What Tucker Carlson's Putin Interview Means for X

Give us the context of what this makes advertisers feel like. Yeah, well, obviously there are a lot of advertisers who would be very reluctant to see their brand show up anywhere near this interview. Right. But I also think that a lot of advertisers who are uncomfortable with that are probably no longer on. I think a lot of the people who are still spending money on X have pretty thick skin when it comes to what they expect or imagine that their marketing is going to appear next to. Right. And s

o I'm not sure that we're necessarily going to see a new wave of people rushing in the other direction, mostly because a lot of those people are already on. And this speaks, of course, to the ultimate aim that we've always been told from Elon Musk about X is for for freedom of speech in all its entirety. So tell us a little bit about how ultimately the deals with the likes of Tucker Carlson are going getting on very people who attract a big crowd to come and ultimately have shows on the platform

. Yeah. You know, I was really interested in this. About a month ago, right after CBS, when X announced that they were going to be doing these new shows. Don Lemon, of course, was another one who they were going to bring on. And, you know, I spoke to four media agencies, you know, after the announcement was made. And all of them basically said the same thing, that these shows aren't really going to move the needle. Now, if you're a big brand looking to spend money on X, it might be nice to have

sort of something that at least as professionally produced that you can, you know, run your video ad next to. But until X gets, you know, a much larger collection of these types of shows with much more and less controversial hosts, quite frankly, I'm not sure that this is the kind of thing that's going to draw advertisers back. And again, I don't think they're running the other way because those folks are already gone. But I don't think this is necessarily big enough that it's going to lure peop

le back who have been reluctant to spend money on acts to begin with. There's a lot happening in the social media space in real time. But you reported that Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky, the decentralized social media platform, is now opened up to everyone. Why is that significant? Well, blue sky, as you both probably know, has emerged as sort of one of the main alternatives to ex ever since Elon Musk took over. And, you know, there's a bunch of technical reasons that people are excited about it. You k

now, this decentralized element is is idealistic, I think. But for the most part, this is simply a place where people who used to love Twitter but no longer feel comfortable using X have been going. And so the fact that they're sort of opening this up to everybody, you know, perhaps that will kind of expedite the growth of blue sky. But, you know, again, we're looking at threads, we're looking at blue sky. You might even remember Mastodon. These were essentially X alternatives. And so it's just

always interesting to keep tabs on what they're doing and whether or not they're still growing and capturing people who are running away from X. Your book on X is imminent or your book on Twitter. I mean Twitter. That's right. As with you. So much has changed in real time. We would we were teasing Jason Stride ever day about how you to rewrite the last graph of his book based on what happened with Blizzard. But something you just said, Blue sky is the alternative to X. Where do you think X sits

in the landscape right now? Matter, Facebook, snap, Instagram reels, things like that. Sure. You know, I still feel like it's a good place to go for certain types of news, right? I'm a big sports fan. I still think that X is probably the best place to go when you want to figure out, Hey, what's going on? My favorite team, what's going on in the NFL playoffs? But there's a bunch of other categories of news that I think that ex used to sort of be the go to place for where it's no longer that or it

's certainly not as reliable as it used to be. And I think there's a bunch of reasons for that. The most notable probably being the change in verification. Right. And sort of eliminating this ability to quickly identify who legitimate journalists are versus folks who might not be doing that professionally. And to me, I think that's hurt the company when it comes to news. But obviously, Ellen would disagree. And, you know, for that reason, I feel like X is sort of fallen out of the position that

it had over news over Instagram, Facebook and others few years ago.