Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Mailbag: A Premature Twitter Eulogy, Netflix in Theaters, Buy or Sell: Strategy Consultants, The Six People You Meet in a Group Chat

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

The night Twitter was laid to rest, TV in movie theaters and the debate over David Zaslav, whether strategy consultants are useful, and celebrating Thanksgiving with a plan to fix the NBA and a taxonomy of group chats.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm your host, Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I am doing, I'm okay. I feel a little disappointed. I'm going to be totally honest. Sharp Tech readers send tons and tons of questions. So we're never like wishing for more questions.

That's definitely the case. But we did put out a call, albeit only 12 hours, for more off-topic. off the beaten road, fun episode questions. Gotta say we have a list of fairly serious questions here. Good chance to catch up on topics. But I don't know. Maybe my audience is just a little, this is my fault. This is a me problem.

I've cultivated an audience as a little too serious and not quite as zany as, say, the goat, the goat listeners who definitely would know how to answer this point. Well, I would say we could have done a better job amplifying the call to listeners because as we waited until like the final 30 seconds of the last podcast and gave them 12 hours. Which dropped 12 hours. Yeah. So I don't know. Strategically, maybe some things we will do differently the next time we do this,

like the Christmas mailbag. But, you know, it is what it is. And we do have a lot of different questions to hit today. We have a lot of catch up on. We should be clear. And normally it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But given the way things are changing online these days, we are recording on Saturday.

We are going to release this on a Monday. If anything happened in 48 hours since we recorded this, we are not taking responsibility for any of it. Exactly. I have no idea whether Twitter is going to be a going concern this time next week. Actually, you know what? This is going to get myself in trouble. I recorded a dithering Friday morning Taiwan time.

So Thursday, like early Thursday evening in the U.S. And, you know, put out the thing. by the time we released this in eight hours, you know, everything, you know, things might have changed. And what I did expect to change was the funeral.

The funeral? And the media in particular, to go so far in the other direction, the overreaction in his stereo was unbelievable. And it's like, no, Twitter is not going to fall over in the next 12 hours. That's like,

that's not, that's not going to, it was unbelievable. And, uh, I get myself in trouble talking on Saturday. But in all seriousness, yeah, that was the, this is the problem with recording any degree of early these days.

Your adjustment might come from both sides. Well, and look, in all seriousness, as a mainstream news consumer, it's a little bit bewildering sometimes with some of these Twitter updates and everything. Like, I was sitting there Thursday night watching all of these people. eulogize Twitter and wondering to myself, like, is the site really just going to cease to exist? Like, it shouldn't be that complicated to keep it online. Like, an outage would be reasonable. But I don't anticipate this just, like, disappearing from our lives.

And I don't know whether that was naive, too. Like, maybe it could just disappear one day. I don't know. No, I mean, of course, anything could happen, right? I mean, I think if we should have any expectation about the world today, it's that anything's possible, right? Like, if you did word that lesson six years ago, then I'm not sure when you're going to learn it, to say the least.

But, you know, part of the reason why Twitter would have so many employees is because there's high degrees of redundancy and there's systems and processes that have been built up. And to some extent, that can definitely go too far and ossify a company and make it hard to move and do whatever. And you have to schedule like multiple teams to cover multiple things because people take notifications, people go out X, Y, Z. But part of that means, like, the whole point is there is some degree of redundancy in the system. And also, like, software is weird.

On one hand, software breaks all the time. It absolutely does need to be updated. And there's weird bugs that something will go wrong and some server and some closet needs to be kicked. For sure, that's the case. But it's also the case that the whole concept of software is it just sort of keeps, like, you build it once and it keeps running. And it's funny because on one hand, to people who are like, like, well, it's like, no, like something like, complex service. I mean, I run a very small service and passport and stuff breaks all the time. Like, it's definitely the case that stuff breaks. It's also the case that you don't need 7,000 people to keep clear up.

Like, like, that's, that's just, that's not, that's never been a sort of realistic assumption. And it's funny because you feel like, you know, people are handing Elon Musk, like, there's this tendency to set the bar for your. enemy as low as humanly possible. And it's like literally at this point, Musk is a success if Twitter does not disappear off the face of the earth within 48 hours. Like it just seems like not very good game theory there. If you're sort of setting that up of like what's a success and what's not.

It's true. He's able to look triumphant as long as Twitter exists once we get past Thanksgiving. You wrote out, you wrote on Friday morning and everyone's like, wow, that was a bender last night. It's like you literally just gave Musk a ton of credibility literally by Twitter continued to exist for like eight hours. It's like that doesn't seem like a very good strategic thinking. But I mean, it's funny because there's a broader Twitter question. I put something in my article earlier this week.

And every time I say something on these lines, I have some small group of subscribers here always get really, really upset. Because I, you know, basically insiduating, I'm not sure Twitter's been a net good for the world. And there is a certain segment of. folks that's like, no, it's all good, you know, to even question that is, is bad. Yeah. And the, this hysteria is exactly what I'm talking about, right?

Like, I just don't think it's good for anyone to get this sort of mob mentality. And by mob mentality, I'm not, you know, I'm just saying in very broad strokes. Everyone worked up about one thing. Right. Because, I mean, and it's, it's very, it's disheartening. You saw a lot of people in the eulogy saying, like, oh, Twitter's become so essential for journalism. I'm like, I know that's the problem, right?

Like there's this shortcut of sensational stories at my fingertips all the time. And I can just do a search, search. Twitter.com, and I have all this sources and quotes that I need. And it's like, well, what was so clearly lacking last night and it was someone to explain how do large distributed web services work? What would it look like if Twitter was floundering? Like what would be some small things on the edges that would fail? Because that's how it would happen.

It would degrade. It's not going to like tip over overnight. This isn't 2010 towards a Ruby on Rails applications. You're going to fail well. Like it's like there has been real work on the technical back end to make it more more resilient. And that was just not existent. And it's depressing as someone. There's a question I think later on here about how I get news and stuff like that.

It's depressing as someone who's always stated, look, I'm not a journalist. I'm not out there reporting. You know, I don't want to break news. I rely on and value journalists and the news ecosystem. And people are out there with their silly avatars and their silly names flying off the handle on Twitter. And then they're going on their, you know, esteemed publication and trying to write a serious article. Like, I just saw you on Twitter. Like, well, why am I going to believe anything that you're saying?

here and then it's doubled down with you have by definition thousands of people that just lost their job who are want revenge want to dump on things that do no stuff and there there is a sense when you're in a company everything always seems terrible right like everything's always a disaster you have no idea how this is a going concern and there's always going to be stuff that you can dump that that that furthers the narrative and when you're in this mindset again this mob-like mindset. And I'm trying to use maybe moms

not the road word because it has a pejorative sense. Like there's a this sort of mass hysteria. It's snowballs. Everything snowballs

and there's escalating rhetoric and it ends up distorting reality. And again and again and again. And I'm not sure that's good for society. And I think that's a reasonable

question to raise. Is it good to have one network? This isn't a social media problem. This is a Twitter problem. Twitter is it's all it's all the media. It's all the way it's sitting in one place whipping themselves up into frenzy after frenzy.

And I just don't know that that's particularly good for anyone. Well, basic infrastructure question here. Your point on software, so if there were an outage, it's not like they would just, you know, shut the doors at Twitter and give up and just not fix it, right? That was the part that I didn't really understand when all these people were eulogizing the end of Twitter. It's like it's not a building that's going to burn to the ground and can't be replaced for however many years. It's not like the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Like there are ways to fix things when they break. And that's one of the benefits of having software.

Well, one of the downsides of software is literally anything is possible. So you can definitely spin up at a scenario where something, breaks on Twitter, something goes down. You can't get access to XYZ because you didn't even realize you did access the person who had the access password or key or token or whatever it is as long as it's gone or whatever it might be. So it's theoretically possible that Twitter could go down and never come back up. The probability and likelihood to your point is exceptionally low.

And so I'm reading it. It's hard to talk about. It's hard to talk about. Twitter because there would be people that are writing these threads. I used to work in the infrastructure for a large company. Here's all the things that could happen. And it's like, yes, that's true. All those things could happen.

The question is the probability of them happening. And then you get on there and you're like, shit, I only have 280 characters. I can't act like, I can't actually explain the nuance. Sure would be nice if the people responsible whose jobs are to write about this would have any interest in exploring the nuance. wants. But they're not. They're searching for Twitters and posting tweets. And, uh, yeah. So again, is it theoretically possible by the time this podcast posts on Monday that Twitter is down and gone forever? Sure. Anything is possible. Again, anything is possible. Is it likely? No,

uh, it's not likely. But I don't know. Like maybe that's, this is the, to tie it all together, is we live in a world of nuance. We live in a world of gray. And Twitter just systematically erase that and it drives everyone to the absolute extreme of everything either Elon is cleaning out culture and he's going to reform the entire tech industry by showing Twitter could run with a tenth of the people that it had and every tech company is to take note and there's going to be hundreds of thousands of entire tech workers on the street that's one acceptable opinion the other acceptable opinion is it's a total disaster like he has no idea what he's doing Twitter is going to be dead tomorrow and the answer is probably in the middle like it is every other single time yes well

flattening reality into good and evil serves no one. And that's sure it does. It serves people on Twitter who want retweets in life. That's true. Yeah. If you're cloud chasing, it's a really effective strategy. But life is messy. Reality is messy and complicated.

And that's okay. Just to put a finer point on some of what you're saying there and add my own thoughts at the end of this impromptu Twitter segment. Number one. Hey, a listener to my basketball podcast, greatest ball talk, reached out to me last week. And his girlfriend works at Twitter and she was one of the people who opted out after Elon sent his hardcore ultimatum. And she was just like, I'm out. It's been a wild couple of weeks here.

And he just hearing her experience, it sounds like it's genuinely very chaotic behind the scenes at Twitter. For sure. Yeah, for sure. How could it not be? It's absolutely an indictment of Elon Musk. And Elon, the more I've learned about it, I mean, there have been just so many unforced errors along the way over the last month of Elon Musk and Twitter. It's kind of mind-boggling.

And I should just say for the record that, like, if I were out in public, confronted with someone like Elon Musk or Elon Musk himself, I mean, like, he's not the type of guy I would want to hang out with under really any circumstances. But as I look at some of the coverage, it's so unbalanced that I find myself like sort of sympathizing with Musk and sort of rooting for Musk. And that's a weird place to be. I don't feel great about it in the slightest, but that's what happens when you have this like escalating rhetoric and hysteria that just spins out of control.

You can't help but sort of push back in your. own mind and be like, well, maybe Musk is going to figure this out. Let's wait and see. Like, I don't know. This is classic Andrew. Or if you, people who don't listen to your basketball podcast, Ben Goliver, the other bet in your life, loves to describe how you will always inevitably zag when other people are thinking. And so this is the most predictable take just knowing you personally.

But I don't think you're alone, right? Like, I mean, honestly, it's like what, what was the best? possible way on Friday night. It's like, how could we completely transform public support and sympathy for Elon Musk in the next eight hours? Let's lose our freaking minds and say that Twitter's going to go under and see if it's a see if it still exists the next morning. It wasn't just that.

It was claiming that Twitter might go under and then, you know, sanitizing the Twitter experience as we look back at the last 10 years and talking about how magical it was. I was like, what the fuck? So anyways, the beginning of this podcast was more serious than we intended, but we're going to keep it light today. And moving on from Twitter, the rest of the podcast will be a Twitter-free zone. I don't want to let Sharp Tech become like a Twitter podcast going forward. It's very hard to escape.

I mean, there is this question that you're obviously going to skip and I'm going to reinsert about highly risky business models for companies and like, why do I have one for Twitter and not anybody else. And I do think there is an aspect, just sort of full disclosure. Remember what I thought about Twitter's business for literally since the beginning of trajectory. Like Twitter,

Twitter is like the most important tech service for me. Like I'm out there all the time. I get so much information from that. It's tremendously valuable. When I say I'm not sure if Twitter's net impact on society has been positive, it's been unbelievably positive for me. And maybe I saw like a total elitist thing. It's great for me, but not for the masses.

But that's kind of how I think, to be honest. And so, like, there's, like, I thought about what can make this a going concern for a very, very long time. So that's, that's number one. But number two, just the, there probably is a bit of me that's like, look, is it going to be the worst thing for the world if Twitter goes away? Is it actually good to have this digital cage match where everyone's on there drawing the sharpest friend enemy distinctions possible? And then brow beating everyone to either be on either one side or the other. Is that actually good? Probably not.

Is it entertaining? Unbelievable entertaining. Is it informative? Absolutely. Can you garner information and ideas that you can't get anywhere else without question? It would be a massive blow to me personally, professionally. There's a question later on about what I research would be a huge blow if Twitter went away. But there may be is a bit where there's a part of me that's like, well, roll the dice.

Try a subscription model because you know what? If it goes sideways, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world. Yeah, I mean, the stakes, who can say what this is going to turn into? And honestly, we're walking a real high wire here trying to guess where Twitter is going to be by the time this post next week. Yeah, who the hell knows? Disclaimer, don't hold us to anything we just said. But in any event, let's keep it moving to the rest of the tech world. Kirk says rank the tech you hate by your willingness to use that technology in the event of an emergency.

So I came up with a quick list here, Ben. First on my list, LinkedIn, the website that has just never made sense to me. And I was forced to join when I entered the legal world. And I just, I could never put any time or energy into LinkedIn and joined. it very begrudgingly, but that's number one on my list. Because ultimately, you know, it's not the end of the world. Like if you, if you email me one day and say, you need to get LinkedIn if you're going to be a member of the Straterey family here, I would sign up. I would just never use it. I rarely, if ever, pay any attention to Shetri's visits or website stats. I mainly

check it like once a year when I do my end of the year articles and I list were like the top five articles that were read in the year or things like that, which is, by the way, one of the beauty is a subscription model is like, I've never, there's no one in the world more untethered from page clicks than me. I would like to think, at least that is like making money from the web. But one thing that is always shocking is the amount of traffic that LinkedIn dries. It really does. Oh my God, really?

Oh, yeah, much larger than Facebook for me. I mean, I mean, different sites vary the different things. I mean, I did put that tweet out that Twitter drives the most traffic, which is for both sites not true at all. Like Twitter is very, very tiny. For strategically, it has traditionally been large. It's gotten less. I do think that Twitter, for a few years, has been fading, definitely.

Twitter is part of the responsibility for this. If you have a link in a tweet, they don't promote it very much. Interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, I mean, well, it's, this is what happens. Like, you want to keep everyone on site. You want to keep showing them ads. Like, there is this nice view of the world that Google Prop gate.

Oh, it would be nice if we'd just kick people off. And then they'll see where we're a great, great resource. In the end, people realize, well, we could make more money if we keep them here and show ads. And this has been a problem for Twitter is it's better to keep people on Twitter getting mad and seeing ads than it is to provide real utility, get a link. They go somewhere else and read it and maybe they don't come back. And so that's definitely been an issue. But the other issue actually, I might have mentioned this before, but as strategically has become much more podcast-centric, and I mean, not just sharp tech, but strategy itself is recorded. as a podcast and you can listen to it.

And a huge number of my listeners or my subscribers now listen. And no one shares a podcast, right? That's one of the challenges that we're trying to figure out. That's why we have a software component. There will be more features coming that make, you know, around sharing and things on those lines because it is a hard problem to solve. But you don't finish reading a data update. Say, this is so great. I'm going to go to Twitter now and find the link to the article and post it.

Whereas if you're reading in an email, it's like, oh, just click a button. And then you can share it to Twitter, XYZ. So, but it does turn out. Sorry, this is a long, long roundabout. All along, LinkedIn has been shockingly. I'm shocked by this. I can't believe LinkedIn is actually a meaningful traffic driver for you. Meaningful is maybe pushing it, to be honest, but it's always been to higher than Facebook.

And it's been surprising in that regard. And I mean, you look at the numbers. Microsoft makes a decent amount of money off of LinkedIn advertising, not just LinkedIn, like, the recruiting stuff. but like there are people that go there and there is a feed of content and people check it out and there's ads in that feed and they make money. Again, not what I do personally, but it's definitely a resource that exists on the internet. Okay. Well, number two on my list, Microsoft Excel. I really admire the people who are great at Microsoft Excel.

I'm sure 98% of our listeners are great at Microsoft Excel. I just look at it and it all feels very overwhelming. There's all these different shortcuts that... No, Microsoft Excel is the number one programming environment in the world. Everyone, you're programming when you do Microsoft Excel, it's just like asking for errors and there's no way to debug it and it's a total mess. But everyone does it. No, I know.

And it's very useful for lots of people. But every time I look at it, all I see is like a jumble of cells and a pain in the ass trying to figure out how to get it to do what I need it to do. So I'm just not an Excel person, but I don't feel that strongly about it. That's why it's number two on my list. Well, maybe my addition to this list is Microsoft Word, which I can't stand. I hate, you know, I don't, if I wanted to format something Microsoft, I would do it myself. I don't need help.

I write in plain text all the time, but I'm looking at a Microsoft Word. right now because you work in Microsoft Word and I'm happy to accommodate you. So between the two of us, we really have a glowing sort of endorsement of the Microsoft Office Suite. Look, man, you've been very accommodating and I really appreciate your begrudging embrace of Microsoft Word here in 2022. I'm just glad that you like Microsoft products because I am definitely out in the wilderness in like, for trajectory, we use Office 365 or Microsoft 365, whatever it's called.

We don't use Google Docs, which I disqual. like I don't like Google Docs either. Yeah. For sure, the, if you have the two people working in a dock at the exact same time, okay, fine. Yes, it's the best alternative. If you want to do actually be productive and have any sort of like teamwork when it comes to things like managing shared inboxes, for example, or different people doing

different things. Like Google stuff is so rudimentary. Yeah. This is definitely one of my more contrary it takes. But give me a Microsoft 365 subscription over a Google Doc subscription for sure. Yeah, well, I 100% agree with you. And I haven't yet pushed Microsoft Word comments on you. That's the big thing in the legal profession.

And I found them very useful. In any event, number three on my list, Amazon, Alexa, I would feel like a complete moron if I were ever talking to Alexa in my house. I don't anticipate ever using it. But I don't hate it as much as number four, which is a meta headset. I can't really imagine any scenario. Again, the emergency here would be if Ben called me one day and said, look, the whole strata team is in horizon workrooms.

We're waiting on you. Put on the meta headset that we sent. I would put it on, but that's really the only time I would feel the need to put on a meta headset. So, no, I don't think we need to send you one. Doesn't, doesn't Alice have one? Alice does have one. Yeah, she has like an older Oculus, though.

I think there are, there have apparently been innovations in the last three years. So I'll have to investigate. Yeah. Number five, AirPods. If I didn't have headphones and needed to record the podcast, I would use AirPods. And then number six, Frontier Airlines. I just, I have nothing to say. Look, just too much disgust.

Oh, man. I considered reading an email that I had missed that we got like a month ago. Somebody emailed in and was like, I stand with Sharp on the AirPods take. We got a lot of people hating on me for the AirPods take, but we did have one person. I think his name was Nick. Does Nick work for the onion? Did he do that wrote that profile? Look, I have no idea who wrote that profile.

But my mother-in-law actually. she was listening to the podcast. It was like, so somebody wrote a profile of Andrew? Can you guys send the profile? So it was pretty great setting her the Onion article. Number six, not really tech, but Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines are two airlines that I will only take in the event of a true emergency because I've had so many bad experiences with them over the years.

Do you have any additions to this conversation, Ben? The airlines is a good one. Completely agree with you on that. Yeah, I think getting word in was good. I mean, I was going to say, you know, probably it definitely would have been Windows back in the day. But then I went to Microsoft. And like, the funny with the Microsoft stuff is when you're at Microsoft, you use all their products in like the ways they were intended to be used. And like, would you use all of them together?

It's like, oh, this actually makes sense. It's pretty great, right? Like, it turns out mixing and matching can cause messes. But, yeah, if I had to switch to using Windows or maybe a funnier example, like doing Linux on the desktop, at this point, and this is like one of my personal conflicts. Like, I have a very big philosophical problem with, like, Apple's approach to the App Store and antitrust and stuff like that. And then so every couple of years, like, you know, I should just use Android. And then, like, two weeks later, I could run kicking and screaming back. I mean, basically, whatever.

tech that, this is definitely, I'm in my old man stage here, whatever tech I use that works, I have no desire to, to change it. Now, I will definitely look for stuff that makes what I do better, but I have a very difficult time making philosophical. I'm going to make a change for, like, philosophical reasons. Like, I have my workful figured out. I don't run betas of stuff because, like, look, these are tools for me to get my job done. I don't need to be debugging an audio driver to figure out why I can't record a podcast, right? Like, in fact, on Max, I always run an operating system really behind. I like, take a full year to sort of iron out all the problems.

So if I had to be on the cutting edge or use something new, which I do, I mean, I do sometimes. If something comes along, like, wow, that tool is exactly what I need. But, I mean, I'm definitely needless to say, much more willing to to try new things than you. I think what I might put on this list is Tesla. Ooh. I do not have a Tesla.

I have no desire for a Tesla. I have friends who have Tesla. I feel like if I'm going to spend all that money on a car, I'd like the car to be nice. And honestly, that's one of the... To find nice there, though. What do you mean by that? Like, not have, like, mismatch panels or, like, little weird oddities or, like, have a luxurious feeling sort of interior to a car. Like, again, it's like a tool, and I would like to have a, like, I'm definitely a believer in the buy something nice.

use it for a long time. My car at this point is like six years old. I don't drive that often. It's a nice car and like, why would I get a new one? The, and I just, I don't want to deal with stuff. Like, I want stuff to work and work for a long time. So, yeah, I don't know. This question did come fly in very late, but it's hilarious that it came in late and you could instantly generate a list of like eight things.

And you know what? I really should have had PCs on that. there. Like if I were forced to work on an IBM think pad, I mean, it would be very low on my list. Do love the nib. Oh, God. I just couldn't do it. Is the nib the little mouse in the, in the center of the keyboard? Yeah, the little red dot. That's the only thing that think pad has going for it. But no, the think pads are great. I think the hardware is great. Like they're, they're durable. I'm just saying after like 15 years on a Mac, I couldn't switch back to Windows. Like it just would be a non-starter for me unless like literally I had no other options and had to use a computer that day. But I appreciate the pro tip from you on the

Mac OS side. I'll wait a year and let them iron out the kinks. No, you don't need to encourage me. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. All right, moving down the list here, yaw says, do you think premium TV content from HBO, Netflix, or Disney will ever release simultaneously in movie theaters? I know HBO has done this in the past with select episodes of Game of Thrones, but why wouldn't they make this part of a diversified revenue stream? It seems like a way to monetize costly television slash streaming productions from superfans willing to pay to see them in theaters.

Do you have thoughts here, Ben? Well, some stuff is happening here. So Netflix, quite interestingly, a couple of people have pushed back on some of recent Netflix conversations to say they are experimenting with time releases. Like I think like the British baking show, like they released a couple and then a weekly thing. And then obviously,

stranger things, they split up into two seasons at least or two parts. And then probably the most interesting one is doing this Chris Rock special, which is going to be live. and then we'll be available on the service. Wow. Yeah, and then the other one that's super interesting is Disney is putting Andor on, I think ABC, the first two episodes. And then it will be available. You have to subscribe to Disney Plus to watch the rest.

All of which makes complete and total sense to me. And the most interesting company here is HBO or Time Warner Discovery. They are, I mean, it's funny because, David Zazlov has become like the Elon Musk of the industry like everyone's decided he's terrible and everything he does is stupid and I kind of feel like on an island here

I think everything he's doing is smart it makes a lot of sense and I'm like maybe I'm going to get this totally wrong but one of the things he's done I mean one of the reason he engendered all this antipathy is he canceled a bunch of movies including you know cat girl and like a bunch of

a bunch of other ones and part of his reasoning was like all these middling movies particularly the ones that go straight to streaming are a total waste of time and money. They don't actually drive new subscribers and they don't stop people from churning. And that seems to be true. Like it seems to like it's like what number one, the internet broadly, you benefit from either being super big or being super cheap. Like that's just the way the internet works in general. Number two, it seems obvious from a normie perspective.

If there's a movie in a theater, I'm going to be more interested in seeing that movie on a streaming service. because it's like in my head. It's like, oh, yeah, when I sit down on Friday night, it was on there. Oh, yeah, that was in theaters. I should, I should check that out. Whereas you see some random sort of thing. It's like, you know, scroll by it.

Like there is a payoff to being in different places. And the fundamental economics of content are you, you spend a lot of money to make it once, and then you can reuse it again and again. Why limit yourself? Use it in a theater, then use it in premium TV, then put it on an airplane, then put it. And it turns out that's what they did for, decades, right?

Like this idea, it's weird, but there's an aspect where you can as a business be too customer-centric where, sure, some people would like to have every movie released on their TV on day one on a streaming service. But you charge for stuff because it's differentiated and people are willing to pay and that's how you survive as an ongoing concern. I think I've made this analogy before. Would people like it if trajectory was free? Sure.

I'd get more readers. They would come in and do it. I also would like to make a living and to be able to build an ongoing concern. And oh, by the way, be able to watch new shows like Sharp Tech or Sharp China or whatever it might be. That depends on going against what consumers want in the short term, making them pay for stuff. But ideally it's a win-win for everyone because they get stuff that's valuable to them. And I can grow and expand and invest in new things. And why would that not apply to it?

entertainment. So yeah, I think the industry, HBO for sure is going to be pushing this. I mean, are they going to start releasing Game of Thrones simultaneously in theaters? Maybe not that, but I think what you're going to see broadly is a real reevaluation of different ways of releasing content, different payoffs, different ways to monetize. Windowing, I think, is making a comeback. And I think that makes a lot of sense. So this is pretty embarrassing, but I'm going to admit it here on the show. My favorite thing. Your standards are so low, I don't know I know what this is going to be. My favorite thing that Netflix releases.

You started a tech podcast and immediately admitted to disliking AirPods. So, I mean, I have no idea what you're going to say here. Please continue. As far as Netflix and Premium TV is concerned, my favorite thing that they do, I love it even more than Drive to Survive, is the Crown, the series about the queen over the last several decades. Yeah, you're right. That is more embarrassing. It's really embarrassing, but look, if they put it in theaters, I would go watch like part one, five hours of the crown, part two, two weeks later, the final five hours of the crown.

Like, I would go do that. And one of the things I find pretty interesting about the streaming wars is there's this flood of content. But all of it feels pretty disposable. And I do think that this question is, you need to make it feel special. Exactly. Like if I'm watching something on my couch, it's just another item in an avalanche of content. And I watch it. I enjoy it.

And a day or two later, I'm not thinking about it. And we'll never have cause to think about it again. But when I'm going to a movie theater with friends or family, like I bought tickets to go see that Netflix movie Glass Onion in a theater. And I'm going to go with my family the night before Thanksgiving. And it's going to be a lot of fun. And when I do that, the content becomes an experience. So when I watch it in the future, I'm not only watching the movie, but I'm remembering, like, where I was, who I was with when I saw it.

And all of it just feels a little bit more durable than this, like, all right, we're putting this on Netflix and everybody's going to watch it and talk about it for maybe a day. And then, like, none of that stuff ever gets revisited. It's one of the big challenges with streaming services. It's like how do you make people care about this over the long haul? And I do think that some of the people who let pure numbers drive their thinking on issues like this, they miss the potential that is out there for like creating longer term investment from fans. Yeah, there's a famous Steve job quote about, you know, some people, other people in the industry try to sell feeds or feed.

feeds or speeds, I should say. And we're, you know, the insinuation that Apple is different and then they want to sell sort of the overall experience and what it feels like to use a product and all those sorts of things. And it's obviously true. And you see this mistake all over the place. Like sports is an excellent example. The reason why the analytics folks, like, sure, back in the day when no one looked at any numbers, was there a correction and an arbitrage opportunity to look at numbers? For sure there was. Are the people who want 47 reviews to get every call right and to analyze every single shot and do XYZ and dispose everything down to spreadsheets?

Is that entertainment? No, it's an entertainment product. It's something that's interesting. What's great about basketball is it's so resistant to analytics at the end of the day. Like you see the most analytics forward teams just end up losing in the playoffs again and again. Because there's something else that goes into basketball that is essential. to winning that is about teamwork, that is about drive, that is about intangibles, that is about hitting clutch mid-drain shots, and it can't be measured, right? And it's the stuff that can't be it.

Yeah, you also, it's difficult to apply analytics that work really well in the regular season to your strategy in the playoffs because it's very different. That's right. But this is, this is what happens is you get a strategy that seems to make sense, then you apply it everywhere. And you lose the human judgment that actually is what makes things great. I mean, just to go back to that open door interview I did last week, I think one of the things I was sort of pushing Eric Wu on is by all accounts, Open Door's pricing algorithm is works pretty well. Work better than Zillow. They do a good job. But all that pricing is relative to like one house versus another house.

and the macro question of what's going to happen when the Fed raises rates, how quickly it's going to change, is a purely human function. Like it's a judgment call. Like, and data and algorithm is all backwards looking. And I think you just see this in space after space after space where there is a short-term gain from reducing things to numbers and you find efficiencies and things that exist. But real greatness, real success, real success. real whatever it might be at the end of the day comes from realizing and understanding that actually there are distinctions. There, like there is judgment.

There is things that can make a difference. And to your point, you know, in content, yeah, some content, having filler content that you just churn out is great. It's actually, it actually is a very valuable thing for a business. You know, the actually, I have an analogy to it to a question I want to get to earlier. You need different types of stuff. But you also, like, how many people, it sounds so cliche and silly, but like when that Avengers, you know, the Avengers, whichever the first one was,

the final one with the finger snap. Infinity or something, yeah. Infinity Wars, yeah, we're real fan boys here. But it wasn't just that there was the buildup to it. It wasn't just that you had the IP that you're harvesting. It wasn't just that, you know, there was a surprising ending. it was that you were sitting in a theater and everyone just like flabbergasted. There's a communal aspect to it that elevates it and makes it more meaningful for people.

And it's hard to measure that sometimes. But it's definitely a real phenomenon. And it should factor into business decisions. And I think this is a real issue for Netflix as far. They want to build franchises. They want to have stuff that's durable, right? Because, you know, franchises are super valuable, not just because you would monetize them lots of other places, but also you,

it gives you negotiating power versus talent because like the the actual IP is more valuable than the talent order might be. It gives you a sort of a sustained like it's it's guaranteed customer acquisition because they already know what it is. But you generate IP not just by making a good show. You generate IP by delivering an experience, a memorable experience. Why do people endure after Garbage Star Wars release for Garbage Star Wars release until they get to Andor, which is pretty great? because so many people, particularly like the, you know, people that are in their 40s and 50s, they retain the sense of wonderment of walking out of the theater and like, that was so cool. Like that was so cool.

And it's maintained the value of this franchise despite Disney dumping all over it for like 40 years. It's incredibly powerful. Yeah, well, and the only other pushback I would have to the Zaslov conversation, I do understand trimming the fat and and looking at certain projects that just aren't really going to move the needle, aren't going to drive audience to your platforms. It's also very difficult to make that decision without giving certain shows room to breathe. Like, it took a lot of people a long time to really pick up on the wire. Or Game of Thrones, to be honest.

Yeah, Game of Thrones is another great example. So you just have to be very careful as you make those decisions. And I think when people look at Zazlov and lash out at him, their concern is that he's not actually being that careful about the way he's making decisions. Which is very reasonable. But this is all, I mean, but this is a Netflix. There's been a Netflix issue too. I mean, and I think for Netflix, it's actually in some respects been worse because,

like if you dive into the Netflix archive and you find a show like, oh, this is kind of cool. And then boom, it ends after two seasons. It's like, oh, well, that sucks. Like, why would, why waste your time? Why bother going through the Netflix archives? I think there's a, there's a brand sort of daint, uh, impairment that happens when your expectation for going into the Netflix archive is that it's going to be a half, a half finished show.

And wouldn't it be better in the long run if you went to the archive and you're like, well, I'm going to find stuff in here. And yeah, there's no new releases I want, but I will just find some. and it's going to at least be a have a satisfying ending. That just doesn't happen. Yeah, well, and I think they do that in part because you have to pay cast members more, the longer it runs. And so it's not a great strategy, at least if you're an artist.

But there is a series that's exactly like that Patriot on Amazon Prime is supposed to be really good, but it only has two seasons. And every episode is an hour long. And so I just like can't justify making the investment. and I feel guilty about it, but it is what it is. To keep it moving from streaming to consulting, Witt says, long-time fan of you both and really enjoy the new bundle of podcasts. I have a bit of an odd question, but I was reading Walter Kichel's The Lord of Strategy about the founding of Management Consulting and the rise of, quote, unquote, strategy as a discipline. Lords of Strategy.

There are a lot of Management Consulting. Okay, yeah, the Lords of Strategy. And it made me curious, how does Ben think about strategy consultants? Are they valuable? Should you build these functions in-house or bring in one of the named firms? Does he think of himself as some kind of superhero version of a strategy consultant? I hope you don't think of yourself that way. I do love the idea of you stepping into a phone booth and coming out in like a strategy consultant cave.

as you sit down to write strategy every day. What do you think here, though? I think I'm the wrong person to ask. I mean, there is a, the closest we are to management consulting beyond my phone booth escapades. Is your spouse,

who is a consultant? I mean, what does she think about this? So I forwarded Witt's question to Alice, my wife. She's a management consultant at Accenture. And honestly, her reaction surprised me. I thought that she'd be thumping her chest, defending the honor of management consultants,

but she actually came back with some takes. She said, and I'm reading verbatim now from a text message, she said, there are two types of management consultants, strategy consultants and consultants who help companies implement new strategy. Accenture does both. I'm focused on implementing strategy. The consultants at the hoity-to-toity consultant firms usually do only strategy and they look down on anyone who's focused on execution. It's considered cooler and more prestigious to be in strategy. I just don't think pure strategy is very useful. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you can't help me execute, why am I paying you? So taking some shots at McKinsey and Deloitte and I don't know.

The white is implementation. The big three are our, see, no, I don't know way too much about this. Oh, boy. The big thing are McKinsey, Bain, and Bcg. Those are the, those are the, the hoity-toity trio, as it were. There you go. It came down to BCG or Accenture for Alice and she went with Accenture. Yeah, I mean, I, that makes sense to me, but I know less about this world than you do, and I've never read the lords of strategy. So I don't know, how do you value the role of a strategy consultant? Yeah, I think, well, her distinction is a very important one. That's exactly where I would have started.

And I actually think there is a lot of value and it makes a lot of sense. Like the Accentures and Delights of the world, like there's stuff that you need to do as a company that's not your core competency. And maybe you only need to do it once or you need to get something off the ground. And often this is IT related or some technology. You say, oh, everyone's a technology company these days. Like, well, no, actually they're not. Like so there's I mean you definitely have technological aspects. But at IBM has a big consulting arm that does, you know, is very IT focused.

And so that that I think has tremendous value makes a lot of sense. It often, you know, are they particularly good at this stuff? No, people in tech will look down on it in like the quality. But the reality is there's not that many, you know, folks that are super good at this in the world. And it's really helpful to be able to bring someone in and help with these sorts of things. within sort of like the MBA business school world, you know, for sure the prestigious rules are the hoity-toity trio, the McKinsey, B.CG, and Bain,

because you don't have to do that implementation stuff. You get a do strategy. Yeah. And I actually completely agree with Alice's take. The reality is, is that in the role of strategy is the role of, that's the CEO's job. And so either number one, you're dealing with an incompetent set of management that can't figure out their strategy. And that's like the ideal case from a management consultant perspective because then you actually have an impact on strategy.

Congratulations. You're doing what you think you're doing. The problem is you're doing it for a company that's probably terrible because they don't have a CEO that can do strategy. Number two is you're being brought in as a pawn in an internal political game to drive things to a direction. that the CEO knows they should go, but he needs someone to actually build up the evidence, the data and all this sort of stuff, because he doesn't have sufficient political capital

to sort of get that done himself. Or you're going to come in and do layoffs. Congratulations. You get to ruin people's lives. I hope you're proud of yourself, right? Well, consultants can also insulate you from backlash, right? Yeah, that's right. No, because he said to do.

Yeah, it's like, great. You've contributed to the decline and accountability in our society. You know, congratulations, right? So I do, you know, I say this a little bit tongue in cheek, number one, because I have a lot of friends. I know a lot of strategy consultants. Number two, there is an aspect of trajectory where strategicry is all strategy. It's not, I'm not doing any implementation.

I do think that's why I value and it's important that I'm actually building my own business and, you know, helped bring the subscription model to the world and now working on podcasts. Because I think there is an aspect of getting your hands dirty and, like, is useful. and relative that also doesn't have anything to do with like, I do sit on the side and say, meta, you should do this. Google, you should do this,

right? Twitter, you should do this. And, you know, so I recognize that weakness and limitation there. That said, one thing that's been really interesting,

I started out knowing no one, right? Yeah, I had a few hundred followers on Twitter. Like I, and so trajectory was completely on the outside, just me giving my takes, right?

Not on X, not on X, and one of the weird things I've had to navigate is now, know everyone, right? Like, and I can get access to whoever. And part of that has been a business model question, like, how do I leverage that? And so that's why I've invested in like the Shrekory interviews and having the podcast. It's like, well, oh, wait, I'm going to, my whole thing is I'm, I'm an outsider. So if I do get inside access, I'm not going to use that to inform my stories. No, all my takes are mine. I don't like, I want to stay super true to that. But I will try to open the door to

my readers. So when I do interviews, I don't do interviews for snippets. I'm like, I only do an interview on the condition that I can release the whole interview as a transcript, as a podcast, because like, I'm like, look, if I'm getting access to you, all my readers get access to you. That's sort of my rule. And so that's been one thing out of business access. But number two is, it's funny, you will get a lot of, I will get pushback from VPs, when you see a VP's, like, that sort of level and they'll disagreeing with me and sometimes they'll get very upset about X, Y, Z. I never get that from CEOs. Even and what I think is the reason is they know, they are with any illusions that I know what's going on in their company.

Of course they have much better information. I'm not, I might be sure I might be missing something or not be aware of XYZ, which the VP in charge of that data is very eager to make sure that I know because he wants to make sure that I'm, you know, portraying his business correctly. Everyone in a CE's world is kissing up to him or her, right? they're telling them what they want to hear because that's just the human condition. They want themselves to look good. They want to get a promotion. They want to keep going forward. And what I found again and again and again with all different personality types,

with all different kinds of company is they're so thirsty for someone to give some sort of outside viewpoint where their paycheck doesn't depend on like them, right? And so even when I'm totally wrong, they're never upset about it. It's very, it's been just really interesting. The difference stream of VP feedback and a CEO feedback could not be more different. And I think there, the best possible manifestation of a strategy consultant is that. It's like, look, I need someone whose interests are actually not aligned with me to come in and give some sort of viewpoint on this, to investigate some sort of space, to, to, like, just because I feel like I'm not getting what I need to get from my organization, not because they're bad people. not because they're not qualified, but because the incentives are wrong.

And I need someone with different incentives to come in and look at a situation. And that's the sort of best possible manifestation of where strategy consultants can make a difference. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of cynical applications of strategy consulting across all sorts of different businesses. But I'm glad you said that because I was going to come back and apologize for giving short shrift to the strategy people. I like imagining the consulting world that's like the Sharks first jets. with strategy and implementation. But there is value to the strategy side because the closer you are to something,

the harder it is to retain perspective and have a good sense of what the bigger picture looks like, what it should look like. And so bringing in an outsider to provide his or her own thoughts can be really useful just as an exercise to sort of think about the direction you want to take things. and to your point, it is difficult to know as an outsider some of what is going on. It's a real challenge.

I experienced that when I was at Grantland. There were all these people reporting on what Grantland should do and everything that is going wrong there. And like the outside reporting was almost uniformly wrong. And it was really eye-opening for me in like my mid-20s to see how many people could get it wrong and sort of distort the reality of what was happening behind the scene. So there are certain. things that you can never know unless you're on the inside. But I do think having that independent perspective can add a ton of value in terms of like what the shape of a given business should look

like. Yeah. I mean, I do think there's probably an aspect where, you know, is it a net positive for society that we all these, you know, very smart, gifted, driven people flitting basically from job to job, which is like, it's like, I don't want to commit. So I'm going to be a match. consultant, right? There is definitely an aspect to that. Like, that's sold as one of the benefits. It's like, look, you can work on a different project every year. It's like, yeah, is that like, it's kind of nice, though, to like settle down and work on one thing and build something. So, yeah, there's, like, with all this stuff, there's, there's, there's, there's pluses and minuses for sure. But yeah, I support, I support Alice in her, in her, you know, standoff

against the management consultants. And I always, I've always appreciate just having that little chip on the shoulder. I can definitely relate to that. There you go. All right. Well, to keep it moving, Chris says there's been talk about the NBA a few times on Sharp Tech or Dithering. You talked about how to make an 80 game season work. I don't remember having that conversation.

I definitely would not. I think I'd be much interested in talking about getting a 60 game season to work or even shorter. It could have been 60. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess that's the minimum. You probably have to play every team twice. So that'd be me.

Play every team twice would be perfect. Chris says his preferred solution would be a league. rule that no player can play more than 50 games of a regular season. This would rest the best players, get young players on the court so they could develop their game and make the regular season more interesting. Gonna have to reject this suggestion. I mean, that's a terrible idea. The whole problem is you, like, the big player, you want to see the best players.

Why would you want to limit them? The reason to reduce games is, I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to, I'm going to a couple of bucks games next week is I know I need to get two games in because I want to make sure you at least one with Yannis, right? And that kind of stinks. It's, it's, uh, whereas if there were only two games a week or there were, you know, a set number, the likelihood of the best players playing is higher, which is a win for everyone. I don't see any win in limiting the best players in playing beyond potentially any prevention, but teams do that on their own. Yeah. The NBA's real sort of real fundamental problem,

and it's a problem for a lot of, is they came up in a world where the best way to earn more money was through quantity. You started out getting more people to come to games because the more games you have, the more people can come. You make more money at the ticket booth.

Then you had the RSNs, more inventory, fill up time, stop people from turning from the cable bundle. You can charge a lot for that capability. That's great. We are in a world, this goes back to your streaming point, of absolute content abundance.

There's games everywhere constantly. And one particular game is not special. Again, the NFL is the obvious contrast here. Like there's only 16, now 17 games in a season. They're all, it's all at a set time, relatively. But still, even when they've expanded, it's still a set time. And it's an event. And it's important.

And that makes it drastically more valuable. But the problem is the entire cost infrastructure and revenue infrastructure, the NBA, is predicated on there being 82 games because of the ticket, concessions, all that sort of stuff, and also because of the RSNs. And everyone, I think, agrees from players to ownership to management, the NBA would be better with fewer games. But no one knows how to get from A to B. I mean, actually, if I were a trillionaire, this is what the money needs to be spent on.

Look, I'm going to make you all whole. You're not going to decrease your revenue. This is what Elon could have done. Use that $50 billion. Buy all 30 teams. That's what I want to do. And then we're changing the schedule. Privatizing.

Yeah, we're going to change the schedule. We're going to have set days of the week, like Tuesday and Friday and a feature game on Saturday or something like that, right? You always know where the NBA is on or XYZ. There's not that many games. And we're going to have real harsh penalties on player sitting or whatever they might. be. So you're always going to have a star player that's playing. And we're going to, and it'll be okay, though, because you're playing fewer games. And we think in the long run, this is going to drastically increase the value of the property. It's going to be exclusive content. We're going to

get it back on broadcast TV because so we can get younger kids, you know, involved. We're going to do things to shorten the game. We're going to get rid of live ball timeouts. I could go on for hours on all my changes I would make. And then once I do that and I increase the value of the week and get over this valley, through this valley of losing revenue, then I will sell all the 30 teams off and make a big profit. There you go. I support that plan wholeheartedly. And it dovetails with the discussion of Netflix and HBO and theaters that we had earlier.

That's right. You want to create an event. And it's really difficult to do that with the current version of the regular season. And it's so funny that you raised that idea of just buying all 30 teams because that was going to be my answer, we got another question about a CEO of a public company and their responsibility to balance short-term profits with long-term growth ideas and investment. And right now, Silver is like a CEO of a public company where he has to answer to shareholders and his hands are tied, even if he knows what the right answer is. And so there has to be a workaround. I hadn't considered

the idea that somebody could just throw like $50 to $70 billion. at the league and take it all private. Again, this is a better use of Elon's money. But yes, that's, it is what, I mean,

it's also a challenge in the NBA because it is a partnership. Like, there's a question here about like, how can NBA teams trade? Well, that's, it's collectively bargain. Like there,

there's a, you know, that, that is just part of the rules and the players agree to that. But that all has to be agreed to. And the players, it's a really, it's a really,

it's a really annoying when people apply like union type rhetoric to players who are making tens of millions of dollars by basketball. And the reason it's not a union isn't just the money involved. It's because they are the product, right? In a very tangible sense. But they need the NBA. Like there's a high degree of interdependence. Like the traditional unions came along when workers were disposable, right?

We just need someone on the assembly line. It could be anyone. That's obviously not the case in the NBA. Like it just, it couldn't be more different. And it's kind of weird that the NBA is a quarter. unquote union, it's really about this collective bargaining and the fact that for a league to work, we need a common set of rules. We need to basically, like baseball famously has the antitrust exception, right? So that you can act collectively, you know, for the greater good of the league,

particularly from an economic perspective. And so that's the challenge in making any changes, is players get 50% of the revenue. They have no desire or inclination to lower that. And even more still because their careers are short. Exactly. If you're retiring at 35, it's like, why am I betting on where this is going to be? That's the star player, right? Most players washed out much earlier than that. Yeah.

So it's a real challenge and we're going to have to seek out a benefactor somewhere along the way. Maybe it'll be you, Ben. Maybe Stratory Plus will hit it big enough that we can buy all 30 teams in the NBA. I'm satisfied. Schenectary has it big enough that I could get a couple tickets a year. That's fine with me. We'll close out with this. I was going to ask you to name the tech that you're most thankful for of that corny-ass Thanksgiving segment.

But we were talking about it and arrived at a different question. Group chats are the tech you're most thankful for. So now I ask you, what makes a successful group chat? What do you have for the masses? Yeah, this is something I've been working on this in my head for a while. and I did put the list together. It's in progress, so I don't necessarily stand by any of that.

But I do think it's important to understand what makes a successful group chat. I would say I'm in a solid, I'm in two sort of high volume group chats that, and so that are very, this applies to in-person groups too. So one of my chats that's not super active, but there is a weekly sort of get-together

and that has similar dynamics. That should count for like double the volume if you're all actually getting together in person. Yeah, well, there is, and there's another one I'm in that's been going on for like a decade. And then we're in one that that's relatively new, but is exceptionally high volume. So what do you need for accessible group chat? There's different characters that you see showing up again and again. So number one, the most obvious one is the high usage player, right? You need like the Allen Iverson or the.

the Russell Westbrook who just getting shots up man just getting shots up like they're like a lot of the takes are bad and honestly the takes are often repeated it's like yes we've heard to make that point before but it's just a constant driver of activity there's always something going on in the group chat right and ideally this person has a thick skin and it can be made fun of because you also need the person who like post things that were already there and then everyone just boxed them and it works great if that's the same person because it's not just that there's always volume in there but there's always an opportunity to sort of make fun of the person

just constantly right and so like this this ideally that's like the superstar where they have they have multiple of those qualities together but you do need both those people the person that just like repeats themselves and gets made fun of and then the person that is posting all the time so that a super important player okay number two you need the benevolent dictator uh this is not a democracy. You need someone who is clearly in charge who will tell people to cut something out on the

side if they need to. And who will, if necessary, take the nuclear option, which is you never kick someone out of a chat. You start a new chat and don't invite the person. Oh, my God. Have you ever had to do that? I mean, yes. Wow.

Ruthless. Well, so one of the things that happens is, and this is. mostly happened. I have witnessed with this with like Buck's related chats is someone, you have to be very careful about who's the admin and can invite people. Because they'll just start inviting people like crazy, right? Okay, yeah. You have to be delicious.

That's a good call. Well, the way you invite people is actually you start a new chat with the new person in it. And then, so that's actually better. Because then you can revert back to the old chat if the new edition sort of didn't work out. And it's already sort of in place and everyone's sort of there. But

this has to be like you can't be, this isn't a democracy. Like someone has to like be in charge and making these calls. Yeah. Well, I'll let the listeners guess who the benevolent dictator is in the group chat that I share with Ben. I've been a different,

I've been in different roles in different chats. I'll just put it that way. So number four is, this is where I am a very high value player in group chats. Group chats work very well when they're 24-7. Because ideally you wake up in the morning and there's a bunch of stuff there. because you're more to your you're susceptible. You're like your will hasn't like woken up yet.

Your executive function. You do have better things to do, but you don't have the energy to do them. That's right. So you start scrolling through and then you start responding. And now a new cycle is restarted, right? And so you have it's so that you have the ongoing just constant sort of stream. And once you've responded and also because it's early in the morning, you probably put something that you might not have put otherwise.

Now you have to like defend yourself and you're like you're in there and you're just you're walked in for the rest of the day. So now it's going on. You do need the normie, the conventional wisdom perspectives. The great thing about the group chatting in with you is that you are not the normie. You think you're the normie, but actually someone else is definitely the normie. You can think about who it is. I'm going to be doing that for the next 60 seconds here, but yes, you always need a normie in any set of circumstances. So that's right. There's two more, there's two more sort of key players. Number one, you need the the person that's, like too cool for the group chat that everyone tries to impress.

Like, like, there's a, there's a, there's a, it's a certain frisahn. Like, he's like, oh, I got a got a good take in here. And this person always ends up being who you wouldn't think it would be. It's just like, wow, it's good, you know, so, that's a consistent quality of the chats. And then the last one is this is the, this is the person you least expect. They never post. They post like once a week or once a month. But every time they post, it's so good.

good and it's so insightful. And it's like, holy crap, we've been wasting our time typing nonsense. And you're just sitting here just dropping this take bomb in there that that's good. And that person's important because they're always kind of in the back of your mind. It's like, I need to have good takes because this person might be reading it. It might come in with another take that will just blow me out of the water. And so you have to have this sort of tension there. So that's my list.

I don't know if you have any additions or subtractions. Well, it's a very good list. And yeah, the last person you're describing there is sort of like the yin to the high volume guys, Yang. That's right. The combination of both. That's crucial. Yep. The Durant to the high volume, Westbrook.

As far as my additions, the only thing I'm going to add is the guy who doesn't read the whole chat and post things that were made fun of 24 hours earlier. That's the role you felt. Literally, Ben accused me of being that guy, minisely. before we came on to record Sharp Tech here. And I can't argue with it because I am absolutely that guy. No, that guy's important because there's also other people that don't necessarily read it all. And there were really good jokes. And so that's an excuse to then make sure the joke got seen, which is for the folks who are good at making the jokes,

they need an outlet to repeat themselves as well. Okay. Well, in our particular group, there are new parents who are up like all night long with their babies. And then there's also Ben, who's 12 hours ahead of everyone. And so the posts go all night long. And sometimes I just don't have the energy to go back through in the morning and, you know, waste 35 minutes before I start my day. But I think that's a wonderful taxonomy of group chats and a great place to close it. Just to go with the like the Thanksgiving theme.

And this is, it sounds super corny and cliche. but I would say the biggest transformation in my life personally over the last several years. I mean, part of this is the in-person thing. I moved to an area where there's, you know, in part because of school reasons. But just having groups like is important. And this is important in the context of Twitter too. You have to be super wary of the person who tweets too much. Number one, just just danger zone.

Might tweet something they shouldn't. But number two, Twitter, there was a day. And I think a lot of people who do feel very sort of genuinely emotional about Twitter is because there was this time period from 2006 to 2010, 11, 12, where like Twitter was community. And you could go there and there'd be conversations and you could listen in on people you respected and admired talking back and forth and you could chip in. Maybe this was a thing in tech more than other areas. but it used to be that anyone who was anyone in tech was on Twitter. And like they're literally having group chat style conversations on Twitter. And you can see people going back and forth and debating something and they would have long threads.

And it was, you had a similar dynamic. And that is, era is so far gone. People are just looking to misinterpret stuff, are looking to take things in the worst possible light, or looking to say, you know, what about this, what about that, or actually A.A. actually be. And Twitter is, it's a battleground now. And that's part of why Twitter will never be replaced, because who wants to actually build that? But that community aspect of Twitter was a real thing. And it's, and it's, it's long since gone. Elon must and kill it. It's been dead for a very, very long time. But I do, that part can exist. I think that group chats is an

area where it can exist. Twitter is very useful group chats because it is fodder. You can just give there's always constantly things to make fun of it's a great news gathering service also like there was a question about how we consume news i get most of my no it's i refer to multiple times yeah i mean yeah the news thing i guess this a question a lot the reality is is i'm very i i don't know tech me always the list of stuff that's going on i read all the company earnings but then a lot of twitter i'm just reading consuming information constantly and then when i write about a specific thing i will spend a big part of my day is just doing a super deep dive and catching up on everything that happened in that space in the last few years or whatever it might be

or making sure I understand or something works. So it's a sort of very targeted approach in some respects. But Twitter is phenomenal in just keeping up on stuff. And also Twitter search is an incredible resource to find links and references to things that you never would have found, particularly with all the modifiers you can use around it to find XYZ. No, Twitter's super valuable, but Twitter is not community. And I don't think anything in the public space can be. Because here's the most important thing for a great group chat or a great group of friends. The number one thing without question is trust. You need to feel safe and you can screw up or you can say what you think or you can do whatever. And people will give you the benefit of the doubt. And when you're in a state of fear,

you're not going to get a sense of community. You're not going to get a sense of, you know, feeling like you have allies and people, you know, and buddies and whatever it might be. And I think, obviously, you can take what I just said and say, that's why Twitter needs to invest in moderation and these would be stronger and XYZ.

But I know, I think you nailed it. Fundamentally, structurally flawed because it's a broadcast medium. Anyone in the world can respond to you. People hold that up as a great thing. It's also a terrible. thing. And putting Twitter in the role it's meant to be, which is really just a broadcast. And yeah, if you want to go out there and do battle, fine, go ahead. But having another place to go for

community and friendship, I think, has made my life so much better. I am tremendously thankful for it. And I hope that it's a function that everyone can sort of find for themselves. There you go. Well, I agree with basically everything you said there. And in particular, it's difficult to have any sort of trust or any sort of fun really posting in public these days because you just never know. And there are certain people who have a certain type of brain that are just great at Twitter and do it constantly and don't think twice about their mentions or anything like that. They're awesome and good for them. But I think for the majority of people, like you look at Facebook, for instance, posting on Facebook was a lot of. a lot of fun in 2008.

But now everyone's life is online at least 50% of the time. And the consequences for like goofing off and screwing up online are very, very serious. And so as people understand that, it's just much harder to sort of like let your hair down and have fun with people. And I think that's what we've seen. From a technical perspective, definitely encryption. And I always says what's app.

It's all, it's encrypted. It's much better at saving. where you are in a conversation. So if you wake up in the morning there's been 40 or 400 messages overnight, you can actually catch up on them. It works much better than I message in that regard. But also you can set, this is critical,

you can set messages to delete after a week. So like it just, it's there and it's gone. And this is, I think I've talked about this. This is the internet at its best, right? Where ideally I do have an in-person group of people and I'm incredibly grateful for that.

Are there interests? same as my. No, it's a pretty disparate group because our uniting function is location. And so, of course, like, are they as interested in tech or XYZ or sports or MBA? Not necessarily, but there is, being with people in person is phenomenal. And everyone, I think, should invest in something, make up a hobby. I don't care. Like, for us, it's, you know, smoking cigars, which, you know, you know, if I die a few years early, because I had a weekly hang out with people. I think, honestly, I think the traffic was worth it.

Like the quality of life improvement is so large. But the internet, like, people move around a lot. They travel a lot or at least in my social circles. I've lived in Taiwan. And the fact that I can get a sort of ongoing feeling like I'm hanging out with my friends and can have that sense and sensation and feeling. And then for sure, you got to organize at least one annual meetup, because in person is important,

but you can have this ongoing sort of thing. It's really the internet at its best. It's like you can be anywhere and feel like you're with people you care about. And that's pretty awesome. Well, a testament to the importance and value of community is a great place to close it out here on the Thanksgiving episode. And I'm very grateful for the community that has emerged over the last like six weeks we've been doing Sharp Tech publicly.

It's been very cool to see how quickly it's grown. And I look forward to keeping it going for the, who knows how long, but certainly we'll be back after Thanksgiving and we'll keep it rolling from there. And, you know, we got so many questions that we weren't going to last longer than Twitter is what you're saying. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know. Twitter's probably not on the way out anytime soon, but I still like our chances.

So we'll see what it turns into. But for now, I hope that all of our listeners have a great Thanksgiving. And Ben, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. and I hope you survive the like 72 hour swing and somehow retain sanity. I will have my Thanksgiving will be 20 minutes long because I am flying out at like 1220 a.m. on Thursday and then I arrive in Taiwan Friday morning. The things would do for Yonis, you know. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, but we are having our Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday.

So I will hopefully get to do it all. Well, enjoy it Saturday. And we will come back after the holiday. two more episodes. Look forward to all of it. Until then, Ben, go bucks.