Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Why Netflix Bet on Wrestling, The Future of Watching Sports, Recapping a Week at the World Economic Forum in Davos

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Introducing the Sharp Tech YouTube Channel, understanding why Netflix choose the WWE for its first live rights partner in sports, more on the Vision Pro and watching sports in VR, and recapping Ben’s week in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum.

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. How are you? I'm doing well. It's an exciting day here and I'm going to kick us off with a little bit of an announcement after months of you and I making offhand references to a video channel that we would be releasing at some unspecified date in the future. That date is now here. You can go to YouTube. You can search Sharp Tech Podcast. We have a video channel on there. We have a link for you in the show notes. You'll be able to see some of the takes that have led to either you or I blushing and looking ridiculous.

And it's a whole new era here. Do you have any thoughts on what this era might turn into? No thoughts. It's an experiment. Bear with us. I've been doing this for 10 years. I've been podcasting for 10 years. and I've been doing video for like 10 minutes.

So we can book right now. My background needs work. We do have nice cameras. Although I did screw up because we launched where the most recent videos were, were me in Madison where the camera is not nearly as nice. I got messages like, wow, Andrew's camera looks so much better than yours. I'm like, oh, yeah. Step it up.

Come on. That was a mistake on my part. I'm back on the good camera. You're bleeding subscribers? Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah, we're posting clips on YouTube.

Again, mostly an experiment. I'm not becoming a YouTube. I am sticking with the subscription model, which is why there won't be full podcasts on YouTube. You cannot, YouTube does have a subscription product, but it doesn't integrate with sort of anything outside of YouTube. And that's sort of a precondition for us ever posting full episodes there. But there are clips. And everyone should click on the link in your show notes. You should go subscribe to get us more subscribers, get us into the algorithm, see what folks might discover this.

hopefully come on and listen to the podcast. Yeah, and it is going to be a work in progress. I'm just going to double down on what you said. We are so much more familiar with writing and podcasting in traditional audio than we are with video. So it's both exciting and terrifying for me personally, but we're going to have fun experimenting over the next couple of months. So check it out. There will be videos on a weekly basis.

More than that, there's usually a couple of clips basically every episode. We're turning the round pretty quickly. So yeah, go check it out. And we welcome feedback and with the acknowledgement that, yeah, we're still figuring this out. So, yeah. We welcome feedback. Some of the meanest comments I've ever received go back to my Grantland days. Don't read the YouTube comments is just a general rule for the internet.

But email us, tweet at us. I'm not going to be reading the YouTube comments no matter what happens. In any event, here we are. The new era is upon us. On to the next order of business. I will read this news from the Wall Street Journal. Speaking of New Airlines. That's right. Netflix has struck a 10-year deal valued at more than $5 billion to become the new home of hit wrestling show, WWE Raw, its biggest push yet into live streaming. The multi-year deal, effective in January 2025, will give the streaming giant exclusive rights to the show in the United States as well as international.

distribution rights to raw in several countries, including Canada, Latin America, and the UK. Netflix will also gain international rights to other WWE shows, including Smackdown and NXT, and other large events such as WrestleMania, the streamer and the wrestling organization's parent company TKO said Tuesday. The agreement gives Netflix access to about 150 hours of live content annually. So, Ben, I'm not going to say, step on the parallel discussion you had with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters. But while we're cross-promoting at the top of the show here, check that out. A link to the Stratecre Interviews feed is in your show notes. And I really enjoy the talk with Greg Peters. But this particular news, which you did touch on with

Peters, it hits on a few different themes we've discussed recently. So I'm wondering, what makes wrestling more attractive to Netflix than other sports rights have been? as, you know, people have been wondering for years, when is Netflix going to dip its toe in the live sports rights battle? And then also what makes Netflix attractive to the WWE? Well, first we have to establish, I'm going to put you on this spot. Is wrestling a sport? I've never seen.

I don't want to offend anybody because I know some really smart people who take wrestling very seriously. my best friend growing up was brilliant. He's now an accomplished doctor and was like a diehard wrestling fan. I've never been a wrestling guy. I don't personally consider it a sport, but I'm not judging the people who do. I think of this more as sort of a fun side show. And so maybe that hybrid model is part of why it makes more sense for Netflix.

I'm not sure. I actually, that's exactly what I was driving at. I think this is, you know, the word sport is, doing a lot of work here. What is it that makes sports compelling, right? There is an aspect of you don't know what's going to happen. And sure, that you get that with W.E. Like there's, you don't know what's going to happen with sort of the story, but it's also a story, right? Like, like, these are sort of scripted events. And, you know, that aspect is, I don't know, maybe it, maybe it's a distinction that doesn't really matter. But it does strike me as this is a nice sort of

middle ground to move from scripted content that is recorded ahead of time and is available on Netflix to scripted content that you watch live and then is sort of in the library sort of in the long run to what is sort of the end state which is there is a game going on and I don't know what's going to happen and no one knows what's going to happen. You know, I guess you don't know what's going to happen if you're watching, watching Rob, but that is sort of, I think, point number one that is sort of interesting to consider here. You have this entire. universe of wrestling. And it's like a universe, right?

Like everyone is a character and there's storylines. And doesn't it run all year long also as another distinction from regular sports? It runs weekly all year long. It's sort of an ongoing thing. There's an obvious sort of extension to like shoulder content, right?

So we've talked a lot about Drive to Survive in F1. The drive to survive is shoulder content for F1. The actual point is the race, but then you can tell stories around that. And Netflix has had obviously a massive amount of success with driving to survive. They're doing it now for tennis, for golf, for basically any sport that they can imagine. They've announced that one for the NBA.

And so they're definitely interested in shoulder content. And it's interesting because WWE is in some respects a combination of shoulder content and the event. It's like the shoulder content is the event. It sort of like comes out on sort of a regular basis. And so just sort of like structurally speaking, to the extent they're moving in this direction, this kind of just makes sense. It's not that much of an extension from what they're doing. And yet it's a massive change.

They're going to actually be broadcasting stuff live. And it's hard to divorce this happening and the amount they're paying for this from the push into ads. Like, like, it just, if you're a subscription service, the, you know, the ad model certainly is compelling, but it's really compelling in the sense that you can offer a lower price price, product and people's attention are there. And with something that's on at a set time every week, the, what you can promise to advertisers, what you're sort of like, what you can deliver is sort of much more concrete, is much more in sort of the, the space of TV.

This brings it much closer to being a, not a TV replacement as far as what you're watching, but a TV replacement in terms of sort of appointment viewing. And I think that that's all important. And appointment viewing is really important if you're trying to sell ads against the, programming you're running. Well, particularly TV type of ads, right? Like, I mean, there's lots of ads that are not appointment viewing that are just like, like, look, you're going to buy a custom t-shirt like the right. There's built-in commercial breaks. Yeah. Right, which people can see if they watch the video, they can see your nice t-shirt here and you're drinking a Diet Coke, but the-I can't wait till we're sponsored by Diet Coke on YouTube. Every single podcast, the Diet Coke, that's what makes it work for me. That's right. But, but, you know, the other one, W. W.E., though, is it also works well as a subscription. product. In fact, WWE a few years ago with pure subscription. You could only watch it through their app. And it was pretty successful. I wouldn't say it was a failure. The challenge with subscriptions is you're sort of limited, you're limiting your audience. We've talked about that.

They got a structure. Customer acquisition. Customer acquisition. They have to go get an app. You're not just sort of there available. And so, you know, a few years ago, Comcast came to them and say, hey, come back to cable, you know, and Bianchi Peacock, you know, sort of a day later, but there was still sort of cable first. And so they went back to Peacock and they increased how, you know, increased how much they were making. But this bit about, it's kind of proven, right? There's a hardcore base of fans that will follow this around and will subscribe to it. It is an event.

As you mentioned, it's on every week all year long. So if someone who is a wrestling fan, they're never canceling, right? because it's sort of always on. It's an ongoing story. And by the way, they don't have the big events, WrestleMania, they don't have those pay-per-view events in the U.S. They do have them internationally.

I would imagine they want them in the U.S. But suddenly you have a great customer acquisition channel too where you could go pay for a pay-per-view or you could just subscribe to Netflix, right? And you can sort of get this event and then you're locked in and you're sort of there year-round. So there's a lot of pieces of this that sort of makes sense. But I think when you zoom out, I wrote for years and years and years when Netflix would never get into sports rights.

And the, the shit, adding ads changes things. It just does. Like it becomes much more compelling for, from a business sort of perspective, it's much more accessible. And Netflix is the one entity that can go to someone like the WWE or perhaps in the future, other sort of sports leagues and say, look, we understand that cable gives you wide, distribution and access, we give you wider distribution and access. People like, we're bigger than cable, which they are. Right. Well, and it's sort of a bridge between the WWE streaming model and, you know, working

exclusively with cable because Netflix can pay the WWE well, but also offer like a massive built in audience and a chance to build that audience. That was one of the things that I found interesting about this deal is the F1 deal. And the reason that investment has succeeded to the extent that it has is because the F1 market in America was completely untapped. And it sounds like, according to Peters, one of the reasons WWE was really enticing is because the international market is untapped. So it's sort of inverted, but there's a lot of room to grow wrestling around the world. And this is a global brand. So it's going to have value in that context.

in the American sports context, it's hard not to juxtapose this with the conversation we had about NBC and Peacock a couple weeks ago. NBC paying Peacock $110 million to host one NFL playoff game. And then Peacock's not going to have any NFL products or any meaningful NFL products to offer its customers that signed on in early January. Yeah. And so this is, again, inverting that. model, it's a smarter investment because you're getting 52 weeks of inventory here. Like it may be event, but it's also inventory-ish in that it's going to be there over and over again. And you and Peters, you were building on the idea that came up in I think that same Peacock podcast where the value in the digital world is not necessarily about any single event that you could deliver or any piece of content you can deliver. But the real value is

creating the expectation that you're going to have content worth consuming on a recurring basis. And that's what Netflix has done with the entire market for all sorts of different niches that they serve. We'll always have stuff for you to watch. And this is furthering that goal. And it just sort of, I think it, it inverts a lot of the logic that people bring to the streaming conversations where for the last 10 years, people have been trying to spend on splashy hits for customer acquisition.

And I think the further we go here and we see all these people churning on all these different streaming services, there's also real value on content that's going to prevent churn and continue to deliver value over and over again as opposed to spending, you know, a billion dollars on the Lord of the Rings show or whatever Prime Video did a year or two back with Bezos. Like, I think this is a different model. I can't overemphasize this. subscription business is about churn management. And people in like business SaaS know this, right?

Like it's so much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sort of keep an old one. And it does feel like no one in Hollywood understood the question of churn. And maybe they still don't. There was this remarkable chart Peter Kafka shared and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. But like Netflix's monthly churn is less than 2%. Now that's still kind of high.

Like your average customer is going to be gone in a year and a half, you sort of sketch that out. But then you go to something like everyone else who's between like five and 10 percent, you're getting a customer and they're gone in months. And it's shocking that this is how that economy works because literally it means in order to just break even on audience, if you're churning between five and 10 percent per month and really, we'll click the link in the show notes so you can look at this chart because basically everybody is between five and ten percent. Netflix is just hovering along at two percent there at the bottom of this chart and everybody else. You have to continue growing by 10 percent or five percent every month just in order to sort

of stay at that break-even point. And it just puts a ton of pressure on all of these streaming networks to continue to acquire customers. And Netflix, their genius has been coming up with ways to avoid that churn. So yeah, that's the name of the game. Yeah, people, people subscribe to Netflix and something else, right? And this is, you know, it's all about, you know, they talk all the time, making our customers happy. Like, it sounds cliche, but that's exactly right. That's exactly I've operated trajectory for this last decade. Like literally, nothing else in my life matters. Customer acquisition doesn't matter. YouTube doesn't matter. Nothing matters other than, and I try to structure my life in different ways. All that matters is that I,

have dedicated time every day to write a good daily update and that the people who get that feel happy about it because if I keep my customers, everything else falls into place. Like that is the core of any sort of subscription business and Netflix gets that and W.E fits into that so cleanly. Like again, this sort of ongoing sort of thing. It's ongoing stories and you're subscribing. You can watch. No, I think actually their library. is more interesting in some respects than like who has to watch an old game. Whereas we're watching a story, like you might want to catch up or sort of, you know, watch old, you know, go back to the 90s or 2000s or whatever and watch some old content. Right.

But it is a promise. Or the shoulder content with sports. That's why they're putting their money there as opposed to, you know, buying the rights that expire in terms of value as soon as the game's over. Well, this is the great irony of the whole sports thing is the Netflix is. the one entity that is actually well positioned to do a peacock like one NFL game that's just on Netflix. Because they have all the content and infrastructure in place so that when 25 million people or whatever it is sign up to watch that show, they're prepared to keep those people. This is going to be the issue for peacock is not how many people watched that game. It's how many people who watch that game are still going to be peacock subscribers in three months.

Right. How many people watched and have not yet found a reason to open peacock since the final whistle in Chiefs Dolphins or whatever it was? That's right. And this is this is a muscle that these companies have never had to sort of exercise. Everyone was just subscribed to cable by default. And they wanted and to the extent they succeeded, it was getting people to sort of watch and like what are your ratings. It's a very different sort of relationship and very different sort of business process than, you know, that's all about. performance. It's like, do people watch or do they not watch? That's different than do they stay, stay subscribed or they do not say stay subscribed? Do they have this sort of ongoing relationship with you? And Netflix, and maybe this is an aspect of Netflix has been subscription from the beginning, they've had to think about this literally from day one of the company. It's a systematically different way of thinking. And, you know, and so you have the situation. Is Netflix going to go into sports generally right away? Probably not. But

it is sort of ironic that they're better place to do. it than anybody else. Now, traditionally, sports rights have been a customer acquisition tool. And, you know, so Fox famously paid a huge amount of money for the NFL in the 90s, but they never made money on that deal directly, even though you have huge audiences you can sell ads against those games. Their play was to establish Fox as the fourth major broadcast network, which meant they had affiliates in every city and they, you know, they were on everywhere that you could go,

which happened, right? Like when they signed that deal, it was like, what, there's all these areas in the U.S. It doesn't even have a Fox station. Guess what? Once the NFL was there, they got Fox stations very quickly. And then you had the entire sort of era of, you know, broadcast, everyone got cable for a broadcast network to be on cable, you had to pay retransmission fees. So Fox made astronomical amounts of money off of that deal broadly because of the way it

benefited the entire business. if they didn't make money off of sports directly. So I, you know, this, so in a big picture, sports's acquisition tool is correct. But you can only do that. It only makes sense.

You can only lose money on a sports deal if you have the back end way to pay it out. And again, the deep irony of this case is Netflix, in some respects, doesn't need sports, which is precisely why they're the best position to buy sports. And there is a path here. You can start seeing it.

And it goes back to ads. Once they added ads, suddenly they have this extra monetization aspect, which makes bidding on sports much more viable because sports, like a huge part of monitoring sports is running ads against the games. It's the best place to put ads sort of there is. Because people are locked in.

They're not going anywhere, XYZ. So that, and I think I air, I don't know if I ever wrote that explicitly. I should have that once Netflix added ads, sports was sort of now on the roadmap in a way it never was. Sports never made sense for a pure subscription product.

It's not evergreen content. You don't have, like, you just need that extra monetization tool. It's way more expensive and there's less inventory that matters in terms of its lasting value. Yeah. Yeah. Most people don't watch a sports game the next day or even a few hours later. Like, they want to watch it live or not. So you have to have advertising to make sports viable.

Now Netflix is advertising. And, you know, it's a very nascent product. They need to build it out. But the advertising will help you cover your costs. But to actually profit from it, you need to have the payoff of retaining the subscribers that you acquire. And, you know, they're going to, like at some point, they probably will buy more sports rights beyond this. Again, WW is just, it already is more than any sport. It's suited to subscription for all the reasons we just articulated, which is why I think it makes such great sense.

And Netflix built in so many protections here. Now, they're paying for Netflix a huge amount of money, but in five years, Netflix can bail or in 10 years they can renew. So, like, they have this property for 20 years. And it's a huge amount of money, but relative to $110 million for three hours of an NFL playoff game. I mean, it's really not that much money once you start jumping in the sports rights pool. So, yeah, it's interesting. By the way, first mispronunciation of the U.S. YouTube era, the word is nascent, not nascent, but Netflix, it's nascent sports rights play here is very

exciting to everybody and an important milestone in this new era for the podcast. I just had to get out of the way quickly. It's right. Good to get out of way on night one here. Question for you. Systemically, one of the things that I find interesting about this is the symmetry where for years and years, decades, inventory sports were the lifeblood of the cable bundle and the sports business writ large on linear TV. Just jump on that because what, this is why bailing on the bundle was so stupid because everyone worked together to solve the customer retention problem, right?

You didn't have to always have stuff because it was all tied together. So if Disney had good content, well, Time Warner also had good content. Universal also had good content. And when they were sold all together, the burden was just was jointly shared to sort of keep people signed up to cable. Once you're going it alone, and it's literally just clicking a week and logging out.

And as that has unraveled, and now it's like the tent pole events are what drives value on linear TV. And shift over to streaming. Again, you had these splashy event type shows that were central to the conversation, but churn is just so central to the story now that it does look like there's more value

to spending on inventory content that's just going to keep people coming back month after month, whether it's shows like suits or Amazon and what they're trying to maybe do with the RSNs, even though that is still sort of up in the air exactly how they're going to use that, or Netflix spending its money on just a year's worth of wrestling as opposed to a single NFL playoff game.

It just seems like the logic on both linear and streaming has flipped. Yeah, I mean, it's tough to go it alone. But the one entity that potentially can is Netflix. They've already solved the term problem, right? I'm sure they would like it to be less than 2%. But they have such a habit and habituation with users of having Netflix. They're in the culture, Netflix and Chill, which is definitely not happening on this YouTube channel.

They have, you know, they have a. guys in their 30s and 40s here. Yeah. They have the live. And so it's such a powerful position to be in where, again, I think the sports thing is going to be a slow burn. But to know that you're already better positioned to buy these rights than anybody else. And it's basically just waited out. Just wait.

Sports isn't going anywhere. At some point, all these folks are going to burn out. The TV product is going to be in a big trouble. All the leagues are going to face the existence. outside the NFL are going to face the existential crisis of sure cable will pay us but it's only in a small number of homes how do we actually get new customers we need someone that actually has reach like like the leagues themselves have a customer acquisition problem and Netflix is going to be sitting there like everyone has Netflix and we have a demonstrated trackword of building this shoulder content that actually makes your sport more popular go back to ESPN one of ESPN's advantages in that era was SportsCenter and all that are sort of highlight shows. And it was death. Like one of the big things that was surprising, not surprising if you thought about it, but

still kind of shocking was when the Big Ten a couple years ago made a new TV deal that did not include ESPN. It used to be for college athletics in particular, you needed ESPN because when a school was going out recruiting and they were getting an athlete, like, they need to know they're going to be on SportsCenter. They're going to have visibility. They're going to be out there. And so ESPN had a built-in sort of cost advantage because if ESPN offers you $800 million

and cable network Y offers you $900 million, you're going to take ESPN because they'll offer so much secondary revenue that matters. That's right. And all that stuff, all the sports center, all this stuff was also basically just pure money for them. It doesn't cost anything to produce. Yes, it's a lower audience, but it's basically, you know, very cheap to produce. You have commercials against that. All the sort of thing. It fills up your schedule because you have to fill a 24-7 time frame. So, you know, you and I are both in college at the time. You come back and you watch, you know, 57 sports centers in a row that are based on the same thing. There's the crossover at like 6 a.m. when it changes to the next thing. Exactly. Always really depressing. The 3 a.m. Sports Center when you're like, oh, man, I've actually seen this. I've already watched this. You wake up on the couch. I fell asleep to this highlight. I wake up to it.

And also that was my favorite part of your interview with Peters, where you're talking through all this. And then Peters says, I don't know. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he basically said, we're not committed to anything more in sports rights in the near term here. And you're like, well, you just really disappointed a lot of commissioners across sports right there because they were prepared to use Netflix as a stock. You can see in the long word, though, like they want Netflix to come to them begging for rights.

And at some point, they're going to come to Netflix begging for distribution and begging for awareness. And Netflix is going to have that cost advantage that ESPN used to have because, hey, if you want to be into 100 million homes, there's only one option. Yep. Well, we shall see. But before we move on from sports and streaming and what the future might look like, I did want to hit one follow-up we got to the Apple conversation.

This is from Sam. He says, as a big-time sports viewer myself, I can relate to Ben's desire to just have a court-side seat perspective for NBA games. But I think the novelty would wear off pretty quickly. You want the angles, the replays, the shifts in perspective. I would feel like I was missing out if I had the limited view of a fan in the crowd. At the same time, feeling immersed in the game would be tricky if the cameras keep shifting forcing me to reorient where I am on the court.

And so then he includes this link to an Instagram reel and says, I loved this video mockup for F1, and I think a similar concept could be applied to all types of sports. Less than feeling like you're in the arena, it's more of a command center approach. You get all the info, all the angles, all the perspectives in a way not even someone in the building could get. This feels like an experience much more native

to an augmented slash virtual content device. Do you have any thoughts? I made sure to grab a Reels version just for Ben. So Ben, I read that for a few reasons. Most importantly, there's no greater testament to the community that you and I are cultivating here with Sharp Tech than Sam making sure to send you that clip as an Instagram reel, knowing that that's your preferred platform for video consumption

and particularly random F1 videos. But also, I think he's right that ultimately the single camera view or the dugout view for sports would get old. The novelty would wear off if you're talking about people who are addicted to sports and are watching like 100 games a year. And so I think some sort of hybrid model makes more sense. But then also the video he sent with this F1 mockup where basically for people who can't watch. the video, we'll put it in the show notes, get to Instagram Reels. You can experience it yourself. There's like an augmented reality track sitting there in front of you and then a TV in the background that has the race on it. I don't know that that's appealing, but this is part of what's

frustrating with the Vision Pro experience is unless you're experiencing it, it's hard as an outsider to have a good feel for whether it's actually like a rewarding way to, watch an entire Formula One race or basketball game or whatever it may be. And so not not not not to pull that card, but um, I knew that's going to be your counter. Sam did say if you use the provision pro or not. I'm going to assume no, you have not. I have and I have no desire for command center approach. I want to see at the game.

It feels like you're there. Like like and again, you can get the sense of presence from the Oculus, which is much more low resolution. and is not, you know, the Division Pro is just that, is that much better, is that much more clear. How do you, if I want to watch a replay, do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to look up at the scoreboard. I'm going to watch a replay. Oh, boy.

No, I'm serious. And you're not going to think about it. That's the way it's going to work. Now, number one, maybe this is just a me thing. Maybe I just prefer being in a stadium and watching a game and some people prefer watching it on a flat plane of glass. I don't know. Speak for yourself. Like, I like going to games.

And I would like to go to more games. And the idea that I can go to games in my living room to me is pretty awesome. Yeah. No, that sounds great. I'm in regardless. I trust your instincts as a sports fan. I'm sure I would enjoy it. I'm not sure I would enjoy it every night.

But I'm open to being persuaded once the Vision Pro arrives and becomes more of a fixture for all of us. And number two, if I'm sitting courtside, why do I want to change my perspective? I mean, have you had the opportunity to sit at an NBA game? I have many times. And it's great, I don't know. I mean, if you're watching like massive games with high stakes, sometimes having a different perspective, like being higher up is actually better because you can see the entire play.

Like court side is a very specific, it's such a privileged-ass conversation. Sitting court side is a very specific experience such that it's distinct from the way I've consumed basketball my entire life. So for the biggest moments, I may want a more traditional consumption model. Yeah, well, I mean, we could put cameras elsewhere in the stadium if you want to sit up in the nosebleed seats. You can do without your nose bleeding with VR. But, you know, again, what I would say is we will see. There's going to be lots of experimentation of this.

But to me, the idea of putting this contraption on your head just so you can have basically 2D experience is bizarre. I don't understand why you'd even want to go to the trouble. The whole point of this is it is immersive. Now, I guess if you're in like a small apartment or whatever and you can get this huge sort of screen, you know, watching movies and stuff like that is going to be cool. But to me, the step change, what is just going to be drastically different, is this idea of feeling like you're in a place. You're not going to feel like you're in a place if you're watching it on a screen within your thing. Now, that said, can you have stuff? Like one of the questions I would have is I enjoy well watching the game by being on Twitter or chatting or whatever it might be.

How is that going to work, right? Like are you going to hold the phone in your phone. Now, you can hold the phone in your hand and use it with the Vision Pro, but that is, you know, you're losing some fidelity there. that's getting a little weird. Maybe, you know, is there some sort of thing where you're mostly immersed, but you have, you have like a chat, but you could have a chat message just floating there, you know, next to you while you're in the stadium, right? Like, it's like, like, like, like, this is the thing.

It feels like AR when you're there. Okay. It's VR. It's on your head. You're not there. But the, what is compelling about the vision pro and its fidelity is it feels like you're there. And so it's like, imagine.

if you were in the stadium and you had AR glasses on. So you could be sitting courtside and also have a view of your messages or Twitter sort of on the side. You could be responding to that or whatever it might be. That's what it's like, except you're in VR. It's like inverts it. So you feel like you're there. But because you're wearing a VR thing, they can put it on the screen that you want. And, you know, could you have that virtual track wherever?

Now, F1 is a different situation. Like the F1 experience live, it's okay. it's cool to see how fast the cars move and get that sense but you're basically just watching TV because the crack is too big to sort of see the whole thing. Yeah, you're watching the big screen the entire time you're there. Right, this real idea of getting this concept of like

where the cars are and then having the screen. I actually think this reel is pretty cool. And of course you could have things like clicking in so you're in the driver's seat and you're like moving around the track. But at the end of the day you want a big picture view of what's happening over a four-mile racetrack. Like, just in that view, like, I actually think for sports like that, a 2D perspective is better precisely because you,

it's like a function of camera angles. If you need multiple camera angles, then yeah, the 2D perspective is probably going to be better. His point about moving around and feeling jarring because you're reorienting yourself, yeah, you probably get motion sickness, I can imagine if this is sort of doing it too often. But an F1 race is fundamentally different than NBA basketball game. Maybe a basketball game is on a constrained space.

Like you're sort of, you're right there. And so again, maybe all this, I'm just totally off base and I'll be wrong. I actually don't want to be a jerk and pull the, I use this. I experienced it. You didn't. Yeah. Particularly when the sports segment was like five seconds long. Okay.

This is all based off of a very, very short. Honestly, as you talk here, I'm imagining how obnoxious I'm going to be when I go into the Apple store for my Vision Pro demo. and they try to walk me through different features. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, just take me to the Fenway Park dug out and take me to court side at the Warriors game. I don't really care about any of this stuff. All I've been waiting for is what it's like

in this immersive sports environment. Yeah. So just to be clear, this is based on a very short experience and I might be totally off base. Maybe Sam sort of has it right. Yeah. So, but we'll see. No, but the possibilities are what's exciting.

The possibilities are exciting. maybe it ends up. The answer is it's probably something in the middle, right? That's how it usually turns out. It's hard. But the cool thing is there will be folks experimenting with it. And we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I think it's safe to say that it's going to be something different than what we have now in 10 years, 20 years, whatever it might be.

And I don't know any better than Sam or even Apple or the sports leagues. We're all going to find out together. New eras. That's the theme of today's Sharp Tech. I'm so excited to see Fenway Park, that Sun's game they demoed. And then I'm going to say, take me to excel. My friend Ben Thompson is so excited to be working in the Vision Pro for decades to come here. I want to feel what that experience is going to be like.

What that is is an immersive environment where you have as much screen space as you want. You have this whole sort of canvas. Yeah. it's like having multiple screens without having to travel with like eight screens or not eight screens, but like a whole office worth of hardware. Yeah. And that's more akin to this idea that maybe Sam is sort of getting towards where anywhere you go, you can have like a 200 inch TV with you, right?

You can have that sort of experience. It's basically a portable best 2D viewing experience. You have this convergence. And, you know, O'Mecoe has sort of talked about this about the best viewing experience, We've moved from movie theaters. You can have this incredible experience in your home. Like people have built these huge home theaters. Meanwhile,

we've simultaneously had this parallel track of miniaturization of moving computing to being more and more mobile. What the Vision Pro is unites those two things. You get the incredible experience that is mobile. And that can sort of like go anywhere. And so there's a, there's a, what I'm excited about, this productivity point is actually the same thing that OMA is excited about in terms of the entertainment aspect.

This bit that I'm arguing with Sam is something different. It's completely new. It's immersive. It's delivering something that was not possible previously. You can get a home theater experience at your home by building a home theater. I can get a multi-screen huge experience by sitting here at my desk where I literally have four monitors around me, right? And I could add more.

You know, the, and you know, honestly, I've been concerned about the Vision Pro, frankly, is it's more based on iOS. It's based on iOS, not MacOS. And I use a lot of MacOS's functionality that is not possible on these operating systems. So I'm worried about being constrained by software, but this idea of having the sort of stuff sort of broadly everywhere is, you know, is very interesting to me. But the real excitement and what will take longer is the stuff that's uniquely possible. And we talk about this context of AI. We talked about this context of when the Internet came along.

V1 of all these products is just taking what was done before and doing it in the new thing. V2 is completely new experiences that were not possible previously. And those take time. They take time. It's going to take time to get this sort of thing. Right. But that spectrum of possibility is what's thrilling about what is at least on the table now with the Vision Pro. We'll see if the developers ever come around.

And we'll see if the Vision Pro is just a complete flop. I think that's on the table as well. But shifting gears entirely here, a week ago, you got out the cord bag, or as you would call it, the cord bag, and you hopped on a flight, Ben. We promised a little travel diary. I'll read you a note from 2020 when Occupy Wall Street co-founder Michael White wrote that, quote, rejecting Davos is easy when one hasn't been invited. Now that I have a chance to go, I want to destroy. discover its revolutionary potential.

So Ben, when you hear that sentence read, do you feel a special kinship with the co-founder of Occupy Wall Street? Mr. Michael White there. This hilarious headline. Yes, I did get an invitation to go to Davos. As you might imagine, AI was sort of a big theme. And so I would, you know, it was, you know, so I had a chance to be involved with some sessions,

including some ones I can't talk about because they were sort of like totally off the record. and with sort of various senior folks. And I had to take it because there was actually a year ago. I was in another group chat. We were talking about it when Davos was going on. And Davos is always sort of a punching bag. And it's a that's very easy to criticize and critique. And now I'm sounding like Michael White here.

You just had to discover. And so we were in a group saying like, we're like, look, this thing's going on for years. It's like it probably jumped the shark like multiple times. But it's like we're like, if we, we, we, we. We should go at least once just to sort of like see it. Like what what is it actually like? And so when I got the invitation, that was in my head. I'm like, I'm going to have to go.

There's some aspects of this that are. Life is short, man. Check it out. I do worry about the sort of like, you know, forgetting about the common person, these big people want you to make decisions to see our life. Like the W. Hopelessly out of touch or whatever is like, he's like this. this boogieman that makes these pronouncements of like global government and like we have to make people like stop drinking coffee or whatever it is.

That are just so deeply objectionable to me. But as a sociological experiment and for the content, I needed to go. Exactly. I mean, look, we have a lot of lists. We do have some listeners who have been to Davos, but legions of people. Oh, no. The worst thing going there is is me feeling these anti-oetist sort of like, you know, in your bones.

This sort of aspects. Yeah, Shrekri is an outsider. Like, I'm on the internet. I'm one of the revolutionaries coming in and breaking down all these institutions. It was disturbing the number of places and things that I went. And it's like, oh, love Shetrekry. Oh, huge fan. Oh, as I had some dinner.

Oh, I'm super honored. I've been reading it for years. It's really important to our thinking about X, Y, Z. I'm like, oh, my God. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I don't want to downplay the accomplishments and expertise in our audience. time we discuss one of these arcane topics that's outside our lane of expertise, we have

so many people who write in who are some of the smartest people in the world explaining the topic to us. So I'm sure there are lots of people who are quite familiar with the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. But in terms of- Here's what I'd say, sort of big picture. My big picture takeaway. You know, it's a good conference. Like it's so number one, the WF is just like Fabulously wealthy off of this thing Because what happens is you have all these companies that Have to pay a lot of money to be WF members.

That's sort of ground one And then have to pay these huge fees to sort of get to this conference Why do they do that? Because everyone else does it. It's one of the most powerful examples of network effects That you've ever seen. So you have this physical real world conference that makes all this money

as huge profit margins, despite the fact there's no expense spared. Like there's a whole entire temporary building that's sort of put up for this whole thing. Like everything is like first class.

Like it's super nice. And yet they're making astronomical lots of money. What is super nice? Are we talking about the food? The drinks nice. The drinks are nice. The facilities are nice.

Everything's nice. And the reason they pay is because everyone else pays. Everyone else is there. if you are in B2B, if you're a business that is selling to other businesses, you're kind of insane not to go. You like, and so, because part of what plays into this is it's a pain in the ass to get to, right? That's why everyone flies their private jets there hilariously, right?

Because it's like, it's like up in the mountains in Switzerland. So me being a peon, had to fly into Zurich and take a train, like switch trains and get up there. That was on my list of questions. So what that means is you have all. these executives and you have the most seniors like CEOs are like there's a whole council that's like CEOs that like that's like well I'll get to this this is a moment everyone's there and because it's such a pain to get there they're there for multiple days if you're going to go you might as well go and so you can get meetings with with basically anyone like because they have open time

they're there that they're there to meet people they're there to talk and so I can and you have this very so the second thing is it's like multiple conferences in one so there's the public conference everyone sees and it's all these grand things. It's always about like this year was all AI stuff. And I chaired some town hall about how do we store trust in technology, blah, blah, blah. It's like whatever. Right. But no greater problem facing all of us than disinformation and misinformation.

Yeah. I'm glad you could anchor that conversation. Just really glad. World leaders. So I mean, just as a side note on that, one of the things about Davos is it's one of the most distinctly European conferences I've gone to in that, in sort of, sort of every discussion, even though there's tons of Americans there, the Americans all feel like usurpers in a very sort of tangible way that's hard to articulate.

And so it's like in one-to-one and so like brings up something about free speech. And everyone's like, what? What's that? It's just sort of like the, it's hard to articulate. But like it feels European, it may be sort of this like the, you know, European I think is more overtly classes. I don't say classes in this in America, but America, we just kind of like, you know, raise your middle finger to it to a certain extent.

And, you know, like, no, I'm some scrappy guy on the internet. And I value that. Here it's like, no, you have like different color badges based on your status. And it's like, if you have XYZ badge, you can't get in here. You're scanning your badge constantly to like. I'm not going to ask what color your badge was. I've read that that's a very loaded question. I know the white badge with the status.

But I the top badge. But even within the top badge, you're still limited on like what you can get into certain places or whatever. Right. And so there's all these parallel things going on. So there's the one on the surface that is like sort of for. public consumption. Then there's like, you know, other sessions that are like, what's the word chatthamouse rules, whatever it is.

Chatam House, yep. Yeah. And then there's ones that are completely off the record that you can't even say, you know, who is there. You're doing sort of X, Y, Z. And the content and response, needless to say changes based on these things. So the public ones are basically what you get on the tip. They're super fluffy sort of X, Y, Z.

They're about the theme of the day. It's all generally one. view of the world, which is whatever it is the current thing for the, like, globalist elite of the world, like everyone kind of agrees on everything, right? Then you get into other ones where, particularly when you get more senior people, these are companies, very nuts and bolts. Like, like, like, AI, how do I increase my margin, right? Like, that's the question that they're interested in.

Like, what, what open versus closed? Not in a philosophical perspective, but what actually makes sense for sort of my business going forward. And then there's a, maybe the deepest level is like where you have the highest level, policymakers in the world and you have CEOs and you have and this is actually real value. You have like people from China and you have people from Europe. You have people from India and you have people from the U.S. all in the same room with their like company counterparts and actually hashing stuff out.

Like now obviously it's not purely private because everyone's in the room, but it is sort of a place where that sort of conversation can and does happen. And so that's like so that we have three levels of competition. aggressively off the record scenario, right? Right. We have the public. We have sort of the hardcore business. And then we have like the cross multilateral sort of discussing sort of issues.

That's all in the WEF sort of buildings. There's meanwhile, this is the weirdest thing. So there is a road in Davos called Promenade or the Promenade or whatever it is. I would imagine if you're in Davos normally, which is like a ski resort, it's a bunch of talent. And there's like, you know, there's a bunch of luxury stores. It's like Aspen, but in Europe, right? And so, so you have all, you know, all these sorts of things, restaurants. When you're there, not only are all these stores and restaurants and bars and coffee shops taken over by companies, they actually put up signs.

And they're like, permanent seeming signs. So it's like, this is the Accenture office. This is the Citibank office. This is the IBM office. This is the Intel. This is the travel agency. that is now the Salesforce suite. And it's so weird because it's like,

this is part of like just the extravagant amounts of money that are spent here. They're not like hanging banners over the cover. It looks like a permanent sign. I don't think it's permanent. It'd be weird to go to Davos. It can't be. Like the Accenture like coffee shop.

Maybe it is. I don't know. The entire town is just there's temporary. There's temporary buildings that are put up that are very nice. Yeah. And so that is and that is probably the part with that. That's why the companies pay the big bucks. Okay.

Everyone in B2B is there and there's just meetings and coffees and deals being done all day, every day. And that's sort of like going. That's like the fourth parallel conference that's sort of happening. And the fifth one is, look, you have all these nerds who become the elites and go there. And now they're going to go and act like stupid college students to go to like these crazy parties every night. Like, and like I went, I only went to one. And it was so dumb. Like it was like being at a house party, but in like this very nice hotel.

like wine everywhere, right? Like, you like the, uh, I think it's the famous, like the Anthony Scareamucci like wine tasting party. It's just the most stupidest thing I've ever been to. I'm like, this is why I, it's like a house party. It was ridiculous. You can barely move. You're all scrunched in. Everyone's getting slashed.

Like just, but, you know, hey, you know, there's the famous stories about the illicit, you know, things that happen in Davos. Like, that's when it's all happening. What happens in Davos? What happens in Davos? Yeah. So it's, it's like this five. conferences.

Wine tasting. Yeah, you can search for it. It's a famous sort of thing. Apparently they ran out a winer early this year. They did by 11 p.m. Yeah, I stayed for 15 minutes and then bailed. So it was definitely not my seat. Come on.

You got to do it for the content. That's why I went. We're trying to launch a YouTube channel right now. I had no desire to go, I went for the content. And then I'm like, okay, I've seen it. I've seen. I can only do so much. I did not conquer.

Then I left. So you have basically like five. conferences or five parallel things happening at the same time in the same place with all the most like powerful people in the world. And the probably the reason, you know, and so the public part is by far the least interesting and least compelling part and the silliest part and the least consequential part and rightly mocked. The other stuff is in some respects the part that people are correct to be scared about, right?

Like you're the powers that be in a ski resort like making plans about the world of the Illuminati. Right. Exactly. Exactly. This is the closest you come to that paranoid vision. It really is. It really is.

And so, but that part is it's also kind of cool, right? You can see why people want to go and people probably don't talk about it. From my perspective, I went, I saw. That's what I wanted to do. Would I go back? Maybe, probably. Honestly, it was fun. Like some of the dinners were really fun.

You meet some really cool people and you. you have cool conversations. If they get mad because I just podcasted this and don't invite me again, it's okay. I'll be fine. Your life will go on. My life will go on. Yeah. I mean,

I was reading about a Salesforce party that Sting performed at. He performed every breath you take and Roxanne. And to me, it sounded like NBA All Star Weekend for like 55 year old rich people. That's basically it. And I've been at that party, like an Adidas party where Jada kiss is performing. and everybody's just sort of milling around and networking. So the other thing about you have lots of rich people and powerful people, but you also have,

they do try to reach out to younger companies and younger people and stuff on those lines. And which is all, which is great. I like the thought. The problem is the, the sensation of striving is like omnipresent, right? Yeah, skin crawling.

That's, yeah, it's like everyone is there to impress and to sort of get ahead and get a deal sort of XYZ. There is a definite missing layer of authenticity. authenticity by and large. But the more private you get, or perhaps the more drunk people get, that is there. And you can get it just because when you're in person with someone, it can be, I can imagine

being in these B2B business meetings in these sort of on the promenade in these weirdly signed stores. Like that's why you go, right? It's a chance to sit down with your CEO counterpart in a way that's off the record. It's not in the books. You just ran into each other. Like there's a lot. If you want serendipity, like, you know, I was talking to a company that.

They're in a high compliance sort of area. Everything they do, like anyone comes to their office to be tracked, X, Y, Z. And this is a chance to talk to someone, and it's off the record. You just ran into them on the street. Right. So those serendipitous encounters happen all the time, scheduled or unscheduled. All you have to do is drop 20 grand and hop on like a 10 hour flight. It's more than that.

No, I think the entry fee, I don't know this for sure, but I think the like the membership to WF runs in like the hundreds of thousands. And then I think the price per participant is in the tens of thousands. I didn't, you know, so I was, you know, again, I was asked to come on, yeah, to moderate some of these sessions about AI, things on those lines. So I did, as I always do, I paid for my hotel. I paid for my travel. I did not have to pay an entry fee. I would not have paid $50,000 or whatever else to go.

Probably not worth it. But, yeah. Well, question for you. I just, but I'm very, you know, I feel like we had to come out and be honest about it. Because there is a deep sense of shame that I, yes, I went to Davos. I was one of those people. Well, look, we promised people that you would be getting read on this YouTube channel. I have blessed.

No, it's true. You are literally flushing as I look at you. Actually, big picture, this has been one of the, honestly, it sounds, how do I say this is not sounding like like a jerk. One of the big challenges to checkery has been going from starting with like 300 Twitter followers. No one knew I was just lobbing grenades. on the internet to everyone knows who I am. I walk into a room way more people know me than I know them.

And I can, you know, I can talk to the Netflix CEO for an interview. Right. Like I reach out to sort of X, Y, Z. And so the way I've tried to resolve those two things, I think you make a mistake if you try to always stay the way you are. You have to acknowledge differences. It's like what I talk about getting old, right? The most annoying and like cringe-worthy thing is the 40-year-old.

that tries to act like they're 25. And it's not just cringe to observe. It's sad for them because different aspects of life have different parts and you and you will find so much more fulfillment by being in the moment. And being in the moment is not just like your present circumstances. It's accepting that I'm a 43 year old, right? That's sort of who I am. I'm not going to go to some stupid house party, wine party sort of thing.

You want a Netflix and chill, you know, after a long day at Davos. With Damos, that comment gets a little dicey. There's articles you can, you can turn out about that. That's true. Not apply to me for the record. And so the way I resolve that from a trajectory content perspective was the trajectory interviews where it's like, oh, wait, the difference with me when I started trajectory to now, I still try to write as an outsider.

I don't rely. I try to not rely on inside information or any that sort of thing about that influence you want to write. I want everyone to believe that what I write is my opinion. It's what I think. And usually I wait, like I was actually annoyed at myself because I wrote about this WV thing too fast. And I wrote a poor, it's blurb about it. But like, like I wait and I'm going to deliver Ben Thompson's perspective and it's completely authentic to me.

But at the same time, how can I both leverage and acknowledge my different status in the industry? Well, I will do these interviews with folks, but I'm not going to do an interview and just pick out quotes to put in an article to spin my point of view. If you come on trajectory, we're posting the whole thing. We're going to post the transcript. We're going to post the podcast. And the information I get from Greg Peters is the information my audience get from Greg Peters. I might be more famous now.

I might have more access now. But I still, you know, maybe this is my whying to myself. See myself as a man of the people, as a man of my audience. We are just out here with takes on tech companies. And so if I get access to more information, my readers get access to more information. And that's why I'm on here talking about going to Davils. I don't want to be the sort of person. I go to Davos and I don't talk about it.

Just furtively go. Yeah. No. I went. I admit it like all the implications of that. But I'm sitting here on this podcast telling you what it was like and I. Yeah. I'm respecting off the record rules.

But beyond that, you know, this is what it was like. There you go. And I'm not going to. It's hard to say this without sounding like I'm kissing your ass. But I will say that you, your ability to remain more or less uncompromised. your analysis despite expanding your network of people who are really powerful and are influencing the world in these off the record meetings in Davos is impressive. And you've never come to me and been like, stop talking shit about person X, Y, or Z because you want

me to be honest, too, as part of what we do here. So no, I mean, it's true. And this is where the subscription model is so, so fantastic, right? Right. There's more freedom. Yeah. I charge, you know, I charge one price for everyone. doesn't matter who you are. I don't even look at who subscribes. I find out by accident usually, but I never go through in search. I don't look up as XYZ a subscriber.

And I don't want to know, frankly. Now, I find out by accident sometimes, but the whole goal is, again, this goes about like to the churn discussion. I try to structure my life to always carve out time for writing, right? In the endavos, for example. Like, there are, I got reachouts from very senior people that are like, oh, yeah, XY CEO would love to meet with you.

And they can meet at this time. And I'd be like, no, that is the six hours or whatever. I carved out to write a daily update because a daily update matters more to me than anything else. Got you there. Yeah. Well, but the point here is with the description model, I don't have to be beholden to an advertiser. I don't have to be behold into the Dallas organizers inviting me or not inviting me. I don't be behold into sort of a CEO.

And that's a great gift, I think, of the Internet. If you want to be in the takes business, this is a great thing about subscription. It's worth a tradeoff of maybe less reach of being able to be honest and being paid on that account by a lot of people instead of just just a few. Okay. So a couple specific questions at the end. Did the Malay speech resonate as much on the ground as it did online? A speech I missed because of my commitment to the daily update. I really wanted to go. I was so I know.

So that I actually, I didn't stay for a whole conference. I was only there for a couple days. My son's birthday was that week. And I'm like, I'm going to get back for his birthday. He's still at the age where he wants dad to be there. And so I'm not going to miss that. So that was on the last day that I was there. So I didn't get a lot of interaction on the ground after that to know if people were sort of talking about it.

So I don't have a good answer to that other than to say, we'll link to the speech. The AI one's amazing where it sounds like him, but it's in English. Oh my God. But yeah, I mean, it was, you know, and, you know, he came in with the view probably, or with some of our listeners have of like, yeah, this is all BS and I'm going to tell you why. And it was certainly very compelling. Yeah. No, it was compelling from afar. And so it's one of those things where I was like, all right, so is this something only the internet cared about and on the ground? It really wasn't that big of a deal. But another question from the ground. Yeah, fair enough. No, you've given us great color. You've exceeded my expectations in terms of. what it felt like being there. Was there any memorable conversation about the future of tech that didn't touch on AI? Is there AI fatigue?

And then also, was there anything you heard that you can repeat about just general progress in AI? Like, were you surprised by anything you found out while you were there? No, I mean, these things get very sort of thematic and trendy. So everything was AI, AI, AI. I certainly think there was opportunities to draw distinctions between where progress is actually happening, which is with transformers and generative AI versus other sorts of things. I will say in general, one thing that did disturb me and bothered me about the conference,

I did have an opportunity to sort of say this in a meeting was there was very brief hand-waving at the upside of AI and then just constant sort of dread and worry. And actually the most interesting were like just general CEOs that are just like very pragmatic about how does this impact my business. But particularly on sort of the public sessions and more on like the policy of questions, everyone was it's all downside focus. What's going to go bad? How do we regulate this? It seems like that's the only sentiment that's acceptable to express in public at this point. Yeah. And so at one point I got up, I'm like everyone's talking about these issues, human rights, inclusion, like all these. sorts of pieces. At the end of the day, the way we uplift humanity is through growth. It's the only

way growing the pie, not slicing up in different ways. How do you grow? You grow by increasing productivity. It's the only way to increase wealth. How do you increase productivity via technology? Technology could be the wheel. It could be the computer. It could be the car. It could be AI. How do you invent technology with intelligence? We are on the verge of one of the greatest gifts humanity has ever had, which is a massive increase in intelligence, which if you care about these human outcomes, has one of the most massive beneficiaries for human welfare ever in history. And people are just barely waving their hands at this and obsessing about the downsides

and are going to kill and destroy one of the greatest gifts we are poised to receive that actually meets the goals you claim to care about. And that was not existing. That view was completely non-existent. And that was probably the most... I also just feel like the reasonable rational position on this and any technology that's as impactful as AI figures to be is that there will be positives and there will be negatives. Like if you went back 40 years, what is the internet going to do to society? Well, there have been some revolutionary benefits and there have been some real drawbacks that have become apparent.

No, go back further. Go back to the Industrial Revolution. Go back to the printing press. Like this is just the reality. And it's the reality, but then there's like 90% of the conversation is fixated on these fantastical downside scenarios. And it just seems a little bit bizarre and irrational. This goes back to our bit about the sports viewing, right? It's very easy to envision downsides that fit in your current frame of view.

It's very hard to imagine new things that were never before possible, right? And that applies massively to add. The upside, it's like a venture capital investment. Like the downside is capped. The upside is unlimited. Now, this could get very dower and dark. Like the downside is capped. We might all die.

But like, you know, certainly something to consider. But the upside is uncapped. The number of things that could happen that could be invented by definition are unimaginable to us today. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. And it doesn't mean they can't be killed. And, you know, this happened, you know, I made this sort of mini speech the same afternoon that that Malay speech came on, which I think hit a lot of the same notes, which is like it's very easy to point to the shortcomings of capitalism, XYZ. But let's be honest, what actually raised people out of poverty was free markets and trade.

Like that is what actually grew the pie. And I think the technology is, is, fits in the same frame. And it was discouraging and disappointing the extent to which the supposed smartest people in the world, our elites had such tiny imaginations. So would you say broadly speaking, it was more pessimistic in terms of the next couple of years or was there some optimism there? I mean, divorcing it from strictly AI, just the general mood. it just felt like it didn't matter it felt like these people don't matter like they're they're they're they're they're scurrying around the edges of this

this sort of force and you know and to the extent it matters the only way they can matter is by making things worse like passing laws passing regulations none of which is going to actually stop any of this stuff like people are going to develop this in general it's like you know the class that we talked about the past

like with gun control right are you actually stopping who actually follows the laws not criminals. That's kind of a big hole in the sort of argument, right? And I think that, you know, you can understand to what if you want to get into the psychology of folks that are there, the internet and this sort of wave in general is increasingly divorced from the powers that be getting together in a ski town in Switzerland and dictating what happens to the world. And the power that they do have. Even in the last five to ten years, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. view on Davos, it used to be like the place to be. And now it's like almost universally reviled on several continents now. So certainly the power centers are shifting around.

Yeah. I mean, it's an aspect of people's shifting attitudes like towards the media, for example, right? That used to be the only way to get your word out. And now when it's one of many, you know, there's just sort of like there's this withdrawal into a particular point of view. And you don't want to just, you don't like, you don't want to be like me because you might not get invited. back or you might lose your job or you might sort of X, Y, Z. And the reality is, is I'm an independent actor thanks to the internet. Thanks to my subscribers. I'm going to go out and say what I think and do what I do. And if you don't invite me back, that's fine. I don't need you. And that, I think, applies to

technology and AI generally. Google and Facebook don't need to make B2B deals to succeed. They just put their product up on the internet. And that is so fundamentally disruptive. Yeah, if you're an enterprise software, go to Davos. I actually think it's worth the money. If you're like, you know, like Sam Altman was there, you know, and he was, you know, his first time there. There's a bunch of tech people there there was like the first time. And so we were, we're all sitting around talking, like, sharing some of these observations. But, you know, I was at this dinner and he's like, well, it's my first time at Davos. I used to always say in my startup advice, don't be the kind of company that goes to, you know, don't be this sort of founder that goes to Davos.

But I think, I actually think if your B2B business, you should go, right? Like that, yeah, that was the shallow. It's revolutionary potential, man. That's right. No, but it's business gets done there, for sure. But is the world controlled there? Maybe it used to be. Maybe it still is to an extent.

But the sort of control is increasingly dystopian and just stopping the future. And it's a shame because the professed reasons to do that are to give people better lives. And I do worry. Yeah. Yeah, I do worry that the actual. outcome of people who claim to have that motivation is to actually deny people better lives in the long run. Well, that's a dour note to end this podcast, the first of the new era, the Sharp Tech video era. But I'm glad that Sharp Tech was on the ground at Davos and All Star Weekend for 55-year-old white guys.

Sounds like it was a success for you. I hope that maybe you make it back. spend more than 15 minutes at the scaramucci wine tasting. Not going again. I can promise you that. Well, a co-host can dream. You know what I mean? But hey, that was a great recap from start to finish. And I look forward to diving into more next week.

We had some mailback questions that we had to push to next week. But until then, Ben, I hope you have a great weekend. I'm excited to keep things rolling on the video front, on the audio front. and I will talk to you next week. Talk to you later.