Maybe, but I saw it more as a way to try to have a little fun in what had been a stalled conversation due to Joe's lack of understanding on why cryptology has become vital and the implications of its need in modern Society.
I wish Joe had done some basic research and mentioned the first crypto wars himself and the fallout with Zimmerman had with PGP and Moxie would have probably opened more about how that pertains to erosion of privacy and security on the internet and the implications of the Surveillance Economy that has grown like a deadly tumor on Society since the Patriot Act and why Signal was created in the first place. He's had Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Andreas Antonopolous on several times now, there is no excuse for not being some what informed given his general curiosity on the topic by now and making the most of those podcasts and having Moxie speak on such a large platform.
Honestly, I wish he had let him request Laura Poitras to come on as she can bring the topic to the massess in a relatable manner better than anyone I've seen so far--hell I remember first seeing CCC and Defcon videos being totally overwhelmed by the speakers so much I couldn't follow any of it. This may be because she comes from a non-technical background as a film maker that has been around Cypherpunks for decades now but has also been at the center of so much of the polemics (Assange, Snowden, Wikileaks, Intercept etc...) of it all and likely saw how valuable it is in life and death situations very quickly.
My issue is with the dropped calls and poor call quality, but given how few people use the voice based calls they because Signal knows how vital to optimize for low bandwidth things like messages given its prime demographic in places with real reasons to use this app for its intended purpose. Again, totally understandable to me and something that they will eventually get to.
What I thought was the funniest part (strangest) is that Moxie walked back to "I'll give you a suggestion of people and you don't even have to have any of them on" and Joe still treated it like Moxie could dictate who was going to be on the podcast. But what's the difference between that and any other guest being like "hey, you should check out ________!" which happens all the time. It was literally a nothing bet. I do think Moxie forcing the week's lineup is a bit much. A single person? Not that bad, but I could see it being used against Joe (though unlikely). But "hey you should check these people out" is nothing. Guests suggest guests all the time and so does his fanbase.
As far as Signal goes, they've almost completed every major feature I've wanted. Usernames look like they're rolling out in a few months or less and group calling works (just needs to scale). Only issues I have are that sometimes there's some latency (this seems to be more related to 1. specific peoples' phones' battery optimization settings and 2. when there are large upticks in user enrollment. So neither of these are that big of an issue for me) and I can't use markdown (essentially a non-issue). Only things I want are fairly fluffy and features I would use fairly irregularly anyways. I don't understand the distaste of UI and it hasn't been properly explained to me yet. UI looks almost identical to WhatsApp except WA is far more busy in the background (which I actually dislike) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯