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- [00:00]
Found App Narrator
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- [02:08]
Katie Drummond
From Wired this is the big interview where we get to know the people behind the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director, and today we're talking about UpsCrolled, a relatively new social media app that lets you post text, photos and videos and Says it prioritizes content over algorithms. The app started off the year with a bang. It became the number one downloaded app on US App stores in late January, and upscroll says it has now surpassed five and a half million users. The app was created by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian, Jordanian Australian with a background in tech who looked at the options out there and said, actually, I want to make something new. He joins me now from Amsterdam. Lucky. Issam. Hi. Welcome to the big interview.
- [02:57]
Issam Hijazi
Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me.
- [02:59]
Katie Drummond
Very happy that you're here. Now, I want to actually start by just talking about your background. It's a fascinating one. You've worked for big tech companies before. You worked at IBM, you worked at Oracle. Tell us a little bit about that, about your history with tech and how it shaped your views on the tech industry and on social media more specifically.
- [03:19]
Issam Hijazi
Absolutely. Great question. So I've been working in the tech industry for the past 17 years and a half, and even prior to that, I started coding actually when I was 12 years old. So I'm pretty much involved in IT and technology since a very early stage now within my career. As you mentioned, I did work with the likes of Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and then small startups. As a young professional, that is a dream job. That is something that every kid wants to be in. It's great companies, they have great technologies, and there's a lot of opportunity to learn. But as you get to understand and learn about the mechanics of these companies, you start to wonder if this is the right place to be at. And this is something I've been starting to have in the past three years. And that made me shift my focus on wanting to start something new. These companies have been complicit in bad things that's happening around the world, things like genocide in Gaza, for instance, by supplying technology, infrastructure, knowledge, et cetera, to countries like Israel and allowing them to do surveillance. And personally, I felt complicit just working for them, and I wanted out.
- [04:28]
Katie Drummond
And talk to me then about that moment where you threw up your hands and you said, that's it. I'm starting something new. I'm starting upscroll. Talk to me about the origins of the company that you're leading now.
- [04:42]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah. So this happened precisely in October 2023, when I started to see the genocide unfolding on our screens in real time. Personally, I've changed. I started to see things differently. I was affected deeply. Not only because I'm a Palestinian, Katie, because I'm a human being, after all. In addition to that I've got family members in Gaza, from cousins to extended family members who got killed during the past two years and a half. So it affected me deeply. It changed my perspective into how I see life, how I see career, how I see people. And it dropped a lot of the masks around me. At that moment. I felt I needed to do something because I was fortunate enough not to be in Gaza, not to be in Palestine, and just to give something back to those people in general. And I've looked around and I've noticed a lot of people been trying to post and talk about what's happening on social media platforms, but they were shadow bound, they were selectively censored. Whenever they post something, it was taken down or that content was not reaching the people that follow them. And that was happening across multiple social media platforms. And in some instances, some of those users were completely removed or deactivated from these platforms without giving those users the reason for the removal itself. At that moment, I felt it was a time to give people back control into how they want to express themselves. And I looked around and I've seen, I've done research and I noticed people are looking for alternatives, but there was a lack of, of ethical or reliable alternative. So at that point I decided to put every waking hour of my days, all the efforts that I have, all my resources, including financially, do a lot of compromises, including for my family to build that platform. And that sounded crazy back then and still sounds crazy today if you ask me. Especially that I was against, and still against those big tech platforms who have billions and billions of users and have billions and billions in funding, resources and influence from different people and organizations. But I was still determined to try this out and give it a shot. Back in 2025, in July, we launched upscroll and we started to see people, you know, coming into the platform and willingness from users to switch or completely stop using other platforms such as Instagram or X or TikTok, and start using an ethical platform.
- [07:15]
Katie Drummond
Talk to me about actually designing upscrolled and sort of how you thought about the user experience. People can post texts, they can post photos, they can post videos, they can like comment and repost content. When you were designing it, what were you most focused on? What kind of user experience do you want people to have when they, when they download the app and they start using it?
- [07:37]
Issam Hijazi
I wanted to create an experience that feels familiar to them. I didn't want to create something unique or have an interface that's different. I wanted something that would instantly feel familiar. To them. So when they switch from Instagram or they switch from X, for example, they will feel that the app is pretty much the same in terms of functionality or the things that they do. And that's intentional. I did not want to create something new that needed a certain learning curve or confusing them. I just wanted it to be as easy as possible for them and that have been perceived pretty well by those users. It's crazy to think of trying to create a new social media just for the sake of it. So that was intentional. And I knew the users that would join upscroll, they want to join it because of a reason. And that reason is because they have been suppressed, they have been oppressed, or they want out from the existing, you know, bectech that they've been using for the past two decades, really. So, yeah, as you mentioned, we do have all kind of functionalities that allows them to engage with one another. Follow. So it's pretty much familiar, it's pretty much standard. Nothing really new from functionality perspective. But behind the scenes there's a lot of differences.
- [08:44]
Katie Drummond
And I'm curious about that because I think you've said that upscrolled doesn't use AI or algorithms to determine what content people see. If I'm correct there, what informs the content that I would see when I open up scrolled and I start looking through my feed? What's behind that? What is happening behind the scenes?
- [09:03]
Issam Hijazi
What's happening behind the scenes is very chronological feed. That is.
- [09:09]
Katie Drummond
I love chronology. Thank you for sticking with chronology. I think too, too many social media apps have lost the plot when it comes to the chronological feed.
- [09:18]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah, yeah. And the fact is, 20 years ago these things existed and we loved them. But then they started to introduce algorithm thinking that it will give us a better experience. But in reality, it just made us addicted to something that has no value. All you need is to follow the people that you like, people that you're interested in, news agencies, organization, and staying up to date with them. You don't want an algorithm to decide what you want or what you like or influence you or change the way you think about things. And these other platforms systematically have been designing and continue to design their algorithm to keep you hooked and try to push content that may not be really relevant to you and that sometime have been associated with pushing propagandas or pushing, you know, political views. And as you can see with certain specific social media organizations that's out there, we just, people just need simplicity. They just want to connect with our people, have a simple social experience, just like it was 20 years ago. As simple as that.
- [10:23]
Katie Drummond
Yes. I want to see the newest thing and then as I scroll, I want to get to the older things. I really appreciate that. Now, I met you very, very briefly. You might not remember this because you were crazed at web summit in Doha. I think this was in early February. And I think that you were right. In the midst of this massive surge in your user base. I think you said you had something like 2 million users, but that was up from like 150,000 in a month. I am fascinated by what your life has been like for the last three months. How small was the company when you started to experience that surge and how have you handled the kind of exponential growth that you've experienced? What's the good, what's the bad? What's been like the hardest thing you've had to deal with?
- [11:16]
Issam Hijazi
Let's go back about nine months ago when we launched in July. I haven't slept properly since then. Oh no, it was pretty much it was a one man show and that's me and everyone.
- [11:29]
Katie Drummond
It was just you?
- [11:30]
Issam Hijazi
It was just me. Wow. And Katie, when you run a social media platform, there's a lot of things that you need to manage infrastructure, you need to manage users expectations, you need to manage support, you need to manage content moderation, you need to make sure the app actually works on Chinese devices, Japanese devices, American devices, and then they need to do some sort of marketing in a way and you need to do fundraising, ask money to put money in the new company so you can raise capital and hire people. So I was doing that for the past, before the surge, for the past six months, before the surge. And I even had to get my wife and my new baby girl, she's now 21 months. And I told them we were in Sydney and I told them, hey, I'm going to be very busy for the next few months. How about you go spend the summer vacation in Jordan with the family and yeah, you come back in September, hopefully things will be better by then. That never happened. I kept pushing and saying, hey, stay in Jordan a little bit further. I needed to travel to the us, other countries to present upschool to different people and organization conferences and things like that. Up until the point I told her, hey, how about you stay in Jordan and I'll come to Jordan and see you both. And that was over about six months. So there was a personal sacrifice of me not being with my family, especially with my daughter, for, you know, the best six months of her life. Let's put it that way. But I know I was on a mission and I wanted to make this successful. Now, moving into January, things did not really get any easier. I knew about the TikTok deal that's going to be officially signed by Larry Ellison and be owned by an American investors, et cetera. But I did not really anticipate what was about to happen. I thought that, yeah, we'll get, you know, some new additional thousands of users. And up until the 20th of January, we had approximately 150,000 users. And up until then it was still me running everything. And I felt like a small community. I knew almost everyone on the platform. I was chatting with them, asking what's working, what's not, trying to improve and still trying to raise funding to build the team and the company and so on. During that time, during the official signing of the TikTok deal, I was in the US and I was at some event in the Bay Area. And before going to the stage, I was looking at the dashboards for the platform and I started to see something strange happening and, and then I started to check other resources like the stats on the app stores and I started to see upscroll jumping, you know, from, I don't know, 150 to 8060 and crawling its way to the top. I was like, okay, something is happening. It wasn't too scary. We had like tens of thousands of new users. I was excited. I was gonna announce this on the stage when I speak on that specific conference in the Bay Area. But then after that specific event, things got more crazy. I started to see hundreds of thousands of people signing up to the platform. I started to get phone calls, emails from people telling me, hey, your app is on number 10 in Australia, your app number 10 in the UK. And I was checking, I was, this is unbelievable. This is surreal. I did not really anticipate none of that. And it got all the way to number one by the end of January. And I think by the end of January we had about 2.5 million users. And it was still me running the show.
- [15:03]
Katie Drummond
Oh my gosh.
- [15:04]
Issam Hijazi
I was getting invited by different news outlets to talk about this, what was happening. People I've never met in my life talking to me, sending me messages, and bibsonic people invited me to Qatar to open to have one of the keynotes opening on the first day. So they flew me in, I went to Qatar and that's probably how you saw me there. And then we had the announcement of the 2.5 million users. And it's been growing since then. But as you can imagine with that kind of growth comes a lot of challenges and I needed to do a lot of firefighting during that period. So yeah, I haven't slept a lot
- [15:40]
Katie Drummond
and that I can't even imagine that you have slept at all. The fact that you have slept at all sounds like a miracle. I mean how many people have you hired now it's you and how many,
- [15:53]
Issam Hijazi
how many others now we are much better place. We have about 25 people working at upscrolled and that's between engineering, between brand comms and strategy, as well as content moderators, obviously HR function and people helping with the management of the projects that we have internally. I had to spin off that team really quickly so I relied on my connections, referrals. I was extremely lucky in finding many people who love the mission of upscrolled and they gave them very interesting places with amazing experiences and they just want to have all that experience that they had into upscroll. So I would say I'm pretty lucky from that regards to be surrounded by an amazing team. Now.
- [16:41]
Katie Drummond
What's been the most brutal learning experience from all of this? What's been the hardest thing, the moment of failure. Has there been something that stands out of just like the nightmare day, the nightmare hour?
- [16:56]
Issam Hijazi
Look, I think it's what we had is a problem you can say, but it's one of those good problems to have. It's one of those problems that you wouldn't anticipate the growth itself. It's great because it's growth. But with growth of course comes all set of challenges. You need to manage suddenly millions and millions of users. You need to suddenly manage bad actors who want intentionally to bring the system down by attacking it from technical perspective, by also posting all kind of nasty content intentionally and then taking screenshots and then sending that to reporters and saying this and that about the platform mission and what we're trying to build here. So I guess that was the biggest problem or challenge that we had within upscroll when it comes to managing all these users as well as the now. You wouldn't face these kind of issues with different businesses. But when you're dealing with user generated content, that is going to be something to expect. So if I would go back in time, I would probably spend more time on things that would help me if such sudden thing happen from automation, from things that catch certain failures, for example, in the system and scale accordingly. But like I mentioned, Katie, it's a good problem to have. We managed to get out of it successfully. We're in a much better place now and we'll continue to improve as we move forward.
- [18:22]
Katie Drummond
We have to take a quick break, then we'll be back with more.
- [18:31]
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- [19:09]
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- [19:40]
Dena Temple Rasten
world feels more chaotic than ever. Huge data breaches, AI threatening jobs, foreign meddling, that creeping feeling of obsolescence. It's information overload. I'm Dena Temple Rasten, host of Click Here from PRX and Recorded Future News. Want to understand how we got here and how you can get ahead of it all? Listen to Click Here. We can help you make sense of all the noise. Click here Wherever you get your podcasts,
- [20:16]
Katie Drummond
How do you imagine upscroll making money? I mean, are you making money right now as a company? How do you eventually plan to monetize what you're doing?
- [20:25]
Issam Hijazi
Great question. Currently we're not making any money. We're backed by certain angel investors who are aligned with our values as well as VCs who are aligned with our values. And I'm personally extremely picky when it comes to who wants to put money in opscrolled. And that's for the obvious reason. I want to continue to have this platform being an ethical platform, always standing on our values moving forward. But yeah, when it comes to monetization, there's a lot of way to monetize existing platform, social media platform. They have done many of those things that we will Maybe do some of them. Example, verified users verify the organization, you get the blue check mark. After you verify your identity, you pay subscription fee, for example. And that's one way to generate money. We will open it up as well. Marketplace kind of feature. So if you're a small business, you want to sell items, you can do that. We take commission. If you're a producer, content creator and people are interested in your content, they can subscribe to your content. Specifically, they pay you, you set the price. We take small commission out of that. And the last thing will be something related to ads that we can run on the platform. But even with ads, we're gonna be selective on who would be able to advertise on the platform itself. We will ensure that ethical businesses will be giving that opportunity. But businesses that we believe that have been complicit in bad things around the world don't get that opportunity. And I think that's a great place for small, medium sized businesses to find the right audience. We already have them. They can find users who are ready to switch to other services. So that can be like the great place to pitch what they offer and have those users switching to their services.
- [22:14]
Katie Drummond
Now you've mentioned this a little bit and alluded to it a little bit too around the issue of content moderation. You know, upscrolled as this surge and this sort of incredible growth happened, has also been criticized. And I want to make sure I give you a chance to respond to that and that we can sort of get into it. You know, critics earlier this year flagged extremist content, anti Semitic content on the platform. The ADL Anti Defamation League put out a very heated statement alleging that that upscrolled lacks enforcement protections. Can you respond to that? I mean, how did you sort of see that unfold from where you sit?
- [22:49]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah, excellent question. We're a new social media platform and if you look at the existing landscape, Katie, you will notice that existing social media platform that have been there for the past 20 years or so still have problem when it comes to content moderation. You'll find a lot of hate speech, which I would love to believe that these platforms don't allow. But you still find it if you open these apps today. So it's a problem that all social media platforms have and we're no different. User generated content can have that risk and it needs to be addressed. Now regarding all these articles or organization that you've mentioned, all these content that have been reported on these articles have been removed from the platform even before the article was published, probably they took some screenshots and made it to the article. We do not allow hate speech on the platform. We do not allow Islamophobia, anti Semitism or any kind of hate really on the platform. We want to build a platform that is safe for everyone to exist, to speak freely, but within legal boundaries, within, you know, respect that people can respect one another and people doesn't have fear to speak about what matters to them. We are continuing to strengthen the mechanisms on how we detect certain bad content internally. We have definitely had a bigger moderation team over the past couple of months and currently we're sitting at zero backlog in terms of bad content or nasty content on the platform. They will still continue to try to post this kind of nasty content on the platform and we will continue to fight it and remove it on the platform. We're very strict when it comes to these things and we have community guidelines which is publicly available that states where we stand and what is allowed and what's not really allowed.
- [24:28]
Katie Drummond
Got it. And in terms of sort of how this works in the background, are you primarily at this point pursuing a human led moderation approach? I mean, is it sort of people who are handling this day to day as opposed to, you know, AI for example, that that would potentially be able to, to automate some of that function? I mean, how are you thinking about content moderation maybe compared to some of these larger social media platforms that have automated a lot of that?
- [24:55]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah, yeah, good question. So currently it's, it's a manual process. So we have content moderators, they receive reports, they look into them and according to the policies they take action. Users are able to report any content that they see and they tend to do that quite fast. So we're able to catch any bad content on the platform quite quickly. Now to scale, we are doing some internal R and D and integration with AI models that are able to detect but not make decision. So we want to be able to detect anything before it widespread on the platform itself and then allow a human in the loop to make a decision. Now there's a lot of content that can be identified easily, pornography, et cetera. And that can be with high confidence and the algorithm can give you that confidence. And probably for this kind of content, for a specific kind of content, we can have a quarantine queue where this content has first to be reviewed by a human. And if it's not really against the policy, then it can go. This is for sensitive material. We're talking about things related to csam, pornography explicit hate speech and similar content. But we will always ensure that a human would make the final decision, not an algorithm, and allow our users to appeal for any decision that is actually made and explain to them why certain things happen. We will continue to improve, but like I mentioned, every other platform, regardless how long they've been, you know, existing, they continue to have these problems and they want to improve it in different ways. And we are learning along the way as well.
- [26:24]
Katie Drummond
I completely understand the idea of making determinations about where to draw the lines, and I think that that is a constantly evolving conversation. It's an incredibly challenging conversation. I was curious though. Users have noticed on upscroll that they cannot actually select Israel as a location for their posts. I'm curious about sort of how you are thinking about the Israel Palestine of it all, given sort of how the company was founded and formed and whether that was a deliberate sort of affirmative decision not to recognize Israel from a company point of view.
- [27:04]
Issam Hijazi
I personally coded that function, not for you as a user to see Israel on the dropdown. Katie I'm a Palestinian and I know a lot about what happened. My ancestors, my grandparents, they were living in Palestine. They were living in Safad before 1948 and they were forced to move out from Safad and become homeless and roam one country to another in order to find a new place. They went to Lebanon, they went to Syria. They went eventually to Jordan. They tried to return to Palestine, to other cities. That didn't work out. They returned to Jordan eventually and now we do not have the right of the return. I'm not able to go to Palestine. I'm not able to go back to my hometown ever, and see it and visit it. Israel continues to kill people on the ground. They continue to genocide people in Gaza. They continue to do bad things in the west bank outside of Gaza, where there's, you know, no Hamas or else. And it's like, you know, I want to ask you this question, and this is a hypothetical question.
- [28:23]
Katie Drummond
Sure.
- [28:23]
Issam Hijazi
Would you hang a picture of your perpetrator in the living room knowing all the things that they have done?
- [28:37]
Katie Drummond
I mean. No. No. Would I hang a photo of someone who had done terrible things to my family in the living room of my home? No, I would not.
- [28:45]
Issam Hijazi
That's a very personal thing to me. Israel is exactly that. And this is an app that I've built, we're building now in response to a lot of things, including the bad things that Israel have done and continue to do and having them to be on the app on that Dropdown is not going to happen. And the more important question, if you've read this somewhere, I really hope that these people who ask why Israel is not on the list are asking the question is Israel responsible or should be held responsible for all the bad things that they've been doing for the past 70 years, specifically in the past two and a half years. I'm not really fixate on a silly drop down where the word Israel is not there.
- [29:32]
Katie Drummond
Obviously the app and the company was born of a very specific point of view. What challenges do you anticipate running into as you try to scale? I mean what, what kind of feedback do you get? I, I, what kinds of emails do you get? You know what I mean? Like you are, you are jumping feet first into the fire in many, many ways. And I think to take that kind of stance overtly, publicly, loudly, unapologetically is a very unusual thing. It is especially for the CEO, especially for the CEO of a for profit company. What's going to be really hard about that and what already is as a
- [30:20]
Issam Hijazi
business we do or as personally I do receive nasty comments, nasty messages from people and as a company we also receive similar kind of communications. But that's accepted, that's expected. Sorry, but we also receive a lot of communication from users who are extremely excited, extremely proud and want to be part of the vision and the work that we do. And that's what matters. We're not looking at the negative. That's very, very minor, Katie. The positive is much, much bigger and we're focusing on that. We know we are building for people and people appreciate that. And I know for a fact that people around the world have changed in the past two years for a lot of reasons and they started to see things differently and they started to choose things differently and they see us as a way out from all that big tick that's happening and they want us to become bigger and, and that's exactly what we're focusing on and relying on their trust where they want us to be. And they are like every other users still they tell us, hey, how about you introduce this new feature? We like this, we don't like that. And that's exactly what we want to hear from them and they continue to do that. So it's a healthy, I would say in a much bigger way than it's not unhealthy or negative, if that makes sense.
- [31:41]
Katie Drummond
Yeah, that makes sense. What do you want for upscrolled over the next few years? What are your ambitions? What's your roadmap? If I talk to you again in two years, what do you want to be able to say you've accomplished?
- [31:53]
Issam Hijazi
Mainstream SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM we are the mainstream social media platform. Everyone use upscrolled and hey, everyone is welcomed on upscroll. We are not creating this platform for specific groups or pro Palestinians or pro anything. We're pro humanity really. So everyone is welcomed with their views. The only difference that we have is no, we're not gonna shut a ban or censor anyone for their thoughts or their views. So I want Obstacle to be a place where everyone around the world are able to express themselves freely without the fear, being comfortable in that space and having all of their friends, their family on the platform, sharing things that's happening that they like about their communities and get bigger. This is the first step in my personal vision. I want upscroll to become big enough and start to build independent infrastructure at the same time, digital infrastructure. Stop relying on the big tech in many areas when it comes to technical infrastructure and start offering that infrastructure for other communities and other people who are seeking ethical alternative. So hopefully we'll get there.
- [33:04]
Katie Drummond
That's interesting because that actually brings me to my last question. One thing I wanted to make sure to cover with you was this idea of social media that is, that is scaled, right, that is used by millions and millions and millions of people as opposed to social media platforms that are much more community oriented and that sort of attract a certain subset of maybe like minded people, right? So Blue sky comes to mind for me as one example where I think you sort of have a certain cohort, a certain maybe demographic using Blue sky. Then you have certain people on X, you have some people still using, you know, Facebook. But I think this idea of social media continuing to fragment and for sort of these bubbles to exist as opposed to a free exchange of ideas, which I think was one of the great promises, right, of social media overall, of, of sort of the digital revolution in the early 2000s. I was curious about sort of how you see that and whether you are optimistic about the possibility for there to be sort of a broad free exchange of ideas or whether you see social media as something that will continue to contract and sort of move into these more of like a bubble or a community reality. Like, like how do you see that playing out? Because I do think that that is really consequential. And when you talk about the future of upscrolled, it sounds like you imagine it being much less of sort of a fragment and much more of a big scale free exchange of ideas. Kind of place. So how do you see that playing out?
- [34:38]
Issam Hijazi
Absolutely. I believe people want a place where they are able to express again without the fear of being censored or the fear of having their content being removed without justification. And as other social media platforms continue to impose these actions, I believe people will start looking for alternatives organically. And then the other thing that is important to highlight here is the network effect. When certain people start to populate a social media platform or social network that would attract the other people to see or check out what exactly they're talking about. So that thing will happen organically in terms of attracting the other people, even if they don't agree with the principles or the vision or even the founder, you know, the company. They're there because they want to hear what the other people are saying. An example of that of X. I don't think a lot of people are big fan of the current CEO of X, but they're still there because they want to.
- [35:40]
Katie Drummond
I think that's probably. Yeah, I think that's probably true.
- [35:43]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah. But they still want to be there to hear what everyone else is talking about.
- [35:47]
Katie Drummond
You're right. You're right, they do. And I. It can be hard for me to wrap my head around it, but you're right, they, they do still participate on.
- [35:53]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah, we're trying to create something ethical, so we'll probably attract the ethical mindset first and that's okay. But then the other side want to see what we're talking about and they will start coming and joining the platform, and that's okay. They will start or they'll continue to use multiple platforms for different purposes because each of them will allow them to express things differently according to their policies, et cetera. And that's a healthy way. It's okay to have multiple platforms. We don't want to strict people to one platform, one space. They should be able to move between them. There should be no monopoly, for example. But I believe also from technology perspective, at some point there will be some sort of openness between all these platforms where users are able to interact from one platform to the other. And there are some technology that enables that Today they're not mature 100% open protocols that allow the exchanging of information between different social media platforms. They will get mature enough, it will become something like, hey, you're on Vodafone, I'm on T Mobile. We are still able to communicate, even though we are, you know, using different vendors or different providers, but we are still able to communicate with one another. And that's going to be exactly the same case with social media platform at some point and I believe regularity will impose this. So an openness of communication, free communication between those platform at this point it will take some time but I personally believe we will get there.
- [37:18]
Katie Drummond
The analogy to Elon Musk and X is smart and is interesting. I mean people don't have to like you. They don't necessarily have to even like why you founded the company to use the app, which I think is certainly true in the context of him. And so you would essentially say upscrolled is for anyone.
- [37:35]
Issam Hijazi
Absolutely, absolutely. If you want to speak freely without the fear of being censored for your views. Again, regardless of what's your ethnicity, where are you from? That's the place to be.
- [37:49]
Katie Drummond
All right, another quick break here and we'll be back with our favorite game.
- [37:56]
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Issam Hijazi
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- [39:54]
Katie Drummond
Now, Issam, we like to close each show with a little game that we think is very clever. It's up to you whether you think it is or not. But it's called control, alt, delete. So I want to know what piece of tech you would love to control. What piece would you love to alt so alter or change? And what you would delete. What would you vanquish from the earth if given the opportunity? And you can be very sort of broad in your definition of tech. I've had some truly irrational answers to this question. So go for it.
- [40:26]
Issam Hijazi
I mean, when you say control technology, I think that's a big thing. I'm not a person who wants to control anything in the world. I think it's, it's a wrong thing for anyone to control anything really, whether that's flow of information or certain technology innovation, et cetera. Because once a person controls something, then that creates a risk. So I wouldn't personally be interested in controlling anything and be responsible of not doing it right. I'd like people to participate in the process.
- [40:56]
Katie Drummond
That is as good an answer as any. Completely fair. If you could change something about technology, what would it be?
- [41:04]
Issam Hijazi
I would change how AI is being used nowadays and try to put some guardrails around using it. I think it's extremely dangerous technology. It's a great technology, don't get me wrong, but I think it's extremely dangerous. I think it makes people less smart. Yeah, and you know, kids use, use those technologies nowadays to, to do things they don't research, they don't have an opinion. I mean, our generation, my generation, we used to go for Google and that was like an upgrade from going to the library. Now kids don't go to Google in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or Claude or something and they ask it that question and they take it for granted. It's the 100% answer, 100% correct answer. And they tell you, hey, ChatGPT said that as, you know, the holy grail or the source of being 100% true, which is scary and dangerous.
- [42:02]
Katie Drummond
So would you put an age limit on AI or would you go even further than that?
- [42:08]
Issam Hijazi
I would change the way AI is designed and have guardrails and have people audit the way it's built. Currently, people, everyday users, they don't understand how OpenAI, how Claude are building their models. They're just taking it for granted. It's smart and they just use it. I think we should make them or we should, you know, hold them accountable and tell them to show us exactly how they build these models and how or why they answer the way they answer, which is very black box at the moment.
- [42:42]
Katie Drummond
And what would you delete? Would you get rid of anything?
- [42:46]
Issam Hijazi
Interesting question. The ones are not controversial here, but
- [42:53]
Katie Drummond
I like that this is where you draw the line.
- [42:55]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah. What would you delete?
- [42:58]
Katie Drummond
What would I delete?
- [42:59]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah.
- [43:00]
Katie Drummond
Wow. The interviewer becomes the interviewee. Oh, there are so many things I would delete. I mean, just as one example, I'm just thinking about my daughter. I have a daughter, too, you know, I would probably delete YouTube Kids. I would probably just get rid of it if I could. We made such a mistake when we started letting her watch YouTube kids, and then we had to pry that iPad out of her clammy little hands, and it was a nightmare. So I might delete that. There are lots of things I think I would probably delete. You know, I might delete X. I understand why you can't say that. I might delete Facebook. You know, I don't know that all of my angry aunts and uncles need to spend more time arguing with each other in their little bubble. Their little Facebook newsfeed bubble.
- [43:43]
Issam Hijazi
Yeah. So it could be an app.
- [43:45]
Katie Drummond
It could be an app. It could be, like, you know, one thing. One other thing I would love to delete is when I'm on my phone and I'm trying to, like, I don't know, look up an address, and it automatically tries to route me to Apple Maps, but I really want to use Google Maps. I would, like, delete that function from my phone.
- [44:03]
Issam Hijazi
I will delete the autocorrect.
- [44:05]
Katie Drummond
Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one.
- [44:09]
Issam Hijazi
I hate the autocorrect. It doesn't correct me. It makes me sound wrong all the time.
- [44:13]
Katie Drummond
Yes. No, it rewrites things to be like, the word you actually were not thinking about at all and had no plans to type.
- [44:21]
Issam Hijazi
And sometimes they're extremely bad words. I was like, mom, sorry, I did not mean that. I meant something else.
- [44:25]
Katie Drummond
Oh, that's funny, because whenever I try to write fuck, it always autocorrects it to duck. Yes. And I'm like, actually, that's very specifically not what I meant. That's a good one. Delete autocorrect. Very smart. Esam, thank you so much for being here and congratulations on the growth. It has been wild to watch over the last three months. So wishing you all the best.
- [44:46]
Issam Hijazi
Thank you, Katie. Thanks for having me.
- [44:47]
Katie Drummond
Yes, thank you. The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope Content Our showrunner is Ann Marie Fertoldi and Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Emily Shaw was our audio engineer in San Francisco. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy this episode was fact checked by Samantha Spangler and Megan Herbst and I am of course your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to the Slack Group thread.
- [45:33]
Issam Hijazi
This week on the political scene. From the New Yorker, Trump's rupture in
- [45:37]
Katie Drummond
the world order, Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only Pre World War II, but really it's a pre 20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.
- [45:57]
Issam Hijazi
Join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [46:09]
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