Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Jay and Farhad Show Reunion!! With @jyarow and @fmanjoo

Episode Date: February 2, 2019

For years, Jay Yarrow and Farhad Manjoo had a podcast, the Jay and Farhad show. You might remember Jay from his time at BusinessInsider (he’s an executive editor at CNBC now) and Farhad of course is a NYTimes columnist. Well, they stopped doing the podcast late last year, which was a super bummer for a lot of us. Jay and Farhad had a super cool chemistry and I know a lot of people for whom the show was unmissable. Well, I got Jay and Farhad to put the band back together, so you’re about to hear a special reunion episode of the Jay and Farhad show! We talk Apple! Facebook! Layoffs! (No twitter, oddly...) It's great! Sponsors: Vistaprint.com. Code: ride Burrow.com/tech Code: tech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Super thrilled about this one because for years,

Jay Yarrow and Farhad Manjoo had a podcast, The Jay and Farhad Show. You might remember Jay Yarrow from his time at Business Insider, but of course now he's an executive editor at CNBC, now a big deal. And Farhad, of course, has always been a big deal, New York Times tech columnist. Well, the boys stopped doing their podcast lately, last year, which was a super bummer for a lot of us. Jay and Farhad had a super cool chemistry,

and I know a lot of people for whom the show was unmissable. Well, I got Jay and Farhad to put the band back together, so you're about to hear a special reunion episode of the Jay and Farhad show, and believe me, you're going to get a taste of that special chemistry. But first, Okay, back together again like a classic indie rock band from the 90s, Jay Yarrow and Farhad Manjou. Jay, how about just for old time's sake, why don't you do the honors with the intro? Hello! No, do it again, I spoke over here. Okay.

Hello! It's the day and farad show reunion. I'm Dea Riro, executive editor at CBC. You are. I'm Farad Manjur, and we are back. Actually, we're not back. We're just doing a special. Well, you can't imagine, Jay, how many times I've been tempted to open with a hello,

but I figure that that's yours and everyone would know it and I can't. I'm not going to step on you. Oh, it's okay. I think I stole it from Henry Blodgett's Twitter bio. I think Henry Blodgett's Twitter bio. I didn't know that. I think it says, hello, I'm the CEO of Business Insider, something like that, which I always found, like, amusing that it said hello.

So I'm pretty sure that's where it was inspired by. Well, let's get this out of the way first. Wither the Jay and Farhad show. Is it dead dead? Is it just resting? What's going on? It's like resting. You know, you can't kill something that was never alive, right?

So what happened? So I, you know, I loved doing this show because it's just me and Jay talking. And Jay's fun to talk to and we didn't do any preparation. The problem is like scheduling is hard. Like we live on different coasts and we would always try to get someone else on. So then you have three people trying to get on. and like Jay's job got kind of busier and my job got busy for a while I don't know and we I have two kids so and no one's busier than someone with two kids as Jay knows I think um so we just like never found time and it

wasn't like no one's paying us for this um it's not affiliated with the times or Cmbc it's just like us talking so and then Jay um didn't want to pay for the SoundCloud account so that was well let's I mean it was more you kept like you were also also Farad was writing his book um yeah so that kind of took time away from doing it. And there was, you know, like I'm an executive editor of CNBC. Like, you know, when we started doing it, like, uh, yeah, exactly. Well, anyway, when we started doing it, Farre was a technology columnist and I was like a tech editor slash reporter and things that changed for both of us.

And it, but bottom line is it's not like, it was a hobby. It was and is a hobby for us. And so, you know, it came and went and like between like with Farahed doing his book, he could never make it to do the thing. And then, yeah, so that's just sort of how it went to the side. It's not like, it's not dead. It's just we, like, we've tried here and there and just hasn't worked out. Well, that does explain why the archives are offline.

But by the way, guys, I know a ton of free hosting, podcast hosting companies that you could throw that back up on. Yeah, but we'd have to, like, Google for that. No, you, you could ask Brian and Brian would tell you. Now, number one, also, by the way, you have tons of fans, the image. amount of times that people have mentioned your show in passing, you know, and just in conversation. Like, and I told you guys a million times on Twitter. Number one, the only thing that makes podcast work is having interesting people on, and people that have something interesting to say, so you guys had that. And then number two, the magic that you guys hit upon it a lot of people don't.

Wow. Is that, is that you can't have two hosts that generally agree most of the time. And so, like, I told you guys on Twitter, like, the best shows were when Mommy and Daddy would fight. Yeah. Because generally you guys came at most issues in slightly different directions. So it was great. I think we managed to do, I think like the key to all those kind of things is that you generally, you agree, you just make it seem like you don't agree. You just agree differently.

Right, right. We, you know, I mean, well, I guess that's not true. Far as like the most conventional thing I've ever encountered. So, yeah, maybe we don't always agree. But we certainly appeared that way. I also always, I would always get comments on Twitter that I sucked, which I guess I say that kind of hurt. But, you know, I don't disagree. I actually disagree.

You don't suck. I think that a lot of times I was just not paying attention to stuff I'm saying. And you were sort of like really caring, caring the show. You know, for that, I thank you. But, you know, the Twitter people, they could have a point. You may suck. I don't know. No, I wouldn't argue.

Like, it's very, very, very kind of you to say all that stuff. No, I just mean I was looking at Twitter while you were speaking. mean you, I'm a prime. So that's, but you know, it's funny that I get, we did get, like, we would get occasional tweets. We would get occasional inquiries. Hey, where's the podcast? And, and I did a podcast before this a long time ago. We did it at when that was business insiders, like Silicon Alley Insider. It was like with Dan Fromer and Nick Carlson. And we stopped doing that. And but we'd get comments. There's something about podcast that is like, it's obviously an intimate thing, you're speaking, you're in someone's ears. It's usually, you don't really listen to podcasts

with other people. It's just, you're usually solo. So it's very flattering when people ask, and it's very kind, because I stopped writing and nobody said, hey, only one person, Eric Jackson said, I wish you still wrote. Nobody's ever done that. But stop doing the podcast, and I get some of that. I get comments about it all the time. I mean, even when we were doing it, people would say they're fans of it. It's, it was sort of, like, I mean, I think it's the thing about podcast so you create this very intimate relationship with the hosts and um i i i feel that way about podcasts i listen to so i can i can imagine that it it hurts some people deeply to not hear me every week so well to try to give people a taste of the magic that they're missing um let's let's let's kick off

i'm going to ask you to pick your poison um apple or facebook or maybe even apple versus facebook what do you guys what do you guys wish that you had the podcast to talk about over the last week you too um i don't know you know how we used to do it was we like in the in the sort of end we used to just look at tech meme and see what was popular on tech meme that was we spend time making fun of tech meme right we just make but i love game and love tech meme but here's what here's about this here's the angle that i would say here's the angle i've been thinking about particularly after facebook what exactly is the scandal with facebook i know like everyone says they've been scandal played Can you, like Farahed, tell me, what's the scandal with Facebook that's happened this year?

Like, what's the thing? Not this year. Cambridge Analytica, which was like several years ago. What was the Cambridge Analytica story? It was giving friends of your friends, giving this research company access to basically all your data. Which happened how many years ago? Like five years ago and then they turned it off, right? right they turned it off although they didn't get the data back but so and then they and then um the other things uh what um the entire um russian influence operation although we don't really know i mean i think there's just sort of very little evidence that that sort of made a difference in the election but it obviously sort of added to this like social concern about facebook's power in the news and facebook sort of of like just the rise of misinformation and the spread of misinformation

and its role in the 2016 election. I think that was like the scandal, the main scandal of Facebook. Also there was, there's all the ad metrics stuff, you know, like basically fake numbers for in several different ways. The problem on the ad metrics thing is, to me,

I feel like advertisers and clients are, they have, have a way of measuring. I don't think most clients today are measuring just like impressions of an advertisement. Like they have an outcome. Like they kind of try to tie back to see as something happening on the other side of our marketing dollars, particularly for digital. So you don't think the numbers, I mean, that was the whole promise of digital media. Like we would know. And then the kind of the ad metric stuff at Facebook kind of undercut that whole argument. The other is all those discriminatory ad selling practices that

ProPublica pointed out, you know, like we want to block certain races or religions or advertised to, you know, Nazis or whatever. There's one of those. What else there's? Listen, just this week, I was the one that put me over the edge was the kids being able to spend their parents money playing Angry Birds on Facebook and they knew that and they designed it to be that way. Right.

Wait, what was it? I missed that one. This is why you should listen to the tech meme right home, Jay. Obviously. Yeah, long story short, they essentially kids were racking up like $5,000 playing games because you know you'd have these in-app purchases. The kids had no idea that the accounts were tied to their parents' credit card account. There's all these eternal documents that came out that allegedly Facebook knew about

this and called it friendly fraud, in quotes, and blah, blah, blah. I guess for me, another scandal is... copying or completely, yeah, just decimating Snapchat, copying stories, putting in all... That's a scandal? I mean, it's... I think it's unfair and monopolistic. Wait, but is your argument that there's no scandal? No, I mean, my argument is just like when you're coming into this earnings report and it's like,

you know, all this, like, Facebook has had this, like, huge negative perception hanging over it all year. and then I'm trying to think like if I zoom back and think about like okay as a user what am I really outraged about with Facebook like what is like what is it the addiction stuff like they they even published research Facebook did about how just like mindlessly scrolling on Facebook is like bad for your health in several ways um so there isn't that too it's bad for it's you know I think that there's like the people have free will they make that choice like it's like it's It's bad for your health. It's not cigarette bad for your house. I'm just saying that there's not like I. So, so yesterday they released earnings that suggests that people are still like really Facebook and advertisers about Facebook and like Facebook is doing really well. I guess I was like minimally surprised because they did have, especially in North America,

they'd had like flat numbers for several quarters. It looked like they were declining. They even sort of suggested that they would try to, that like, that like, they expected declining engagement. And so it was a little bit surprising, but I don't think it's, I mean, it's an addictive product.

It's not that surprising that people are. Yeah, I mean, I just think that, like, I'm just trying to think about the perspective of your average Facebook user.

What has Facebook done in the past three, six, or 12 months that would make you say, I got it, I can't do this anymore. I think the major story, they've, they, you know, it's the same story. Like, they have and continue to play fast and loose with people's private information,

and it's unclear how they house it. And, but, but the other thing about the Facebook privacy story is that, like, it never has seemed to affect, you know, people's willingness to use Facebook. Like, and so, like, maybe, again, we're seeing that that's happening. Like, this is just sort of the latest iteration of, like, Facebook's kind of loop of scandal where it's, like, privacy outrage. People keep using Facebook. Like the Cambridge Analytica thing was many years old.

What's like what's a privacy outrage in all the things you're listing? No, I mean, I think the Cambridge Analytica thing was many years old, but we learned about it and the scope of it more recently. I feel like that was that was the thing. Farhad mentioned fast and loose. What do you guys think about, you know, playing fast and loose with Apple's rules of the road in terms of using their certificates and things? things like that. I guess that didn't bother me that much. Not even, in fact, I'm kind of shifting gears a bit. Not does that bother

you as a user? But maybe I'm thinking more in terms of just the general Facebook attitude of, you know, we're invincible, we can do whatever we want. Like, even to the point of we're going to poke Apple in the eye. Yeah. I guess, I mean,

I think that it suggests something about their internal culture, which I think is like the right target here. They, they, they, I don't know if invincibility is the right word, but they just seem to have no kind of internal like barriers against doing things that might be good for their business. There's no like internal kind of stops or ethics or just like questions about like, how will

this look if the New York Times reported it in detail or like tech crunch in this case? I mean, I like, if I'm in the meeting, if I'm like Mark Zuckerberg or I'm Cheryl Sandberg, And, you know, one of my directs or whatever comes up and says, hey, we want to do some market research. And what our plan is is we're going to offer people 20 bucks a month. So, you know, not that much money, 240 bucks a year. And they're going to give us full access to their devices. And we say, okay, well, what's the age range we're looking at? And let's say, whatever it was 13 to 45 or whatever it was, we say, okay, well, on those teenage, we're going to make sure that they can sign off, right?

And like, we don't want to do anything untow. Yeah, no, no, of course. They're going to sign off. I'd be like, okay. Yeah, if people are willing to let for $20.40. Yeah, but isn't the problem here that they, like Apple didn't allow that? Like, that wasn't, I mean, it's sort of. But, like, okay, so, like, like, I don't know the specifics of why they decided to go the route they did.

And, like, I also, like, why does Apple get to decide whether or not, like, it's my phone. Well, that's the interesting thing, right. It's my phone. And I want to give any, if I, if someone's willing to pay me 20, $20. bucks a month to get every to just see what I'm doing in essence I give it to Apple for free so sure I'll give you 20 bucks there's two things here also like you know people have made the argument just today that like you know this shows actually the the scary power of Apple and and then the thing is the question that I have is so we're all assuming that Apple doesn't Apple has because it's the platform

like I said on yesterday's show you know Zuckerberg wanted his own Facebook phone so he could have this information. He never got it, so he tried to do an end round to get it. So how do we know we're all assuming that Apple doesn't do anything with this data, right? I don't know if we're assuming. I mean, I think Apple says that it doesn't do, it doesn't collect this sort of data. I think what I'm saying is that Apple gives off the impression that we're a neutral broker, we're the platform, we're in the hardware business.

We're not going to look at your business of your apps. That's just false. Like they have a huge problem perception-wise, which is like, Google pays them $9 billion a year to get the search box and everything you type in there goes to Google and whatever. And it also turned out that Google had a similar privacy infringing app. But like whatever sort of position, whatever kind of holy privacy position Apple is taking is totally undercut by its Google deal. And I feel like if it really wanted to kind of make this point that it's going to try to fight the. the internet advertising business,

try to reform the kind of privacy of that whole business, it should make Duck, Duck Go, the default search engine. Like, it should do something different about the search engine. It should change the way that it operates with companies like Facebook and Google,

you know, in all kinds of ways. Also, I suspect that one reason Facebook felt okay doing that is because, like, Apple may not, have been enforcing such rules, like obviously wasn't enforcing such rules. And like the culture of Apple with regard to what people can do on those, you know, side-loaded apps, maybe it wasn't clear. And maybe Apple, you know, was sort of winkingly okay with that kind of stuff. We don't know what the, what, like, what signs Apple gave Facebook that, you know, that would have been okay.

Jay, do you have any thoughts about Apple and peak smartphone and smartphone recession and that sort of thing? Uh, sure. Sounds like no. Here's what I would say on Apple. I mean, like, you know, Apple's an unbelievable business. Just an unbelievably great business. Like, and it's a bad, in its bad quarters, it's doing $84 billion in revenue or whatever. Uh, it's just an awesome, awesome business.

Uh, you know, they weren't going to sell iPhones forever. And they suffer, if you want to call it that, uh, by tough comparisons. And I think the Apple Watch is an amazing business. It doesn't get credit that it deserves for probably being an amazing business. Part of that is because Apple decided not to release unit numbers, so nobody knew, which allows Apple to have this market essentially to itself.

But at the same time, it doesn't probably get credit as a result of it. The thing that I would, I'm kind of, if you will, curious or the thing that I'm going to be watching and I'm interested to see how it goes is like Apple's whole like services narrative and obsession, I think that that could be dangerous for Apple. Why? Well, because in order to drive services, it's essentially an upselling business.

It's you bought this expensive phone. Now we want to upsell you into AppleCare and we want to upsell you into iCloud storage and we want to upsell you into Apple music and we want to like tack on a lot of stuff. and I think that that can, you know, it can be, it has some risk for a user to be like, gosh, why are they trying to constantly like ping me to upsell me on things? And I think that that's the risk there. No, well, what, so here's what I think. I mean, I've heard several people suggest this, so I don't know who to give credit to,

but there's this idea of flirting around sort of like Apple, the like Apple community, Apple fandom and some analysts that Apple would, you know, turn. would turn over its model into something like the Amazon Prime model where you'd pay, I don't know, like some hundreds, like a thousand or more dollars a year to get it, or, you know, every two years to get like a phone, um, access to their music and TV service. Oh, like Apple Prime. AppleCare. Yeah, you'd get the, you'd get the hardware and the services together. I think I floated this years ago on our podcast, but go ahead. Oh, okay. Maybe, maybe it's you. Probably. Um,

I think that's a good idea. That's like turning services into this like recurring subscription. And, you know, I think their long-term bet is on like rich people. They're going to be like continue to be rich people in the world. And like, you know, if you're a company betting on like inequality, you're doing going to do well. I think their huge problem is in China. Ben Thompson has written about this often. It's like they don't have a good kind of differentiator in China because like everyone uses WeChat.

and so you can move like we chat is sort of the um the you know the kind of the thing you think about when you use your phone and it's the difference between an android phone and an apple phone in that environment um you know is smaller that's that that's reasonable to me that makes sense i don't know exactly how apple solves that i you know they're smart about software maybe they can figure something out um maybe they just sort of continue to to decline in china but um but elsewhere i don't see their dominance sort of declining and like um their and also their hardware to me still seems much better than everyone else's like i don't i don't i i have been using the 10s max i guess it's called and i love it it's great cameras great big fan yeah i mean sure okay before before we go uh far hud

you had your piece this week about um the the woes in digital media extremely well written, which everyone said. What, extremely? Extremely? Listen, read it, Jay. I was just going to say. Even Henry. It was okay.

Henry Blodgett pointed out. Henry was just, Henry was saying that because he was about to slam you. So he was trying to like butter you up before he trashed you. So Henry did take umbrage with it. Um, so first, um, just, you know, recap sort of what you were trying to say in that piece. And then I imagine Jay maybe will be taking. Henry's role by proxy here. It just seems to me like a time of the, like the end of the kind of optimistic,

innovative boom time of digital media. And that's sad to me. We had this idea that, like, it's been good that in the last couple years, subscriptions are doing really well at the times, at some other publications. I won't even name them. And then there's a, a bunch of billionaires who are helping people, helping media, buying media, you know, Bezos and others. But I don't think that that's the model for like the world. I mean, not everyone can pay a lot.

Most people won't pay. And it's not going to, it doesn't seem to be making a dent in like local news. And there was this promise with BuzzFeed and a whole bunch of other companies that kind of grew up around the same time that took VC money that you could. build a thriving free media business kind of alongside social media. Social media would be the distribution and you could still make ad money doing it and you could support a newsroom of hundreds. And I think the BuzzFeed layouts really suggest the end of that kind of hope. Like BuzzFeed is still going to continue, but I think it'll be smaller, less innovative, less experimental. It's going to have a far fewer journalists. Like journalism is sort of like, you know, it's just like a branding thing

for them. It helps their brand. I don't think they're going to make a lot of money from it. And this to me is very sad. Maybe it's expected. Like I think that the thing Henry was saying was that, you know, we expand, the business expanded too quickly and like, it'll get smaller but not die. But even smaller and not dying is still bad. So, yeah. So I would say you're entitled to be sad. You can, yeah, I'm not going to stop you from being sad. But I think there's, there's just this over, like, not to be too much of a cliche, like local news is a legitimate problem that I don't think anyone has solved for or figured out. But I do think that my personal view on local news in terms of solving for local news is that you have one, maybe three, like, I mean, local,

local, like at your town level, you get like one to five, like, killer reporters who build like a newsletter that I think people in town would pay for and you could probably do well. I think that could work. Yeah, you know, like someone, like a great reporter who can sniff out information in your town and just like, like almost like the town gossip who knows everything. But, you know, whatever. Local state now state issues like covering like state government. I think that that's probably I'm not super smart on this, but it does seem like it's going to be a problem. It certainly seems like it. and but the other like to the bigger point i totally side with henry on this like look buzzfeed is a 300 million dollar on revenue business that's a great business that's a really good business now what's so what's the problem quote unquote for buzzfeed well they

raised money they raised a ton like 500 million yeah they raised like i don't know i think 500 million over the course of their lifespan or whatever and they raised it at like a $1.3 billion valuation, which means the people who invested, which is like the parent company of CNBC, NBC Universal, they invested at over a billion dollar valuation, I believe, which means they thought that would probably be worth $3 billion in like a 10-year span or five-year span, which is how that kind of investment usually works. And maybe it's not going to be worth $3 billion in the next two years or five years. that doesn't mean it's a bad business.

That doesn't mean that it's a bad company. It just means that it's not going to fulfill the expectations that were thrust upon it or that it thrust upon itself a few years ago. And maybe, you know, I don't know the inner workings of BuzzFeed, you know, but maybe they were hiring. They had this view of like, let's hire like crazy. We're okay burning cash because we're going to grow the top line. And eventually we're going to figure out a really great business and we're going to have

margin expansion, and that never happened, or that hasn't yet happened. And so now they're in a position where, like, okay, we've built a really good business, and now we need to figure out how to get profitable and be sustainable. And that means, like, you're going to have to make some hard choices and you're going to make some cuts in some journalistic parts of what you're doing. But that's sort of, like, natural. And that's how it happens in business. Like, you just can't just hire recklessly and expect everything to work out. Like, that's running a business. I think that's, I mean, I don't think that's exactly right. I don't think they hired it recklessly.

I think they had a view of the internet that suggested that they, that as the social web sort of recognized the quality of their content, that they would get higher ad rates than, like, user-generated content would. And that didn't really happen. Like, what happened is that... But that's okay. Like, the New York Times, like, to Henry's point, like, the New York Times, despite you being there, has been really flourishing lately.

And so is the Washington Post and they're profitable businesses. Politico is a profitable business. Axios is a great example. Here's another great example. Axios launched. They say, no, you know, we have to take their word for it because they're private. Axios is not making money. Axios did $25 million in revenue in its second year and lost $56,000.

If Axios wanted to make turn a profit, it would do it tomorrow. It would just either like let one person go, sorry to whoever you are. or it would just hire one less person this year. Like, it could make money. Now, are you looking for it? Like, this gets into something I've been thinking about a lot is how Facebook just totally, I think Facebook scrambled everyone's brains. Like, Facebook was this just, like, Google was an unbelievable business,

like a magic money machine. Literally, people go into Google and ask for things to buy. And so the ads are served to them. It's just unbelievable, huge cash. like a cash machine, just this unbelievable business. And if Facebook, if Google existed alone, everyone would be like, well, that's Google. They're just freaks in nature. There's one of them. But then Facebook came along and Facebook did it. And so then what happened was everyone's like, oh my God, like these aren't, Google wasn't a freak in nature. There's more than one

Google. So it was like Facebook. So then all these like expectations were heaped upon Twitter and Pinterest and everyone else because it was like, well, Facebook proved there's got to be more than one, so there's probably five of them out there. And then it turns out there's probably only two. And, you know, some of this happened in media, too, where it's like, you're like, oh, Axios, they're not making money. It's like, okay, like, is Axios going to be a $100 billion company that's like doing a 50% margin? Probably not. Like, what's the natural margin on that business? I don't know. Like, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 30%. What's the natural size for the revenue? But also, too. They're in near two. Like, maybe it's $100 million. Maybe it's $100 million. Maybe it's

50 million, but let's say you built a media business that generated 50 million in revenue and you were able to pocket 10 to 20 million dollars. Would you be happy with that? Like if you built that business and you worked at that company and you're doing high quality journalism? Like yeah. Not to not to pimp my own stuff, but like this is what I was talking about last weekend with Rafat Ali. This whole concept of it's not just that, you know, everyone, can we do another Google? Can we do another Facebook? It was also that I think that VCs and everybody else thought that you could you could have a media business that could achieve the scale of a Facebook where you could have a publication that was read by a billion people every single day. And that's sort of what

the dream that like the BuzzFeeds of the world sold people on. And that's the thing that seems to have been ephemeral. Right. I think that Axios might do well in the same way that Politico did well, which is like it's it's it's a they were founded by the same people. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's sort of a niche publication for a group, you know, for some types of readers, media junkies, Xios's case. Well, Axios would say political and business leaders. All right. Yeah, whatever.

Okay. I like Axios. I like Xios. But I don't think that it's an example of what I think BuzzVeed was trying to go for and what I think we're missing, which is like some newsroom, some digital newsroom on the scale of like the New York Times or the Washington Post that can be sustainable on advertising. Like a thing that serves like the country or the world or Europe or something. I don't think we're seeing that.

What we're seeing is like the New York Times kind of surviving, the Washington Post surviving, and then like, you know. Yeah, but so like what, like that's like who says there have a thousand different companies? Like it wasn't like, you know, it's like there was BuzzFeed, there was Box, there's Huffington Post, there's Business Insider. Like that's four. Like, you know, how many do you think? How many do you? News is a commodity. like it's a commodity business right yeah i mean so why should there be a ton of those you're not

you're not you're you're not like this you're just you're saying it's going to be smaller uh and i should be okay with that i'm just saying like i'm not okay with that i thought that we were going to have i thought the internet was going to give us um i thought that it the sort of dream of the last few years was that we would have, you know, perhaps like a thriving news industry, like the gloom of the end of, like, newspapers. We do have a thriving news industry, though. Like, we have a thriving news industry, we have a thriving news industry built on business models that are, you know,

pretty shaky and dependent on platforms to kind of, for like... Every business is shaky. Like, we just, like... Apple's isn't, Google's isn't. You just said it, right? Apple just lost $300 billion in market. cap in the past three months. Oh, but you that you fit their business. Okay. So, so, so it's not hard. Go ask Tim Cook if he thinks that people out there just like take their hats off to Apple and don't

have criticism of it and don't think it's a shaky business. Like every business has haters and critics and like in the media business is the same thing. And like there was this weird like entitlement feeling, I guess in the media business that everything should work and everything will be fine. Like, you know, these are, like, the New York Times is a good business. It is. It's not like, you know, it's not Facebook and it's not Google and it's not making iPhones. So, but guess what? Those are three of the greatest businesses in the world.

So maybe don't compare yourself to them. Like, it's all about, to me, managing costs and managing expectations. Like, manage your costs, manage how big you think you're really going to be and be okay and understand that and be okay with it. Right. I don't think we're disagree. Do you think that journalism is, like, bad right now? I think journalism is great right now.

In general, I think that journalism is great right now, but it'll be, it's going to be worse after the layoffs of last week. It's going to be worse after when there's a recession. Like, it's going to, like, we're in good times economically, and we're having layoffs in digital media. I think that there's... There's layoffs in everything. Like, every industry goes through turn.

Like, there's layoffs in all kinds of business. I'm not suggesting that this is like that this should be some easy churn-free business. There's always been churn in this business. But I think, you know, I think winter is coming. I think it's going to be get worse. Okay. Guys, that's what I wanted. As the biggest Jay and Farhad stand may be out there, that's that old time rock and roll.

Thank you guys both for coming on the show. If we ever do this again, we'll have to do it at a time when I have more time to just let you guys go. Yeah, we didn't even get to talk about our favorite topic, which is Tesla. Oh, no, I thought that was Twitter. Yeah, I thought Twitter was our favorite topic. I feel like we talked about Tesla basically every week. Yeah, well, Tesla's interesting.

I mean, but you've quit Twitter, which is crazy. It's your whole identity. You must feel lost without it. I feel okay. It is my identity, though, but I'm okay. Your whole identity is everything you were. Now you're just a guy. You're just a guy writing for the New York Times.

There's like a million of you. Thank you.