Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Solving Online Groceries, Explaining Those Cheap New Cell Phone Plans, Autonomous Deliveries, Tech vs. Humans in Content Development

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Grocery delivery apps and why Wal-Mart might have the better idea, why Visible uses the Verizon network while charging half the price, and a question about the future of autonomous vehicles outside of passenger rides. At the end: whether tech could change content development in Hollywood and Ben's memories from the Ron Dayne era at Wisconsin.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? Doing well, doing well. Kids are back in school finally. The five-week marathon is over, so I'm feeling great. Oh, wow. Well, I'm in a good mood as well.

Today's show is going to be a proper mailbag. I feel like we teased the mailbag last week and then the DOJ intervened. and sabotaged our plans. We spent like 35 minutes talking about antitrust and Google history. Today, we're just going to bounce all over the place. I do have a follow-up question for you about the DOJ sort of tech stuff, or just sort of like antitrust in general. So the impression I get from you is, and I think this maybe applies to some people who are cheering for this case, is a real default sort of of assumption that it's true and right and good because tech companies are so big.

And so think good as someone who's going after them. Is that sort of a fair characterization of your sort of viewpoint and default position? It's fair to a degree. I think there are one of the things that's interesting to me is that people in big tech think that everybody who cares about antitrust has it out. for big tech specifically when I think in reality, the issue is that historically in this country, there's been a movement to keep all companies from getting too big and too powerful. And that's sort of the principle that underlies our antitrust laws.

And so it's not, I have nothing personal against anyone in big tech. But in general, I do think that like reanimating some of the laws. that, you know, predominated for like 75 years would be a good and healthy thing for society. Yeah, I think that's a useful distinction to make because I agree. Like there is a certain like traditional sort of a tradition in American politics that being super big, like just having really big entities involved in the daily lives of Americans is not something that that we like and we want to sort of happen. And I think that's fine and healthy.

I think the, I just sort of thinking about this over the weekend, the, the trouble I have when it comes to analyzing this is like it often feels like once you actually dig into the details, it's like, well, this isn't actually a violation, right? And I think this applies, I think honestly it probably applies a lot of the app store stuff, which I personally, you know, I feel particularly strongly just because I, you know, I came up through the app ecosystem. I'm sort of like familiar with that, but I can certainly see publishers and things like that feeling the same. way about Google. And they're being a lot of frustration about this. And I feel like there's a real tendency in this debate for people to end up talking past each other where it's just like, hey, you don't actually like care about the law as it is. Like where's the actual harm? And it's like, you're just defending big companies. You don't like, you, you love, love tech or whatever it might be. And I don't know, I just think it sort of reiterates the point that we discussed

on the last episode, which is it's one thing to have a political image. impulse against bigness, but the way that political impulse was realized a century ago was by passing laws. And I think the misplace here, at least, again, I'm mostly familiar with tech. I'm not familiar with the other cases. My assumption instinct, which may or may not be right or wrong, is that in a lot of other cases, I think, you know, I've read a little bit about things like health care and hospitals, like, where you're talking about actual monopolization of, like, physical resources and assets

in like a particular market, which is like what the antitrust laws were about. And I just think digital markets, if you feel that way, then you really, the push needs to be for new and different laws as opposed to, you know, I think that's where I, you know, there's a where there's a mismatch and sort of expectations and what should happen. And for me, I would say there's a two-pronged push. I think on one hand, enforce the laws we have in a bunch of different industries like hospitals, for instance, where consolidation is out of control and harms, like, individual consumers. But at the same time, I think what consistently offends you, offend maybe a little bit too

strong, but, like, it's slightly incoherent to apply the laws that we have to some of these aggregators and the power that they accrue and try to sort of fit them in the typical monopoly box and we're going to need to sort of rework the the broader framework to address some of the core issues there. Right. And the other thing that I think is a challenge is, I mean, this is going to sound like a blatant sort of tech defender. But like the consumer gain from tech and a lot of these companies is really massive, right? The fact we get access to a tool like Google for free and you say, oh yeah, they use that, you know, they can do that because they're advertising. They're using the advertising.

space and blah, blah, blah, blah. Still, at the end of the day, right? Like, what's the goal here? Right? And I do feel like there would be, it almost be more honest to be like, yeah, actually, Google, you get a ton of benefit from it. You know, in all these sort of tech companies, there's huge consumer benefits. And we are going to limit that because we think, you know, there's a principle about

being too big and having too much power, even at the cost of consumer welfare, right? And this sort of applies to a bunch of things. Like you talk about like the globalization debate generally, right? If you actually do the calculations, comparative advantage and free trade, like you're going to generally, that's almost stacking the deck in a certain way. When you offer your pushback, like, yeah, that might be true. But we actually think it's still do it. Right, exactly, exactly, which may or may not be true. But I do think there is room to be sort of honest about some of the tradeoffs here.

And I think there might still be the political impulse anyway, right? Don't come out and say, oh, consumers are going to be like this goes to the. privacy thing. We would have more privacy if we had better competition laws, like, which I just don't, I actually think it'd go the opposite direction, right? But let's, I think there's, I think there's, and I think this works to the big company's advantage where, you know, they can point out real benefits. Totally. Clearly, clear benefits, easy for everyone to understand and articulating some of the harms just requires more nuance and a sort of a leap to, a secondary and tertiary level. And I remember in my antitrust class in law school, I was downgraded.

I thought I was going to get an A and I got a B plus because on my exam, I was talking about Amazon and arguing that, look, Amazon is really great for consumers, but the market they have allows them to abuse sellers and makes it harder to start like a medium-sized business to compete with them because they have so much market share that they can just undercut everybody on price. And then if you want to do business with Amazon, they have tremendous amounts of leverage. And so ultimately, it leads to less variety in the marketplace and different sorts of harms to consumers than, you know, typical like a monopolist raising prices and just screwing everybody. And that's harder for people to understand. But I think even in the time since I was in law school to now, more people are warming to the idea that this is more complicated than meets the eye.

Well, wait, so were you saying you deserve the B plus or you're still bitter about it? No, I'm bitter about it because the professor, I'm like, look, this is a fairly nuanced argument, but I clearly understand what's going on here. And I think he was assuming that I just didn't really understand like the consumer welfare test or whatever. and I understood it. It was just insufficient in my eyes. I have a similar story from business school where I made the point about, this is when Google sort of exited China. And I just sort of observed,

they were getting their rear end kicked in China. And they dressed it up in this sort of very principled sort of stand. And I'm like, well, there's probably a little bit of A, a little bit of B here. And the professor was a huge Google fan. And just like, he's like, no, like you're, you're blaming China. Yeah, no, exactly. And I, same thing. I got to be, I was very annoyed. I'm like, I feel like I understand this space pretty well. But yeah, professors. Totally. I was like, look, this is one of the few classes where I've paid full attention the entire time. I was not, I was not a basketball reference in the back of the back row. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, with that out of the way, let's get to mailbag here. The first question I have is from John. He says,

what are your thoughts about on-demand grocery delivery and its long-term viability as a business model? Startups like getter, guerrillas, et cetera, proliferated during the lockdown when there were few alternatives. As we leave the pandemic behind, can they sustain increased costs and possibly reduced demand? What do you think, Ben? With the caveat that I do not know a ton about these businesses and frankly in general, with the more appropriate caveat that some of my predictions about the way the pandemic

will put on the wrong one turned out to be wrong and I feel very guilty because now every tech executive that lays off employees is like, well, we thought our business would be sustaining longer and I'm like, wait, dude, I was kind of mud on your hands. Yeah, for the record that applied primarily to e-commerce specifically,

which, you know, because e-commerce, you have this upward going slope and it's like, well, if it jumps up, that's where we were going to be in five to six years anyway. So why would we sort of roll back? Turned out we did roll back. So I think that argument certainly by D. Commerce, I was wrong. But I am skeptical of, and I think I always have been, of startups in the space of some of these delivery things.

And, you know, groceries are just tough in general. I wrote about this back when Amazon acquired Whole Foods. And I think my analysis of the case was right. what I think, you know, I think in retrospect, I'm not sure how well that's worked, but I think it hasn't worked out is sort of a validation of some of the questions that came up in that case, which is when it comes to like e-com, like you go back to Amazon's initial insight around books, right? Books, you have a known list of what they are. Like, it's either that book or it's not, right?

You can stock all the books in the world in a way that gives you advantage of a regular bookstores, and you can reach anyone because you're sending it through the mail. And this was a product that was perfect for e-commerce. And everything about books is like the exact opposite of groceries, right? You know, groceries, there's wide variation even with a particular, now for some types of groceries, like the package, processed foods. Yeah, it is what it is. But when it comes to anything fresh, there's high variation, right? You don't know what it is.

There's high spoilage, right? If stuff doesn't sell, go out the door soon enough, you have to throw it away. and there's real logistical challenges in delivering it to your door and keeping it fresh and not having to go bad. And it's just a completely different product than books. It could not be more different. And I think that's a reason why Amazon always struggled in this space. And you go back to the dot-com era and things like web van and stuff like that. It's always been a big challenge because you have to build up all this infrastructure to get stuff to your door without it going bad.

And if you don't have the scale, you're just going to have these huge inventory problems and spoilage and stuff going bad. And so where the whole foods acquisition made sense was you need to have the base of grocery stores have solved this by number one, by keeping everything in one spot, they can have better control over their store. They have refrigerators, right? Very useful, it turns out, right? But then people come through and people do the picking for you. You don't have to specify this quality of fruit or vegetables or meat or whatever it might be. And then you get the volume of traffic going through. You get the inventory turnover that sort of makes your, makes the, makes the,

the economics makes sense. And then on that, you can layer on the e-commerce where it's sort of additive to an in-store model. And I think that was in broad strokes the idea. But there was questions like the best e-commerce models like an Amazon warehouse, that whole thing is tuned to e-commerce, right? No shopper is going to an Amazon warehouse and picking stuff out. To create a user experience and flow for a grocery store or a department store,

is totally different than what you need for e-commerce where they have these robots flying around and pickers and all the stuff. It's just, it's crazy. It's a completely different experience. And that's important and essential to their success. And is a reason why other companies struggled in e-commerce. Like, go back to like the Walmart's initial challenges here. Just picking didn't work. So like, we'll have to set up our own network. But then that was separate from their network. It's like, well, what advantages do we have? Like, you know, it was just sort of a big mess. Walmart, though, is and always has been the most interesting to me for groceries because And I think where they did they got a

lawsuit in the pandemic and I should have looked this up before. I have I needed to check out actually the recent earnings. But I think the sort of hybrid pickup model is very, very compelling where you. So Walmart they have they're very large. They have they have a ton of stuff in there. They have, you know, a lot of traffic that goes through them. They have all the turnover.

And then this idea that you can go in and they'll have pickers. and they'll get all your stuff for you and you just pull up and you put in your trunk and then you go home, I think is a model that makes a lot of sense that accommodates the unique aspect of groceries and why they're difficult from an e-commerce perspective while layering on sort of a level of convenience that that makes it pretty compelling. That makes a lot more sense to me than the delivery model where I have never understood. I mean, you've got all these businesses where they were able to offer competitive prices because they had venture funding, subsidizing their discounts to keep prices like, you know, reasonable.

But to the question here, like, the costs are inevitably going to increase and that will affect demand. And we're also not in a pandemic anymore. So it's like, how does this business actually work? Now, if you're talking about curbside groceries, like I asked my wife about this before we came on to record. And I complain about it because she uses grocery delivery services. And it's always like 20% more expensive or whatever. And she said, well, what about the opportunity cost that comes with like my time going to grocery shop or our time? Because we usually go together.

And that's a fair point. And Andrew's like, those are our dates. What are you talking about? If you can split the difference and have the groceries sitting there like outside the store, that actually makes a lot of sense to me and seems like it would be a lot more sustainable than the delivery system. Yeah, I mean, I think everyone has been trying to figure this out for a long time because it's such a huge portion of commerce generally, right? I mean, Amazon will always say, oh, we're a very small part of total retail, right? And they're lumping everything into retail, but a big part of that is grocery.

And yeah, I think just figuring out there's so many problems that are already solved by existing grocery stores. And so it's the one sort of area where sort of working backwards from that, you know, seems to make some sort of sense. Now you have other companies like Instacart, for example, that are trying to wear on top existing grocery stores and having pickers going in. But then, I mean, now you have the opposite problem, right? Is the store formulated for that in a way that a warehouse is formulated for e-commerce. And I think there's just this real tension between, you know, the efficiency of having a dedicated e-commerce entity versus the inventory challenges that come with grocery.

And because of that, I am more optimistic. about more fully integrated services, whether that be a Walmart or to what extent, you know, if Instacar can get fully integrated into grocery stores, which I think they're sort of trying to do, then that is maybe, that's maybe more compelling. These other startups that are trying to layer on top of in sort of like a modular way, existing stores, and we're going to go in and do it, I'm, I'm pretty skeptical that that's going to be an ongoing model that makes sense post-pandemic. I'm skeptical as well.

Do you use grocery delivery services in Taiwan? No, they do exist, I think. But I mean, Taiwan, like, you know, it's a big, you know, I'm in a big city. It's very convenient, walkable. Usually just buy stuff and then make it. You know, there's grocery stores like around. So it's more of a sort of like, you know, classical European sort of model where the grocery stores in your body will get food. And you make it.

Yeah. And we have a relatively small refrigerator. And to be honest, maybe that does give me a less clear view. point on the space. But I mean, the American model of, you know, people live in suburbs, they go to the huge store and they stock up in their big SUVs and carry it back. And then they have like 14 freezers in the, in the garage. You know, that is kind of the American solution to the pain of going to the grocery store is just do it once a week, right? Or once every two weeks and get a whole bunch of stuff and stock up. And that does maybe to an extent work better for

e-commerce because you're kind of like lumping all those costs of delivery into one bit, but it also reduces the value because it's like, well, it's one trip a week, right? And, you know, I still like, you know, it's something about food. I still like to see my vegetables before I picked them out. I still like to see the fruit, whatever. Yeah. And that's, you know, maybe that will change over time. But I think the space is tough in general.

And so I do give the advantage to, again, I think Walmart's the most interesting thing here, just because they do have the combination of they have the physical assets, they do have the scale. And I think it is, you know, this whole omni channel sort of thing where, you know, mixture of in store and delivery does not make sense for a lot of stuff because the warehouse model is just superior, but it may make sense specifically for groceries. Okay. Yeah. I do not like paying another human to go out and do basic tasks for me. It makes me feel like a weak millennial. So I'm not a fan of the grocery delivery systems. Yeah, you're about equality.

You're on the same page. Take down the big tech companies. I want to pick up my own groceries. I can go pick up my own goddamn groceries, okay? It's really not that hard. But my wife will continue to order from Amazon Fresh or whatever it is. I mean, the reality is your wife should probably be hosting this podcast about tech. And she's going on this is being interested in it.

But yes, that's right. She's a far more prolific adopter of tech than I am. Billy says, hi guys, very normie question for you. Love a good normie question. I've been seeing and hearing a lot of ads about non-Verizon or AT&T cellular networks, specifically Visible, which is all over the Bill Simmons podcast, and Mint Mobile, which has those ads where Ryan Reynolds is trying to be funny. My question is specifically about Visible,

whose ad copy says it sits on the Verizon network but at a discounted price. Quite simply, how does this work? Why am I paying X dollars a month for Verizon when there's a cheaper option on Verizon's network? Is the data speed ramped down in exchange for the discounted price and Verizon is just selling excess network capacity? I thought you couldn't do this under the whole net neutrality principle, excited to hear Ben's explainer. Do you have an explainer for him, Ben? Well, I think part of being a normie is you shouldn't get too excited about, you know, whatever. explainer I might come up with.

Too dirty, too locked in. But I do appreciate that, that extra sentiment at the end. So the way I don't know about these deals specifically, but broadly speaking, the way these deals work is Verizon has a huge amount of capacity, right? They need to build up because they need to handle sort of peak events. And they're making huge fixed cost investments in their network so that, when it's super busy and there's tons of people using it during like primetime hours or during a big game or whatever it might be a big event they can handle it without the service degrading and you go back to like when the

iPhone first came out dramatically up the use of data and AT&T's network would just fall down all the time and you know it that was just it wasn't ready for that sort of influx of data that was prompted by this device that suddenly made using data much more compelling and you go back to the iPhone introduction it was a you know, a touchscreen iPod. Everyone cheers. It was a revolutionary mobile phone. Everybody cheers. It was an internet communicator.

There's kind of a little cheer. And I was like, what's that? Turns out that's everything, right? That was the whole thing in what was transformational about it. And it took a long time for the networks to sort of build up the capacity to sort of handle that. At the same time, this is a fixed cost investment, right? Which means they need that investment to be being leveraged.

the more that it's being used, the more customers they have, the more they can spread out that cost across all their customers. And so there's a real challenge where if you're building for maximum capacity, the rest of the time, you're sort of overbuilt. And that's bad. Like just from a business perspective, you made all this fixed loss investment. It's the same thing we see in like chips, for example, right? Intel's margins are destroyed this quarter because they have too much capacity relative to how much they're selling. And that has to all be layered on the chips that are still being sold. And so their profits go way down.

So the solution here, and I actually think it's a great solution, to be honest, is they sell network capacity to other carriers like this visible, right? But there's priorities attached to those deals. So when the network is fully loaded, Verizon data will always go through first, and you're going to get a worse experience on visible. And they have, I think there's, I don't, I think there's five tiers and it's like gated. And you see this with some of the all you can eat sort of data deals. It's like, you know, sometimes performance may be degraded. Like that's what's happening is you're on like a lower, once you pass through whatever cap they have, you're on a lower tier of prioritization where, hey, if the network can handle it, sure, you can still get your great performance of data. But if the network is overloaded, the Verizon stuff's going to go through first.

And I think, honestly, I think this is a good customer positive solution. If it's really important to you to have the best data performance at all times, no matter how stressed the network is, then pay the pricier Verizon deal. If you're willing to sacrifice performance when it's really busy, in exchange for having good performance 90% of the time, 95% of the time, and you pay half as much a month, then go with something like visible. And this is a way for Verizon to price discriminate access to their network without sort of hurting the Verizon brand, right? Because if they just treated everything the same all the time and visible and whatever, then people are like, wow, Verizon's kind of shitty. Right, because you don't think about the quality of a network except when it's bad, right? And so Verizon doesn't want their service to ever be bad, whereas visible, you're like,

well, I am only paying $20 a month for it. I guess I get what you pay for. It's honestly brilliant. Yeah, I come away from this conversation. Also, a perfectly legible explainer there to this Normie's ears. So thank you for that. It all makes perfect sense. and I come away from it feeling much better about visible as like a product.

Yeah. Now, maybe there should be more transparency in explaining about what's happening here. Like, why are you getting a cheaper deal? I think people do sort of intuitively know. Look, it's on the Verizon network and it's half as much. There's got to be a catch here. There is a catch. This is sort of the catch.

Now, as far as net neutrality, so number one, the net neutrality principles that were past the tail end of the Obama administration that were, you know, infamously rolled back by the. the Trump administration, I think this is actually a good example of why, you know, I don't think it applied to this situation specifically, but I do think this is a good example of why network prioritization is a good thing, right? We're getting more efficient use of bandwidth. Customers can select into the level of performance that they want. So if it's more important to say money, they can do that. If it's more important to always have good wireless performance,

they can do that. I think that's a positive outcome and sort of the, you know, the, you know, the way the market working as it should to get optimal performance out of what is a very, very expensive investment, we want Verizon building more towers. We want to have guaranteed performance if you're willing to pay for it. And we also want them to be able to make money doing so. And I think this is actually a great outcome of that. You know, the net neutrality stuff was a crazy debate because it got completely wrapped up into Trump and no one was actually talking about the details. obviously I'm a queer supporter. I don't want any discrimination based on type of content, right?

I don't want them looking in and saying. That should be policed aggressive. Right. But I do want, and this is always what has made bandwidth questions fundamentally different than other questions because we're in a world where bandwidth and the need for it continues to increase, right? Now everyone's on TikTok and Instagram. Guess what?

That uses a ton of data because it's your streaming video sort of constantly. And we want that we want continued investments into data. And you're going to get more investments from Verizon and AT&T. If they can discriminate based on these sort of levels, that's a good thing actually, right? Now, I am fully in favor of some sort of law that makes clear you can't discriminate based on content. You can't pick and choose what goes through and what doesn't. But the general idea that we want prioritization within a network, I think is a good thing. Because it incentivizes them to build up.

their network and make it better and more efficient for everyone. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Well, and as we talk through this, what I like about this model is it creates more choices for consumers. And particularly as we head further and further into the 21st century, like everyone needs a cell phone.

Everyone needs a cell phone plan. And it's kind of a crappy place to be when there are basically like three providers you could choose from to exist in like the modern. era. And so if you can come up with cheaper plans that are maybe a C plus or a B minus relative to like an A on AT&T, that's a good thing for everybody. And it's good for the market as a whole. So I applaud visible and I've not seen the Ryan Reynolds ads, but I'll keep an eye out for them going forward. Yeah. There's a few weird things in this market. Like for example, the cable companies bought a bunch of spectrum that they waiter sold to Verizon, but in exchange,

I think they have a higher prioritization. Don't quote me on this. I think I'm just trying to remember what I've read in the past. So I actually think the best options for if you don't want to buy one, the big three, but you want on their network is like your spectrum deal because they're on Verizon. But I think they're relative, like relative to the other ones, they have a better in the prioritization stack or something on the lateral.

There's lots of complications that go into this. I do think more transparency would be a good thing here, right? Like maybe that is an opportunity for regulation. Just be super clear. What are you paying for? Like, where are you in the priority stack, right? It's an important point on the visible front in particular because it's like the lower prices are great, but you should be kind of clear about the drawbacks. Right.

And this bit, though, you make a very good point, which is we really do want heavy investment here. It's a big, like, this stuff's tough. And it's tough because you have to like refresh it every, like you go to 4G to 5G. It's a whole new cycle of reinvestment. And, you know, the problem with like, you go back to like T-Mobile and Sprint, Sprint made a disastrous bet on sort of YMAX. They were sort of out of the game. So you had two really big guys. You had T-Mobile kind of there.

And then Sprint was a disaster. There's an aspect where I actually, that was an uncomfortable merger. But I think it's one that made sense because I would rather have three strong entries than sort of like two strong entries and then a couple sort of struggling ones. And, you know, but you can understand just you look at it. You're like, oh, that's bad. We're consulting from four to three. But when you layer in this, we really want to continue to drive, make sure that there's heavy incentives to invest because you need ongoing investment.

Then it becomes a much sort of closer question. I actually went to the other side where I thought that was a merger. That was uncomfortable, but I thought was an appropriate one. And, you know, there is a broader thing, too, about people are like, why doesn't Apple build a network? Why would Apple build a network? They have companies tripping over themselves to spend. billions of dollars to make iPhones work better. That's a great thing to sit on top of that.

And Apple has certainly benefited from that over the years. And is one of the more brilliant strategic moves that they've done is getting other people to do all their work for them. Yeah. It reminds me of the NBA at college basketball, people pushing for the NBA to have its own development league and everything, including people in the NBA itself. Why would you do that? college basketball is sitting there with like a billion dollar framework, free promotion for everybody. It does not make sense to try to spend all that money yourself. If I were an owner, I'd be pretty pissed off about it.

So I think Apple has the right idea. It's not just that they're paying for player development. They're also paying to sort of eliminate mistakes because you see if guys can perform or not. And they're also paying to make stars because a guy who wins a national title at your North Carolina or whatever comes in the NBA. he's a much bigger deal than some random guy in a Gile team. Exactly. And there were ethical complications like five or six years ago when guys weren't getting paid, at least officially. Yeah.

Now, all those are out the window. Sophie says a few episodes ago, you guys discussed the accident that the Tesla autopilot caused on the Bay Bridge and said that despite causing this one accident, it's still pretty revolutionary technology that's going to be transformative in the future. So number one, I think it was on dithering, not on sharp tech. Number two, I always get when people, it's always disconcerting when people summarize what we said. I'm like, I don't think we said that, but anyhow, continue. Well, I think it's a fair bet that it's going to be pretty revolutionary. How exactly that manifests is an open question right now.

And so she asks, how do you think passenger autonomous vehicle companies, parentheses, cruise, Waymo, will fare compared to companies like Nuro, which is using autonomous vehicles for use cases outside of passenger rides, or those that on an even smaller scale have created sidewalk bots, parentheses, Coco. I'd love to hear your predictions about these types of companies and how you think they'll shake up the tech and auto industry. So Nero, I believe, is an autonomous delivery vehicle company. And Coco, I saw their little carts. I've not ever seen one on a sidewalk, but I went, watched a video of them zooming around a go-kart track. What would you do if you encountered one? I mean, is there. Oh, well, so I'm...

Maybe there's two questions. What would you do and what would you want to do and not... I was going to say, what I would want to do is kick it over because I want to forestall the robot. takeover as long as we can. I love the people in Philly who beat the crap out of that robot five or six years ago. Absolutely on the same page as those guys. Did you boo Santa Claus too? I did not boost Santa Claus.

I just, you know, I like humans. We don't necessarily need to seed control to robots in every aspect of life. But what do you think of autonomous vehicles outside of the typical like Tesla autopilot model? Yeah, I've always been, I think just to go back to that discussion, I think what's interesting about the car space in general, I wouldn't be surprised if we rolled out autonomous driving everywhere now that actually the absolute number of accidents would go down. But the attention and fear of anyone action that involves autonomous is so sky high that there's a real, like, for better or worse, we've accepted there's going to be tens of thousands of vaccines a year that involve humans, right? and they don't move the needle. Whereas you get one accident with an autonomous car and it's front page news. And that's just the way, that's just a reality that I think you need to accept in this,

you've seen this, you know, in lots of places. You're going to see the same thing with AI. Like, it just is a bigger deal when a computer is doing it. We have higher expectations for better or worse. And, you know, from your perspective, maybe for better. And, you know, it's just, it's complicated. Like all this stuff is very, very complicated. Sure.

Given that, my assumption. is I'm fairly skeptical of self-driving cars being like fully self-driving cars. And there's like different levels of autonomy just because there's a, there's a narrative story here. And narratives are powerful. And like it's a big story when, when they screw up. And, you know, so I'm skeptical. Just I think there's a, and there's so many variables, so many things can change.

You have different sorts of weather. There's a reason why all these sort of, uh, the, the trial. are in like Phoenix, Arizona where it's like the weather is always good or I didn't realize that. Yeah, the roads are very wide. Everything's well marked. Like it's like everything's a grid.

Like it's the most boring place in the world to drive like my, my parents live there, so I drive there a fair bit and I can't stand it. And it's also perfectly suited to two cars. Now my, this is sort of as I was reading this question in preparation of this podcast, this sort of popped into my head, which may or may not be true.

I think one of the things with electric vehicles, for example, I find the investment in electric for very large things to maybe not make a lot of sense, right? You have this real tradeoff in battery density and weight and like just the number of like the cost to make them to the question to which they are recyclable or not where I'm not sure it makes sense to have like battery powered planes, for example, right? Or like they're like battery powered ships. Like the larger you get, the more stuff you're carrying. the more the trade-off makes sense for sort of the emissions that comes from a traditional,

like the reason why carbon-based fuels are so powerful is because they're so efficient. Like you get so much power relative to the weight that you're carrying. And so that makes sense for very large things. And so my sense is the real opportunity for electric is the smaller you go, the more compelling it is. And, you know, we mentioned Horace Deidio earlier in micromobility and this idea that can we shift to even smaller vehicles and can we change our environment so they're more compelling and more interesting. I like an electric scooter, for example, which I think is a very sort of compelling sort of offering. And the smaller you are, the worst, the tradeoffs make sense as far as using internal combustion engines

and the more viable and practical it is to use batteries and it's easy to get them close to a charger and plug them in and all these sorts of things. I wonder if autonomy is going to go in the opposite direction. where the larger you are, the more predictable your route is, the less variation you sort of encounter in your environment. And so there it actually makes more sense to have more autonomy. And so I talked to John Ostrall about sort of like the airline industry a couple weeks ago on on trajectory.

And, you know, there's a real pilot shortage issue. And, you know, as air, and so one thing, you know, airlines are doing is they're spending much more money on much larger planes because, like, we're not actually increasing the number of flights that much, but more people want to fly, so we need to carry more people at once. Well, another way to increase the number of flights, particularly to smaller, more far-fung places that would not have service normally is what if we only needed one pilot instead of two? Because the computer is so capable and it can fly it well.

And obviously, you know, this is tricky because if flights already are like the autonomous vehicle in that when there's a crash, everyone freaks out, right? Even if the relative number of deaths from the air industry are way lower than cars, they get way more visibility because they're very dramatic and they kind of like work against people. I think it's like part of it is there's still a sense in people that people should not be in the air. It should be unsafe. Yeah, exactly right. There's some confirmation bias anytime there's a plane crash.

And I think that applies to so the autonomous. I think there's probably a similar thing where like this is unnatural. And because of that, there's going to be much more story about it. But at the same time, that is, it's still, it's fairly predictable, like what an airplane is doing, where it's going. there's less variables compared to a car where there's pedestrians and there's dogs running on the road and there's other cars and you never know what people will do. And so like you go down the stack, well, I mean, you know, ships are obviously a would be a potential question. You have trains, like trains are literally on rails to what extent can you go down to like trucks, right? Trucks on semi-highways.

Like it's more variables for sure, but fewer than being on like some random side road or something along that. And I wouldn't be surprised if autonomy actually is more viable and becomes more of a thing, the larger and more predictable you are. And it's sort of like an inverse to the electrical thing. I'm not saying those two are related. It's just sort of interesting to think about that. They're kind of moving an opposite direction. Yeah.

I mean, that's along the same lines that I was thinking where you could have autonomous trucks that had like a middle lane on the highway where only autonomous vehicles ran. and that seems like it's a lot more sustainable than trying to have like autonomous Uber zooming around like downtown area where there's all kinds of complications they run into. The other thing you could do is like long delivery routes. You just have the autonomous vehicles all go to like certain shipping centers. And then like once they're in the metro area like a human goes and delivers them in the city. But if you simplify that task, I'm sure you could save a lot of money by streamlining

the process with autonomous vehicles. One other thing is interesting about the trucking bit in particular is for a few years there when people were talking about autonomous driving, that was sort of the focus of the, you know, tax taking all the jobs argument and the fear of sort of AI where, hey, you know, trucker trucking is like one of the biggest employers in multiple states, you know, like what happens to all these people are out of a job? And then it's become very clear we're actually super short on truckers. And so it's, I think that the, it's just going to, I don't know, it's just, I don't know,

I just thought it's interesting how that has been forgotten. Now AI is going to take all the jobs, you know, like our jobs, wherever it might be. And the reality is using our resources more efficiently. It's not just a sustainability thing. That's how economies grow, right? That's how you get more production generally. So I think that the space is interesting,

and the intersection of those two bits is going to be interesting in how they sort of interact. But yeah, you can envision a world where all the inner city stuff is super automated, is super like sort of built out, you know, and then this actually ties into what if we made our cities more, you know, in the sort of horse-edgedy sort of thing, more walkable or electric cars in small, small cars and there's a real shift in how that moves around. But that's obviously going to take a long time to sort of build out. I think one of the strengths of the U.S. system generally is ideally of different states and different cities trying different things and you'll sort of figure out the right mix that makes sense. I mean, the U.S. is just different. It's so like I think it's hard for people not in the U.S. to understand just how freaking big the U.S. is.

And that's really, it's not just integral to a lot of these questions. You know, it goes to the country's character and lots of, you know, interesting, you know, that's just the way it's built out. You have to work with that as it is. But hopefully that will, you know, we lead to some new ways of approaching things. Yeah. Well, I do agree with you that on some level, if you're doing it in an urban area, is there's going to need to be new infrastructure in place for some of this stuff to flourish.

Let me give you one more example. Everyone always complains about, oh, where's the U.S. rail system, right? And you know, like, oh, you know, as this big sort of deficiency. And the funny thing is, is actually the U.S. is one of the best rail systems in the world. The difference is our rail system is almost used completely for freight. Like, the reason why Amtrak's bad is in part because it's on freight lines and they have to defer to freight trains. It's not a particularly great experience. But the total value of goods that are moved and transferred via the U.S.

REL system is astronomical. I think it's one of the highest in the world. It's generally very profitable. And it works quite well. And in the U.S., well, if cities are super far apart, flying actually makes a lot of sense, right? You're not talking about a 90-minute train ride. In the Northeast Quarter, sure, but you're talking about multiple hours for cities that on a map seem relatively close together. And that's actually an area where, and this is totally contrary to people's assumptions in conventional wisdom, the U.S. has actually found, in my estimation, a good balance between moving people by air and moving goods by train.

And to the extent we can do that with autonomy and with trucking and all these sorts of things, I think there's, I'm optimistic. I actually think we can sort of figure this out and get to a good place. Well, thank you for defending our rail system. And, you know, it's an unpopular take, but I don't even think. And you know what? Bring it on. I don't think Amtrak is as crappy as everyone else does. We were in a meeting back in the fall and someone was kind of grumbling about Amtrak and I nodded along. But I've had a lot of good experiences on Amtrak.

The North East quarter train is great, right? Like, of course, if I'm going between Philly and New York or down to D.C., of course I'm going to take the train, right? Those cities are so much closer. Like, it was like, oh, we should have it in like between, you know, you put it in the the Midwest. Oh, like, there should be a train between Chicago and Minneapolis. It's like, that's really far. Like, it's way farther than people realize. It's like 500 miles. And like, would you rather? And again, it's the opportunity cost. Like, do you want to take a seven hour train from Chicago to St. Louis? Maybe it wouldn't be seven hours. But like, it's substantial

and meaningful. And if you can fly there in an hour. Right. And the flights aren't going away. So the economic case for these things really falls apart. I think there's just a very, romantic attachment to trains. That's actually a surprisingly strong part, I think, of U.S. infrastructure. Like, trains do make a lot of sense. They are much more efficient. And so devote as much capacity as you can to stuff that doesn't have a time premium

attached to it and move that and then use the one that makes sense for people that do have a time premium. Like, I would rather spend, take an hour flight to Minneapolis that I would just sit on a train for seven hours or five hours or whatever it is. Max says, when Netflix and Amazon began to produce. their own content. They made lots of bold declarations about how different their developmental process would be compared to traditional Hollywood studios. Amazon famously allowed users to weigh in on series ideas and even to watch finished pilots and vote on which one of them

should be greenlit. Similarly, much was made of Netflix's commitment to, quote, data-driven content development due to their trove of user data. And yet, it feels as though Netflix, Amazon, and Apple have all retreated to traditional Hollywood development and production practices. They have made far fewer data-driven proclamations. Their hit rates seem to me not any better than all the other Hollywood studios, and each of their content divisions are now run by executives who grew up in traditional entertainment companies.

Based on your thesis that we will likely end up seeing content makers separated from from content sellers, do you see any role for tech innovation in the development and creation of entertainment content? Right now, I'd argue that the process is not substantially different than it was during the silent film era. Do you have thoughts, Ben? It's probably overstating it to say there's been no changes in production since the silent film era, but by and large, I think the observation is correct. We've seen a lot less chatter about sort of, you know, data-driven development, which I think I was always a little more skeptical of. I remember we used to talk about this on Exponent.

And I think my co-host was a little more enthusiastic about it. And I always, HBO has always been the counterpoint where they're so famously, they're more involved than anyone else. And you look at it and their hit rate seems to be so good. And that continues to sort of seem to be the case now. And I, you know, to your point, I think that's kind of great, right? It's good to know that there's still room in space for autours. Is that what you say it?

Like the idea, like somebody like they could figure out what is compelling and what's going to resonate. And that is, and that's something that's valuable and worth paying for. I would imagine there is still data is used a lot when it comes to like the filler content and just stuff that people are looking for and they just want to be on in the background. You know, one could argue. I certainly know that people who get. attached to certain shows argue that they wish Netflix would be less data driven in that they

wouldn't kill shows that are not getting sort of sufficient users or pick up and build stuff up over time. So I don't know. I think the other context to this is as audiences have gotten way more nicheified and, you know, it's not part of the reason why the most compelling streaming content is things like Friends and the office and Seinfeld is they started out with these huge bases of 10, of millions of people watching it together on a Thursday night and there's this broad cultural familiarity and memory of, you know, of this sort of content that gives it lasting resonance

and power sort of in the long run. I also do think this is a reason why I continue to be skeptical and critical of Netflix's all at once release strategy and not trying to build any sort of cultural resonance around their content. It's like, it feels like playing on a hard mode, right? Like there's, there's all this, all these content, out there begging to hype up your show because they want to produce more content. They want you to succeed so that they can write more reviews and discussion articles about it and drive more clicks and all that sort of thing. And it just seems like an own goal to not even want to take advantage of that.

But, you know, I don't know. I think by and large, I do agree with this viewer's viewpoint, particularly when it comes to big hits and resonant stuff. But there are tons of confounding factors about the viewership market that. makes it hard, hard to say for sure what's happening. But I do think there's a real skill in making something compelling. And that's probably a different skill than in distributing and selling. And that's one of the reasons.

Yeah, I do think there will be a return to this sort of bifurcation. Yeah. I agree that it's kind of nice that, you know, as tech is taking over every aspect of life, there are certain things that you have to do yourself or experience yourself to really get like the full effect. Like one stupid example is like if you take a picture of a sunset, it can be a nice picture, but it's nowhere near as cool as like watching a sunset,

like as great as iPhone cameras have become and everything else. Like you're just not getting the full experience. And so I want that to be true for development in the entertainment industry. I do worry though. You do worry that you're, that this is more of a wants than actually is. Well, I mean, because we've talked about it on here.

Like, AI is going to be able to generate video in the not too distant future and flood the zone with like zero marginal cost content. And I am not sure what that will do to the development process, but I have a feeling it won't be great. And it's going to put even more pressure on studios to just sort of churn out cheap, lowest common denominator stuff. And if you're looking to do that, like, AI will be really great at taking a bunch of unstructured data and synthesizing it and making it clear that, like, five different things tend to be, like, relatively successful. But I don't think that's great for creativity.

Well, one of the things I've always said multiple times on podcasts, and people have heard me say this before, is the reason why I always, particularly the earlier years of Shackery, spent so much time looking at newspapers, is because I think. think it's predictive. It's not just interesting in its own rights, predictive of what comes down the road. And what we see with the internet markets again and again and again and again is there is this split. There's a barbell effect where either you succeed by being cheap and small or, you know, in cheap as far as your cost structure or you succeed by being large and dominant in sort of overwhelming, you know, and so you go to newspapers, for example, you can succeed by being the New York Times, having the biggest brand,

actually the New York Times is stronger than ever because it's more accessible and they've figured out a business model that fits, and they still drive the national conversation like they did. It used to be,

the New York Times drove the conversation. You know, the famous thing was New York Times prints it in the morning, the evening news talks about in the evening, every newspaper in the country talks about the next day, right? Like this sort of like waterfall effect. Now it just dominates right off the top, right?

It becomes the topic de jour because everyone can get access to it immediately and it still retains a very strong sort of agenda-setting role, and the internet has supercharged that. But all those other newspapers that were trailing along, and their advantage was not timeliness, not agenda setting, but just access. That was the only newspaper that was accessible to most people

in their geographic markets because you actually had to print the paper and deliver it to their doorstep. All those are struggling out of business, or ad-laden, are just terrible, mostly make money from old people, and when they die, they're all screwed, right? And meanwhile, so a site like Shrekri can succeed fantastically on the internet where I get the same access to everyone. My cost structure is super low, so I don't need a ton of people and, you know, can build a very nice business that was not at all possible in the sort of previous sort of analog era.

Now, text is cheap and easy. It's like you literally just type in a computer and you post on a website, people can access it. I think you see the same effects over time for other media. It just takes time for the cost to come down. But as the costs come down, you're going to see the same effects. And so HBO, I think, remains really, really valuable

because they can still create content that resonates and breaks through and drives conversation and you get this broad-based sort of effect and you get this virtuous cycle where they make a show. People talk about it. People read the reviews. Oh, I should jump that show. And streaming actually,

helps here because people can catch up. They can like, oh, you know, I'm going to jump in on episode four. I get to quickly catch up and see what's going on. No, I'm locked in. And, you know, that's a positive thing. If you can break through. And if you want to make stuff super cheap,

TikTok, look at YouTube. Like, this is video content that people find compelling that they get and acquire for no cost. And that just eats up a ton and ton of time. And yeah, maybe something that'll be AI generated. But we have this. same economic effects right now, which is user generated, right? And so the area you're talking about is in many respects already here, and it is flooding the zone. And so what suffers is everything

in the middle, where it costs money to make, but you don't get the virtuous cycle of something that breaks through. And that, and so people, you know, I love rom-coms. I love, you know, sort of the artistic sort of movie that- I miss rom-coms, yes. And budget action movies. But all of the mid-budget stuff was like what I grew up on and it now just doesn't exist anymore. The internet breaks the economics of all that sort of stuff because all that stuff rested on geographic limitations and the fact that it costs money to distribute content. When your only way to see a movie was to go to the theater and you've already seen the big one like, well, let's check this movie out, right? And you have some movie they spent $20 million on that makes $100 million in the theater. nice little business.

That model just kind of doesn't exist anymore. And it's going to get worse before and if it ever gets better, to be honest. Because you see this like this is, we've talked about Dave Zosseloff at Time Warner. This is exactly all, everyone's complaining. Oh, he's cutting all this sort of stuff. He's cutting all this stuff that is not worth the investment because it doesn't break through. And it's more expensive than just making filler, you know, home improvement shows. And it's brutal.

It's forced on them because they're huge. debt load, but it is also very, very rational. And, you know, it came for print first. Then it sort of came for music to a certain extent. And it's going to come for video. And it might actually be worse for video than music. Music has the concert fallback where you can have sort of a niche band and you can make your money on the road.

It's a brutal life. You're traveling everywhere and you're just stretching out of living. But it's still possible. And what is the, what is the concert? It's an in-person experience. that is geographically constrained. It's not easily accessible. It's the fact it's not easily accessible

that makes it valuable. And video, the whole middle may be completely hollowed out because there's nothing to sustain it in that aspect. It's a damn shame. Die Hard with a vengeance was better than every single

Marvel movie released for the past 15 years. And unfortunately, there's just not a market for die hard with a vengeance anymore. But maybe one day that'll change. I should be clear, though, AI will be able to pull in scripts from the past 40 years and take what was successful and synthesize it and make it clear that, you know, a handful of themes tend to resonate with audiences. That will be crappy content at the end of the day.

And to your point, there will be a market for, you know, elite content that's actually produced by humans. But your costs are going to have to be aligned, right? That's going to be the real challenge. Like the key to strategic sort of things, and the whole substack thing and all that is your costs are low. You have to benefit from the Internet in every aspect. The top line aspect is you can reach anyone in the world, right? So your addressable market is very large.

But your costs have to also leverage the Internet in that they're very low because you get that free distribution, all those sorts of things. If you end up in a situation with relatively high costs, like it's just very, very hard to compete because you're in this situation where as soon as you don't break through once, you're like bankrupt, right? Like it is totally. And this is also where subscriptions are compelling for content creation because it gives you more freedom of movement to fail. But, but yeah, you have to keep that stuff.

You have to keep that stuff in order. I mean, so it's kind of a bummer, but it's this is what the internet does. It does it again and again and again and again. You're going to see the same thing probably with jobs. And like if you're super differentiated high end, no problem. If a job can be moved to abroad or can be automated, you're going to have the same sort of effects. Well, we can't end on that grim note. So one final question here.

There's a lot of jobs that were predicated on geography and sort of the developing access. I know that you're right. That's what makes it even worse. Yeah, to be clear, we're just, we're not cheering for this. Objectively analyze the world, not say it's good or bad. So yeah, Max says, I'm looking to hear more about Ben's time at Wisconsin as I'm currently majoring in computer science there. Does he have any favorite memories from Wisconsin, a favorite place on campus, Best Bar, also looking for suggestions on how to connect with others at UW,

I guess UW, Wisconsin, who listened to Stratory as I remember hearing questions come from others at Wisconsin in previous episodes. So first and foremost, anyone who's listening at Wisconsin, email us and we can put you in touch with Max here. If you want to take. Well, I don't know. How many Wisconsin listeners can we possibly have? Probably more than you think, to be honest.

Okay. Great. This is actually interesting. I think one of the things I've underinvested in at Stratory without question is sort of like community aspects and making it possible for. folks to find each other and link together. And it's more a matter of it's not, I'm not very good at that, to be honest. And, you know, as far as the discipline of like cost structure that I, I just haven't invested that in terms of either time or money, like hiring someone to build a community

XYZ. But it is, I think, a miss opportunity in some respects. And ideally it would be easy for him to sort of connect and figure this out. So you're also spread pretty thin. I mean, and I struggle with too. I'm recording like podcasts every day, so it's hard to sort of respond and test in that. Right. So I'm saying, are you sure you want to take on the burden of connecting backs to his other stick readers? But I just, I just want to acknowledge. I recognize that as an opportunity. Like, I do think it is an opportunity because you, if you can tap into community, then you start getting particularly, you know, actually this podcast has actually been very cool from me from my perspective. And I was super skeptical of the mailbag approach, right? And just because I've always. operate on the look I'm going to give you my opinion you take it or leave it you're like I'll sell it for a fair price you can pay it or not pay it or whatever it might be and that's going to be a sort of a good relationship and one of the things that's been really fun is having you on board who believed in this concept and you're also the one that goes through the emails and like deals with it and picks up the show notes but it's super fun right and it it adds a component to my output that is

totally different than anything I did before in a way that I think's very positive and that's an example of how, like, it is valuable, right? We easily generate two shows a week because we have, the users are actually playing. Yeah, no, exactly. It's like there's a user-generated component to our show where I'm not having to invest the time that I would to self-generate a show, but can still produce something compelling because the users are like co-authors of, of this content. And so it's actually been, it's been eye-opening for me where I theoretically knew this

was possible, but I under, estimated and appreciated, not just that it would be functional, but that could be really good and fun and enjoyable to sort of produce. So that's sort of a broad observation. And all the credit goes to you, Mr. Andrew Sharp. Now, I want Wisconsin memories. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's hard to say. Like, it's disconcerting how old I am. I mean, I graduated over 20 years ago. So one of the great things, I mean, I'm sure Wisconsin is not very pleasant right now because this is the toughest time. The weather is pretty brutal. That's not always fun. But I do think if you're into sports, like going to a big school with great sports teams, I think it's super added to the experience. I went to every football game,

every basketball game, my whole time there, like something to look forward to. It's on your schedule, something I always talk about. Like, so that I obviously strongly endorse that. Even if you're not a fan, it were very fun. The peak of the Ron Dane era was Ben's time. That's right. And I, I, the Ron Dane chance. I started and no one gives me credit for this. Actually, none of my friends believe me, but damn it, I absolutely did. The announcer would go, no, so every time Ron Danes there, the announcer would go, Ron Dane. And so I started in the student section right after that, Ron Dane.

And the whole, it started the whole student section every time after the announcer said it, they would echo it. And I promise to you, I started that. No one believes me. I think our audience is probably younger than we realized. So a lot of people don't know who Ron Dayne is. It's like a 280 pound running back. Go look him up on YouTube. He was delightful.

A staple of my childhood as well. A bowling ball. Yeah. In physique and effect. So I do endorse sports. I was in Wisconsin has this big heavy drinking bar culture for better or worse. My bar of choice was the plaza. The plaza was a total dive bar.

that's where sort of the, I mean, I was involved in the student newspaper. That's where the newspaper and political people and like student government folks, like we were real nerds. I think I've told this story before where we would have like protests, you know, because that was the thing to do is to have protests. And then afterwards, you know, we'd write stern editorials in favor of free speech against the protesters and, you know, they write letters to the editor. And then we'd all go to the pause and drink together. It was definitely like peak larping to a certain extent. But that's mostly where I hung out the, I mean, I don't know. Like, if you don't get a Wisconsin fish fry every Friday night, you are absolutely missing out.

That should be a staple of your weekend experience. There's multiple places to get it. But yeah, that was really the defined my arrow. I was, the paper back then, you know, seeing a foregone area, is like we published, there was two daily newspapers that published five days a week. that were super competitive that made money. Like, and so we actually got paid. The reason I picked the paper I worked out

because they actually paid their employees. And so that was super intense. Like you actually were in a newsroom. So I was usually there from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. most days. And then we'd hit the pause afterwards. So the other. Just living. Yeah, well, the other advice that I have in this applies just in general.

I changed my major multiple times. I would like reschedule every class that takes while I graduate. And at some point I'm like, this is stupid. I'm just going to take classes of professionals that I like and, you know, strongly favor like the seminars where there's only a few students. There's a lot of discussion. And that was, that was, you know, a fantastic experience. Just took classes I never would have thought of otherwise. You really sort of got to dive into talk through really complex, interesting subjects. Probably less time and space to do that if you're a CS major. On the other

hand, you're probably going to graduate much more employable than I was as a political science major, so there's pluses and minuses. But, you know, it worked out in the end. I don't know. I'm not sure that I have a great articulation. Probably a lot of stuff that is makes for good stories and is tellable is stuff that maybe I choose to forget.

You never know what happens at various house parties if it's on those lines, but that's part of the college experience. Well, in addition to pioneering newsletters, Ron Dane, the chant at Wisconsin. We'll never get the credit that I mean. Maybe you will.

Look, someone out there can add it to your Wikipedia as soon as we publish this episode. So here's the problem. I am totally convinced that I started that. But the older you get, the more you may tell yourself stories. Right. Maybe I just made this up in my head. But I am pretty sure at the time, because the problem is all my friends deny it. They're like, no, you didn't.

That's ridiculous. And I'm like, no, I absolutely did. So I just want to be honest about I am convinced that I did, but none of my friends confirm that. So I don't want to overstate things. And, you know, the reality of being at Wisconsin is it's not like you are in a completely appropriate state of mind for forming memories. March chunks of the experience.

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to like glorify drinking, but that's just a reality at Wisconsin. There's a lot of it that happens, particularly on the weekends, particularly, you know, at the at the paper so it is what it is i went to school in puritanical boston and at 20 years old i was dating a girl briefly dating a girl who was at wisconsin went to visit her and had three of the best days of my life in madison um and i left being like was well that was the greatest place on earth we went to hockey game did all sorts of stuff ate all kinds of horrible food and there was drinking the entire time a great weekend i can't wait to visit you this summer in madison to

see whether, you know, my takes at 20 years old were right. And Madison is, in fact, the best place in the world. For now, though. Except for the end of January and early February. So good luck to Max. Trudging to school in like the zero degree windshield. Thoughts and prayers to all the Wisconsin listeners who are going to email me in the next three days here. Well, this is the time for our high school listeners.

Luke Fickle, Wisconsin football is back. baby. Enroll while you can. That's right. That's right. Walk in. This is a rocket ship about to take off. And on that note, we are going to come back later in the week. Email at sharptech.fm is the email address. We'd love to hear from you. And Ben, until later in the week. If you like mail-day questions, also SharpChina, email at SharpChina out of the FM and basketball. Greatest of all talk at Gmail. There's a link in your show notes to add it to your podcast player. And this is the time to do it because the last episode last week was phenomenal. What do top, you know, top 10 percentile goat episode. In part because with, you know, Ben delivered a few fantastic soliloquies that basically

were admissions that Andrew was right. And so I enjoyed them. I thought you were very gracious in not acknowledging that was the case. But great episode. If you want to get started, that's a good one to get started with. Absolutely. A 20-minute lecture to Luca Donchid. So dive in if that sounds appealing to you.

All right. We're coming back later in the week. Ben, I will talk to you soon. Talk to you later.