The Bill Simmons Podcast - Bryan Curtis on ESPN's Skipper Era and Ben Thompson on Netflix vs. Disney (Ep. 303)

Episode Date: December 20, 2017

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by The Ringer's editor-at-large, Bryan Curtis, to discuss John Skipper's decision to step down at ESPN and Skipper's lasting legacy at the company. Then, Stratechery's Ben Thompson joins (32:00) to give his thoughts on Disney's most recent acquisition and who's competing in the tech space with Netflix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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One shining podcast, a college basketball podcast, but a little bit more. This one is a pretty good idea. Coming up, Brian Curtis, Ben Thompson, but first Pearl jam. All right, Brian Curtis is on the line.

Ben Thompson from Mr. Peckery Blog coming up in a little bit. I want to talk to Brian firstst, ringer editor at large, as well as somebody who wrote about John Skipper yesterday, my old boss, who announced yesterday that he is stepping down. He resigned. I think he'd been in charge for five years to deal with a substance issue.

I would say it was one of the most shocking announcements that I've read. I couldn't believe it. I was stunned. I didn't even want to say anything on Monday's podcast because I wanted to make sure I had all the info, and I was kind of shook. Brian, what was your reaction? That it was in the shittiest year possible at ESPN ended in the worst possible way.

I just don't know how else to say it in the most depressing way, like you said. I mean, they've been through the layoff thing, the president attacking them, all the various things we've talked about, written about this year. And then all of a sudden, your guy just resigns on a Monday morning. I'm still in shock. I'm still trying to figure out what happened and why the timing was when it was, because, you know, he spoke in front of all the talent on Wednesday in Bristol and was obviously involved in the Disney-Fox deal, I'm sure, because they're getting all these RSNs.

He was at the Lomachenko fight on Saturday night. But my guess is the way it was handled that day in the morning and the statement that Iger caved, and then from everybody's reaction, it seems like by our reports, nobody knew this was coming. I think Skipper probably knew this was coming for a few days, a few weeks, I don't know. Your mind goes to, well, why wouldn't you just take a leave of absence? I've never heard of somebody resigning to deal with a substance issue. My guess is that he just needed to get

out of this job and was done with it and could not see a world in which that he could do this job and feel healthy and good about the life he was leading. Is there any other takeaway than that, unless there's more to this story? No, and I'm just amazed at the juxtaposition. Like you said, that the message, the specific message when he flew everybody up to Bristol last week was, you know, don't believe what you read in the press about ESPN. We're still in a great position, and the future isn't scary.

I think he had a specific line where he said that. The future's not scary. It's going to be great, and I want to lead this company into a great future. And five days later, he's gone. Yeah. I, uh, you know, I, I've been lucky enough to have some people have a huge impact in my life and he was, he was definitely one of the top ones and he was an incredible boss to me and he gave me so many awesome chances at ESPN. He, you know, not just Grant winning 30 for 30, but just blowing out my column and putting me in ESPN magazine and always being ready to hear my next idea.

I had ideas that people never heard because they weren't good enough or because ESPN couldn't make them. But he was always pushing and pushing and pushing to innovate. And, you know, the way things ended for me the last year, definitely contentious. There's no question. I think maybe 15 years was too long to stay. But I always felt, and I think he feels this way too, that I never judged my entire stay there by everything that happened the last year. I always look at all the great things we were able to do. I've always spoken about him respectfully since,

and maybe I disagreed with some of the decisions, especially with how they handled the Grantland thing after I left. But I just have a lot of respect for that guy, and I was really feeling for him yesterday because I think that's a really difficult thing to just put yourself out there like that, knowing that there's also going to be a lot of speculation, especially considering the climate we're in. I think most people's minds went to the same place. Oh, he's trying to get in front of something. Well,

what if he's not? What if he just, it was time for him to leave? So we'll find out. I'm sure more info will come out over these next few days, but I think he had a dramatic, dramatic, dramatic top five of anyone who worked at ESPN impact on that company. I also don't think the last couple of years he was certainly not to the same standards that he showed when the first 10 years I was in the company. And I think there was a lot of mistakes, big and small, that were made on his watch near the end. And the company is trying to rebound and fix some of the fallout from some of those mistakes. None of them were gigantic, but when you start adding them up, you've written about them a bunch of times.

We've talked about it on this podcast a bunch of times. It was a company that was at the same time massively successful, but also trying to figure out what it was. And now it's starting to feel like it's figuring out what it was, but I'm still not sure. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think what was striking about those mistakes was they were often the exact opposite mistake. You know, you pull this guy Robert Lee off a football game, and that seems to be ESPN, you know, bending over backwards not to offend anybody on the planet, right? We just don't want to offend anybody. One person may be angry. And then, what is it, a couple months later,

he pulls in the Barstool guy, which seems to be, let's, you know, risk offending a bunch of people, even inside our own company, so that we can get this new audience. And then that blows up. And it's like the opposite mistake. And yeah, you're right. It wasn't anything that was just gigantic. But there's lots of little things like that. And at the time, I think the reaction inside the company was just, well, what's going on?

What is this? And then you do Barstool for one episode and then pull the plug and just create a weird war with those guys who were all celebrating yesterday when he was, when he went down. And I just, it's just puzzling, puzzling. I think, you know, as somebody that's been lucky enough to, to lead a couple of different pretty cool enterprises, um, it's, it sounds like a cliche, but it's true. You're, you really are as good as the people that you put around you. And, you know, when he took over in 2012, he had a chance to really blow up and reframe ESPN.

And there were people that were probably two positions too high. There were people that had been there too long. It wasn't the right group of people around him. And the right thing to do would have been to blow it up and really make some moves. I think he waited too long. And I think that was one of the reasons why the company stumbled in a couple of ways over the last few years. I just don't think he had the right group of people around him. I think over the last year or so, putting Conor in charge of content, who I obviously worked with a long time and is a really smart guy. Burke Magnus, raising him, elevating him, putting more in the hands of Justin Connolly,

who I think is the successor. I think he would be my bet if I had to bet anybody. But you're starting to see it's a younger kind of more ready for where ESPN has to go as a company group around him. And I actually think he would have been in a better position to succeed these next couple of years. And now he's gone. And what's crazy is there is no successor.

And you could argue it was Machiavellian by him to always prevent having that one successor who could jump in and take his job or always be breathing down his neck. Or you could argue they just didn't have the internal candidate. But when you read these stories, I'm sure you've read all of them. And who knows? Nobody has any info. This just happened. There's no way to actually know who the successors are. None of them are ready for the job.

None of them have remotely the credentials or the work history that would suggest that they could take this job over. When Skipper took that job, first of all, he's the best content guy they've ever had. He had run a whole bunch of different things and he was ready for that job. And he was actually older than Bodenheimer. You know, they don't have that person this time. And the rub is it's the most dangerous time in the history of the company, right? That's right. That's the rub because you need a guy in here who understands content, but at the same time

could solve the more important, how do we make money question? Yeah. You know? And, you know, we've seen two rounds of layoffs. I saw like the new publisher of the New York Times the other day saying, we're not going to have any more layoffs to get to a number. Have you heard that announcement from ESPN? You know, if you come in there, you're going to have to lay off, maybe lay off more people.

Right. You know, do all these painful things and, you know these painful things and shrink more, kind of rein in your ambitions even more in certain places. And that's just a nightmare job. Do you think – you saw the outpouring on Twitter yesterday for him. Yeah. Was it because he was a content guy, quote-unquote, because he was so devoted to the good stuff there, and that's fairly rare in television executives? I think part of it is he's a genuine guy, and anybody who had a real dealing with him

had some sort of moment with him where they felt like, my boss is a real person. Now, whether they eventually had dealings with him down the road, that was one of the things that would be frustrating about it is if they felt like he veered from that in some way, then it hurt even more because he was such a real person and a genuine guy. I think that was one thing. The other thing is he genuinely cared about doing good stuff. And it wasn't lip service. I think 30 for 30 is a good example, and I've discussed this before on the pod,

but that was not something that, I just don't think any other network would have done that, just as it was conceived. It was conceived by a sports columnist on the internet who then developed it with this 30-year-old guy who was this mid-level duty as pin films who had never really been in charge of anything and we were outsourcing 30 films to all these people and they were it was going to cost 15 million dollars no nobody would do that nobody

would do that idea but he wanted to do it because he thought it was cool. And it was the same thing with Grantland. He thought the idea was cool and he liked the thought of, you know, getting a little more literate on the internet and taking some chances and finding young talent. He was really, that was something that we really clicked on. I was really obsessed with, I think there's a bunch of good young people out there that we can find and put under one umbrella. And he wanted that more than anybody. So I think everybody had their own moment with him. I think you saw Levitard yesterday. Yeah.

And that was all genuine too because Levitard's somebody that was this local guy in Miami who was kind of the guy in Miami, and then started writing for ESPN, the magazine, and the magazine loved him. And him and Skipper just became friends. And Skipper became convinced that Levitar should start pushing himself and start doing more and more. And eventually Levitar got set up with this whole thing in Miami that was pretty cool, pretty multimedia. He doesn't write as much anymore, but he's got a radio show

and he's got this whole crew and he's in the Cleavender Hotel. And that was all Skipper who, for two reasons, he liked Levitard, but also understood pretty early that ESPN just couldn't go after white people as an audience, that they had to have something for everybody. And he thought the Latino audience was just being underserved. And he really did think about diversity and just how to grow ESPN's audiences. I don't know. I thought everything he did came from a pretty genuine place.

Was that your feeling from afar? Yeah, for sure. And also, when you talk about somebody like Levitard, it's always like legacy of really unlikely TV stars. Yeah. And radio stars and internet stars and, you know, print stars who are really big. And if you and I, you know, had picked them out of,

you know, had gone to a lineup and said, which of these people we might not have picked the same people just because of the way TV is. Right. Our TV was. And yeah, ESPN looks pretty amazing in that regard and looks really diverse. And what you said about the quality thing, too, you know, it didn't have to go down that path.

Right. It's amazing to me that, what, seven months ago we were talking about the big giant war in sports television was Jamie Hortz versus John Skipper. Neither of them are there anymore, by the way. That's amazing to me that, what, seven months ago, we were talking about the big giant war in sports television was Jamie Hortz versus John Skipper. Neither of them are there anymore, by the way. That's amazing. And one was saying, look, this is over. You know, you can't do a news division. You can't.

This is about debate. And Skipper was saying implicitly and explicitly, no, no, we have to keep a lot of this up. You know, we can't abandon it completely. I think that, yeah. I'm sorry. Keep going. No, but I just, I are, yeah. I'm sorry, keep going. No, but I just, I mean, I think that is not, you know, they had to make a lot of cuts, and they did make a lot of cuts,

and a lot of them were really painful, but I think they mostly, in a lot of ways, I'll say, they stood their ground on that question. I think one of the biggest reasons we liked each other was, I'm talking about him like he's past tense. He's obviously still alive, and I'm sure he'll do more stuff. But, I mean, when I worked there, one of the reasons that we liked each other was we were both super competitive.

And, you know, probably my favorite skipper year was 2013 when Fox started doing all this rumbling that Fox was coming. Here comes Fox. You know, watch out for these guys. And he just took it personally. It was like, all right. And at that point, he had a war chest. They didn't understand that the subs were going backwards.

And he was just like, I'm not letting Fox skate in foothold. And it turned into this little mini bidding war, almost like how the Red Sox and Yankees are doing. He's just keeping people, and he goes after Olbermann. It was all competitiveness. I don't even know if it was a good strategy. He was just like, fuck these guys. I'm not letting these guys get a foothold.

Fuck them. And made a bunch of moves. And I don't know. He had a swagger to him during that stretch that I just really resonated with me because I wanted to be on the best team, you know, and he did too. Yeah. When you're talking to people over there, are you hearing a what do we do now vibe out of that place? Or is everybody still positive? I think it's going to take a few days to digest everything.

Because what happens when you hear something like this is you don't know how long it's been going on. You start thinking back to every interaction you had with him. I know I did. If this was for years, how many years? Was he in pain? What was it? What's going on? You have to think all that stuff.

And it's human nature. But I think what's fascinating is five years ago, you look at who took over that company. When Bodenheimer stepped down and Skipper comes in and the regime that he kind of had in place, and pretty much all those people are gone. Like Sean Bratches was basically the head of sales. He's out. Marie Donahue and John Kozner were like skippers two lieutenants

they're not there John Walsh was his conciliary he's not there John Wildhack got moved to run production he was terrible he's not there and the only person who survived incredibly out of like the cabinet other than people that nobody would know, but is Norby Williamson, who the joke was they couldn't get rid of him.

And now he has more power than ever. He's in charge of all their afternoon lineups. He's the little finger of ESPN. It's incredible. But I just can't fathom the story. I got to be honest. A few things shocked me, but I just can't fathom this, that they don't even have a successor in place.

Think about that. If this was a sports team and you just didn't have a coach and GM and the team was like, yeah, we're going to take 90 days to look at it, you'd be like, what? It's free agency. Wait a second. Who's making the picks? Like, that's what this feels like a little bit.

But on top of it, you have thousands of people who are working for ESPN whose lives are being impacted by this every day. Absolutely. I couldn't believe how many people they flew up for that conference last week, that meeting. I mean, you're like, oh, wait, because we keep hearing, people are leaving, people are leaving, people are being laid off. They still have so many people who are counting on them to figure this thing out. And honestly, you know what? Another thing about his last couple of years, really his whole time,

especially the last couple of years, was this nostalgia problem of ESPN. I don't know how you quantify this, but every time something goes wrong, people just say, you know what? Ah, it's just not the ESPN I grew up with. You know, it's not Dana Keith. It's not Boomer. It's not the sports center I once knew. And it just like, feels like that hangs over everything, you know, and it's not fair. It's not fair to the people who are there. Um, but it just feels like that. The one thing I read over and over again is this whole thing about nostalgia. You did a great job. You wrote about the demise of the highlight guy for The Ringer.

Excellent piece. That coincidentally, we didn't know the Skipper stuff was going to happen, obviously, but you were writing about ESPN this week. And you're right. And it's like anything else where in your head it was greater than it actually was. You write so eloquently about the media, and there's nobody like you. I hate to make you uncomfortable and praise you, but there's nobody like you right now writing about sports media.

Has it been too gossipy this year for you? Do you like this stuff? No. I mean, I don't love it that every four weeks, Sean Fennessey sending me an email saying, how do we write about X person who just resigned, got fired, or got

laid off? Yeah. Or should we? Should we cover this, basically? Or the executive Game of Thrones stuff, you know? Yeah. Which, I mean, Skipper's kind of in a different category, but there's just, that stuff is less interesting to me than the people, the men and women who are doing this, and the ideas and all that stuff that goes into that beat.

Yeah, I would say this has been a really gut-wrenching year, and knowing a lot of the people, as we do, who get caught up in this stuff, you know, whowrenching year and knowing a lot of the people as we do yeah who get caught up in this stuff you know who are really good and then they're just now they're in some they're looking for the next thing or they're getting paid to do nothing or or whatever you know you and i both have a dozen plus people at least were you surprised by the outpouring of affection for skipper yesterday? It sounds like you were a little bit. You know, no, I knew people really liked him and in some cases loved him. And I knew he was really popular with my set, which is, you know, more writerly people, more on the writer's side, ESPN mag side, those kind of people.

But yeah, I was still struck by it. I really was. I don't, I don't, how many people, you know, how many, especially because it's, you know, I know he's more than just a TV executive. When I think of TV executives, it's just such a piranha business, you know? And the people who quote unquote love you are the people you, you have given jobs to most recently and promoted most recently, and everybody else kind of low-grade hates you. And Skipper, for running a company that large, had a lot of people who really, really loved him.

And like Jemele Hill, right? I mean, look what she just went through. And I know for a fact that that's genuine. What she was saying on Twitter yesterday is that she, you know, after all she's been through, she and Skipper, she still had a ton of admiration for him. And they were still good on whatever level you can be good after all that happened. Yeah, I mean, the two things that stick in my craw probably from my time there was, one, that we didn't have a phone call before it was decided to leak it to the New York Times that they weren't renewing my contract.

When we both knew it was headed that way, I just felt like I had, given the career I had, I just think we should have announced that together. I got over it. And as the time passes, you start looking at the good stuff and not the bad stuff, I think, is the human answer. Yeah, and the four or three and change or whatever it was, fabulous years we had doing that.

Yeah. Which, as you say, was a skipper thing, you know? Yeah. At some level, you know, with his blessing. You know, that was great. I think the best thing about working for him and something that I've tried to, I guess the right word is adopt,

but definitely something that I think anybody who works with me will at least admit this is true. Skipper always was down for a good idea. And whether he was going to actually do it or not, that was a different story. But he always wanted to hear them and he always wanted people to feel like they could have ideas and they could pitch ideas and no idea was crazy enough for him. I think that's a really good quality as a boss and, you know, he's the only person I've

ever worked for in my life that was wired that way. And I learned a lot from it. And I think I would argue there's not a lot of bosses just in general in the creative circles that just think that way. And that's the way you have to think. Because once you start thinking that way, everybody that works for you starts maybe not 100% thinking that way. But at least they know if they have a good idea, there's a chance. And I think I never would have known that if I didn't work for him. I just wouldn't have realized it.

So for me, that's his legacy. And I think for the world as a whole, he oversaw ESPN during the craziest decade it had. Right? This is the craziest decade ESPN's had. They're at the absolute top of the mountain and look unassailable at the end of 2013. And then their business flipped on them and they had to figure out real solutions for it.

And it seems like they figured out at least some, but I still think it's going to be a rocky next couple of years. And now if the wrong person takes place, takes charge, it could really snowball badly the other way. But, and we can also agree. Iger seems like he's staying now forever.

Right. Does the guy who, you mean we don't have to apologize to Clay Travis? Cause I guess not running for president. Doesn't sound like it. Yeah, no. So just,

just, just so we're clear, no apology. Cause I think we were getting handed on Twitter for a while for that one. Oh, sound like it. Yeah, no. So just so we're clear, no apology, because I think we were getting hounded on Twitter for a while for that one. Oh, I missed that. Oh, okay. Oh, wow. Sorry, you missed that.

Wow, what a bullet dodged. Oh, geez. Any 2018 predictions? Oh, I'm fascinated what the 6 o'clock sports center was going to look like speaking of ESPN. Well, I don't, nobody's written this. They took down all the stuff. I tweeted it the other day.

Oh, you did? You tweeted it? Yeah. It's all gone. What happened to Stu Scott? What happened to everybody? It would have been like if they went in and just completely stripped the Grantland studio

and we were just doing an electrical closet. Unbelievable. That was such a big part of the identity of the show is they were so proud of that studio and the pictures they picked and they just took all of them. So obviously they just want those two to leave. I mean, it seems like it's untenable, right? It's just not going to work. Yeah, that's a pretty big F you.

Well, and especially now if Norby, if there's no real boss in place, or there's a temporary boss, Norby's going to, you know, he's in charge of that whole site. Who's going to stop him? I just feel they never had somebody, a producer that was on that show who could take what they do well and translate it into something that would make the network happy.

They didn't have that person they could lean on. And maybe they're just going to go back to a generic 6 o'clock highlight show at this point in time and set up the night's games and stuff that we were doing with Lindsay Zarniak 12 months ago. I don't know.

Do you think he's going to turn Aria and Sansa against each other? I don't think that's... Is that Michael and Jamal? No, I don't know. That's not possible. It was my second littleinger joke of the column. I got you.

Sorry. I was just trying to put all the characters together. Well, if it was the Game of Thrones part, then that is what he would be trying to do, and they would figure it out and then get him back. I was going to say, we know what happened with Littlefinger. Yeah. The whole thing. They just have to fake being mad at each other for a couple of days and make it work.

Yeah. That part's crazy. I do think they need to figure out how to bring in more talent and people that can move the needle. It's different between, oh, we have talent and actually having people who move the needle. And whoever the next boss is has to find talent. Skipper found talent. That's what he did. And your point about like, no, you know, give me ideas, right?

Yeah. We are, if nothing else, we are the market for ideas right now. We need to figure stuff out. And people who are underemployed or ambitious and want the next thing, you're first in line. You tell me what we should do. I forgot to mention with Skipper, I do think he played a huge role in soccer kind of taking off in this country to whatever degree it took off as a TV sport. It was a big passion of his from the moment he had any sort of say. And I remember in 2009, I went to Mexico to watch the U.S.-Mexico game in the famous stadium there, Azteca.

And we went for three days. And we were in Mexico City in some hotel compound that you weren't allowed to leave because of the security guards and just drinking these weird tomato juice, whatever those weird Mexican Bloody Mary-type drinks were, whatever the house things, a bunch of soccer people. And Skipper was really adamant that soccer in the next decade was going to take off in the World Cup. This was before I think we found out that we weren't going to have the World Cup. But we were just really passionate about it.

We went to Azteca. America lost. It was the craziest crowd I've ever seen. And as we were leaving, they were throwing stuff at us in the car, and Skipper got mad. I thought he was going to go after the people that were throwing the stuff at us. I was like, this is the boss I want. My boss is ready to fight for his crew.

But it was just a great trip. And he just really loves sports. You know, and I think whoever gets that job has to be wired that way. And that was the reason Mark Shapiro didn't work

when he was the head of ESPN. He didn't, he wasn't crazy about sports like that. You know, Bo Neimer loves sports and Skipper loves sports and hopefully the next person will too.

Did we cover everything? Absolutely. I think we did. Okay. What's your next piece? I got some more year-end stuff. Okay, good. Particularly interested in sports writers

and social media. I'll say that. Okay. You might want to hear Jim Miller's new podcast. There's my tease. Absolutely. Yeah.. I'll say that. Okay. You might want to hear Jim Miller's new podcast. There's my tease, absolutely. Yeah, I got interviewed for that. It's actually really good.

I was glad I was involved. Good job. The Origins podcast, Jim Miller. Brian Curtis, thank you. Thanks, Bill. All right, we're going to call Ben Thompson first. If you've ever seen anything we've done in my office on Instagram, which is at SpickGuy33, you probably noticed how nice my posters look.

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and get all our stuff. We have some good stuff, including my video mailbag. Come on. What's more fun than a video mailbag? Nothing. All right, we're calling Ben Thompson. On the line right now

from one of my favorite sites, Stratechery, which I was calling Stratechery until he corrected me the last time he was on this podcast. How do I know? I can barely read. Ben Thompson, how are you?

I'm doing well. Well, I mean, I'm dreading my next experience watching Jason Kidd murder the Bucs in a couple minutes. But other than that, I'm doing great. Yeah. So you have your at Ben Thompson Twitter feed, and then there's another Twitter feed called No Tech Ben where you just complain about Jason Kidd every night. It's like you're two different people. It's really, really annoying, which is why I created a separate account. I had mercy on those following me.

I want to be able to complain without limit. Yeah, I wish Haralabob would do that with Bitcoin. I wish he would create a separate Haralabob Bitcoin feed and just leave the Haralabob feed for NBA. A lot of stuff going on with Disney this month, and this is even before what happened with John Skipper yesterday. You've been writing about this Disney and Fox merger for a while. You had the same reaction I had. I had a reaction, and then usually I read you, and if you confirm my reaction, I feel really proud of myself. I thought this was an incredible deal for Disney.

Now, I'm saying that when it gets to, what, $60 billion or whatever the hell the final number is, I have no context what that is. I know in the NBA, if you paid $500 million for LeBron, I would be able to put that into some sort of context. With this, I can't. But basically, what they're trying to do here is create their own Netflix competitor. And to have that Fox library added to the Disney library, that's now a realistic thing. What was the big takeaway for you when you looked at that deal with, oh, this is smart, I love this?

It was exactly that. I mean, what Netflix came along and with, oh, this is smart, I love this? It was exactly that. I mean, what Netflix came along and did, originally everyone viewed it as just another outlet, another channel where they could sell their stuff. They're spending all this money to create this content. If we can sell it to one more place. I think we talked about it once on the podcast earlier this year, about making 30 for 30 and sell it to Netflix,

and you feel great about it, and you don't realize that Netflix is getting this sort of evergreen content because the nature of content for Netflix is very different. They're not just interested in sort of the first run. They're interested in building a library so that when you go there, you'll stay there and it's attractive to all kinds of people who are interested in all kinds of stuff. And the problem is that Disney and all the other studios

were basically arming a competitor to their best friend, which was the cable companies. Because the cable companies basically had this sort of monopoly on in-home entertainment. And then Disney could come along and say, well, if you want people to sign up, you have to have sports, for example. You have to have the Disney Channel. And we can charge a really high price for that. And Netflix is there saying, well, you don't have to get cable. You could just watch us instead. And that started playing out.

And Disney was really stuck with this sort of incredibly profitable, really attractive model. Which, by the way, Disney made a great deal. Remember, 20 years ago, they bought Capital Cities and ABC, which included ESPN at the time. So they bought into this game ahead of everyone else the first time. And this is almost them catching up, where instead of having that cable company in the middle, and you're kind of just using them to get money from customers and then taking all the money, they have to go directly to customers. They have to get people to sign up for their service directly.

And that means having more content. It means having exclusive content. And the best way to have lots of your own exclusive content is to own it all. And you're also hurting a competitor, which is nice. But I look at this where they were five years ago. We've talked about this in this pod. I've talked about this on other pods. ESPN was doing so well.

You basically are trying to protect the lead you have instead of figuring out all these different ways to grow the lead. The last couple of years, some of the different, you know, the fallbacks they've had and the way some of their competitors have risen and competitors they didn't even realize they were going to have made them kind of rethink their strategy on everything. And this was always the best idea. I never understood this when I was there, why they didn't have their own version of whatever

that they could put 30 for 30 and whatever else they wanted. It was always basically like in 2009, 2010, ESPN Classic was kind of the playground that we always looked at and we would send memos for. Could this be a sports movie channel? What is this? This channel that it seems like they're going to create now this library that disney's going to create not only is it a netflix competitor it it might actually beat netflix the disney library combined with the fox library this is more than a competitor i would put

them five years from now as kind of the favorite. What do you think? I think it's going to be a two-horse race. If this goes through and if it's approved, and obviously there's going to be a lot of sort of antitrust questions about this, but one of the sort of arguments why it should be allowed is Netflix is in such a dominant position right now because it's hard looking back four or five years,

like when Disney sold all their stuff to netflix in 2012 you could see the outlines of how netflix would sort of take over everything but it wasn't really apparent then but but everything sort of played out as as you might have expected it and if you play that forward in another five years five ten years netflix is this sort of monster that just buying everything no one can resist it even more than they are today. And it's already sort of that case in Hollywood. Hold on. Wait a second, though. So in 2012, did Netflix know this was going to happen or was this dumb luck?

No. This has been Netflix's plan. I mean, what they've done from the beginning is they've taken this sort of sideways approach to content where they served a problem that no one was serving, which was people wanted to watch movies and not worry about late fees, and they were movie hounds, and they gave them DVDs, right? And they could do that because DVDs, fair use,

there was the second use doctrine. You couldn't charge for them a second time. And so they built up a customer base, and they leveraged that customer base into the first streaming deal, which was with Starz. And I think we talked about this last time, but the idea with Starz was Netflix, it was so different because instead of only having

one of the movies available, whatever Starz was showing on TV, Netflix had all of them available immediately. And that was such a sort of mindfuck in the way you think about content and what matters as far as that stuff goes. And they got more and more customers, and then they started

buying more content and paying more for content people like oh netflix is a little bit of content well netflix just pulled out the checkbook and these hollywood guys that are so used to will sell to anyone who will buy our stuff they they gave it to netflix and meanwhile netflix starts investing in their original content and that original content served two purposes one it was a differentiated stuff that you wanted to get to. It was a reason to sign up for Netflix. And then two, as we're seeing now, it built up a base so that when these guys finally woke up and started pulling their stuff from Netflix, it didn't matter nearly as much as it would have mattered five or six years ago. And what Netflix has is this huge customer base.

They're over 100 million subscribers now, and they're all over the world. So they can leverage this stuff all over the place, and they pull out the checkbook, and they buy more stuff, which makes their product more attractive, which makes them more customers, which makes their checks bigger. And they're all doing this buying against the future. They're taking on a ton of debt to finance these shows, but it's playing out because it's being made up, the customers they're acquiring. And it's this virtuous cycle that's going on. And if it keeps going on as it is, in 10 years, they're going to be just dominant over everyone. It's going to be the bundle for everything except for sports. And now there really is, if this deal goes through, a viable counterpoint to that.

So I think the future is not that Netflix is doomed by any means, but rather that if this goes through, it'll be Netflix and Disney. And then sports will kind of be on the side, a separate thing. We'll see if it sticks with Disney or not. And maybe possibly a third. Now everybody who's left out of Netflix or this whole Disney slash Fox app has to figure out how to create their own app, which odds are it'll be a disaster. But my guess is that other people will now join forces and try to come up with the third one i don't think so i don't i don't think it's gonna be possible i mean it's you asked why didn't disney do this before the reason i do before is because one it's really hard it just to do it in general i mean disney is the best brand and all that sort of stuff so

they have some of the tools in place but it's hard from a technical perspective which is about why they bought bam media the the mlb streaming service right but then also or the technology behind i should say but also the other issue is it costs you a lot of money like to pull your content from netflix costs money to compete with cable which disney is setting themselves up to do is to hurt themselves like they make so much money still today from the cable bundle to put out a service where you have a reason to not sign up for cable because you're signing for Disney you are basically hurting yourself and that is a really really hard thing to do and Disney to their immense credit is well down the road to where they're going to do that and that will put them in a better place for 10

years from now but it might put them in a worse place for a year or two from now and all these other guys all the other studios Paramount or Universal or whatever it might be, they're probably going to end up just selling to Netflix and selling to Disney. And it's not going to be as good of a business as it was today, but they'll still make money. It's just going to be much less money than they would have otherwise. I guess, sorry, just to jump in, I interrupted myself. If there is a third one, it probably would be Universal. And I could actually see Hulu ending up with Comcast after this all sort of shakes out.

If there is a third one, that's who it will be. But I suspect it will be the big two and everyone else. So you interrupted yourself and you stepped on what my big point was going to be. I think the third one is going to be Hulu. And if you look at who owns it right now, Walt Disney owns 30%. Fox owns 30%. Now, I don't know if that was that in this deal. I don't know.

Yeah, it is. It is. Disney will own 60% if it goes through. Comcast owns 30% through NBCUniversal. And then Time Warner owns 10% would it now they could basically just cock block everybody else on Hulu if they if they basically have the majority with those two things

or they could sell the 60% to them and use some of that money to to make the Disney Fox Netflix competitor better and basically dare NBC and Universal. My whole thing is, I don't think it matters if we have two, three, four, or five of these,

because people are definitely going to pay for Disney slash Fox, and they're definitely going to pay for Netflix. And if there's a third one, they'll pay for that too. So I think something happens with Hulu. Hulu doesn't just stay this way. Something happens. It's probably, I mean, not to get too much into the nitty gritty, but that might be how they solve the sort of antitrust questions around this deal, where that might end up being

the deal they make with the U.S. government, where we will spin off Hulu. Again, Comcast is the most obvious buyer of that to sort of like make this deal go through. And I don't think that will be, I don't think Disney will feel that bad about it because they're clear they want to build their own service, one. And two, having two different services that are both about entertainment generally really doesn't make any sense. There is still value that comes from a bundle because different

people want different things. You can charge all of them the same price. And that's how cable works today. And what's going to happen, you just kind of mentioned, oh, people will buy this, they'll buy this, they'll buy this. People are going to end up paying about the same amount that they pay for cable TV today. It's just going to be organized totally differently. And that's not a surprise. I've been writing that's going to happen in the long run.

The amount people pay for entertainment is going to stay about the same. It's going to shake out to be about the same. It's just going to be organized totally differently. Right. And now we didn't mention Amazon Prime yet. They're, I'm sure, monitoring this, wondering where they fit in with this whole thing. Totally differently. Right. And now we didn't mention Amazon Prime yet. They're, I'm sure, monitoring this, wondering where they fit in with this whole thing. And they have more money than God.

So who knows with them? They might make a move. Same thing with Apple. I mean, one of my favorite L.A. rumors right now, and I'm sure it's not true, but it's just a fun one, is that Disney is going to finish this Fox thing and then sell everything to Apple for like $250 billion or whatever the price would be. I still feel like Apple and Amazon have to be heard from as this shakes out. What do you think there? I mean, Amazon has always been a threat. I've always listed Amazon as Netflix's biggest threat because Amazon's perspective and approach to the market is so different because they're not necessarily interested in making money directly on video. They're interested in acquiring customers for years. And so they take

a very long-term view on the market, which gives them a lot more... It's the same thing Netflix did to the other guys. They just had a longer view of the market, which meant they would pay different prices for different stuff in a way that the traditional guys couldn't really understand or compete with. And Amazon has the potential to do the same thing with Netflix. Over this past year, though, you've seen that's also sort of a constraint on Amazon, where they've kind of scaled back a little bit and started to really question, like, is this the absolute best application of our capital?

And I think they're really trying to go for this. Like, we want one or two huge hits so that people have to sign up. And I think they're taking less of a holistic, we're going to be the home of entertainment in the long run, which probably makes sense. And it's the same sort of thing with Apple. At the end of the day, Apple's not an entertainment company. That's not what they do. They make

personal computers, whether those be actual computers, whether they be phones in your pocket or whatever the future might hold. And I have a hard time believing that just because they have a lot of money and Apple has more money than anyone that I don't think that's necessarily sufficient. Like you need a mindset and focus and approach to actually succeed at this stuff. And I'm skeptical of, of Apple in particular, really adopting the sort of approach that will, that will pay off in the long run. I think Disney is in it to win it, and I think they're in a great place to do so. And I would expect it to shake out that Disney and Netflix are the two that really matter.

Amazon will probably hang around. They have the service. I don't think they're in it, though, to be the dominant player. I got to say, I'm impressed by, you know, Disney really set themselves back there a couple years in a variety of ways. And over the last year, they have addressed every long-range, big-picture issue they had, right? One of them was our tech stuff wasn't nearly good enough,

and now they did the big thing with ESPN and BAM and all that stuff. Now they have the Netflix competitor, which allows them basically all this different flexibility going forward with how the world's going. Then the third thing is the ESPN OTT app that nobody really understood what you were getting. It can't be anything that conflicts with the cable deals, all this stuff. Now they have these Fox RSNs, and I'm sure those are going to go in that app in some way on top of some of the other stuff they have in their library of things. And, you know, they have 90, 30 for 30s at this point,

all these other things that they can kind of shove in this OTT app that I'm still not positive I want, but at least it's a little more interesting. Where do you stand on that? Yeah, I think that sports is just fundamentally different because sports are so expensive for one. I mean, sports make up between like 40% and 50% of what you pay in your cable bill today as it is.

And if anything, I think that proportion is only going to go up. If you're not interested in sports, the reason to subscribe to cable is diminishing like super rapidly. But on the flip side, if're not interested in sports, the reason to subscribe to cable is diminishing super rapidly. But on the flip side, if you are interested in sports, the reason to subscribe to cable remains just as strong as they've ever been. I've always thought that ESPN, yes, they spent all

that money on rights a few years ago, but that was the exact right thing to do because the way you win going forward, the way you keep people, keep customers, is having differentiated content. At the end of the day, ESn has the most and best differentiated content as far as as far as sports goes and so i think they're in better shape than people give them credit for but so i think this app is more about it's more optionality like if they do need to abandon cable then this will be an option where they'll have everything built in place and ready to go. But I think

it's more likely that it's more additive, I think, to cable. Because, again, that time thing is huge. There's so many sports all over the world. There's like cricket in India, or there's like English Premier League soccer, and that's been a huge success for NBC buying up those rights. And I think that was, I wrote that a few years ago, there's a

big miss for ESPN not to get those because that's the sort of sport you build a streaming service on. Like people who care about that really care and will pay a lot of money to get it. And I think they can build up – the original plan was ESPN 2, ESPN 3, ESPN 4. You've talked about ESPN and Ocho. But that's actually viable. There's so much stuff out there. And the way the internet works is you don't win by serving the general public.

You serve by finding these niches that people are just obsessed about. That's the entire point of my business. You find a niche that people really, really care about, and then you charge them a lot of money. And it's viable because you're actually serving the entire world. You're not just serving a small geographic area or even just a country. And so I think it's different than the Disney deal. I think Disney is all in on this Disney app and being a Netflix-style competitor, and that is their future. They will hold on to the cable revenue as long as they can, but their future is this app.

Whereas I think sports is the opposite. I think cable remains the future as long as they can hold on, and that's the right thing to do. Well, and as you said, this allows them to basically put their feet in both pools. They can build the ship that's the escape yacht if cable just completely falls apart and they need to have their own app. So they have that. But ideally, you would have both, and you would have two streams of revenue. And then really, if the third stream of revenue was worst case scenario, they could eventually end up in this

Disney Fox Netflix competitor app, like way down the road. Maybe they're part of this and maybe it's a much bigger thing. I think they have so many more options than they did five years ago. And, you know, and as I've said before, I was there five years ago and I know they weren't thinking about this stuff. They just, I remember there, years ago, and I know they weren't thinking about this stuff. I remember I had one boss who, when the NBA deal was coming up, which I think was 2013 range, really wanted to get League Pass as part of the deal. Just we take it, we own it, and it becomes ours.

And in retrospect, that would have been unbelievable. Now the NBA was smart enough. They had this guy, Bill Koenig, who's brilliant, who knew that league pass was like the future for them. And there was no way they were – NBA was always going to control that. But when you think about the last five years, where they were five years ago, where it's like, oh, they're going to pay us $10 million for all of our 30-for-30s and all of our Disney movies. Great. Here. Take it.

Take it, Netflix. And then Netflix builds a whole business off it. I think they're seeing things pretty clearly now. And I think, you know, I don't really know what the tipping point would be for me to pay for an ESPN OTT app. But it certainly is a little more interesting than it was six weeks ago, right? There was no way I was paying for it before. Right. And you'll definitely pay for the Disney app, right? A thousand million percent.

And this is the thing why I've always been optimistic about Disney. Like back in 2015 when they had that earnings call where Iger finally admitted that, you know, yeah, ESPN is slipping a little more than we thought and their stock tanked. I wrote an article saying that I actually am still optimistic about Disney in the long run because at the end of the day, like great content still matters. Like differentiation still matters. And yes, Disney didn't really figure this stuff out. And I would argue as recently as nine to 12 months ago, it still wasn't clear that they had really figured it out. I don't think they did.

I think they were figuring out this year. Yeah, it's been the last six months. It's been incredible. Honestly, it's been incredible to see how rapidly they have completely shifted the way they're thinking about this stuff. But what they've always had in their back pocket is they've had great content.

And Iger went out and bought Pixar, and he went out and bought Lucasfilm, he went out and bought Marvel, and the inherent assets that Disney had. And they just had to figure out how to leverage that. And I think they now have figured that out. And that's a much better place to be than folks that have middling content and also haven't figured out their business model. They're the ones that are really in trouble.

But Disney's always had that trump card. And crap, the ruined word. Disney's always had that in their pocket, and now they're figuring out how to use it. Well, I'm sure the most bummed out people right now are the AT&T and Time Warner merger people, because they had their own thing going

on, and now that's been postponed yet again, and both companies have been just paralyzed in 2017 with the potential of what they could be together versus kind of treading along until they have more information on where that's going. We were talking about competitors and we were talking about could Hulu be the third one. There's an AT&T, Time Warner, something that I think could be involved too, especially if they can get the phones involved and DirecTV.

They just have a lot of assets, and unfortunately they can't unveil the assets. It's like this NBA team that signed a bunch of free agents and everybody got hurt. We don't know what it is. Where do you see the future of that happening? I mean, it's a much less compelling deal for lots of reasons, in part because the only way it really makes sense is if they sort of act illegally, which is why, you know. Like, there is actually a valid justification for the Department of Justice suing to block the deal.

I mean, is it politically motivated? We don't know. But there is a justification, which is they could, you know, jack up the prices on their content. And if, if cable companies say, okay, we're going to black you out, then people like, okay, I'm going to get satellite. Well, who owns the satellite? Well, AT&T owns the satellite. Like, so this is kind of, you know, it's definitely, it's definitely something to be concerned about, but beyond that, it's really hard to see, like, if this future world is less about owning the pipes and more about owning sort attention, where people come to you because you have great stuff and they want to get more stuff and they'll just spend more and more time with you.

Sure, HBO is great at getting people up front, and TNT has the NBA and stuff like that, but the long-term value is, I think, much less compelling than the Disney-Fox tie-up, which makes – to my mind, makes much more sense both in the short and medium term but also particularly in the long run. I mean AT&T has some other stuff going on. Like they have this dividend thing that they worry about covering, and Time Warner will help with that. Like there's lots of boring business reasons why they keep acquiring these companies with good cash flow. But it's much less compelling, I think, less interesting in the long run. And I think this deal shows why. It's so obvious what this deal is driving towards in a way that the AT&T Time Warner one is kind of still hard to figure out what's the point. Is there, you know, we're hitting the end of 2017 here. Is there a loser? Is there somebody that just took a major

step back this year out of all, out of all these big companies that we discuss every time you come on? Is there somebody that you were like, wow, that was not a great 2017 for them? You mean other than Uber? Well, yeah, yeah. I was talking, I was talking more content. Yeah. Uber and Snapchat, I think were the two that, you know, are the ones that obviously took major steps back. Yeah. Everyone that's not in everyone that we didn't talk about, Disney, Fox and Disney, Fox and Netflix are great. And everyone else is in significantly worse shape now because for the reasons we just said, like, there's only so many companies that I think are going to be successful in going direct.

It's been the trend for a long time that the, you know, the sort of like Viacom's of the world that have traditionally had much higher ad loads and lower cost of content. The writing's been on the wall for that sort of model for a long time. And the world's been shifting to subscriptions away from advertising for years. I mean, this is the other reason why Disney's been in good shape.

Why is Disney's cable network so profitable? It's not because of advertising. It's because of carriage fees. Carriage fees are basically subscription fees that they earn not directly from subscribers but from cable companies. But why do they pay them? Because they have content that they have to have. All the entertainment companies that have doubled down on that type of content are in so much better shape than the ones that have been much more sort of broad-based, low production costs, tons of advertising monetization. All those companies are in significantly worse shape than the differentiated ones. And that's Disney by and large. And I think Fox has also been really strong.

You look at some of the stuff they're doing on FX, like Atlanta and the Americans and stuff like that. All that stuff is right in the differentiation wheelhouse that Disney is building here. And this other sort of more blasé stuff that a lot of these other studios are doing, it's just going to be Facebook filler. I was going to ask you, and then there's Facebook. I hesitate to even mention them because they might have changed their content plan yet again for one more time in 2017.

Your thoughts on Facebook the last 18 months? It's been – I mean Facebook has been the dominant story of 2017 I think by far, in part because they – people are appreciating more and more the role they played in 2016. And what's interesting, though, is a lot of that appreciation has been misplaced. I don't think like Trump didn't win because of Russian ads on Facebook. Like, that's just a that's a very silly way to view what happened. I agree. It is interesting, though, is what Facebook did do is Facebook destroyed media like they destroyed traditional media in the U.S. and the reason that matters is media and political parties were two pieces were they interacted they were tied together the reason why political parties mattered the reason why you

needed them to for candidates to get get out there to become famous to get fundraisers all that sort of stuff was because the media controlled the choke point on awareness and people knowing who candidates were and what they stood for and so those two things were together what happened was the collapse of the media as a gatekeeper actually also meant the collapse of political parties as gatekeepers which led to this new world where someone like trump would come along and already had his celebrity sort of built in and immediately get a sort of bully pulpit. And everyone's like, oh, why are the cable companies or why are the news companies showing Trump speeches? They're enabling him. No, they're responding.

They have no choice but to show him because that's what people want. And the what the Internet has really unlocked is this new world where you succeed by giving people what they want in a much more. That's always been the case broadly, want in a much more that's always been the case broadly but it's much more direct now like there's no sort of like choking off the distribution channel where you can kind of sit up there like an editor like sitting at the New York Times and you get to decide the news cycle for everyone that's that world is gone and Facebook is a big enabler of that and I think you know maybe the Russia thing is sort of a side note to that but it gets at something fundamental, which is this company is really changing the way the world works.

Meanwhile, Facebook, I don't think none of this was intentional. They're also busy figuring out how to make money, and they're looking at Google. They are obsessed with Google always. Google has YouTube, which is the default place to upload all kinds of video. It's getting tons and tons of advertising revenue. Like YouTube is the real killer of a lot of this filler video that just goes there now. And Facebook wants a piece of that because video is – everyone looks at TV advertising. Like it's at the pot at the end of the rainbow.

Like whenever that shifts to online, like we're going to make so much money. And they're just scrambling trying to build a product such that when that money shifts it doesn't all go to youtube but they can get their their fair share of it so i mean they're doing amazing like they're they're dominant like they are they reduced the number of ads or not reducing the ads they stopped increasing the number of ads yeah they just started jacking up prices instead so their profits are still going up and that's like a sure sign that they have market power so they're in they're in a dominant position. But they are both scrambling because that's what companies do and also really under threat.

And I think the price cycle speaks for itself. And I've also enjoyed they keep you on your toes as they change their content plan every three months. Twitter, who both you and I were bullish on, for a while, I feel like, let's take our victory lap. The stock's up to $25, and people are starting to think Twitter knows what they're doing. You run ahead of me, let's take the lap. I thought we ripped them pretty thoroughly. Speaking of the bucks, I believe we compared them to the Milky Box in a negative way earlier this year. But we talked about how – I think we talked – I thought I talked about it with you. I know I talked about it on this podcast about how I was really impressed with our dealings with them and just in general that they really seemed like they were starting to get their shit together.

And I feel like the last, I don't know, six, seven months, you can feel it and see it. And they still have a lot of issues with the trolling and i feel like the last i don't know six seven months you can feel it and see it and they still have a lot of issues with the trolling and the stuff like that but from a content monetization standpoint they made huge strides in 2017 i mean what's so obvious about twitter and this has always sort of been the the core of the bull case for twitter is it's so vital i mean yeah like it's there's nothing that can take the place of Twitter. And this drives Facebook up the wall, right? Even more than like Google, the fact that Twitter is out there

and it's just kind of a mess of a company and the user base isn't that large, relatively speaking, but it's importance to like the world generally and the way it, you know, it's like the, it's the network of news. It's the network of everything that's happening in the world., it's like the, it's the network of news. It's the network of everything that's happening in the world. And it's like irreplaceable in that regard. And, you know, to the extent they can figure out how to actually build a business on top of that, you know, is

always sort of the open question, but that part's not going away. And that gives them, you know, a lot more runway than they probably deserve. Yeah. it's a one of a kindness that, like with Snapchat, Instagram comes along and just takes Snapchat's best two ideas and adds them to what they already had, and all of a sudden Snapchat's reeling and completely changing everything they're doing. You can't do that with Twitter. There's no way to steal what the last 10 years

that Twitter put together. You can't just come in and take the two best pieces of it. It's not happening. There's something very essential to it. Yeah, and you're right. It's a vital part of the day. It has its flaws like everything, but it always had upside. And there was always the potential, which is the same thing we talked about with Disney.

It's like they still have really good assets. They still have a track record of going out and buying really big whatever's and then adding to their whatever making a bigger whatever and they've done it over and over again and uh you know i would say about snapchat too i mean snapchats i think still has some aspect of that it's not just not just about stories i mean i know i think a lot of us old fogies came in and said oh the stories aspect is so obviously compelling but the way that most kids actually use snapchat is the chat. Like they actually just send all kinds of names and stuff to each other constantly at

all hours of the day. And that bit is still something that Facebook still can't touch because Facebook has always had a sort of public performance aspect to it. And Instagram very much is still in that. I think you might have talked about your daughter. Parent Corner, by the way, is my all-time favorite. I'm so glad you did. Thank you.

I was so glad I did the episode with all Parent Corner in it. Thank you. Even though I listened to most of that. So I will admit, when you do the Monday morning things with Costello, I fast forward, I listen to Parent Corner first. Oh, that's great. It's my favorite. Yeah, I'm with you on the Snapchat because it still has its little secrecy thing and it's still – it's basically an awesome camera and you can add special effects and stuff like that.

But I do feel like Instagram, the secrecy that's going on with Instagram and I see with my daughter where these kids all have three spam accounts now on top of their account and their parents think they only have one account but they really have four and they don't know about the other three and you know the dms and there's ways you can sneak around and instagram that make me nervous but it's not like snapchat snapchat is like one of those uh giant castles in england that you go in you don't know what the rooms and how deep it is and you just don't even know where you're going and the problem with instagram is the back end is all tied to facebook so if you're an advertiser and you're even considering snapchat like yeah maybe snapchat has more engagement with like these teenagers you want to reach but instagram's so much easier and we're already buying ads on facebook and we it's so easier to just plug into instagram like that combination is just it's from a monetization standpoint it's really hard to

compete with and that's's Snapchat's biggest problem. Snapchat decided to go public without actually having a business, which turns out wasn't the best idea. But, I mean, so they're having a hard time. But that's – if they can – I'm not throwing you in the towel completely, although certainly it's looking very Twitter-esque to say the least. Who has a better year in 2018, Uber or Airbnb? Oof. twitter-esque to say the least who has a better year in 2018 uber or airbnb i mean airbnb airbnb is is kind of funny because uber has gotten all the bad press and deservedly so i mean i'm not excusing anything that's gone on there and all the sort of shady stuff they've done but if you back up and look at it from a societal standpoint i I think Uber is so much better than Airbnb. Airbnb is basically turning what should be neighborhoods into like tourist areas. And who wants that? Like no one

wants like people rolling their suitcases in every other day to the apartment across the road or the house next door. Whereas Uber, you know, reduces drunk driving, increases the ability to go out with people, makes it so much easier to enjoy parts of cities that you might have never even gone to or had access to. And but but so I think the big question for Airbnb is at what point does that aspect sort of come home? And it's starting to like you can see they're actually having problems getting inventory more and more in these cities that are starting to crack down on Airbnb listings. Yeah. And so, you know, I think they'll probably have a better year just because Uber's in a pretty bad shape right now. I mean, they are still very strong. Their brand's still very strong. Their user base is still larger. But here in the US, Lyft has had a huge 2017 picking up on Uber's

mistakes. And worse, Lyft is now like an official partner with Google, both that they're partnering with Waymo, the self-driving stuff, but also Google just invested like a billion dollars in them. And that's really bad because the long-term future of this ride sharing stuff is self-driving cars. And if you believe that Google is the furthest ahead, then where is that most likely to come to market? It's going to come to market with Lyft, which may not happen for a long time, but what it means is Lyft will be able to earn money basically as long as they want,

or sorry, will be able to raise money from investors as long as they want. It's the best way to invest in self-driving cars, which means Uber, they should have been able to spend Lyft into the ground, and now that's not going to happen. And that's leaving aside the rest of the world where they're kind of getting their rear-handed to them as well. So I would pick Airbnb,

but I'm not sure it's going to be totally smooth sailing for Airbnb in 2018 either. I didn't even realize Airbnb was having this kind of impact until Victor Luckerson wrote a great piece for The Ringer about, I think it was Nashville, and how it's basically transformed part of Nashville and just turned it into this never-ending tourist den. And these people moved there because they liked the neighborhood and it was peaceful. And all of a sudden now every week there's a different party going on or whatever. And I'll be interested to see how it plays out. I don't really know if you can legislate somebody letting other people live in their house.

I think you can do it with condos and apartment buildings, but I don't think you can do it with houses. So we'll see what happens. I mean, they're trying in San Francisco. So it's going to be interesting to see how it turns out. Yeah, good luck. All right, we're at the end of this. San Francisco's a mess in general. We're at the end of this podcast, so I'm going to give you 60 seconds to complain about Jason Kidd.

Jason Kidd is the worst coach in the NBA. And he gets so much credit, but really the improvement in the Bucs is Giannis. And I want to focus on this point. People give Jason Kidd credit for Giannis. Jason Kidd has hurt Giannis. Like Giannis, particularly his shooting, Giannis was such a free and easy shooter his first year.

Then he was barred from shooting three-pointers, and Jason said no more shooting. And basically he's become hesitant, and when he's hesitant, he can't shoot well. You can see at the end of a shot clock when he just puts it up, his actual motion is so much better. And you look at the Bucs generally, every game they have a different rotation. They change it constantly. There's no process. Not a it constantly. There's no process. Not a good sign.

There's no plan here. It's totally throw shit against the wall and see what sticks on not just a game-by-game basis, but literally a quarter-by-quarter basis. And if you have no consistency and no plan and no idea where you're going, you're just going to – all you're left with is talent. And so when the Bucs win, they win because Giannis is great. And when they lose, they lose because good coaches just pick them apart like you wouldn't believe.

I mean, Giannis is having, as a PR, of over like 30. And a guy with Bucs, all the Bucs, at all the Bucs, the best follow on Bucs Twitter, charted out all the players that have finished the season above 31 or 32 PR, whatever Giannis is at. That's not many. They were all either in the conference finals or in the NBA finals. And the Bucs are at 500.

And you have to, like, what's the hole here? And it's kid. And it's so frustrating as a Bucs fan because the national media just kind of drops in on the Bucs and they're not watching them on a game-by-game basis. But, I mean, I could go on for hours. Like, he started, here's one example. DeAndre Wiggins, who has been bouncing around the league because he's not good. He looks good because he picks guys up 40 feet away,

but the defense is actually terrible when he's on the court. He played a ton against the Pelicans. We're having a ton of injuries. I get it. It's hard. But the Bucs' best lineup with the injuries, which would be Bledsoe, Brogdon, Middleton, Giannis, and Henson. Because usually it would be Snell, but Snell's out.

They played three minutes against the Pelicans, the last three minutes of the game. They didn't play together the rest of the game. We either had Gary Payton, the two, the second catch shoot. Or D'Andre Wiggins, who was even worse, on the floor. And it's not just four and five. It allows Giannis to be doubled basically the moment he crosses the half-court line. So anyhow, I've got to finish. I know I'm going to go know going on in a minute against the Bulls Wiggins was particularly bad in two minutes he had a minus 11 wow minus 11 on the floor and fortunately he didn't play the rest of the game like I said Jason Kidd is it's all responsive so if he's bad in a couple minutes

he will get pulled for the rest of the game because he has no plan. So what's the reaction? Against the Rockets, DeAndre Wiggins starts. Oh, no. And so he's minus 12 in like 15 minutes in the game, and the Bucs lose by seven. And these lineup decisions, it's all like, oh, James Harden's really good, so let's start DeAndre Wiggins. There's no plan. It's all reactionary.

It sounds like hockey. It's like a hockey coach. Well, the whole defense thing. The whole defense thing. Everyone's no plan. It's all reactionary. It sounds like hockey. It sounds like a hockey coach. Well, the whole defense thing. The whole defense thing. Everyone's getting credit. Oh, the Bucs are really long and rangy. If they do this high-pressure turnover defense, like, you know, it was like bought into the theory.

But the reality for years has not worked. And the Bucs finally switched to a more conservative drop back on the pick-and-roll defense. I'm not sure which Jason Kidd lied about and said they didn't, but he told a Utah sideline reporter that they had changed it. It's bizarre. The whole thing with all the background stuff. This is the deepest deep dive.

I said 60 seconds. You went like 300. I can't stop. I can't stop. But they finally changed. And guess what? The Bucs turnovers actually went way up that they did. Why?

If you actually don't have guys running around with their heads – like chickens with their heads cut off, they're in a better position to use that length and athleticism to make great defensive plays. And this whole like the theory and it's all like, oh, I can imagine how this might work. It's how he coaches and everyone buys into it in the media. But the actual results and process are totally lacking.

This sounds like me when I was flipping out about how bad Doc Rivers was in 05, 06, and 07, and nobody believed me. And then they got Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and 17 role players, and we won 67 games, and people are like, see, Doc Rivers is a good coach. He's like, no, he's not. He's got an unbelievable team. He's not a good coach. I think he got better as it went along.

The Bucs are like yannis has improved incredibly yannis would have improved no matter who his coach was i mean the guy's unbelievably driven and this is one of the reasons why you know uh close you know bucks fans were so in on him super early and this guy was selling trinkets on the street like 10 years 10 years ago i mean the guy has unbelievable drive and he is going to make himself the greatest player that he can be. I have no doubt. Giannis has the potential to be in the GOAT conversation in the long run. I'm not saying he's going to be, but he has the physical tools and he has the drive.

It's so frustrating. This is everything I wanted. I knew you would take it up to 11 out of 10, and you did. Now Giannis is the GOAT. This is the best. No, he's not the GOAT. No, I like it. I 11 out of 10, and you did. Now Giannis is the GOAT. This is the best. No, he's not the GOAT. No, I like it. I might agree.

I'm with you. I love it. You frazzled me with the 60 seconds. I actually was thinking about this. I wanted to have a clear, coherent case about why Jason Kidd is a bad coach that I could finally drop in the BS report. And you said 60 seconds. I got frazzled.

I just started spewing stuff out over the place. You fired up threes. I will say it was easier to play you guys without Greg Monroe, who, a Celtic killer, and just that low post guy. We gotta go, but if I ran the Bucs, I would play Giannis

at center. I don't know if I would do it this year because I wouldn't want to put the miles on him because you guys aren't going to win the title anyway, but long term, him at center with the right team around him is just terrifying because he can protect the rim. You wouldn't lose anything. Oh, he's an incredible rim protector.

He's not a great wing defender. He's not a one-on-one guy. His lateral quickness is actually not. That's his biggest weakness. But as a weak side defender and a help defender, I mean, he's unbelievable. He's the best. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. All all right do a quick plug for your newsletter uh stratechery strategy and tech together you just search for ben thompson it's the easiest result we had this discussion last

time about how you spent months thinking about the ringer name uh yeah and i probably should have done the same thing but yeah ben thompson and i write one free article a week so you can get that or you can sign up for ten dollars a month and get an extra three articles sent to your email inbox every morning. I've been reading for a couple of years. I tried to hire you. I love reading your stuff. I think it's great. I think it's essential.

And it was an especially fun year in 2017 to read it. Thanks for coming on. Talk to you soon. Talk to you later. Thanks so much to Brian Curtis. Thanks to Ben Thompson. Thanks to you soon. Talk to you later. Thanks so much to Brian Curtis. Thanks to Ben Thompson. Thanks to SeatGeek. Don't forget, $20 off your first SeatGeek purchase

and NBA tickets. Use promo code BSNBA. Back Friday with one more BS Podcast. I don't have.