Tech Brew Ride Home - Jay and Farhad Show Reunion Part II

Episode Date: May 18, 2019

You know them, you love them, Jay Yarrow of CNBC, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times. It’s another Jay and Farhad Show Reunion! Today’s topics: Uber’s IPO, the Streaming Wars, and Game of Thrones! These are my favorite episodes. I just hit record, and we thumb wrestle each other to get in a hot take. :) Sponsors: Capterra.com/ride Sonic.com/ride 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 episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home, this time a weekend bonus episode. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. You know them, you love them.

Jay Yarrow of CNBC Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times. It's another Jay and Farhad Show reunion. Today's topics, Uber's IPO, the Streaming Wars, and Game of Thrones. These are my favorite episodes to do. I just hit record, and we thumb-wrestle each other to get in our hot takes. please enjoy Hey Jay you want to do the the intro honors

oh sure are we recording yeah consider us recording usually start recording first we're recording you're recording okay yeah hello

it's the Jay and Farad show but not really I'm Jay Yarrow executive at CNBC and you are I'm Farhad Manjew columnist at the New York Times and we're actually on tech meme

so our guest is actually our host That's right I'm Brian ostensibly the host but, you know, I'll sit in the back seat and just point the mic at you guys. Well, don't sit in the back seat because we haven't done this in a while, and I just don't read as much tech news as I used to, so I don't know anything that's happening. Right, which, by the way, I'm going to queue up...

Your pottery career? Pottery career. Wait, wait, I'm going to queue up the first question, actually, for Jay, but, so am I not supposed to Farhad refer to you as the New York Times technology columnist anymore? Yeah, I'm not the New York Times technology columnist anymore? Yeah, I'm not the New York Times technology columnist. I mean, I am, I write, I'm a columnist who writes about technology sometimes at the New York Times. Your technology columnist emeritus or something.

Yeah, exactly. My official title is opinion columnist. That's it. All right, I am teeing this one up for Jay primarily because since Jay has the, closer to the Wall Street angle than either of us for HUD. He just works at CNBC. He's not like a traitor. That makes him closer. Little do you know. Little do you know.

So Jay, I love your take on the Uber IPO stuff. Oh, what's his take? I don't even know. Well, that's what I'm asking. No, he's saying he would love to get it. Oh, he would love. Oh, because I have, and do you have a particularly salty take? Let's hear it. No, um, so

I guess, uh, what I would say on Uber. So I tweeted this before they went public. What I said is what is the bull case for Uber? And you look at Uber and you have a company that's core business has dramatically slowed in terms of growth and still has a fierce competitor in Lyft, which also just went public. You know, if you look at, so the Uber argument is, well, we're this huge platform company. And we're not just ride share, but we're sort of this marketplace for connecting drivers to different services. services. So we have the ride share business, but fierce competition with Lyft. Well, we have the food

delivery business. Well, you know, you have delivery competitors all over the place with Grubhub and DoorDash. And, you know, just this morning, Amazon invested in the UK company Deliveroo, which does the same thing. So you have fierce competitors there. Well, we're a self-driving car. We're going to be, we have a leg up in autonomy because we have all this data on driving. And in fact, what Uber might argue would be everyone else has to go full driverless, but we can do, we understand the quickest route. So we can do 1% driverless. But they're competing with Tesla, which may not be a heavy competition, but they're competing with Tesla. They're competing with Waymo. They're competing with like GM in driverless. And they don't really have a significant

competitive advantage in that space. And they also say, well, we're also making inroads and trucking. We're doing essentially what we do with Uber for ride shares of trucking. Well, you know, Amazon has for the past year quietly been doing the exact same thing, like kind of disrupting the trucking space. So you go down the line, and I don't see any business that they have a core advantage of, and they are competing against. You're also doing, you're forgetting their main new pitch, which is that they're this kind of urban mobility company,

and they offer you all kinds of different ways of getting around a city, including, you know, cars, car sharing, but also scooters. scooters and I don't know a whole bunch of other things and they connect you to transit but yeah that's the other thing that's sort of their new they're not just a car sharing company they're your city mobility company yeah I'm okay so so look they're there the wait what is what it what is the response I I mean I feel like your take is what a lot of people think, and it seems like apparent after their IPO, that's what a lot of people think. I'm still wondering what the bulk case for them is, because I think you're right. They're competitive in every,

they have a strong competitor in every category. The weird thing is that some of their competitors are funded by some of their founders, funders, so SoftBank, Funding, DoorDash. I think several of their funders are both Lyft and Uber investors. Well, I was going to say, especially in like Asia and like South America, like SoftBank and Masasana. That was one of the things in that New York Times piece is that that's one of the problems is that he's funded all of their competition and all of the non-North American European markets. Right.

Right. So someone has argued to me, so I threw that out on Twitter and somebody came back with, and this is sort of a backhanded compliment, but the bull case for Uber is akin to Yahoo when they had the Alibaba steak, is that Uber has like this huge stake in like Didi, was it, D.D. Schwanger, I forget how I don't know how you pronounce it, but they have some, they have stakes in international Ubers and that those like companies will also get big and that that that'll be kind of helping to grow their value. I mean, look, I think, so what would Uber say, Uber's argument be we have, we're this huge platform company and we have a lot of huge markets that

we can grow into. But I just, I think that, you know, I think they're losing a lot of money with no clear path to profitability and then you go down the line of that competition. They haven't in a way that really can make you feel comfortable as an investor. They haven't really ejected away from the competition. They haven't really built away, like reached escape velocity, I guess you'd say, from the competition. Now, they would say we're so far ahead of Lyft that is not close. And maybe that's true. But I think Lyft is just enough of a problem to kind of hold them back from owning the space. And so, yeah, I think that it's a company that just loses a ton of money,

no clear path to profitability, which, you know, losing money in and of itself isn't problematic for investors, even on the public markets. I think it's having a, but you have to have a strong top line growth story, and you have to have a story about market domination that the public can believe in. And just look at Tesla, which I think like Tesla is down, like 40, I don't know if it's 43% this year or if it's just 40% from its highs, but Tesla has significantly cratered post-Model 3 because they've struggled to make the model 3 and the story on Tesla is broken, right? The story on Tesla was, we're going to dominate

the marketplace. We're going to take over all electrics and we're going to sell this cheap car and we're going to run away with the marketplace. They aren't running away with the marketplace and they seem to have operational problems. Similarly with Uber, it's the same kind of thing. If Uber has a story to tell about growth, like a viable, believable story about growth, then you endure the losses because you believe in the long, long term, it's going to work out. I think that the problem for Uber is that they both don't have a short term story or a long term story. Like, their short term story is the problem is that they have fierce competition. And I think Lyft is a big competitor in, you know, because one thing about Lyft is it's smaller overall in terms of market share. But in key cities, New York, San Francisco, I think Lyft is like half of the market. And so in key cities, it's enough of competition that Uber can't raise prices or can't, you know, change compensation to drivers in a way that will significantly improve its profitability in those markets.

And then, you know, as long as kind of Lyft has money and the ability to do that, that's great. That is difficult for Uber. So it can't tell the short-term story of domination. And then the long-term story is just very, very difficult. Like, the reason that people invested in Amazon forever and Amazon was losing money is because they were clearly growing and they would own all. You know, there was a plausible argument you could make that they would own all of e-commerce and then possibly own commerce generally or get a big enough slice of commerce.

And that was even before AWS. You don't really have that story with Uber. In the long run, because of some. self-driving because of all the competition from, you know, all the other car-sharing companies, but also just competition from car manufacturers, just kind of the slowness of the auto market, the difficulty of imagining huge change there. I think that it's very hard to kind of picture Uber as being, you know, the Amazon of transportation in the way Amazon, who's the Amazon of retail.

Well, Jay talked about like busted narratives, and that's kind of in a larger sense what I'm curious about in the sense that like, I can't remember who it was, maybe Dan Pramack or somebody on Twitter last week said, the ultimate bullcase for Uber is you look at Facebook, you look at Google, you look at all of these other big companies, these oligarchs in tech, and they have half a trillion dollar market caps at least. And so the ultimate bull case for Uber is it's got what, a 50? billion dollar market cap, and so 10x that, right? And Uber's whole narrative was that it was continuing this sort of trajectory of there was Google, then Facebook, and like this is, Uber was the shining light of this generation. And like, you know, I don't know if it has to do with like the change to growth investing in VC or whatever, but like, you know, Pinterest just had its first earnings and they were really terrible in the stocks down. Like, what if, what if all of these unicorns become like zombie stocks? Remember when Groupon was like the fastest growing company?

Groupon's still around, but there are zombie stock, right? So like what happens if this entire generation turns out to be zombies? I mean, I think that's looking at it the wrong way, I guess. The reason that Pinterest is having trouble is because the advertising business is tough and it's competing with, you know, Google and Facebook. and you could tell that story about, you could tell a similar, I mean, that's like the,

the reason that Uber is having trouble is sort of, we went over that. I think you could tell a very good, like you can make a case for all of these companies having trouble individually and not as a group, I guess. People had lots of doubts about the Facebook IPO, and, you know, for lots of months. And then Facebook figured out its mobile strategy,

both like to get both the actual app and then advertising on mobile. And because it was enormously successful on both those things, the Facebook IPO was resurrected and it did really well. I feel like Slack's going to go public soon. And Slack has possibly a better story to tell. I actually didn't look at their numbers, so I don't know. And may be completely wrong here.

But I have the sense that Slack is moving on in the enterprise and has a plausible story to, to tell about its future and it's making money. And I don't think that, you know, just because it's going to go public at the same time as all these other companies, that you can sort of write it off, for example, it's in a different space. It's an enterprise company. We work, on the other hand, is like a completely different story. And it's losing money and nobody knows how it's going to make money and it looks weird.

So I think you can sort of point to these problems that the different companies have without this. I mean, I think some of them may turn into the next coupon. Maybe Uber will. But yeah, I don't know if there's like a whole crop of them. Yeah. And I just to go back to what you're saying, I mean, first of all, like the reason that Facebook and Google are worth $500 billion is that they like are cash flow machines. They're highly profitable. they are in, they like monopolize large growing markets, which is digital advertising,

and they've been there for, I guess, what you would call like a secular change, right? And if Uber was in a, if there was a true secular change in how we transport ourselves, and Uber was able to participate and capture the vast majority of that upside, then the stock would take off. But first of all, you know, it's been like, what, a week it's been trading? So, you know, and to what, like, far I talked about, like, Facebook looks pretty busted. It was a busted IPO and looked really bad in the beginning and eventually obviously turned around and has been a smashing success. People forget that that happened to Google, too.

I can't remember what it was, what the numbers were. What was it? Like a Dutch auction? They had a weird IPO. And people didn't believe in that. So, so first of all, like, it's still early days. second of all, you were saying something along the lines of like what happens if these are zombie stocks. Like, you know, Quora apparently is a $2 billion company, a $20 million in revenue.

And that happened just the other day. So, you know, part of me wants to be like our investors getting freaked out when they see what happens on the public markets with some of these companies. But like, also I think Pinterest is up post-IPO. But then the other part of me is like, well, core is getting a $2 billion valuation. And I think there was a report that DoorDash wants to raise at a $12 billion valuation. And I think like, I think Farhead's column was slightly over the top, but not totally about how Uber is a stain on Silicon Valley. I would say, you know, the main thing that I took away from what Farad wrote there was, you know, ultimately, well, what I would say is that ultimately for all the hand-wringing and all the quote-unquote and all the bad behavior

and everything that happened, if you were to ask any of these investors, if you could do it all over again, would you do it? I bet every single one of them would say, of course I would do it. And you had the day before the IPO, all these articles from places like CNBC and the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere talking about this person had a $10,000 stake and now he's worth $100 million. This person put $100,000 and that's worth $2 billion and all that kind of stuff. Although I think the Saudis and SoftBank have lost money on Uber. Yeah, the late, right, the late, like the last money in is always going to be. Which was cumulatively the majority of the money, apparently, but maybe they're back in.

I mean, the Bill Gurley, who's on the board of Uber, and I think Bill Gurley was frustrated that they hadn't gotten public earlier. He's written, like, blog posts, like, sub-tweeting, basically, like, you know, if you're the late money coming in. Like, he wrote basically saying, like, if you're the last money coming in on this, you're going to look like a dope. and they did. But, you know, so is it, what's the knock on effect? I don't think there is going to be a knock on effect. If you just look at like valuations, you could argue valuations should probably come down, but then like we work is going to try and go public and we'll see what happens with that. Like I think these investors, they look, they don't look at, no one's looking at post IPO what happened. They're looking at what happened to the IPO and funding in Silicon Valley and funding startups.

And, you know, there's, we're focusing on. negative story like Uber, Beyond Meat has taken off, you know? Like there are positive stories out there that are. You think Beyond Meets is a tech company? I don't think so, but it's funded by the Silicon Valley investors, right? So I think that it's funny. There's heavy debates inside TechMeme about is we work a tech company. Like if you'll notice TechMeme rarely covers WeWork because the consensus is it's just stupid real estate, right? But it's just funded by the same people. Pinterest is up significantly from its IPO.

It's down after its first earnings report today, but I'm looking at our chart. I started around 19 bucks, and it's up to 26. I'm not sure where Pinterest priced, but Pinterest is up well. What about Pager duty? That's another one that everyone talked about. Pager duty, let's take a look at a Pager duty,

since it went public. Kind of flattish, but up overall from the IPO pricing. It was up significantly for a while and kind of came back, but I think PagerDuty's up from its pricing. Did Zoom go out already? I can't remember. Yeah, Zoom went out. Zoom was a huge success.

Right, yeah. Zoom today is up 7% for some reason. Yeah, Zoom, again, I don't know what the pricing was. Like the first day of trading, I think it was around 82, and it's now at 90. One thing I wonder about is whether, you know, Uber took very long to go public. Facebook did too. That was kind of the Facebook was kind of the start of that trend, companies take longer and longer to go public. I wonder if after the Uber IPO, if there will be

some shortening of that time? That's kind of what I was asking. Yeah, in a weird way. Yeah. Because I mean, I think every company, like, so a lot of people argue Snapchat went public too early, right? Like Snapchat has, it has been below, priced at $17 a share, and I think it trades around 10, right now, and it has gotten as low as five. And the criticism, so it's 1153 for Snap. The criticism on Snap was that they went out too early. They weren't ready to go public. So, you know, I think I mean, I think Uber could have made the, if Uber went public

two years ago, four years ago, like, obviously without Travis didn't have that kind of Travis baggage, but, you know, had Dara, a CEO then, it would have been in high growth. you could have made a more plausible story about like eating up the competition probably may have ended up at the same place but you know snap I think I also think yeah but who knows I mean it's a 70 billion dollar company right now for all the like negativity we're ringing about it was a bad IPO in terms like it's a bad IPO for the people the institutional investors who were sold it I guess you could argue for the Saudi folks a real tragedy that they may not make as much money as they had hoped for some employees, you know, in terms of option pricing, that's, that's tough. But,

you know, you're not supposed to be, you know, you're supposed to hold these for a while. Like, that's what they're hoping for. And so I think Uber was hurt by Lyft getting out in front of them. Like, the fact that Lyft did so poorly on the markets made it much harder for Uber. And let's also not forget that Uber went public. Like, so Lyft was bad and then Uber followed. And the narrative isn't that much stronger for Lyft for Uber that was for narrative for Lyft. And then the day of trading was the week that Donald Trump decided to fully engage the China trade war. And that hasn't really hurt the market as much as you would think. But it wasn't great.

It wasn't great the day that you're going public and you're starting on that. So there are other market conditions outside of that that also impact Uber a little bit. Let's try to hit one other topic before we go. and I'm going to pick the streaming wars because if I remember correctly, you guys talked a lot about Netflix back in the day on your show. But I even think your show, I remember listening maybe when you guys were bemoaning whether or not ESPN would ever do like a streaming app or something like that. So actually the other weekend episode that I'm going to pair with you guys this weekend is with Eric Jackson to talk about streaming stuff. And like, he's really, really bullish on like Disney Plus and stuff like that. So I don't even have a question other than, I guess, kind of broadly again,

like what's your take on the streaming situation? Disney Plus, Apple Plus, everybody. My comment here is going to be from the point of view of a consumer, which is there are way too many services, and there are obviously more coming. And I foresee myself ending up paying much more than I used to pay for cable. And it's going to, there's going to, like, I don't know, I think that people are going to, people are going to get, sign up for this stuff, forget that they're subscribing, and that's going to be one big problem.

And another is these services are going to have a lot of churn. I think, you know, I get a lot of value from Netflix, and I feel like I can wait for, I can handle Netflix raising its prices, and I'll probably stick with it. Google TV or YouTube TV recently raised its prices, and I seriously debated about whether to keep it. Are you one of those people that like that? Because there's some people that swear by YouTube TV. I've never tried it.

I mean, I think it's great when I want to watch for like one time every year when I want to watch sports. But other than that, it's, I barely watch broadcast TV. And so it's a lot of money. It's like $50 a month now. But the great thing about it is you can cancel it when you don't want it, so pretty easily. So I've been sort of doing that. So there's a lot of churn for me on there. I mean, I subscribe to a lot of things, and I feel like probably too many because I barely use them.

Netflix and Spotify and Amazon Prime are the main ones. And I feel like for a lot of people, we're going to have that where you have like two or three that you definitely have to subscribe to. and I suspect there will be kind of turn and I don't know less fidelity to all the others. Perhaps Disney may be the exception, but I can't even see that. Like my kids are pretty big Disney fans, but I don't know. I don't imagine that there'll be enough Disney content that I will jump, that I will put it ahead of, for example, Netflix. I'm in my kind of decisions about what to subscribe to or not. Yeah, I guess I come at it from a few angles.

Like I think about it from the business side of like how are you like trying to position your business? And I also think about it from the consumer side. It's like I don't know. You're asking a very broad question. So I'm not exactly sure how to answer it, I guess. But what I would say is I think there's we're going to have a lot of different services. And on each service, you're going to. to have, consumers will be making their a discrete set of decisions.

Okay, all right, that's that's Mambo Jumbo. So let me give you a specific question. How much is everybody in this game because they feel like strategically they have to be? Because I think everyone intuitively knows we're not going to sign up for 10 different subscriptions. So like if you're a, if you're an AT&T or, you know, NBC Universal, I don't I don't know if you could, but the, like, is everyone just afraid, well, we have to have a distribution platform or we lose control of our? Oh, yeah. I mean, right, there's no, there's no not doing it.

Like, if you're Disney, you can't not do it. If you're, if you run a major sort of content company now, you can't not have a subscription service. The question is whether to, you can't not, you can't not have some kind of subscription business. The question is whether to, you know, give your content to Netflix and do it that way, or have your own. I think that you sort of have to have that conversation

and perhaps have your own streaming service. The ones that really, I think, are, dodgy ones are things like that, what is it, Qibi? Quibi, oh, God, yeah, I did a segment on that yesterday. Yeah, so the Katzenberg, Meg Whitman one, for TV, or I guess it's that's like short. They don't even want you to watch it on your TV.

It's for phones, right? Yeah, it's sort of short video content. That seems really difficult to me. Or there's the one for podcasts, Luminary. That has so many different problems. Like, one, I feel like it's a bad deal for even podcasters, right? For people to sign up to Illuminary or sort of breaking up the market, you kind of creating your own bespoke thing.

Those seem more. Yeah, that would be another 20-minute conversation. I did a lot of that two weeks ago. But wait, neither of you guys are bullish on Disney at all. Like, because to me... I'm bullish. So I calculated this one time, and there are two companies that I spend most of my disposable cash on.

One is Amazon, and the other is Disney. What about Apple? I don't buy that much from Apple. I mean, I buy... If they put out a new IMac that's got a big screen, you're going to buy it. Yeah, but once every three years. I bet if you... Amoratize it.

Yeah. I may spend a lot of money at Disney. Where? In what capacity? Like vacations. Like Disneyland. You've gone multiple vacations in Disneyland? Well, you grew up not that far from...

By the way, Farhad, listen, guess what if... So Disney has Disney Plus coming out. They've got Hulu, they've got ESPN. They're going to bundle that together, right? What if all of a sudden there's a Disney Plus Prime? And then you get certain discards... for every time you go to the theme parks, if you take a cruise, if you get like early tickets to the Lion King on Broadway, like, there's a whole subscription play here where like you can fully join the Disney brand and family forever. Yeah, I suspect it will be very expensive. I mean, that's the kind of the Disney way, right? So I, we don't know any pricing on the Disney streaming service.

Yes, we do. Yes, we do. They came in really, really low seven bucks a month, which, which that's one of the reasons why people are, like, well, Apple hasn't announced their prices yet. I will put my money on, I will probably purchase and sort of bet on the Disney service before the Apple service. The Disney service makes more sense. $7 seems reasonable to me. So I guess I'm not unbullish on it. I'm not bearish on it.

But it seems sort of, like, it seems difficult to imagine that. eclipsing Netflix. I feel they did this for, because of all the evidence from Netflix that this is going to be. Yeah, I don't think that that's the narrative here. You know, you guys are going to come out tomorrow, Saturday, and the Eric Jackson one's going to come out on Sunday. You should listen to the Eric Jackson one. It's not, they're not trying to make a Netflix killer. I can't believe you're characterizing me as bearish or bullish.

I don't even think I've said anything. So that's interesting. Oh, I was responding specifically to Farhud, I guess. Yeah, you paint a wide brush. Very broad. But we're the same, you and not. Not really. Look, I think, like, so there's, like, one, I think you were asking, is this offense or is it defense for these companies?

I think for each, like, for a bunch of companies, there's different views on it. Like, I think it's a little bit of both, but it's mostly offense for most of these companies. Like Warner Media, it's, like, to me, it seems all offense. Yeah. not you know it's all offense there and for disney i think it's i think it's mostly offense but it's offense that was coming from a place of defense uh if that makes sense and i think i'm like i would say i'm fairly bullish on disney like we have i have a four-year-old and now a two and a half-month uh old and i think about like going forward when like my son you know he's very scared but of movies

So, like, we tried watching Finding Nemo in his defense. A little scary in the beginning. I'm not going to spoil it, but there is death right off the bat. So, you know, but I personally look forward to, like, I can't wait until he's older and she's older, and we can all watch, like, Disney and Pixar movies together, and either I'm going to pay $18 for them or go to a garage sale and trying to find a bucket of DVDs for a dollar, or I could subscribe to this service. And I think that, you know, I'll subscribe to it.

Now, is that enough to keep you around for a long time? Well, they have a long runway to build more and more content into it. And then they also own, don't forget, they own Hulu now. And Hulu is growing faster in North America than Netflix, which, you know, is what it is. That's because they're coming off a smaller base. But, you know, I think Hulu is getting, has been very, very, like, like the show, Handmaid's Tale, right? That drove a ton of sign-up.

And Hulu plays in the ad-supported side of it as well. I think Hulu's strategy is great overall. So I think Hulu as a service is great, both for the originals and because it's an easy way to get TV shows, especially TV shows that are sort of like hard to find elsewhere. And the ad-supported thing is interesting and unusual in the market. But you also still have to pay, right? For a lot of that. You still have to pay, but it's significantly cheaper than Netflix, and you just have to sit through the ads for it.

And look at what Roku is doing. Like, that's a whole other side of this that's exploding. And NBC Universal's view is like to do an ad-supported service as well under the idea that like consumers are willing to sit through a light ad load because they think it's a fair tradeoff as opposed to paying a monthly fee. I mean, we never talked about this. But we should talk about, I mean, I feel like the real question in this whole business is how Apple will do. And they're both late and spending a lot of money and not really in this business.

I think the interesting question will be if anyone is moved to subscribe to their thing that we don't know anything about that's coming out later this year. I don't see how. I don't know why they're doing it. I don't know why they're doing it. And I don't see how at this point they can charge a dime. Well, they're going to. They want to, but that's one of the things. Like when Disney announced it was going to be $7 a month, it's like, well, but you get all of the, you get all the Simpsons ever.

Forget all the Star Wars. Forget all the Marvel. And so you're going to, there's no way that Apple can come in above $7 a month now, right? And even there, what are you, you're paying for these new shows that maybe you do or don't? want to watch like it's the HBO proposition without any of the HBO like Halo right yeah um I mean it'd be great if they just bought HBO for example uh but they should have bought Netflix yeah I mean everyone should have bought Netflix um not so much you just don't you know like would they have bought like would they have bought Netflix and invested in and and done the right

for shows, would it have worked? You just never know. And I think, like, you know, Hulu is an amazing story in just in terms of it was built by these incumbents as a hedge against YouTube. And then it wound up being a hedge against Netflix. And, you know, now Disney's going to outright control it, but it has figured out a formula and it's growing.

Is YouTube, do we know anything about Hulu's financials? I mean, do you make money? Is it? Oh, okay. It loses money. It was, we knew the financials because all of those companies that were investors in it were public companies. And so, like, in their, like, filings, they would reveal what was going on with Hulu. And it wasn't, it was the same kind of financial story as Netflix, basically.

Right. You know, I'm just going to put in another plug. I love Spotify. I think Spotify is great. And it's the... A plug. Wait. I didn't know the...

you own Spotify. Yeah, I run Spotify. No, I feel like more than any other app or subscription service, Spotify is the most, it's just the best run. I mean, Netflix does well as well. Wow, huge slap in the face to New York Times management of all the great subscription services out there. The one subscription services out there.

The place that you should subscribe to is the New York Times. than that, please, I feel like Spotify is really good at investing in the app, investing in making, you know, in improving the service. And like, it sort of works with everything. It's great. It's like, it's like a model for what subscription services should be. And I think that people don't talk about how good it is enough, often enough. I have no financial interest in Spotify. I just hope they survive because, um, You know, they're obviously competing with the platform companies, and I wish them well. Well, if you do resurrect the Jay and Farhood show, I will come on and tell you about Spotify's moves into podcasting and Luminary and all that good stuff.

But real quick, let's close with this, which is my Thrones question, which is not, do you like what's happening? I'm more curious, do you have a take on everyone suddenly having a take, and everyone suddenly being a script doctor? and like everyone, like, it's just fascinating in real time to watch everyone, like, all the sudden give a complete and total s about this show, even people that, like, didn't even care before, all of a sudden people are pissed. Well, wait, why? So I, it's a, it's a huge show. It's being watched by a lot of people.

It's like, and that's rare in this culture? It's rare that you have- It's rare anymore, for sure, yeah. Yeah. So I think that's, that's, that's, there's a feeling of together. And also, this season has been really, I mean, it's the final season. So people are going to comment on it. It's the end of a long story that people have been invested in for almost a decade or longer

if you started reading the books in like the 80s or whatever. Maybe what I'm asking is, that that's what feels odd to me is that everyone is unified almost in the sense that like everyone feels like you guys are screwing this up. Well, but they are screwing it up. And it's sort of obvious that they're- I agree with you. I mean, they're, and I think they're screwing it up for very, when I can tell, very, like, selfish reasons. The thing that they're screwing it up with is that they wanted fewer episodes in this and the last season. And the main problems that I see with the story could have been cleared up with more episodes.

Like, it's just, it's mostly a problem of kind of pacing rather than direction. And I feel like if there had been, you know, more time to go over some of the huge things that happened in this season, like just, more episodes, more time on them, you would have had just overall a better and more plausible story. But they wanted to go off and make the next Star Wars. And so that's what they're doing. Which to me is like that whole thing, you know, it's bizarre. And it's almost, I wonder if it's because HBO is a subscription service. Like if this was an ad-supported TV show.

That's interesting. Yeah. Because when you think about it, like the incentives, like I thought about that, like, it just should like it should be more episodes like there's no reason for it to be ending this year and it didn't have to be like even if you don't do three seasons what if you just did two more episodes this season and two more episodes last season you already had everyone out in northern island and and Croatian all these places and like if i'm if i'm you know oh they want to go make star wars whatever like go pay them more like that you know you can solve this very

easily with enough cash and uh and i wonder if it was ad supported if it's an easier economic decision to up the cash and keep them around because it's like it would be such a phenomenon like how much does a another season of Game of Thrones like I'm not sure does another season of Game of Thrones incrementally

add subscribers to HBO or are all the Game of Thrones subscriber everyone that wants to watch Game of Thrones have they already subscribed so what is the economic calculation but like 100% this show this show like in last season I thought there were episodes that dragged and even the beginning of the season like the

first two, you're like, come on, get on with it. Obviously, there is character exploration that should have been done and all that kind of stuff. I mean, you're saying, you know, going back to the start of this, why is everyone suddenly kind of consensus, has reached consensus on criticism of this show? I think, you know, it's not fun to everyone have conventional takes and everyone kind of congeal around one point of view, but I don't think that it's per se wrong. I think there's a little bit of, you know, it's set a high standard. There's a ton of adoration. there's a ton of affection for it. And so just like Apple gets criticized for really minor stuff,

and it's because they hold themselves a high standard. And so do the people who kind of love them and hate them will create that. Like anything that becomes this big and popular is going to become a lightning rod in that capacity. But I don't see anything that's radically off base in terms of the criticism. And I think there's a certain extent, too, to which the show really did change. after they stopped having the books to rely on. The dialogue, I think, got less crisp. The character development changed.

And there's an extent to which is it, now that we know it's off of the original material, are we as a, collectively as a group, are we all more hypercritical because we know that it was based off this one person's work and we all loved it there. And now that we know that they're often untethered from it, that we feel a little bit freer to criticize in a way that we didn't feel. free to criticize prior to that. I mean, maybe, but I feel like if these, I feel like a lot of the commentary about it, particularly the off-twitter commentary, is probably not based on that level of kind of

insight about the showrunners and like their source text. I think that is just kind of obviously worse than previous seasons. And people are, because there are so many, because we're at the end and there's so many invested in it, people are commenting about it. Are we allowed to do spoilers? Are we allowed to talk about specific things in the show? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, you know. It was crazy when the ships are right there around the corner and they kill one of the track

and it's like, what? And then the next episode, the dragons suddenly can't wipe it. You know what, no, and I got a credit. And then she flies at him and doesn't like have it breathe fire. Like it made no, and it was also like they were there and then all of a sudden they're on water. It's like, I didn't even know there was water. Yeah. All of a sudden there's water there, and then they weren't near the water for, like, the rest of that episode.

So, no, the ultimate summation of this, and this is from The Watch podcast, which is from the ringer, is think about this. Aria had that kill list, right? And she leaves Winterfell, and she goes down, and she's going to, and then all that happens in literally 10 seconds, the hound says to her, hey, you don't want to do this. And Ari is like, you know, I don't. I want to bounce. Well, in the old in the old show you would have two episodes for that to slowly dawn on her and they literally have 10 seconds for her to be like, you're right, I don't want to be a vigilante killer anymore. I come all this way. I've been planning this my entire life and you're right, I should just turn around now. And when she like, and when she, I still, she killed the Night King. She came out of nowhere.

Right. And I thought, I was like, wow, that was dramatic and all that kind of stuff. I was like, but surely they'll explain exactly how she did it next episode. There's no explanation. It was, she just came flying out of nowhere and did it. And you're like- Just two more episodes last season, two more episodes this season, everything's fine. Yeah, I just think you could have explained, like, did she take a secret trap door? Did she do, like, somebody was like saying, no, I think it's because she can like, change her identity, like, whatever, what they call that the man of the faces, faceless men.

Like, she did one of her faceless men tricks. And that's how she got in there. I don't think that's right. But we'll find out. I'm sure they'll explain it to us on the next episode, and they never did. Well, if all we got to do is wait 10, 15 years when they reboot it and they'll fix everything theoretically. I got to go, guys, because otherwise I won't have today's show out by 5 p.m. It's fine.

All right. No one's listening. No one's going to notice. You're fine. Don't worry about it. Let's keep doing this. Well, maybe in theory you guys got to go home too. All right.

Farad's at his house doing this. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. That's true. Always at my house. Well, I want to go home. All right. Thank you guys.

All right. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Bye.