Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - The Google Culture Question, A Law of Large Companies, Twitter's Algorithm Plans, Apple's Attempt at Glucose Monitoring

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Parsing the criticisms of ex-Google employees who've put the company's culture in the spotlight, mid-2000s Microsoft as a Google analog and a window into the good and bad of dominant companies, and reactions to Elon Musk's latest comments about open sourcing Twitter's algorithm. At the end: follow-up on Spotify as a podcast aggregator and marveling at Apple's latest project.

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 okay. Doing okay. Had my annual COVID checkup, but doing well. COVID checkup. Does that mean you got COVID?

I did. I did. Just like last time, I had a couple days of runny nose. You can never decide if it's good or bad to have over the weekend. On one hand, your weekend is ruined. On the other hand, I'm now free and clear to podcast. so we're ready to rock. Well, and not only that, you picked a good weekend to be down and out because you had

Drive to Survive episodes. I did. I powered through the entire thing. I had nothing better to do. It was great. Yeah, you texted me on Sunday morning that you had finished the series. And I'm pretty close to finishing it, but I don't have COVID as an excuse. So I just look like a degenerate who watched like nine hours of Formula One reality television

this weekend. But I'm glad that you were able to power through. and don't have to have any shame about it, you know? That's right. No shame, just like Christian Horner. That's my mom. Oh, boy. Horner. Great season of Christian Horner out there. If anyone wants to check it out on Netflix.

Ben, we are getting back to a proper mailbag today. We're going to bounce all over the place. And we'll kick things off with a quick one from Gideon in Taipei. He says, I really like how the Stratocry bundle has expanded this past year. Are there any plans to do a yearly long, episode with all these new characters. It seems like with the convergence of tech regulation, AI, and geopolitics, there is plenty of reason for Ben, Andrew, Bill Bishop, James maybe, and Gruber to hop on a call.

Maybe call it super or mega dithering. Currently no plans for that, but this cracked me up, the idea of hosting like a take-a-palooza one day, where we all come out on stage together. Do you have any thoughts, Ben? I'm not sure how well that would work as a podcast. You know, part of the entire premise of Sharp Tech and Sharp China and all these sort of podcasts is you're in my sort of personal strong belief in like what makes a good podcast. And, you know, our hope with all these shows is they get better over time because we build chemistry and understand how to go back and forth and things along those lines. And I like to think that that's happening with Sharp Tech, right?

I want every episode to be, wow, like, you know, catching your stride, getting. you know, really figuring things out back and forth. I'm not sure that 10 people on a call contributes to that, to be honest. Just completely incoherent. Yeah, I'm not going to refuse to moderate an eight-person podcast, but I will promise that I won't be as effective on an eight-person podcast. So maybe one day we'll host some sort of keynote out there. Maybe we could do it in Taipei.

I'd love to visit Taiwan somewhere along the way. Yeah, I mean, we will see about that. We will cross that bridge when it comes. Very much not a promise from Ben Thompson there. Yeah, all of it is a good reminder that if you're listening to Sharp Tech, the free version, you can learn more about the other shows we're releasing by going to your show notes. We've got tech in there. We've got weekly interviews from Ben.

We've got China. And then we've also got basketball, which would be the funniest addition to the eight-person podcast that Gideon is imagining. You'll get Ben Gulliver. Tech takes. That's exactly what we're looking for. Goliver to Taipei. All right, to keep it moving. Seems like every couple of days for the last month or two,

I see someone in tech make a reference to Google's culture as a potential weakness long term. And so I appreciate this question from Adam. He says, Andrew and Ben, do you guys have any thoughts on the ex-Gouglers who came out recently and said that the company's culture is a roadblock to progress? And he provides several links featuring some of those complaints. Just for context, I won't read all of them, but a few notes here. First, there was the New York Times in 2021.

15 current and former Google executives speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Google and Mr. Pichai, told the New York Times that Google was suffering from many of the pitfalls of a large maturing company, a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward an action, and a fixation. on public perception. Then, more recently, there was a medium post from Praveen Sashadri, the founder of Appnotes, a company that was acquired by Google in 2020. And he wrote, Google is trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, and other bureaucratic processes.

And while the employees are capable, they, quote, get very little done quarter over quarter year over year. The way I see it, he writes, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money printing machine called ads that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. And the four problems are one, no mission, two, no urgency, three delusions of exceptionalism, four mismanagement. So he is pulling no punches there. But what do you think of the dynamics generally? Like, is there a way Google can break free from the culture it has now? Is there something they could be doing that they're not doing at the moment?

My sense, as someone who, number one, has never worked at Google, certainly not recently. Number two, you know, I think Google has always been the most challenging company for me to analyze for lots of reasons. Albeit, as we've talked about previously, it's been a good spur from my own sort of thinking about dominance in markets and why they are dominant and things. on those lines. My sense is this is not a Google-specific sort of issue. This is a monopoly sort of issue. And, you know, we've had lots of discussions about is Google a monopoly according to the traditional definition?

And certainly my argument is no for the reasons we've discussed. But that's a distinct question as to whether they are like dominant in their market and no longer have any real competition, which is true, right? That's sort of the paradox of why it's difficult to talk about Google and the context of antitrust because the, you know, this is the frustration with the laws as they are in the attempt to make them fit Google. We can agree, I can agree with the critics that Google is in this dominant position with no real challengers and has been for a long time while arguing that the specific prescriptions in law for dominant companies don't really apply in this case. In this

case, setting that aside, I'm going to use the word monopoly because I think it is relevant to what happens here. And the company I do know a lot about, and I am familiar with for having work there, particularly at the tell end of their monopoly-driven, incompetent era, is Microsoft. And Microsoft was a little bit further down the road than where Google is now,

because Microsoft had reached the state of too much money, too little competition, all the sort of internal problems that result from that, plus they had layered on all the antitrust you know, in the settlement with the Justice Department. So their legal oversight was even more extreme. I mean, you weren't very early on at Microsoft, right when you started. And I started in 2011, certain words you should never use.

You should never put in emails. Like that was literally like a training point. Like the LCA, you know, the legal group was this something you had to be aware of and know who to contact and was tied into all sorts of stuff. Well, and just for a parallel, recently the Department of Justice was seeking sanctions because Google employees were communicating on channels that delete every day as opposed to putting anything of substance in an email. And it'll be interesting to see how the court rules on that one. But clearly certain things haven't changed that much since the Microsoft Monopoly heyday.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that's always been a, you know, companies always come to rue their email in sort of the long run. It's the first thing you learn as a lawyer. Don't put anything in writing. So yes, I'm sure they're being advised by. a whole team of lawyers who are pushing Google chat and their erascible messages. Absolutely, absolutely. So the problem is it's competition, it's pressure from the outside that drives excellence,

that curb sort of wasteful behavior, wasteful processes. If you're a startup that's super competitive that is scratching and clawing to build your market and to expand it, you don't have time to screw around with all the things that are with this medium article, which is excellent. and definitely worth a read. And it felt very damning of Google, but it also felt very predictable, as in we've read this article before

about other large companies. And I think this is sort of a natural law of large companies. You get a whole bunch of people in sort of an environment. There's no external pressure. There's no forcing mechanism on acting efficiently. Or say you need to make decisions, right? If you make a decision that something's good or bad or going forward.

Number one, someone has to be accountable for that decision. And number two, the people who disagree are going to feel upset and hurt, right? If the decision doesn't matter, then number one, the best thing to do is skirt accountability because there's no upside in being right. But if something goes terribly wrong, there is downside. So you have this inverse, right? You have this sort of like startup idea where the upside is infinite, right? Because the company can be wildly profitable.

The downside is zero. It's relatively speaking, not that much of a downside. That's how the whole sort of VC approach sort of works. When you're a large dominant company with a dominant business model, that is inverted. There is no infinite, there's infinite downside, which is screwing up the model or getting attention, and for your career personally, becoming the fall person for whatever decision was made. And the upside is minimal. It doesn't really exist.

And I thought the other point that was really good in this article is this bit about how your motivations internally become, all about pleasing the people around you. It becomes this insular environment where success or failure is a function of how much people inside of the company like you or don't like you. And again, I don't think this is necessarily a Google specific thing. So I hesitate to cast aspersions on their culture. Yeah, I mean, I think this is honestly just a function of what happens when you are a dominant company, right?

And one of the tricks of management for sure is to try to limit this. but I'm honestly not sure if it's possible. And I suspect it's even worse in like software organizations where you're not really touching the real world at all, right? If you have a total lack of touching grass, right? There's an aspect here to Google. I think that the obvious contrast of the company that's done the best for the longest while being large is Apple. But there's a certain forcing function to having to produce a phone in tens or hundreds of millions of years. units every single year or a computer or an iPad or like devices, right?

There's a very binary, does it work or does it not sort of outcome, right? There's just an inescapable unit of measurement about whether you're succeeding or not. And one of the most fascinating insights I got when I was at Apple as the great things will be an intern at Apple is you got the executive speaker series where every week one of the top executives would sit down for the interns for an hour. Sometimes they had prepared remarks. and they just did Q&A. But there was an insight that Johnny I've had during this session, which was, look,

the most selfish thing you can do is not be honest. And he's like, the temptation is not to hurt people's feelings. And he's like, but the reason you don't want to hurt people's feelings is because you don't want them to not like you. And he's like, but if you actually care about product quality or you actually care about something well, you have to be honest. And he's like, the number one thing we want to push for is sort of brutal honesty. And that stood out for a very long time.

I think that's something that is a continual topic of discussion, the question of across all industries. And just for the record, if you care about the person, the honesty can help that person get better and address weaknesses. And if you're not being honest, then that sort of sets people up to fail long term. So, yeah. Right. But the problem is that if there's no. point of accountability, then that sort of falls apart. Because you're like, I was honest that this person's work on this shade of blue on the

Google homepage was bad. But it turns out that doesn't really matter in either direction. And so if there's no real payoff for being honest, then it's very easy to fall into the short term. Look, I made people unhappy. Like, they complained to their manager. We have this review process, right? This was one of the things in the medium article that I could identify with at Microsoft,

where in an attempt to avoid sort of like, you know, too much managerial power or like, there's someone over you that has total authority over your career, they'll have these committees for like promotions and things on those lines. But the reality, the way that actually works out is you as an employee have to kiss up to everyone around you and make sure you didn't make any enemies because the promotion committee or whatever is responsible for sort of moving you up, right? I mean, I experienced, like, sure. I've talked about it at Microsoft.

Like, I thought I was pretty proactive. There's a few things I did that were not part of my job, that I went above and beyond and made a big difference and were, you know, had company-wide sort of impact. There's one sort of example in particular that, you know, around when we were doing the Windows app source stuff. And it didn't matter. I never got promoted. And the reason was because I had made too many enemies along the way. Now, to be totally honest, I probably didn't deserve to be promoted in retrospect. I was sort of a, you know, I was way too emotional at work.

I got way too worked up about stuff. I was kind of a dick, to be totally honest. And the reality is in a large organization, that is a limiting, like, that's what actually matters. You're just trying to keep this large ship on course because there's nothing anyone can do that actually changes the trajectory in a positive direction. And so again, without working at Google or diving into it and somewhat citing my experience at Microsoft, I think this is just what happens. And so what changed things at Microsoft? Well, some people would say it's still very bureaucratic and there's still all these sort of challenges. And I'm sure that's probably the case. But there was also sort of like a decade of

just embarrassment and of failure. Okay, great. Because I was going to ask, like, is that ultimately what happened where like things got so bad under Balmer and so kind of humiliating in some ways that it just shook everyone from their slumber. Well, Microsoft had real advantages moving forward. And so they just had to sort of seize the opportunity, right? And they had advantages that aligned with just the fundamental structure of the company, right? There's this old adage that what strategy eats tactics for breakfast or something along those lines, Right? Or culture eats strategy for breakfast, I think is what it is. And that's definitely the case. But the thing that matters even beyond culture is like what's the fundamental sort of nature of the company. And this is something I wrote a lot about Microsoft in the early years of trajectory, which was Microsoft is this all consuming, we do everything sort of beast that could go to enterprise customers and say, look, the whole environment is changing. You're not sure how to handle it. The company that used to help.

you through these big changes. IBM is completely irrelevant at this point, you know, particularly when it came to the cloud, which was the big shift then. Look, we have our crap together slightly better than you are, just entrust us and we'll sort of shift you along. And in the case of Satchie Nadell's leadership, it was, you know, just sort of shifting the focus.

What Microsoft had to do from a tactical perspective was get off the windows fixation. Everything that Windows did was based on Windows. And so his great triumph, was making windows no longer the center of everything. And there is an aspect where Nadello is very good at managing investor expectations for a very long time. And when the stock is taking off like a rocket for the first time in 20 years, that gives you a lot of capital to sort of change the culture underneath it.

And like success does breed success. And so how that relates to Google, I don't know. Like I think this whole explosion of chatbots and of, the Bing thing and of chat GPT. It is probably all things considered a good thing for Google because it is hopefully some sort of wake up call. Right. But you could both argue Google needs to make changes and maybe that includes changes

at the very top while also understanding and appreciating that I'm not sure different leadership would have made a difference over the last decade because this is just what happens when you don't face competitive pressure. Well, and is Google better? off than Microsoft was in 2011? Yeah, for sure. Well, what's interesting, I think Microsoft was not as bad off

as people thought on one hand. On the other hand, you had all this SaaS stuff coming along, and Microsoft was so slow to sort of respond, but they did have, in retrospect it's even clear, so many latent advantages. And to be fair, Azure started under Steve

Balmer, right? Like, Satchadela impact was not necessarily implementing the right tactics per se. It was really in cutting off, like just, you know, cutting off Windows was the big thing, right? Yeah. And, uh, or in Windows still exists. It's still the mediocre product. It's always been. But it is no longer the axle around which the entire company spins. That was the big shift. For Google searches as dominant as ever. So yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think basically in retrospect, Microsoft was probably in better shape that people realized.

People in tech and analysis generally over index on the consumer space. And, we're where Microsoft was not in a good place, but they've never really been a good place. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Microsoft's success to consumer was a function of the Windows monopoly, where people used Windows at work. Like, that's how it came up.

They wanted, you know, it was just easiest and most obvious to have Windows at home, and then you could use the same applications you had wherever. They never actually have built a breakthrough consumer products in these sort of meaningful way. And now they had the opportunity to do so. They're running away, kicking and screaming. So, yeah, I mean, I just, it's funny.

Like everyone has always observed the path here of being similar, Microsoft and Google. And I think that's true, but I think that's not a uniqueness to management. I really think it's a function of being in a dominant space with no real feedback functions. And when that's the case, just human nature and human politics and all that sort of stuff is going to rise to the forefront. Yeah. Well, and Microsoft is interesting because you typically, at least from an outsider's perspective, I look at companies that suffer from that inertia, and usually it doesn't end well. Like, I think back to AOL, for example, where they just had a lot of money and ran out of ideas on what to spend it on.

And Microsoft, to be able to reinvent themselves and press their advantages in different ways remains, like, incredibly impressive to me. Like, the Nadella run the last 10 years has been crazy. And Google, it's just people keep teeing off on them. Like this weekend, I saw Paul Graham tweeting about this. Evan said they're, one of the things they're dealing with is the threat from within, the internal resistance to shipping software, which is not merely a custom, but embodied in a bureaucratic class who will have to be fired first. I don't know what to make of that. The other note that I found interesting, and it dovetails with your iPhone note,

Ars Technica was writing about all these ex-googlers, and they said that not all of Google is run like Google. The Android division in particular has been called out by other employees, feeling like an entirely different company. And maybe that is because they have to ship new software every year and integrate it with hardware. And there's just more deliverables that they have to worry about in the short term that sort of keeps everyone sharp and at least conscious of competition in ways that the rest of the company isn't.

Yeah, I think that I think that's true. I think that sort of makes the point broadly, right? When you talk about people can't ship in the general Google org, like, what can happen if you ship something? it can succeed and then nothing really changes about the trajectory of the company or it can fail and you have a terrible PR cycle you have all this embarrassment you have some sort of the Justice Department starts investigating you for XYZ like it's a real flip of the incentives and so everything is following according to the incentives that are in place and those incentives

are a function of their dominant position and and to the point you just made the the lack of a forcing function as far as getting something out the door. And so, you know, again, this is not to excuse Google's leadership per se, but a lot of times, this is why it's always useful to step back and think about what are the, you know, I go back to the first post ever on Stratory, which is coming up on 10 years next month, which is the, it was a sailboat. And my whole point there was what I want Stratory to be about is people get so focused on like a specific sort of outcome or input. So they're looking for A causes B.

And actually, what's the wind? What's the waves? Is there another sailboat out of distance? Like, what's happening to actually influence the sort of impact here? And I think this is a perfect example. Again, this is not necessarily a defense of Sundarpa Chai or Google's leadership, but it's also not as much of a condemnation as it might seem. Now, again, you can separate this.

Does Google need a change? I think it would be good for Google if they can leverage this point to make big changes, right? To the extent that Bing is viewed as a threat, to the extent that Chachibati is a threat, this is a point of leverage to make these changes, to, you know, sort of push back on a culture that has been incentivized as followed incentives to be slow and cautious. We'll see if they can sort of seize that, right? Like that's difficult. I think an interesting, another company here is Facebook. Facebook, it sounds like, is getting, like, one of the things that I'm hearing right now is Facebook already did all those layoffs.

There's a huge sort of clear out of middle management coming. Yeah. Like, a lot of manager being told, look, you either go back to coding or you're out. Like, like, we're going to flatten this organization. We have like double digit layers between the base individual contributor and Mark Zuckerberg. That's not going to work going forward. And one of the reasons they can pull that off is because Mark Zuckerberg is still in charge, right? Why does he get to say what to do?

Well, because he's the founder, right? Sundar Pachai, no matter how successful he's been, is at the end of the day, the product of a political process where he came up through the ranks and was chosen to be the leader. And that's just a, you know, there's a longstanding theory of management about the disconnect between shareholders and managers, right? like there's an alignment problem. But there's another sort of alignment problem between founders and managers where what gives them their legitimacy? What's the basis of their authority?

It's different to be the basis of authority is I started this. So I get to say what's up versus I got selected because of my performance within this organization and therefore I'm in charge. So is Satya bulletproof now after everything he's done over the last 10 plus years?

Bulletproof in what sense? Just like nobody can tell him shit if he tries to change any aspect of the Microsoft culture? I mean, I don't know. I mean, that's an interesting question. I think that... Because of how dark things were and now... Right. No, it does give him a lot of credence sort of internally.

I'm curious what the sort of thought or pushback, whatever, to the whole Bing thing was. You know, on one hand... Sundar seems to have steered the ship during relatively prosperous times and not screwed anything up, but hasn't necessarily brought the company back from the brink in the eyes of either employees or board of director types. Yeah, well, I mean, the reality is

Google has increased its value and achieve profits that are astronomical underneath Suna Pachai, right? This is why that's sort of a difficult measure to sort of look at. And you know, so I don't know. Certainly Nadella, I think has more freedom of movement now given

where he's at. And because there's a real value to having defeated the forces arrayed against you, right? Like I think Nadella having taken down windows a bit, and there were real, I think, battles internal to Microsoft around that, that makes him a more effective leader sort of going forward. Now, in Pachai's defense, what has he needed to take down a notch, right? Like there's been no opportunity for that sort of battle to fight.

And, you know, that's, again, which that's not a criticism of him per se, but also it's not necessarily a defense either. It sort of cuts in both directions. I mean, Microsoft at the end of the day, it's worth noting, and this has always been a criticism, their comeback has been predicated on leveraging the customers' relationships they earned 20, 30 years ago, right? They still are not really good at acquiring new companies.

If you're a new company, why would you go with Microsoft? Like, everyone who's using a Microsoft's day, by and large, is using Microsoft 20, 30 years ago. All the new startups, no one in Silicon Valley uses Microsoft stuff. They all use Google stuff for their office stuff. They use Slack or whatever it might be. And that's fine because I think one of the mistakes that tech analysts made was forgetting that as much as startups are important as large these companies get, it's still a fraction of the entire worldwide market. And, you know, the vast majority of the market still is established companies, which is Microsoft's bread and butter.

But, you know, it remains like, how are they going to actually get new folks? That's why they're so invested in this Open AI stuff, because they do see it as a way to actually acquire new customers, as a reason to choose Microsoft beyond inertia. We've been working them for a very long time. But that question sort of remains in the long run. So that's going to be, I think, the challenge for Nadella going forward. You see this in cycles, right?

IBM, back in the day, was this dominant mainframe manufacturer. Then they created the PC. Well, created the PC that gave away the, you know, the keys of the kingdom by outsourcing the operating system to Microsoft and the chip to Intel. But even then, they were still a super dominant profitable company. It was only until the 90s where it was like we, you know, our business is falling apart. Like we have no real differentiation. What are we offering?

Lou Gerser comes in. The real pressure on IBM at the time was to break up the company, was to like just split it up in the different pieces. This massive thing doesn't make sense. His real insight is that, look, the nature. of IBM is to be large. That sounds weird. Like, how is that an advantage? But what he realized was, look, there's all these other companies out there where this

internet thing's coming along. They have no idea what to do. But they do know and trust IBM. So we're going to reframe ourselves as a services company. They built up this huge consulting arm. Like, we're going to help all these companies get online and became super profitable. I think even more profitable than they ever were before. Now, the problem we're seeing is 20, 30 years on.

That was nice for that era, but they never actually fixed like the underlying innovation problem. And Lou Gerser, if you read his book, he talks about the future of cloud computing and how it's clearly coming down the road, which IBM completely missed on because the margins weren't there and they got super financially focused again. And so the worry for Sotje Nadell is Lou Gerser. He understood the nature of Microsoft. We are, you know, we are large. we have a lot of companies. There's a shift to the cloud. Mobile's happening.

They have all these SaaS applications that are all over the place. We don't know how to figure them out. What's the Slack thing? And they're like, look, just trust us. We'll take care of it. We'll shift you along. And it's been phenomenally successful. The question is, you know, what then happens 10, 20 years down the road?

And, you know, the good thing for Nadella is I'm sure he'll be long gone by then. And he'll go down like Gersoner as like this incredible CEO. And deservedly so. but you're still stuck with the cost. This is the cost of monopoly. And this is sort of comforting for people that worry about these large companies. There is a self-limiting factor to the long-run dominance of these companies. Just because human nature is a real thing.

And when you don't have real-world forcing functions or real-world competition, you do get fat and flabby. It's sort of an incontrovertible rule of business. The psychology of it is, fascinating and it's I'm sure holds true across all sorts of different industries. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to follow the Johnny Ive Maxim if there's no incentive to do it. It's a lot easier. You know, if you're following the Johnny Ive Maxim and everybody is successful and nobody wants to hear it, then the guy who's honest and trying to help is just the asshole. And I'm not saying that you were the asshole at Microsoft per se. I was no, I was just some I was just some low level thing. I'm not trying to overstate my role here.

And by the way, Johnny I've certainly suffered from a lack of honest feedback, I think, in his later years. It sort of makes the point. Like, Johnny Ive was great because he had Steve Jobs as an editor. And when Johnny Ive was in charge, stuff was not great. Like, Apple lost sight of user functionality of what actually mattered to the end user. They got wrapped up in the beauty of their designs and forgot about functionality. Like, it's a useful object lesson that if you don't have the right feedback functions, the right incentives in place, even with the hardware forcing function,

you start doing stupid stuff. Even geniuses need editors. That's a good note for all of us. And from a couple of hugely successful behemoth tech companies to a young and hungry upstart, Twitter, Titter Takeover on Twitter asked. I just almost spit up my copy. Ben Thompson, Andrew, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Twitter.

open sourcing its algorithm when it happens. And for context, a note from TechCrunch last week, a new tweet by Twitter owner Elon Musk suggests the company is preparing to open source its algorithm as soon as next week, unless, of course, it's all a joke. One never knows these days. However, Musk has been a longtime proponent of the idea that Twitter's recommendation algorithm should be open sourced, having repeatedly stated that belief even before he took the helm and again when announcing his intention to acquire Twitter in April 2022.

So, Ben, tell me what could it mean if Twitter open sources its algorithm? What should we be watching for if this actually happens this week? And as with all things, Musk, who the hell knows if it actually would happen this week? What's your reaction to all of it? Number one, I don't understand why you're taking must seriously about any of this sort of stuff. He says a lot of things that's going to happen that don't. And, you know, it's interesting because my long, my, now longstanding, but my take on Musk is I think he similarly suffers,

but in a different way from the world of software versus the world of hardware. Right. When you have a forcing function of hardware in physics, you can come up with as many crazy ideas as you want, make as many promises you want to the day. Physics is Musk's editor in that case. Exactly. And in software, you could do whatever you want.

That's great in some cases and it's bad in a lot of others. And this applies to Google and applies to Twitter. So number one, yeah, I'll talk about it when it happens. And it's not on my editorial calendar this week. Number two, this idea is dumb because the issue with open sourcing these algorithms, like a lot of folks that talk about this stuff live in a world of, and maybe this is an age thing, maybe it's whatever it is, but they live in a world where spam

is a dramatically more solved problem than it used to be, despite the fact that spammers are much more motivated and numerous than they used to be. Like, people complain about Google's search being poor. The number one reason why Google's search degrades over time

is not because Google made dumb changes. It's because the amount of crap they're dealing with increases exponentially. And it's going to get worse with all the AI stuff, right? Like people are, You know, it's bad enough when people can generate. There's no, you know, the cost of generating bad content or SEO friendly content is low because you can just host it in distribution. That's all free in the internet.

You still have to actually generate it, right? Well, now you don't have to, you know, you can generate it for effectively free, right? It's going to be a mess. And this is, there's a sort of tragedy that happens to every social network that happens everywhere in the internet where the big problem is just dealing with the deluge of crap. And that is always going to be the case. And this pronouncement by Musk is fundamentally contrary to his stated complaint about Twitter about bots and stuff on the algorithm, right? Yeah. Like, like, why has Twitter at under the bots?

Well, I mean, you could certainly say there's some degree of incompetence there. And it's funny, a lot of people complaining about changes must make forgets the fact that we were talking. This isn't a new come to G-Smo. We talked about Twitter being incompetent at this stuff for a very, very long time. But that doesn't change the fact. It's got the worst, though. It like, honestly, I tweet and half the time I tweet, I will get like porn replies now, which wasn't happening before.

So I don't know what the hell he's doing, but he's not. It's sort of equality because it used to be the case that all the bots were in, Elon Musk replies. Now they're everywhere. Exactly. We all get to feel like us. Power to the people. Yeah.

Power to people. That's what he's been about since day one. All right. So then what does it mean? The problem with open sourcing an algorithm is you're giving a rest of the to the worst actors about how to game the entire thing. Right? Like, like, like, this is, this is sort of the issue.

Now, should there be more transparency? Should there be a more neutral sort of application? Is it problematic that appears the government had a direct line into Twitter, decide what was or wasn't shown? While things that were, should have always been a subject of discussion and debate, like, I don't know, was COVID a lab leak, like should not have been censored. Right. Right.

But that's like a distinct, it's a related, but a distinct question from open sourcing the algorithm in its entirety. Yeah. And the truth is the nature, and this is good or bad. I'm just, this is sort of a true of the value, the nature of these algorithms, maybe not Twitter. Maybe Twitter is a very deterministic if A, then B sort of algorithm. The truth is these algorithms have been the, the biggest application of AI and machine learning for years at Google and at Facebook and things along those lines. Like, like, it's very difficult to even articulate why it is you're seeing something at this point, because there's some sort of like something in your profile that you've expressed interest in,

that it's a bunch of vector math that basically decides what you see. And again, that might be a bad thing. You might say we need to have more clearly discernible sort of what shows up and what doesn't. And again, maybe with Twitter, that's not the case. Maybe that's one of the reasons why Twitter's recommendation algorithm is generally bad. It seems to be if Elon Musk's show. and that's basically like why number one in the algo

but even before him it was not great either but but I mean I think just in general and there's two mistakes that can be made there's the must side which is this is all super obvious why you're such morons and it turns out it's much more complex than it seems it's fair to note there is the other side

which is tempting for me to fall on or other people say like look this is really complicated and it's not as clear cut as you see. Sometimes that can go the other way too. That becomes a Google-like excuse for just leaving things the way they are. And energy, yeah. Yeah, and like allowing bad actors to have influence because, you know, it's easier to respond to government pressure because that's a forcing function than it is to some sort of vague idea of, you know,

free debate or whatever it might be, right? And so I'm not saying that there is a temptation, I think, of musk critics to always go the opposite direction and say, you know, start out with because this must must be wrong and then back into this is hard and complicated. At the same time, it is hard and complicated. And I think some of these simplistic prescriptions are, you know, I don't know, not challenging, but. And it sounds like one danger would be that if you open source it entirely, people who are sort

of bad actors would be able to take advantage of it. and then a lot of normal people would have no idea what to do with any of it. And there wouldn't necessarily be like, there wouldn't necessarily be as many advantages and you'd be creating a whole new set of problems. Yeah, I mean, I think the most compelling argument that people have put forward is, and this was one of my proposals for Twitter that is obviously never going to happen now. But it would be fascinating if Twitter the service were separate from Twitter the app. and you could use different apps to access the service, and each app could, you'd have competition amongst algorithms,

like different apps, surface things and prioritize differently. You know, I do think one thing that's worth noting is people like, oh, why don't you just put tweets in order chronologically? This is one of the, this is like the crowning example of revealed preference versus state of preference. People always like, again, we're going to get email saying, oh, I prefer chronological. At scale, people always prefer the,

the feed versus the corner. I use both, though, just for the record. I enjoy having the freedom to toggle back and forth these days. Yeah, well, Twitter's interesting because Twitter, what of Twitter's great strengths is it is a service where you want tweets about what's happening right now. Exactly. Like if I'm following a live event, I want to be on the following tab

a hundred times out of 100. Right. And I think offering both is a good approach and is reasonable. But, you know, the reality is, is, but hey, if Twitter had done my proposal back when Musk bought it and separated it in two companies where one's the service and one's the consumer facing front end and then opened it up broadly, you could have companies that do both and you could figure it out sort of in the marketplace broadly. I think maybe the most frustrating thing about the Musk tenure is basically it's devolved onto

let's do the old strategy but better, which is reasonable. I think there's a lot of reason to be skeptical of Twitter's leadership over the years and say it wasn't very good. But I do think because there were obvious flaws in the leadership and cultural problems at Twitter that have gone back to day one. I mean, what of my original takes on Twitter is the problem they had was their product market fit was achieved almost immediately. And so they never had that forcing function of getting better and like figuring out

how to be a functional company. Like Twitter's had infighting and political maneuvering from day one. And they got away with it because it was such a unique service that filled such a niche and grew so quickly at the beginning that they never actually had to be a functioning company. At least Google had to be functioning for its first 15, 20 years, right? Yeah. And then they could get the political infighting. Twitter has been political infighting from day one. And, you know, it's not clear how, I mean, and so that's the other thing where, look, cleaning out the entire staff, you can understand why that feels attractive.

And, you know, I think there's more credence to it that that is that is commonly acknowledged. I'm not sure, you know, but there's, as with anything, there's virtue and moderation. But it's definitely tough. Well, I will link to your piece in the show notes about open sourcing and what that could do if Twitter was like split into two companies. I will say that having different versions of the Twitter experience I could access at any given moment. would be at least more coherent than the way I use Twitter now, which is log on for like Lakers jokes and then see intense Ukraine-China takes. And like it's all sort of converging in one place,

which used to be the miracle of Twitter and why people loved it. But I think the further we go, the more I find myself being like, look, I'm actually just here for basketball right now. Or like, I want to read interesting stuff. And if there was a version that had like your politics algorithm and a version that had your sports algorithm or what have you, I think that could be really attractive. But who knows if the Musk team is ever going to do anything that's never going to happen. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you could still get different UI experiences with different Twitter clients, but that's been completely killed. Which again, if you're doubling down on the original Twitter strategy, there is a rationality to that. But I think my biggest disappointment with the Musk approach, again, is there was no real change in thinking about what Twitter could or could not be. No attempt to reimagine it. Yeah, it was just basically, look, the problem is everyone here was dumb or did their job poorly and we're going to do the same thing they did but better. And again, this isn't to defend old Twitter. I think, again, the takes that are instinctually anti-Musk sort of imply that Twitter was this. phenomenally well-managed company previously, and it was not.

But I think that it was also not the right strategy broadly, but we'll never know. To keep it moving on a completely different note, Dan has this follow-up to our Spotify discussion. Andrew, I'm disappointed you did not make the critical point in a Spotify discussion I otherwise enjoyed. Namely, it's good that Spotify didn't succeed in becoming a podcast aggregator. do everything we can to ensure they don't. The only reason the podcasting ecosystem remains interesting, healthy, or vibrant is that it hasn't been conquered by algorithms. Quality content spreads by

literal word of mouth, just like nature intended. If and when aggregators finally take over, podcasting will follow video, music, and the written word into the algorithmic abyss. Addictive content designed purely to catch the eye of algorithms, which in turn, exist. to serve the needs of advertisers. It took a completely new company in Substack to begin to save writing. Who would do the same for podcasts? Apple? Substack again?

I'm being kind of tongue in cheek, but only kinda. Parentheses. And if my mental model of Ben is correct, I'm guessing he will strongly disagree here. Smiley face. So, do you strongly disagree with the thesis put forth by Dan? Well, Dan doesn't even want to give me credit for the substantiated. model so I'm you know oh boy shots fired I don't I don't I don't get worked up when people credit

substack for the subscription based writing approach for independent writers on the web generally but on my own podcast I mean I mean you were doing it and everyone you were sort of unique at a unicorn substack mainstreamed it at least and made any idiot feel like they could go out there and start a blog and start their own small business right and what inspired substack yeah sure But I think that is my actual point. I have a couple points. I mean, Dan's kind of sort of right. I do disagree to an extent, but in a couple ways.

Number one, yeah, we're in an algorithmic abyss for writing or music, whatever, because that's where users choose to be. You can follow writers directly, and there is a monetization model for that to work. And if you care, then pull out your pocketbook and pay for it. There's a sort of, I don't want to say entitlement, but this belief that we to stay. It was an unstable world where you got all this incredible sort of content, like the blogosphere sort of era that everyone longs for.

That was not economic. That was not a stable equilibrium for how this stuff worked. And it'd be great if that was the case. But we see this again and again in the internet with this drive towards either the algorithmic is king sort of platforms on one side or individual direct and you pay for it sort of on the other. And when it comes to podcasts, you know, the reason why I've invested in things like Passport and the reason why we're experimenting with the bundle is because I do see this coming in the long run. And I want to prove out that there is a sustainable alternative model to support the sort of content that you would prefer to have instead of stuff that serves the algorithm generally.

So that's number one. There are alternatives. We do have to figure them out. But the internet, there's no one's forcing you to follow the algorithm. People are choosing to do that, but there's just denial of human agency that is kind of annoying in these discussions. Like, you can go direct to publisher if you support them. And we've seen that at larger scale than just a techery. Like the New York Times is a good example of, you know, been very successful, doubling down.

Like there was a great strategy document they put out like a decade ago. Leaving aside whatever you think of the New York Times. But their point there is, look, we're not going to chase every breaking story. We're not going to chase like the daily news. That's freely available. We're going to double down and invest on stuff that you can only find here. And it's worked out phenomenally well. And that can work sort of broadly speaking, number one.

Number two, the problem with the podcast ecosystem as it was, had to remain stagnant, is you end up with a few big winners, right? So if you started the podcast at the right time, at an early enough date, then you had an audience of probably you wanted to have probably at least about 100,000 listeners, then you can have a really great sort of you could get the advertisers. Yeah. Yeah, that are willing to invest in long lifetime value purchases because they're hard to track, they're how to purchase.

So it's a lot of investment to do that. But also, you could do that for a while. We'll see how long all these, you know, Casper mattresses survive in a high interest rate, sort of like environment or whatever we're talking about now, right? And so it's not clear how long that would last for one. But number two, you had a very high barrier to entry. And you had a sort of retardation of the ecosystem where there should be a lot of niches and a lot of individual sort of things.

But could they emerge or find an audience or make any sort of money when they could. This is why people said blogging was dead when I started trajectory. Because like, look, you can't make money from Google ads anymore. There's no business model. Blogging is over. It's all big publications. One of the things I'm very proud of for strategy. And I wrote this article when I first started, like, blogging is not dead.

The problem is no one has the right business model. And the business model ought to be subscriptions. Because like the, people say, oh, it's not a blog. It's not free. Well, why is it not a blog? Like, like, people can, like, people are just, that's how I'm extracting value from my customers. That sounded bad extracting value. But if they want this blog to continue to exist, then they need to pay for it.

And that's just the reality we need to go through for, for, lots of sort of media. And then the other potential here is, and so what's the challenge? What's the challenge if you're niche? Like, how do you get subscribers? You need people to find you. And yet, word of mouth is great.

And I say this is someone whose business is entirely built on word of mouth. It's also one where in retrospect, I was in the right place at the right time. Schencher came along when social media was large enough to make a difference, but small enough. that had been overtaken by competition.

Yeah, and also like Twitter hadn't killed the link, right? I've talked a lot about Shetri grew almost completely on Twitter, people sharing links and that being sort of compelling. That doesn't exist for podcasts. No one shares podcasts. This is a problem for the Shetri business. One of the reasons why we're pushing this direction is I added the podcast for the daily update. More than half of my subscribers listen to it.

It's great for churn. No one shares, right? So it's kind of like killed word of mouth. Word of mouth for podcasting is tough. And so I do think there's value. Aggregators are great if you have the right business model to align with them. Twitter, at least the theory and aggregator for text, great for me, right? Right.

People are giving my customers a mic, an ability to tell other people about that has been great. It's not great if you have a legacy business model, particularly an ad-based one, that's based on this dominance and a lot of the medium-sized podcasts will complain a lot about Spotify because they worry about Spotify eating their ad revenue. But there is a payoff in terms of a much broader array of podcasts. Number one, being able to monetize to some extent and number two, being able to be discovered. And so I do see the downsides, but I reject this idea that aggregators are, you know, are all bad. Like they wouldn't exist if there weren't real benefits to them.

At the end of the day, they're not putting wires in the ground and leveraging them. That's why regular antitrust law doesn't really work for them. They work because people like them. One final point. It's not quit Spotify's failed. Their strategy for exclusive content that was mid-tier that didn't move the needle was dumb. And they're fixing that strategy. But last time I checked, they are the largest podcast player.

They're the only one with a rational plan for advertising and podcasts, podcasting in the long run. So I think this is a situation where. the press coverage of their shifts has overshot a bit. There's definitely a change. Is it an appropriate change? But it's not clear that the enterprise is doomed or that they're giving up on it. Yeah. And I hope our episode last week didn't indicate that they had failed.

I think we were both pretty clear that there are aspects of the strategy that made no sense, but that it's still a good long-term bet. And I love you getting very fired up on several different fronts in response to this question. I think it's an interesting point in large part because the reason I love podcasts is it is the one area of the internet. I don't know whether it's an algorithmic thing or not, but podcasting has not been subject to this like watering down effect where there's just a lot of crap out there and it's difficult to sort through everything. And eventually it all starts to sound like the same thing. There's a lot more diversity in the podcasting medium. And I think part of that is related to the medium itself, as opposed to like the lack of Spotify as an aggregate or throwing its weight around or something like that.

I think like the difficulty in sharing podcasts also creates a space where people are more comfortable being honest. And you just get a lot of productive back and forth that doesn't really exist anywhere else on the internet. And I do think that's why people like podcasts today and why it. there's still a huge market there. And I can't imagine an algorithm dumbing things down and like just completely changing that model, even if Spotify does like come to really dominate the space, just because I think the nature of the medium is a little different than, you know, Netflix or whatever writing you want to choose.

And I should also note that the reason I'm willing to give Spotify the benefit of the doubt on podcasting is because they are so much more creator-friendly than Apple, which tries to take a cut from subscriptions, gives you a shockingly limited amount of data on who's listening and when and how long and everything else. And so I think it's productive for the industry to have the locus of power shift from Apple to Spotify, but we'll see what it looks like five or ten years from now. I hope Dan's not right. Well, I think you made a really important point. Like the nature of podcasting, like the thing that I'm frustrated with as far as like, you know, herdinger checkery growth, for example, is also exactly why it's great. And I think that that's a point that's very well made.

It's also why it's resistant to this aggregator sort of world. But I think the thing to take away from that is there has been an explosion of podcasts. but because we started out, and this is a testament to why RSS is a great thing, right? What's the fundamental nature of RSS? It's, I don't, I'm going to, if I check this one place, I will know when someone I care about posted something. And where RSS has always, will always be great as in following, say, the individual blogger, right, who posts once a year or twice a year. But every time that person posts, you really want to see it. And RSS is perfect for that.

And podcasting has been built on RSS from day one. And so it is sort of the inherent nature of it is about a direct connection to an individual creator or a set of creators or whatever it might be. And the, you know, why did RSS die as a complicated, you know, for online is a complicated story. To some extent, you know, large sites would just dump a bunch of stuff. And so you had an opportunity for something like Google Reader to come along, which was better. and it also surfaced stuff better. And then Google killed Google Reader. And was that nefarious because Google Reader was not actually good for Google because

there weren't any ads on it. And, you know, it was not an aggregator sort of thing. It was a direct connection with customers, which is against Arrogators. Lots of debate to be had about that. That's how you can trace your internet age. Do you remember the like uprising when Google canceled Google Reader? There are still people to this day that are like insanely passionate about how evil that whole thing was.

Yeah, it was. And, you know, it's, it's an easy way to hate Google because you can very much see how building it up and killing it was very aligned with Google's incentives. And so whether it was just inept management or it was actually beneficial, both stories seem correct. And, yeah, but podcasting still has that at its root. And that's a great thing. Like, that's sort of at the core of what is there.

The key thing, though, to keep it is you do. need a business model. And maybe there's an aspect where you can do a podcast on the side to your regular job. And that's easier than writing, right? You know, just writing regularly is difficult. And so it's easier to keep it on sort of an amateur basis. But also, you know, hey, go out there, support your favorite podcasters, right?

Like, like, if you want this to stay a thing, like users get what they want. Sure. And we're still in the stage for podcasts where we can keep it the way we want it to be. and this isn't a Spotify thing or an Apple thing, thanks to these new models, it's a user thing, and that's a good thing. Yeah, well, and it's unclear how exactly some of these podcasts would be pushed, but it should be noted that a lot of the prestige shows that like wannabe serial genre of podcasting are pushed very aggressively

by various aggregator-like services, whether it's Apple Podcasts, or some of these huge publishing houses, that will promote it on 10 different channels or whatever, and oftentimes they still don't resonate. And what resonates is the honest back and forth and the chemistry we talked about. And again, it's just sort of a different animal than the rest of the internet,

which is why we're doing the podcast. I'm having fun with it so far. One final question here. Actually, there's just one note I wanted to read from Bloomberg. Apple Inc. has a moonshot-style project underway that dates back to the Steve Jobs era. non-invasive and continuous blood glucose monitoring. The goal of this secret endeavor, dubbed E5,

is to measure how much glucose is in somebody's body without needing to prick the skin for blood. After hitting major milestones recently, the company now believes it could eventually bring glucose monitoring to market, according to people familiar with the effort. There's still years of work ahead, but the move could upend a multi-billion dollar industry, roughly 1 in 10 Americans have diabetes and they typically rely on a device that pokes the skin for a blood sample.

Apple is taking a different approach using a chip technology known as silicon photonics and a measurement process called optical absorption spectroscopy. The system uses lasers to emit specific wavelengths of light into an area below the skin where there is interstitial fluid, substances that leak out of capillaries that can be absorbed by glucose. The light is then reflected back to the sensor in a way that indicates the concentration of glucose, an algorithm, then determines a person's blood glucose level. Ben, I don't even have a question here, but I am amazed by all of this. And I think an important part of the Sharp Tech brand is occasionally just being amazed by technology. And so my mind was blown when Mark German reported this last week. And I have no

idea where it leads or how plausible any of this is, but it feels like living in science fiction. Yeah, it's awesome. I mean, obviously, we have to wait for it to actually make it to market. You can see all the potential obstacles. It has to be reliable. And, you know, Apple has the same sort of risk functions internally, right? Like if they get this wrong, And it's out there, you know, to what extent does that risk outweigh the potential upside of actually shipping this? But at the same time, it's also, you know, this is a great thing to have a large company with basically a limited resources, you know, being able to invest in something like this. And it's the best part of Apple, right, making really cool hardware in inventing new technologies that make a real difference in people's lives. And yeah, and I appreciate the idea of this stuff is great.

And it can make a big difference in people's lives. I think that applies in general. I mean, go back to Spotify or Google or Microsoft or all this sort of stuff. It's just the speed with which we take things for granted. Yeah. We're awful. Pretty remarkable. Completely life-altering technology that hits.

And then, you know, 10 or 15 years later, everyone's bitching. about it. But this just sort of took my breath away. And it's another thing that Apple does. They don't rest on their laurels and they continue to push forward in ways that other monopoly-like companies obviously

don't. And the inertia is it like totally paralyzing for them for whatever reason. Right. And I think the areas where Apple struggles the most, you know, is things like services and like, you know, Siri looks particularly hilariously bad these

days in a world of chat GPT, even when it was already looked terrible compared to say a Google assistant or something similar. At the same time, I think a pushback on this point is Apple has for a long time talked about the potential for their devices in health care, broadly speaking. You know, it's a huge part of the world economy, the U.S. economy in particular so they can get a real toll hold. Like you could imagine the scenario, which I think happens occasionally, but where like insurance plans, like pay for you to get an Apple watch or whatever might be, right? That's, they know the power of a subsidy model because that's how their phone sold for a long time, right? But, I mean, I think just sort of a broad thing to tie this together is there's two big risks and problems with the broad base.

And so it ties back to Google, the free for users advertising based model. One is you lose a real feedback function or there's multiple ones. Use a real feedback function because people like, if you're selling something, people stop buying it. That's a real clear feedback. Yeah. Right. Number two, you would deal with the deluge of crap because anyone can sort of produce stuff and put it out there. There's a tragedy of the free, right? Tragedy of the commons, but everything's free in this sort of way. But the sort of third thing bit is, you know, there's a real motivation.

One of the reasons why investors have always been a bit critical of Apple, even over many years and even morally, is like, at the end of the day, like, isn't it good enough, right? Like, isn't your phone sort of good enough? Why do you have to get another one? You know, elongating upgrade cycles is like a go-to term for investment analysts when it comes to Apple. And that is a great spur to figure out new reasons and new ways to buy stuff. And that's great, right? And to tie this into the content bit, one of the critiques of the rise of the substack model is, as I like to think, the Shrekry model, is, well, there's less access to general information. right like like because now stuff's behind a paywall and that is a valid critique but there is sort of like

an argument like do we want more of the information to exist in the world generally speaking and having a direct feedback mechanism and a direct funding mechanism and a direct way to vote on i want more of this content which is i'm going to pay for it i think in the long run is healthy for there being more points of view, more bits of information sort of in in the world generally. And there's just a bit where there is, I think, generally good things that come from direct feedback loops from traditional sort of market competition that is a real cost of this free advertising-based world generally. And that can apply to the broader societal value, but it can also apply to the motivations

that go into creating that. And yeah, it's just a general observation, I think, ties a lot of this stuff together. There you go. Well, our next episode will be for subscribers only. So if you want to subscribe, hit the show notes, prioritizing quality. Yeah, this sounds like an hour long chill for us. No, I'm glad we could tie it together, though, with the top of the show and the Google conversation. Well, I mean, there is a bit, right, like where it's awfully arrogant on me to sit around and say this is what, you know, this is the problem with Google, right? I've never worked there. I've gotten stuff wrong about them in the past. You know, this applies to any sort of big company. On one hand, well, that's my God-given right as an American.

So I'm going to tell you what I think regardless. But number two, one of the reasons why I'm very proud of Sartechery is I do think there's an aspect of me walking the walk, not just talking to talk. Because like the thinking that undergirds what we're doing with Sharp Tech or with techery, like to understand an aggregator does not mean you're trying to be an aggregator. in my case, it's like, well, given the presence of these companies in the market, what's the appropriate response? What's a viable way to build a business as an individual? Because you

don't want to be at the mercy of these things. And so to the, yeah, so I mean, maybe it's inevitable that if I'm honest, if I take the Johnny I've approach here, yeah, I'm going to pat myself on the back a little bit, but because there was a degree of an intentionality around this approach. I made lots of mistakes and got lucky lots of times. I talked about earlier. I was right time, right place for sure. But like this is this is the answer. And from a user perspective, from a customer perspective,

you can't have it all. You can't get everything for free. You can't get avoid all the garbage. You can't get multiple points of view unless you're putting your own skin in the game. And in this case, it's money. And yeah, no one can afford to have five. gazillion substacks subscriptions. I get that. One of the things I want to figure out is can we figure out bundles so that people can get aspect of different stuff at a reasonable price.

And we're not by any means in the perfect end state that we ought to be. But it's worth acknowledging that you get what you pay for. And if all you're willing to pay is attention, you're going to get companies and entities and content that is predicated on tapping into your worse instincts because it's an easy way, cheap way to get attention. And, you know, it sort of falls on all of us, broadly speaking, to choose a different path. Yeah. It's a very convincing argument for where the internet is now and what the model is going to look like 10 or 20 years from now, particularly as AI floods the market with all sorts of sort of auto-generated content. And it's just, paying for quality is probably where we're going to all end up. Or paying for flaws, because

we're just humans. We get stuff wrong. Yeah, a lot of flaws, man. All I can say, brick by brick, we're building toward Take a Paloosa in Taipei. Somewhere down the line, I'll convince Ben, I promise you. But until then, this was a great performance by you with COVID. I didn't even notice that you were sick the entire time.

So A plus work. Yeah, I think I have a little bit of a weird vocal tenor because there's literally no air going through my nose. But other than that, I think we're doing fine. All right. Well, hopefully, will be healthier later in the week and we'll come back Thursday. Until then, Ben, I will talk to you soon. Talk to you later.