Casey Newton, Kara & Nayeema Talk Tech 53:12

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Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Million Dollar Listing San Francisco with a lot fewer houses. Just kidding. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza. It's more like $44 billion listing these days. Yes, that is the price Elon Musk paid for Twitter and overpaid for it. But imagine how many houses you could have bought in San Francisco. Maybe two, something like that. Yeah.

Anyway, we're ending the year with, of course, more Twitter drama. Will he, won't he quit being CEO? Will he or won't he, Cara? Probably not. Who knows? We talk about that for our episode today, which we taped on Tuesday this week. I got to interview yourself and Casey Newton, the tech reporter who runs the platformer Substack.

Yeah, we did it at Manny's in San Francisco where I've done a lot of events over the years interviewing tons of people. It's a really great bookstore and community space focusing on really civic stuff. I love it there. And Naima was moderating. Yes, I was. The event title was What the Hell is Going On in Tech? Yeah. Which was, you know, a big topic to take on. And yet you guys did a great job. We talked about it all from Sam Bankman Freed, Scammery, or I should say Alleged, right? Alleged Scammery? Okay, sure. Yeah.

to big tech layoffs and open AI that will soon replace us. But of course, we started with Elon, your favorite subject, Cara. Yeah, Elon. I think we probably talked too much about him, but you know, it's an interesting topic. Anyway, let's dive in. Thank you everyone for being here. And thanks to Manny for having us in this beautiful space, this great community. Let's start off with Twitter. Okay. It's been almost two months since Elon Musk walked in with his sync.

So I guess my first question for you is, has it sunk in yet? And what is the most surprising thing that he has done? I think it is sunk in and it has actually become a sinkhole. And now the company is now sort of in the center of the earth. Yeah. It is sunk all the way in. Yes. Yeah. Sunk in. Deep in. And what's the most surprising thing?

- Why don't you start, Casey? - Oh, I mean, you know, I assume you are following this story. It's probably not worth me rehearsing the latest developments, you know, the journalists getting banned, posting a poll saying I'm gonna step down, the people of Twitter sensibly saying yes, absolutely step down.

Him having nothing to say about that, but responding to random tweets from congressmen about defense bills. So we're fully all over the map. And look, this is extremely erratic behavior. Anybody who's telling you that they can draw a straight line through all of these dots is lying to you. But I will admit, I'm curious to see what happens next. So I'm just looking something up, but I don't know the exact price, but I'm going to look it up for you because I think the entire story of Twitter right now is the stock price of Tesla.

And it is today... I think it's 137. 137.80. It was 150 across the 150 line. When it goes down another $10, activists will be attacking this company. And that's where the story really is, the real story of what's happening. The stock price...

for context, was $400 almost at the beginning of this year. Yeah, so I think you have to watch that. And he sold a lot of the stock after he said he wasn't. And so paying attention to Tesla, right now he's arguing with Tesla investors who literally would lick him up and down any day of the week and twice on Sunday. He's insulting them too now. And that's a real... These people would stand up on anything. So I would watch Tesla and what's happening there. I think the most surprising thing is if you had to pick one of the people who could...

fix this thing, Elon would have been one of them in terms of support of Silicon Valley, money, know-how, love of the product, et cetera, et cetera. The fact that he has...

essentially lost his mind from a business point of view and a personal point of view is the most surprising thing because he really could have been capable of fixing what is a very bad business. The missing ingredient was humility, right? I think if you wander into any business that you have never been in before and you have 7,000 people who've been doing it for 17 years and you say to them, I'm smarter than every single one of you and we're just going to start the company over from scratch.

there's no way that goes well for you, right? And so to me, that is the biggest surprise, is that he was not humble for one moment at any point in the last six weeks. Have you experienced him as humble previously, prior to this? No. So it's not surprising, right? No, no, not like this, though, because I did a really good interview with Yoel Roth, who is hiding somewhere, I guess somewhere probably nice. And he was saying humility was what was missing, and he's the one that stayed there.

It is absolute chaos right now on Twitter. I mean, there's like yellow checks and gray squares. I don't even know. There's so much going on right now. By the way, they have like fewer than five designers at the company now and not all of them actually like design things anymore. So I mean, like there's a non-zero chance that like, you know, David Sachs is in Photoshop drawing up logos.

That explains so much about the clip art that's happening right now on Twitter. But he's done so much. He started off with layoffs. He pissed off advertisers. He dismantled this content moderation. This whole idea of verified. But is there anything that Elon has done that is a good idea? A number of things. What do you think? They needed to cut staff. They absolutely needed to cut costs. I think he was...

directionally correct is like make a point of view. There was a lot of points of view at Twitter. So having a more singular editorial point of view is a, is a strong idea. And focusing in on subscriptions was something we always talked for years. We talked about and folk, but yeah,

the way he's doing it, it doesn't make any sense and isn't a very good value proposition. So there's a lot of, you know, the idea of a super app, interesting, probably can't do it. They're all good ideas. What do you think? I'm starting to take the opposite side of it though, because like at the end of the day, it,

I will admit that, yes, had he implemented any of those successfully, maybe it could have been a good idea. But at the end of the day, this is a company that made $5 billion last year and was not in crisis. And he came in and he started a crisis. That's right. And at the end of the year, we're now in this situation where one of the things that may...

this is going to sound a bit self-aggrandizing for a journalist to say, but I will argue that. Um, one of the reasons that Twitter is an important company is that it is because it is like a, a, a real time virtual water cooler for the entire Western press corps. Right. And it sets the daily global news agenda. Yeah. And, um, it's, we're now in a situation where the reporters have realized like we're not safe here. Right. Our accounts can be banned at any time for any reason. This is not going to be how we're distributing the news. Uh,

certainly in five years, but maybe not in January, right? And so you're starting to see all of that leech out of the platform. Mastodon, a website that is almost impossible to use, is humming. It is humming. And it is the journalists who are making it hum, right? And so that's why it's just hard for me to be like, well, you know, Elon had a couple ideas. It doesn't work out. It was like, no, he took a, he had a clear flight path to $5 billion and he fucked it up.

Right. But I think it's because fundamentally the people he also brought with him, he always been wary of journalists, but the people who brought with him hate. They have a, there's an ethos among the Marc Andreessen's and the, and the David Sachs. There's a whole bunch of them that literally just think journalism journalists suck. And because we're not sucking up to them at all times, they, they hate it. That's really, it's weird. And you started, you started to see it on clubhouse, like, which, which I never went on. Cause I'm like, why do I need to be yelled at by these idiot venture capitalists? Like, and they're always like, come on. I'm like, no, fuck.

you? Why would I come to your idiotic party where you tell me I'm like terrible? And so I think they have a fundamental, they think they can do it better and they talk about it a lot. And the persistent victimization that the richest and most powerful people on the planet display there. And again, it's not, it's Elon's fault, but he's in that environment. He's in that stew of mentality about the press that's really,

Not necessarily unfair, but he doesn't understand the relationship. He thinks you're friends. But he's been in that for a long time, right? Yes, he and I have. We had one year-long beef over the stupidest thing I've ever experienced. Because somewhere there's a room of 150 people and some tech titans standing here saying how journalists are too powerful.

But we're not. But that's their theory, right? Their theory is they're trying to do, you saw Marc Andreessen try to do Future. Yes. You know, and I kept going, media is hard. You know, he always says software is hard. I'm like, media is harder. And then it was terrible. It just was, they're terrible at media. They're terrible at media. Yeah. It,

I've been thinking about this lately. Andreessen Horowitz is a firm that hates the media and is constantly investing in media companies. And the media companies are not succeeding. And I think those two things are related. Yes, I do too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Banning journalists from Twitter. Banning journalists that were covering the Elon Jett story. That seemed like a low point between Silicon Valley and journalism. Well, and here's why. Here's why, right? Go ahead.

Elon Musk, in the lead-up to him taking over Twitter, is outraged about some of the censorship that has gone on in this platform. And recently, he's given away a lot of internal communications from the pre-Elon era that talk about how there was a shadowy cabal that was making content moderation decisions.

And this shadowy cabal, if you can believe this, and I'm glad most of you are sitting down, consisted of the CEO and the head of legal and the head of trust and safety. And they would all get in a room and they would make content moderation decisions. And there were reporters who were tweeting this out. And these are 150,000 retweets. Can you believe this? Can you believe what was going on? I'm somebody who looks at that and thinks that's how it's done at literally every company. What's the big scandal? Yes, yes, yes.

And then after all of that, in the aftermath of him being so outraged about the shadowy cabal making these, you know, decisions that are totally arbitrary and totally unfair. He's like, these people are tweeting out public information about my jet and they're trying to join Mastodon on Instagram and I don't want to see him anymore. Get rid of him. Like you could not write it funnier. It was absurd. It was. I,

I had a, like, look, he did pay over pay for it. So if he wants to kick journalists off, it's not the end of democracy. It's just not, it's just not. And he's going to do what he feels like doing. And he does point out his case. He said that this is one of the things that I was struck by those Twitter files, which who knows if they're complete, by the way, the whole thing was done. The secret cabal was funny. It's a secret group of people, the management. It's a public company. Like,

They do it with my stuff all the time. Here's Yoel Roth saying to Kara Swisher that he was going to, he was worried about the previous Hillary thing and because he was primed to do it by the FBI. And I literally was like, you fucking idiot who's doing this, whoever it was, it was Michael Schellenbacher, whatever that guy was.

I was like, that's not what was said. Like they don't, they can't even Google it and watch it. Like kind of complaining that there's like a secret cabal at like the Starbucks. It's like setting the workers schedule. They're deciding what shape the coffee should be. I don't care if the journalists get, he put them right back on. It's his right to do it. That's the thing. Like if he had just come out and said like, I'm, I'm banning Taylor Lorenz cause I don't like her. I would have more respect for that. Would you like to have access to it? Cause it's going to obviously. I would like good journalists to have access cause it's a great story of what I,

what I walked away from it is boy, they tried really hard to do an impossible job, which Casey's written about a lot. I've written about a lot. And it was interesting to see the inner workings. It wasn't that interesting, but it was actually in the hands of very good journalists. You would have gotten a wonderful, interesting, complex, difficult story. And that would have been cool. I would have liked to see that. I would have liked to see that. And what do you think he's trying to do? I mean, obviously this is feeding into conspiracy theories. It didn't work. It didn't work. I mean,

But I think, like, look, this is a political project for him. He is a reactionary conservative, right? Like, the takeover of Twitter is a reactionary takeover. And the whole point is to punish the people who used to run it. And so, like, this will actually probably be the most value that Elon gets out of his purchase is just the entertainment that he briefly felt watching people retweet him talking about the Twitter files. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has moved to a very conservative... I think the problem is he's got no impulse control and it's made of it that it's going to...

He's he's ruining the rest of his businesses where everyone thought he was brilliant and it doesn't take away the fact that he's brilliant It's that he's out of control. He's not as smart as you think he is. And so that's I think the damage so recently he's put himself The polls were open and he asked if he should step down a CEO 17 million people voted I believe Okay, so like a quarter of the room voted did you write yeah, of course and

He blocked me, but then I somehow got, didn't block, it doesn't work very well anymore, Twitter. So,

So 57.5% of respondents said step down. I'm sure nobody in this room said that. Yeah. I wanted to say no because I'm like, let's keep this going, sir. Let's go on. You're really enjoying watching this high-speed train wreck. I am enjoying it. No. It's sad, too. No, it's not. It's great. It's great. He's followed up, by the way, an hour ago saying he will resign as CEO as soon as he finds... He says, I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job. Oh.

And after that, I will just run the software and servers team, which is the business. He will not be running the Twitter hardware team. It's a promotion masked as a demotion. So I guess three questions. Will he step down? Who will he pick?

And who should he pick? Okay. No. I think he will not. In real terms, no, he will not. He's paid too much for this muffler. You know what I mean? He's not leaving this thing. And, you know, I don't know if I would if I put that much money at stake, right? I think he may try to do something where he buys the loans so that he fully owns it. He pays half for the loans when it...

The banks are about to put them out on the market. And so either he's going to buy them or Apollo's going to buy them. You have to buy a lot more Tesla stock. I know, but if Apollo buys... He can get money from the Saudis. He can get money. I think if Apollo buys it, he's in a world of trouble because they're another not nice group of mostly men who are going to be...

beat him senseless. And they don't care that he's Elon Musk. They don't care at all. They don't care to have dinner with him or hang out with him or whatever or go to Mars with him or anything. So I think that's one of the things. So no, I don't think he's going to give up power. That means he can't get anyone he should get for that business. I mean, I named a couple. Brett Taylor I thought would be good.

uh, he was the chairman of Twitter. He'd handled that beautiful boy. Did he do well for the shareholders of Twitter? Um, public shareholders of Twitter. I mean, Twitter is almost dead. Yeah. The shareholders made out. Okay. They faint out. Great. 5420 is a great price for a company worth $10. So a share. Um, so, uh, the other person I said was Stuart Butterfield would be interesting. He ran Slack. He understands it. Um,

I don't know if he wants to work. And Susan Wojcicki. And Susan Wojcicki, who has looked around at other jobs before. She's certainly capable. These are people that would do, understand advertisers, understand large systems. That's who I would. None of, not one of those people would put up with any shit from Elon. Would they take the job? Do you think Susan would take the job? Well, no, because you have to talk to him. Like, no. No. He'll be running. He'll be reporting to you as your head of software. There's no way. Yeah. There's no way.

There's no way any of those very highly qualified people would take that job. No way. So it will be his minions. It'll be David Sachs and Jason Calacanis. Casey? Yeah. Okay. So I think that he will step down as CEO, and I think he's going to name some white male Tesla engineer who was canceled for a blog post in 2008.

As like the new CEO. And he's going to be like, this is the only person who doesn't have the woke mind virus and like can be threatened. No one is ever going to have heard of this person. And, um, and, but then while that's all happening, like Elon will continue to just sort of metal behind the scenes and, you know, demand that the check marks turn pink and you know, all of that. Oh, I can't wait for that day. Yeah. He's not going anywhere. He should pick you like the three that Kara mentioned or.

You can't say yourself, Casey. I don't know that I would do great at that. Mm-hmm.

He needs to sell this company. He cannot be involved in this company. It needs to be a new group of investors. And I think there are a lot of people who worked at the old Twitter who would do a perfectly good job with this company. And I think that if it were on its own, you probably could attract someone of the caliber of a Stewart or a Brett Taylor to do something. And that's what I hope is that he just gets out of this company. Or sells it to someone for less or the banks will come in. One of those things will happen. You could see...

Oddly enough, I was thinking the other day of Microsoft picking it up. If they don't get the Activision deal, it might be an interesting purchase for them at the right price. Because they have LinkedIn, they've got some other things. And he's sort of...

detoxified it in a weird way by making such a mess of it. Like it's so toxic it's reached bottom value. Right, exactly. Yeah, it would be a good buy. It's a great buy. I mean, yes, but like my favorite like, and it might never happen, but like it just could literally any day is like Apple could just like look up porn terms on Twitter and realize that it violates every single one of their terms of service. Yes, yes.

So, you know, we could say it's less toxic, but it's like, well, it depends on what you're looking for. You know, Apple could kill it in a second if he wanted to. Right after he had tweeted that poll, some, you know, someone had suggested that only Twitter blue users should be voting and the direct democracy that has become Twitter. Only the landed gentry can participate in this democracy. It's very confusing. $8 landed gentry. The Lords and the plebs are everyone's switching places. But Elon responded, Twitter will make that change, suggesting that over time, this weird

voting, you know, election 2022. Exactly. But is it becoming more closed? I guess. Is he, is he pushing towards a more closed version of Twitter? There's like a viral tweet yesterday, the day before somebody was like, you know, being on Twitter right now is like when I like a kid in elementary school is like losing the game. So they just keep changing all the rules. It's like that, that is what Twitter is. Yeah. I have been that elementary school. Yeah. I think it's a, he, he can't hold on. He cannot be controlling it much longer. He will end up owning Twitter.

a toxic version of my space at some point. That sounds so terrible. Yeah. Um, I love it. Wait, did you, my space, Tom responded to him. Did anybody see this? Uh, what was the, I just remember seeing it. Oh, it was great. Sorry. Yeah. Facebook actually, we can go into Facebook cause they did a good job responding to the, you can't, they did. But first I want to ask you, so year ago, Elon Musk is time 2021 person of the year. He's on the cover. Um, you know, he's,

stepped up to into Carrie you've talked about this like this kind of imperfect Steve Jobs vacuum that was left of the visionary yeah I wish Steve Jobs had made a vacuum by the way that thing would have been great

That's so sad. It would have been the best vacuum ever. See you, Dyson. But he's facing real problems at Tesla. Is he now the anti-hero and is there any coming back for him? Oh, always. Yeah. I don't know. I sort of veer between is he Howard Hughes? You know, and I think Howard Hughes made great strides in aviation and ended up in a hotel room with long fingernails and Kleenex tissues naked. Like you could...

You could see that. You could see it. No, but a lot of our great inventors end up in a mental place of mental instability. And so I think that's a little bit as you're seeing it there. And again...

You know, interesting, the person who has the best seat is Walter Isaacson, who's been with him the whole time. He wrote many biographies, but the Steve Jobs ones, and he's been with him for the past year. So that should be something. But it'll be interesting to see what Walter does. Yeah. Will he write a nice book? I'm guessing not. I'm guessing not. Ultimately, Elon turns on all journalists. And so I think that that should be interesting. And just the little I've spoken to about it,

There's focus on his early life. His father is particularly terrible. A lot of people have bad parents, but this guy is really quite a piece of work. I think he was quite bullied as a kid. There's going to be a lot about his origins, which, again, it doesn't excuse his misogyny and rudeness and everything else, but it certainly should be interesting to see how that happened.

He was booed out of Chappelle, but is anyone still rooting for him? Oh, well, okay. Well, so this is a great question because it lets me tell the story of Paul Graham. Do we all know Paul Graham? Okay, so Paul Graham was a founded Y Combinator, this very famous Silicon Valley incubator, and was one of the sort of Elon cheerleaders. And when Elon first took over, he was tweeting things like, wow, a lot of you think you could run a company better than Elon Musk, and y'all are about to find out, neater, neater, neater, right?

So there are all these people like Paul Graham who watched over the past 10 years as tech workers gained all this power because they were in demand, because they were creating massive value. They used that value to ask for more things like more diverse workplaces and being properly compensated. And it is driving the manager's crazy.

crazy it's driving them crazy because they think we're paying you so much and yet you're still unhappy and so they saw Elon coming in is we're going to be able to claw all of that back right and so when Elon wiped out 75% of the workforce oh they've never been happier than watching that happen right but what happened to Paul Graham his ass got banned for tweeting a mastodon link

there could be no funnier outcome than Paul so you have the Y Combinator mafia like all on Twitter like a gog because Elon you know one of their gods has now turned against him and then that's where he turned it back which is interesting that was that was they let me just tell you Reed Hastings did it you know I had a back and forth with Mark Benioff about it I sent him all the really the anti-gay stuff around Paul Pelosi I was like really and he's like oh and I'm like really and um

I think they do still go, don't bet against him, Kara. And I'm like, I'm not betting. I'm not in your stupid fucking game. And what I get to is what I say to a lot of them when they do this, and I write all of them after they do something like that without the context of the other stuff going on. I write it to all of them. I write and I text them and I go, you're so poor, all you have is money. And so how dare you do this?

How dare you continue to do this? But they love it. They do. They do. They're like, oh, stick in the journalist's cross. Stick it in the employees. We're the geniuses and we're not being treated with the great love we deserve. And so it's sort of this wealthy, and it is mostly white guys, grievance. It's grievance at the world that is undeserved and they just are unworthy.

I mean, it's personified by Paul. And, you know, when he got suspended, I'm like, yay, good. And it's just so beautiful, though, because these CEOs, they really think that they could run their companies and have them be just as successful with 25% of the workforce. And they're getting a lesson in reality. Yeah. So do you think it's going to change? I mean, there's been this clash between libertarianism and woke, quote, wokeism in Silicon Valley. Looking forward,

is this story going to change how CEOs look at companies? Are they going to go back to the same hubris? We could run this with 80% less people. No, I think they're going to get their heads handed to them because their businesses are successful because of the employees. And if they don't like all the lunches and they don't like the kombucha stands, I don't like them much either. But, you know, they don't like all this stuff. Guess who built them? They did. And so this is the kids they've raised and this is the kids they have to deal with. And so, you know, and that's the thing. Say that.

By the way, the kombucha stand at Facebook is quite nice. I know you do. I know you do. I know you do. Get that man a kombucha. Then get up onto the roof of Facebook. It's really good on the roof of Facebook. No such thing as a free kombucha. It's delicious. Soldiers sold for that. They change it every day, too.

We're going to move on from Twitter. There's been a lot of critique that there's been too much coverage of Twitter because particularly for the reason you said, journalists, it's our haven, et cetera. What were we not paying attention to because we were sidetracked by Twitter? It's not sidetracked. It's about a lot of things. What have we not covered? Let's look at what tech journalism has failed to cover because we've been obsessed and caught in the whirlwind that is the high-speed train wreck.

I don't think that's the case. I think it's a very important story. I think it's these people are the richest, most powerful people. And he's setting the tone. I don't think it's an unimportant story. I think it's a great story. And it's personally been very profitable to me. So I'm grateful for it. Thank you, Jeff Zucker. You know, what I would say is... Didn't Jeff Zucker say that about Trump and live to regret it? That's true. That's true. Yes.

But what I would also say is that I think there's a decent chance like five years from now, we will go back and like read what we were writing about Elon in like October, November of this year. I will say we should have been writing way more about the AI stuff. Yeah. Like the AI stuff is going to be transformational in a way that might make the Elon drama look pretty small by comparison. Yes, that's absolutely true. Although he was a big funder of OpenAI, which was... All roads lead back to this guy, I'm telling you.

We'll take a quick break and we'll be back in a minute.

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

One story that has gotten a lot of coverage is crypto. Crypto, yeah. Crypto. So this is probably the second biggest tech story that's been covered recently. As we are taping this, Sam Bankman-Fried is enjoying, I believe, his last evening in the Bahamas. He is... Spalming. The weather's spalming. He's enjoying a piña colada. Apparently the prison is not that nice. Who would have thought? I thought prison in the Bahamas would be nicer than the rest. I don't think I'll ever find myself there, but... Hopefully not. He will be extradited back to the United States.

Is the fall of FTX an SBF problem or is it a broader crypto problem? It's absolutely a crypto problem. Don't listen to the people who are telling you this is not a crypto problem. When you look at the balance sheet of this company, half of it was like nonsense coins, right? It was a little FTT. It was a little, you know, XYZ, who knows?

the reason that they were able to grow as big as they were and look as strong as they were is because their balance was full of nonsense crypto. And if they just sort of opened up a bank, you know, like the, you know, SBF limited, whatever, it would never have grown that fast, right? People would not have poured money into it. So this was a crypto story from start to finish. And in a way it was like sort of the perfect story to cap off just an

absolutely disastrous year for the crypto folks, right? Like, I'm somebody who really tried to have an open mind with this stuff because I saw how much money and talent was going into it. And I just thought, statistically, there's no way that all of these people are wrong and that what they're building is useless. And at the end of 2022, it basically all looks useless. Yeah, it's most of it. I think it is a crypto problem. And one of the reasons was not lack of regulation because I think it was just getting started. It was very early. But in the way it was a classic fraud scheme, it was sort of like...

What's that musical with Zero Mostel? Spring Producers. That's what it felt like. People were bringing money in and he was goosing it with his donations and his partner was goosing it with Republican donations to hold off just enough. He was trying to sort of virtue signal everybody. It was the perfect fraud. So in that way, it was like lots of things that have happened. It's hard to disappear.

pure $8 billion. But the other thing, no, it's not. And the other part is everybody was sort of like, am I left out of this? And one of the things that you have to realize about Silicon Valley is if they're not in on the next thing, no matter how rich they are, they have so much FOMA and so does everybody else. And so we had covered it super early, but one of the problems is that there are bits and pieces that make a lot of sense, right? And so it's got enough realness to it that with everyone piling in with FOMA and

they wanted to be part of it. Like, when something goes up, and I tell this story all the time, but I did an early Bitcoin story when Wences Casares, who was at Zappo, he was like, I did a story on him, so I bought 10 Bitcoin, and they were $50 each at the time. And I just, and I put them on a stupid drive and lost it. And it's something. We could have been in the Bahamas.

There went Louie's college education. College education, right, yeah. And it was really interesting at the time because the people who started it actually did make a lot of sense for people in other countries and currency to rethink currency. And so that's the problem. It was greed meeting something that really did need to be reformed, meeting someone who was very good at manipulating people's idea of...

In the world of craziness, here was this, you know, unmade bed guy who seemed rather harmless, you know, and he looked like he dressed like a toddler and, you know, he seemed simple. He never, we never brought him on stage at Code. We thought about asking him several times. We did. Why didn't you? It reminded me the same thing of Elizabeth Holmes at the time. I didn't think grifty. I'm like, I,

don't get it. Like it was, it was this with her. The reason I never had her on stage is cause, um, you were threatened by her. I was threatened by her. Um, no, um, definitely not. Um,

It was because she told a lot of little lies that I knew about socially in Silicon Valley. And I thought it was weird that she lied about little things. And I was like, and my brother actually called me. He said, he goes, we have a better chance of landing, like aliens landing in the United States tomorrow than this thing working. And my brother's a doctor. And so a lot of people who are smart about it were like, this is stupid. And I didn't understand it. And so that's why we didn't. Same thing with Freed is that I didn't understand it. I was like, I don't...

explain it to me like I'm stupid. And so I never wanted to sit with him because I thought,

maybe he's a grifter. Like, even though he doesn't, and he's giving an awful lot of money to people. That was kind of weird to me, the naming of stadiums, stuff like that. But this is how they suck people in, right? So some things are very complex, they're hard to understand, and yet they're so appealing. People want to have that snake oil, and you get celebrities in, like Eva Longoria from Desperate Housewives and Crypto, who knew? But, you know, Ryan from OC is testifying at the Senate floor. He somehow made his way out of OC. But,

Do we think there's going to be a sea change in regulation that we see in crypto beyond everything else? Because Gary Gensler is... No, the United States Congress is taking a pass on this one. Pass on this one. For five years, they said, we're really thinking about doing something. They didn't do something. And now the Republicans are going to take the House. That said, they were going to do a lot of... And I'm not going to say what Senator was. They were going to do a lot of positive stuff for the crypto industry. Oh, say, can I say? I'm not going to say because there was a couple people that were pushing a couple senators to do something more.

very pro-Sam Bankman-Fried, and they pushed back. A lot of senators did push back because they were like, this feels grifty and we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't be... And when they had anything strong, they were nervous about it. I think a lot of senators were pretty aware of it. So you think something's going to happen and you think nothing's going to happen?

that you think they will write. No, I don't think anything's going to happen. No, nothing's going to happen. Can I ask a slightly different question? Sure, go ahead. Do you think, because obviously there's going to be multiple streaming documentaries and scripts. Do you think any of those will actually be entertaining to watch? Do you think you can get a good, I don't know, eight or ten episodes out of this? Uh,

You know, I gotta say, my favorite thing this year was the dropout. I thought it was so good. She was amazing. And by the way, she does a good Elizabeth Holmes. But blood is easier to understand than crypto. I think that's what you're getting at, right? Like the Silk Road documentaries were pretty...

Like, obviously, if you get, like, Jonah Hill and you, like, put it in the Bahamas and, like, it's, like, in a sexy house, like, that, like, then I'm like, okay. Like, you maybe got me for four episodes. But then I'm like, I don't know. It was a crypto exchange. You know what's going to happen. What's going to happen? Oh, what's going to happen? Speaking of regulation, speaking of governance, enjoy my new series, The Unmade Bed on Hulu.

In 2027. It's very disturbing. By the way, can I just point out, he did interviews with literally everybody, you know? Except for you. Who did he turn down? Did he really turn you down? Yes. All the nice men he gave interviews to. And he gave one or two women. But he turned me down. We can do the prison interview. I know. I'm going to. That's always better for podcasting.

I was like, comb your fucking hair, you grifter. That would have been my first. It's funny. If you were asked a year ago who is the anti-hero of tech, you might have said Mark Zuckerberg. Now it's a runoff between Elon or Sam Bankman Freed, maybe. Where is Mark Zuckerberg these days? I mean, I think he's probably delighted to be off most people's radar. Yeah, dancing on the graves. Well, they had this really weird year where I,

So he announced last year they were going to do this pivot to the metaverse. And I think it like caught on beyond their wildest imagination. Like Facebook has like tried many marketing campaigns over the years. Most people just like ignore them. You know, this was like for whatever reason, people really did spend a year talking about the metaverse. Okay. But not positively. Right.

Yes. Yes. But also like I was getting emails that are like, you know, here's like the top 15 firms that are like building the metaverse of tomorrow. I mean, like so many like outside people got in on it. They got the topic out there. Yeah, they really got the topic out there. And then, you know, they have a technological problem. Like the technology is not ready. They have to invent and miniaturize a bunch of things and they're not there yet. And it might take five years and it might take 10.

But that's kind of what they have their heads down doing. They had a really hard year at Meta. They lost over half the stock's value. Sort of like all of that. But this has been the best year for Meta's brand since 2015. So I think they're probably feeling pretty good about that. They are. Can I tell you how I know they're feeling good? Guess who invited Kara Swisher to lunch? Oh, wow.

Not Mark Zuckerberg. Not Mark. Not Mark. He's too scared. But Facebook is suddenly like, hey, girl, want to talk? And I'm like, what? Like, don't you hate me? They're like, no. We love what you do. And you will go to lunch, Carol. I went to lunch. Are you kidding? We like text all the time now, me and the Facebook people. It's great.

That's how bad it is. Still not coming for an interview. They will. Facebook recently tweeted an emoji. It's called the face with peeking eye emoji. There's the peekaboo. Let me just say, Facebook's still got a lot of problems. Oh, name one. Name one.

Name 15. I think their advertising business is super challenged in lots of different ways with competitors and regulatory issues. It just isn't working. They've got a lot of problems in their main business all over the place. I think they are moving into the sort of

part where they're not getting the best people. I don't think the metaverse is catching on. I think people are, there's a resting investing culture there a little bit more than it should be. Mark's not excited them with his new thing. I think their executives, again, continue to be suck-ups a little bit to Mark. I think he needs a more challenging team.

and I think they've got a lot of chance. And Apple, hello, Apple has just handed them their launch, and they haven't been able to compete in hardware yet. Oculus is very nice, but a small business. But Kirsten Cinema is selling all of her stuff on Facebook Marketplace. I don't know if you read that story, but there are bright spots. There's still Instagram and TikTok. TikTok, that's the biggest one. I'm sorry, sure, yes. TikTok is really, really...

The only thing that they have going for them are able to lobby Congress about TikTok very effectively, I think. And you shared a story with us, which is they've invested heavily in Reels to take out TikTok. And the Reels have cost them a lot in ad sales because they can't monetize. Yeah. Yeah. 500 million. Yeah. I mean, they're...

I think there's a chance that Reels is doing better for them than you think, if only because it has stopped TikTok from growing quite as fast as it did. I think Reels and YouTube have sort of neutralized some of that TikTok growth. And by the way, if you open up TikTok, you'll see that it's starting to look a lot more like Facebook, right? It's like there's a tab for your friends now, right? So all these social apps sort of wind up morphing into each other over time. My thing, though, is just no culture is made on Reels. It's like nothing...

nothing is like happening on reels that feels like it has a pulse whereas you open up TikTok and it's like, okay, yeah, clearly like, this is what the 17 girls care about. Can I ask a question? Because I spent an hour and a half watching everything with my son the other night, two nights ago. And he's watching a lot of Reddit and YouTube because it's more real. He said, TikTok's too polished and he really likes the,

the mess that YouTube is in that regard. And he kind of likes it even if it's bad. And it never listens to what he says. Like he says no, and then he gets more of it. And he kind of likes that. And he also loves Reddit. I have to say he really likes Reddit. I also had a conversation with Lou yesterday, and he brought up Reddit. And it struck me because I thought, you know, it's interesting that as we're talking about, you know, this sort of very unsettled social media landscape that we live in now, why aren't more people talking about Reddit as sort of like the natural inheritor to like some portion of the Twitter audience? And

I don't know. I think Reddit has a really big opportunity and I hope they seize on it because I think they've figured out a lot of stuff and it doesn't get talked about very much. Yep, I would agree. I was surprised. They've made a lot of strides in content moderation, et cetera, that now you could build upon. Carrie, you gave a compliment to Facebook this year. What did I say? Just how I knew they took you to lunch. I'm kidding.

You said that he did a good, he did a decent job of the layoff. I thought he did a great job. Yeah. Look, they have to do layoffs. A lot of these companies were overstuffed with people. And I thought he handled it. He took responsibility. He dealt with the visa issues. He didn't talk down to people.

He said, I'm laying you off. It's my responsibility. It's on me. He gave him four months severance. He gave them a lot of severance. I thought two people had it well. John Carlson from Stripe handled it well. And previous to that, Brian Chesky handled it pretty well. It's not a great thing to lay people off, but if you have to, this is how you do it. And I thought he did a good job.

Mark is a nice person. He's a nice person. He's not an asshole. I wouldn't say he's an asshole. Those are big words for you. I know. He's not an asshole. I mean, like, there's sort of like an interesting, like, empirical illustration of that, which is you look at how many people worked with him for 10 plus years and, like, look at how many people worked for Elon Musk for 10 plus years and it's like zero. Yeah. So, earlier we were talking about how these CEOs would,

not possibly get away with thinking that employees don't give them anything because they can't survive without them. But there's real economic headwinds coming. So are the employees going to lose out in this battle between employer-employee?

No. Eventually, no, because the economy will rebound. Every day, the value walks out of the building. And so I think they have to figure out how to manage these workforces in a different way, whether they're remote or not remote. And I know, like, Mark Benioff just was like, come back to Salesforce Tower. We're going to do a sacrifice. We're having another luau on the roof. Yeah.

Casey, what do you think? What do I think? Yeah, what do you think? I think that, yeah, this is a scary moment for the tech workforce. You know, their jobs are at risk. Some of the things that they fought for have at risk. And I think we're seeing a lot of, like, more collective action in the tech industry than we're used to seeing. And I think that's a good thing. You know, it's like, you know, one of my favorite, like, stats you can look at, it's not always, like, public, but sometimes you can work it out, is just, like, the revenue generated per employee. It's like...

The people who are working at YouTube and Facebook and even Twitter, they're making so much money for these people. They're getting a tiny fraction of it. So it's like, close that gap. Employers would say, oh, that's revenue generated per software or whatever. They would look at that. I've been through three of these. And they always were like, finally, we're getting control from the employees. The first one in 2001 or 2002 and then the one in 2008. They never do. The employees are fully...

the most important element. Does working remotely curb the power of employees to organize and have relationships and build together? I think whole movements are happening on Signal right now. I think the group chats are popping. Like things are happening. Yeah. I think they're still the most important part of any tech company is the employees. I do. We'll be back in a minute to talk about how ChatGBT and AI will be taking your job.

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So let's end by talking about climate change and also another big area, AI. So these are big investments, big kind of leapfrog tech investments that we're seeing. How do you know when...

when you're seeing movement in these new industries, when to be skeptical because it feels maybe grifty or too soon or too much, or when to be excited and optimistic about it? Well, you talk about chat. I mean, it's inevitable. It seems inevitable. Yeah. I mean, so I, I love that question. And for me, the answer is like when I can touch it, you know, it's like for,

for the last three years, I go to these like Google keynotes, but like Sundar gets up there and he was just like, this language model we've had, you've never seen a language model like this. You won't believe the things it can do. Just look at this recording of a thing that it did. Amazing, right? And I'm like, yeah, Sundar, that looks great, but like, when can I touch it? This year, OpenAI comes out. It's like, you can touch it now. You can do things with it. It's like, it really does the things. And,

And so I am skeptical about it. But getting to that point earlier where you were saying about trying to understand what was Theranos? What was FTX? We never really got it. You use ChatGPT, you get it. So anyway, to me, that's the story of 2022. Explain what ChatGPT is. Does everyone here use ChatGPT? Are you...

Yeah? Is that writing your papers and talking to your girlfriends? Clap if ChatGPT is doing your job. Okay, there are two people in this room of a couple hundred. You should try it. It's a large language model. It's not a search engine, but you can use it for similar things. You can use it to write song lyrics. You can use it to tell you how to put together an outfit. Anything that a blog might tell you how to do, because ChatGPT has ingested the entire internet, it can tell you what to do. And it's amazing.

It's amazing the things that it could do. And it's not even the state of the art technology. OpenAI, which makes it, has a new version of ChatGPT, which is coming next year. And oh boy. This is all we're going to be talking about 2023. What it's able to do is also negotiate down your Verizon bill or unnecessary bills. So don't pay is made a deal with ChatGPT to use. It'll be bots talking to the customer service bots. And you won't have to be involved.

Until, like, you're working for them. Yeah. You will be working for them. I can't wait until we can turn that on on Tinder, by the way. That's going to be great. It's already happening. People are using ChatGPT. And when you say people, Naima, are those people in the room with us right now? Don't even think I can organize the scale of dates I have, Casey. Oh, okay.

Kara, should Google be worried because Microsoft has invested in OpenAI? No. I think it's very competitive. That's what's exciting about it. I mean, Google's way ahead. They've got DeepMinds. They've got all kinds of things. But you've got really interesting stuff probably from Facebook. There's going to be stuff from Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Yeah, they have Lambda, which hasn't come out. Okay. Should Google be worried? They'll figure it out. I'm not worried about that. But can you imagine a more hilarious story besides everything we already talked about with Twitter than...

like the revenge of Bing. I know, Bing is like, I'm telling you. Like seriously,

like you should buy that website. I'm just like picturing, you know, like school children just being like, why is the default search engine set to Google? Like, we're a Bing household. I'm telling you, I think this is Bing's moment. I have been waiting for it for 20 years. Do you remember when he debuted Bing at Code? Were you there? No, I wasn't. When was this? He came, Steve Ballmer came to debut two things. The giant surface table. We called it the big ass table. You know, that nobody ever bought, not one of them. It was a big table. It was stupid. It

a big computer essentially and then he debuted Bing at Code the first time and he'd get on stage and we'd go do you have something to say he goes Bing and then he kept going Bing Bing Bing and we were like oh god oh god there was like I think no one created more memes per sentence than Steve Ballmer until Jennifer Coolidge and oh yeah

I miss him. I'll say it. I miss him. We'll close out here. I tried to outsource my job today because I went to chat GPT after it sent all my dating app messages. And I said, what are the questions that we should ask Kara Swisher and Casey Newton? Oh, wow. And the questions that got back were pretty lackluster. I just want to set your expectations. But two out of the five questions it sent back were about the ethics of tech and what tech could do, which I...

thought was kind of interesting. I thought it would be about how do you deal with the sexual tension between the two of you. Now, if you have ideas, let us know. First of all, it's negative sexual tension. So, this is what ChatGPT asked. As an AI, I do not have personal preferences or the ability to interact with individuals in the same way a human would.

Therefore, I am unable to suggest a specific question to ask Kara Swisher or Casey Newton. However, here are a few general suggestions for questions that might be relevant to her work and expertise. Yes, he merged her pronouns. I'm sorry. So how do you balance the need for innovation with the need to address social and ethical concerns surrounding technology?

Well, that's the question, isn't it? That's the only question. We don't have an answer for that. I mean, really. Think about it from the start. When it comes to the content moderation stuff, you talk to the people who start doing this stuff at Snapchat, YouTube, it's all the same. It's a bunch of men in a room and the first bad thing happens on the platform is, oh, no, we need a policy for that. And then it just sort of grows from there. More recently, platforms have started with the idea of, well, we know that these things are going to hurt people. How can we not hurt people? That's what to do.

The industry is actually established enough that particularly if you're running a social platform, we have best practices for reducing harm. So start there. When I first saw the Facebook Live, I asked all kinds of questions. I was like, what if someone murders someone? What if someone bullies someone? And they looked at me like, and one of them literally said, you're a bummer.

And I'm like, the fucking human race is a bummer. Like, are you kidding me with the things they could do with it? And one of the things I, when I go see groups of young technologists, I always say, imagine your product is an episode of black mirror. What, what episode of black mirror? And then don't fucking make it that way. Like,

Make it in a way that... They talk about cancel consequence. It's consequence. It's understanding... And they have no ability to understand consequence for the longest time. And I think that has to do with a group of people who've never felt unsafe a day in their lives, do not think about safety. They don't think about color. They don't think about women. They don't think about... And that's not good for them as people, even if they're wildly creative. It's not good for us. It's not good for anybody. And so that's my biggest problem. And also...

And open AI has its own problems, potentially. I mean, this can be used to put up websites and misinformation at a level we've never seen before, right? And it will be completely hard, like deep fakes, et cetera, to deduce what's real, what's human, what's auto-generated. So it's scary. But to conclude, I did ask the chatbot who is the best source reporter in tech today.

And the response, quote, says, there are many talented and well-respected. I have a very nice voice for her. Yeah, you do. I feel like I'm talking to data from Star Trek. They can hire me to be like the Scarlett Johansson in her. There are many talented and well-respected reporters in the tech industry who are known to their strong sources and thorough reporting. Some of the reporters who are frequently cited as being amongst the best in the field include Kara Swisher and Casey Newton. And they named also Ben Thompson, John Gruber. How does that feel?

does that feel to be validated by AI that was funded in part by Elon Musk? Well, again, this is why I'm so bullish on Bing. You'll be the number one search result with all your Bing advertisements. Yeah. I'm very thrilled. Thank you, Elon, so much for being right about one thing in the past couple of months, which is WeBlock. Thank you very much, Casey. Thank you, Cara. Thank you to everyone here. Thank you.

Love that, Casey. And love Manny's. I've never been there before. Yeah, it was a great crowd, wasn't it? Were you surprised by how it was packed? Was I surprised by how famous you are, Cara? Is that what you're going to ask me? No, besides that, that's obvious for everyone and all, as I keep pointing out to you and you keep ignoring. But it just is a really lovely space. And it's a great addition to the neighborhood, which, you know, the mission goes up and down. I lived nearby in Potrero Hill for a couple years. You did? Oh, and? I didn't know about Manny's.

Well, it was probably after you left. Yeah, I left in 2016. I would go in search of culture in San Francisco.

I would go for miles searching for culture and find myself in the East Bay. The crowd did not want to hear any of it from anybody. We love San Francisco. I like New York, but San Francisco is fine. Fine. And I have to say, the New York Times said it was a ghost town. It didn't feel like a ghost town. It does not. I know you're going to be mayor of Cairo one day. I know. They requested it, and I think I shall. We're going to have to delete these tapes when I'm your chief of staff there. That's all right. It doesn't matter. It's San Francisco. I could marry a goat. They'd be fine with it. Anyway...

Is talking to me the equivalent of marrying a goat? Excellent. No, I'm just saying a real goat. A real goat. Oh, an actual goat. Not the greatest of all time. I was confused. You're paying me a compliment. Alas, no. No, not at all. Not even slightly. Okay. So, by the way, after our conversation yesterday, I stumbled across a quote, which is relevant, and I wonder if you can place it. Okay. The quote is, it does know a lot, but the danger is that it is confident and wrong a significant fraction of the time. Who or what is it?

I don't know. Is it about chat GPT? Yes, it's chat GPT. And it's Sam Altman talking about chat GPT. He's still working it through, but everyone's excited about it. I thought you could say the same thing about Elon. It does know a lot, but the danger is that it is confident and wrong a significant fraction of the time. You know how I have a phrase like that? It's an old time phrase, which is frequently wrong, but never in doubt. And who does it apply to? Everybody. Except for? Kara Swisher. Okay. Happy New Year. Want to read us out on that? Yes.

Yes. Go famous, lady. Read us out with the credits. I shall. I shall.

Today's show was produced by ChatGPT. Just kidding. It was made by Naeem Araza, Blake Nishik, Christian Castro-Rossell, and Rafaela Seward. Special thanks to Haley Milliken, Fred Runner, and the team at Manny's and Manny himself. What a guy. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to be the head of software and servers. If not, it's a

foolish ceo job for you go wherever you listen to podcasts search for on with kara swisher and hit follow and also vote for me for ceo of twitter thanks for listening to on with kara swisher from new york magazine the vox media podcast network and us we'll be back on monday with more