Transcript
Corey
0:00
It is live. Yes.
Carter
0:03
Don't we have music?
Carter
0:07
Hey, welcome to The Strategists with Corey and Hogan. No, Corey and Hogan. Carter and...
Carter
0:12
Fuck, I did that bad. Can we replay that? I did that...
Corey
0:16
I mean, why would we mess with perfection? Carter, you're five minutes late. No, I'm not. Zain's not here. I
Carter
0:24
I was five minutes early, and then Riverside, I could see you. And I'll tell you something, The look of
Corey
0:30
face, the look, the look
Carter
0:32
look of disappointment on your face made me feel like maybe not coming in today because
Carter
0:37
because the look of disappointment was really strong.
Carter
0:41
Like how could Carter fuck this up? I
Carter
0:43
I didn't fuck this up.
Corey
0:45
I mean, I feel like you did because how did we fix this just for the audience? How did we resolve this problem? I
Carter
0:50
I restarted my computer, but
Carter
0:55
but I don't think that that's my fault. I restarted my computer and Twitter is still fucked up.
Corey
1:00
that's a great point. It's not the servers in San Francisco. No. I'll give you that. And
Carter
1:05
And I still can't figure out Mastodon. So both
Corey
1:08
of those feel like- I'm not even going to try. The minute I got to the Mastodon screen
Corey
1:13
screen where it was like, now pick your server. You've got to go somewhere else. I thought, this is not for me. This is not going
Corey
1:19
Also, can I say in all candor, I'm not really sure why it's the solution because it doesn't have any verification. yeah
Corey
1:27
you know it's deeply federated yeah
Corey
1:28
yeah so apparently you could end up on a server that was all crazy right wing uh trolls i
Corey
1:34
i don't know that's why i didn't go on the one that the
Carter
1:36
the economists are on like econ twitter looked like it was or econ mastodon looked like it was going to be like that where people were all you know spouting economic theater theories and shit like that i couldn't handle that
Corey
1:50
possessed you to even consider econ twitter can i ask well
Carter
1:55
well Well, I like to think of myself as pretty smart.
Corey
1:58
Doesn't Zane have a degree in economics?
Carter
2:00
Does Zane really have a degree? I
Corey
2:02
I'm not really sure. Probably in communications. We can say whatever we want about him. He's probably got a degree
Carter
2:06
degree in communications. Failed out of economics.
Carter
2:09
You know, failed out of business. So it might be economics. Probably failed out of economics, so wound up in communications.
Corey
2:16
Now, I do believe he was a distinguished alumni award recipient at the U of A.
Corey
2:22
That's about all I know.
Carter
2:23
Of the U of A? He went to Edmonton? Oh, fuck. You can get any degree up there.
Carter
2:29
Anybody can get a degree.
Carter
2:31
It's not like the
Corey
2:32
the University of Calgary.
Carter
2:33
That's high status, baby. That's where I went.
Corey
2:36
That's the best university this
Carter
2:38
this side of the Red Deer River.
Corey
2:39
River. Certainly, certainly has the best administrators. I agree. Yeah.
Carter
2:46
You're looking really good
Carter
2:46
today, by the way. You could have shaved for me.
Carter
2:48
But, you know, whatever.
Corey
2:52
right uh zane is not here because he's sick i
Carter
2:55
i was sick on thursday so i said you know what i said
Carter
2:58
a special episode and you were right there this
Corey
3:00
this is the this is the patreon yeah this is so thursday originally zane
Corey
3:06
zane was in toronto yeah but he didn't have his microphone and
Corey
3:10
and you said and i let me just find the exact quote here i
Corey
3:14
i can't do it unless you want me to to be recording from the toilet yeah
Carter
3:17
things didn't go my way
Corey
3:18
way i have follow-up questions but we'll wait until after things
Carter
3:21
things didn't go my way on thursday i
Corey
3:25
did seriously consider just doing like a like a rant uh like a one-hour rant about twitter by myself i'd
Carter
3:33
i'd listen to that particular
Carter
3:34
i'd have listened yeah
Corey
3:35
yeah i know you know you'd listen to anything though
Carter
3:37
that's true that's true because i'd have been on the toilet all
Corey
3:43
have just met a general theme there's a limit
Carter
3:45
limit to how much tiktok you can watch on the toilet it's a limit i
Corey
3:48
i don't think there is like you can actually just keep scrolling when that woman pops up and says whoa you've been doing this a lot i
Carter
3:53
i got that don't
Corey
3:54
don't let that fool you i
Carter
3:56
made me sad it
Carter
3:58
made me sad i
Carter
4:00
they seem to want me to post something now though they've got these screens where you're like if you post something you can see something i'm like i don't want to do that
Corey
4:07
that oh well yeah
Corey
4:08
yeah let's give a little get a little i guess what does that even
Corey
4:12
i don't know but i was trying to do a little bit of an intro a formal thing here to say that we didn't do patreon on thursday so this is our patreon episode and we're doing our regularly scheduled episode tomorrow
Carter
4:23
i interrupt you i'm sorry you
Corey
4:26
hey it's a whole different energy when zane's not here when are you getting when are you getting
Carter
4:30
getting your car this
Carter
4:31
this is exciting people
Corey
4:32
even know next week so i flipped i went back and i've decided yes i am going to get the car because when i went to cancel the car order they They said, oh,
Corey
4:40
oh, your car is actually on route right now.
Carter
4:43
And that was that. It was just that simple.
Corey
4:46
Well, it does lead to questions. You were $500
Carter
4:48
$500 in. You were 500 bucks in. And you would have gotten the $500 back. I would have. And you still went with the sunk cost.
Corey
4:57
it did lead to some questions, right? Like, that's quite a coincidence. And now I can't help but note it's two weeks later and I'm still waiting for this car. Yeah.
Corey
5:05
You know, still waiting for that final, yeah, come get it. Well,
Carter
5:08
Well, and you and I are going to race up and down the Deerfoot.
Corey
5:12
The Deerfoot, not Deerfoot? Well, that's
Carter
5:14
that's what I just said. I was just testing you and you didn't even fall for it.
Carter
5:17
This is the most upsetting part of the whole day.
Carter
5:21
For those of you not following along on our Twitter feeds, there's a conversation about whether or not it's the Deerfoot in Calgary or just Deerfoot. And the correct answer is, of course, the Deerfoot because it separates us from the Northeast. So there you go. That's how it developed.
Corey
5:38
Well, but I live in the Northeast, so I don't know if that logic holds for me as much. You're
Carter
5:42
You're in the Northwest part of the Northeast.
Corey
5:45
No, I'm in the Southwest part of the Northeast, if we're going to get really down to it.
Corey
5:49
This is riveting, I'm sure, for eight people. Wow. But I want to bring in the other, you know, couple thousand here. Okay.
Corey
5:58
See, because now listen. You
Carter
5:59
You know what? This whole, since we
Corey
6:00
we started recording for- You're thinking, hey, we only have 900 patrons is what you're thinking. Yeah.
Corey
6:04
Yet somehow every Patreon episode has about 2,000 downloads. I'm not so sure how I feel about that. They're
Carter
6:10
They're fucking us is what's happened. They're
Corey
6:12
They're fucking us. This is why
Carter
6:15
my contempt for the audience is the right strategy. I
Carter
6:18
I don't give a fuck.
Corey
6:19
fuck. This episode is the result of your theft. I just want you all to know that. We would have done a lot better job if you weren't stealing 50 cents of every dollar of ours here.
Carter
6:28
Get a friend to sign
Carter
6:29
up. Oh, this reminds me. we're supposed to be launching the uh 30 days of strategists uh
Carter
6:34
uh christmas special like
Corey
6:36
like 30 chris yeah we didn't really come
Corey
6:38
come up with a name i guess you just branded it right there yeah the 30 days of strategist christmas yeah
Carter
6:43
although it might be too early now that i'm looking at the date yeah
Carter
6:47
tune in next week when
Corey
6:49
launch 30 days of strategist christmas do you know if you just google how many days until well
Carter
6:55
well i'm going to go with there's 30 days in november and it's 20 days
Corey
6:57
days it's the 20th day it's 35 yeah it's 35 days i'm yeah yeah
Corey
7:02
education at the university of calgary things huh
Corey
7:08
right well 35 days of strategist christmas begins now oh
Corey
7:11
so we're offering a special where if you get two patreon six dollar subscriptions it's only 12 yeah which
Carter
7:16
which is amazing so you can get one for yourself
Corey
7:20
for you can get one for the person who you're letting steal from us already because half of you fox are listening name for free because
Carter
7:27
because you've already given the link to one of your friends now well you should buy it for that friend right and if it's a relative buy it for the relative point if it's your wife buy it for your wife if it's your husband fuck that guy don't give him anything for free can
Corey
7:42
can i tell you something okay
Carter
7:48
only thing that's even better is if you actually give this with a strategist pillow because
Carter
7:54
because the strategist pillow is fantastic heather tried it on me the other night it i don't
Corey
7:58
don't want oxygen gets through that thing so heather
Carter
8:02
heather heather now has her murder weapon i'm just saying it's
Carter
8:05
it's gonna be it's very
Corey
8:06
very good so i want you to know um that we we started we've lost 33 of our audience and we're eight minutes in and and we haven't actually started talking about anything yet so maybe this is part of the reason
Carter
8:17
reason we should talk about something what do you want to talk about you
Corey
8:19
you want to talk about something yeah
Carter
8:20
we tried twitter that didn't last as long as we thought it would well
Corey
8:23
well let's talk about twitter okay we talk about twitter we should do
Corey
8:28
i wanted i sincerely do want to talk about this because i feel like there's a few things i want to unpack there's obviously the un how unending drama when
Carter
8:35
when you have tweeted about twitter 4 000 times in the last 24 i
Corey
8:39
i can't help myself yeah it's like it's crazy it's like it's
Corey
8:43
it's like prestige television you've got something new happening all the time there's he throws in cliffhangers he actually should be making a tv show oh
Corey
8:50
like all of a sudden you know he's sending an email saying if you don't hit yes in 24, 48 hours, you're gone. You're out of here. Right. And by the way, it looks like a third of people left when he did that. And so now all of a sudden people are saying this thing's going to fail and he's shutting the Twitter offices. And then he's changing his mind less than 24 hours later and saying, actually, I need you to come to the Twitter offices. And then there's a picture of him at a whiteboard where somebody I think is basically explaining how the systems work. And he decided to post this. He thought this was confidence inspiring for for investors,
Corey
9:20
investors, for advertisers. As
Carter
9:23
As a code reviewer.
Carter
9:24
Now, you know code.
Carter
9:27
And you and I have this similar relationship.
Carter
9:29
I draw boxes, and then I never actually make out how complicated the box is. And then I used to, back in the day, send you off to figure out how to solve the boxes. And it turns out that solving
Carter
9:41
solving the boxes is really hard sometimes. Like, it's not easy. Just because you put it in a box on the whiteboard.
Corey
9:49
whiteboard. Yeah, it wasn't always easy. It doesn't mean
Corey
9:51
mean it's going to happen. I tell you, that, what, year and a half where I worked for you was a ride all the time. You
Corey
9:58
And then I didn't work for you and I had your office and that was a lot better because I also made more money
Carter
10:03
Yeah. That was better.
Carter
10:04
Hey, can I ask you a question?
Corey
10:07
Sure. Let's not jump off Twitter. No. When
Carter
10:09
When you were on Twitter, did you used to have statistics where you could see what your highest tweet was and your followers rates and how you're adding people and all the statistics and stuff like that?
Corey
10:19
Yeah. It's like there's an analytics thing on Twitter. I haven't looked at it in a while, but I think it might even be analytics.twitter.com, isn't it?
Carter
10:25
Well, I can't find it anymore.
Corey
10:28
Well, that is actually not the topic I was hoping to
Carter
10:31
to address. I'm just saying, I think that he killed
Corey
10:32
killed analytics. Stephen Carter looks for... Okay. Well, here's
Corey
10:37
There is a lot going on in Twitter, a lot, and it is very dramatic and it is very crazy, but it's also pretty
Corey
10:44
pretty problematic. And there's been a couple of problematic things that have happened in the last, let's say, 48 hours here most notably with donald trump being reinstated and i want to point out three weeks ago he said there would be no major reinstatements without like a content review panel or
Corey
11:01
something to that effect right like there was going to be a committee that was going to look at this and then he just started um reinstating people just he reinstated jordan peterson and then the next day he throws a post or like that night he puts a post up saying this is a poll like a Twitter poll, should Donald Trump be reinstated? Yes or no. Donald Trump wins like 52 to 48, like kind of Jason Kenney leadership review numbers, not super strong. You would think maybe it would give you pause still. And then he just brings the guy back.
Corey
11:31
As of right now, Donald Trump hasn't posted anything yet.
Corey
11:35
yeah, this is somebody who had encouragement of an armed resurrection of his country, really damaged American democracy, was dropped
Corey
11:44
dropped from from Twitter because of that. If you go to Donald Trump's Twitter account, and I don't recommend it, but it's a time capsule of that moment. It's what he was tweeting there. I think his last tweet was something like, I am not going to go to the inauguration before he was kicked from the platform.
Corey
12:00
And so this is just happening. And there's the actual thing that happened, which is Donald Trump being reinstated. And is this a good thing? Oh, and like the Babylon Bee, like some conservative humor site is
Corey
12:12
this a is this a proper thing but then there's the fact that he has once again flipped on himself yeah you know he made a statement three weeks ago three
Corey
12:21
three weeks ago and
Corey
12:22
and he's reversed well
Carter
12:23
well and this is
Corey
12:26
now you go on i'll get to that okay
Carter
12:28
okay well this is this is what we were talking about before i mean we we were asked by our friendly co-host last time what we would do and both of us said you got to stop moving quickly right you have have to stop reacting to the moment. And Elon just can't seem to do that. He doesn't have the ability. He said he was going to appoint a new CEO. I want
Corey
12:49
want to meet that
Carter
12:50
that person, but he hasn't done anything. Instead, he just kind of rams his stuff through one thing after another, one thing after another. And I do think that this has a correlation to politics because
Carter
13:01
because I think we've all worked for that politician that just wants to just keep lighting themselves on fire all the the single time all the time and yeah you're looking at me stop looking at me when i say that you bastard you bastard yeah
Corey
13:15
yeah it's just the politicians just the politicians that
Carter
13:17
that do this and elon is i mentioned
Corey
13:19
mentioned about that office i got i
Corey
13:24
it was only because
Carter
13:25
because i was mean to brad wall and jim prentice so
Corey
13:29
okay well look you later
Carter
13:32
a podcast with me that the title was even jim prentice's mother doesn't like jim prentice so you
Corey
13:38
know yeah that's true yeah
Carter
13:39
yeah you should have been out with me that's what i'm saying all
Corey
13:43
all right well listen the
Carter
13:45
the rambly mess new
Corey
13:46
new ceo comment that actually came out of him in a court proceeding about tesla which is just part of the additional chaos that's going on like let's not forget he's also the ceo of a bunch of other companies right now and he's spending all of his time in twitter trying to figure out how
Corey
14:00
how key cards work uh if you believe some of the twitter rumors here but uh
Corey
14:04
uh you know he he's
Corey
14:05
he's just he's wild he's out of control and then today he was posting like this this like kind of vulgar misogynistic meme about you know donald trump uh would he be tempted back into twitter right um and
Corey
14:19
and at a certain point
Corey
14:21
what do you do what do you do as somebody who like me i
Corey
14:25
i know this is you too does kind of love Twitter is kind of a lot of fun for us, right?
Corey
14:30
But at a certain point, and perhaps it's way in the rear view mirror, and we've just been in denial about it, like, when does it just become amoral to use this platform?
Carter
14:38
You know, I think that that was a question I was certainly asking myself when he threatened to bring Trump back, because Trump, to me, was, you know, the worst part of Twitter when he was on it. You know, there's lots of worst parts of Twitter all the the time and uh but there's lots of great parts of twitter um but when trump was on twitter it was really just a much worse place so when he invited him back i honestly thought about you know stepping away from it and deleting my account um
Carter
15:08
um unfortunately or fortunately i've managed my life around how to how i get information and most of that information now is gathered through uh Twitter. I have a few subscriptions to news sites. Back
Carter
15:28
in the day, we used to go and visit the news aggregators. I've given up that. I'm not doing that. This is the way that I get my information. And I don't listen to the radio stations anymore. I get my information straight
Carter
15:44
straight straight from the source the reporters tweeting it like it always used to be and i'm not sure that i can actually disentangle where i am currently from this mess uh that elon musk is creating what do you think can you can you disentangle yourself i
Corey
16:00
i i've had kind of similar reactions this is where i get so much information it's where i you know see the world but it
Corey
16:07
it does get me think there's the moral argument but there's also the what's your plan b because this whole site could would go down in some way shape or form in the next bit we really glossed over the fact that a
Corey
16:18
a third of the remaining employees keep in mind he'd already fired half of them left
Corey
16:24
right generally speaking the people who are going to leave when you put an offer like that in front of them are the ones with options now there are some very talented people who don't have options simply because of visa requirements as has been well documented they're
Corey
16:35
they're kind of stuck at twitter
Corey
16:38
that's that's pretty problematic right like when all of a sudden you're talking about out of a company that was 7,500 people, you're now a company of, let's just say 2,500. I don't think we've gotten firm reporting on the numbers there.
Corey
16:53
That's especially weird when you consider you're a global organization that is going to have to deal with global law enforcement, right? What do you do when there's like sex predators putting up child pornography in Romania, right? Like what's your plan to deal with that? You know, what are your content team doing? Does anybody speak Romanian to be able to review this or have the the Romanian people all quit. Like, I just want to stress, like on one hand, a lot of people would say 7,500 people seems like a lot for a website like that. Let's set aside the technical complications. Let's think about the social complications about running a global network like that. What
Carter
17:25
the hell are you going to do? We'd be, you know, you and I have been to the Twitter offices in Toronto. I mean, it's not a huge operation, you know, the, the, the content moderation and the, and the determinants of, of the, of the trends and those types of things That took a lot of people. And the people we know at Twitter are gone from Twitter. Obviously, we didn't know everybody in Twitter Canada. But losing a direct link to Canada, I mean, it makes it so much easier too for a politician like Justin Trudeau to come in and say, now's the time that we put the regulatory framework in place to actually manage these types of systems. organisms, gone are the people who were lobbying to ensure that that didn't happen. Gone are the people who were trying to battle back against a different culture. I mean, freedom of speech, and we went through this when we were with H&K, because H&K was an American company. And freedom of speech fundamentally means something different in the United States than it does basically in the rest of the world. The rest of the world does not have freedom of speech
Carter
18:31
in the way that the Americans have interpreted it. And I would argue the Americans have interpreted it quite
Carter
18:37
quite poorly. But Musk now seems to be keen on building the entire platform on an American style of freedom of speech, one that you and I, when we were chatting and seeing what was going on even back 10 years ago now, just
Carter
18:55
just seemed like it was too much, just seemed like it was going too far. are. And I think that we can now see the results of that action is that it is too far in this freedom of speech without responsibility. We always used to have freedom of speech. We used to write letters to the editor of the newspaper. And if they were deemed inappropriate by the editor, they weren't posted.
Carter
19:17
Now no one gets to deem them inappropriate anymore.
Carter
19:22
can still still go to the town hall and still scream at the world, but ain't no one listening. And now with Twitter and Facebook, I really do think, and in fact, if I was maybe even advising Justin Trudeau, I'd say this is probably a great time to take a whack at this, not just for Twitter, but for Meta and Google as well.
Corey
19:43
Well, look, I think one of the things we were talking about the other day about the ArriveCat app is
Corey
19:47
that there are complexities involved with these big organizations and these big operations that you don't really sort of consider. So on a certain level, like let's, let's talk, let's draw the parallel with Twitter here. Like on one level with Twitter's doing is pretty fucking basic, right? You are, you are putting things up and somebody else can read those things. And
Corey
20:07
And yes, there's like, there's the way that it shows you and there's the algorithm behind it, but the complication comes from scale, right? All of a sudden it's one thing to say, yeah, I want to, I want to sort a million posts, But what do you do about sorting a billion posts? That's a thousand times as complicated. How are you going to do that at speed? How is this going to work? How are you going to get relevant content and make sure you're not throwing it to somebody else? That's one source of complication. The other source of complication, though, is the way it butts up with other organizations. So when we were talking about ArriveCam, we're like, oh, my God, you're going to have to work with all of those government departments. Yeah, maybe it shouldn't be as expensive as it was, but you couldn't code it in your basement because it's the meetings, it's the conversations.
Corey
20:48
Twitter works everywhere in the world. where Twitter is allowed. It's not in China, I suppose. Although I think that there are expats who will use Twitter in China.
Corey
20:57
You've got a situation now where 2,500 people are going to have to maintain global coordination, right? Let's think about GDPR. Let's think about the privacy laws in Europe, just as a starting point. This
Corey
21:11
one thing. Let's think about the minute Russia says data
Corey
21:14
data in Russia needs to be maintained in Russia, right? Well, forget Russia for now, Now, in a sense, because we're not dealing with Russia because of all of these sanctions, but that used to always drive me crazy when I was working for corporate clients and we had something that spanned across Europe, including Russia.
Corey
21:30
It's the conversations, it's the interactions, it's not even the engineering, it's not the coding. The complexity comes from the interactions and Twitter is literally about interactions.
Carter
21:40
It's nuts to me that, you
Carter
21:44
know, we talked about the Dunning-Kruger effect with Elon Elon Musk and how he could be caught up into this sense of, I know how this thing works. You know, what you just described is super simple. Like how it works is probably super simple. How it works in context of all of these different, you know, countries and, uh, rules in the European
Carter
22:06
union is its own nightmare. And I don't know that Musk really understood that when when he was coming in um it's like he's been you know he's south african but he never quite made it all the way to europe like it just it
Carter
22:21
just seems to baffle him yeah
Corey
22:25
well look we could
Corey
22:27
whinge about the state of twitter for a while i'd like to wonder about that's
Corey
22:30
what's plan b okay
Corey
22:32
but i want to put on my zane velgey hat oh
Corey
22:34
i want to i want to throw something at you i want to throw a zane style task i
Corey
22:39
want to move it on to our next segment all right let's we don't have have segment music no we should we
Carter
22:45
we should have yeah
Carter
22:48
that's what you came up with
Corey
22:54
first of all not
Corey
22:55
not a lot of choices on the soundboard it was that oh actually
Corey
22:58
actually that would have been great that was so
Carter
23:02
fuck is wrong with you that
Carter
23:04
that was fantastic it should have
Corey
23:05
have been that yeah
Corey
23:09
okay so we we got a point now uh the transition the sound mark transition was better for transition than clapping okay
Corey
23:18
good i want to throw a challenge to you here i'm gonna i'm gonna ask you to put your strategist hat on oh
Corey
23:22
i'm gonna ask you to go back in the time machine yeah to october 25th just before elon musk is taking over this is a couple of days before he takes over twitter
Corey
23:32
and i want you to
Corey
23:33
to sit down you're sitting down with elon i'm trying to do his thing That's good.
Carter
23:37
It's a really good thing. Really impressive.
Corey
23:40
You're sitting down with Elon and he says, Stephen, I
Corey
23:44
I want to fire most of the people here. I want to have a much smaller Twitter. I want to go really big into free speech. I want to bring in Twitter blue. I want to sell check marks to everybody. Basically, he wants to do everything that he has said he wants to do. You're not changing his goals here, right? right?
Corey
24:03
you now have the benefit both of the last three and a half weeks, plus I think just kind of common strategy sense here.
Corey
24:10
How would you have done it in a way that wasn't so
Corey
24:14
so chaotic and awful and gotten you there in a better way? Because sometimes we do have clients who do this, right?
Carter
24:22
Yeah. I'd say to them, we're going to draw five circles.
Carter
24:25
We're going to draw five circles, in one of the circles we're going to put people who tweet right
Carter
24:29
right these are the people who tweet then we're going to put another circle we're going to put advertisers we
Carter
24:34
we put another circle we're going to put staff we
Carter
24:37
we put another circle and
Carter
24:38
and we're going to put government governments
Carter
24:42
right all around the world and
Carter
24:45
we're going to put another circle i
Carter
24:48
can't remember what my last circle was but it was five circles and it disappeared into four but
Carter
24:53
but basically i want you you to do a stakeholder, you know, to set out some stakeholder stuff. And
Carter
24:57
And this is where I think he really, really got into trouble because he
Carter
25:03
he said, I'm going to start moving immediately without regard for how one move on the tweets is going to impact the advertisers or a move on advertisers is going to impact staffing or the staffing move is going to impact how governments see it. And I'd say, which groups are you prepared to, you know, which groups do you want to try and work with? And which groups do you want to work around? Because you can't work around them all. There are no shortcuts to everything. So which ones are you prepared to put first? And which ones do you have to put second or third? And I would say, I would have made a strong case that I understand what you're trying to do with the staff.
Carter
25:43
But frankly, our problems are we're not getting any revenues from the people who tweet, and
Carter
25:48
and we're not getting enough revenues from the advertisers.
Carter
25:50
And I think that keeping the staff, or at least some of them, is really going to help us set a tone of how we're going to actually increase revenues. And
Carter
26:00
And if we take our current 7,000 people and
Carter
26:03
and we look at their job descriptions, and instead of making them disappear, we try and make them profitable, I
Carter
26:13
think we're going to have a much better system. uh, three or four or five months from now, when we start to actually make in turn a profit for this organization.
Corey
26:25
couple of things. That was really good. Yeah. Um, not
Carter
26:27
not bad for spur of the moment.
Corey
26:31
So I forgot to hit go live. So we've been talking 20 minutes to ourselves. Are
Carter
26:34
Are you fucking kidding me?
Carter
26:39
you fucking kidding me? You're like,
Carter
26:42
lost a third of our audience. How the hell do we not lose our whole audience who
Carter
26:47
who were the people who stayed well
Corey
26:52
now we've lost a few more we've lost a few more i'm not gonna lie to you okay
Corey
26:56
okay i want to build on what you said there let's just pretend none of that happened oh
Carter
26:59
oh no it's good none
Corey
27:00
none of that you
Carter
27:01
you want to build on what i said
Carter
27:06
me a hard time that i couldn't log on to the program and all you had to do is hit a fucking button it's
Corey
27:12
it's supposed to it is supposed to auto go live now didn't do that tonight yeah
Carter
27:21
or no or the operator you can have one of those two
Corey
27:27
what would you how
Carter
27:27
how would you build upon my my my my okay my my genius you
Corey
27:32
created five circles you remembered what was in four of them right so people who tweet advertisers staff staff and governments. And you want to talk about how you keep
Corey
27:42
keep certain ones on sign. Right.
Corey
27:44
What I want to build on is to say, you also really need to think about how they feel right now and how they're trending. And in particular, obviously advertisers and staff, very, well, all of those people, very squeamish, but advertisers have started in the spring when you first made this this bid, pulling
Corey
28:00
pulling people out, right?
Corey
28:01
right? Like you're saying, not super interested in
Corey
28:05
in right now committing to next year.
Corey
28:09
Then you've got the
Corey
28:10
the staff who have heard rumors and it's been reported that 75% of them are going to be let go or the company needs to be an awful lot smaller, right?
Corey
28:20
And you need to sort of assess that and you need to do that with a certain amount of detail and understand, okay, what staff are really anxious? What staff are excited? What am I working with here? Like one of the things that I think is insane about all of this is that Elon Musk just showed up with a fucking sink one day. And
Corey
28:35
And that was his introduction to the world. I get no sense that he gave a deep thought into what those groups were thinking about because his actions
Corey
28:44
make me think that. You know, he then followed it up by doing things that immediately antagonized those groups. Obviously, we've talked in the past about the Pelosi tweet that he put on. Now, if he was thinking about those circles of yours and he said, governments, advertisers, better not tweet about Pelosi and suggest that it's some sort of like crazy
Corey
29:03
crazy sex scandal thing as some of the right wing blogosphere was jumping into. Yeah,
Corey
29:07
Absolutely without any kind of merit. I just want to underline.
Corey
29:13
But then there's the question of the staff. Who
Corey
29:15
Who is on board? Because there will be some crazy tech bros who are on side with you, right? What are you working with here? Instead, okay, this is going to be my first contribution. I'm going to throw it back to you.
Corey
29:28
Say you want to have a Twitter that's 75% smaller. Yeah.
Corey
29:34
Why do you do it this way? Why do you randomly from a perch fire half of them, send out an ultimatum saying, if you're hardcore enough to be here, hit yes. Otherwise, this will be your three-month severance starting as of 5 p.m. Eastern. Right?
Corey
29:48
Why would you do that? that why wouldn't you do a much more positive kind of opt-in thing or or frankly even if you wanted to do those two things why wouldn't you have started with the hardcore opt-in thing like
Corey
29:59
yeah you want to change the culture at twitter you want to start with that why would you then begin with indiscriminately letting half of the people go that
Corey
30:07
that makes no sense to me
Carter
30:08
yeah i mean and without really even understanding who was being let go i mean the the stories about the number of people who've been let go in key areas i mean why are you getting to this draw drawing on on the whiteboard two and a half weeks in, you know, start off, get the drawing on the whiteboard and then determine what areas are actually valuable. Like you and I are pretty power users of Twitter, right? Maybe we don't matter in
Carter
30:33
in the overall scheme of things, right? Maybe all that matters is big brands and little fish. And these, you know, the, the, the people who are 10,000 to 50,000 followers or 10,000, even 500,000 followers don't
Carter
30:48
don't really generate the outcomes that you're looking for. If you're not, you know, Kim
Carter
30:53
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, like, why are you even here? And if you want to stay here, you know, you and I are talking about how we have divided a bit or devised some of our life around this product. If you gave us a good product that It wasn't about the check mark, but it was actually about the things that we needed and we are using. I think that we would have been willing to pony up $10 or $12 a month because
Carter
31:21
like the influence that we have. We do. And at 15,000 and 10,000 people, that's
Carter
31:28
that's a fairly significant amount of influence that we can't readily create somewhere else. We are, in fact, trapped.
Corey
31:35
Well, so you talk about your four circles. Yeah.
Corey
31:39
again, he seemed to be shooting from the hip on here.
Corey
31:42
There's been some reporting that one of the reasons why the blue check system is destined to fail is that power users of Twitter as a group, their analysis showed, the analysis they didn't do until after they introduced this product, is
Corey
31:56
Elon Musk added in this idea that we would only see half as many ads if we purchased this product. That would
Corey
32:03
would cost Twitter $44 in advertising revenue because we're on there all the time. And so he's going to charge us $8 a month. Yeah. I mean, even if that 44 is for all the advertising, $22. So this, this, he's going to give us, he's going to give up $22 of revenue in exchange for $8 of revenue with
Corey
32:19
with this cockamamie scheme of his, right? Yeah. He,
Corey
32:22
He, he clearly did not go and do even kind of fundamental. Let's get out a spreadsheet analysis here. He just did a bunch of stuff. And, and it's wild to me that along the way, nobody said, Hey dude, this is a $44 billion purchase of yours. Do you want to give it a little bit of thought? But,
Corey
32:39
yeah, I think that thinking about the needs of the power user, especially if you're going to create a consumer out of them, would have been a way to start. You, me, and Zane have talked about this, about
Corey
32:48
about what a potential alternative product could be.
Corey
32:52
What if you could only have up to 5,000 followers?
Corey
32:56
kind of like Facebook,
Corey
32:57
Facebook has got a cap.
Carter
32:59
And then as soon as you get past that cap, you have to become a corporate entity or some other entity, right? YouTube, you know, they
Carter
33:08
they actually do it the other way, where as soon as you reach a certain number, you start to get paid. You know, you're part of their, you know, their creative set. And so you're actually making money on their program. um you
Carter
33:22
you know these are different choices that could have been made you know if you you know and he has started to tweet now about if you have x number of followers you may have to uh start paying for those followers but i think that's too little too late like if he'd come in and said here's what i'm going to do everybody between 10 000 and or 5 000 and up we are going to chat we are going to give you a blue check mark if you're if you're a real person's name so it's not not you know jesus christ or something like that and because you're part of our human can our human community you now get to have you know all these other perks and the perks would all be there um
Carter
34:04
know instead he's just he's so in chaos there is no strategy um there is no strategy and that's just so weird because the guy came up with you know he knew that with electric cars, you know, the Bolt and some of the early electric cars were terrible looking, right? And he comes up with the Tesla Roadster and that strategic decision to make a car that looked beautiful, changed the electric car market. And that strategic decision was targeted towards the audience. you and i want to look good in our in our in our tesla and your i don't have a tesla volkswagen um it's less
Corey
34:48
okay i'm gonna make you do some work here i think this is good we throw a lot of things on the table but we're kind of flipping into what the fuck is he doing mode a little too much for my like here so you've created let's
Corey
34:57
let's call it four circles if you remember the fifth we'll throw it on there people who tweet advertisers staff government you're sitting Sitting down with Elon Musk, it's October 25th. He says, Stephen, I want to do all the things I've done, but I want to do them in a sensible way.
Corey
35:14
What do you tell him? Let's go through these buckets one by one. People who tweet. He wants to get rid of verified. He wants to open it to the people. How does he do it in a way that doesn't break Twitter? And let's be clear, this was broken because he introduced this and then he had to pull this and there was the official badge and then there wasn't and then it was back.
Corey
35:33
It's pretty broken. So how does he introduce this in a way that's not broken? In
Carter
35:36
In a way, how does he introduce it in a way that's not broken?
Corey
35:39
What's the strategy of introducing a new feature like this that thinks
Corey
35:43
thinks about your buckets,
Corey
35:45
but is really about, you
Corey
35:47
you know, the people who tweet at this point?
Carter
35:48
Well, I would start off by saying our most valued customers are the people with the blue check marks.
Carter
35:54
People with blue check marks are our most valuable contributors because they're willing willing to put their face and their name behind the tweets that they tweet. And that gives us authenticity.
Carter
36:07
But at the same time, we are also a very valuable medium to them. So we would like to start charging $10 a month for all verified accounts, over 5,000 people who are following you. At 50,000 people, you're going to start paying for your follower count as well.
Carter
36:29
Because now you're not just a communicator, you're an advertiser. Just
Carter
36:32
Just by putting up your tweets, you are advertising. And so we are going to give you access to your market for
Carter
36:44
for every 100,000 people on
Carter
36:48
Pretty good KPI. It would work. It's for a year. And then for the big accounts that have 23 million people following them, they can make a choice whether or not they're going to stick or not. And the small accounts, it's not that big a deal for you and me to pony up $10,000. But now it is designed to target the best users. And then you say to people who aren't yet verified, if
Carter
37:10
if you'd like to be verified, here are the steps. We need a real photograph. We need a real thing. And you need to grow your market to have 5,000 people following you.
Carter
37:21
Then you can be verified and you can start paying $10 a month because
Carter
37:26
because now you're part of our team.
Carter
37:29
You're part of Twitter's team.
Corey
37:30
That's interesting. Let me build on that. I like this idea of saying it's not whether Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post thinks you're important that gets you verified. If Twitter thinks you're important, you're verified. It's based on your followers. Maybe you make it so it's followers themselves
Corey
37:45
themselves who identities have been verified and you make it a two-step. Even
Corey
37:49
to be eligible, you need to verify your identity, but to get the blue check, you hit 5,000. Maybe it's something like that.
Corey
37:56
And maybe your price points are a little wild on the low end to me, but I like where you're going with this. Okay. I like this. Let's keep moving along here. This is how,
Carter
38:04
how, and then you go to your advertisers, right?
Carter
38:08
And you say to your advertisers, we
Carter
38:10
we are now going to have the largest team of brand ambassadors for you, the Twitter, you can even imagine.
Carter
38:17
They're going to be our verified team.
Carter
38:19
And here's the way this is going to work. We're going to give our verified members the opportunity to monetize their accounts by promoting your promotions.
Carter
38:29
So all they need to do,
Carter
38:31
so let's say they have 5,000 people.
Carter
38:33
They're going to get $5
Carter
38:36
$5 off their membership when
Carter
38:38
when they pick you as a brand that they're going to partner with. So you want to partner with Flair Airlines, you get $5 off of your membership for
Carter
38:46
for partnering with Flair Airlines. And now every time you tweet, you're going to put at the bottom, this tweet sponsored by Flair Airlines.
Corey
38:55
Oh, I got you one better here. The
Corey
38:57
The organic paid program. So you are paying at a certain level, right?
Corey
39:04
When you amplify corporate
Corey
39:05
corporate Corporate content. Maybe even if you don't have a partnership, like it gets tagged organic paid, but it
Corey
39:11
it gets their message out in an organic way that's
Corey
39:14
that's there. And that reduces the cost of your membership and maybe even eventually puts money in your pocket. Exactly.
Carter
39:19
Exactly. It doesn't have to be much money in your pocket, Corey. I mean, how many producers, how many, I mean, sure, yeah, there's Mr. Beast on YouTube, but most YouTube content creators are making-
Corey
39:29
I'm floored you know who Mr. Beast is. I'm fucking
Carter
39:31
fucking huge in this town. I know, I know, I
Carter
39:34
I know everything there is to know.
Carter
39:35
Come on. Uh, you
Corey
39:38
you know, you don't need to be Mr. Beast. There's a Mr. Beast burger in Calgary. It's actually pretty good. I
Carter
39:42
I don't ask questions. Um, I
Carter
39:44
I don't actually know what that is. And now I'm a little bit embarrassed. Thanks for embarrassing, but
Carter
39:51
but you don't need
Corey
39:52
need to make a lot of money
Carter
39:53
money to make this worthwhile, right? right? You can whore your account out, like you would, obviously. You can whore your account out and risk losing some followers.
Corey
40:03
literally showed up to lunch with me covered in sponsorship logos last week. I just want to point
Carter
40:10
point that out. I did, but that
Carter
40:11
that was a free jacket, and so you get sponsored.
Corey
40:22
Okay. So what you've done, I like what you've done. Now we're connecting them,
Carter
40:28
Because the other thing that we're going to need is we're going to need the staff that are currently there to make these changes actually work, right?
Carter
40:34
right? So let's slow down on the changes. And what we're going to do is we're going to incentivize the staff, the people who are able to help us achieve these changes fastest, the ones that come to the table and say, this is how we're going to monetize Twitter, the
Carter
40:49
the tweeting side. This is how we're going to really reward the advertisers. advertisers and this is how we're going to be able to to getting to our third bucket this is how we're going to make sure that we are actually making sure that governments don't come after us as we're making this significant change those are the people that are the most valuable to you and even if they're only valuable to you in the next four to six months the four to six months that you're going to be paying them their severance anyways keep them in the building keep
Carter
41:17
keep them in the building because we need to get these people turned around and the ones that aren't are going to be leaving on their own.
Carter
41:26
The ones that aren't turned around are going to be walking out the door because they don't like what we're doing, but we like what we're doing and the people who stay are going to like what we're doing too.
Corey
41:37
I think it's always difficult when you're in an organization with a great deal of change because no matter how nice
Corey
41:44
nice of a manager you are, how good of a manager you are. You
Corey
41:48
run up against a fundamental truth, which is the person who's
Corey
41:51
who's dealing with that change may not like that change. This might not be what they signed up for. And now it's a totally different ride. And I feel pretty strongly that if Elon Musk felt that culture was so fundamental to what he was trying to build here, he needed to start... Listen, there's a couple of things I want to throw on the table. One is competency.
Corey
42:12
Competent people don't want to work for somebody who looks incompetent. So he should have taken a beat and he should have tried to show that he cares to understand the organization.
Corey
42:20
But if culture is really important to him, I think he needed to signal that. And it's only been three weeks. He could have sent one more modest signal at this point. Listen, I want to change the culture here. Culture is very important to me. We've got to get a bit more of a killer edge around here where we're trying to move features through faster. And then rather than having an email, do you like me? Yes. No. Right. There are ways that he could have put together events, you know, town halls, forums, seeing who's engaged, tracked who's engaged, even if he wants to be a little bit more about that and started to understand the people before he started making decisions about them.
Carter
42:53
Tell me how you would monetize this platform.
Carter
42:56
Bring me your ideas and, and the people who, you know, and say, this has to be the culture change. We
Carter
43:02
We have been the darlings of the stock market. We have been the darlings of, of, uh, you know, freedom of speech and all of that, but we are not the darlings of profitability. And today, starting right now, good businesses can check all of these boxes, including profitability box, right?
Carter
43:21
right? SpaceX can be profitable. Tesla can be profitable. PayPal was profitable. I'm not coming in here to ruin things. I'm coming in here to check the last box. I'm coming in here to check the last box.
Corey
43:34
And you know, I think in a way, he almost did He did something that I would recommend. And then he just went way too far and he combined it with a bunch of crazy actions. But you remember when he did that town hall after
Corey
43:45
after the layoffs? Again, that's a big mistake. But where he did that town hall and he said, we're
Corey
43:50
we're losing a lot of money, right?
Corey
43:52
That's not what I would have said. But I would have made clear the situation of, I bought Twitter because I see immense potential. I love this platform. I'm on this platform all of the time. And I look at it and I think, how does this platform, the most relevant news organization on the planet by a wide margin, the world happens here first. How can we be losing money? I think there's an immense opportunity. I know you all see it. And so here's my situation. I'm going to take a beat. I can't wait forever because I am currently losing about you could actually do the math like oh I don't know about a million dollars a day or or two three million dollars a day x number of dollars a minute so we don't have forever here but let's talk about this and so then you change it from being threatening to almost being magnanimous like this is the scale of the problem here I'm not going to go nuts but let's talk about it let's start bringing those things forward and then you can start having the conversations about culture and competency that you want to have but
Corey
44:48
but the way he he did it instead, um,
Corey
44:50
um, I think was just guaranteed to have, let's not dwell on it, but like to fire people in that fashion was nuts because who knows how many good people he lost as a result. Well,
Carter
44:59
Well, I think that this is where we were talking about right from the beginning, right, right from the beginning, we talked about trying to keep your good people close and, and to, to, um, I can't remember how you phrased it, but essentially not, it's going to be, uh, one person with all the good ideas, but you're going to have a multiplier effect of good people with good ideas and elon has made it such that those good people with good ideas don't want to be as part of his organization i think this becomes one of those you know moments for people to kind of really learn from you know like there were there have been collapses of companies before and it's
Carter
45:33
it's you know when you're in business school what do you study collapses of company you put this out on on twitter right uh when you tweet it out that That, you know, most of the business organizations that you studied in business school are gone now, right? Even if their innovation looked like it was a good idea. And, you know, is it impossible to imagine a world in which Twitter does not exist? Well, was it impossible to imagine a world without Blockbuster, right?
Carter
46:01
right? Simpson Sears is gone, for God's sake. like i
Corey
46:06
you know i was thinking if you tried to explain to somebody in the 90s any of this how lost they would be like you're talking about elon musk who's elon musk oh he's the world's richest man he's worth 200 billion dollars what how oh he got rich from paypal don't know what that is yet oh also tesla don't know what that is yet oh spacex like this all came from nowhere and it's not just elon musk it's jeff bezos it's it's you know the telecommunications revolution that's created so many of these people. It's the fact we live in this god-awful gilded age where billionaires are created. But
Carter
46:36
But can I just say that this also is kind of another reminiscence, like the robber barons of the railway times, right? There is a pushback on the rich that is about to happen. I don't know where it's going to start because the Republicans obviously are defending
Corey
46:55
defending them. The revolution starts here, Carter. Right here,
Carter
46:56
here, right now, this is the revolution. But the pushback on the rich will happen because people don't like what they're seeing. People don't want to be treated in this fashion and they don't want to be apart from everybody else. Now, how far does it go? Is it just the 1950s where you're paying 90 cents on the dollar when you're making over, I don't remember what the number was, a million dollars a year? Is that how it rectifies itself? That works for me. I can get around a wealth tax right or is it something a little bit more i don't know revolutionary and all of a sudden we're looking at you know the the rise of communism the rise of lenin again uh and and the marx and and these ideas that are scary that is as hell um and the i just
Corey
47:43
want you to know when when
Corey
47:45
when you said the rise of lenin i actually imagined him like getting out of that That glass case.
Corey
47:52
That's the imagery you left me with.
Carter
47:53
Well, I'm trying to
Corey
47:54
to be- I don't want to lose this thread. You've got a good thread here. And
Corey
47:57
And while I'm happy to burst your balloon,
Corey
48:01
I think I'm doing it for good, not for evil. We've talked about people who tweet. We've talked about advertisers. I want to circle back to advertisers because I think that's only part of the story. I want to talk about existing advertisers too. But we've talked about staff.
Corey
48:14
Government. Government was your fourth circle here. I'm Elon. I'm asking you, hey,
Corey
48:20
hey, I want to do all of the things I've talked about doing.
Corey
48:23
How do I keep governments on board?
Carter
48:25
Number one, don't be a target.
Carter
48:27
Do not be a target. Do not allow yourself to be a target for the Democrats. Do not allow yourself to be a target for the Republicans. How do
Corey
48:35
do I do that? Stephen, I'm the world's richest man, but I can't create miracles. I've got to make this Donald Trump decision. You
Carter
48:43
don't don't think that there's a shortcut by bringing back Trump. You're going to make profitability happen by bringing back Trump. You are bringing back something some a person who is going to look at free speech differently. You're
Carter
48:57
You're you're you're begging for some sort of a Senate inquiry into into how this all operates. You're putting yourself in a position where Republican or Democrat could be investigating the entire business. You know, this could be viewed as, you
Carter
49:15
you know, as the
Carter
49:16
the creation of of oligopoly. You don't want that. You want to make sure that people are happy with you in some fashion. And to do that means just not pissing everybody off. off. You have to go to, to, uh, you have to go and talk to the Democrats. You have to go and talk to the, to the Republicans. What does free speech mean to you? How would you, how would you have us do this? Bring them into your problems and ask them as this large news producer, how do we allow ourselves to become the organization that you know we can be? I mean, how do we work better How do we work better for politicians? How do we work better for political organization? How do we improve democracy? Go and be that guy. Don't just be the, I have to make a billion
Carter
50:06
billion dollars back every year, starting with this year. Like
Carter
50:11
Like that guy gets no respect on the
Corey
50:19
Well, I think another thing is governments don't like erratic
Corey
50:21
erratic actions. They don't like fast actions.
Corey
50:23
And again, it's been three weeks, man. It's crazy how much he's tried to jam in on this. And
Corey
50:29
And it's just begging for somebody to come in and say, what the fuck is going on here?
Corey
50:34
Time is his friend. Time is his friend when dealing with the government. And time is his friend when dealing with the Trump issue too, can I say. Because bringing back Donald Trump, that's
Corey
50:43
that's a big decision.
Corey
50:45
Not bringing him back is just delaying a decision. I actually think his first instinct was the right one here to say, we're going to put a panel together. We're going to find a way to have a bunch of voices on this, to make sure that this is being done in a neutral fashion. fashion.
Corey
50:59
Why he then decided to pull himself out of neutrality is, well, it's not even beyond me. It's he was trying to change the channel. He was trying to change the conversation around Twitter for sure. But he
Corey
51:09
he was right with his first instinct, or maybe that wasn't his first instinct, but he was right with his first comment as owner on this.
Carter
51:15
Yeah. I mean, I think that, you
Carter
51:17
you know, I actually have a question for you. What was he trying to achieve by bringing back Trump? like where's the upside yeah
Corey
51:24
yeah uh i so i see two one is really the channel change after his really fucked up layoff thing right yeah i do think there was a bit of a channel change for him he was getting tired of being beaten up even by people who were friendly of him online and he said how can i get a little bit of love and
Corey
51:40
and he decided he would do the thing that they were cheering him on to do all the way along which is unban a bunch of people so he did that but as soon as you do that the question of what do you do with donald trump becomes right there in front of your fucking face and you no longer can say it's going to this panel because you've just overridden this panel on a bunch of other things so he came up with this you know vox populi vox dei comment the voice of the people is the voice of god comment that he made and he did this stupid fucking vote
Corey
52:09
and and so i think that though the other benefit or at least the thing that you know the elon musk fan club can say about, oh, what a genius he is, is, let's
Corey
52:19
let's put it this way. I actually don't think Twitter's in much danger from Truth Social. But if you thought they were, this is a pretty great way to try to kill Truth Social. Because Truth Social only really works as long as Donald Trump is on it. The minute Donald Trump comes to Twitter, Truth Social is dead. And so he's trying to create, allegedly,
Corey
52:37
allegedly, a bit of a trap for Donald Trump. Like, come back to Twitter. Here's this audience it's massive this is how you can be relevant and it will kill truth social now i
Corey
52:48
don't think truth social is in the game so i think that's kind of dumb but that that would be the two arguments for why this happened well
Carter
52:55
well i just again
Carter
52:56
again when you look at my little
Carter
52:59
drawing here it doesn't work with you know it works with 52 of twitter uh which i don't buy for a second because i suspect that there were bots involved and there were you know chaos is being sown from around the world including in canada if you believe the uh uh that uh china's interfering in our elections although i have no idea how um but 52 it's
Carter
53:25
it's not big enough it's not big enough to to deal with the pain and now
Carter
53:31
now you've got all these other you know you've reduced your relationship with advertisers again for sure it's not like advertisers
Carter
53:37
advertisers are lining up to be on truth social i mean outside of my pillow um is anybody advertising on on truth social i mean i
Carter
53:46
i don't understand how he thinks that this is your
Corey
53:48
your pillow is advertising on truth social or my
Carter
53:51
my pillow isn't it my pillow the
Corey
53:54
pillow guy i was doing it yeah it wasn't a funny joke but it was a joke Oh, it was a joke. About your actual literal pillow. Yeah.
Corey
54:05
So good. Man, you kill me. You've given me a lot of good stuff here.
Corey
54:09
I'm going to give you credit for it, even though the best stuff clearly came from me. Well, I had to open.
Carter
54:14
open. You know, it's always the guy who opens that has the hardest time. You know this. What have I missed? What
Corey
54:20
missed? No, I want to go back. I think there's two areas that need shoring up. Oh,
Corey
54:25
Talk to me about their existing advertising. and their existing ad revenue. So they were getting last year about four and a half billion dollars a year. Advertising in general, the bottom is somewhat falling out on. And we already talked about the fact that advertisers started pulling their long-term plans on Twitter the
Corey
54:39
the minute this announcement began. They
Corey
54:41
They got very squeamish. And
Corey
54:43
And I'll very shorthand some of the reporting in those first weeks where advertisers found him ill-informed, erratic. He fired the people that they were dealing with. During one of the meetings, there was reporting people were canceling their ad buys like in real time as a result of his unsatisfactory answers on yeah
Corey
55:02
on how he was going to deal with some of these problems and the thing i want to talk about specifically steven hate
Corey
55:07
hate speech hate speech seems to be what was driving the advertisers away what are you telling advertisers to keep those existing advertisers on sign well
Carter
55:16
well i'd start off by saying that most of the platform is is the source that people go to for all their news their information it we are you know twitter is the number one source for news and information uh almost anywhere in the world and so yes there is hate speech yes there is some uh misinformation um but within
Carter
55:38
within that is mostly pearls mostly good information that's being shared we are going to
Carter
55:47
through our network that we're working on with the twitter yeah
Carter
55:51
right we are going to make sure that we're cleaning up the number of people uh cleaning up the topics of discussion and make sure that the the overall discussion that happens on twitter is information that you can associate brands with because that is going to be our bread and butter the
Carter
56:09
the way to do that the good news is the The way that we have to do that is by putting controls on who has the biggest megaphones. And that makes it so much easier for you to control how your brand is perceived. And
Carter
56:23
And you have to go in there and you have to say that the plans that we have for the actual changing of Twitter are
Carter
56:29
the plans that are going to work for your
Carter
56:32
your brands, whatever your brand is. But we need you to be there if we're going to actually make these changes successful. successful we can't make them successful if you're not on twitter so when you walk away if you were to take these your brand away from twitter um all we know for sure is that twitter's going to be a less brand friendly place without brands available i
Corey
56:58
i don't know if i would put it on them i just thought i'd try it yeah i mean that's disagreed with you but look
Corey
57:04
look i i think I think the thing I would be telling the advertisers is in
Corey
57:08
in a room, which by the way, I would bring the
Corey
57:11
the people I did not fire, I would bring the heads of sales and that have the relationships with these people and make clear almost the limits of myself on this portfolio and say, so
Corey
57:21
so first manage expectations, say, look,
Corey
57:24
look, despite the rhetoric and some of the drama in the news, what I need you to know is that change will happen slowly and with consultation. That would be key message number one. Change will happen slowly and with consultation. Key
Corey
57:36
Key message number two. I need you to understand, I do know the difference between free speech and shouting fire in a theater, right?
Corey
57:44
We can act as though these are easy decisions. We can pretend it's easy to say Donald Trump shouldn't be on there, but half of America believes he should be. And there is a conversation about what is legitimate political discourse. And I understand it makes you squeamish.
Corey
57:58
It's our job to figure out how to do that and protect your brands. And that's a job we take seriously. But see key message number one, changes will happen slowly and with consultation.
Corey
58:08
And then key message number three would be the
Corey
58:10
the reason you should stay on Twitter is the reason you're already on Twitter. There's immense value here. You know, this is a newsmaking audience. It's a keyed in audience. It's people who are engaged. They're the tastemakers that are out there.
Corey
58:22
And there's good return on investment.
Corey
58:24
So that's all I have to say for today. I've brought the experts. I'm going to continue listening to these experts. We'll bring in additional experts. I'd love to hear your thoughts about what we need to be doing.
Corey
58:34
key message four is I'm open to consultation, but
Corey
58:36
but that's what I need you to know. We're moving slow. I understand that this is a fraught area.
Corey
58:43
These are my pros.
Carter
58:44
Yeah. I mean, I like that, but you and I obviously weren't brought into that room to
Carter
58:48
to do this. I'm intrigued.
Carter
58:51
All of these things that we're suggesting that he has done in the past, is there anything that you would suggest right now you're being called into his office for monday morning what
Carter
59:01
thing uh from my four circles staff government uh advertisers and twitter and twitter users what one thing are you telling him has to be done uh before the end of day
Carter
59:16
you know at the end of this at the by the end of this week same
Corey
59:20
same thing that i've said the last two two episodes we've talked about this slow down don't be erratic like at this point you are you are killing yourself and you cannot pretend to me that this is a master plan because you've reversed yourself in
Corey
59:34
in your blue checks you've reversed yourself with advertisers you've reversed yourself with staff you've reversed yourself with government you've
Corey
59:41
you've reversed yourself on all of these fronts in
Corey
59:43
in three weeks you look like a fool right now slow down stop doing you know you
Corey
59:50
is it? Ready Aim Fire instead of it's Fire Ready Aim. This is what you're doing right now.
Corey
59:55
And you can't tell me that this is a startup where you're just trying to fail fast. It's not a startup. The reason you bought this is because it's not a startup. It's a major piece of global infrastructure and you are fucking it up.
Carter
1:00:07
So what happens when you get escorted to security? I mean, having been escorted to security, I'm wondering how you will respond.
Corey
1:00:14
Well, I've never been escorted to security. Not yet. Don't make
Carter
1:00:18
make it sound like you're not going to be because you take that message into elon musk i fear that that's what's going to happen i
Carter
1:00:25
i fear that that's
Corey
1:00:25
that's you know i
Corey
1:00:27
mean fundamentally i think this is his problem he he doesn't have a lot of people around him who are telling him the truth because a lot of the things he's done any
Corey
1:00:35
any functioning work i i've mentioned this before but i'm going to mention again in this context the reason planes have co-pilots is not to just say oh you're right pilot. I agree with you. You're doing the right thing, pilot. The reason planes have co-pilots is because you have somebody else checking their work. And in fact, the system only works and pilots are trained to voice up when they have a nagging concern. When they're like, are you sure that's the right button? Maybe it is the right button. Have the conversation about the button.
Corey
1:01:05
You're not having the conversation about the button. You're just flicking that fucking switch and getting cheered on by your co-pilots. And that's very, very dangerous. You
Carter
1:01:11
You know, Heather and Samantha took an avalanche level one course last week. And the most challenging part of doing any avalanche course is being able to say to the people who have more experience than you, the people who know more than you, I'm sorry, I don't feel comfortable right now. And
Carter
1:01:29
And I think that, you know, in my job in politics, and this is, I think, one thing that people don't understand.
Carter
1:01:37
My job in politics was to tell the emperor they had no clothes on and to say no more than I said yes to the person who employs me, who I am reliant on in order to maintain my employment. And I suspect that with you, you
Carter
1:01:51
you know, you've never said no to anybody in your life. And that's why you've elevated yourself to such a high level.
Corey
1:02:01
were literally my boss i think you know better than oh
Carter
1:02:04
oh my god every day i
Corey
1:02:05
i just do it with a smile every
Carter
1:02:07
every day you and zane would come in like it was a fucking intervention
Corey
1:02:12
was an intervention every time steven every
Carter
1:02:16
we did an hour
Corey
1:02:16
hour long show there that was
Corey
1:02:18
was pretty good yeah we've talked about advertising we've talked about staff we could do more on government but maybe we'll save that for when zane's back i think it's time uh Let's move it on to our next segment.
Carter
1:02:29
What the fuck? You have a button. You
Carter
1:02:32
You have a next segment button.
Corey
1:02:35
you need to do
Carter
1:02:36
do is press the right button.
Carter
1:02:41
What happens? What happens to this show? People pay. This is the one they paid for, right? Like this is the one they paid for. This
Corey
1:02:48
This is the Patreon. Yeah. By the way, anyone watching right now doesn't know because they missed the first 20 minutes of it. Oh, okay.
Carter
1:02:54
people watching, this is a patreon so i hope
Carter
1:02:57
hope you paid you little fuckers
Corey
1:03:02
uh okay over under lightning round steven we do this for you oh did
Carter
1:03:06
did you actually prepare an over under lightning round oh
Corey
1:03:09
fuck i didn't actually here i got one for you i got one for you
Carter
1:03:12
you because i did it this
Carter
1:03:12
for you this is for you will
Carter
1:03:14
will twitter fall apart and if so when
Corey
1:03:20
um it depends on what you mean by fall apart it's gonna function worse it's gonna get in a big fight with somebody somewhere in the world, but it will probably still technically run the same way that if you went to like GeoCities
Corey
1:03:33
GeoCities up until they shut down those servers, it probably ran, right? It's just not going to be relevant in the same way.
Carter
1:03:41
Okay. Now you ask me a question. This is how this
Corey
1:03:44
this is now working out.
Corey
1:03:46
That question you asked me, what's your thoughts on it?
Carter
1:03:49
I think it actually shuts down.
Carter
1:03:51
I think one day we all get the fail whale and
Carter
1:03:54
it actually shuts down
Corey
1:03:55
down it's not happening you know i'll tell you when it happens i'll
Carter
1:03:57
i'll tell you when it happens january the 3rd why
Corey
1:04:02
why do you think january the 3rd because
Carter
1:04:05
that someone somewhere is stitching this thing together through christmas and then on new year's day they're like fuck this i'm not coming in it's the biggest party they've ever gone to on new year's eve they are spending all their bonus money it's all going out and uh by january the third there is no longer any um functioning staff essentially left to uh to ensure the fail whale doesn't come up okay
Corey
1:04:31
okay well you seem to think twitter is just write it down a computer in a room that some guy is no but this
Carter
1:04:37
this is the other reason why it takes a long time to fail because it isn't just i know it's not a computer in a room smart ass um okay
Carter
1:04:46
but it's nothing is built to last forever and if it if it doesn't get the right people doing the right work to keep keep it functioning it will eventually start to not not function properly and there will there could be an actual day where it fails in my humble opinion okay
Corey
1:05:06
well um let me ask you this in the next question i went to national news watch.com i'm trying to just figure out a question i can ask you oh
Corey
1:05:14
shit we didn't even talk about elizabeth may is elizabeth may gonna be oh no that elizabeth may
Carter
1:05:20
stops functioning as green party leader on january 4th
Corey
1:05:28
right well i think uh with that um man am i angry about
Carter
1:05:32
about elizabeth may winning like
Carter
1:05:34
like why well Well, it's okay. Why did people choose her? Like, someone needs to... Oh, yeah, we're recording again tomorrow.
Carter
1:05:40
Hey, this was The Strategist. We're back again tomorrow night for a free episode, you fuckers. Thanks for listening.