Speaker 1: I'm Emily Chang and this is the circuit.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm talking about tweets. I have a weird relationship
Speaker 2: with Twitter. Yeah, we all do.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most influential and controversial social networks today,
Speaker 1: and for years it struggled to make money and moderate content.
Speaker 1: Then one of the world's richest men stepped in. To
Speaker 1: some he was the Knight and shining armor. To others,
Speaker 1: he was Twitter's worst nightmare. I wanted to get some
Speaker 1: perspective from two people who know Twitter better than almost anyone.
Speaker 1: Here's my conversation with Twitter co founder and former CEO
Speaker 1: of Williams and one of the most critical members of
Speaker 1: the founding team, Jason Goldman.
Speaker 3: All right, so let's just start with like, tell us
Speaker 3: who you are, tell me who you are, and.
Speaker 4: What was your goal on a Twitter story?
Speaker 2: Should we do each other instead?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Yes. So this is Jason at Goldman on Twitter.
Speaker 6: Jason worked with me on Blogger when I was six
Speaker 6: people and three of them were named Jason. Three of
Speaker 6: them were name Jason, so we started calling him Goldman.
Speaker 6: And then Blogger went to Google, we got acquired, we
Speaker 6: worked together there. I left Google, Jason took over Blogger
Speaker 6: bus and I left to start Audio, which became which
Speaker 6: Twitter came out of, and Jason was like that audio bs,
Speaker 6: I'm not buying that. But then we did Twitter. He's like,
Speaker 6: I'm in. And then he came over and ran product
Speaker 6: and did a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you guys have been friends for a really long time.
Speaker 5: Indeed.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's actually like the twenty year anniversary of this
Speaker 7: month I was selling Blogger to Google. Is that when
Speaker 7: we started?
Speaker 5: You're right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like, so that's like when we met.
Speaker 3: Wow, Yeah, who knew what the next twenty years were told?
Speaker 2: Yes, and so.
Speaker 7: Evan Williams Uh was the creator and founder of Pyra Labs,
Speaker 7: makers of Blogger, and I joined during the second phase
Speaker 7: of Blogger.
Speaker 2: There had been a version with.
Speaker 7: A founding team and then the dock crash happened, and
Speaker 7: ev kept it alive essentially through force of will yes,
Speaker 7: which is which is pretty crazy, and then slowly built
Speaker 7: up the team of six people, three of him were
Speaker 7: Jason's sold the company to Google, which was their first acquisition.
Speaker 7: He was the first company that Google had ever bought.
Speaker 7: This is the first like aqua hire in the history
Speaker 7: of Google. Was V's company and he worked there, and
Speaker 7: then Guest started Audio, a podcasting company because of his
Speaker 7: deep love of podcasts.
Speaker 4: Has a lot of there's a lot of history, a
Speaker 4: lot of insur.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then and then yeah, and then once Audio pivoted,
Speaker 7: created Obvious to be a holding company for Odio and
Speaker 7: this nascent product, Twitter, and uh, then Twitter was spun
Speaker 7: out and he eventually became CEO of Twitter and was
Speaker 7: on the board until what twenty seventeen, nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 5: It's a while, it's a while.
Speaker 4: I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, and you were CEO.
Speaker 6: Until I was CEO from October two thousand and eight
Speaker 6: to October, Yeah, October twenty ten, two years exactly.
Speaker 3: So there's been a lot of changing of the guards
Speaker 3: at Twitter. When Elon burst onto the scene, were you
Speaker 3: both just like, what, like.
Speaker 4: What was the first reaction?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was surprising.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm trying to remember the first bursting on
Speaker 6: or if I was even aware of it.
Speaker 2: Were you?
Speaker 7: He clearly was addicted to the service, and so you know,
Speaker 7: I was aware of him from that perspective, the idea
Speaker 7: that he was going to either join the board or
Speaker 7: then eventually make an offer in the company.
Speaker 2: The joining the board happened so briefly.
Speaker 7: I didn't really react strongly to that, but the idea
Speaker 7: that he was going to buy the company to me
Speaker 7: initially seeing like, oh, he's not gonna be really serious
Speaker 7: about this. It's going to be like the way you
Speaker 7: sort of, you know, put in a reservation on like
Speaker 7: a fancy sports car if you're having like, you know,
Speaker 7: kind of some some sort of like crisis and you're
Speaker 7: just like, ah, like, I'll like see if this I'll
Speaker 7: see if this is something I want to buy later.
Speaker 7: But it turned out he was serious about it for
Speaker 7: a minute and really signed a binding contract that he
Speaker 7: later tried to get out of.
Speaker 4: I mean, Elon Musk owns Twitter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is that idea takes some getting used to, Like,
Speaker 3: I mean, are.
Speaker 5: You it's really bazy. It's very bazy.
Speaker 6: I don't really think about it on a daily basis,
Speaker 6: but there have been a couple of moments where I'm like,
Speaker 6: I started this thing with some other people a long
Speaker 6: time ago in this little office and then the world's
Speaker 6: richest man bought it, and it's this big news stories
Speaker 6: like how did how did that happen?
Speaker 7: That's weird and it's also like someone like you know,
Speaker 7: like I don't know Elon personally, but it's like someone
Speaker 7: who's been in like the orbit of like I've known
Speaker 7: Elon yeah a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, when he burst onto the scene, like, was there
Speaker 3: any part of you that was like, well, this is
Speaker 3: interesting maybe something?
Speaker 5: Yes, And I mean for sure I was somewhat excited.
Speaker 6: I was like, oh, I like interesting things to happen, right,
Speaker 6: I'm not a fan of things stay in the way
Speaker 6: they are. I mean, that's why we do tech, that's
Speaker 6: why we start new things. So you know, Twitter had
Speaker 6: been pretty much the same. I think it had been
Speaker 6: getting better and better. Actually, the trajectory of improvements in
Speaker 6: the year or two prior to Elon. I thought the
Speaker 6: team was great at that the exec team was like
Speaker 6: probably the best it's ever been. They're making product improvements.
Speaker 6: So it was on a good trajectory, I thought. But
Speaker 6: then it was like Elon, Holy, Holy Holy, he does
Speaker 6: crazy things.
Speaker 5: This will be interesting and fun. We'll see what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we made differ on this.
Speaker 6: But.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean I was just concerned because like everything
Speaker 7: he was talking about that he wanted to do with
Speaker 7: the products seem pretty lightly considered, like you know it
Speaker 7: was it was it was like, oh, there's you know,
Speaker 7: we got to defeat all the bots, and you know,
Speaker 7: there's all this stuff about like the culture wars that
Speaker 7: we need, you know, we need to get rid of
Speaker 7: the wokeness on this.
Speaker 2: It's like he doesn't really mean that this is like some.
Speaker 7: Sort of you know performance in the early days of
Speaker 7: what he thinks he wants to do, but it became
Speaker 7: clear over time that no, that is his primary interest
Speaker 7: in owning the platform.
Speaker 2: It's to kind of push on these particular.
Speaker 7: Cultural issues and his own personal use of the product
Speaker 7: he wants to make better, which you know, I guess
Speaker 7: you know, if you're the world's richest man, as he
Speaker 7: was at the time, and you want to have the
Speaker 7: product tailored exactly for your use, then you can buy
Speaker 7: it and just really make it fit in the niche
Speaker 7: that you have.
Speaker 5: It's a thing you can do.
Speaker 2: That's the thing you can do.
Speaker 4: So how do you feel about what he's done so far?
Speaker 5: I don't think he's dialed it in quite right yet.
Speaker 6: I don't spend as much time on the platform, and
Speaker 6: I like that he's willing to try things. But yeah,
Speaker 6: I don't know if he's figured out when you spend
Speaker 6: more time on Twitter these days, well, it's.
Speaker 2: Gone pretty poorly.
Speaker 7: I mean of just subjectively speaking, you know, I mean
Speaker 7: one of the things people say that have sort of
Speaker 7: you know, echoed a bit of which is that well,
Speaker 7: at least he's gonna try things, He's gonna do things
Speaker 7: with the product. The moves fast sort of it is
Speaker 7: blied by that most of the things that have been
Speaker 7: pushed out the door were there things that existed previously,
Speaker 7: like Twitter Blue or view counts which were just you know,
Speaker 7: existed in the product but hadn't been turned on, or
Speaker 7: there things that the stuff that he pushed out that
Speaker 7: was really kind of bespoke is make sure you.
Speaker 2: Amplify my tweets so that everyone sees them, which is again,
Speaker 2: if you own the product, you can do that.
Speaker 7: It's just a curious way to product manage a global platform.
Speaker 5: And I also want to like the just trying things.
Speaker 6: I agree, like it's not that alone, isn't that impressive
Speaker 6: or useful? And like I said before, that team that
Speaker 6: was in there, there's also a lot of things killed
Speaker 6: from what I understand, that were actually really interesting things
Speaker 6: in the works.
Speaker 5: That I know from the former execut team, and so.
Speaker 6: Just want to note that because there was there were
Speaker 6: things being being worked on that you know, maybe they're
Speaker 6: taking a long time, but it's a big service.
Speaker 3: For years Twitter, which criticized for not innovating fast enough,
Speaker 3: not making enough money going to get users, did something
Speaker 3: have to happen?
Speaker 6: My main feedback that I recall given on board is
Speaker 6: we need to do more things, more innovation, more bigger
Speaker 6: boulder bets.
Speaker 5: And that's much easier said than done.
Speaker 6: And so it's not like board members saying that is useful,
Speaker 6: but that was my primary feeling during those years.
Speaker 4: Did somebody have to shake something up?
Speaker 3: I mean right that you know people are at least
Speaker 3: these moving fast breaking things, but shipping things.
Speaker 7: I think there's a totally fair criticism on Twitter that
Speaker 7: there wasn't enough innovation and there wasn't enough new direction
Speaker 7: of it in the last you know, let's say decade.
Speaker 7: A lot of that effort, though, was going towards making
Speaker 7: the platform more safe and dealing with a lot of
Speaker 7: things that have been overlooked for a long period of time,
Speaker 7: including you know, harassment, abuse like manipulation by non state actors,
Speaker 7: all of these problems that are really not just real
Speaker 7: in the sense that they exist, but have real effects.
Speaker 7: And you look at what happens when you don't tackle
Speaker 7: those problems, whether it's genocide and mean mars is. In
Speaker 7: the case of Facebook, you're talking about real problems that
Speaker 7: they had to clean up and deal with. So I
Speaker 7: respect the fact that they spent a lot of time
Speaker 7: on that as opposed to shipping new features. But I
Speaker 7: do agree that Twitter didn't do enough in the last
Speaker 7: decade towards building features that resonated for the set of
Speaker 7: users who already got what Twitter was. And I kind
Speaker 7: of take that back to when we were there, which
Speaker 7: was we were always really focused on the top of
Speaker 7: the funnel. It was always it was this relentless focus
Speaker 7: on we've got to get more people in the top
Speaker 7: of the funnel.
Speaker 2: We've got to grow the overall.
Speaker 7: Universe of users on this, and there wasn't enough focus,
Speaker 7: in my view, in hindsight on But we've got some
Speaker 7: people for whom this really works, and that includes you know,
Speaker 7: journalists and entertainers, and you know people in the media,
Speaker 7: and and and you know politicians, and you know people
Speaker 7: who are good at the product, who are funny at it.
Speaker 7: Even though they're not famous anywhere else, what can we
Speaker 7: do to deepen their experience of the product. I think
Speaker 7: that could have been prioritized a lot more and would
Speaker 7: have produced a different result. But yes, it's totally fair
Speaker 7: to say that something needed to happen, and given what
Speaker 7: we know now about how twenty twenty two played out economically,
Speaker 7: something probably would have happened.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: You know, it's unlikely that Twitter would have just sailed
Speaker 7: through this worst tech downturn since two thousand without massive layoffs,
Speaker 7: without some sort of activist interest in the company. Something
Speaker 7: probably would have happened because Twitter was in a vulnerable state.
Speaker 7: I just don't think it needed to be quite this silly.
Speaker 6: I completely agree on folks and depth rather than breadth.
Speaker 6: I have the same view in hindsight about Twitter and
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of the tech world, and I think
Speaker 6: that's very related to the business model in selling advertisers.
Speaker 6: It's like, there's breadth is a number of people you
Speaker 6: can reach is important, where as a consumer paid service
Speaker 6: or an enterprise service you have to have depth, and
Speaker 6: so figuring out the right combination of those things is
Speaker 6: an important strategic consideration.
Speaker 5: The other thing.
Speaker 6: I would say, though, if you look at most other
Speaker 6: major tech companies, it's not like their core thing that
Speaker 6: made them big.
Speaker 5: They dramatically changed down the road.
Speaker 6: They incrementally improve it forever, whether that's Facebook or Apple
Speaker 6: or Amazon or whoever, and then they add new things.
Speaker 6: And so Twitter is one of the few companies of
Speaker 6: its size that didn't acquire something significant that became a
Speaker 6: second line of business or a major other product. You know,
Speaker 6: sometimes you start those things, and Twitter tried to start
Speaker 6: a few things.
Speaker 5: That's very hard, very unusual. Gmail was started internally.
Speaker 6: Most of Google's other successful products were acquired, at least
Speaker 6: the seed of them was acquired.
Speaker 7: Including the entire advertising business.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and YouTube and Android and all those major things
Speaker 6: obviously Instagram, Facebook, all this, and so that is the path,
Speaker 6: Like you have massive growth for consumer and then you
Speaker 6: plateau and you try to keep making it better and
Speaker 6: you add things, usually through acquisition. And Twitter made some
Speaker 6: very smart acquisitions very early, but in a lot of
Speaker 6: talent acquisitions. But there's no like second leg of the
Speaker 6: stool that was ever brought in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you wonder like who's actually working there anymore?
Speaker 7: It's almost down to the number of people that were
Speaker 7: there when we when when.
Speaker 2: I left, like in twenty ten.
Speaker 7: I think when I left it was like eight hundred,
Speaker 7: So we're within like a two acts of it being
Speaker 7: around the same size. Yeah, it's it's gotten pretty it's
Speaker 7: gotten pretty tidy, and that.
Speaker 5: Goes to those people who were keeping it going.
Speaker 2: The way in which the deal.
Speaker 7: He tried to back out of the deal even though
Speaker 7: he sound signed a binding contract that had a specific
Speaker 7: performance clause, And in general, his approach to contracts seems
Speaker 7: to be it's a starting point for negotiation as opposed
Speaker 7: to this is something I'm actually obligated to do.
Speaker 3: Well. Speaking of the industry, is there something about his
Speaker 3: hardcore approach that's shaken the valley up?
Speaker 7: Well, I think the fact that interest rates are going
Speaker 7: up and there's the greatest economic downturn for the industry
Speaker 7: since two thousand has more.
Speaker 2: To do with why the industry has shoken up.
Speaker 7: I mean, like you know, I think that like this,
Speaker 7: there really is like sort of a c change in
Speaker 7: terms of what the economic environment is for startups and
Speaker 7: big companies as well. And I don't think that Facebook
Speaker 7: and Google are doing massive layoffs because they saw that
Speaker 7: Elon could get people to sleep.
Speaker 2: On the floor and whatever.
Speaker 7: I don't think that really figures into Zas and Sundar's
Speaker 7: calculation as much as the street is demanding like a
Speaker 7: different level of performance than it was a year ago,
Speaker 7: because the environment.
Speaker 2: Is completely different.
Speaker 7: So I don't want to give too much credit, but
Speaker 7: there you can kind of sense there is a particularly
Speaker 7: among like the VC world, this hunger for this era
Speaker 7: of austerity.
Speaker 8: Everyone wants these goddamn lattes running us out of business,
Speaker 8: can't sell enough ads for this kombucha on HAP and
Speaker 8: and like now that air is over and you know
Speaker 8: people are gonna have to buckle down, there's that there's
Speaker 8: a hunger for that to be true.
Speaker 2: I think it.
Speaker 7: I think it's important to remember that the employees weren't
Speaker 7: the ones asking for the kombucha. They were happy to
Speaker 7: accept the kombucha, but like once it was once it
Speaker 7: was main available, but there was a talent shortage, and
Speaker 7: so companies were bending over backwards to try to hire
Speaker 7: all these people. And as I'm in which economic booms
Speaker 7: seemed unending, and now that the economic environment has changed.
Speaker 2: That story has changed as well.
Speaker 7: I don't think Elon has created that reality but it
Speaker 7: is certainly emblematic of the narrative that people are using
Speaker 7: to justify those changes.
Speaker 4: The tables have turned.
Speaker 3: The austerity of Silicon Valley begins. Okay, Jack Dorsey, who
Speaker 3: co founded Twitter with you, said Twitter is the closest
Speaker 3: thing we have to a global consciousness solving for the
Speaker 3: problem of Twitter being a company.
Speaker 4: Elon is the singular solution.
Speaker 2: I trust. This is one of the worst age tweets
Speaker 2: of all time.
Speaker 7: Like I mean, like this, this is honestly one of
Speaker 7: the worst tweets that's ever been put on the platform,
Speaker 7: and there's a lot of them. Jack has been very
Speaker 7: consistent on this from the beginning. Is that he really
Speaker 7: was interested in Twitter as a protocol. Twitter as like
Speaker 7: a communications protocol, like a public good that could be
Speaker 7: used in the same way that civic infrastructure exists. Like
Speaker 7: Jack was very interested in maps and civic infrastructure, and
Speaker 7: that was that was like a lot of his interest
Speaker 7: and he is the reason he's I believe, you know,
Speaker 7: a Bitcoin maximalist, is because he sees that as this
Speaker 7: decentralized version of technology that can't be controlled by one company.
Speaker 7: He's very committed to the idea of the open web.
Speaker 7: And you know, which is a tradition that we grew
Speaker 7: up in as well. The problem was with Twitter is
Speaker 7: that from the beginning we committed to a completely different
Speaker 7: path with the company. We were inherently not building a
Speaker 7: public good. We were building a for profit enterprise that
Speaker 7: took VC funding and was going to be a different
Speaker 7: type of a different type of company. So this notion
Speaker 7: that Twitter was ever going to be a public service
Speaker 7: really is a historical It.
Speaker 2: Was never that was never going to happen.
Speaker 7: But I think with Elon he convinced himself Jack did
Speaker 7: that Elon shared this ambition for Twitter, which is interesting
Speaker 7: on two notes. One, the idea that Twitter could become
Speaker 7: that at this late stage seems questionable but maybe interesting
Speaker 7: to pursue. And two, there's literally no evidence whatsoever heard
Speaker 7: that Elon agrees with this vision for Twitter, that Elon
Speaker 7: believes that Twitter should be a public good. It seems
Speaker 7: much more the case that Elon wants Twitter to be
Speaker 7: his personal playground, in which he sets the rules and
Speaker 7: determines how it works. It's the exact opposite of an open, decentralized,
Speaker 7: uncontrolled product.
Speaker 2: It's a very centralized product, controlled by one person.
Speaker 6: I agree with Jason. Twitter was never going to be
Speaker 6: an open protocol. Jack has been very consistent, and I
Speaker 6: will say Jack has a beautiful mind that is very
Speaker 6: conceptually driven, and from the very first moment I met him,
Speaker 6: we would have these discussions where the trick was figuring
Speaker 6: out what layer of abstraction we were talking at. And
Speaker 6: so I love the idea by the way of an open,
Speaker 6: decentralized protocol, and I had debates when I was running
Speaker 6: the company with Jack and other people in the company
Speaker 6: about whether Twitter could or should be that, and a
Speaker 6: lot of our efforts around the Twitter Api early on
Speaker 6: were to.
Speaker 5: Enable that idea.
Speaker 6: The conclusion I eventually came to is that it was
Speaker 6: not just the architecture of the system we built was.
Speaker 6: I mean, by definition, it's not an open protocol and
Speaker 6: we would have to completely remake it for it to
Speaker 6: be so, and it was unclear how to do that
Speaker 6: and with funding. I think Jack agrees with this point
Speaker 6: that once it was we took venture capital, it couldn't
Speaker 6: be that. He may regret taking venture capital, but I
Speaker 6: don't because it helped us fund this amazing, cool thing
Speaker 6: that has been very successful. It's just a different thing,
Speaker 6: and I don't know what Elon wants it to be,
Speaker 6: but it doesn't seem like it's heading in that direction,
Speaker 6: at least there's no evidence of that. What I think
Speaker 6: is interesting and exciting is that it's opened up a
Speaker 6: space for potentially other platforms or other protocols to emerge,
Speaker 6: and people may pay attention to them because Twitter maybe
Speaker 6: has less of a gravitational force for everybody's attention.
Speaker 3: Do you, I mean, there are a lot of folks
Speaker 3: out there who are angry at Jack, Like I think
Speaker 3: some folks feel like Jack's fed Twitter to the Elon wolves.
Speaker 4: Do you feel that at all?
Speaker 7: Or I do like the I mean, if you look
Speaker 7: at the timeline and how the deal was put together,
Speaker 7: it's pretty clear that Jack was instrumental in both recruiting
Speaker 7: Elon to be initially on the board and then wholeheartedly,
Speaker 7: as he said in the tweet, endorsing Elon as the
Speaker 7: sole solution you trust for the future of the company,
Speaker 7: which is to the detriment of the hand pick CEO
Speaker 7: that he put in, you know, like the previous year,
Speaker 7: like he had only.
Speaker 2: Been on the job for six months or something like that.
Speaker 7: And then above and beyond that, it was also clear that,
Speaker 7: you know, employee, there was gonna be massive layoffs, the
Speaker 7: culture of the company is gonna dramatically change, and you know,
Speaker 7: there are people who felt like Jack was with the
Speaker 7: last caretaker as the last founder who's full time employed
Speaker 7: in the company to kind of look out for those
Speaker 7: people and felt abandoned by that.
Speaker 5: I'm not mad at Jack.
Speaker 6: I think he made a mistake, but I'm very grateful
Speaker 6: to Jack for for I mean, he cares so deeply,
Speaker 6: and I know he's Jack is is says what he believes,
Speaker 6: and he did the decision he thought was correct, and
Speaker 6: I think he really wants that future.
Speaker 5: I think it was was probably not going that. I
Speaker 5: don't know.
Speaker 6: I haven't talked to him recently. I would love to,
Speaker 6: but I'm guessing it's not going the way he was hoping.
Speaker 5: I think one of.
Speaker 6: The coolest things Jack did toward the future he wanted
Speaker 6: was starting Blue Sky Smart.
Speaker 5: Blue Sky is really cool.
Speaker 6: Blue Sky was the decentralized Twitter project that he funded
Speaker 6: or Twitter funded, I'm actually not sure which he funded,
Speaker 6: and actually he's they're very smart people, a Blue Sky
Speaker 6: working very cool like architectural solutions to a decentralized network
Speaker 6: and unfortun I think perhaps it was underfunded or just
Speaker 6: hasn't gone far enough. But that is more interesting to
Speaker 6: me than like, I think the notion that was wrong
Speaker 6: is turning Twitter into that.
Speaker 3: So let's take the other part of the tweet. Twitter
Speaker 3: is a global content. What is Twitter? Is Twitter the
Speaker 3: global town square? Is it the global consciousness in your view?
Speaker 6: Oh gosh, no, I think the global consciousness is the
Speaker 6: global consciousness. We have a global consciousness. It's not Twitter.
Speaker 6: I think that's not right. It's conceptually sort of like, oh,
Speaker 6: let's connect all the people in the world and have
Speaker 6: a communication mechanism. Like that's the conceptual part that we
Speaker 6: talked about in the beginning, not just of Twitter, but
Speaker 6: of the Internet that was mind blowing. It's like, oh,
Speaker 6: my gosh, how cool will it be to actually connect
Speaker 6: each other's brains in real time through language and like
Speaker 6: time and distance, eliminate time and distance for communication. That's
Speaker 6: still very exciting, like just an amazing Twitter is a
Speaker 6: pretty distilled.
Speaker 5: Version of that.
Speaker 6: But it's not dramatically different than you know, the telegram
Speaker 6: and then the email and the webinar. It's just like
Speaker 6: a particular I mean, the Internet is that you could
Speaker 6: say the Internet is maybe the closest thing to connecting
Speaker 6: it not Twitter itself, but that's a that's like detailed.
Speaker 5: What is Twitter?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: There are many metaphors that one could play with.
Speaker 7: I think the easiest way I think about Twitter is
Speaker 7: that is the world's leading marketplace for tweets, like it is,
Speaker 7: it is unmatched, specific, it is unmatched and delivering tweets
Speaker 7: to people. Uh, and I think that's better than the
Speaker 7: global I think the global town Square stuff is not
Speaker 7: good because you're co opting a public good into inherently
Speaker 7: a private enterprise. And the global consciousness thing is not
Speaker 7: good because, as says, there is a global consciousness like that,
Speaker 7: like there is something that exists out of private enterprise
Speaker 7: that binds people together and that you know, shares common experiences.
Speaker 7: Even at Google with the best technologist in the world,
Speaker 7: people who are building the bleeding edge of the Internet
Speaker 7: in early two thousands, those people, including the founders, fundamentally
Speaker 7: did not understand that the web was a platform.
Speaker 2: For self expression.
Speaker 7: That the most interesting thing in the Web itself was
Speaker 7: not that you could get information out of it. It
Speaker 7: wasn't a library which you could check out infinite books.
Speaker 7: It was that you could put anything onto this canvas.
Speaker 7: And that's always what excited us, what led to a blogger,
Speaker 7: and what you made me want to work on it,
Speaker 7: what made me want to work on Twitter, was that
Speaker 7: this was a way of using the web as this
Speaker 7: portal into other people's experiences, in other people's lives, and
Speaker 7: that really is seductive and interesting and interesting. I think
Speaker 7: the problem is just that you have to distinguish between
Speaker 7: You have to accept the fact that if you're doing
Speaker 7: it in the context of a for profit enterprise, you're
Speaker 7: inherently building a certain type of thing. And it's not
Speaker 7: going to be a public good, it's not going to
Speaker 7: be a metaphysical construct.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a company. But that could still
Speaker 2: be really cool company.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I think there is a notion that one
Speaker 6: could slip into here is like, because we made it
Speaker 6: a company, it's just like this you.
Speaker 5: Know, capitalistic thing.
Speaker 6: It could also be of tremendous service, and I think
Speaker 6: it has been and you know, debatable, but what is
Speaker 6: it to some extent, platforms, once they reach a certain scale,
Speaker 6: do kind of work like governments, even if they are
Speaker 6: for profit, because you have all these constituencies. You you're
Speaker 6: trying to make them all happy. You have to enforce
Speaker 6: you have to have rules, and you have to enforce rules,
Speaker 6: I believe, or else you have anarchy. I mean some
Speaker 6: people would choose anarchy. I think we've learned through civilization
Speaker 6: that is probably best to have rules and reinforce those rules.
Speaker 6: And I think the same applies to platforms. Where it
Speaker 6: gets tricky is then there's like how much do the
Speaker 6: platforms take versus Right?
Speaker 3: Well, this is the hardest question, right, Like what makes
Speaker 3: it amazing also makes it assess pool and how do
Speaker 3: you take the best without the worst?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Right?
Speaker 6: Interesting point on that front, though, is there is a
Speaker 6: view in the decentralized web rhetoric that the problem with
Speaker 6: centralized platforms or for profit platforms is they they take
Speaker 6: all the money that all the people create. But Twitter
Speaker 6: and its history has never made money. Like there's been
Speaker 6: profitable years, but overall there's no money.
Speaker 5: I mean I've made money, I mean, thank.
Speaker 6: You, but but like as a company, there's like if
Speaker 6: you spread all that money around, it's not like this
Speaker 6: it's just money. Yeah, it's just like there was some
Speaker 6: people who funded this thing that and they did very well,
Speaker 6: and some people work there did very well. But that's
Speaker 6: the other aspect of this that I think is often confused.
Speaker 6: That may not be true Google, It's a makes a
Speaker 6: lont of money, but maybe that's why something different had
Speaker 6: to happen.
Speaker 3: Well, there's this question of sort of is Twitter justice
Speaker 3: social network or should it be held to a higher standard.
Speaker 7: I think as a point about governance is a good
Speaker 7: one because it does become the case of these platforms
Speaker 7: do become you know, transnational, They have to exist in
Speaker 7: multi markets, they have different rules in all of those markets.
Speaker 7: They have a board of governance that's either internalized or
Speaker 7: externalized in the case of Facebook, that tries to review
Speaker 7: what they're doing, and in some sense, regulation has been
Speaker 7: trying to catch up to what these platforms have done,
Speaker 7: and in its vacuum, things like the terms of service
Speaker 7: for how you get included in the Apple App Store
Speaker 7: become the most important law in the land. Whether or
Speaker 7: not you can be in the app store matters way
Speaker 7: more than what the EUS said, what regulations the EU
Speaker 7: have passed here too for or what the US does
Speaker 7: in a congressional hearing about Twitter, like.
Speaker 2: That is the law of the land. But it probably
Speaker 2: shouldn't be that way.
Speaker 7: It probably, in my view, should be the case that
Speaker 7: these platforms have to adhere to a certain set of
Speaker 7: values and that are held to account when they trespass
Speaker 7: against those values by democratic systems.
Speaker 3: So you were the White House Chief Digital Officer, do
Speaker 3: you think Twitter should be regulated?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 7: Definitely, Yeah, I think absolutely. I think regulation is has
Speaker 7: been long overdue domestically, it's already happening around the world.
Speaker 7: The type of the type of regulation I think is
Speaker 7: almost in arguable that anyone ought support or you know,
Speaker 7: that's even from a technologies perspective, is just greater transparency
Speaker 7: on how these things work. Because the thing that people
Speaker 7: don't understand is there is this naive perception similar to
Speaker 7: the money making thing, which is that these companies will
Speaker 7: do anything to twist the knobs and squeeze a few
Speaker 7: more dollars. The reality is that no one running these
Speaker 7: companies actually understands what's going on that well. That I mean,
Speaker 7: like these are we're talking about stochastic systems that are
Speaker 7: amplifying content according to a set of rules that some
Speaker 7: human wrote, but the output of those rules is unpredictable.
Speaker 5: Increasingly some human didn't Yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 7: And so you don't even know you don't even know
Speaker 7: what people are seeing or why, and unless you have
Speaker 7: some third party ability to audit and review what are
Speaker 7: the impacts of what people are seeing?
Speaker 2: What are people seeing?
Speaker 7: I think we, we, including the people who built these systems,
Speaker 7: can confidently say they understand the effect of what they've felt.
Speaker 6: I will add also this will sound self serving, but
Speaker 6: I'm actually really proud of.
Speaker 5: How Twitter has governed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, over since we started it, and Jason was a
Speaker 6: big part of this in the early days, and then
Speaker 6: Alex mcgilvory, Vigia, most recently del Harvey. There's a whole
Speaker 6: department of people and I think across trust and safety
Speaker 6: industry wide, who take their jobs very very seriously, are
Speaker 6: very values driven and very thoughtful and really experts on
Speaker 6: these issues in a way that people outside have no
Speaker 6: idea the complexity and the thoughtfulness that goes into these
Speaker 6: decisions about what can stay.
Speaker 1: On, what right?
Speaker 3: I mean, what was it like being behind the scenes
Speaker 3: of all of that, what stays on, what comes down?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean it's crazy, like because people think, like
Speaker 7: to as point, people think it's like, why don't you.
Speaker 2: Just remove the Nazis.
Speaker 7: It's like, well, the issue is that there's some guy
Speaker 7: who's not exactly a Nazi but is like cosplaying as
Speaker 7: like a Nazi tinged frog, And how do we feel
Speaker 7: about like Nazi tinge You know, it's this very like
Speaker 7: edge case stuff. There's this guy named Noah who was
Speaker 7: a Twitter troll very early two thousand and seven, two
Speaker 7: thousand and eight, and he was creating a bunch of
Speaker 7: accounts on Twitter and having using the API to have
Speaker 7: them all talk to each other and when occasionally use
Speaker 7: them to brigade like other people with weird art projects
Speaker 7: that he was building.
Speaker 2: I've got a bit of, like, you know, an anarchist
Speaker 2: in me as well. It's like, oh, let's just see
Speaker 2: what you can do on this canvas of the web.
Speaker 7: I was like, yeah, we'll see what happens when you
Speaker 7: like put a bunch of art projects out there and
Speaker 7: have all the bots talk to each other. What will
Speaker 7: it be That I thought it was cool, But on
Speaker 7: the other hand, you had users writing in and be
Speaker 7: like I just like, my whole thing got messed up
Speaker 7: because this guy targeted me with a bunch of weird pictures.
Speaker 7: And so I remember I was having a conversation with
Speaker 7: him was like, could you just, like, you know, be
Speaker 7: more chill.
Speaker 2: You know, He's like, well, what does that? What does
Speaker 2: that mean?
Speaker 7: I was like, well, we're trying to figure out how
Speaker 7: to write the rules, but you're just you're just doing
Speaker 7: a lot right now.
Speaker 2: And like he just it just he just wouldn't be
Speaker 2: kept in a box.
Speaker 7: There's a lot of things like that that don't fall
Speaker 7: in a bright line category.
Speaker 5: It reminds me of different metaphors that.
Speaker 6: You're like, you're like hosting a party, yeah, and like
Speaker 6: someone's ruining the vibe, yeah, or I mean maybe they're
Speaker 6: putting someone in danger. And then it's like police, but
Speaker 6: someone's just ruining the vibe. You're like, be more chill.
Speaker 6: I mean that's ideal. Like if you want to have
Speaker 6: a good party in a good environment, you need to
Speaker 6: make it comfortable and say for everybody, but there could
Speaker 6: be different vibes and different conversations, but you you try
Speaker 6: to do that for the whole world, and then it
Speaker 6: gets very hard and it's very very nuanced, and I
Speaker 6: believe you want to host a good party not just
Speaker 6: say like do whatever you want on the streets. We
Speaker 6: just pave the streets, and that's all we do, right, right,
Speaker 6: because it's and that's proven with lots of parts of
Speaker 6: the web where people don't govern and they turn horrible.
Speaker 5: It turns horrible.
Speaker 3: Okay, well what about former President Trump?
Speaker 4: Would you a band Trump?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I mean those are those are the things that, like,
Speaker 7: those kind of decisions get a lot of outside attention
Speaker 7: because it's like the president of the United States or whatever.
Speaker 3: Well, it's also a metaphor or like the broader problem.
Speaker 7: I do think, like the harm like and actually like
Speaker 7: just to give back, like I do think Jack deserves
Speaker 7: a lot of credit in the post twenty sixteen environment
Speaker 7: for dedicating more resources to figuring out these hard questions
Speaker 7: of like of of how should we mitigate harm? More
Speaker 7: like obviously we've backed ourselves in a corner somehow where
Speaker 7: the platform is being used in new ways that.
Speaker 2: Are causing harm for users. What do we do about that?
Speaker 7: The empowered leaders like Vija to figure that out and
Speaker 7: drive those teams, and it led to a decision making
Speaker 7: process that people can, you.
Speaker 2: Know, question the results of.
Speaker 7: But that's the governance structure is more important than anyone.
Speaker 2: Decision of you know, should we ban Trump or not?
Speaker 7: It's like, Okay, how does that decision get made, Who's
Speaker 7: who's involved in it? Like, how does that decision be
Speaker 7: made transparent to other people? I mean to give you
Speaker 7: just a specific answer, since ye have I definitely would
Speaker 7: have banned Trumpty incided, you know, insided a coup against
Speaker 7: the United States, Like I think there should be a
Speaker 7: no coup policy. You should be not be able to use,
Speaker 7: like you should not be able to use the service
Speaker 7: to inside a coupe.
Speaker 2: That would be that would be something I'd be comfortable
Speaker 2: standing behind.
Speaker 5: I agree with that.
Speaker 6: I think that's where it gets really, that's where it
Speaker 6: gets really murky, because there is it's then you go back,
Speaker 6: but it's not actually a house party. It is actually
Speaker 6: this very important service that the world communicates and worldly.
Speaker 6: And should you ban the president of the United States,
Speaker 6: even if you believe that individual is doing harm to
Speaker 6: the world. I think I don't know the answer my question.
Speaker 6: I'm actually I was on the board during that time,
Speaker 6: and we didn't talk about, you know, whether we should
Speaker 6: ban Trump. Maybe there were a few conversations, but there
Speaker 6: was much more conversation about how do we decide these things?
Speaker 6: And I think that was an incredibly hard thing to decide.
Speaker 5: But my take on that is like, it's not actually clear.
Speaker 6: If these rules were super objective, we could just have
Speaker 6: the computers moderate it.
Speaker 5: And maybe we're getting.
Speaker 6: Closer to that with AI, but at least up until now,
Speaker 6: the rules are subjective. And that's why there's a whole
Speaker 6: infrastructure of humans. I don't think they can be made
Speaker 6: completely objective. And the same way the law that we
Speaker 6: that we live by isn't completely objective, and that's why
Speaker 6: we have judges and juries and the whole process to
Speaker 6: figure out like where things fall.
Speaker 5: The same thing is true in you know, in on
Speaker 5: this platform, how.
Speaker 3: Does Twitter survive eat? Long does Twitter survive us?
Speaker 2: Well, we tried to kill the product a lot.
Speaker 7: I mean we we I mean it didn't work very
Speaker 7: well for a while when we were working there.
Speaker 5: So I mean, there seems to be anti fragile.
Speaker 2: There's this joke, there's this joke about.
Speaker 7: You know, not joke, but there's a standard in the
Speaker 7: industry of you know, you got to have like.
Speaker 2: Five nines or how many nines of uptime do you have?
Speaker 7: You know, you up like nine nine point nine nine
Speaker 7: percent of the time, And Google was like you know
Speaker 7: a seven nine company, right, it never went down And
Speaker 7: I remember when in like twenty eight Twitter was like,
Speaker 7: can we get a nine? We can we buy a nine?
Speaker 4: I saw it failwell a few times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it didn't work really well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but it'll survive. I mean, things that big don't die.
Speaker 6: And Yahoo's still a company, my Space is still a thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think that's fine.
Speaker 6: I mean, and look, I think it's way too soon
Speaker 6: to tell whether or not it bounces back. I don't
Speaker 6: even know what the numbers are. Maybe it's thriving, but
Speaker 6: reputationally it's very different, at least.
Speaker 5: Amongst people I know.
Speaker 4: Does the brand recover?
Speaker 6: I think that's hard. I think brand recovery is much harder.
Speaker 6: And now the brand is very linked to Elon. There's
Speaker 6: all these influencer companies that are like very personality driven,
Speaker 6: and now Twitter after the fact became one.
Speaker 5: Is very interesting.
Speaker 6: But I just think I think the reason to be
Speaker 6: optimistic right now is related to your question before it
Speaker 6: should be a company?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Should the Internet be a company?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 6: And guess what anyone can make a new Twitter, or
Speaker 6: a better Twitter, or just a whole new paradigm on
Speaker 6: the Internet, and lots of people are trying right now,
Speaker 6: and that's really cool. And I don't think there's going
Speaker 6: to be a Twitter replacement. But for a long time
Speaker 6: there has been not that much innovation in consumer internet,
Speaker 6: and because it was very hard, because Twitter, Instagram, et
Speaker 6: cetera had sucked up so much of the attention and
Speaker 6: if you need want to build critical mass of a network,
Speaker 6: you had to get people out of these things. There's
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of people working on new concepts and ideas,
Speaker 6: and some of those are going to thrive. And I
Speaker 6: don't think I think Twitter will be one of the
Speaker 6: many things we look at to communicating online.
Speaker 7: The brand question, I think I share, I share your optimism,
Speaker 7: which is rare for me, but like you know, because
Speaker 7: because like we're in you know, we're in like a
Speaker 7: really bad market right now, and that's when the coolest
Speaker 7: stuff is always happened. I mean, we met up in
Speaker 7: the thepost dot crash era, right we were like in
Speaker 7: a detective's office on Market Street, like you know, it
Speaker 7: was like there was no one was building companies in
Speaker 7: San Francisco, and that that kind of that kind of
Speaker 7: collapse and resetting of expectations is really healthy and is
Speaker 7: what drives new possibilities. The other thing that drives me
Speaker 7: possibilities is platform evolution, and.
Speaker 2: There hasn't been one in a long time in tech.
Speaker 7: The last platform evolution was the mobile, the mobile revolution,
Speaker 7: and the and the and cloud computing revolution. And it's
Speaker 7: been for in terms of tech, just a very long
Speaker 7: time since those And you know, it's a long time
Speaker 7: by how thirsty the industry is to believe in anything else, like,
Speaker 7: please let it be Web three, Please let it be
Speaker 7: the VR goggles. There's got to be something. There's got
Speaker 7: to be some new land out there, and now like
Speaker 7: everyone believes it's gonna be AI and and that one,
Speaker 7: at least as opposed to the other two, looks like
Speaker 7: it might be something like you can do stuff with it,
Speaker 7: which is and it's getting better faster, which is.
Speaker 2: A good hallmark of technology. But you know, it's it.
Speaker 7: It all that leads me to believe, as ev does,
Speaker 7: that there's gonna be people trying stuff now and there's
Speaker 7: an opportunity because of the brand collapse of Twitter. The
Speaker 7: brand collapse of Twitter is particularly sad because it was
Speaker 7: self inflicted and the decisions that he made around verification
Speaker 7: are kind of indicative of that because by choosing to
Speaker 7: charge for verification, that wasn't really verification. This was just
Speaker 7: sort of a way of inflicting harm on journalists and
Speaker 7: celebrities that he didn't like and who's who thought he
Speaker 7: could extract value from, whereas in fact having those people
Speaker 7: on the platform was the brand value of the platform.
Speaker 7: Those people being on the platform and being identified as
Speaker 7: they were allowed people have trust in participating in conversations
Speaker 7: on Twitter, and so that brand value is eroded.
Speaker 4: What about Elon Musk's brand.
Speaker 2: It's really suffered. I would say, I.
Speaker 9: Think he's he's a wild man, but he's also a genius,
Speaker 9: and he's an engineer, and he's I think he's brilliant,
Speaker 9: but no one's brilliant and everything.
Speaker 7: This is this is the fundamental This is the fun
Speaker 7: mental problem. This is one of my view Silicon vallees
Speaker 7: fundamental sins is the sin of genius, which is that
Speaker 7: you see someone who's made a ton of money, and
Speaker 7: this is just sort of an American problem where you
Speaker 7: believe that someone's made a ton of money must be smart,
Speaker 7: like they couldn't have just there wasn't you discount luck
Speaker 7: and you overvalue skill.
Speaker 3: Had any feel right now looking at something that you
Speaker 3: created kind of going through this, Is there any sadness?
Speaker 4: Is there any anger? Is there any feeling of regret?
Speaker 5: I'm very zen, but.
Speaker 4: We don't want to send you to therapy after this interview.
Speaker 6: But I was sad when the purchase actually went through.
Speaker 6: I was surprised, Like up to the last minute, I
Speaker 6: thought it was not going to happen, and then when
Speaker 6: it happened, I was like, oh, I no longer own
Speaker 6: any Twitter and it's not a public company. I was
Speaker 6: a little sad about that. I wasn't sure why. It
Speaker 6: was a nice check, it was a good prize for
Speaker 6: my remaining shares. I really felt for the people who
Speaker 6: were there who went and you know, I had a
Speaker 6: lot of turmoil and lots of really great people. But
Speaker 6: I also am always a fan of creative destruction. And
Speaker 6: you know, what's new in Jason's point earlier that something
Speaker 6: would have happened anyway because of the financial picture.
Speaker 2: Of the world.
Speaker 5: It's also just you know, social media was not perfect,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 6: But like what's what's important about maintaining Twitter as it was?
Speaker 6: And like maybe there's maybe it's the wrong idea. Maybe
Speaker 6: we just had the wrong idea with Twitter. Now it's
Speaker 6: time to move on to some other idea.
Speaker 3: I mean that's a big thing to say coming from
Speaker 3: the founder of Twitter.
Speaker 6: I think it was the right idea for the time, right,
Speaker 6: But I don't think that means it's the right idea forever.
Speaker 5: I mean, what's the right idea forever? Especially in technology?
Speaker 4: Is it TikTok? Is it mastered on?
Speaker 3: Is it their Snap?
Speaker 2: There's TikTok's pretty great, that's pretty great.
Speaker 5: It's just a completely different thing.
Speaker 6: And there's so one thing that's happening social media. I
Speaker 6: think the idea of social media is probably the thing
Speaker 6: I'm questioning the most right now, because social is really cool.
Speaker 5: Everybody's social.
Speaker 6: People are interesting, people want to connect with each other.
Speaker 5: And then there's media. Media is also very interesting.
Speaker 6: For a minute, we thought, oh, the best would be
Speaker 6: if we got media from our friends. TikTok and some
Speaker 6: other places are showing the media from your friends is
Speaker 6: probably not as good as the media from some super
Speaker 6: talented person who's you've never met before. And you could
Speaker 6: just enjoy that media, and then you might enjoy talking
Speaker 6: to your friend that's social and maybe they don't have
Speaker 6: to be the same thing.
Speaker 5: And there's a lot of trends like on.
Speaker 6: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, where fewer and fewer people are posting.
Speaker 6: That's been the trends for years and because of the professionalization,
Speaker 6: and but those who do post are building bigger audiences,
Speaker 6: they're making businesses out of it, the whole creator economy
Speaker 6: blah blah. And then so for a normal person putting
Speaker 6: posts out into the world, thoughts is both higher risk
Speaker 6: and lower reward than it was before. So that's no
Speaker 6: longer where one time thought, well.
Speaker 5: Everyone's going to do everyone's going to do this. Everyone's
Speaker 5: not going to do this, Why would they? Why would
Speaker 5: they do it? Everyone's going to talk to their friends
Speaker 5: online and off.
Speaker 6: And I actually think there's tons of interesting things now
Speaker 6: if we think about how do we use the internet
Speaker 6: to help people be more social without consuming or creating media.
Speaker 3: Maybe the future of social media is a separation of
Speaker 3: social and media.
Speaker 4: Really interesting.
Speaker 3: What are the chances that Elon does pull this off?
Speaker 3: What are the chances he creates a Twitter that's a
Speaker 3: better version.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't rule it out, Yeah, I wouldn't really.
Speaker 6: I think it's definitely too soon to tell what's going
Speaker 6: to happen. I think if they keep trying things, which
Speaker 6: they almost certainly will, there's going to be some interesting
Speaker 6: discoveries and opportunity to say, oh, that was a thing
Speaker 6: that Elon did, whether or not he did it or
Speaker 6: someone on his.
Speaker 5: Team did it.
Speaker 6: But but I also think generally the new thing does
Speaker 6: not come from the old thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it would be surprising also if the thing that
Speaker 7: like sort of turned it around that made it a
Speaker 7: win was there's some feature that they have to launch, right.
Speaker 7: I mean, like, I don't think this is like a
Speaker 7: we have a roadmap of three features, and if we
Speaker 7: ship them, Twitter suddenly.
Speaker 6: Becomes there were a lot of people think about features
Speaker 6: for a good decade and then at software they're infinite possibilities.
Speaker 6: There's new AI possibilities, et cetera. I mean, it's probably
Speaker 6: pretty fun to own Twitter. I owned it once. It
Speaker 6: was it was it was interesting. It's like what a
Speaker 6: canvas to create from. If you have the pressure of
Speaker 6: and oh my god, we're losing billions of dollars, maybe
Speaker 6: that it limits your creativity a bit, which is why
Speaker 6: I think Jack was feeling a bit stuck being a
Speaker 6: public company, and the Elon solution is making a private company.
Speaker 6: I don't know how comfortable Elon is with losing billions
Speaker 6: of dollars. Maybe it's fine, maybe he can get to
Speaker 6: break even and then just play with it. And I
Speaker 6: do think that is actually important. I do think being
Speaker 6: a public company and having it's the classic innovator's dilemma.
Speaker 6: You can't do anything interesting because you have to keep
Speaker 6: this revenue growing. A certain to zig when you just
Speaker 6: have to make these numbers go up is very, very hard.
Speaker 6: So that does increase the chances.
Speaker 3: Actually, you haven't tweeted in a while, you haven't been
Speaker 3: tweeting much.
Speaker 2: What the hell? What would it take?
Speaker 4: What would it take to get you back?
Speaker 6: I just I don't enjoy it as much as I
Speaker 6: used to. I haven't tweeted that much for years. I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm mostly probably ninety percent of my.
Speaker 5: Tweets in the last five years, we're just medium links.
Speaker 3: But is the bar higher now?
Speaker 6: I just I'm like those regular people who I don't
Speaker 6: want to be an influencer necessarily, and the the it's this.
Speaker 6: I have been on masted on and using that at
Speaker 6: dot DM unmasked it.
Speaker 5: On and it's been it's been fun.
Speaker 6: It's a bit more freer as I feel more comfortable
Speaker 6: just throwing stuff out there. But that's what part of
Speaker 6: what got me think is just like social media, do
Speaker 6: I have the need to just like, hey guys, I
Speaker 6: had a thought, let's throw it out there in the world.
Speaker 6: What do you think. I love doing that. I love
Speaker 6: having conversation, exploring ideas. A lot of the drive for
Speaker 6: me that's gone is like, can I put something out
Speaker 6: there that people are going to positive respond to? Like
Speaker 6: the dopamine hit of doing that just doesn't catch me.
Speaker 6: Like you used what about.
Speaker 7: Just like a nice eating a taco for nostalgia saying tweeting?
Speaker 5: I think I did that, and within within the last
Speaker 5: few months.
Speaker 7: You hit on this and this is like one of
Speaker 7: the things that like, I think actually we were wrong
Speaker 7: about going back to like a blogger time.
Speaker 2: Which was the people at Google didn't understand why.
Speaker 7: The web was a canvas and a participatory medium, and
Speaker 7: I think they were wrong about that.
Speaker 2: But we believed everyone was going to do it.
Speaker 5: I kind of believe everyone did even a blog.
Speaker 7: Everyone was gonna have everyone everyone will have a blog,
Speaker 7: And they're like, well, what will people write these about?
Speaker 2: Whatever they're interested in the right Yeah, their life, share
Speaker 2: their ideas.
Speaker 7: The problems that come with deciding you want to be
Speaker 7: a content creator and putting yourselves out there.
Speaker 2: It's just you have to be willing to like kind.
Speaker 7: Of opt into a certain model, and so as a result,
Speaker 7: Twitter has become less fun, you know for that type
Speaker 7: of user.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know what it's like.
Speaker 6: It's like lots of people like playing guitar and a
Speaker 6: very few of them, you know, or maybe many of
Speaker 6: them aspire to be famous musicians, but it's just the
Speaker 6: path to get there.
Speaker 5: Everybody knows. It's just like crazy.
Speaker 6: There's not like this huge disparity between the people who
Speaker 6: were good at it or right.
Speaker 5: I mean really, creators aren't even on Twitter.
Speaker 6: They're on TikTok where they have these massive, massive audiences.
Speaker 6: If you look at that and think, well, I'm going
Speaker 6: to step onto that same stage and play my guitar,
Speaker 6: then you're like, no, I'm not. Yeah, I'm like and
Speaker 6: but it used to be the stage wasn't that big,
Speaker 6: so it's like, oh, yeah, hop up on stage with me.
Speaker 5: We're all just hanging out jamming.
Speaker 6: That was when we thought, yeah, everybody will do this,
Speaker 6: and then the stage changed, So.
Speaker 3: What would your advice be for Elon Musk right now,
Speaker 3: what would your advice be for anyone, for somebody running
Speaker 3: Twitter or somebody running a social For.
Speaker 7: Elon in particular, I would you know, it would be
Speaker 7: the classic. You should really go on like a listening
Speaker 7: tour and like go around the world.
Speaker 2: You've got a plane, go around the world.
Speaker 7: And meet with some users in different parts of the
Speaker 7: world that use the product or power users of the
Speaker 7: product that derive value from doing it, that are outside
Speaker 7: of this very specific bubble in which you exist, that
Speaker 7: are this very strangeness of like right wing you know,
Speaker 7: right wing agitators that you reply to a lot. Go
Speaker 7: meet with the folks in India who are sort of
Speaker 7: being prosecuted for the use of Twitter. Go meet with
Speaker 7: dissidents who are like you know, opposed to the Chinese
Speaker 7: government using Twitter in Hong Kong or Taiwan. Go use go,
Speaker 7: go meet with people in all these parts of the
Speaker 7: world that are you know, walle on Twitter to do
Speaker 7: different things.
Speaker 2: It doesn't all have to be politics.
Speaker 7: You meet with people who are you know, weird music
Speaker 7: creators and in parts of the world that you know,
Speaker 7: we don't get a lot of visibility into here and
Speaker 7: understand why they value the service and what they get
Speaker 7: from it.
Speaker 5: I don't feel like I have advice for Elon.
Speaker 6: I would just say my hope is Elon keeps doing
Speaker 6: important work that impacts the world and in really amazing ways.
Speaker 5: As he has for a lot of his career.
Speaker 6: And I don't know if it's about getting more of
Speaker 6: his tweets.
Speaker 2: Sam.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like if you took like the philosophy that led
Speaker 7: him to open up like the Tesla supercharger network to
Speaker 7: other vehicles, and said, like, what is the equivalent move
Speaker 7: for Twitter, That's great, That's an interesting idea.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is obviously more personal, but like I
Speaker 3: feel to your point, like if Twitter went away or
Speaker 3: materially changed, like, it makes me a little sad. I
Speaker 3: feel like I don't have a platform to go out
Speaker 3: there on or it's for some reason, it feels more
Speaker 3: vulnerable out there.
Speaker 4: I feel more vulnerable out there.
Speaker 2: You do have a TV show. I have other ways
Speaker 2: of being hurt.
Speaker 4: True, not everything rises.
Speaker 3: To the level of the top that I'm meeting down
Speaker 3: the street.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: That's why I think as a user it is a
Speaker 3: little sad. I mean, I'm sure there's other people who
Speaker 3: are super excited, right about the problem.
Speaker 5: A lot of people love Twitter and don't want it,
Speaker 5: and it was pretty good. It's pretty good.
Speaker 3: Is that you're saying, well, maybe people just don't want it,
Speaker 3: but it was pretty good.
Speaker 5: It's yeah, I don't.
Speaker 7: Know as a person on this couch who's most addicted.
Speaker 2: And like loves using camp pull myself away.
Speaker 4: You're still tweeting.
Speaker 2: I tweet a bunch.
Speaker 7: There's constantly things on the service, even in this somewhat
Speaker 7: sadder time that I'm like, this is the service is
Speaker 7: never going to die. This is delighte. Even though I
Speaker 7: believe my own personal experience is that it's less volume
Speaker 7: than it was, that it somehow feels more dead. You
Speaker 7: still see those those occasional ones that make you're like,
Speaker 7: this can never go away.
Speaker 6: This interactually a great And by the way, I don't
Speaker 6: tweet a lot, but my timeline's great. There's amazing stuff
Speaker 6: on there. And even if most people don't want to tweet,
Speaker 6: if one hundred million people in the world share the
Speaker 6: most interesting idea, thought, or piece of media they found today,
Speaker 6: which is small percentage of the population, and the computers
Speaker 6: could algorithmically give you the most interesting slice of that possible.
Speaker 5: That's a hell of a media service.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so we might not be losing as much.
Speaker 7: We're really we're losing more of a vibe than we
Speaker 7: are losing a vibe.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's about the vibe.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey did not respond to requests
Speaker 1: for comment. Thanks so much for listening to this episode
Speaker 1: of the Circuit. I'm Emily Chang. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can
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