Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Twitter is FALLING APART”.
All right, let’s jump right into our big topic of the week. Okay, Luke you’ve been traveling, obviously because you’re clearly, not here so um well, have you been keeping up with what’s been going on in the social apocalypse, I thought after the first week of Elon owning Twitter, that the the days of of of hot and heavy fast And loose updates coming was gon na, be uh we’re gon na be kind of over, but if anything it feels like the chaos has accelerated. Have you been paying attention to this? I’Ve been checking in at least at least like once or twice a day just to scroll for a few seconds, and it is, it is brilliant and beautiful chaos. In my opinion, I said before this was happening that I was happy that it was happening because it’s not like he could make it any worse and if anything he’s definitely made it more entertaining um and in his own words. I don’t know if this is necessarily 100 true or not, but in his own words, there’s more users on Twitter right now than there ever has been or more activity.
At the very least, so I mean to a certain degree it’s working, maybe all the advertisers are leaving, but there’s a lot of people yeah there’s I mean I, I honestly I haven’t been able to look away from the train wreck and you know what the really Mind-Boggling thing to me is: is that one of as one of the chief trolls on Twitter never mind Chief twit, the fact that he couldn’t see this coming from a thousand miles away like man? Have you checked out some of the amazing impersonator accounts? Oh yeah, there’s there’s been some pretty epic ones: the um, whatever that Pharmacy was Eli, Lilly and Co. Okay, yeah wow, fake verified Twitter account for Eli Lillian, Co tweeted – and this is this – is the most amazing part. Tweeted insulin is now free, after which their stock actually plummeted. Is that amazing or what their stock went from 368 down to 346? And this isn’t like this isn’t a stock that was going down? This is a stock. That’S been going up for the last month. Actually has trended up overall for the last six months and experienced a significant daily dip. Now I do expect it to recover uh Eli, Lilly and Co has since apologized for the misunderstanding. Uh.
They say that um they’re, sorry that um, you thought they said that they’re not sorry for gouging on the price of insulin. No, no! No they’re! Not sorry about that at all, but they’re. Sorry that they’re, sorry that anyone thought that they would stop doing that. It’S the most awful non-apology apology that I think I have ever seen like very fitting for a pharmaceutical gouging company, though oh totally makes sense absolutely absolutely. It is amazing to me what pharmaceutical companies get away with in the states in the in the conversation under that tweet, I saw a lot of people talking about the price of insulin, which they absolutely should and one of the most common defenses for the price of Insulin is that it doesn’t matter because your insurance pays for it and it’s like no, no, no insurance does not pay for anything. You pay for insurance and then the money passes through your insurance, that that’s how Insurance works and if you’re insulin costs more you’ll pay more for insurance, and if your employer pays for your insurance, that’s money that could have gone to you right.
Come on. People come on people – oh that’s still, money leaving your like sphere of influence, whether or not it was going to be 100 exactly directly deposited into your bank account or not is not 100 relevant. Your boss might have ended up just keeping it right, but there’s a chance. Okay, there’s a chance that some of it might have made its way to you once it leaves your company’s coffers and goes to some pharmaceutical company that chance goes to zero. There is zero chance that it makes it to you. This is just this is just like.
How does money work Basics here and I’m sure that I’m preaching to the choir, I know our audience is pretty clever and understands fundamentally how Insurance works at the end of the day, no insurance company will stay solvent if dollars out is greater than dollars in right. So you have to charge at least as much as you end up paying out. That’S how it works. I mean it’s and that’s another really funny one to me is you know people will go, but you know I don’t want to.
I don’t want to pay for someone else’s medicine, that’s that’s socialism, but that that’s what insurance basically is. Is everyone pays into this pool and then the people that need it get paid out and the the greater those payout prices are, the fewer people they can afford to treat and the more rejected claims like the whole thing is, like you know, you’re kind of kind Of all on the same team, until the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies collude to get the pricing as high as possible so that well it’s not even a conclusion. I’M sure the insurance companies would rather pay less. But there’s the whole thing where you can’t um uh, where the negotiation abilities of these companies is limited in the US. It’S it’s wild! It’S wild! What’S going on down there and to be clear yeah, we have tons of problems tons of problems in Canadian Health Care.
Like lots of problems, but our insulin is like cheap, which is good. I guess we have that benefit at least yeah man. The fact that you can, I mean just with the with the midterm elections going on down there right now. The fact that anyone can get elected without a platform that includes like just putting big Pharma in its place is mind-blowing to me, like that. That’S not the number one issue, regardless of like reforming their Medicare system or or whatever like, even if they kept their system entirely the same just stepping on pharmaceutical companies a little bit in general, I think, makes a ton of sense some. Some of the you look at U.S developed drugs in the U.S and they’re like 20 times the price as that same drug from that same company, literally five minutes across the border. Yeah, like literally, you could walk in some cases to somewhere where it costs a fraction.
As much If I Was An American in America, I would be pissed that I was subsidizing. The drug costs for other uh, like Rich Nations, basically like that. That would be annoying. Why why why do we have to do that? I would be angry about that and wanting that to change completely regardless of any other health care reform stuff, just like the pharmaceutical stuff, is crazy, that’s all but anyways. What was your favorite thing that happened on Twitter since elon’s takeover, because I know mine, let’s go ahead, let’s, let’s just do kind of a week in review here. So this week on elon’s Twitter, uh, Eight dollar, Twitter, blue, launched you got to give credit where credit’s, due okay Elon said that they were going to launch this paid verification program like extremely quickly.
This is probably faster than Twitter has ever gone from conceptualizing a new product to launching it right so credit where it’s due. They got this program launched extremely quickly, so for eight dollars you could buy a check mark and that check mark would identify your account as uh, like blue verified. So it was part of the Twitter blue program and then clicking on. It would also identify if it was like a legacy verified account.
Um then they launched a second gray official check mark under accounts that had Legacy verification education to differentiate actual. You know verified accounts that were at risk of being impersonated with just uh people who paid for a blue um picture. Next to their name. Uh Tumblr launched their own Eight dollar blue check marks. You can apparently buy up to 24 of them, which is pretty neat um just thought we thought we’d throw throw that in there.
So Tumblr managed to get in the news about this. Well, I why anything Luke? Why can you buy 24 of them because then you’re more verified like what are you an idiot? No, you could just stack up to 24 of them in your username um. Then, within hours, Elon killed the official check mark uh. He also tweeted far too many corrupt Legacy. Blue verification check marks exist so no choice but to remove Legacy blue in coming months.
No idea what that means. Um, then, on Thursday. This is this is great. I actually was reading an article whose premise was um elon’s Twitter might not be that screwed trimming, the head count reduces the operating cost and the users are up and uh he’s got this.
This uh, this core of of like like right-handed people who are going to be able to help execute in this area and this area and this area and in the time between, I guess, uh them. Writing that article and me reading it two of the top Executives that were supposedly going to be uh, helping Elon steady, the ship. I think one of them was in charge of advertising sales and then one of them was I’m sorry, trust and safe. That’S right! Uh, head of trust and safety, um left, oh man, um Twitter employees were told that remote work is ending. If you can physically make it to an office, and you don’t show up. Resignation accepted um.
That was apparently the message and in an internal memo Elon, I didn’t quite directly say that the company might go bankrupt or was this was this in the was this in the internal memo? I I can’t remember uh, where is it blah blah blah? No, I don’t know he sent out a memo that basically said as much though oh man, that is wild uh, also said he wants to turn it into a bank with high yield money market accounts. I have no idea whatsoever that that even what that even means Friday morning, so this is this morning all right. So this is less than a less than a week after Twitter blue launched um. They suspended the launch of blue brought the official check mark back, but only for certain brands, uh leading to Twitter support’s, two most recent tweets being completely contradictory. Oh man um! So here you go yeah here it is official.
We are not currently putting an official label on accounts, but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception to combat impersonation we’ve added an official label to some accounts so which one is it uh. I saw a really hilarious, tweet uh from someone uh putting putting Twitter Blues official verification check, mark uh with the appropriate uh company. So it had a head of lettuce uh on there like little bar graphs for how long these things lasted. So it had a head of lettuce at three days: uh it had uh Anthony scaramucci. Do you remember that guy yeah yeah, I had him on there uh.
I forget her name but had uh Britain’s last Liz, truss uh Britain’s uh, very shortest shortest lasting PM. Ever um – oh man, uh so yeah it was head and head of trust and safety uh, so Chief privacy officer, um, Chief uh, ISO uh information security office. I can’t remember what uh CCO stands for yeah in infosec, yeah and chief compliance officer, all resigned. I mean man uh.
This is a complete cluster. Okay Luke. What was your favorite part of the week hit me my favorite part um was when everyone that I saw on the platform was impersonating Elon. All the same time.
Did you? Do you see that yeah yeah? That was absolutely amazing? I opened Twitter and I thought it was glitched because, as I scrolled through literally every single account in my in my uh news, feed, whatever was Elon Musk with his picture, and I had to scroll like a few times to get to someone that wasn’t. Impersonating Elon – and I was like that’s actually that that’s some like epic, everyone coming together on the internet, stuff that you just you don’t see all the time you know .