Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - What's Going on at Amazon? and AI Language Barriers

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Amazon after a rocky 12 months and on the verge of 18,000 layoffs, whether it's time for the business to mature beyond the Bezos' "Day 1" creed, plus Web3's AI outlook, the utopian view on AI's implications for linguistics, and a question about communities.

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? I'm doing okay. Doing okay. Finally back on the home mic, it's a good feeling. I'm sure the timbre of my voice is excellent right now. Kids are still not in school, which is kind of a pain.

It's very difficult to be productive with people around. Give me the hermit lifestyle. But other than that, I'm doing well. I mean, can you let people know exactly what you're dealing with? It seems like, oh, it's absolutely ridiculous. It's an interminable winter break. Yeah. So we're in Taiwan, right?

Taiwan does not have Christmas. I mean, there's Christmas, but there's no, like, days off or anything along those lines. But the kids go to the, you know, international American school. And so they have two weeks of Christmas break. But then there's Chinese New Year, which is when usually the local kids have like three weeks off of school. traditionally they'd have one week off at the international school. And this year, Chinese New Year is very early. It's actually this weekend.

And so instead of having like coming back for like one week of school, they're just like, okay, we're going to have a five week break. Which sucks for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that the year is going to go further into the summer than usual. But it really stinks because some of us have to actually work. So yeah, last week I was still traveling. I took the kids to go hit the slopes And I still had I was stuck in a hotel room doing work doing podcasting

But you help me out by bailing on the first one of the week So today is is supposedly Well, it is it's a national holiday It would be a day off But we are here producing a podcast Because rewarding our loyalist Here we are It's great to be here as we trudged through the five week winter break

It's brutal kids on break He's just terrible for productivity. It's awful. I can imagine. I've not had that problem yet, but it's coming sooner than I can even guess. But for now, we'll start with a company that you and I have never really discussed in depth on Sharp Tech. Somehow, for the first couple months, we never really had like a good Amazon conversation. Yeah, I've been feeling about techery too.

I've been like, they've been on my list to write about for ages. So yeah, we'll get there in podcast form. And it's an interesting time. So I'm going to start with a note we got from Max back in the fall that we never addressed on this show. He says, what is going on at Amazon? It feels like they've made some significant blunders since Jeff Bezos's vaunted return during the pandemic. For example, the pivot to purchasing fulfillment centers instead of renting them, missing that the COVID-driven changes in consumer patterns were temporary,

and the big losses from Alexa. Are these only significant because macroeconomic conditions are exposing mistakes that can't be covered by a booming market? Or is there something else going on with their decision making? And I'll just give you a couple additional facts here. Amazon stock is down 40% from where it was a year ago. And then in November 22, the New York Times reported that Amazon plan to lay off 10,000 employees. and shortly after the new year, Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that the company will actually be laying off about 18,000 employees starting this week, I believe.

So I'll let you focus on whatever aspect of the business is most interesting. But what do you think of all this? There's a bunch of interesting threads here. I was certainly wrong about the assumptions around consumer behavior. You know, the, you see this trend of sort of e-commerce becoming an ever larger part of sort of the economy. And then COVID obviously increased it. But the thinking, and I absolutely articulated this is, well, it's just pulling forward stuff that's going to happen. I actually thought I thought I was being quite conservative where I was saying a lot of this COVID changes is temporary.

Like once it's over, things are going to sort of snap back. That's general, you know, and it's interesting because in some respect, some of the remote work has stuck more than the commerce stuff. Or the commerce stuff, it's like, well, it was going to happen anyway, right? If you follow the trend line in five to ten years, we would have been at the same level that COVID accelerated to. And so my assumption was that, well, we'll just sort of stay at that level, maybe it'll plateau a bit.

But what's actually happened is there was this big spike in e-commerce and then it sort of plummeted back down to the trend line. And that I was, I for one, was definitely wrong about that. and everyone else was pretty wrong about that, right? Shopify's talking about being wrong with that. Stripes talk about being wrong about that. Amazon's talking about being wrong about that. I think everyone in the tech industry was wrong about that.

And to whatever extent, I bear responsibility for helping propagate that. I apologize to the stockholders of the tech industry. Thank you for the accountability. I think that that's being by some little bit of his credit. But for sure, I was completely wrong about that. And so that's, I think the overarching, issue because this leads to a lot of knock on effects, particularly for a company like Amazon, where their biggest point of differentiation is in their sort of logistics network. And so to sustain

that level of sort of e-commerce, they invested a whole bunch of money. And that's like money you don't sort of get back. Like you put that money in up front with the assumption you're going to reap the gains of it over time. If those gains don't come, you're still carrying those costs. And some of that is marginal costs, like an increased employee base. Like they talked about, you know, a year ago that they were basically drastically overemployed relative to sort of what they needed. Like they were at like holiday levels, but it was like March. And so that's something that you can obviously trim down. Now, I think these layoffs are more about sort of headquarter layoffs, but there's still major sort of like physical stuff that you're invested in.

And there's been news about this. Like they're renting out like warehouse space, stuff like that. And that's the harder cost to get rid of. We've talked about this dynamic in the context of like the chip industry where when you make these big upfront costs, it's like a guillotine over your neck in a way if you don't grow into it. And I think that's a big part of what has impacted Amazon. And that's both a macro thing and a sort of like big picture mistake. And Amazon was sort of hardly alone. in making this mistake, but it doesn't change the fact it was a mistake all the same.

And so just to confirm, basically what Amazon did was misread the early part of the pandemic when consumer demand was out of control and they sunk a bunch of money into their retail infrastructure. And consumer demand has fallen off right as things like transportation and also just consumer goods have inflated in cost. And so the business, at least as far as retail is concerned is much cooler than they expected it to be to justify all that investment. I think in broad strokes, yeah, I think that I think that's correct. Now, I do think there are some mistakes that Amazon made in particular. And some of these are, there was a, I think some of them actually predate the pandemic. There was an article I wrote in September 2019 called Day 2 to 1 day.

And, you know, there was this period, I think, in the, you know, 2015 to 2019 era where Amazon really started acting like a mature company with market power where they were squeezing their suppliers and they were trying to ring like every, you know, they sort of lost their low cost advantage. They really shifted to what you go to Amazon because it's, it's reliable and you get it in two days. And you just, it's your default search. And, you know, you could, if you wanted to find it cheaper somewhere else, you could, but did you really want to risk it, right? It's kind of a, you know, it's going to show up. Their fulfillment is such an advantage in the marketplace. Like, if I have to wait an extra three to four business days to get something that's $2 cheaper somewhere else, I'm not going to wait. I'm just going to get it at Amazon.

And so I'm surprised they haven't taken advantage of it more than they have to this point. Well, I mean, I agree. I think that it was very rational sort of just start searching on Amazon. But you also had other stuff going on, like they're big push in advertising. And like when you search for stuff, it was like, you know, it just everything's an ad. You know, it was certainly going on. You also had Amazon's choice. Yeah.

Yeah, you had the real reach into. Well, Amazon's choice, I think, is some sort of algorithm to be addressed label. I don't think that's necessarily an ad. But if you do a search result, a whole bunch of stuff are ads. Like it's stuff that like people have to pay to get their stuff up there. And, you know, that's certainly been a beneficiary of things like ATT. Like if you're a small business selling some sort of item, you used to be on Shopify. You find people with Facebook ads.

Well, if that's no longer a viable channel, you have to push it up and sort of Amazon search results. And Amazon's been a real beneficiary of that. But then also there was, you know, there's things like they really pushed into making it super easy for like Chinese sellers on Amazon. And on one hand, that got them a whole bunch of stuff. at just basically anything you can imagine at low prices. It also, you know, led to issues of like, you know, their counterfeits, are there things that are actually reliable, which I think has been, you know, at least, you know, one can imagine that being problematic for how much you rely on Amazon.

But this article, day two to one day, Jeff Bezos, this is actually when he really came back. Like, you kind of came back a couple times. It's been kind of a weird, weird sort of trajectory with Jeff Bezos. And he's like, no, we're coming back. We're reinvesting. We're going to get to one day delivery for everyone. Like, screw this two-day stuff. We're really doubling down and reinvesting.

And it was framed in this context of, you know, he always writes in his shareholder, you know, annual share a letter or he did, but, you know, he was still CEO, that like, we're a day one company, right? You know, we're not a day two company. Day one companies are always inventing. They're doing new things. They're experimenting. Day two companies are just laying back and sort of garnishing the results.

And I kind of reflect on this on a personal level. There's an aspect where I think I've made this point on Sharp Tech before in a joking way, but I actually believe it quite seriously. Okay. When you're young, you're like, I'm never going to be an old person like that person over there. How lame is that, right? I'm going to be young and spry and do new things and live in new places and XYZ. and I'm not going to be like an old boomer or whatever it is.

And as you get older, there is some aspect of actually the people that are my age and still trying to act young are kind of lame. And there's a bit where embracing who you are and moving through the stages of life, I think is a sort of healthy approach in general. And you could make the case that this sort of applies to Amazon, right? This is not a young company anymore. It's a 25-year-old company or whatever it might be, or 26-year-old. No, I actually might be 30 years old coming up on it next year, I think.

And you know what? Like they have an established position. They have an established sort of logistics network. Investors have been trusting them for three decades with the assumption that all this investment is going to pay off in the long run. And maybe there's a point where the natural state for Amazon is to just be like your default go-to store for everything on the web, the everything store. and to be reliable and deliver on that.

And you've got the sense from Jeff Bezos coming back. I mean, I praised in this article, but sort of in retrospect, a few years on, it's like, I mean, Jeff Bezels personally seems to be trying to be a young person. Is he trying to push Amazon to sort of be a young person at the same time? He's a really great example of the phenomenon in the wild. Yeah, I learned that lesson when I was like 25 years old. I went out with some friends in Manhattan Beach. and we were at like kind of a hip bar or whatever and there was like a 55 year old guy in there

hitting on a bunch of like 25 year old women and he just looked kind of like leathery and sad in that setting and it's seared into my memory because I remember thinking at 25 I'm like never want to be that guy you don't want to be the old guy in the club or the bar just trying to mix in with people who are like several generations younger And Jeff Bezos does seem to be living that life. But there's an absolute of Amazon there. Like at what point is it actually appropriate to sort of settle down and be the company you've built?

Well, and let me ask you, like has their core business, the retail business, do we know whether it's ever been profitable? Yeah. I mean, so Amazon's very, very interesting because I might be totally wrong on this point because Amazon has proven the sort of the conventional wrong on this, a lot of points. So Amazon starts out. they have the book business, right? And books make, why did they do books?

Not because Jeff Beazel's particularly should have books, but because books were a perfect match for what the internet made possible. With books, there was basically an infinite supply. But no store, no physical store could carry that infinite supply. Amazon, though, by virtue of being on the internet, could have infinite shelf space, right? They could carry all the books in the world. Now, it might take you a while to get the book, but that was a way to get it. They also could reach everywhere, right?

You could be in Backwoods, Wyoming. And yeah, it might take you like two weeks, but you were going to get that book in a way that you would have to drive forever to sort of get it. And so there was all these, and books were a knowable thing. There was an entire catalog of every book in the world. So you could list them all. And like, there was only a few suppliers, relatively speaking. So you could even as a small startup, you could build the right connections.

You could get access to everything you needed to. Books were perfectly suited to the internet. They were better sold on the internet than they were in physical stores. So that's why he started with books. Then they built books and then they moved and then they moved into CDs, which had the same sort of dynamics and things like DVDs that had the similar dynamics. And these were exceptionally profitable. Now, over time, because you build up the scale and then you're selling them, you're getting your scale dynamics as you build out your infrastructure. And what they would do is they would keep investing into new areas.

using the cash flow from the established businesses. Now, they did some really smart things along the way. Like, for example, books were obviously threatened by e-books. Well, what they did, they just dominated e-books, right? And so they sort of took over that area. And the problem is the further down you went into goods, like when you start selling like TVs and stuff like that, the logistics start to get really expensive

and the margins aren't necessarily great. And so the relative margin went down as you went. But by and large, the way to think about Amazon is not as one business. It's at a whole entire collection of businesses under one roof. And they funnel the profits from very profitable divisions like books back in the day into other divisions to build up new ones. And it's a brilliant model. So Amazon is like the opposite of Apple. Like Apple is this super integrated.

Everything is like funnels into one sort of product vision. And that product has to be sold at a huge profit to sort of pay for it all. Amazon is like a whole collection of independent businesses. and then management at the top is funneling money from proper ones to new ones, and it's sort of like this perpetual motion engine of building sort of new businesses. And then undergirding it all over time has been the development of this logistics network that gives you sort of a sustainable advantage in every sort of area that you enter. And it's been a very brilliant sort of approach and brilliant strategy.

So does Amazon make money isn't quite the right question? It's do they have divisions that are throwing up money and then are they investing that properly in new areas that could sort of drive growth in the long run? Now, the real thing about Amazon is that the home run, the Grand Slam, the whatever large sports analysis you want to use was AWS, where they built AWS. And theoretically, and in PR, it's like, oh, well, we already built this infrastructure for our store. Let's sell to other people. The truth is that the store, that was the idea. It took a long, long time for Amazon the store to actually move on to AWS.

Like, there's this popular conception. Amazon builds all this capacity. for the holidays. They don't need it the rest of the year. That makes no sense because people who use AWS also need it during the holidays, right? No, AWS is sort of this separate thing and it's this idea of just being primitives. It's like there's compute, there's storage, and you just buy these pieces and there's a very clean interface in theory that you can sort of build on.

And for people who don't know, AWS is Amazon Web Services and they've made it really easy to host websites and basically undergird, like, large portions of. of the internet. Right. This podcast is is made possible of AWS. Right. Passports built any of us. So. And it's hugely profitable.

It makes a ton of money, right? Like it was one of them. I call it the AWS IPO when they first revealed their their finances. It was like a bomb went off. Like the like the fact they're making so much money out. Because everyone assumed it was like kind of be like super low margin. And so AWS actually makes a ton of money. And a lot of that money is going into the retail store and building out these logistics.

and going into things like Alexa, which we should definitely get to. So put a mark in that. And so Amazon as a whole isn't making a lot of money, but there's definitely components that are making a ton. And you have this reinvestment, this we're not going to, we're not going to be old. We're going to jump back in. You have COVID that sort of doubles down on that. We must do this.

We have to sort of do it. And the economy is going to support us. And then you have all this low interest rate sort of environment. And then now suddenly people are looking at all like, well, where's the profit? It's where's the actual like, we've been waiting around for 30 years here. I was going to say it's been like 25 years of that strategy where we're going to take our profits over here to grow over here. And in the long run, it'll be worth it. And so like when did they hit that point where, okay, now this is the most dominant company on the planet?

Right. No, exactly. And I think I think that's probably the question that a lot of investors are asking. Now, I do think there's a, AWS is like the canonical example of why you should trust. Amazon, right? Like, just an unbelievable success that was ridiculously expensive and, you know, a real long shot, you know, at least in theory. They did it, they delivered it. It's massively profitable. You know, if anything, you can understand why they tried to hide the finances for so long because it prompted a huge response, you know, from Microsoft and sort of others. But

the other piece here is, I think, kind of Alexa. So Alexa and the whole, that whole idea, And I wrote a piece about Alexa being like the operating system of the home. And this idea that the home is Amazon missed or not missed. They like they tried to enter smartphones. That was a ridiculous sort of endeavor. Did they? I must have missed that. Oh, my God.

What year are we talking about there? I think it was 2014 or something like that. So they, yeah, they made the fire phone. It was like Jeff Bezos sort of like personal project. I'm very proud for calling that. terrible idea from day one. And then I actually used one. And it's the worst phone I've ever used to my life.

It's really bad. It should be a collector's item. I wonder whether there's a resale market. Well, a credit to Bezos is he, they cut it immediately. And they just wrote it down and then they ban on the market. Yeah, that was a terrible idea. It was dumb to do, but at least they sort of cut their losses immediately. And then three months later, they come out with the echo speaker with Alexa.

And this is on the heels of this massive failure. So everyone's dumping on Echo and Alexa. And I'm like, this is actually a pretty great idea because what made this different was the home's the one place where you don't necessarily have your phone with you all the time. You have to charge at some point, right? And the home is the one place where you don't feel like a moron for like talking to a speaker because you're just in your own house, right? You're not sort of out and about. And I think the problem is it was never super clear how this actually ties into making money, right? Like the, you know, you add stuff to your shopping list.

Well, it's like when you're shopping, and we talked about this a bit in the context of, of chat GPT versus Google, you kind of want to see a selection. You want to choose, right? Do you really trust like Alex to get the right thing for you or whatever it might be? Sure. And then there's also, they've gotten to things like ring doorbells and there's lots of stuff for your house. But there's a real question, like, what's the payoff here? Like, what, how does this actually manifest into sort of making money at the end point? And they've been spending a ton on Alexa, like billions and billions and billions of dollars a year.

And I think there's a question there about where is the payoff? At the time, do you think it was mostly just a hedge in terms of what the like touchpoints with customers might be 10 or 20 years down the line? Yeah. And no one wants to be sort of shut out on the smartphone. Again, Apple's given a perfect object lesson about why no one wants to be like under the heel of whoever controls the touchpoint to the customer. And I can understand where you would be in a conference room thinking like, all right, well, let's try to own the home and reach people that way. No, totally. I think it's a great, I think it was a great idea.

I think it's a great strategy. I've been fully supportive of it all along. I do think, though, it's one of those things where we're eight, you know, eight, nine years on. And I'm sort of taking the skeptical investor perspective. It's like, what's the payoff here? Well, and also, I would say that humans haven't adopted the technology the way a lot of people expected they would or hoped they would. Yeah, I think we'll mostly use it to play music. And if you're really advanced, use it to turn lights on.

Right, exactly. That's the extent of it, which, you know, I've heard from my friend Ben Thompson that it can be really useful for those two activities. But beyond that, I'm not sure. It's funny because this is actually the same reason to raise questions to be skeptical about things like chat GPT replaced in Google, right? Like the, do to what extent do we actually want answers and actions from a computer versus? Conversations, yeah. Yeah, versus like options, right? And we retain some sort of like decision making in sort of the process.

And it's unknown, right? Is the issue that is just not good enough or is it actually fundamentally flawed as a model of as a model of computing? I think that there's, it's, you think about how much the AI stuff has advanced just in the last few years. And that certainly lends credence to the idea, look, it's just not. good enough yet. But it remains an open question. So anyhow, I just like, but I think the bigger issue, I mean, so Alexa is definitely an open question. I've revisited it a couple times. I do want to revisit it again. But I think the bigger issue was this overinvestment. I do think there's a question of should Amazon just be the big company, mature company that they are, you know, and the other thing,

and I know people get really upset when I talk about this, but the vast majority of tech companies are dramatically overstaffed. Like, like, Facebook, you know, we talked about cutting like 10 or 11 percent of their workforce. That brought them back to like the level of employment of like six months ago, right? Like, like, the reality is they probably should have cut way more than that. Like what actually is advanced about Facebook business relative to 2019 or 2020 that they need 4X the employees or whatever might be? And this applies to companies all over, including Amazon.

And I think, and so I'm not surprised at this, this layoff sort of increase. Greece. Again, I don't, people get really upset about this and I can understand why, but it's just sort of like the reality. And I think, I think this year is going to be pretty rough. Like, like, honestly, yes, there was a lot of last last year. They probably weren't sufficient. And then ones that haven't done last yet is probably coming. And that's just going to be a tough thing. And I think the hope and what we've seen in past downturns is that actually ends up leading to more entrepreneurship. and sort of more new companies. And, you know, certainly I hope that would be the case sort of going forward.

But I do think it's going to be, it's going to be tough, not just for Amazon, but for a lot of companies over the next few months. And it's eye-opening for people who've been paying attention to the last 20 years when companies like Amazon have basically just dominated and like the success has compounded with each passing like five-year window. And it's strange to see. costs start to matter for them. Like Brad Stone, he had a good article at Bloomberg and he wrote about some of the cost over the last few years, he said, especially in the final years of Bezos's

tenure as chief executive officer, frugality seemed to go out the window. Amazon spent big on everything from new offices in Seattle and Arlington, Virginia to Hollywood productions, parentheses a $1 billion tab for more Lord of the Rings, which I said was ridiculous at the time. ridiculous at the time and it was even more ridiculous once you watched it. And acquisitions, $8.5 billion for MGM, which no one thought was worth that much, Stone Rites. The company also went on a wild spree of hiring employees and constructing warehouses, both to satisfy pandemic demand, but also to support that new one-day delivery promise to prime members. And it's just interesting to see like costs matter for a company like Amazon and like a new reality where they're sort of playing

in the same game that everyone else is because for a long time companies like Amazon and Facebook and the rest of the big five, they've all felt basically bulletproof relative to normal companies. Yeah. And it's all relative. Like these are all, you know, Amazon doesn't make much profit, but I think they could. But particularly the other big tech companies just they still make tons of profit. The issue is that their sort of stock price was predicated on the assumption that the growth and sort of profit would sort of continue indefinitely.

And so the correction here, like the relative prices compared to, you know, your typical quote unquote real world firm are still much higher. It's all sort of relative to what they were, I think is sort of the thing. I mean, I don't think that, you know, I don't think that Amazon is doomed by any means. The question is, is it reasonable to sort of value them based on the assumption that this growth and dominance continues over the next 30 years? And they certainly were hiring at that. But I think the reality is the hiring was out of control. Like you had the last few years, it was crazy. And I think it was bad for Silicon Valley.

It was bad for tech. Because you had these large companies. It was becoming completely irrational to be an engineer and work for a startup. Because like the, you know, you're never going to be competitive on a salary perspective. The idea is, well, there might be some sort of upside. But then even when the, when you actually calculated out that upside and then you had these startups raising at crazy valuations where it's like, like, what's going to actually have to happen for us to grow into that valuation?

And then you, you almost have like this hoarding of talent by these, these large companies. And this hoarding, I think, was a very bad thing. And I, I, I, again, this is very easy for me. me to say sitting in Taiwan with sort of a stable income. Not working for Amazon. Although the people that get bad, like, hey, your, your subscribers might be a tech employee. I get it.

But if I, if I sugarcoded it because I was worried about that, then you shouldn't listen to me. Yeah. It wasn't great the last five to six years where you just had these big five companies hoovering up basically all the talent and paying them to not do what. It wasn't super clear. And the optimistic take, the silver whining, is that there's actually now much more talent available to go into building new things. And it's happening in conjunction with this AI stuff.

So maybe that's actually a paradigm shifter that makes new companies possible. I like that glass half full spin on things. And maybe this is going to lead to more variety in the future. I can see why people might look skeptically at that rationale and say, look, that's a really, rosy spin on like a downturn that's cutting like thousands and thousands of jobs across Silicon Valley. But I'm going to choose to be the optimist and say this is a healthy shakeup for everybody. I'll subscribe to what you're selling here. I mean, we've seen this before, right? The years after the dot com crashed were really,

really brutal. And it's tough because on a micro level for all those individual people impacted, it was life changing in sort of a negative way. And it takes years to recover from that and you might be like sort of permanently behind. So I don't want to minimize the damage that comes from this. At the same time, that's the era where all sort of like a whole bunch of the great companies grew up and were founded and built. Precisely because there was talent available. There was like and there was no other option than to build. And the past era that we've just lived through where all these companies are basically hiring people to keep them from work.

working with potential competitors and just having them sort of sit around. Like that's kind of a shitty place to be. And so if we can disperse the talent a little bit more than we have been, that's probably a good thing. Yeah. Like the VR world would be in a much better place if Facebook was very pressed for costs like three years earlier. And like Facebook, I think feels like they're in too deep now. So they might as well keep going. But there's an aspect where, you know, if they had this sort of cost pressure and revenue pressure that they have now,

do they ever make this bet, right? And if they don't, then you have much more sort of, you probably have a whole bunch of startups in this space and people focusing on different things and building different pieces, and you have much more experimentation and evolution. And yeah, a lot of those companies in that space will fail, because that's what happens with startups,

but you would probably have a much stronger ecosystem and much more speed and moving in a particular direction, you know, if VR were being developed in the startup space as opposed to basically being the playground of Apple and Facebook. Right. Okay. So to take it back to Amazon at the end here, and the initial question from Max, this isn't something where you're like particularly concerned about Andy Jassy's decision making long term.

This is like a sort of perfect storm of factors that have brought them to where they are right now. Yeah. I mean, I have a like on some stuff I think Jesse's been spot on like closing like the retail stores and stuff like that's like, why are you? embracing a model that your model is better than then, and that's what you're predicated on? You're displacing all that brick and mortar stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think the entertainment video stuff is definitely interesting. It certainly seems like that's something that Bezos cares about in particular. And so I don't know. I mean, like the, you know, we talked to a little bit about that before.

I mean, just I can see the idea of wanting to own like, basically own the CBS of the future, right? CBS, NBC, ABC, phenomenally profitable for years and years. And is that going to be the case of streaming where there's a few services that matter and then you sell access to all sorts of other stuff?

There is an aspect, and this is sort of like a long-running trope in Silicon Valley. You know, people make money in Silicon Valley and then spend it all in Hollywood trying to be cool. And there is, you know... Again, that identity crisis that Bezos has been experiencing the last 10 years or so. I mean, you know, you can raise the same questions about Apple, like the Apple TV plus on is, you know, I mean, Apple has so much money.

It doesn't kind of doesn't really matter. But, you know, it's like, what are we doing here? Like, what's the point? I would really be interested to hear someone at Amazon explain what they think the point is because it's a little confusing to me. I've written about prime video like five times. And every time, like, I don't, I'm not sure. Like, you know, Amazon deserves so much benefit of the doubt. but I'm like, I'm just, I'm not sure I get it.

I'm not sure what's going on here. I mean, like the, like, for example, like, who does not have Amazon Prime that is going to get Amazon Prime? Like, is there actually a meaningful shift? And I don't know, maybe, maybe this is my sort of like, you know, relatively rich, well off sort of, you know, I'm in Taiwan and I still have Amazon Prime, in part because they do have benefits for international, but also when I'm in the States for two months, I'm more than pay for it, right?

And so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask about this. But it's like, I don't know. Like, there definitely is. What it's like is prime is such a good product that they have a bunch of lock-in regardless of whether there's a video service. Like, it seems like their theory is this is just another inducement that will keep people subscribing to prime year after year after year. But the reality is the core prime business is so good that like they don't need to spend,

you know, however many billion dollars per year. to secure Prime video and keep me locked in over there. That's just like a weird perk that comes with their otherwise great business. And I think that's true for almost everybody who has Prime. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, though. Like it's very hard to, yeah. Because I think Amazon does have data, right? They know.

And there is, you know, the Amazon Prime Bundle is really interesting because people look at it's like, it's like a grab bag of stuff. There's all this disparate stuff. But like sort of like from Bundle theory, having a bunch of random stuff is actually great. because it's like these are anti-turn mechanisms. Like if you're using Amazon music, right, like you're not going to turn from prime because like all your playlist and stuff right in there,

whatever might be. And, and, you know, video, so, I mean, the problem with video is just so expensive,

right? It's like, it feels like that's more expensive than all the other Amazon prime benefits combined. I mean, like, I don't know. I'm just shooting off the street for the hip gear.

But again, it's one of those things where I, have by default deferred to Amazon because they have data and I don't and their track record has been so good. And maybe sort of the none of it what's happening now is Amazon just losing a little bit of that benefit of the doubt. And that maybe is more than anything what's happened over the last, you know, a couple of years.

Yeah. Well, to your point on video, they do make really interesting choices with the shows they buy into because for every Lord of the Rings crazy billion dollar investment, they also go hard after shows that appeal to like true normies. Like my parents will watch like Bosch on Amazon video. Jack Ryan or whatever it is. Exactly. Yeah.

And so it's interesting. They're playing a different game than like Apple TV. Well, by all accounts, The War of the Rings things is really a Bezos pet project. He was jealous of Game of Thrones and he wanted his own Game of Thrones. And it's fair to ask is Jeff Bezos additive or negative for, Amazon sort of bottom line and if it's negative, for how long has that been the case? I think that's a reasonable question to ask.

Interesting. Okay. Well, that's a good place to end it on Amazon. If people have follow-ups, please email us and we can keep the conversation going. All right. To keep it moving, though, Ben, some follow-ups to our GPT conversation. Aaron says, if Web 3 promises authenticity and uniqueness, and AI promises abundance and commoditized creation.

What's the relationship between the two? Is it complementary where we could have blockchains verifying the providence of media or will it be competitive? What do you think of this, Ben? This is exactly why I haven't been outright dismissive of Web 3 and blockchains all along, right? The entire, what makes the internet and digital interesting and possible is that everything is infinitely reputable.

And that is good for abundance, but the fact, the possibility of introducing scarcity, getting all the benefits of digital, but it being scarce, is really interesting. And you can see some real interesting and valid viewpoints or valid use cases for this. I think the challenge with Web 3 is that's basically been the argument of Web 3 has always been theoretical. And like, where are the actual products that actually demonstrate this? And yes, we'll get responses of, oh, this is doing this. Yeah, they're proposing to XYZ, but where's the actual like take up and use and questions along those lines? And to what extent is stuff going to be via blockchain versus just sort of like trusted companies or individuals, right? But the question of verification and reputation and knowing that something is what it says it is, those are all real questions.

They've been real questions at the internet for a long time. and the validity of that concern is only going to increase with with sort of this AI stuff. So yeah, I absolutely do think they're complementary. Now, I've been consistent in saying the Web 3 blockchain stuff is a feature. It's not, I mean, okay, that's like what. There's a brief period I speculated is this sort of a new paradigm. That was, I think, not right, but I think I have been consistent from when I first writing about it. Like, look, there is a need for verification and saying what something is.

You know, there was, I don't know, like there is a complementarity. I basically is what I would say in theory. I think the issue is seeing what emerges in practice. And a lot of this theoretical output was disguised by what is definitely scarce. Well, money is scarce. And so that became like a super obvious use case with everything that goes with that, including fraud and like all those other bits and pieces. It's so hard as a normie, you've seen.

it mentioned with crypto almost all the time. I hear about Web 3. Crypto is the next sentence. And it just feels like there have been so many buzzwords thrown around over the last couple of years. I almost want a new name for what people are envisioning here because Web 3 just feels like a giant scam to me. And maybe I'm wrong there, but just based on like the way it's been messaged and packaged over the last several years, it just feels like sort of a house of cards that people are trying to sell without much there there. Yeah, I think the big question, too, the sort of verification thing, right? Is there, like, there are verification entities that, that do offer verification.

You'd see them in the financial sector, or it could be a bang. There's this thing called root certificates that basically undergird security on the web, and, you know, your browser trusts a few sort of certificate providers, and then those certificate providers issue certificates to like treachery, right? If you want to do a purchase or to Amazon or whatever it might be. And at the end of the data,

there is some sort of like trusted entity at the tail end of that. The idea with some of this Web3 stuff is we can do a way to trust entity entirely. And it's sort of like this sort of more sort of peer to peer sort of establishment. And is that even necessary?

I think is a fair question, particularly given the tradeoffs in sort of performance and accessibility that come with that. And I don't know, we'll see. I mean, it does feel even further off than like is AI going to be good, to be honest. Right. And again, it's very hard to distinguish this from the money-making use cases.

I mean, I was talking to someone in crypto a couple years ago because I'm very interested in it for like a like we have like passport, right? Like, is there a way to verify someone's membership? And I think this is where actually NFTs are actually quite interesting. not as an artistic medium, but as a, this is basically a unique token. If I have this token, I should be able to get access to different things by virtue of having that token, right? And the question is, you know, well, should that work because it's on a blockchain or because it's owned by unique entities? Like, well, how are you going to get like YouTube and Instagram and all these things to work together? They're not going to trust each other.

Well, what if there is sort of like a blockchain there? And this has always been very interesting to me. Like I think this idea is compelling and and what this person told me is like, look, the reality is everyone in crypto, they don't care unless they can make money from it. And that's the only, that's the driving sort of factor. And I think the, if I were, this is sort of the glass half full podcast. If there's an optimistic day for crypto is at this massive decline in value, the fraud, all this sort of stuff is actually really good. because all these attempts to just make more money and need to be wiped out of the system, washed out,

and folks that actually want to do product, you know, will then have room to emerge. But that's like an extreme version of the, look, there's going to be a ton of pain. People are going to lose tons of money or lose their life savings. But hey,

now we can actually innovate. And it sounds, you know, that sounds even harsher than, I mean, like, it is a bummer. I think crypto, I was back in Wisconsin as like, you know, just some like normally friends of mine.

Like, oh, you know, like into crypto. I'm like, oh, this gives me a bad feeling. Like you have like, I had a couple of friends get really into crypto. Yeah. Didn't end well. No. And but this is always the tension I felt writing about it is because I do think there is just, and this is maybe my problem being an analyst.

I'm interested in theory, right? Like the idea of, of scared digital. scarcity is really, really interesting to me. And maybe being too interested in that theory meant I was insufficiently harsh on the reality. And I think that's definitely a criticism I have of myself and, you know, is probably one that can be levied broadly. Yeah. Well, and I look at this question and like the interplay between Web3 and AI.

All I know, and it underscores the importance of product on the open AI side. like I can look at chat GPT and understand what it is. Where was the killer? Where was the killer Web3 use case other than like making a bunch of money? For three years, I've been seeing tweets about Web3 and sitting here being like, what the fuck does this even mean? Like what is any of this? And it's all very esoteric and does make sense to its adherence.

But growing beyond that is going to be a challenge. And AI is further along. I mean, I think that's been made clear over the last couple months here. To keep it moving, though, Ryan says, on the last show, you guys got a question regarding AI and the dominance of the English language. On that front, I'm intrigued by the amazing improvements we've seen in recent years around real-time translations across a number of mediums, text-to-text, voice-to-text and even voice-to-voice, along with neat initiatives like Meta's No Language Left Behind Project. Is it possible that AI actually enables deeper cross-cultural integrations as real-time translations allow users to interact with any and all content and potentially each other localized real-time in their native tongue?

Perhaps this is just the techno-utopian dreamer in me. Love the show. I always listen on my fantastic AirPods pros. Every week we get another listener who brings up how much they love. their AirPods pros. I just want to say thank you to everybody who writes in with their AirPods updates. You are slowly wearing me down sometime in the next year or two. I will crack and get AirPods Pro's Stockholm syndrome. But what do you think of the idea on the language side, Ben? I mean, I certainly am very intimately aware of this. I use translation constantly. I have to

deal with the, I mean, I could read Chinese to an extent, but it's a way easier to just translate and go from there. So, yeah, and like, one very underrated, I think underappreciated improvement has been Apple's image recognition image translation. So now you can just sort of like, you know, particularly when there's screenshots passed around and it's like, oh, you just save it and highlight it and translate it. It's amazing. Wow.

Wow. So, but there is an extent where what I'm doing is just making more of the web English to size from a practical perspective, right? I think like, I think the, the, you get worse, we're not sociologists. We're just, you know, podcasters, but hey, that gives us free license, right? I think there is a-stop us, yeah. There's an aspect where this just cements the dominance of English as the medium of the internet, right? It makes it easier for people to get to English.

English. I just think the larger, the dominant player, the dominant sort of a cruise over time as opposed to being diminished. But like, I've talked about this in the context of, you know, like networks and things on those lines, right? Like if you had, if you had network portability, everyone thinks about network portability as like being bad for Facebook because now you can get access to, to, you know, you can move your network to another place. And theoretically that's right. Or, but that network portability flows the opposite direction. Now Facebook can inject. your other networks, right? And get sort of like pull things in, right? And if there was network portability between Twitter and Facebook, what's more likely that Twitter builds a Facebook replacement or that Facebook builds a Twitter replacement, right? I think like, like, and so I think there's an aspect here where just being large and dominant means you tend to absorb as opposed to the other direction. Now, if I really wanted to be philosophical and contrarian, is all this sort of like,

cross-cultural exchange actually good, I think would be an interesting question. That is a really good question. Yes. So I loved the optimism from Ryan, the Utopian Dreaming. And I also remember watching the meta keynote this year. There was a lot of VR stuff that I rolled my eyes through. But the No Language Left Behind project, which was like just a small piece of it, is crazy impressive. Like what they're able to translate in basically real time is cool to imagine like a couple years down the line when it gets more advanced. Now, again, this is very amateur sociology. Yeah, I think the lesson of the last 20 years, which most people still haven't really connected the dots on, is that being able to be connected to millions of people at any given moment is not a good thing

for society. And that's really like kind of led to some social fabric unraveling as opposed to being enhanced. Well, just like in fundamental things that I thought we all agreed on, right? It turns out it's a lot easier to support like free speech when you're not exposed to the speech of people you don't like and the means don't exist to control it, right? Suddenly on the internet, we see all this speech we don't like. And because it's the internet and there's choke points, it's like there's ways to leverage

it. And boy, everyone sure seems to be competing to try to leverage it. right? And like that, to me, that that's been a real wake-up call. Like, like, how much, you know, and it's kind of obvious if you back out of it, like how much of the things that we actually care about are structural and systemic in nature, right? Are we pro-free speech? Because we're pro-free speech. We're pro-free speech because we, uh, you know, we're not willing to make the onerous, like, you go back to like, if you had a control free speech 30 years ago, you have to actually like go into people's homes and go on the streets and actually lock people up.

And like, no, no, that's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, especially in the abstract, there's no way I would ever support that, right? Suddenly online, it's like, well, look at this. This is unbelievable. Can you believe that people think this? Twitter, do something about it. And Twitter can. They can kick people off.

And is that a government? No, no, no, no. What's not, you know, now we fall back to these semantic arguments instead of like this, this philosophical one. It turns out our philosophy was not nearly as deep as we thought it was. But it's not even limited to America. I mean, there's been a rise of more kind of radical behavior all over the world for the last 20 years. The only thing with building community is that's not saying whether the community is good or bad, right?

There's maybe value in having terrible viewpoints and being shunned by society. Now you go online, you can find a whole bunch of people that agree with you. You feel validated and you end up going deeper and deeper into these holes. Yeah. Well, and I don't mean to laugh because it's definitely been unsettling to watch over the last five to ten years. But I really hope that Ryan is right and that we do live in some utopian reality where we can all communicate instantaneously via AI. The enthusiasm of your voice is giving it. Well, no, it's like the No Language Left Behind project is really cool.

Would it actually be good to have everybody connected is a really good follow-up question. But it's going to happen. And I think, you know, there's an aspect of arguing about what, what has or hasn't happened versus how do we figure out and manage us going forward. And, you know, that's useful. And this context is useful in all sorts of contexts for sure. Okay. One life advice question toward the end here.

Daniel says, I don't know what life advice question. Everyone got mad at us about our dating app takes, which, by the way, we framed as these are two old married men on the porch complaining. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. People took it way too seriously. Oh, yeah. Well, that's, you know, it's the internet is fine.

It's the world that we inhabit here. We used to call us two old men in a mic or something like that. I'm not as old as you. You keep trying to pull me into the old bin here. You told me earlier today to embrace being old. I'm still young at heart, young and vibrant, you know? Yeah, I would think you're pathetic. No, just kidding.

Yeah. Young and stupid. No, not young. Old and tried to be young. It's the worst. Yeah, desperately clinging to my youth. All right. Daniel says in several recent episodes,

you emphasize that the internet will primarily help people find communities. Then people will share context within their communities or group chats. As someone who works in tech but lives in a smaller market, how would you recommend building out this community virtually?

Are there specific forums or places to seek discussion around the overlap of technology and business? Or should I begin replying to tweets and sharing ideas and a community will naturally form? What do you think? It's a good question. And I think the inevitable follow-on question that is much harder to answer. First off, I don't think the internet will primarily help. I think the internet optimistically will help sort of work communities, right? This is the, you know, again, sort of to continue the theme, it's the glass half full.

view of the internet. I do have hope for this in part because of my personal experience, but this idea of how and where do you find community is, I think, a really pressing one for sure. I remember being in Taiwan when I first came and I like, I would like to have more community and I'm like, I'm going to, like, really start posting in like this forum or whatever. Like, I think it was like the Ars Technica forums or something like back of the day. And it just never, never really took it. It sort of wasn't, wasn't my thing. And And so it's a really interesting challenge. I think the first thing I would say, though, and this is just, you know, Ben on his porch,

lecturing to people is you can't underestimate the importance of real life community and real life connections. And so, you know, this, you know, Daniel's in a smaller market, like, well, here's another thing. Here's the way to put it. I think a mistake people make is they try to put everything into one pot. I can't remember. I'm sure I've relayed this to some podcast sometimes. whatever pieces of advice I've gotten, I tend to, you know, tell the story five million times, but I'll tell it again.

When I was going to Taiwan, I got a piece of advice from my manager. And he's like, you know, Ben, I'm worried about you going back to Taiwan that, you know, you're not going to find, like, you're not going to have the community that sort of you need around you. And he's like, you're going to have to, you have to like piece it, piece it together. And that was really insightful where I have a community. And I wrote about this in social networking 2.0 where I think I was actually able to achieve this. And I think this is maybe a leading edge of what will be good for people in the long run.

I have a Bucks fan community in like my Twitter DMs, right? And we're all a bunch of maniacs. And we talk about that. I have a community with a bunch of old, you know, bloggers and podcasters that's been together like 10 years. And we mostly got together because we all kind of do similar things or whatever. And, you know, I can't remember the kind. Actually, I think it got together because there was a weird stocking case around where that.

We were trying to like like figure out what to do about it. Stocking? Like someone was harassing somebody? Yeah, it was it was actually pretty very, very quite dodgy at one point. But that community's been ongoing for like a decade. And then there's what like there's different what like in that I have a community about, you know, I have an real life community here in Taiwan primarily with expats that have been here for a long time. And, you know, that's where I, you know, my cigar smoking community or whatever it might be.

But basically, I don't look to my Taiwan community for tech takes, right? I actually find it very interesting. I love talking to people who are not in tech about tech because I think it's really interesting. You get lots ofishing viewpoints. I have my friends from high school back in Madison that we never talk about tech ever, right? But, you know, we have all this shared context. We talk about bachelor highlights. We post our whordles in there every day, right?

Like there's, and I think the difference is that in the, you know, the physical world, all your community was in one place, right? And if you were someone, I grew up in Wisconsin, I was super interested in tech. There was literally no one around me that cared or was interested in that at all, right? And so I had to leave, right? And you hear this story a lot. What's interesting about the internet, and I think the future of people who do find really good community around them is instead of everything being integrated and you have to get your tech

community and your real life community and your sports community and you have to like luck out and like everyone's in the same town and somehow you figure it out and like that's that's pretty tough right what the internet makes possible is you can have multiple communities and you sit the Venn diagram of sort of all of them and I think one of the stupidest and most misdiscences disguided things that's ever been said was by Mark Zuckerberg, where, and I think he's backed off on this since then, but it was like a decade goes like, no, you need to be your authentic self online, you need to be all yourself. No, that's ridiculous.

We're not our authentic self in any scenario or not our fully integrated itself, right? We could be, I'm authentic in all my groups, but it's a different part of me. It's a different angle. Yeah, right, which I think is totally fine and totally healthy. Like, and it certainly has been fine and healthy for me where, you know, this is where I'm an insane bucks fan. This is where I have like Apple and blogs, whatever. This is where I have my group, I comment about social issues, right? This is my group where we

talk about, we complain about Taiwan COVID restrictions. Like, like there's different places for different parts. And I think the, this looking for one thing to meet all your needs, this is why manager is exactly right about. Like, you need to find, meet your different needs in different places. Now, how do you go about doing that. It's tough, but I would definitely recommend get a real life group, like whatever, maybe it's just around your kids or sports teams or whatever, whatever it might be. There's just something

irreplaceable about being together sort of in person. Number two, if you are fortunate to develop a great group chat, whatever, you got to get together at least once a year, right? There has to be some aspect of sort of connection. And then number three, like trust is definitely super duper important. And, you know, we talked about like, how do you grow a group chat, things on those lines. But I don't know, like, how did we end up? Like, I think, I think for me, NBA Twitter has actually been a huge area. That's how I met Duman, who I've worked with now for years. It's difficult. Honestly, like, I'm biased because I spent nearly 10 years as a sports writer and

have loved sports my entire life. But, like, I use sports to relate to so many people that I have really meaningful relationships with that are still at their core founded on like our love of basketball. And like when things break down, we end up bullshitting about the NBA. And then it's sort of like, oh, wow, okay, it's great to hang out. And sports is just a really easy hack if you happen to be an older guy. So I don't know much about other ways to establish community. I did want to include it, though.

Yeah, no, I think sports is a great point. And this gets at the integration point and my rant before the break about letting politics infuse everything. Like, if you require the person you interact with to be completely, quote unquote, right, according to your definition of right in every aspect of life, you're going to be a lonely, miserable person. Right? Like, certainly find your political group where you get together and you complain of. about your political opponents. The same stuff. Yeah.

Find a different group, right? Especially for the in-person stuff, right? I was going to say in-person, it's impossible. There just aren't that many fun people to hang out with who all think the same way. Like in any place in the entire world, it's just hard to like find five or six reliable people that you look forward to seeing who are also on the same page about every political issue or whatever it is that you're demanding conformity from. Right.

When I rant about this, this isn't, my rant is not political. My rant is a very personal concern for people I see who have isolated themselves and are just completely miserable because they're letting things they can't control dictate the stuff that actually makes them content and happy or unhappy, right? Like at the end of the day, you know, there's, there is, I think, a, a, a completely opponent to this where, you know, generally speaking, the stereotype of guys, you know, like, oh, you went to hang out with your friend. Oh, how's he doing with XYC? Oh, I don't know. We just talked about sports the whole time. Like, that's, like, the stereotypes

tend to exist for a reason. And there's an aspect where, you know what, hang out with someone and talking about like some random thing is like that's just. It's still good for you, though. It's so good for you, right? No, it's so good for you. Like, it's, it's hard to articulate. And in this world where everything has to be measured. Like it seems borderline antisocial to like, if my wife was like, all right, so you guys just spent like three hours and all you talked about was the NBA. But that's still like a really healthy, esteemable act and like it leaves me feeling better. Like there's whatever the synapses are firing based on like in person interaction, it's still really positive for my life. Yeah.

No, absolutely. And then you think about the people that are. pressuring you to everyone you associate with has to have the right number of ex-beliefs on every single axes. There's a nice way to circle back to that rant because it was not politically. Like, honestly, I just see, I see this in so many friends. And maybe this again is a part about being old and the age. And I feel so satisfied by virtue of having a wide range.

Like, I know people who believe all sorts of crazy stuff across left to right, right? up and now. And being able to meet people where they are is such a better way to live. And not because it's quote-to-quote good or bad for society because it's good or bad, it's good for you. It's good to connect. It's good to have people that you care about. And just by virtue of because they're a person. And you're not expecting anything of them beyond companionship and community. Right.

It's a pro-humanity take at the end of all of it. it. And again, yeah, class half full episode here. And to answer Daniel more specifically. Yeah, thank you. I was going to say, I've actually answered this question. I felt bad because like we've been emphasizing community and this is like the toughest nut to crack.

I would just say if you make it a priority to establish an in-person community, it may take six months. It may take 12 months. But just put yourself out there in some situations with people who could be. potentially be like part of that in-person community. And I think that's probably the best approach for something like this. Yeah, I mean, just speaking for myself personally, I had online communities on an ongoing basis for a long time.

It was transformational for me personally to have an in-person community. Like that made more of a difference than almost sort of anything else because there is something really real intangible there. And find like what's, you know, you're, you work in tech live in a small market. Maybe there's some sort of like like some sort of high. obvious tech club or whatever it might be or just, I don't know. I mean, like obviously a lot of this tends to be, you know, as I say, drinks at a bar. I'm not saying like there should be ways to interact outside of that.

Sports is obviously a thing. Maybe it's your kid sports. But if you make it a priority as if it's like an objective at your job and just take it seriously and like once a month go out and try to meet people in one form or another, eventually you will find the right sort of mix. Right. And this is, it's definitely something that compounds over time, right? Because once you have one or two trusted people, you will get introduced to one or two other trusted people. And then your network sort of expands.

It's like a startup in some respects. It's really hard to go from zero to one. But once you get going, it becomes much easier. There you go. Well, it's great to see you back in your home studio, Ben. My favorite Ben Thompson fact, thus far, who knows what I'll learn in the few. future is your soda stream addiction and your, your setup right there near your office.

That's right. I have my dedicated soda stream refrigerator? My favorite part about Ben generally is there's just no half measures in like any aspect of his life. So he decides he likes soda stream and gets a soda stream specific fridge that is stocked at all times with, is it six soda streams or is it 12? No, so this refrigerator fits six bottles on the bottom that I have an extra several bottles on the side. So as you take one out, you always have to put one back in.

And then on the top, there's a couple of slots so I can have some sort of to-go bottles of like bottle water. If I'm running out the door, I can grab them. You don't want to take your sort of stream with you. Also, don't do any of this flavor stuff. You didn't have to clean the bottle. Just keep it simple. Yeah, no, just water. Just water.

That's very important. There you go. Sage advice. from Ben Thompson. People always want to know how you work. Now they know it's all about the Stodestring. This is a long-running sort of gag that I think me and John Gruber have joked about where the way the way a blogger tells time is by what liquid they're drinking. So if it's coffee, it must be boarding. If it's sparkling water, it must be afternoon. If it's whiskey, it's at its nighttime. I'm grateful to sparkling water. It got me off of soda after like a 30-year addiction. So it's a It's the most normie, like, basic thing I do is drink seltzer all day.

Yeah, but I'm right there with you. Don't buy all those cans. I'm telling you, you make your own. Actually, we had, if you ever get a carbonated water faucet where it's actually like you have a big tanker. Wow. Life changing. We've been debating about getting that installed here for ages. But yeah.

Okay. Well, that's the one you'll know that Sharp Tech has truly made it. We'll both have carbonated water faucets. There's a really bad intersection, though, between the sparkling water addiction and the getting old part. Just don't want to get into the bathroom details, but it just occurs a little too frequently. There you go. All right. Well, on that note, we are going to come back later in the week.

We had a bunch of good mailbag questions that we weren't able to hit on this episode. Again, if you've got follow-ups to the Amazon conversation, we would love to hear from you. And I look forward to keeping it rolling. A fun bonus holiday episode here, Ben. Yes, email at sharptech.fm. Don't forget about SharpChina. You and Bill actually got back in the saddle a week early.

You could ask questions there. Email at sharp china.fm. And yeah, I'll look forward to talk to you later this week. All right.