's like it's fucking bizarre. So okay,
what happens. You're an expert in this field, you have
a doctorate in Internet studies, ellen ology one oh one
(16:13):
and one oh two. How does this play out? Give
me your like, you know, well, look, I don't think
Twitter is gonna get banned by Apple anytime soon. Be
pretty cool if they did that, right, I mean, that
could happen maybe like a sick if Tim Cook was
just like you know what, I'm Tim Cook, like, I
could buy your company twenty five times over. It's not
unimaginable to me. But I think you know, it would
create political and pr problems for Apple then it would
(16:35):
rather not have. Like Twitter is going to continue to
be on the App Store, but if they keep going
down this road, they're gonna lose way more of their advertisers,
which means that Twitter is just gonna keep losing money.
And then Ellen is going to have to decide do
I want to make a bunch of really obvious decisions
that would bring advertisers back, or do I want to
be a free speech crusader who just sort of you know,
captains the ship as it sinks into the ocean. And
(16:56):
at this point it seems like he's much more in
the latter camp. We'll see if you know, losing yet
more billions of dollars changes his mind. But there's a
potential like right off for right down situation here, right like, yeah,
if he really tanks it. Some people have suggested to
me that, you know, maybe this whole thing is a
bit of a ploy to put the thing into bankruptcy
and then restructure the debt and you know that sort
(17:17):
of thing, um and which I guess as possible and
then what continue to own it? Uh yeah, or you know,
like sell it to some telecom somewhere. You know, it
does sort of feel like one potential, like a terrible
but hilarious outcome of Twitter, Like do you mean to
like Verizon is what you're saying? Well, exactly, It's like
a subdivision of Yahoo, you know, subdivision Twitter Holy on
(17:42):
every other tweet is just an ad for like one
weird trick to remove your belt. It's the chum boxes
is in the feed now, I know, I love that
beautiful idea. Have you been talking people at other major
tech companies? Is there nobody who's looking at this as
an acquisition, as like an opportunistic like Google? Google doesn't
on Twitter. The thing that the social networks camp by
anything right now? Like Facebook tried to buy a gift
search engine and the UK told them absolutely not. They
(18:04):
said that would ruin competition in the market. So you know,
the idea that Facebook would require Twitter, I think is
just totally out of the question. Okay. I mean I
don't think I don't see Facebook, But you don't think
Google would be interested? Um? I think you know, Sooner
is such a like chill, laid back guy that I
think the prospect of owning Twitter would just probably give
him hives. You know, there's just kind of too many problems, right, Microsoft, Microsoft,
(18:25):
they wanted to buy Discord so bad, right, they want
to pay ten billion dollars for that thing. If they
could pick up Twitter for like a billion dollars, Like
I could see them wanting to do that. I don't
think a billion, it'll be more than a billion, right
by the time Musk is done with this, Like, I mean,
it depends if he drives away every single advertiser on
the platform except for the my Pillow guys. Right, yeah.
Does it feel that way to you though? Right now?
(18:46):
I mean, all I can tell you is like the
direction that we're going in right, Like, nothing has happened
in the past several weeks that have made me feel like, Okay,
he's starting to get it. It's like it's exactly what
you just said. Every time he's been presented with an
on ramp that would lead him to a more rational,
profitable path, he has chosen the other path. So he
could choose a different path and it would change everything,
but he's only been choosing one sort of path. M
(19:17):
You know, it does seem like kind of impossible that
you can just lose all of these people and not
have something eventually down the road, like just simply break.
It doesn't seem like it's broken yet, but like, does
it feel like there's something like that on the horizon.
Do you have any sense from people that you're talking
to who are there that like there's gonna be some
kind of catastrophic mom because all these prognosticators like the
day that happened, where like I've been in the industry
(19:40):
thirty years and it's only a matter of time before
it puts one lot of code in and the whole
thing goes down. I believe those people like I do.
I was like pretty early to saying I think there's
probably gonna be like a major outage of Twitter. It
could last like a day or more. I still think
we could see it. People d M me now and
it's like, hey, like my notifications are only showing September,
(20:00):
or like they're sending me videos of tweets jumping all
around their timeline. So I do think little stuff is
starting to break. Maybe the engineers who are still there,
we'll be able to get it under control and it
won't be a problem. There's also this question of like,
you know, every service relies on these SSL certifications, but
you need like dozens of them for all the different
micro services that run your company. And I've been told
by people tech companies, like at every tech company, one
(20:21):
of these services just stops working because it didn't make
it onto a spreadsheet, and somebody forgot to renew it,
and the teams that were responsible for managing these spreadsheets
on Twitter no longer exist. So you know, that's why
I think that we are likelier than not to see
a multi day outage. But you know it's not a guarantee, right,
Do you know how many people still work there? Do
we have a number? I think it's like probably around
two thousand, maybe a little bit less. And how many
(20:43):
people are working there when he took over. That's that's
got to be like a record or something, right like
in terms of like reduction and workforce. Yeah, it's a
pretty huge drop. Yeah, there is a lot of like
engineering talent and otherwise out in San Francisco right now
or the West coast generally for Alan. If it starts breaking,
is that the point where we know like it's real
(21:06):
because it feels all this stuff feels like the six accounts,
for instance, like has he done the thing? Has he
opened the floodgates? As he released death Con three or
whatever they're calling been told that they have started to
restore some of those accounts. I do you think it's
gonna take? Sometimes these are people like Milo right, Milo
yan Monopolis. I'm definitely mispronounced his last name. So I
don't know that accounts specifically, but that that certainly seems
like an account that would be included yet like something
(21:28):
that might have been banned for like rampant transphobia, or
for like hate speech or um, I don't know, mobbing behavior,
things that like Twitter typically banned for. You know, if
you had the wrong opinion about the president, they would
ban you. If you didn't like Trump, shadow ban you
all those people. Yeah, but they're not totally restored yet,
(21:51):
not not totally yet, but it's it has been decreed
that they will be. Have you felt any change in
your feed in what you're seeing? I mean because as
I do tweet about what Elon Musk does, I do
get a lot of the Mr Musk guys in my replies,
and I have to say, there isn't actually this perfect meme.
Have you seen this meme? It's like from the Simpsons
of somebody jumping Okay, so I think it's a I
(22:12):
think it's a Pooh or somebody's chumping in front of
a pool. Somebody's like trying to shoot him, and the
way it's labeled is it's essentially like weird. It's labeled
weird nerds are jumping in front of Elon Musk to
take a bullet from him. It's like it's like, I
think the person with the gun is like reasonable feet
it's like valid criticism. And then see Elon Musk and
then there's like like weird nerds, you know, defending Elon
(22:35):
Musk or whatever, or we're just we says weird nerds. Yes,
I have seen and and shared the meme. Yeah, I
am not much of a meme sharer generally, but man,
when a Mr. Musky shows up, it's so satisfying to
drop it because it truly like there's nothing they can say.
It's like, no, they really are just there to defend
a billionaire for no. No, It's it's so strange and
like they do have their own by the way, I'm
(22:56):
sure you've seen them. They have made their own versions
of the meme that counter they add some stuff. It's like,
you know, I'm not going to describe it here because
we've already described far too much of an image for
the listener, But yes, they have their own sort of
reverse attack. Simpson's mean but doesn't really land the way
(23:17):
that one does, which is I mean, I think the
thing that is, you know, we talked about this a
little bit before, but this whole idea of this, like
the cult of Elon Musk, Like I find it somewhat inexplicable,
and I think partially the pandemic and everybody being alone
and online a lot kind of like created more of
this energy. Clearly, like the Internet is home to the fanboy.
(23:40):
And I will say, I don't want to like, you know,
miss gender all of the fans or whatever, but there
are they are mostly boys. I mean, let's just be
I want to be clear. Like they present as very well,
they present as presenting is very masculine. That's what ELSE say.
But the Internet is the home of the fan boy.
And like I think, like you know, you listen, you
have a long a long history of covering technology companies,
(24:02):
and so you've seen at intervals this kind of fan
boyish behavior fan behavior. But it does feel like this
is such a you know, I don't know, it's like
it feels so personal to people, and I don't fully
understand the psychology of it, And you know, I wonder
how much that contributes to his actions, Like does it
feel like he's almost in some way doing some of
these things to get the reaction. Yeah. So one way
(24:24):
that I think Elon Musk is just like you and me,
is like it's exciting when a lot of people like
your tweet and retweet it and and like make you
feel like you're a really smart person who's made a
clever observation. It turns out that if you're a billionaire,
like that feels just as good. You know, then if
you're a common person it should It shouldn't though, right,
I mean, I think we can agree that if you
and I were billionaires, we would not be on Twitter,
right I think. I mean I'm actually I disagree. I
(24:45):
think I would be. And here's why. I think, once
you reach a certain level of power in this world,
Twitter is the only way you can feel like a
human again. Like you you It gives you just a
sense of danger, right, the idea that I could ruin
my entire life. You know, people are just thrilled by
the idea that it could get canceled, you know, so
they like flirt with it. I love this concept, Like
it's just like it's like, you know, the only way
(25:06):
I can feel anything is that's that's what it is. Yeah,
I think if you're a billionaire, there are lots of ways. One,
there are lots of ways you can get canceled and
you don't have to go on Twitter. How would you
do it? How would you do it? Well, it's funny
you should ask. I have been thinking a lot about
this lately. Maybe it's just that the negative feedback is
actually what he's looking for, you know, like he must
(25:28):
never hear no from the people around him. So I
was talking with somebody who worked with him a lot,
like after the acquisition, and this person was just saying
that their theory about why he is the way he
is is because of his media consumption diet, which is
mostly Twitter. It's mostly sort of you know, right wingers
on Twitter, and he's just sort of like fallen head
over heels from them. And of course they're telling him like, yes,
you're so right about everything, while they sort of you know,
(25:51):
gas him up. They're also being like, oh, and also
like do these like horrible things, because like it's the
only way to protect free speech and civilization, and he
falls for it. It's weird, though, because that seems dumb.
I mean, he's obviously not the world's smartest man. Okay,
let's just be clear. I don't think but have we
decided who the world's smartest? I don't know like that.
The Binance guy seems pretty, he's he's like, I don't
(26:13):
know if he's great. He seems smart, though, I think yeah, maybe, yeah,
maybe the FTX guy might be the Yeah, he would see. Yeah,
I haven't haven't read much about him lately, but you know,
as of two months ago, he seemed really smart. He
seemed really smart up until about two months ago, um
or a month. It hasn't been that long term. It's
been two fucking weeks there or something. It's like, that's
how what's going on with the timeline? Yeah, we haven't
(26:35):
figured out who the world smartest man is, but I
think we can all agree Elon Musk is not that person.
I'm not saying that he has to agree with like
whatever the alternate opinion is like on the left about
some of these things. And I'm not saying that some
of the things that the right wing thinks about Twitter
that they're completely baseless. There are probably some pockets some
places where they either have made bad decisions or overstepped
(26:58):
or whatever they had employees who were kind of off
doing their own thing, and it was like not well regulated. Sure,
like a well regulated militia. Twitter does not have one
of those. Uh not, Yeah, you must working on it,
Elon muskeet Um, it's fucking dumb bedside see sorry to gross.
It's just such a gross bedside scene. It's really like
(27:20):
there's so many things that could be there. But anyhow,
but yeah, I don't know who these people are that
cheering them on, Like it seems like he might be
able to see through some of like their rhetoric and
be like these guys seem actually seem kind of dumb,
you know. I mean this is a guy who's talking
about and he believes in climate change, right Ellen, Yeah,
I mean that was his whole thing. He's like, let's
save the planet or whatever. You know, does he now
(27:42):
like climate change maybe isn't real? Like is that what's
going on? That's kind of how it feels. I mean,
his views on a lot of things just seemed very malleable,
you know, like I don't think there are a lot
of fixed points there. I like how I'm like Casey explained, Elon,
you know, I've been writing a lot about this and
like that is sort of the number one thing that
I think people want is like explain Elon Musk. And
what I have found over the past month of writing
(28:02):
about him almost every single day is that there is
not a sort of logical through line that I can
draw for you that explains the guy. He's a whim
based person. He's a w BP baby. That's something you
can order. Okay, So what's the future here? What? First off?
(28:30):
Should Twitter die? Is? That is because you end every
interview I say, I don't always do that. I actually
have never said that, and so, but thank you for
pointing it out. I think it'd be a fun little segment.
Note to Adam and Lyra, we want to leave that
moment in that's very authentic and real. Um No, what
is the now? You've got me very self conscious about
(28:51):
using the phrase with what in future in it? Yeah,
but like what is the future hold here? It should
Twitter die? First off? Let me ask you that, and
you're opinion, I think it's still a little bit too
early for me to say, like I think Twitter should die. Also,
I'm very self interested in the continuation of Twitter, Like
you know, it's been an incredible story for my business.
(29:12):
And too. I use it to talk about a lot
of things. I learned a lot of things. I still
had a lot of value from Twitter. So you know,
I don't necessarily want it to die. I certainly don't
want it to die before there is a good replacement
for it. I don't think there is a good replacement
for it yet. Yeah, there's a lot of people competing
for that. Do you like any of them? So I
looked at High and it was absolutely terrible. It's empty,
I mean empty, but also just random porn stuff that
(29:34):
was like not even good, not even just you know,
like if they had been really high quality porn that
I wanted to see, how might be. Like I'm sticking
around here, I'd love to see a resurgence of Tumbler.
I think Tumbler is such an expressive and fun I mean,
it's not perfect. All of them are bad in some way,
but um, do I like any of them? I mean
I like mastered On a lot. As I mentioned before,
I think the problem with masted On is it has
(29:56):
a lot of the qualities of Twitter. The onboarding is
terrible and confusing, and when somebody simplifies that to a
place where it's as simple as sign up for a
Twitter account and you get to see all the things
you want to see. I think there's that's the closest
I've seen to something that is both feels like Twitter
but also feels different than Twitter in a way, like
(30:17):
feels like it's doing something or trying something new. It's
gonna be a while before everybody can adopt it because
there's no good you know, there's no good on ramp
to it if we can use our on ramp metaphor.
I look, I wrote about Masses on Twice seventeen. When
it first came out. It was like having a moment
and I wrote a piece and interview the guy and
seems like an interesting guy and he's kind of kept
going all these years, just sort of like this, ain't it? Man?
(30:38):
Like you just like pull it open. It just it
doesn't feel alive the way that the Twitter feels. I
guess you could get there, but it's just not I'm
not gonna be a defender. I don't want to be
a massive on defender. I haven't heard people say this,
and I think there's a debate going on and I
think there's some big issues with it. I mean, one
is like that it's a small group of people. It's
a very specific for people. It's a pretty white group
of people. That's one thing that's that's for sure. It's
a very eurocentric group of people in a lot of ways.
(30:59):
What it is It's like, it's like if all the
people who said that they were going to move to
Canada when Trump became president started a social network, Like
that's what Mason is. That is definitely a vibe. Though
I think it's changing daily. I feel like I can
see a progression again, I don't. I'm not like Mr Mastedon.
I will say that of all of the things I
messed around, I haven't tried post yet because I've signed
up for the waitlist and I have I've heard nothing
(31:19):
but bad things about it. Does not seem great to me.
I also think, like, what is interesting about massed On
and why it's worth exploring as a potential successor is
this top down approach. I think right now we're experiencing
the most problematic version of the top down sort of
social network ownership. And I think all of our social
(31:41):
network issues are like very much linked to the fact that,
like the control for the user is removed and it's
just kind of the whims of Mark Zuckerberg wants to
change your feed tomorrow, He's just gonna do that, or
if Elon must decides like the Nazis are back and
there's nothing you can do about it except just ride
the fucking wave. And I think that, like there's something
to be said for a version of this. I think
(32:01):
the decentralizing. I hate to say it, okay, I do.
I hate to use decentralized in this way, but this
idea of a decentralized social network where all of these
different places can talk but they're not all controlled in
the same way. He's really interesting. I don't see anybody
else trying, like what's the next thing? Like are you
a TikTok user? Yeah, but I don't. I don't post,
you know, just sort of like check out the vital
(32:22):
dances because you're a grown up, you're not posting. Come on.
My specific criticism of TikTok is it so much of
it is amateur comedians taking seventeen cracks at the same joke,
you know what I mean, Where it's like you got
the selfie cam and they have the little premise and
they're like, here's like every um coffee in San Francisco
or whatever, and then it's just that for like four
and a half minutes. Is it the thing where it's
(32:43):
back and forth and they're like one of them is
like like one person is the coffee and then it's
the it's the same person, but it's a person like
drinking the coffee or whatever. I love the actions hilarious.
But you're also an improv guy. I mean we should
say you're a big You're big improv dude. Your second
job is your profashional improv person. The second job is
to make people laugh. Jo. You love to live, laugh
(33:05):
and and love. Really, the only trinity of life is
what I'm doing. I'm living laughing. You do you do
do improv? I do do improv. That's like sort of
my creative outlets. So you're seeing a lot of bad
comedians on there because the algorithm is leading you to
these comedians. Like the truth is, that's like once TikTok
figured out I was gay, it started showing me a
(33:25):
lot of like Broadway and like theater kid content, and
like I do actually enjoy it, but I don't enjoy
it to the like degree that TikTok shows it to me.
I'm like, there has to be something that is not
like high school musical that I can watch right now.
But TikTok's algorithm is sort of like, you spent two
seconds extra on this one video, and now we think
this is it for you. It's like you know, which
(33:47):
like sometimes it very much is. And I think taketok
like somebody changing the channels for you. If you're just
sitting there watching TV and you don't know what's gonna
come up and act, and it's sort of like, I
guess I'll keep waiting, maybe something really good it's gonna
show up. It's a slot machine, man, Like. I think
that's why it's so powerful, is just the idea that
maybe a good video will will happen next. But TikTok
can't replace what Twitter does. Facebook is not going to
(34:07):
come back, right, No young people are gonna be joining
Facebook anytime soon. I don't think so. I don't know
what the demo of Twitter is. I don't know if
it's that young, to be honest, I mean I feel
like it's all right. I mean like that's why the
media is obsessed with this story, is like this is
the only social network that any of us were actually
good at right Well, I think actually a big part
of the story is the the perceived importance of Twitter
versus the actual importance of Twitter. And I actually had
(34:29):
Gia Tolentino on the show and we talked about this,
which is, like, it feels real important to us, and
there's like two million people or something on it, which
is not a lot of people by comparison to other
social networks. But there are a lot of people who
are in media who decide on, like what the headline
is for tomorrow's paper, who are like writing stories that
are going to inform this larger sort of piece of culture.
(34:51):
And for some reason, we all think and Elon Must
seems to agree, and I think he's kind of wrong
that like it is as important as everybody thinks it is.
You know, talks about you know, it's gonna save humanity
and civilization and all that. Like I don't I don't
see that as being an outcome for Twitter. Like it
it's as a sort of media politics sports app with
maybe a little bit of entertainment thrown in. And I
(35:12):
think you could build a hugely valuable business around that,
but you gotta make some different decisions your Instagram is
one of my bright spots in my day because it
can I can I tell you that that you post
Casey if you don't follow him on Instagram, I don't
even know if your ship is public, but like everybody
should follow him. It is every day, And I don't
know where you find the time to this, To be
honest with you, like, maybe you do it quickly. You
follow the right accounts. Every day. He'll put funny tweets
(35:35):
that he finds on his Instagram, which to me is
like how I would like to experience Twitter, to be honest,
like a highly curated experience of the best stuff on there,
and I like will regularly at the end of my day,
I sit down. I have this lounge chair, I sit in.
I'll have a drink, maybe a little cigaretta, which I
like to smoke. I'll setting the scene here, the lights
are down low, maybe there's a fire roaring in the fireplace,
(35:57):
and I'll just I'll whip open Install Graham and just
open up Casey Newton's fucking feed his stories and just
ride just joyous waves of Twitter comedy. I just say, Josh,
I put stuff that's like extra gay and sexually explicit
on my close Friends story, I could add I want
to see everything. I want to see all of it.
(36:17):
And as you know, I'm an ally, so I'm ready
for whatever. As you know, an ally what all of
the allies are saying all over the place, It's like, no,
it's so good and and and like all the time,
I'm sitting there just giggling, and Laura's like, what are
you doing, I'm like, Okay, Sy's feed is so good.
Well nice to me to say. Okay, So two things.
So one all that, so I have an alt account.
(36:39):
I followed some like funny people, some gay people, like
the Outgruth just serves me that stuff. So it's really
mostly just Twitter algorithm that is sharing that stuff for me. Um.
But to that is the other thing I love about Twitter.
Twitter was the only funny social network. You think I
ever laughed looking at Instagram? No, like, but it's like,
you know, and I guess TikTok every once in a while,
but it's like, you know, I'm not. I'm not laughing
looking at most stuff. You never laughed reading Facebook. So
(37:00):
that that's what I love about you know. I mean,
TikTok has a little bit of comedy and some of
the some of the comedians aren't bad. Some of the
stuff is quite inventive. But I tweeted about this like
a few weeks ago, and I'm like, the thing I
think if Twitter does implode, ultimately the thing the number
one thing I will miss the most. It's not breaking
news or people arguing or can you believe what Trump tweeted?
It is like there is a type of written comedy
(37:21):
that grew out of Twitter that could only exist on Twitter,
that only functions on Twitter. Really, I guess it kind
of functions if you throw out your Instagram feed, But
it only functions because I know the language of Twitter,
and that's what makes these things funny. I will say
not to not to go back to Mastodon, but I
have seen and experienced things like that I Mastodon, which
has given me a tiny glimmer of hope that it
(37:42):
could exist elsewhere. You've laughed at a mastodonto, so I think, yes,
first off, let's get they got to change that terminology,
but I think they Unfortunately the app that I have
been using predominantly to and interface with Mastheton is called two.
So it's a real problem for me personally. Are you
(38:02):
okay there's are a breaking news story going on right now.
I saw you looking to the side. Oh no, Brooke
Hammerling is complaining because it's okay, So whatever the story is. Basically,
when we started our podcast, they gave us Harra Swisher's
old feed and it became a thing. What was the feed?
It was was say feed podcast, but the Times gave
(38:23):
us the Hardwork feed. And so now some people are
seeing hard Fork in their Spotify wraps even though they
were really sway listeners, and they're having emotions about it
and so anyway, so that that was what I was
looking at. And Brooke Camerling is yelling at you on Twitter.
Yeah yeah, she said, no offense to the guys who
hosts at and White Times. That's me at me next time.
But she goes out of her way to say she
hasn't listened to Hard Work, So um, that's where she's at.
(38:45):
I mean, I get it's it's two guys. Two guys
guys are over. It was guys are extremely We're done
with you. We don't need any of us anymore. She says,
the two guys on a podcast right now, turn us off.
Are you still listening to the off? They can't help themselves.
But it's for you know, it's for the like of
private by guys. I mean honest, So there might be
(39:05):
at some guys listening. Um, you know, you know he
had a strong woman reporter, the best in her space,
one of the best all time, legend, she'd a great
fucking podcast, And these two white guys come steamrolling into
the feed exact classic, honestly classic guy behavior. How many
timeff In a way, it's like a kind of a
very long you interrupting her when you think about like
(39:28):
a very big, like technically difficult interruption for ultimate. Really
it really is. You're like, here's how a podcast should
actually sing kara. But yeah, I get I understand her argument. Um,
but I do love that podcast that hard Fork. Wait
wait bit, you're you're doing this podcast for a company?
(39:48):
Oh I would? I was like, can I get Ben
Shapiro's feet? Can we slide me in there instead of
Ben Shapiro? I think that would. I think the fans
is what that's what they're looking for to another one
from one Jewish guy another They won't even notice. Yeah. No,
I would love to be split into somebody's feed. My
dream in life is for somebode like we have this
dormant feed. It's got like a hundred thousand subscribers. Do
you mind if we just put your podcast on it?
(40:10):
Like they somebody should sell those that should be a business.
Should be a business. They should be they should be
dealing those out, you know, like a like a drug
dealer for the highest bidder. Why isn't go Daddy invest
in your service that sells podcast feed? This is I'm
just a free fucking idea, honestly, and that's why so
poor to listen to pockets. You never know when you're
gonna hear a billion dollar idea on this podcast. Thank you?
(40:31):
All right, so listen, we're probably running. I mean, we've
gone through a lot here today, but we should probably
do a little plug time for you, which I feel
like it is what was what people want. And we
we have touched on hard fork, which is the name.
I have a lot of questions, but I know I
understand what it is. My impression is that if you
were a stranger coming to the name hard Fork, you'd
have a lot of confusion. Tell us about in a
(40:52):
hard fork. Your your listeners are very sophisticated. They probably
already know what a hard fork is, you know, a
hard fork does not want to explain it. You're like,
I actually don't know, Like actually I was hoping you
knew what it was, because no, here's the deal. We uh,
when we pitched the show, it was you know, last fall,
and we were like, well, obviously crypto is here to stay.
(41:12):
And so it's like a good kind of crypto term.
And in crypto, a hard work is where something has
gone disastrously wrong and they sort of have to rewind
the blockchain back and start over. Right. Yeah, it's also
a coding thing. I mean, I think most of your
listeners have probably forked code at least fifty times. Okay,
we're forking and forking over here, playing on forking several
(41:32):
lines of code after this before you fork your code. Yeah,
so that's that's what it is. And uh, you know,
we're we're six episodes in. We're having a good here's
the Here's what I'm gonnae peop about the show because
it's very low concept. It is two people talking, but
it is just like this, it's kind of like the
other other. It's like that we don't interrupt each other
as much as you do on this show. You know,
(41:54):
it's a little more chill. But what I will say
is there's a lot of like tech podcasts out there,
and we are truly trying to have a good time.
We're not here to doom and gloomy about the end
of the world. We're gonna try to make you laugh
while you're listening to the show. And it turns out
if you just do that, you're separating yourself from the
vast majority of all tech podcast I hear you, actually
and I and I love that for you and for
(42:15):
Kevin Ruce, your co host. Heaven is wonderful listen. I've
listened to many, to several at least one episodes. I've
enjoyed all of them. And well, you know what's the
funny thing is it just appeared in my I was
I had subscribed this way, it just showed up. I
like that you got that. I like that you made
that point about me interrupting it is a problem that
I have. Well, that's like I like coming on the show. Also,
(42:36):
by the way, you know I used to work for you.
I know you a great exeative gratitude. You hired me
at the Verge and it really set me up for
an amazing things, So of course I would talk to
you about anything. But when I when I first joined,
I was so intimidated by you because you held my
my very fate in your hands. And so I'm excited
to come on your show and like, actually, I feel
like I can interrupt you back and not be the
end of my life. So for yes, you know, I
(42:56):
was raised now I'm I'm I'm a atheist basically, but
I was raised in the Jewish ow And as you know,
our love language is interruption. Um to me, it's anti semitic.
If you're like mad about interruptions that, let's say that.
And we we have to stand by our Jewish friends
during this moment. We really do. It's not just. It's
not just when it's really big stuff. Sometimes it really
small stuff, Like if you don't like me interrupting you,
(43:17):
that's you're saying my culture is not valid. Uh, And
so I think it's important to just put that out there.
But I did hire you at the Verge, but only
because you're a brilliant genius who's amazing at what you do,
and to not hire you would have been so obviously
a mistake. I think I've read one good story when
you hired me at the Verge. You you you you took
a risk. It was do you remember the story? Yes,
(43:38):
so the story that I broke about Twitter. It was
about Twitter. It was literally out. It was they had
bought this music company and we're making a standalone music app.
And it was like, they do that, and they did
that and it didn't go great for them, and they
shut it down called Twitter Music. Oh oh, Twitter Music.
I would subscribe to the Twitter music like account for
(44:00):
a while and they would post like music. Yes, right,
they put they posted music. Yeah, maybe maybe you want
to bring that back. I mean, I gotta try something,
okay real quick before we go. You're protected, of course
by your your various jobs that you do in the
world of journalism odd jobs. Yeah, I mean you are,
technically speaking still you were still a member of the
Verge staff craft. I'm a contributing editor there, you know.
(44:21):
And you also have platform Er. Yes, so my main
job as I read a newsletter called Platformer, which you
can find a platformer dot news. Um. But yeah, is
it a substack. That's a substack. It is on the
sub stack platform. Yeah. Yeah. How are you feeling about
that relationship? You feeling good? About Substack. I mean, I
think I think it's fine. I think when you look
at what the other platforms take from their creators in
terms of just raw cash, like sub stack actually is
(44:43):
the most generous. You keep ninety percent of it, you
know before you're a little stripe fees. So I feel
okay about it. But you know, nothing is forever is
sort of how okay? You heard it here first, casey
and taking platform or off sub Stack shocking stuff. You
heard it here first. The ephemerality of all fairs. It's true, though,
every time I think about joining anything, I'm kind of
like could end up like Twitter. You know you never could.
(45:04):
I could go sideways. I was gonna say, you're protected
by your many many jobs in journalism. One do you
worry about your blue check mark going away? I plan
to keep it. The thing for me, like the r
O I on my use of Twitter is insane. It's like,
you can't I can't compare myself to any other Twitter
user because I tweet about the ongoing destruction of Twitter,
and every day people pay me to read more about it.
(45:24):
So it's like I will pay eight dollars for a checkmark.
I'll pay you. You will pay eight dollars to check,
because the last thing I wanted somebody impersonating me. Josh.
Imagine an impersonating Casey Newton. Come on it, I mean,
isn't that isn't, But won't I still be able to
impersonate you as long as I put like quotes around
my name, you impersonate me. I will come for you, Josh.
I would love for you. I should maybe I should
do that. I shouldn't start in casing an impersonation account.
(45:47):
I don't know. Listen, Casey, this has been so fun,
so wonderful. I don't know if we got anywhere, learned anything,
but I do feel like we had I hope not. Yeah,
I hope we had a blast while doing it. When
does Hardfork come out? Hard Fork comes out every Friday morning.
You know, it's here's what I say about my job.
It's I write newsletters that are like very serious emails
you get during the week, and then on Friday you
get to have a drink with your friend Kevin and
(46:08):
Casey with hard work. So you know you can chase
this with hard Fork. I recommend subscribing right after you
get done listening to this episode, even during if you
can multitask and then you're you're doing your newsletter. How
often are you doing that? We do it. It's a Monday, Tuesday,
and Thursdays. Okay? And do you have any bombshells coming
on Twitter anytime soon? Look look through the last month
(46:29):
of stuff, like with Joey Scheper. We have broken more
news in the past month that platform has like probably ever.
So yeah, there are more more scoops are coming. I
love it. I love it, and I love you Casey.
You're the best. You're the best of what you do
and you're a wonderful human. And thank you for joining
us on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Josh is great.
(46:51):
There you have it. What more can be said on
the topic of Twitter, I mean probably more, and we
probably will say more, but I think I feel like
we have exhausted all possible angles and I and I
feel better for it, honest I feel cleansed in a way.
So that is our show for this week. We'll be
back next week with more what future And as always,
I wish you and your family the very best.
Hey, and welcome to what Future. I'm your host, Joshua Zapolski.
So for many weeks I've been talking about thinking about
skirting around and perhaps even delving into the issue of Twitter,
which is ever present in the minds of all people
who are on Twitter and it's new owner, Elon Musk,
and all of the madness that has been sort of
(00:38):
unleashed on the general population. I have touched on it
here and there, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Sometimes I wasn't
touching on it at all, and you just thought I
was because you're a very confused person. But there's so
much that has happened with Twitter, the social network, and
its owner, Elon Musk, and the users of it that
(01:00):
it felt worth exploring in a more direct and sort
of plain manner. And I would say just in the
last week, just in the last few days, there have
been things that have been happening that are just seemed
totally surreal at this point. For instance, Elon Musk is
tweeting a Tim Cooke, the CEO of Apple, about how
he's going to go to war with Apple because they
don't want to advertise on Twitter, because Twitter is now
(01:22):
full of Nazis and racists again. They're no longer going
to flag COVID misinformation or even attempt to stop the
spread of misinformation on the service as it relates to COVID.
No other social network in the world is doing that.
Everybody's trying to stop the flow of and stem the
tide of miss info. They're like, no, we're not doing
(01:42):
that anymore. They fired all of the team that was
tracking child sex abuse on the platform, or most of
the team. Bloomberg's headline was they decimated the team tackling
child sexual abuse. So just really normal stuff for a
social network with two million users, it just becomes such
an ongoing, rolling story. I thought, you know who, who
(02:05):
can you talk to you about this? Who really understands
the inner workings of it, And immediately I thought of
Casey Newton, who is an amazing journalist and writer and
has been, along with his partners Zoe Schiffer, has been
writing to Scoop after Scoop in the last few weeks
about what's going on inside of Twitter, and they broke
a ton of stories. I think they broke the story
about all these people quitting Twitter. They've broken all of
(02:26):
these stories about these panicked emails that Elon Muskus send
him because nobody can write code there anymore. And just
it's been an amazing kind of example of what I
would say is the finest journalism around this topic and
kind of exposes the the chaos and the insanity of
this moment inside of Twitter. And so I thought, let's
(02:47):
get Casey on the show. Let's talk to him about
what the state of play is at Twitter. And so
that's what we did. Okay, let's get after it. As
(03:12):
Chris Cuomo used to say before he was canceled and
fired from CNN. Sorry, it's a dark memory from just
the recent past. The Cuomos, they didn't fare too well
as the pandemic was closing up. They really didn't knock
it out of the park. Okay, but we're not here
to talk about their weird bad behavior. We're here to
talk about the weird bad behavior of another guy. Yeah, uh,
(03:37):
who's not a Cuomo Elon Musk So okay, So first off,
you cover this, you are a top of the class,
top shelf. I can't think of anything but a top
sort of you know, you're a top when it comes
to coverage. I can't speak on to every subject for you,
But when it comes to coverage of the Internet and
internet companies, in particularly Twitter, you're the best. You're You're
(03:59):
on top. What thanks man? Thanks? You have many many, many,
many sneaky ass sources screring around whatever remains of Twitter
h Q delivering truth bombs to you on a regular basis.
Would you say this is all accurate? The thing is,
I have never really thought of myself as as a
great reporter, But in that case, I don't believe that. Well, look,
(04:20):
I think I'm a good writer. I think it was
a pretty good thinker, But like, I've never been the
scoopiest guy. But with this particular story, Josh, I'm not
kidding when I tell you, like, for two or three weeks,
I would wake up and every single day I would
just open up Signal and people were like, here are
like four more things that no one has reported yet.
There's just so much going on at that company and
it just kind of needed to go somewhere. So it's
been an amazing month, the reporting that you've been doing.
(04:41):
And you and Joe Schiffer. Am I saying that right?
Is that the correct pronunciation? Yeah, my colleagues, She's wonderfully.
You all have been doing some great, great reporting. It's
made me. I've been glued to Twitter kind of yeah,
I don't think do you have a Master Dawn account yet?
Are you on that? Dude? I'm in it, but I
just look at that thing and I just feel like
it's dead on arrival. No, dude, Taylor Lareen's already has
sixty thou followers on Massadotic. You need to catch the
(05:04):
funk up by day. Okay, I'll see what I can do.
She's like, actually, I don't even know, like maybe she
has box. I'm not really sure. Are there sixty people
on masted on. I'm not entirely sure. I've heard they
have like eight million almost. No, it's kicking as I
love it. I think it's terrific. But anyhow, it's that's
We'll talk about that at another point in time. So
so let's talk about Twitter for a second, okay, And
we don't have to recap all of the Twitter news
(05:25):
because obviously I've been talking about it here and there
on the podcast, and and I think the people who
are listening to this, the sick, sick people who listen
to this podcast have heard, you know, some something about
what's happening on Twitter, but you know you're hearing from
people who are currently working there, correct, Like, I don't
want you to I don't want you to to give away
any sources, but let's just say people who are very
very close to the inside mechanations of Twitter. Is it
(05:49):
as crazy to them or does it feel as off
the rails to people who are actually working there as
it does to human beings like us that are on
the outside. It absolutely feels off the real You know,
people will tell me some things, but there's a lot
that they won't tell me, and instead they'll say, like,
I will tell you the real story in like three years.
You know, it's like once enough time has passed that
(06:10):
you know what I feel like. But they're like, it's
crazier than you can even imagine. Yeah, So there's obviously
the people on the ground. There's Twitter, there's people, a
lot of people have been laid off, there's people who
have quit. There's like four people who currently work at
Twitter now and one of them Ze lot Mosque. But
I assume you're also talking to your have you spoken
to like vcs and investors and people who are outside
of this. Yeah, I get this weird impressure. Then maybe
(06:32):
a lot of them are like, Ellen is showing everyone
how it's done. Do you is that what's going on
out there? Yes? Yeah, some people are so excited about
what Ellen is doing because over the last ten years,
tech workers gained so much power, right, there was a
lot of competition for the best engineers. The companies were
printing money, they were making you know, like a million
(06:52):
dollars plus off of every single employee that they had,
and so workers just had all this freedom and they
you know, they had to serve them lunch, and they
had to give him great perks, you know, backrubs, laundry.
Then it actually give them backrubs. That's actually illegal. I
think that that it would have been happened not the manager.
They would bring people into get back. They would bring people,
they would bring in professional Okay, they're getting them backrubs
(07:14):
and lunch in the backrubs. That's a date. A BackRub
and lunch is like, that's a thousand dollar date. And
that's what it was like to work in Airbnb. So
you know, this all is going on. But instead of
saying thank you, my capitalist master, what do people do?
They say, like, well, we should also make this place
more diverse, right, Like we should improve the working condition.
(07:34):
We should actually treat our contractors as well as we
treat the full time employees. And this drives the CEO
is crazy. And so the moment that the economy starts
to turn and Elon takes over Twitter and just starts
slashing and burning, there are a lot of CEOs and
b c saying this is the way we need to
remind these workers what their true places. And that's licking
our boots. Wow. I mean to me, there's sort of
something about the Twitter stuff that is obviously it's Trumpian
(07:57):
in many ways because of Elon's I think Lawn's personality
on Twitter has become increasingly more trump like. Like I mean,
actually a lot of people have said to me recently,
they're like, can you believe this is the guy you're
asking about? Like, you know, are we living in a
simulation like not that long ago? And it is funny
because I used to think about Ellen and like, I'm like,
he's a little weird. He's kind of got some like
edge lord equalities, but not really. He's more just like
(08:18):
a super interesting guy and he's doing really interesting stuff.
And it's like so we're now so far afield from
this other version of Elon Musk that I used to
think of him as, and it he does increasingly have
more in common with like a Trump character. Like Trump.
It feels like this is one of those situations where
is he just gonna do all of the things that
(08:39):
are terrible and bad and everybody's like, that's the worst.
This is terrible and just nothing is going to stop.
But no reality can intersect with his like master plan.
So reality has already intersected with him in the form
of many of his advertisers pulling up and running out
the door, right is you know, Apple was his biggest
brand advertiser. They're spending like forty eight million doll it
(09:00):
was a quarter. They're just gone now, and he needs
that money, like you know, they saddled this company up
with something like thirteen billion dollars in debt. They have
to pay a billion dollars a year just an interest
on the debt. Twitter is making about five billion a
year before all of this happened, and now they've lost
a significant amount of their advertising. We reported this week
that in Europe their ads are down like forty nine
percent week over week, So that's reality for him. I mean,
(09:23):
how many advertisers have actually pulled out do you know
the dollar amount? Well? Sadly they don't text me when
they do it. You know, what we've what we've heard
is that it is just many, many, many millions. You
said Apple was their biggest advertiser. Is that? Yeah, their
single biggest brand advertiser, because apparently Apple doesn't advertise on Facebook. Yeah.
Interesting apples like increasingly finding no friends in the social
(09:46):
media landscape, which is like kind of makes sense. I mean,
given their business model and what they're trying to do.
But if Apple was their largest and they're doing you
said forty eight million a quarter, yeah, I mean, sure
there's somebody who's working on the back of the envelope
math on this. But I the thing that I always
thought was most striking in the early days of the
Elon Musk is gonna buy Twitter conversation? I think I
want to say, maybe Mike Isaac, maybe it was a
(10:06):
group of people did a story at the Times that
was like, here's what musques like plans are, or maybe
it's just a reblog of your story. I don't I
never never know these days, But did you get those
I think I think they broke up. They broke some
You're like, I'm willing to admit that maybe someone else
is broken news, but they were like one of the
parts of the plan was like he's going to eliminate
the reliance on advertiser revenue. He's gonna have it by
(10:30):
five or something, and the other you know, revenue is
gonna be derived from like subscription and payments and all
this other stuff. But the company's revenue, right I believe
is the number is derived from advertising in two, like
in the Year of Our Lord two. So if that
goes away, do you know what happens? Do you have
any ideas anybody spoken to you on like what that
(10:50):
looks like if suddenly he can't afford to pay people
and can't keep the lights on. Yeah, I mean, it
just looks like a company going out of business, right,
you know, one must but more sifically, what must took over?
He was like, we we can't rule out that this
company is going to go bankrupt. You know. That was
sort of his opening pep rally to the troop was
like we're fun. He's like, I'm glad, yeah, But but
(11:14):
what's amazing is that after telling everyone that instead of
being like, you know, here's my my five point plan
to return as to profitability, he was like, We're going
to piss off all the advertisers, We're going to restore
sixty accounts from the worst Twitter users of all time,
and we're gonna start a fight with Apple, which we
literally call it a war. Right, So, I mean, the
man is not making rational decisions. See, that's what I believe.
(11:35):
But then you've got these like weird Mr Mosque people
who are like, who are like that is truly what
they are is the Mr must people. They're like, either
don't understand the long game he's playing, and I'm like,
I don't know, my dude, I feel like there's a
lot of ways to play a long game that doesn't
look this stupid. Like isn't it so amazing too that
that is an exact replica of how people treated Trump, right,
(11:56):
because it was always you know, Mr Trump, you know
you're here to say no matter what, like the cree
easiest ship that Trump ever did, there were always people
there to tell you that it was nine dimensional chess. Listen.
I hate to say this, but I think people need
Christ back in their lives. That's what this podcast is about, right,
this is actually a pro evangelical Christian podcast to Jesus people.
But there is an argument. I think, doesn't it feel
(12:17):
like the climate out here is you've got these people
who are so like devoted. I mean, Elon Musk Today's
abstractions on the devotion to this guy is crazy. Like
I mean, it's is sort of like the Trump thing
where Trump, you know, early in his campaign, was like
I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and they'd love
me for whatever. It's like, yeah, you were right, Like
I hate to admit it, but I don't understand it.
(12:38):
It's like, you know, you like his car, maybe you
bought some stock, you know, you want to go to Mars.
Like that's all fine, those all our normal things that
people may engage in. But like when it's so clearly
the guy's blowing it, it's like Kanye, Like he reminds
me a lot of Kanye right now. And in fact,
I ironically d m you on Twitter about this, but
I was like, haf has met. It's like it kind
(13:00):
of one of those situations where it does seem like
it's so far afield from like the Elon Musk character
that proceeds this, even for the other stuff that he's done,
even for the Peto the Peto guy comments or whatever.
It was like a sporadic sort of flare up. Now
he's like, here's my weird nightstand with diet cokes on it, caffeine.
You know who I know who drinks caffe free diet coke.
(13:22):
My parents drinks caffee free dico. They're like, we love
to taste of diet coke, but we hate the energy
it gives us. So yeah, we we don't want to
be all hopped up after three pm. What's he afraid of?
Like I thought, he's the guy who like sleeps on
the floor at the office, and he like sleeps one
hour a night, and like you would think he'd want
the regular diet coke. He's like, I need every chemical,
but the one that actually will help me stay awake,
(13:42):
Like that's just how happen. So that's how I've got
to roll. Also, the one that's actually natural. I don't
want that. We're all watching the car crash, right, we're
like kind of rubber neck and like I just looked
at my feed and I can't even think of anything
to talk about on Twitter anymore except Elon Musk being dumb,
Like you know, it's like I don't there's no other
topic that seems interesting, and like people like little world Cup.
I'm like, who cares. We're watching the World Cup of
(14:04):
Guys flaming out right now? You know? Yeah, he really
does feel like not just the main subject but sort
of the only subject sometimes, and he'll tweet literally anything.
You know, He'll just be like I put tooth raised
on my toothbrush and people will be like, uh, oh well,
I hate to tell Elon Musk, but and then you know,
go on with a ninety part thread or they're like
by by cryptos get yes exactly, here's an of the
(14:27):
tooth brush, but this idea that it's like, oh well,
it turns out I'm a little bit smarter than Elon Musk.
So I think I'm gonna quote tweet him and just
let my followers know that I've got him clocked, buddy,
Like low does yourself steam have to be for you
to want to stunt on Elon Musk? On the timeline?
Have I done this? Everyone has? I feel like I'm
the only person who hasn't. At this point, you have
(14:48):
to maintain the credibility of a neutral reporter. You need
to be able because if he decides to grant an
interview with somebody, Casey, don't tell me you haven't been
thinking about it. If you decided to grant an interview,
it'd be such a nightmare. The John he's gonna grant,
He'll grant an interview with the Daily Wire. That's who
he's going to grant an interview that is going to happen. Ye. Yes,
he's not gonna be talking to me anytime soon, I imagine,
(15:09):
although you know, Elon, if you're listening, call me. But
the thing is, like those interviews suck. If every single
question is it like, tell me about like this genocide
that you directly cause people are like you are a
simple you know you're you're keeping from this guy, and
it's like, you know, like I just hate being in
that position, So I'm fine to not be doing that
sort of thing. My opinion is like I am stunned
(15:30):
at how insanely bad this looks like. I'm not like
Elon Musk is a total idiot. I think he's smart
in some ways, sure, but there are so many ways
this could have gone better. I believe in every intersector,
every you know, crossroads he got to it was like, well,
you could have driven down the road and made it
(15:50):
not so horrible, but you decided to hit this off
ramp for reasons that honestly, only edge lords can explain.
And the only way they can explain is like, you
don't get he's playing chess in nine D chess or
whatever it is. It's like it's fucking bizarre. So okay,
what happens. You're an expert in this field, you have
a doctorate in Internet studies, ellen ology one oh one
(16:13):
and one oh two. How does this play out? Give
me your like, you know, well, look, I don't think
Twitter is gonna get banned by Apple anytime soon. Be
pretty cool if they did that, right, I mean, that
could happen maybe like a sick if Tim Cook was
just like you know what, I'm Tim Cook, like, I
could buy your company twenty five times over. It's not
unimaginable to me. But I think you know, it would
create political and pr problems for Apple then it would
(16:35):
rather not have. Like Twitter is going to continue to
be on the App Store, but if they keep going
down this road, they're gonna lose way more of their advertisers,
which means that Twitter is just gonna keep losing money.
And then Ellen is going to have to decide do
I want to make a bunch of really obvious decisions
that would bring advertisers back, or do I want to
be a free speech crusader who just sort of you know,
captains the ship as it sinks into the ocean. And
(16:56):
at this point it seems like he's much more in
the latter camp. We'll see if you know, losing yet
more billions of dollars changes his mind. But there's a
potential like right off for right down situation here, right like, yeah,
if he really tanks it. Some people have suggested to
me that, you know, maybe this whole thing is a
bit of a ploy to put the thing into bankruptcy
and then restructure the debt and you know that sort
(17:17):
of thing, um and which I guess as possible and
then what continue to own it? Uh yeah, or you know,
like sell it to some telecom somewhere. You know, it
does sort of feel like one potential, like a terrible
but hilarious outcome of Twitter, Like do you mean to
like Verizon is what you're saying? Well, exactly, It's like
a subdivision of Yahoo, you know, subdivision Twitter Holy on
(17:42):
every other tweet is just an ad for like one
weird trick to remove your belt. It's the chum boxes
is in the feed now, I know, I love that
beautiful idea. Have you been talking people at other major
tech companies? Is there nobody who's looking at this as
an acquisition, as like an opportunistic like Google? Google doesn't
on Twitter. The thing that the social networks camp by
anything right now? Like Facebook tried to buy a gift
search engine and the UK told them absolutely not. They
(18:04):
said that would ruin competition in the market. So you know,
the idea that Facebook would require Twitter, I think is
just totally out of the question. Okay. I mean I
don't think I don't see Facebook, But you don't think
Google would be interested? Um? I think you know, Sooner
is such a like chill, laid back guy that I
think the prospect of owning Twitter would just probably give
him hives. You know, there's just kind of too many problems, right, Microsoft, Microsoft,
(18:25):
they wanted to buy Discord so bad, right, they want
to pay ten billion dollars for that thing. If they
could pick up Twitter for like a billion dollars, Like
I could see them wanting to do that. I don't
think a billion, it'll be more than a billion, right
by the time Musk is done with this, Like, I mean,
it depends if he drives away every single advertiser on
the platform except for the my Pillow guys. Right, yeah.
Does it feel that way to you though? Right now?
(18:46):
I mean, all I can tell you is like the
direction that we're going in right, Like, nothing has happened
in the past several weeks that have made me feel like, Okay,
he's starting to get it. It's like it's exactly what
you just said. Every time he's been presented with an
on ramp that would lead him to a more rational,
profitable path, he has chosen the other path. So he
could choose a different path and it would change everything,
but he's only been choosing one sort of path. M
(19:17):
You know, it does seem like kind of impossible that
you can just lose all of these people and not
have something eventually down the road, like just simply break.
It doesn't seem like it's broken yet, but like, does
it feel like there's something like that on the horizon.
Do you have any sense from people that you're talking
to who are there that like there's gonna be some
kind of catastrophic mom because all these prognosticators like the
day that happened, where like I've been in the industry
(19:40):
thirty years and it's only a matter of time before
it puts one lot of code in and the whole
thing goes down. I believe those people like I do.
I was like pretty early to saying I think there's
probably gonna be like a major outage of Twitter. It
could last like a day or more. I still think
we could see it. People d M me now and
it's like, hey, like my notifications are only showing September,
(20:00):
or like they're sending me videos of tweets jumping all
around their timeline. So I do think little stuff is
starting to break. Maybe the engineers who are still there,
we'll be able to get it under control and it
won't be a problem. There's also this question of like,
you know, every service relies on these SSL certifications, but
you need like dozens of them for all the different
micro services that run your company. And I've been told
by people tech companies, like at every tech company, one
(20:21):
of these services just stops working because it didn't make
it onto a spreadsheet, and somebody forgot to renew it,
and the teams that were responsible for managing these spreadsheets
on Twitter no longer exist. So you know, that's why
I think that we are likelier than not to see
a multi day outage. But you know it's not a guarantee, right,
Do you know how many people still work there? Do
we have a number? I think it's like probably around
two thousand, maybe a little bit less. And how many
(20:43):
people are working there when he took over. That's that's
got to be like a record or something, right like
in terms of like reduction and workforce. Yeah, it's a
pretty huge drop. Yeah, there is a lot of like
engineering talent and otherwise out in San Francisco right now
or the West coast generally for Alan. If it starts breaking,
is that the point where we know like it's real
(21:06):
because it feels all this stuff feels like the six accounts,
for instance, like has he done the thing? Has he
opened the floodgates? As he released death Con three or
whatever they're calling been told that they have started to
restore some of those accounts. I do you think it's
gonna take? Sometimes these are people like Milo right, Milo
yan Monopolis. I'm definitely mispronounced his last name. So I
don't know that accounts specifically, but that that certainly seems
like an account that would be included yet like something
(21:28):
that might have been banned for like rampant transphobia, or
for like hate speech or um, I don't know, mobbing behavior,
things that like Twitter typically banned for. You know, if
you had the wrong opinion about the president, they would
ban you. If you didn't like Trump, shadow ban you
all those people. Yeah, but they're not totally restored yet,
(21:51):
not not totally yet, but it's it has been decreed
that they will be. Have you felt any change in
your feed in what you're seeing? I mean because as
I do tweet about what Elon Musk does, I do
get a lot of the Mr Musk guys in my replies,
and I have to say, there isn't actually this perfect meme.
Have you seen this meme? It's like from the Simpsons
of somebody jumping Okay, so I think it's a I
(22:12):
think it's a Pooh or somebody's chumping in front of
a pool. Somebody's like trying to shoot him, and the
way it's labeled is it's essentially like weird. It's labeled
weird nerds are jumping in front of Elon Musk to
take a bullet from him. It's like it's like, I
think the person with the gun is like reasonable feet
it's like valid criticism. And then see Elon Musk and
then there's like like weird nerds, you know, defending Elon
(22:35):
Musk or whatever, or we're just we says weird nerds. Yes,
I have seen and and shared the meme. Yeah, I
am not much of a meme sharer generally, but man,
when a Mr. Musky shows up, it's so satisfying to
drop it because it truly like there's nothing they can say.
It's like, no, they really are just there to defend
a billionaire for no. No, It's it's so strange and
like they do have their own by the way, I'm
(22:56):
sure you've seen them. They have made their own versions
of the meme that counter they add some stuff. It's like,
you know, I'm not going to describe it here because
we've already described far too much of an image for
the listener, But yes, they have their own sort of
reverse attack. Simpson's mean but doesn't really land the way
(23:17):
that one does, which is I mean, I think the
thing that is, you know, we talked about this a
little bit before, but this whole idea of this, like
the cult of Elon Musk, Like I find it somewhat inexplicable,
and I think partially the pandemic and everybody being alone
and online a lot kind of like created more of
this energy. Clearly, like the Internet is home to the fanboy.
(23:40):
And I will say, I don't want to like, you know,
miss gender all of the fans or whatever, but there
are they are mostly boys. I mean, let's just be
I want to be clear. Like they present as very well,
they present as presenting is very masculine. That's what ELSE say.
But the Internet is the home of the fan boy.
And like I think, like you know, you listen, you
have a long a long history of covering technology companies,
(24:02):
and so you've seen at intervals this kind of fan
boyish behavior fan behavior. But it does feel like this
is such a you know, I don't know, it's like
it feels so personal to people, and I don't fully
understand the psychology of it, And you know, I wonder
how much that contributes to his actions, Like does it
feel like he's almost in some way doing some of
these things to get the reaction. Yeah. So one way
(24:24):
that I think Elon Musk is just like you and me,
is like it's exciting when a lot of people like
your tweet and retweet it and and like make you
feel like you're a really smart person who's made a
clever observation. It turns out that if you're a billionaire,
like that feels just as good. You know, then if
you're a common person it should It shouldn't though, right,
I mean, I think we can agree that if you
and I were billionaires, we would not be on Twitter,
right I think. I mean I'm actually I disagree. I
(24:45):
think I would be. And here's why. I think, once
you reach a certain level of power in this world,
Twitter is the only way you can feel like a
human again. Like you you It gives you just a
sense of danger, right, the idea that I could ruin
my entire life. You know, people are just thrilled by
the idea that it could get canceled, you know, so
they like flirt with it. I love this concept, Like
it's just like it's like, you know, the only way
(25:06):
I can feel anything is that's that's what it is. Yeah,
I think if you're a billionaire, there are lots of ways. One,
there are lots of ways you can get canceled and
you don't have to go on Twitter. How would you
do it? How would you do it? Well, it's funny
you should ask. I have been thinking a lot about
this lately. Maybe it's just that the negative feedback is
actually what he's looking for, you know, like he must
(25:28):
never hear no from the people around him. So I
was talking with somebody who worked with him a lot,
like after the acquisition, and this person was just saying
that their theory about why he is the way he
is is because of his media consumption diet, which is
mostly Twitter. It's mostly sort of you know, right wingers
on Twitter, and he's just sort of like fallen head
over heels from them. And of course they're telling him like, yes,
you're so right about everything, while they sort of you know,
(25:51):
gas him up. They're also being like, oh, and also
like do these like horrible things, because like it's the
only way to protect free speech and civilization, and he
falls for it. It's weird, though, because that seems dumb.
I mean, he's obviously not the world's smartest man. Okay,
let's just be clear. I don't think but have we
decided who the world's smartest? I don't know like that.
The Binance guy seems pretty, he's he's like, I don't
(26:13):
know if he's great. He seems smart, though, I think yeah, maybe, yeah,
maybe the FTX guy might be the Yeah, he would see. Yeah,
I haven't haven't read much about him lately, but you know,
as of two months ago, he seemed really smart. He
seemed really smart up until about two months ago, um
or a month. It hasn't been that long term. It's
been two fucking weeks there or something. It's like, that's
how what's going on with the timeline? Yeah, we haven't
(26:35):
figured out who the world smartest man is, but I
think we can all agree Elon Musk is not that person.
I'm not saying that he has to agree with like
whatever the alternate opinion is like on the left about
some of these things. And I'm not saying that some
of the things that the right wing thinks about Twitter
that they're completely baseless. There are probably some pockets some
places where they either have made bad decisions or overstepped
(26:58):
or whatever they had employees who were kind of off
doing their own thing, and it was like not well regulated. Sure,
like a well regulated militia. Twitter does not have one
of those. Uh not, Yeah, you must working on it,
Elon muskeet Um, it's fucking dumb bedside see sorry to gross.
It's just such a gross bedside scene. It's really like
(27:20):
there's so many things that could be there. But anyhow,
but yeah, I don't know who these people are that
cheering them on, Like it seems like he might be
able to see through some of like their rhetoric and
be like these guys seem actually seem kind of dumb,
you know. I mean this is a guy who's talking
about and he believes in climate change, right Ellen, Yeah,
I mean that was his whole thing. He's like, let's
save the planet or whatever. You know, does he now
(27:42):
like climate change maybe isn't real? Like is that what's
going on? That's kind of how it feels. I mean,
his views on a lot of things just seemed very malleable,
you know, like I don't think there are a lot
of fixed points there. I like how I'm like Casey explained, Elon,
you know, I've been writing a lot about this and
like that is sort of the number one thing that
I think people want is like explain Elon Musk. And
what I have found over the past month of writing
(28:02):
about him almost every single day is that there is
not a sort of logical through line that I can
draw for you that explains the guy. He's a whim
based person. He's a w BP baby. That's something you
can order. Okay, So what's the future here? What? First off?
(28:30):
Should Twitter die? Is? That is because you end every
interview I say, I don't always do that. I actually
have never said that, and so, but thank you for
pointing it out. I think it'd be a fun little segment.
Note to Adam and Lyra, we want to leave that
moment in that's very authentic and real. Um No, what
is the now? You've got me very self conscious about
(28:51):
using the phrase with what in future in it? Yeah,
but like what is the future hold here? It should
Twitter die? First off? Let me ask you that, and
you're opinion, I think it's still a little bit too
early for me to say, like I think Twitter should die. Also,
I'm very self interested in the continuation of Twitter, Like
you know, it's been an incredible story for my business.
(29:12):
And too. I use it to talk about a lot
of things. I learned a lot of things. I still
had a lot of value from Twitter. So you know,
I don't necessarily want it to die. I certainly don't
want it to die before there is a good replacement
for it. I don't think there is a good replacement
for it yet. Yeah, there's a lot of people competing
for that. Do you like any of them? So I
looked at High and it was absolutely terrible. It's empty,
I mean empty, but also just random porn stuff that
(29:34):
was like not even good, not even just you know,
like if they had been really high quality porn that
I wanted to see, how might be. Like I'm sticking
around here, I'd love to see a resurgence of Tumbler.
I think Tumbler is such an expressive and fun I mean,
it's not perfect. All of them are bad in some way,
but um, do I like any of them? I mean
I like mastered On a lot. As I mentioned before,
I think the problem with masted On is it has
(29:56):
a lot of the qualities of Twitter. The onboarding is
terrible and confusing, and when somebody simplifies that to a
place where it's as simple as sign up for a
Twitter account and you get to see all the things
you want to see. I think there's that's the closest
I've seen to something that is both feels like Twitter
but also feels different than Twitter in a way, like
(30:17):
feels like it's doing something or trying something new. It's
gonna be a while before everybody can adopt it because
there's no good you know, there's no good on ramp
to it if we can use our on ramp metaphor.
I look, I wrote about Masses on Twice seventeen. When
it first came out. It was like having a moment
and I wrote a piece and interview the guy and
seems like an interesting guy and he's kind of kept
going all these years, just sort of like this, ain't it? Man?
(30:38):
Like you just like pull it open. It just it
doesn't feel alive the way that the Twitter feels. I
guess you could get there, but it's just not I'm
not gonna be a defender. I don't want to be
a massive on defender. I haven't heard people say this,
and I think there's a debate going on and I
think there's some big issues with it. I mean, one
is like that it's a small group of people. It's
a very specific for people. It's a pretty white group
of people. That's one thing that's that's for sure. It's
a very eurocentric group of people in a lot of ways.
(30:59):
What it is It's like, it's like if all the
people who said that they were going to move to
Canada when Trump became president started a social network, Like
that's what Mason is. That is definitely a vibe. Though
I think it's changing daily. I feel like I can
see a progression again, I don't. I'm not like Mr Mastedon.
I will say that of all of the things I
messed around, I haven't tried post yet because I've signed
up for the waitlist and I have I've heard nothing
(31:19):
but bad things about it. Does not seem great to me.
I also think, like, what is interesting about massed On
and why it's worth exploring as a potential successor is
this top down approach. I think right now we're experiencing
the most problematic version of the top down sort of
social network ownership. And I think all of our social
(31:41):
network issues are like very much linked to the fact that,
like the control for the user is removed and it's
just kind of the whims of Mark Zuckerberg wants to
change your feed tomorrow, He's just gonna do that, or
if Elon must decides like the Nazis are back and
there's nothing you can do about it except just ride
the fucking wave. And I think that, like there's something
to be said for a version of this. I think
(32:01):
the decentralizing. I hate to say it, okay, I do.
I hate to use decentralized in this way, but this
idea of a decentralized social network where all of these
different places can talk but they're not all controlled in
the same way. He's really interesting. I don't see anybody
else trying, like what's the next thing? Like are you
a TikTok user? Yeah, but I don't. I don't post,
you know, just sort of like check out the vital
(32:22):
dances because you're a grown up, you're not posting. Come on.
My specific criticism of TikTok is it so much of
it is amateur comedians taking seventeen cracks at the same joke,
you know what I mean, Where it's like you got
the selfie cam and they have the little premise and
they're like, here's like every um coffee in San Francisco
or whatever, and then it's just that for like four
and a half minutes. Is it the thing where it's
(32:43):
back and forth and they're like one of them is
like like one person is the coffee and then it's
the it's the same person, but it's a person like
drinking the coffee or whatever. I love the actions hilarious.
But you're also an improv guy. I mean we should
say you're a big You're big improv dude. Your second
job is your profashional improv person. The second job is
to make people laugh. Jo. You love to live, laugh
(33:05):
and and love. Really, the only trinity of life is
what I'm doing. I'm living laughing. You do you do
do improv? I do do improv. That's like sort of
my creative outlets. So you're seeing a lot of bad
comedians on there because the algorithm is leading you to
these comedians. Like the truth is, that's like once TikTok
figured out I was gay, it started showing me a
(33:25):
lot of like Broadway and like theater kid content, and
like I do actually enjoy it, but I don't enjoy
it to the like degree that TikTok shows it to me.
I'm like, there has to be something that is not
like high school musical that I can watch right now.
But TikTok's algorithm is sort of like, you spent two
seconds extra on this one video, and now we think
this is it for you. It's like you know, which
(33:47):
like sometimes it very much is. And I think taketok
like somebody changing the channels for you. If you're just
sitting there watching TV and you don't know what's gonna
come up and act, and it's sort of like, I
guess I'll keep waiting, maybe something really good it's gonna
show up. It's a slot machine, man, Like. I think
that's why it's so powerful, is just the idea that
maybe a good video will will happen next. But TikTok
can't replace what Twitter does. Facebook is not going to
(34:07):
come back, right, No young people are gonna be joining
Facebook anytime soon. I don't think so. I don't know
what the demo of Twitter is. I don't know if
it's that young, to be honest, I mean I feel
like it's all right. I mean like that's why the
media is obsessed with this story, is like this is
the only social network that any of us were actually
good at right Well, I think actually a big part
of the story is the the perceived importance of Twitter
versus the actual importance of Twitter. And I actually had
(34:29):
Gia Tolentino on the show and we talked about this,
which is, like, it feels real important to us, and
there's like two million people or something on it, which
is not a lot of people by comparison to other
social networks. But there are a lot of people who
are in media who decide on, like what the headline
is for tomorrow's paper, who are like writing stories that
are going to inform this larger sort of piece of culture.
(34:51):
And for some reason, we all think and Elon Must
seems to agree, and I think he's kind of wrong
that like it is as important as everybody thinks it is.
You know, talks about you know, it's gonna save humanity
and civilization and all that. Like I don't I don't
see that as being an outcome for Twitter. Like it
it's as a sort of media politics sports app with
maybe a little bit of entertainment thrown in. And I
(35:12):
think you could build a hugely valuable business around that,
but you gotta make some different decisions your Instagram is
one of my bright spots in my day because it
can I can I tell you that that you post
Casey if you don't follow him on Instagram, I don't
even know if your ship is public, but like everybody
should follow him. It is every day, And I don't
know where you find the time to this, To be
honest with you, like, maybe you do it quickly. You
follow the right accounts. Every day. He'll put funny tweets
(35:35):
that he finds on his Instagram, which to me is
like how I would like to experience Twitter, to be honest,
like a highly curated experience of the best stuff on there,
and I like will regularly at the end of my day,
I sit down. I have this lounge chair, I sit in.
I'll have a drink, maybe a little cigaretta, which I
like to smoke. I'll setting the scene here, the lights
are down low, maybe there's a fire roaring in the fireplace,
(35:57):
and I'll just I'll whip open Install Graham and just
open up Casey Newton's fucking feed his stories and just
ride just joyous waves of Twitter comedy. I just say, Josh,
I put stuff that's like extra gay and sexually explicit
on my close Friends story, I could add I want
to see everything. I want to see all of it.
(36:17):
And as you know, I'm an ally, so I'm ready
for whatever. As you know, an ally what all of
the allies are saying all over the place, It's like, no,
it's so good and and and like all the time,
I'm sitting there just giggling, and Laura's like, what are
you doing, I'm like, Okay, Sy's feed is so good.
Well nice to me to say. Okay, So two things.
So one all that, so I have an alt account.
(36:39):
I followed some like funny people, some gay people, like
the Outgruth just serves me that stuff. So it's really
mostly just Twitter algorithm that is sharing that stuff for me. Um.
But to that is the other thing I love about Twitter.
Twitter was the only funny social network. You think I
ever laughed looking at Instagram? No, like, but it's like,
you know, and I guess TikTok every once in a while,
but it's like, you know, I'm not. I'm not laughing
looking at most stuff. You never laughed reading Facebook. So
(37:00):
that that's what I love about you know. I mean,
TikTok has a little bit of comedy and some of
the some of the comedians aren't bad. Some of the
stuff is quite inventive. But I tweeted about this like
a few weeks ago, and I'm like, the thing I
think if Twitter does implode, ultimately the thing the number
one thing I will miss the most. It's not breaking
news or people arguing or can you believe what Trump tweeted?
It is like there is a type of written comedy
(37:21):
that grew out of Twitter that could only exist on Twitter,
that only functions on Twitter. Really, I guess it kind
of functions if you throw out your Instagram feed, But
it only functions because I know the language of Twitter,
and that's what makes these things funny. I will say
not to not to go back to Mastodon, but I
have seen and experienced things like that I Mastodon, which
has given me a tiny glimmer of hope that it
(37:42):
could exist elsewhere. You've laughed at a mastodonto, so I think, yes,
first off, let's get they got to change that terminology,
but I think they Unfortunately the app that I have
been using predominantly to and interface with Mastheton is called two.
So it's a real problem for me personally. Are you
(38:02):
okay there's are a breaking news story going on right now.
I saw you looking to the side. Oh no, Brooke
Hammerling is complaining because it's okay, So whatever the story is. Basically,
when we started our podcast, they gave us Harra Swisher's
old feed and it became a thing. What was the feed?
It was was say feed podcast, but the Times gave
(38:23):
us the Hardwork feed. And so now some people are
seeing hard Fork in their Spotify wraps even though they
were really sway listeners, and they're having emotions about it
and so anyway, so that that was what I was
looking at. And Brooke Camerling is yelling at you on Twitter.
Yeah yeah, she said, no offense to the guys who
hosts at and White Times. That's me at me next time.
But she goes out of her way to say she
hasn't listened to Hard Work, So um, that's where she's at.
(38:45):
I mean, I get it's it's two guys. Two guys
guys are over. It was guys are extremely We're done
with you. We don't need any of us anymore. She says,
the two guys on a podcast right now, turn us off.
Are you still listening to the off? They can't help themselves.
But it's for you know, it's for the like of
private by guys. I mean honest, So there might be
(39:05):
at some guys listening. Um, you know, you know he
had a strong woman reporter, the best in her space,
one of the best all time, legend, she'd a great
fucking podcast, And these two white guys come steamrolling into
the feed exact classic, honestly classic guy behavior. How many
timeff In a way, it's like a kind of a
very long you interrupting her when you think about like
(39:28):
a very big, like technically difficult interruption for ultimate. Really
it really is. You're like, here's how a podcast should
actually sing kara. But yeah, I get I understand her argument. Um,
but I do love that podcast that hard Fork. Wait
wait bit, you're you're doing this podcast for a company?
(39:48):
Oh I would? I was like, can I get Ben
Shapiro's feet? Can we slide me in there instead of
Ben Shapiro? I think that would. I think the fans
is what that's what they're looking for to another one
from one Jewish guy another They won't even notice. Yeah. No,
I would love to be split into somebody's feed. My
dream in life is for somebode like we have this
dormant feed. It's got like a hundred thousand subscribers. Do
you mind if we just put your podcast on it?
(40:10):
Like they somebody should sell those that should be a business.
Should be a business. They should be they should be
dealing those out, you know, like a like a drug
dealer for the highest bidder. Why isn't go Daddy invest
in your service that sells podcast feed? This is I'm
just a free fucking idea, honestly, and that's why so
poor to listen to pockets. You never know when you're
gonna hear a billion dollar idea on this podcast. Thank you?
(40:31):
All right, so listen, we're probably running. I mean, we've
gone through a lot here today, but we should probably
do a little plug time for you, which I feel
like it is what was what people want. And we
we have touched on hard fork, which is the name.
I have a lot of questions, but I know I
understand what it is. My impression is that if you
were a stranger coming to the name hard Fork, you'd
have a lot of confusion. Tell us about in a
(40:52):
hard fork. Your your listeners are very sophisticated. They probably
already know what a hard fork is, you know, a
hard fork does not want to explain it. You're like,
I actually don't know, Like actually I was hoping you
knew what it was, because no, here's the deal. We uh,
when we pitched the show, it was you know, last fall,
and we were like, well, obviously crypto is here to stay.
(41:12):
And so it's like a good kind of crypto term.
And in crypto, a hard work is where something has
gone disastrously wrong and they sort of have to rewind
the blockchain back and start over. Right. Yeah, it's also
a coding thing. I mean, I think most of your
listeners have probably forked code at least fifty times. Okay,
we're forking and forking over here, playing on forking several
(41:32):
lines of code after this before you fork your code. Yeah,
so that's that's what it is. And uh, you know,
we're we're six episodes in. We're having a good here's
the Here's what I'm gonnae peop about the show because
it's very low concept. It is two people talking, but
it is just like this, it's kind of like the
other other. It's like that we don't interrupt each other
as much as you do on this show. You know,
(41:54):
it's a little more chill. But what I will say
is there's a lot of like tech podcasts out there,
and we are truly trying to have a good time.
We're not here to doom and gloomy about the end
of the world. We're gonna try to make you laugh
while you're listening to the show. And it turns out
if you just do that, you're separating yourself from the
vast majority of all tech podcast I hear you, actually
and I and I love that for you and for
(42:15):
Kevin Ruce, your co host. Heaven is wonderful listen. I've
listened to many, to several at least one episodes. I've
enjoyed all of them. And well, you know what's the
funny thing is it just appeared in my I was
I had subscribed this way, it just showed up. I
like that you got that. I like that you made
that point about me interrupting it is a problem that
I have. Well, that's like I like coming on the show. Also,
(42:36):
by the way, you know I used to work for you.
I know you a great exeative gratitude. You hired me
at the Verge and it really set me up for
an amazing things, So of course I would talk to
you about anything. But when I when I first joined,
I was so intimidated by you because you held my
my very fate in your hands. And so I'm excited
to come on your show and like, actually, I feel
like I can interrupt you back and not be the
end of my life. So for yes, you know, I
(42:56):
was raised now I'm I'm I'm a atheist basically, but
I was raised in the Jewish ow And as you know,
our love language is interruption. Um to me, it's anti semitic.
If you're like mad about interruptions that, let's say that.
And we we have to stand by our Jewish friends
during this moment. We really do. It's not just. It's
not just when it's really big stuff. Sometimes it really
small stuff, Like if you don't like me interrupting you,
(43:17):
that's you're saying my culture is not valid. Uh, And
so I think it's important to just put that out there.
But I did hire you at the Verge, but only
because you're a brilliant genius who's amazing at what you do,
and to not hire you would have been so obviously
a mistake. I think I've read one good story when
you hired me at the Verge. You you you you took
a risk. It was do you remember the story? Yes,
(43:38):
so the story that I broke about Twitter. It was
about Twitter. It was literally out. It was they had
bought this music company and we're making a standalone music app.
And it was like, they do that, and they did
that and it didn't go great for them, and they
shut it down called Twitter Music. Oh oh, Twitter Music.
I would subscribe to the Twitter music like account for
(44:00):
a while and they would post like music. Yes, right,
they put they posted music. Yeah, maybe maybe you want
to bring that back. I mean, I gotta try something,
okay real quick before we go. You're protected, of course
by your your various jobs that you do in the
world of journalism odd jobs. Yeah, I mean you are,
technically speaking still you were still a member of the
Verge staff craft. I'm a contributing editor there, you know.
(44:21):
And you also have platform Er. Yes, so my main
job as I read a newsletter called Platformer, which you
can find a platformer dot news. Um. But yeah, is
it a substack. That's a substack. It is on the
sub stack platform. Yeah. Yeah. How are you feeling about
that relationship? You feeling good? About Substack. I mean, I
think I think it's fine. I think when you look
at what the other platforms take from their creators in
terms of just raw cash, like sub stack actually is
(44:43):
the most generous. You keep ninety percent of it, you
know before you're a little stripe fees. So I feel
okay about it. But you know, nothing is forever is
sort of how okay? You heard it here first, casey
and taking platform or off sub Stack shocking stuff. You
heard it here first. The ephemerality of all fairs. It's true, though,
every time I think about joining anything, I'm kind of
like could end up like Twitter. You know you never could.
(45:04):
I could go sideways. I was gonna say, you're protected
by your many many jobs in journalism. One do you
worry about your blue check mark going away? I plan
to keep it. The thing for me, like the r
O I on my use of Twitter is insane. It's like,
you can't I can't compare myself to any other Twitter
user because I tweet about the ongoing destruction of Twitter,
and every day people pay me to read more about it.
(45:24):
So it's like I will pay eight dollars for a checkmark.
I'll pay you. You will pay eight dollars to check,
because the last thing I wanted somebody impersonating me. Josh.
Imagine an impersonating Casey Newton. Come on it, I mean,
isn't that isn't, But won't I still be able to
impersonate you as long as I put like quotes around
my name, you impersonate me. I will come for you, Josh.
I would love for you. I should maybe I should
do that. I shouldn't start in casing an impersonation account.
(45:47):
I don't know. Listen, Casey, this has been so fun,
so wonderful. I don't know if we got anywhere, learned anything,
but I do feel like we had I hope not. Yeah,
I hope we had a blast while doing it. When
does Hardfork come out? Hard Fork comes out every Friday morning.
You know, it's here's what I say about my job.
It's I write newsletters that are like very serious emails
you get during the week, and then on Friday you
get to have a drink with your friend Kevin and
(46:08):
Casey with hard work. So you know you can chase
this with hard Fork. I recommend subscribing right after you
get done listening to this episode, even during if you
can multitask and then you're you're doing your newsletter. How
often are you doing that? We do it. It's a Monday, Tuesday,
and Thursdays. Okay? And do you have any bombshells coming
on Twitter anytime soon? Look look through the last month
(46:29):
of stuff, like with Joey Scheper. We have broken more
news in the past month that platform has like probably ever.
So yeah, there are more more scoops are coming. I
love it. I love it, and I love you Casey.
You're the best. You're the best of what you do
and you're a wonderful human. And thank you for joining
us on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Josh is great.
(46:51):
There you have it. What more can be said on
the topic of Twitter, I mean probably more, and we
probably will say more, but I think I feel like
we have exhausted all possible angles and I and I
feel better for it, honest I feel cleansed in a way.
So that is our show for this week. We'll be
back next week with more what future And as always,
I wish you and your family the very best.
Host
Joshua Topolsky
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