YouSaid · the spoken record

James Crabtree

lines on the record: 78
first: 2018-07-28
most recent: 2018-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“All going to cut. Yeah, I mean, in the end, SoftBank is going to kind of decide who gets what, right? That's right. It looks like, so Uber is sold out in Singapore, so we don't have Singapore anymore. We've just got Grab. But it looks like they're going to stick out for a while in India. I wouldn't be at all surprised in the end if Uber just decided that India was too much bother and that they'd do exactly the same thing as they've done anywhere else. But at the moment, it looks like they've decided.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Singapore is a little bit different. Yeah, do you like it too? I do. Yeah, it's a great place to raise kids. I think it's not somewhere that you feel affection for in quite the same way as you do with India. I mean, as a foreign correspondent, I think India is every foreign correspondent posting. It's such a fascinating place.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, moderately so, at least in theory. I mean, India's damn complicated, so it's always hard to say. But I came to love India while I lived there, and I wish it well. I see no particular reason why it shouldn't prosper in the future.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My conclusion is India is not Russia. There's a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the Indian economy and a lot of people in this country are going to continue investing in India and in Indian tech, given that's what we're talking about. But India's path, it's not going to happen magically in by accident. And so in a sense, you need sensible political reforms to sort of do to some degree.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd have the British Secret Service after me. In addition to your fetching aviator sunglasses, you could have a batsu to some sort with some special power.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some goose, I would have a lot of goons. There'd be goons everywhere. You'd rough up your enemies. I mean, all sorts of fun you could have. Rough up, use that euphemism, certainly.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crazy kind of nation building investments, right? I mean, there's nothing worse than being. What's the point of that? Non creative billionaires. I go around to many of them and I know, and I'm like, you're a dull billionaire.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Elon Musk is interesting because he, in a sense, is the closest that you get in the modern Western economy to maybe Richard Branson in a kind of slightly less interesting way. He has that buccaneering spirit. And so when I first moved to Mumbai, the reason why I was captivated by these guys is it's a form of capitalism that we just don't have anymore. This really is a 19th century form of capitalism. And so Mukesh Ambani invested $30 billion in this network. He's never going to make that money back. I mean, it's a mad investment. He's doing it for various complicated reasons of his own. But in a sense, there's something rather kind of admiral about that, I found that what's the point of being a tycoon if you don't make crazy kind of nation-building investments, right? I mean, there's nothing worse than being a kind of gutless tycoon. What's the point of that?”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think her house. That's right. So I think Mukesha and Bani, if one figure embodies the sort of excess of the billionaire Raj, then it's him and it's that house.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New money entrepreneurs who start out with nothing and make it on their own broadly, honestly, and you gradually just see the sort of the people in what I call the billionaire rage shrinking in importance over time.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That will happen. And then you will see that the cleaner parts of the economy simply attract more people. So that is partly tech. You will see a number of billionaires, so people like Vijay Shikasharma, who's the guy who runs this PTM company, which is the one that's most equivalent to financial in China. He's now a tech billionaire. You're seeing a kind of new generation of tech billionaires coming up from the startup scene that was getting investment three or four years ago. That's great. But that's not the only example. I mean, consumer services, private sector financial services, so India's financial system is very state-dominated, but there are banks and fintech startups and that sort of thing. Blockchain. Yeah, God knows, blockchain. I mean, you know about that. I don't. I never really understood it. But I think you will see, I think India's going to remain a very unequal society. And so the hope must be that more of that wealth is coming from entrepreneurially generated.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so he, I don't think he's going to play that role because he has too much for checkered heritage, but in a sense he has been drawn into this new emerging kind of consumer tech economy. That's not a bad thing. In a sense, whatever you think about Mukesh Ambani, and I'm pretty critical of him in the book, the fact that he has sunk all of this money into a pretty good new 4G network is very good for me. Right, so bad billionaires.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, he has the whole thing. So I don't know. He's got a lot of apartments, got six floors of parking. There's a nice roof deck at the top. I mean, it's an extraordinary building and it became a kind of icon of what I call India's Gilded Age. But Ambani has just spent a god-awful amount of money investing in a new telecoms outfit called Reliance Geo. It's a greenfield 4G super fast new network that he built because his background is in oil refining and various types of heavy industry, but he decided that his company needed to be more on the consumer side of the economy. And he basically wanted to be a kind of tech guy. He wanted to be the sort of person who could sort of turn up in Silicon Valley and be treated like Jack Maher or Mark Zuckerberg.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll show you the, I'm going to show you the picture now on the front cover of the book. Oh my God. It's an extraordinary looking building. It's called Antillia. And so he built this. So”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, his ridiculous billion dollar house is on the front cover of my book. He has this, call it the billion-dollar house. It's a 170 meter skyscraper in downtown Mumbai that he built for him and his wife and his three kids. He lives”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a great question. I hope that you will see a gradual shift in wealth creation. Two things can happen. Firstly, some of the existing billionaires who you might put in the bad billionaire camp are getting drawn towards the sort of cleaner parts of the economy. So one example would be Mukeshambani, who's India's richest man, his ridiculous. What is his name?”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because he, and in particular those around him, do not believe in India as a secular, multiracial society. They believe in a Hindu nation in which Hindus are top dogs and Muslims in particular are sort of lesser dogs, as it were. That's not the right phrase to use. And so that's rather alarming because India does have a heritage of communal violence and rioting and all sorts of things. And those of us, A, you know, there's a moral reason for thinking that all people are of equal worth, but equally if you want to develop, you want to have stability and allow people to invest. And many of us think that the sort of the old Indian system that is sort of secular and which minorities feel secure is more likely to be those systems that will help endurance development path.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so No Andrea Modi is a sort of, he's a right wing Hindu nationalist, he's a contradictory figure because he is business friendly and anti-corruption notionally, although his record has been a bit mixed. But on the other hand, his party is a bit like the Republican Party of old before Trump when you had the Christian coalition and the Rockefeller Republicans. And so he sort of brings together those two strains in Indian life, the part of the center-right that is pro-business, but the part of the center-right that is also a right-wing nationalist. So if you're an Indian liberal, Actually most people in business are quite pro-modi, the tech sector, I think, as well, most of them probably quite like the PJP, which is his party. But if you're an Indian liberal, secular liberal, so the values in the Indian Constitution, which was written in 1947, are not that different from the American constitution there. Liberal and secular, all the people of the country, many diverse faiths should live together, those sorts of people who still believe in that, which includes me as an outsider tend to be slightly worried about.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Move to where the jobs are, and that's the sort of thing that India needs to do, and it needs to clean up its politics and sort of invest in A decent government”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has to happen. With luck, what happens is what happened in Eastern Asia, which is that you introduce a whole range of political reforms, some of which are targeted at the super rich. So, as I say, you make sure people pay their taxes, you make sure they're responsible in other ways, very few people in India pay taxes at the moment. You try and find ways to stop crony capitalism so that those people who do become rich do so because they are innovative, they're sort of appropriately rewarded for creating jobs, creating value. And then you put a big effort into the people at the bottom. That's an area where India is badly lacking. So if you look at a country like Malaysia or Taiwan, they put a lot of effort into schools and hospitals, basic pensions for old people. You create not as, you know, this is not a European style social welfare system, but this is a system where people who live often rather fragile existences have some degree of social support so that they can go and kind of take risks.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad billionaires. I like your bad versus good. I think they're all bad. But let's finish up talking about where they go from here. If you have this, you have this period of growth and then you have this period of sort of corruption. Where does it go from here? Where do you see? Like you have, now you have all these people who are very wealthy, these super rich interested in keeping the status quo, presumably What happens to an economy like this? What has to happen?”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than this guy. I mean, it's sort of. In one sense, this is a reason to some degree you can look at this optimistic and say, well, look at what India has managed to achieve given all of these constraints. But that. That's not actually the story that you want, right? The reason why India is lagging China is because you have world-class tech talent interesting business models, great opportunities, but they are held back by the political system, the lack of infrastructure and the sort of development stage of the country. And not very good.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just sort of happen while I do remember being there writing a variety of stories about tech in India and having to visit a minister. And it was like 20 ministers to get to the one minister who's just essentially a mayor. He wasn't even a big minister. It was kind of fascinating. And I remember sitting in the office waiting and waiting and waiting, just having my heels go. And I said, I bet I can reach Bill Gates faster than this guy. And I reached Bill Gates faster. I emailed him and he wrote, hey, this was back in David and he wrote back. But it was really fascinating. And then I showed the minister. I was like, look, Bill Gates moves faster than you. I mean, it's sort of in one sense.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, they've just about managed to cobble together an urban rail system. The traffic in Bangalore is just almost, I mean, it must be, along with Jakarta and Manila, it's the worst traffic in the whole world. It's just appallingly bad. And that's because the governance of the place is very problematic. And so they used to say of the tech sector in the 1990s, they used to say it grows at night. And that was the sort of famous phrase, which meant that the only reason why India was able to develop this world-leading technology sector was sort of the government wasn't really noticing. It just sort of happened while I remember being.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But Bangalore is a sort of classic example because, in addition to the sort of poverty which would catch you, it has terrible politics. I mean, just. Run by complete scoundrels. And it's true of almost all Indian cities, but Bangalore is particularly bad because you also there have sort of reasonable urban middle class of people who are very globally connected and responsible and somehow they're not able to wrestle control of politics away from the bad guys. And at the same time, all of the money still goes out such money as there is goes out towards the villages. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, in a sense, money may well follow, go to the people who really need it, but it does mean that you leave a city like Bangalore, which should be one of the beating hearts of your economy with pretty terrible infrastructure. So you compare Bangalore to, I don't know, Shenzhen, and it's just a disaster.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's interesting because that's very similar in India. So one of the problems that India has is its politics are still very oriented to the villages. And so that means you go to a city like Bangalore, which some of your listeners will have been to. It's the tech capital. It's the home to many of these unicorns. It's got an amazing deep bench of engineering talent. It feels a lot like San Francisco in many ways because it's still very unequal. There's still slums, but you've got a lot of people riding around on microscooters and that sort of thing. You have the real accoutrement of a sort of”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of urban center over the next 20 or 30 years. I just saw really fascinating statistic that most people will be, 70% of people will be living in cities here in the United States in the next 50 years or something like that. 70% of the voting will be among the rural areas. You know what I mean? The people that aren't there will have most of the voting power and they happen to be all old white men, which was fascinating, which was really, whoa.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The process of urbanization since China just did the same thing, but the second most impressive movement of people in human history, so some 300 million people are going to move from villages into some sort of urban center over the next 20 or 30 years.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that's the alarming thing for India, that it's become very, very unequal in the early stages of its development. And so if you want to become prosperous, you have to build out the middle class. But you do that really your first job before you start thinking about building out the middle class, which is quite a kind of... Rich world conception, you're talking about moving farmers into the lower middle working classes and then upwards. And so in a sense, half of the people in India still work on the land. That's astonishing, as was true in the United States before the Civil War. And so that's the sort of task that you're talking about, bulking up the middle class in the cities. And India is about to undergo the most astonishing”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's true. I mean, it's never an easy picture, but you move from the Gilda Age to the progressive era. And, you know, history sort of developed. And so there's no reason why India shouldn't be able to do that. We also know from the example of the economies of India.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And another is the boom and bust model in its industrial investment cycle. And I suppose the argument that I make in the book is that there's no reason to be pessimistic about this. If you were to have sat in the middle of New York in 1880 in the height of the American Gilded Age, then you would have looked around and seen a country that had just the most delinquent class of super-rich, completely amoral in it for themselves, doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, exactly. Oyster eating, mansion. A lot of shootings. Mansion construction, sort of general kind of rape and pillage. And they were working hand in glove with a political class that were as venal as anywhere in the world. And so you may well have been pretty pessimistic about America's chances. But 10, 20, 30 years later, things began to look up for a whole range of reasons that people are aware of, the assertion of control over politics about the middle classes.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Raj phrase, as some of your listeners may not know, that the Raj was the period of British colonialism was called. And it's a Sanskrit word Rajah, which means rule or kingdom. And so this phrase is often used in India. So in the socialist era when the economy was closed, they had something called the license raj. This is how people used to know a world in which if you were a company there was a license or a quota which said literally how many things you could make. So if you made widgets or cars, you were only allowed to make twenty thousand or whatever it might be. So that was the license raj. And so people talk about rajes and that's why I called it the billionaire raj. Where does it go from here? Good question. I mean, I think India stands at a sort of inflection point where it has these fault lines that it has to deal with, one of which is the rise of the super rich and the fact that India is becoming much more unequal, one of which is crony capitalism”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Then you have the Raj. It's an interesting one. It's got sort of the old school implications of colonialism, as we were talking about before. And the new school, talk about, when you talk about these abuses, I'd love to know what's going to happen from here after this is, have these have been created. Because if you have this sustained era of corruption, essentially, is what you're talking about talk a little bit about that. Like, what are these billionaires like with all this money and how they got to where they got?”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're gay, if you're an untouchable in India, if you are sort of denied a place in the public square, then that's often where these companies actually have a reasonable role to play.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, but in general, I mean, I think, for instance, Google has done a reasonably good job. They have a better image, I think. And in general, I don't think there's a sort of sense that the Silicon Valley tech companies are sort of bad thing as long as they don't do things that are stupid. There does tend to be, in addition to this broader problem I've talked about with Facebook, they get into trouble because the ones that are platforms for free speech are used by a mixture of sort of nutcases and people who want to test the boundaries of what are often countries that are far from First Amendment free speech environments. And so they get sort of wrapped up in that. But I have to say, I think often one can look quite benignly on the tech companies from that perspective because, in a sense, often they're inadvertently challenging laws that are not great anyway. And so they're actually a sort of platform for expression if you are.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He tried to launch this service call free basics, which was a sort of free internet butt that people said contravene net neutrality. And the Indians didn't like this at all. And there was a big backlash about it. And Facebook tried to kind of barrel through. It was another one of these incidents in which Mark Zuckerberg just came across as completely kind of cloth-eared sort of basically tried to kind of push forward saying they were really doing the right thing for the right reasons until the backlash became overwhelming and then they had to have a humiliating climb down.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the Silicon Valley companies have got a slightly watch their step in India. So Facebook, again, is the one that put its foot in it. It tried to launch a service called FreeBasics. That was around the time that Mark Andreassen sort of made this rather, yeah, he sort of talked about benign colonialism, and that obviously went down very badly. So they tried to launch the service called.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't invest in kind of local operations, and so in the end, they get caught out when their services become immensely popular in Asia and get misused.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody had anything. No information, no nothing, and you went from a situation to that in which, I mean, still it's not as if the entire population has smartphones, but you're moving pretty quickly to a position in which you have ubiquitous mass communication. That doesn't mean people are going to use it in the same way that we are. It also doesn't mean not very many people in India have credit cards yet. Nonetheless, the mobile phone has been a massively empowering tool for poor people, for women. But it would be naive to think that you slap this new set of technologies onto an emerging market that is sort of complicated and difficult and has different religions and different cultures. It would be naive to think that all of this was going to be good. And so there are some real problems and the tech companies are just not terribly good at dealing with this because they're not, you know, they don't have that many people. They're still kind of quite light most of their engineering talent is here in Silicon Valley. They have thin government affairs departments.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, no. I mean, for sure, I think most of the things that technology can do is very helpful, not just the communication, but in a sense the mobile phone was a miraculous device in India because it was much more so than here. You went from a situation in which...”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and WhatsApp is, I think, a particular problem because it's such a lean organization. I mean, Facebook at least is sort of bulking up. I can see this month by month in Southeast Asia. There's sort of they're hiring people in countries. They're trying to do their best. I mean, they could do more, but they're at least moving in the right direction. But WhatsApp is a super tiny, lean company built with engineers and really nothing else. And so my sense is they are completely blindsided by what is going on in India at the moment.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“55% margins, it's a very, very profitable country company. They are not spending enough money on trying to grapple with the downsides that their platform provides, which are different in... These countries than they are in the West.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again and again. No, I mean precisely. I think it's a very complicated picture, maybe the same as here, but particularly in emerging Asia, which is the area I know. You know, Facebook and WhatsApp, they have many positive elements. So the consumer surplus from a service like WhatsApp, it's free, basically free. I mean, you get it for the price of your cheap data packet. In terms of helping people connect with one another, all the things that it says, you know, but that sort of stuff, that's huge. When you're poor and you haven't been able to do that, when you're living halfway across a country, you're not able to speak to your relatives. It's a different, more important, more significant thing than in the United States. And so I don't want to be seen just to be needlessly bashing them, but I really feel...”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This, in a sense, may be a sort of, I mean, it may be a secondary concern for them given all of the sort of Trump-Russia stuff. But nonetheless, they're being accused of being involved in exacerbating a genocide in Myanmar. And no matter what else is on your plate, you do not want to be in the place of having sensible people. The United Nations said, The genocide in Myanmar has been demonstrably worse because of the way Facebook is used as a platform, and that is an enormous problem in anyone's book.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is sort of weak media, weak established media. You get big problems. Big problems are sort of spreading hate speech, big problems of false information, big problems also of actually these things being manipulated by autocratic regimes that not so much true in India, but it's true in Southeast Asia. And so it seems to me that Facebook in particular has a huge problem in India, in Myanmar, in Sri Lanka, and a lot of places in Asia, that they're not really beginning to grapple with problems that come with the platform.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can never really tell. It sort of seems to me that there is likely to be some portion of this. These were just lynchings that happened anyway and people use WhatsApp. And so WhatsApp is kind of being blamed. But it speaks to a much bigger problem for Facebook in particular, but to a lesser extent for Twitter, which is happening all across Asia, which is when you slap these social media platforms on top of poor developing countries that have deep social divisions and no real”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The latest example in the phenomenon of sort of online disinformation fake news that people, in addition, so one of the sort of funny things that happens, there's a great article in the Wall Street Journal a little while ago about how India wakes up in the morning and sends each other. Everyone sends each other these funny little kind of gif messages saying good morning or we are blessed today. And both WhatsApp and also Google discovered that this was sort of gumming up their servers in the US because of the popularity of the service. But it's also used to forward badly sourced false information. And so in this case, in these villages, there have been a rash of examples in which a WhatsApp group appear to have been used to coordinate lynchings of suspected child abusers. Now that's what's happened, whether that is actually true or not, I'm rather skeptical.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for those who don't know, it's exactly it's Facebook own messaging app. Facebook bought it two or three years ago, paid what seemed to be a big price, but got a bargain, I think. And it's amazingly popular in India. Everybody uses it. And so it has become”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so WhatsApp has become the latest poster boy of bad social media behavior. It's happened in the last month or two. India regrettably does have quite a lot of lynchings. This is just a sort of fact of life in a country that has a weak police force and a weak state. But WhatsApp is amazingly popular in India. It's WhatsApp's largest market messaging.”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“India's open ecosystem should have advantages over the Chinese one in the long run. Again, that's a very interesting theoretical question because obviously the innovation that you get off the Chinese mega platforms is amazing. I mean, I spent some time in China. I now live in Singapore. So I've written a bit about DD and Alibaba and Ant in particular. And there's clearly something amazing that you can do with these sort of huge Chinese companies that you can't do elsewhere. But the open sort of innovation system that India has when combined with real depth of sort of programming talent in particular at the very top end in cities like Bangalore and the links that you have with Silicon Valley. You know, that should have some long run advantages”
2018-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'The Billionaire Raj' author James Crabtree · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT