Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - What’s the Deal with Micropayments?, Costs and Benefits and Twitter Blue, More Thoughts on Microsoft-Activision

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Twitter's latest idea spurs a discussion of the micropayment model, an email about Twitter Blue and Twitter subscription's for independent creators, and follow-up Microsoft thoughts on the spirit underlying antitrust laws, the EU regulatory environment, and why Microsoft can't simply partner with Activision in the cloud gaming space.

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, Andrew. It's great that all sports are finished. There's nothing to watch on TV, so I have nothing better to do than podcast. That's the spirit, you know. This isn't a sports podcast.

Sports have ceased to exist. And we'll just keep it rolling on the technology front. we've got some follow-ups to last week's Microsoft conversation, a few other fun emails. There were some requests to comment on the bucks. We will not be doing that. That's my gift to you, Ben, on this Monday here. And we'll start, though, with a topic that we've gotten emails about every few weeks since we started podcasting together. Micropayments.

Every few weeks, people will suggest micro payments as a social thing. solution for news organizations or substack or Twitter. And lo and behold, Elon Musk over the weekend said, rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click. This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price when they want to read an occasional article. should be a major win-win for both media orgs and the public. So I was going to talk about micropamins with you last week.

I had it on a rundown. And the reason I did is because a couple different times over the last year or two, I've heard you say that micropayments don't work very well on the internet. So I feel like Elon, it's serendipitous that Twitter's rolling this out here because I was curious anyways, why don't they work very well on the internet? And for anyone who's completely uninitiated, what do we mean when we say micro payments? So micro payments is the idea, I mean, use your checkery as an example, where to read, you know, 75% of chesternery content, you need to have a subscription. And theoretically, it's like, oh, I really want to read that particular update that Ben wrote, but I don't want to pay for a subscription.

So why can't I just pay for a single article? Mm-hmm. And I think I kind of just explained the problem. There's a tweet here, John Lagoon said, everyone who has never tried to make living as a writer thinks micropayments are a good idea. I was going to say, it feels very intuitive to regular people who are completely uninitiated.

And so I think that's why it continues to pop up in our inbox every couple of weeks. So there are three major problems when it comes to micropayments, the idea that you're going to pay on sort of a per article basis. So number one is the lack of a payment layer. Like what do you get? So every single article you're going to pull out a credit card and enter your credit card information and then sort of make make a purchase. And moreover, that credit card has a $29 to 30 cent per charge fee plus, you know,

3% of the charge. So you're going to need to charge, you know, that if it's on a phone, Apple's going to take their 30%. So there's all sorts of like problems just from a sort of technical perspective. I mean, there has been some success in micro payments, well, it's not really micro payments. It's more micro tipping in the Chinese ecosystem. But a big part of that is on WeChat in particular, a big part of that is we chat wallet is sort of attached to, to WeChat. And so you can do a transaction without

any fees that all it literally is just the tap of a button. And also WeChat is just sort of like, you know, by brute force is sort of like, they have this whole mini app sort of concept that technically really shouldn't be allowed under the app store and all this sort of stuff, but they're sort of too big to fail as far as Apple is concerned. And, you know, and so they have lots of, lots of wiggle room as far as implemented sort of thing than other folks. But even then, like I said, it's mostly really a sort of a micro tip sort of thing, where you can just tip an author, you liked an article or whatever it might be.

And we have seen some success with that. There's stuff like that on Twitch in particular. And even in those cases, the way it only ever works is you sell like a bunch of of tokens. And so you basically have your own currency. And this gets around some of the transaction problems, which is you get sort of, you know, a bunch of tokens in place. And then you can sort of, you know, distribute those tokens to the creators you like as, as you wish or whatever might be. So this whole, there's an infrastructure layer that is a real challenge here. And it's worth noting is an area where Twitter doing it is inherently more interesting sort of a publication doing it

on its own. You could imagine a world where Twitter does have credit cards on file, so you don't have to go put your credit card in every single time. You can imagine a world where Twitter is selling tokens, so they have sort of their own currency that, and they can sell a bunch at once that you can then sort of sprinkle around as it were. And so I think just in general, if micro payments were to ever work, it's going to be on sort of the aggregation layer. It's not going to be on the per publication layer. There's just too much sort of friction involved as far as this sort of as far as even just getting anything off the ground. And so again, just getting a credit card in and fees are just an obstacle to this ever

sort of happening in the first place, even before we get to the other issues. So the other issues I'm curious about is it essentially that you're devaluing? Well, okay. Well, I'll get to the other issues then. Because I have a list here. So number two is, so number one is just the infrastructure stuff. Number two is I think this is one of those things where, uh, customers don't understand themselves very well.

And what I mean is the reality is if you're in a situation where, say, you have some tokens or there's an article you want to get, you're faced with this sort of decision making about purchase constantly. It's like, do I want to spend my money there? Do I want to do it there? Oh, do I spend my money on that article? That wasn't worth it. I felt disappointed. Or like, and it's just sort of a, I think it's a state of existence that is not actually. particularly pleasurable to be in.

It's much easier to think about that article I wanted to read, I didn't because it required a subscription versus this world where actually every single article you're forced to make a decision. Do I want to pay for it or not? Do I want to pay for it or not? Do I want to pay for it or not? And so I think that this is, I think this is probably the least important sort of issue here.

But I do think there is an aspect from the consumer side of things where this sort of existence, it's kind of like, you know, if you're playing a mobile game, you're constantly having to, like, decide, you know, do how to pay for this, to do XYZ, without the sort of addictive component where you're getting ongoing entertainment. And it's all anticipatory, right? It's like, do I want to click through this? Do I want to go for it? And it's like, it's just this constant state of decision anxiety about reading the news,

right? It's just like, I just. So to boil it down, it sounds better in theory than it is in practice if you're a news consumer to be confronted with all of these different news organizations hitting you up for 99 cents. read an article. Right. Like it's sort of a dystopian version of like serping the web.

Yes. Yes. No, exactly. And number three is it's a terrible idea for publishers. Like that's the biggest problem here. And this sort of gets that tweet I mentioned earlier, which no one actually thinks about this from the writer slash publisher perspective. And it's very, very simple.

The lifetime value of a subscriber to Shetri to me is worth hundreds of dollars, right? I have very well churn rates. Once people convert, of course, it's a barrier to get people to convert because it's a commitment. But once they convert, they stay subscribers for a long time. And so you think about it, there's a thousand people considering reading an update. Only like one of them needs to convert to make that completely worthwhile to completely outweigh the value you're going to get from sort of everyone else, especially what you consider

taking all the fees out and that sort of stuff. Now, there are some examples like I had John Osterer, you know, on a few months. to go on, Chautregory for an interview. He does sell individual versions of the articles. And what he's identified is this sort of opportunity where he has a very, very strict paywall, for one. It's not in emails. You have to always click through.

And it's like, it's pretty hardcore. And, you know, it's just, it's much, strategically is a relatively loose paywall, all things considered. But he writes for industry, you know, sort of the, the airline industry, not just airlines, but airplanes and the whole sort of just anything airplane related or a helicopter He writes the air current and it's a very specialized niche that he's sort of carved out for himself. Right. So the opportunity he's identified is people in like, you know, we'll be reading it for their work and they want to pass it along to their to their management or to their executives.

And so that he will offer a PDF of the article, but that costs like $100 or something. I don't know. I don't know exactly what the prices. But it's super high. it's basically like here you'll have a nicely presented in a format that executives can get their email and read, right? Instead of trying to copy and paste or, you know, some garbage from, oh, here's the thing I found on the internet, right? And it's actually like that is micropayments, but number one, it's not what people are thinking about. And number two, it's really expensive and it aligns with his business model.

People have this vision. I'm just going to pay 10 cents to sort of get through. It's the precise opposite what you're laying out there because I think when people hear micro payments and start fantasize, about a version of the internet where everybody's powered by micro payments, you're talking about sort of lowering the bar to get people in the door and get them familiar with the work and everything. And Ostrar, it sounds like is going the opposite direction where it's like, yep, this is a very premium service so you can either subscribe wholesale or I will give you a very premium version of micropayments.

Right. That premium version is for the premium subscribers to share it basically with their executive. Yeah. That's basically the point of it. I think it makes a ton of sense, actually. The other thing, just sort of broadly speaking, in theory, there is a way you can think about sort of a news article that it's this item. Like, it's like I built a phone and go buy a phone for sale. I built a widget, go buy a widget for sale.

I wrote an article, go by an article. And that's just not really the reality of how it works. You feel like news is the most trenchant example of this, where if you have news and it's breaking news that actually reveals some new bit of information about the. the world, that is worthless the moment that it is published. Because once the, once the information is out there, it's out there, right? And sort of it spreads on Twitter. It doesn't matter if it was sort of an exclusive article on the Wall Street Journal or whatever. It's like, it's going to be aggregated immediately. It's going to be spread on Twitter. It's going to like be all over the place. So then what are you selling actually? What you're actually selling with that article by

large is you are you are selling the process by which that news was uncovered and sort of came to be, right? And, you know, I think there's an aspect of that with trajectory. I'm not breaking news, but once an article is written, sure, maybe there's a little bit more where it's genuinely unique because it's like a specific point of view and hopefully it's written in a well enough and enjoyable way where it is valuable sort of as an artifact in its own right. But by and large, what I'm asking people to subscribe to is the ongoing production of content like that. And you're sort of investing in the process by which you are getting content that you appreciate. And Micropayments is not like that.

Micropayments is treating content like it's a widget and it's just out there and now it's for sale. And I think just in general, whenever you get into a situation where your modization method is distinct from the economic reality of the content, you think about like any sort of content, any sort of media has zero marginal costs, right? You saw this with music. This idea that you're going to try to sell songs was not a long-term sustainable one because there's just an aspect too. And consumers are sort of intuitive. sensitive to this that look, I could just copy it's, I could just copy an MP3. I could just go to Napster. I could just do it. There's going to be ways around it to sort of get, get what you want because there's zero marginal cost. There's no longer sort of a, when that physical object went away.

Right. And so what did we do in music? How was the music industry saved? By switching to a model that embraced the reality of sort of the internet and said, oh yeah, it's free to share music. So we'll just let you have everything if you pay sort of a subscription fee. And that actually is the same thing that you're selling with subscription to a publishing entity. You're not actually, because it's fruitless to try to sell the zero marginal cost good. I'm not selling articles. I am selling my ongoing work and production of doing these articles. And this is a bit also why I think for the newsletter business, for what I do, there is a lot more value than people think when it comes to consistency and quantity, to be totally honest.

Everyone will say, like, I'll take a day off. for like, oh, you should take more days off or I just, look, all I want is quality. I don't care about quantity. I don't think that's actually true. People, this is one of those things where people don't really know it if it weren't there. But like if I just publish an article every other day or one couple this week, a few more the next week, XYZ, it wasn't sort of predictable. Then you started getting to like, I had a way, like, what am I paid for?

Yeah, there's a bit where just like, look, it's going to show up every single day. there's a very tangible expression of what I'm selling, which is not individual articles. It's the ongoing analysis, ongoing discussion, ongoing sort of shaping and articulation of this model I have of the world. And I think that's important, even if it's less articulated. And microtransactions is totally orthogonal to that. Right. And if you were trying to support that vision for the business by micropayments, you would need like millions and millions and millions. of micro payments.

Right. And basically, so you, what problem you have, like go to a company like Peloton, right? One of the reasons why Peloton got absolutely murdered by the pandemic much more than, say, Zoom, which you talked about last week, I mean, Zoom's market values, obviously much lower. But at the end of the day, like it's not like they got stuck with a bunch of inventory, right? When you're doing with physical goods, you have inventory. And inventory can really kill you because you have all this working capital, you have all this money that went into it.

And then it's just sitting there. And that money is basically. basically dead money that is not doing anything. You have to end up discounting to get rid of it. And then you're kind of ruining your brand value because the discounts. And like there's, there's lots of challenges that come with physical inventory. Now, content companies are not doing a physical inventory, but there is an aspect of the work that goes into producing an article is sort of like your sunk cost. That is sort of like your inventory in a certain respect.

And it's high. The costs of good journalism are really, really high. Right. And so this idea that you're going to invest hugely up front to create this article and hope and pray that you get it on the back end. And it's worse because that article in the back end, yeah, like the, it's not like, at least with physical goods, you can sell them over time. Like it's, it sucks that your capital is sort of locked up in the warehouse, but you can at least sell it over time, right? In an article, if it doesn't break through in day one, well, it's worthless. The value's gone to nothing. And so then what you're asking, you're imparting this massive amount of risk, shifting it onto the production of content for an extremely uncertain outcome.

And then you have to do it day after day after day after day and just hope you get paid for it. Right. Now, there is an aspect of this as far as being ad supported for sure, because the more sort of view something gets. But this is why the solution for high quality is and always has been. and is the reason I started as description a decade ago, it's the only business model that makes sense. It's the only one that sort of aligns with what's best for the publisher, what's sustainable in the long run.

And again, to your point, people look around and say, yeah, this sucks all these descriptions have to pay for, and now substack comes along and everyone has a paywall. And yeah, it is annoying, not denying that. I think it's a big business opportunity that subsistock has squandered by not figuring out a way to get a bundle because that's the answer, right? the answer to to there being too many subscriptions is to bundle them all together into one. But from a publisher perspective, this microresections don't sort of make sense at all.

Would you say that's the biggest hurdle for Twitter here? Because the concept of a centralized platform trying to make this work where they're the ones who do all the work on the credit card side and it's worth it because they're working with, you know, 40 different publications to get this off the ground. Like in theory, I understand why that makes more sense than, you know, the Wall Street Journal trying to make it work on their own with micropayments. It's like the bundling thing, right? It definitely has a better shot of success to be a third layer that can be across multiple publications because you need credit cards on file. You need ideally probably some sort of token systems that you can abstract away the fees and the cost and you can do one transaction that will, you know, support multiple micropayments. sort of things. And so it definitely, Twitter has a better shot of doing it than any publication on their own because of those dynamics. So that all is true. That said, you know, well, the other,

the other point worth noting is people that, at least in theory, people are discovering links. They would never have subscribed to that publication otherwise. It would be more interesting to quick in. And also it would be really annoying to, you know, say, I'm not going to get a description. I'm just going to go to Twitter every single day and find the link, you know, to pay a microdiscence for what I want to do. So it's sort of divorced enough. Whereas, you know, to be, if you went to Chistechery, I have a, I can offer you and you want to click on something.

I can throw up a paywall that says, you know, you have to subscribe. It's not as good if I throw up a payroll says you have to subscribe or you can pay a micropayment. I've now introduced an additional hurdle in the customer's decision making process at the exact point where I only want there to be one option and they're the most inspired to make the choice that I want them to make, right? That's the exact time you don't want them to be thinking and having to make a decision. You want them to subscribe.

Particularly because the lifetime value, as you said, of a subscriber is just vastly higher. One person gets a description is worth like thousands of micro payments, right? And that's true for the New York Times. It's true for the Wall Street Journal. It's true for literally everybody who would in theory be participating in this. So I'm curious to see how far it gets, frankly. Right. So the Twitter bit where you could share it and it's a different, the customer's in a different

frame of mind, they might not have ever heard of you. You know, especially if you're a well-known sort of publication and people have already made their decision whether a subscriber or not, maybe you can reach sort of people and get incremental revenue. But you do have to worry about cannibalizing revenue. And, yeah, again, it makes, it does. does make more sense on the Twitter layer than basically almost anywhere else. But if this doesn't work, then it should be the final nail in the coffin, but it won't be.

I've made this argument about micro payments multiple times. And we still get asked about it because, you know, again, I think people just, they only think about it from their own personal frame of reference and are annoyed by paywalls, which again, I understand. Yeah. But it just makes absolutely no sense for an individual publication. Okay. so one more Twitter question. Kirk says, as a hobbyist content creator, parentheses, written work, videos, and podcasts, the early days of Twitter were great for sharing things and growing an audience. Super follows was a bit of a mess, but Twitter subscription seems actually useful, question mark.

It's a shame that so much of being on Twitter is a political act unto itself. Is there any light at the end of the Elon tunnel, or am I and others like me playing our instruments on the deck of the Titanic. I enjoyed this question because I'm grappling with the same issue and whether to subscribe to like Twitter Blue or whatever. Both sides of the Blue Check Wars were good arguments for touching grass. I'm glad we all survived that. But in general, it does make a lot of sense for independent creators to subscribe to Twitter

Blue and invest in the platform a little bit just as a promotional expense. and, you know, reading Kirk's email sort of underscored that for me. Like, if I'm advising someone else, I'd say, yeah, definitely pay that $8 a month as a promotional cost if you're an independent creator. But what do you think about all of this? Well, first off, I think this whole bit where the response to someone, if they have a blue check is not to engage their argument, it's to mock they have a blue check is one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen on the internet. It's so lame. Like this idea that because someone, I think there is genuine value being provided by the Twitter subscription.

Like the bookmark folders is super useful. Like the account I used to actually read Twitter, it's very beneficial to like as you come across stuff and be able to sort stuff. There's the whole like a nuzzle, not nuzzle sort of thing where you can see articles that other people are following. Like there's, and writing along tweets is sometimes useful. you're sort of summarizing a sort of thing. Or posting log videos.

Again, if you're a creator, it's sort of a no-brainer when you really break it down. And this I think someone subscribing to it is perfectly fine. And this idea that we're going to make a purchase decision about value into something political is kind of a stark example of everything that's absolutely irritating and annoying about sort of modern society these days. Why does everything have to be political? It's really, really annoying. And it's honestly, I find myself just embarrassed for the people that are doing this mockery. It's such this sort of like high school sort of mentality where we're just going to, you know, pick on this one thing and be bullies about it because, you know, we don't like this other person. It's, I don't know.

It's just like it. I just find it ridiculous. It's, I don't know. There was a 10 day stretch. where there were passionate arguments about Blue Checks every time I logged on Twitter. And I was depressed by both sides of the argument because I just didn't think that there needed to be that much passion about this particular issue, either pro or against. But I'm with you. The idea that it's stigmatizing or some sort of political statement for someone like Kirk to subscribe to Twitter Blue and lean into it is completely absurd. And the only argument that I have against subscribing to Twitter Blue is that I wonder whether it would be better for my work long term if I just de-emphasize Twitter altogether.

And I think creatively, it's just probably more useful to take a step back. And subscribing and paying on a monthly basis is probably a step in the wrong direction on that journey. But who knows? I'll see where I land. Well, the other thing I will say, though, on the flip side is the new Twitter Blue. era is really freaking annoying as a user. Like I do like this, you know, this I, I see so many stupid, this is how to use chat GPT threads by like, you know, because the AI is this new era to like become an influencer, right?

And to be like, build your sort of following. And I swear, and why do I see them in my, in my Twitter thread? Because as Elon promised, the blue checks are getting promoted. And the way it's set up is threads are beneficial. and it makes me, it is absolutely making me use Twitter less because I just find it so annoying. Like ads are one thing. But then you have this content that's not an ad, but and then it seems nominally in my interest face, it's about.

Charlottons. Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely, it's like, for me, this has been by far the biggest decrease in Twitter functionality and usefulness since Elon took over. It sucks. And, and, and so. Yeah, I mean, there's like everyone, everyone sucks.

That's my takeaway in this whole, this whole blue check debacle. Elon is making the product worse. And people that are acting like petty high schoolers are really annoying. And like, I'm just annoyed by everyone. Just a general state of annoyance, which is kind of the default Twitter state, to be fair. But it's definitely gotten worse for me. Listen, man, we're going to be disheartedly. all of this at the next meeting of the touchgrass movement.

I think it's been a very compelling example of why it's good. No, no, we don't talk about it. Get outside. No, your ideal touchgrass experience does not discuss Twitter at all. Don't introduce any of this shit. That's right. Very fair. Well, my mom texted me this weekend.

The place to discuss Twitter is on Twitter and nowhere else. What about blue sky? What about blue sky? My mom is lobbying for me to find myself an invite to blue sky because that's supposedly the future going forward. Yeah, good luck with that. I think I'm all set. Look, I don't trust anybody who's been on Twitter for 10 years and then wants to recreate

that platform experience anywhere else. Yeah. I mean, I think just in general, a product is not usually replaced by like a one-for-one replacement. Like, no, Twitter's uses can and will disperse over time. And now on the flip side, I do think to. Kirk's point, I think the Twitter subscription thing is a good idea. It was very poorly implemented. I actually think Elon is doing a better job of implementing it. This idea where if you have a

following and a base on Twitter and you don't want to go through the trouble of building up, maybe your work doesn't make sense for a substack or going somewhere else off platform, that you can have sort of a way to communicate with your followers and give them exclusive sort of content. Like I think there's a lot of these folks that do like this super in-depth like basketball. I think basketball is a good example where they do these play breakdowns they do these game breakdowns that that would be something really compelling you could actually have a great sort of funnel where you start a breakdown for free and then the rest is for your Twitter followers and it's like oh I'm I'm actually interested to understand like playing this all out like analyzing xyz and by the way just viewing that in

Twitter is often a better experience than going to a website anyway where half the time the players don't work correctly like there's just like there's just you know and you have a native a native video player makes a big difference. And I think that like for stuff like that, it makes it makes a bunch of sense. And again, this goes back to the broader Twitter example where everyone talks about Twitter was this idyllic well-run place before. And it was a trash site with trash management. That's why you can even buy it. And so like, like it's like this is a good example where what they're doing with subscriptions is what Twitter should have done all along. And there is this default response where if Twitter does it under Elon's leadership, it is bad.

And that's not the case. There was a lot of low-hanging fruits. And honestly, the micropayments thing, I don't think it's going to work. I have no objection to him trying. Like I said, if it's ever going to work, it's going to work on that sort of third way or so sure, go for it. Why not? Yeah. Well, I'm with you on the idea.

And I am also with you on the unlikely scenario where that actually succeeds. I can't really envision it taking off, but that's more because of the publishing side. But this is the whole Twitter problem. Like, I'm like, why am I yelling? Why am I upset?

It's like everything about Twitter is just makes it's annoying and irritating. And it's not just Twitter. It's a lot of people on Twitter. And I think there is a certain amount of self-reflection, which is if you think this guy is so bad, why are you spending so much time on his platform obsessed with him? Like, like there's a real sort of. Not calling kettle black here.

Yeah. And it also, it's just so much of what has been exhausting about culture generally over the last five to ten years. Why doesn't it be political? Right? Yeah. Can't we just have a discussion about, about XYZ without having it? Or like you said, whether it's actually good for the product to have your feed populated by all of these people who have basically paid to be there and maybe are full of shit. Yeah.

The GPT threads is a great. control. It's out of control. Like I said, like there's, and it's been like that the entire time since GPT 3.5 launched, Twitter has been full of these different people. Right. But they weren't shut to you. Like, it's just like it's every other tweet. I'm like the like what does? I actually value the algorithmic timeline a lot. I mean, I'm off kilter as far as time zones go. So I'm generally, which is probably good thing in general. Like I'm not experiencing stuff in real time most of the time. And particularly on on my. count where I actually want to like harvest information, I would like to have some sort of algorithm attached to it to elevate what's best because whoever happened to be posting at midnight Pacific time is not particularly that I don't like time time is an algorithm. That's not the algorithm that I want at that particular moment. But after this change, it's out of control.

Like it's like and honestly, maybe it's healthy. It's definitely making me use to it or less because it's just, it's annoying. Yeah. Well, and I agree with you that the successors to Twitter are not going to be products that basically recreate note for note what Twitter was. And I think the future of social media is more interesting than that. Yeah, what Twitter was, let's be totally honest, is Twitter is a place, it's a battleground. It's a place to fight with your enemies and to dunk on them. And so to that extent, maybe Elon is doing a great job, right?

He's giving endless sort of fodder like, yeah, like, oh, let's give everyone an emblem that they can fight about, right? I mean, maybe, maybe he's smart like a fox. I don't know, but it's not, not for me. Well, hopefully he just slowly degrades the product until we all move on and touch grass together. But for now, let's keep it moving. Follow up. Yeah. There is this sort of selection effect.

I think it's worth noting. You have to have alignment. And is the alignment of people who are willing to pay for Twitter align with what provides the best Twitter experience? And this is why, and I actually feel pretty, this middle ground of we're going to be ad supported and also have a subscription product, it's not good. You used to have the wrong sort of incentives in place. Like, people will occasionally tweet, oh, Ewan is really following Ben's advice. No, he's not.

My take was make it all subscription. Like, because then everyone's, again, on the same ground, right? And you, like, you have to go one way or the other because you're otherwise. you're introducing these incentives that are that are not really great and are making the product worse. Distorting the content landscape and what what people have been getting from it from the last like 10 years. Granted, it sucked for like five to seven years now.

So it's already been sort of a wash in nonsense. But I take your point that. Right. But it sucked in a way that only Twitter can suck. That actually is a benefit, which is again, people dunking on each other. people will go it's it's an entertainment product there is there is a real aspect to it and now it's overtly gamified where people can just literally buy their way into your feed which you find alienating and i think it's fair to guess that most people are going to find that alienating over time yep yeah well we'll see i'm still undecided on twitter blue i did you do you see what i mean though where like long term i might just be better off stepping back from twitter altogether from like a workflow standpoint. Well, yeah, I think by and large, Twitter is very bad for creators. I mean, there's certainly, and I say this, maybe it's unfair for me to say this, given that

that trajectory was basically built on Twitter. But it wasn't built on Twitter from me being on Twitter. It was built on Twitter from people who read me sharing my links. And this was before links were super, you know, now links, like any post with, this is, this isn't new to you on. This has been true for, we've talked about this. It's been true for several years where tweets with links are deprioritized by the algorithm. And you can sort of understand it. It's take them off Twitter. They're going somewhere else, XYZ.

Again, I think that Twitter with a different business model, you think about a Twitter that is subscription-based, for example, people leaving is no problem because you're actually very motivated. If people are finding valuable stuff that they go and read, then they feel their subscription is worth more money and they're actually having a good thing. This is where you have this hybrid bit where you're trying to be ad-supported and tack on this other stuff. it's just it's it's it's

obliterating the quality of the user experience it's just it's very very poor um and so again Twitter was great for me but as a writer online you spend a lot of time oh it's writing is so much better now you get feedback from readers isn't that wonderful right

if you make a mistake people come back to you XYZ that's all true but I think there's a really dark side to this as well which is this immediate direct to creator feedback loop is not a particularly healthy way to live. And also not really an accurate reflection of your audience is what I've learned over the years.

The people you hear from on Twitter can steer you in directions that don't actually make a lot of sense relative to most of who's consuming your work. That's absolutely true. And I think that actually is the biggest thing. But I do think there's an even darker bit, which is not that you get hooked on the wrong sort of feedback. But this kind of feedback is very psychologically. challenging, right?

And this idea... It's taxing and it requires energy that could be better spent in a hundred other areas as opposed to just sort of agonizing about getting attacked on Twitter for one reason or another. Right. And just writing in fear and always being concerned

and being worried and it's always sort of this looming sort of bit about what people are going to say. And then you go back to the old world where you had to publish in a book or publish in a newspaper or whatever and yes, people would get mad at you, but there was a, there was a removal of the creative, of the creative process from sort of the feedback process. And again, there were downsides to that for sure. You could be wrong. You could,

you know, do XYZ and not be proudly wrong. Yeah, yeah. No repercussions. Exactly. It was a better time in America. But there's a, but I think this is the reason why so many creators burn out and usually burn out pretty quickly, right? You see it again and again. there's these bright stars that sort of streak across the sky. And so to your point, there's all a long, circuitous way to say that Twitter is like crack cocaine when it comes to this sort of stuff, right?

Like, it's definitely there's a lot. Well, I don't know there's a lot of value to crack cocaine. Are we going to be broke? There's definitely a lot of value to it. The heart, the information collection is still unparalleled, even with the stupid AI threads. There's people that are on Twitter,

talking about stuff that you're just not going to find somewhere else. They're not going to make a substack. They're not going to do a blog, all that sort of thing. The ease of entry does mean there's more good stuff on there. But boy, it is, it's really, it's really dangerous. And you get, it can be dangerous in small ways where you end up writing about stuff. Like, like, these basketball writers that write these big profiles of like the seventh, seventh person on the bench.

And it's like, does that actually break through in a meaningful way or people just want read another profile about Steph Curry, right? But the people on Twitter don't want to read another profile of Steph Curry. They want to read a profile about, you know, listen, I want to read a profile about Kavana Looney after the last two weeks. Well, that was justified. Wisconsin's own Kvon, Looney, I will note. But, but whereas, you know, like what?

Yeah, you're writing for Twitter, as opposed to writing for readers. Right. And I think like this is an ESPN problem we've talked about, right? Like they, it's too online. And your, your goal, your business opportunity, because of your distribution is to reach the mass, which is the case, it's always been the case,

but they're so sort of stuck on the Twitter thing that you just end up making worse content. And again, in a lot of folks just end up blowing up. It's, I don't know, these thoughts were a little sort of over the place and discombobulated. But, I mean, I feel so much of my life is really engineered around trying to keep myself safe, right? I have someone that, that is between me and my email,

and does that mean I sometimes miss stuff? Yes, but then they surface stuff. And, you know, Twitter is the one that I, that there is a potential direct connection. But then that's why I don't really use my Twitter account anymore. Like it's probably been bad for my business. If I was on Twitter more, I had some threads introducing articles instead of just posting a link. And I was engaged in back and forth, right? Like there is a function where my subscriber account is always sort of been a percentage of my Twitter follow account.

being the gate of people subscribing is knowing who I am. So if I made sure more people knew who I was, I would probably get more subscribers. But that growth I would have gained is counteracted by the lifetime value of not going insane. It's an investment in your professional longevity. That's right. And that has real value and real benefits. So we'll see.

I feel like that little dialogue just validated my, decision to not get Twitter blue. But time will tell. And thank you for the email, Kirk, inspiring this lively back and forth. Speaking of lively back and forths, let's move to the Microsoft Activision follow-up. We got a lot of feedback to last week's show.

We'll run through a few of those emails here. I have a thought that I'd like to get in first. I actually will be your response to it. And I'm actually thinking, I'm not sure I'm quite how to write about it yet. I'm maybe I'll read about today, but I do find our debate really interesting. And I actually kind of felt bad that I was a little hard on you. But it's funny because once we're debating, then we're getting into the weeds, right?

And once you're in the weeds, it seems like, of course, like I feel like my argument is, is obvious, right? If you, if you follow through what we actually mean by antitrust and competition and market definition, like this idea that that gaming is just, cloud gaming is so it's absurd on its face. That's not the way it works, right? Like, of course you're, especially if it's the exact same game, are you to play the idea that call of duty played with an Xbox game pass subscription is a different market

than call of duty played on a PlayStation is ridiculous. It's absurd, right? And, but yet, I was trying to grant you this point. I think it did, I'm not sure how sincere it came across on the podcast, but I meant it very sincerely. It did. About 40 minutes into the podcast.

podcast, a couple of days of fatigue caught up with me and I went completely brain to I was pretty embarrassed. I think you made it to like a 55 mark. We did have to do a few takes on the conclusion. I was just like, holy shit. No, you know what? I give you all the excuses. Just like people ought to give Janus, they should remember he basically broke his back and was injured. And it used this fighting through it as as somehow 2021 was the exception and this series was the norm is so unfair, just like it'd be unfair to say that you're sleep deprived sort of argument. But no, I thought you were fine. I thought your arguments were good.

But you were sincere, though, with your olive branch. I think you called it a fig leaf initially. And then it became an olive branch. By olive leaf. Yeah. And talking about the spirit is where you want to go, right? That's right. Like Microsoft is a massive company.

Activision is a huge game publisher. It doesn't seem right that this transaction should go down. and just because I can't find the right reason for it doesn't mean that it's it's right, right? And I was actually talking to Gruber on dithering and I kind of had this idea. And I'm actually curious your take on it. I think there's an analogy here to the debates around censorship on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever it might be, where this idea that, oh, they're violating the First Amendment. It's like, well, no, actually, the First Amendment is what gives private companies the right to decide what is on their platform. X, Y, Z, right?

And it's one of those things where as soon as you get in the debate and get in the weeds, one side of the argument is incontrovertible and is obvious, which is their private companies, they can do what they want. Section 230 is a good thing that, like, would be overrun with spam and trolls. Like, all these things is the way it ought to be. And for you to say it's violation of the First Amendment is not just incorrect. It's completely opposite to sort of the reality, right? Dysingenuous.

In this case, that is the people making that argument. is me making the argument about this antitrust thing, which when you get into like talking about market definition, the outcome is super clear and obvious and anyone argues me as an imbecile, right? But there is a bit where just like, you know, there's something off here about Microsoft being buying Activision, right? I think there's a similar thing here.

We've talked about some contexts of COVID and how so many facts that were censored ended up being correct, which is there's something off here, right? Like this idea that a few private executives are making decisions about what facts are allowed about a sort of unknown new sort of virus that's going around and to the audacity to the authority. And is it technically legally evils to the First Amendment? No, it's the exact opposite. It's actually an articulation of the First Amendment. It's an example of what the First Amendment enables.

But there's something about it that is off, that feels off. And I'm not quite sure what the implications are here. Again, obviously there's lots of bad stuff. I'm not, I'm not, don't pull a Monta, Monta Bailey out here and like pull out the most You're not terrible comments that would be said. Right, exactly. I'm not going to, like, but that's why the COVID one is so interesting, right?

You were censored and kicked off of Twitter for saying the vaccines do not stop transmission. Not only did that turn out to not be true. It actually, if you go back and read Pfizer's submission, that was known all along. Right. And so we people were actually getting kicked off of Twitter for not just saying things that ended up being true that were actually true at anyone gone back and read, right, right, sort of the fundamental stuff. Or maybe it was it was just never tested or whatever it might be, right? So, so again, that's why the COVID example I think is so compelling because this was a meaningful thing that meaningfully affected people's lives in it that is still affecting people's lives. And what we ended up in a situation where people were being censored for stuff that was true, right? And again, I'm not defending the most extremist here. So don't put that on me. I'm just trying to say that there is a bit here where this feels wrong.

This feels like the whole point of the First Amendment is supposed to find the truth to come back and say, well, actually, according to the First Amendment, you know, this is their First Amendment rights, blah, blah, blah. It's like you're technically right, but you're missing the point. And I feel like it's the same thing with this Microsoft Activision thing. I think it's a great analogy. The spirit of the First Amendment is. is a collective concern on the part of lawmakers at the time that free and open discourse would be stifled by the government.

And the only entity capable of stifling discourse at that time was the government, right? And this is why the analogy actually goes further, where the issue today is we do have dominant platforms that do have a much more meaningful ability to sort of control and restrict speech than was ever thought possible at the time when the First Amendment was written, just as in this case, this idea that companies could get this large when antitrust laws were written in the late 1800s. They were written because people were concerned. And there was an assumption that companies could get so big that it was going to be problematic

from a political standpoint, problematic in individual markets, where they just had so much power that they could dictate terms to everyone. And I think that still prevails today. And to the extent things are changing, I would say, you know, the politics around this, it's always been pretty political. Like, it was political in the 80s when the interpretation of the laws that we had started to change. It was political in the 90s with Bill Clinton and then the Obama DOJ. And then even if you go back to like trust busting, I'm sure the Carnegie's and the Mellons were saying, God, this is so political. Like, it's always been sort of a pendulum that swings back and forth.

And there has always been a concern, at least in America. I mean, Microsoft Activision is a UK situation. So I know less about that history. But there's always been a concern that companies get too big and end up harming the collective more than, you know, harming, harming like the wider population. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. And it's hard.

And the key thing is to your point, it's always been political. I think the mistake, and I again, I'm sort of repeating myself, though, is that the current sort of people who are against big business, which basically means big tech these days. And I do think from a tech perspective, it's worth noting, look, people don't hate you because it's tech. They hate you because you're big, right? Like so we understand the hatred sort of correctly. It honestly is important because a lot of people in tech think that tech is being vilified here when it's really just the biggest companies on the planet that are suddenly in the crosshairs. But the issue that I think that the anti-big movement has sort of made is believing the problems. They don't understand tech.

That's a fundamental issue. So they blame Reagan. They blame the changing antitrust laws without understanding. It doesn't matter. You could have, that's why the current FTC is just going to keep losing in court. The problem is the laws were made for a different era where the scarce good was distribution. that is no longer the scarce good. The scarce good is sort of user attention and user time.

And so not only do the old laws, you end up, it's like the First Amendment thing. Like the way the First Amendment, the law actually works is it actually enables censorship. I'm not, I'm saying, give me grace here. But the point being is it lets big companies sort of decide what sort of said on their platforms or not. Like, that's how it's actually interpreted. And I think there's a similar thing where you have these laws. and the way they're just the reality because they're kind of engineer for the exact opposite scenario, they end up just making, you know, dominant companies more, like in this case,

the case of gaming, the actual application of traditional antitrust laws is going to be in Trent Sony, the dominant player, right? Like, that's sort of what is going going to happen. But I go back to the, the KD analogy and salary caps. The way I view this and maybe people can tell me I'm full of shit here, but the way I view it is, that it's not necessarily anti-big business to say that, you know, the NBA has a salary cap for a reason because their assumption is that protecting competitive balance or at least the illusion of competitive balance makes for a better product that makes all 30 teams more valuable in the long run and makes the players more money in the long run.

So it's, you know, reasonable to have some regulation in terms of the way teams can grow and who they can sign, who they can draft and everything else. And if you were sitting there lobbying for a free market and saying the warriors should be able to sign whoever they want if they're willing to pay the most money. As an American, an American sports fan, I'm like, that sounds fucking terrible. As an American, you're saying as a socialist? This is the whole irony of U.S. sports being socialist. Exactly.

If you go to the UK, very different. Protecting the value of the 30. Yeah, because we're basically a cabal or what's the word I'm looking for? I know. There are some socialist elements in the way we operate pro sports in this country. But I just feel like it requires careful calibration to make some of this stuff work. And that's not a, I promise it's not a socialist stance. I don't know what that is. Well, like, why not just be able to buy a company that's for sale?

I mean, the, but I think the challenge there is to your point, like what were the actual sort of rules in place? And an artificial, a sports league is an artificial construct so you can make up new rules if you want to, right? I mean, we both watch F1 and make new rules just on the drop of a hat every single week, it seems, right? In this case, we're dealing with sort of the rule of law. And this is sort of where the rub comes in, both in terms of the First Amendment thing and in this case, which is, look, according to any rational interpretation of these laws, this behavior is not just fine. It's sort of what we should expect and want. And that the answer again is not to say, in my estimation, is not to say, well, we should stop it anyway because it's bad. It's like, no, this needs to be a spur to actually go back to ground zero and make new laws.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, from a business and strategy standpoint, the takeaway from all of the Microsoft Activision stuff over the last year or so is that, you know, value neutral, agree or disagree all. big tech mergers and acquisitions are going to face an uphill battle securing approval, particularly if you have to do it across multiple continents. And so whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is almost immaterial if you're running a company like Microsoft or a company like Facebook and meta going forward. The UK bit is very interesting. A friend reached out is like he thinks the UK and their regulatory group is kind of the most interesting group in the world right now because the UK is large enough to matter to the bottom line, but it's not that large where you're going to get sort of like the regulatory capture

or that you might get in sort of other places, right? I don't know if that's the case, but it is an interesting sort of theory. But yeah, this worldwide aspect is, again, and it's sort of counter to the nature of tech. I mean, we got another question here. I'll just jump ahead. People are like, you just throw off that Europe is down any big tech companies.

it's like, well, the market for tech is the whole world. And so if you do have a meaningful regulatory advantage, if you do have a meaningful risk-taking advantage, if you do have a meaningful labor advantage where you can, you know, hire and fire at will, if you do have like, again, we can have a debate as to whether that's good or bad, but there's no question it's better from a business perspective. If you do have a more free-willing funding environment where there's just, this real willingness to lose money, like, because you're betting on the super high upside, and you're competing in a worldwide market, which tech inherently is, any company in Europe's

going to be out-competed. Like, like, that's the issue. Now, if Europe had a great firewall, like China, there would be large European tech companies because it's a great, you could build tech companies, right? And then you're, you're shielded from competition. But, you know, that's sort of, it's just a reality that on the margins matter. And there is meaningful regulatory differences, funding differences, risk-taking differences, between tech, particularly tech-centered in Silicon Valley and the rest of the world broadly,

and Europe in particular. And that's why we ended up in the situation we're at where Europe's big contribution is regulation. And that's kind of it. To go back to like the landscape we have now and just the basic realities that companies are going to have to grapple with, it comes full circle with the free speech analogy because it's what you said about Spotify. like a year or two back where it's like, look, the reality's surrounding speech and everyone's attitude about free speech

have changed. And companies need to adapt to that change. And that's happening on multiple continents. Yeah, because everyone's been talking about the fracturing of the internet. And it's one of those things where you kind of feel inured to it because everyone's been talking about it for years and years and years. But now it's suddenly this, it's definitely starting to feel very well. And I do think the AI stuff is going to be a real,

tipping point there. And, and I think, you know, to this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, listener from Europe that was pretty shout out to here. Yeah. About about, about my statements. I would just ask curin, looking forward, what would be your expectations in 15 years of the, the, the, the, what role AI is going to play, how strong the companies are going to be in Europe, relative to the U.S. Why is that going to be the case? And it's, if anything, all those relatively minute differences I talked about that over time magnifying the very large ones are becoming even larger now, right? Are we going to have a large AI company in Europe? Seems pretty unlikely, right? And what does that mean to go forward? Maybe we are going to get a European firewall. Maybe that is going to be the answer. I mean,

but yeah, and this is going to, like I said, it's going to screw a tech economics, like, because everything's built with the assumption of serving the whole world. I guess this probably leads to one of the other questions here. But I'm jumping ahead. No, no, no. Look. And as far as regulations concern, I mean, we're running into that issue as TSM tries to get semiconductor production off the ground in the U.S. And as the world becomes more fractured, all the different regulations across continents are going to cause lots of interesting problems for these businesses. Now, so where do you want to jump? Because we also got Aaron who said, why does Microsoft need Activision to create a cloud streaming platform? Why not partner?

Yeah, especially we, I've been ranting a lot this episode. So we have run out of time. I thought we, I wasn't sure. I had enough questions here, but we've barely gotten halfway through. The reason why Microsoft needs Activision is it kind of goes back to the micropayments issue, which is it's not in Activision's interest as a standalone company to make their titles available on a subscription service because it's just going to kill their standalone sales, right? because they would rather everyone on Xbox buy Call of Duty for $70 than get whatever share, again, particularly at the beginning. And this is the whole thing with my bundles are hard, right?

You need the best content to get the bundle off the ground, but it's not in the interest of the best content to make their stuff available at a cheaper price. And so that's a real challenge for how you actually build this sort of stuff. And so in this case, a partnership does not make sense. Microsoft needs to actually be in control because their thinking is not maximizing Activision value. It's maximizing their entire enterprise value, which means not just the Activision games, not just the Xbox platform, not just Xbox GamePass, but Azure and like the whole

sort of thing and building a lifetime value with subscribers. You can imagine the future like a you're all up Microsoft subscription. That includes office, includes, includes, you're going to say. They've executed this strategy. brilliantly in other areas. That's right. They want to build in the consumer market they have in the enterprise market,

which is basically look. And they always talk about their calls. Now they get more and more, they're still adding at a very high rate people to their Microsoft 365 subscription for business, former Office 65, but they also keep bumping them up to the highest level, the E5 levels.

They're increasing their average revenue per user. They want to do that in consumer. They want to have the bundle to end all bundles that is everything you need, that of course, why would you not get it? And it's cost a lot of money, but it's a lot of value. And that's what they're going for.

And so to get Activision and this key IP to be a part of that vision, so people see that value, they need to have control because on an Activision only basis, it doesn't make sense, right? Okay. And so directionally, it doesn't make sense for Activision. For Activision. Acvision is the biggest player, right? Yeah.

It's like, like, you know, if you were, you know, if someone wanted to build a bundle, right? And they want, I would say, I'm going to build a bundle for tech. well, if you want to build a bundle for tech, I mean, if I might sound a little immodest here, your bundle's probably going to be more successful if strategy is in it, right? Because why would you want to have a bunch of other people and then strike her in the side?

Like, well, I'd just rather have the structery one, right? And Sharp China and greatest of all talk. That's right. Make sure you fold in the whole family for bundling here. So you want to get me on board, right? But I have to say, well, I can imagine if your bundle had a million subscribers, sure, that would be worth it to me to make way less per subscriber because the total is going to be

greater, right? This is the whole thing with bundles. You can see a future where this is a win, win, win for everyone. But for now, your bundle, you have no subscribers or you have a few, like, I'm making, I have way more subscribers and I get to keep all the money. So why should I join your bundle, right? That's the, that's the issue. Like, that's why the almost all bundles that have, that's right, almost all bundles that have

succeeded have started with some sort of physical limitation and it sort of grew organically from that. This is why the cable bundle is so interesting. The cable bundle came about because remote towns wanted to get broadcast TV. And so they would build a big tower and they would get a TV and it's like, oh, well, we could use satellite to send the signal there. Oh, well, we could make a TV station that is just on satellite, right? Like we're doing to have TBS as a local station. We're going to send it all over the world, right? Or all over the country. And so the cable bundle, which in the end, was better, even for ESPN, it's better to be everywhere. It rose organically from a physical constraint that, and that's how we sort of ended up where

we are. And once the bundle's going, it's awesome and powerful until they, you know, self-destructed destroyed themselves. But for many, many years, there's a lot of money to be made. Getting a bundle off the ground with existing entities that already have large revenues and keep all the money per subscriber, it's very, very difficult. You have to basically brute force it. You have to spend your way into it.

So if someone wants to do a bundle and say, Ben, I'll guarantee you billions of dollars a year, even though you're losing a bunch because in the long run, we think it'll, it'll work out of business. Number one, I probably won't do it because I think you're going to go out of business because I'm not sure you're going to actually get there, right? But that's what they're going to have to do. They have to pay me a lot of money. That's right. To be a part of that. And they, you know, and so in this case, Microsoft paying $70 billion or whatever it is for Activision is trying to brute force a compelling bundle. Like that's the premium that. that they're paying because they're not going to be able to partner. They're going to end up with Xbox GamePath, which is the companies they're allowed to acquire to date. And sort of all the small people, they're like, oh, yeah, I wouldn't be the bundle.

I want to be the bundle. I'll take all those new customers. But then as a gamer, you're like, well, the best, the top X games that I want are not a part of this. So like,

what's the actual value that I'm getting here? I'll just keep buying games a la carte as, as I'm interested in them. Well, that's a great answer to a question that we got like five, separate times in the last couple of days. So I appreciate that. And speaking of cable self-destruction,

Peacock continues to hemorrhage money according to the latest numbers. Peacock is one of the dumbest things in like my history of writing trajectory. It's unbelievable because it's not just that they were, they never had a chance of being successful. You know, it's not just that they're incurring the cost of building the service and foregoing the benefit of selling their content. It's there also, they were the most. aggressive in putting sports on there.

Like the Olympics being on there and like putting a cautionary tale to every other streamer that's trying to do that. And it's owned by a cable company. That's the whole thing. It's not just they're destroying their local business, the NBC Universal business. They're destroying the whole cable bundle. They're the ones that are selling the cable bundle.

It's unbelievable. It is. It's so dumb. And I was just they, they, well, it was $700 million last quarter. It's going off. Yep. It's incredible. It is,

it's one of the biggest train wrecks I've ever seen. It's, it's crazy. And it's a train wreck where you had a train hurtling towards a curve and you could see the, you could see the train wreck years and years of time, right? Yeah. It's nuts. Absolutely.

Well, it's also just a terrible user experience on Peacock. So I'm not upset about their demise with that one. And got some other notes that will follow up on one. One really good question about antitrust. and innovation and VC funding and everything else. So we will come back to that later in the week. This is definitely a very deep vein.

There are a lot of questions to be raised about how much value is actually being created, you know, these sort of things. And why is it? So I'm not going to confine it to three minutes at the end of this podcast. I'm still mad that you called me a socialist for supporting salary caps in American throw sports. You still have to compete in that context. If you're the Warriors, you may not be allowed to say. I will do.

I do have a statement on Janus and the Bucks. Okay. Here we go. On that point. No, no, no. Just you remind me on that point. The Buc season was a failure. Let's be very clear.

For the record, Janus knows it was a failure. And he was so upset, clearly, just from the whole thing in the game and how it ended. He was just making word salad. And somehow turns into this profound sort of thing. Like the reason it's terrible because he's being co-opted. And it's not, this is not an ethos that Janus lives by. One of the reason that makes him so endearing is how much he cares. Like this idea that Janus does not view the season as a failure is, it's, it's, I feel like for pure bucks.

The idea that Nike is like making some sort of like campaign about it's disgusting. It's not what Janus is. It's not what he stands for. And the reason why people do still love sports is, because it's the place where, like, at the end of the day, you either won or you didn't. Like the results matter. And what, there's always explanatory factors. I think Janus having a broken back is a pretty significant one.

Guess what? Extending to shoot free throws is probably not great with the bad back. He's a bad free throw shooter. He's not a 43% free throw shooter. This idea that this is emblematic of his career is ridiculous. But what is also not emblematic of his career in persona is that quote. And it was like, he was. He felt bad because he was so upset and he likes the reporter.

And so he was like trying to like cover like not be. The whole thing, look, it was a failure. We can accept that. The quote is not a failure. The depth, all the intellectual depth of like an Instagram caption or, you know, those, those graphics where they put up like a famous quote about how failing is actually, you know, the honest is quote. Failing is just a step to victory.

But yes, I'm glad that you seem like you're in good spirits at the end of all of that. because it was such a catastrophe. Yeah, good. That's a good attitude, not just a waking nightmare, which is sort of how I experienced it on your behalf. But, you know, Jimmy Butler, it's a pain in the ass in the playoffs. And probably would have been different if Janus had been healthy. Is that your official stance?

Of course it would have been different if Yonzo had been healthy. Okay. The bucks, I don't know, everyone but Yonis, a little shaky down the stretch. Chris Middleton was great. Do you love to hate on? He was our best player in the series. We got roasted on defense, by the least on offense. Steady hand on the wheel, as always.

Money Middleton. Well, on that note, we are going to come back later in the week. We'll hit some questions that we weren't able to get to today. If you've got other topics, you'd like us to hit email at sharp tech. com. And Ben, I look forward to keeping it rolling. All right. Talk to you soon.

Good luck with Charles. You get Charles on TV and Charles in the home. You got it all. We're watching Charles Barkley every night. Me and Charles sitting there on the couch. It's just living the dream here. And I'm sleeping a little bit better. So I'm going to knock on wood as I say that.

But we'll keep it rolling. Talk to you soon.