The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Untradeable SGA With Michael Pina and the Future of Everything With Derek Thompson

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Michael Pina to discuss Shai Gilgeous-Alexander becoming an untradeable asset (3:56), what the Knicks should do next (20:30), and whether the Hawks or Heat should be the Southeast Division favorites (37:24). Then, Bill is joined by Derek Thompson to discuss the potential end of an era in the tech world, and what to expect in the future (46:23). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Derek Thompson and Michael Pina Associate Producer: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, if you love the NBA draft and you can't get enough Wimby and Yama content, I don't know why you wouldn't be able to get enough. You should be getting as much as you want. Well, we have some at the Ringer NBA Draft Show. Kevin O'Connor, J. Kyle Mann, breaking down the NBA draft every week. Favorite prospects, Wimby updates, homages to Jarks, our guy. We have it all. Go check it out. Ringer NBA Draft Show, wherever you get your podcasts. It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. Football is in full action. FanDuel's highest rated sports book is the best place to bet it all.

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and helplines available and listen to the end of the episode for additional details. You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem called Win 100 Gambler or visit rg-help.com. This episode is brought to you by my old friend, Miller Lite. I've been a big fan of Miller Lite, man, since college days when I was allowed to have beer. I think nephew Kyle is a fan too. Miller Lite keeps it simple for us. Undebatable quality, great taste. Picture this, it's game day, all the gang's here. You're tailgating outside the stadium. It's a great time for beer. Or how about when you're standing at the grill and the smell

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We did Blowout. Me, Sean Fantasy, Wesley Morris, Chris Ryan. It is still naughty November. We have one more coming next week. And that's it. I also did a hottest take this week that I was very excited about. It's about the overuse of the word insane and how it has to end. So go listen to that.

Go listen to the hottest take. And you can hear me complain. It's an has to end. So go listen to that. Go listen to the hottest take and you can hear me complain. It's an insane hottest take. You're going to love it. Prestige TV podcast did White Lotus episode three is on there from Sunday night. Chris Ryan and I were going to do Tulsa King this week, but then I made the mistake of watching it and I'm going to pass and pass on a Tulsa King recap. I'll just leave it at that. So we have this week, Sex Lives at College Girls is coming back and I think we have a

pot on the prestige later in the week. And if you missed the season finale of Atlanta, the podcast that we did, Van Latham, Charles Holmes, Van hasatham, Charles Holmes. Van has now gone nuts. He thinks this is the best season finale of all time. I thought it was awesome. I'm not ready to go there. Best season finale of all time.

I might have to have Van on. We might have to figure it out once and for all what was the greatest season finale of all time. I think the one I'm most partial to is probably the Larry Sanders show. The last episode of that just was so immensely satisfying and so awesome in so many different ways. I also think The Sopranos last episode

is now underrated because now that 16 years has passed since the ending that made everybody think their cable went out, it's a pretty amazing episode. And you just have to get over that last second. Cousin Sauer had made this as mine right now. Thank God he's not here. But I got to think about this some more. My favorite series finale of all time. Cheers is pretty good. I'll have a list for you. Maybe Thursday I'll have a list for you.

And I'm going to make fun of Van again after we finish this. Coming up on this podcast, Michael Pena, his first appearance on this pod. He joined the Ringer, I think a month ago or six weeks ago, something like that. And he's been doing great stuff for us. And we're going to talk about a few things NBA related. One is Shea Gilgis-Alexander and what's happened to him this year and how he is no longer a trade asset because he might be untradeable. We're going to talk about what happened in the Knicks and what's going on in the division with Miami and Atlanta and who we like going forward. I think the answer will not surprise you. And then after that, I had Derek Thompson come on

and we're going to talk about what just happened the last 15 years in the content streaming tech era and whether that was officially the end of an era that culminates with Elon and Twitter and FTX and just all the stocks plummeting. Everything just seems to be changing right now. And is this the end of something?

And where's it going? And what did the last 15 years mean? Some predictions about the future of everything. This is a good podcast. First, let's bring in our friends from Pearl Jam. All right. I knew I'd like this guy when I texted him. He had a 617 area code. I was like, this is somebody that I'm glad is on my side of the ring.

And Michael Pena's here. He wrote a piece. What is that? What? Monthly awards? You did a monthly nba awards piece on monday the one yeah the season awards what do you call it exactly we're a couple weeks in a few weeks in it was a small sample size theater awards is what i nicknamed it i think internally you know

we all do it about i i hate the mvp debate until there's like 12 games left but yet we do it so often now that now i get mad when I see, like you had Luka as the MVP and not Tatum. And I was like, fuck this. Tatum's doing everything right now. Boston has the best offense in the league. I was getting mad for 13 games in. We're not talking about Tatum coming out of the gig.

I want to talk about SGA. Played the Celtics last night. He was incredible. 13 for 26 against all of these different defenders, Boston's throwing at him. He doesn't really take three pointers. I mean, he made two last night, but for the most part, his in the paint stats are starting to rival what you would see from centers. And to say he made the leap is the understatement. Every year we have a guy who just makes a leap and it's usually a

young guy and it's usually somebody under maybe 26. And you're like, wow, I didn't realize this guy was going to be this good. This guy is clearly the guy this year. And now of course, I have Knicks fans in my life being like, oh, we just got to, same Mitchell thing. We got to, to me, he's an untradeable. Do you have him, let's start there. Do you have him as an untradeable at this point? I agree. I don't understand the trade rumors, really. I feel like it's wish casting from Knicks fans. It's wish casting from Raptors fans.

Any other fan base that wants this dude? He's absolutely unguardable. I mean, you cited it last night against the Celtics. They're throwing some of the best individual defenders in basketball at him. Grant Williams, Jalen Brown, Marcus Smart. It didn't matter. Al Horford. They threw some Al Horford at him.

They had tried six guys at him. Sure. Sam Houser did block his shot. Want to get that on the record. Incredible play. But no, he's, I mean, 31 and a half points, six assists, five boards, whatever it is, sixth in PER. The numbers kind of speak. It's more about just watching him play, watching how fluid he is, getting to the rim.

Averaging 17.1 points in the paint, which is third behind only Giannis and Zion. Jesus. More than John Morant, who averaged the most points in the paint for a guard in 25 years since they started basically recording the statistics. So he's just, he's incredible. He can do everything with both hands, drives left more than he drives right and I went to some of those games and he clearly had it. Like it was like, this guy's going to be good. He's definitely a starting guard. Maybe an all-star, like that could be the ceiling. He'd have some games where he just sucked. Then he'd have some other games where like, oh, this guy.

And when they threw him in the Paul George trade, which I think they had to, I don't think OKC is doing that trade otherwise, but I remember doing pods at the time being like, yeah, I know that was a shitload of picks, but I'm telling you, like, I just think the Clippers should have figured out a way to keep him because everything they're trying to do, this is like the guy you need with those two guys. Potentially. I'd never thought he was going to be this good, but I also pressed. He's like,

Hey, if you want Paul George, I need that guy. And I need some picks, but I really, I think SGA was the key to the trade. I never in a million years in that first clip of year thought that he was be,

be as good as the guy, these first 13 games. It just didn't, didn't seem like he had the offense. And I think what's been stunning to me is he's got this weird herky-jerky thing where it's like, he's not one of those like Jaws, like I'm going to beat you down. I'm going to do some stuff and I'm going to go buy you. Shea, like you don't even really know he's going buy you until he already went buy you. You think

like he's setting up or he's waiting for a pick to come over and he's moving at this weird speed. And then all of a sudden he's just by people can finish with either hand. And he's just, I think he's the quirkiest offensive player in the league. Would you, could you come up with a quirkier offense than him? He's very idiosyncratic. Um, yeah, I would say that, you I would say that when I wrote the small sample size theory, he was my most improved player, obviously. And I wrote in there that trying to guard him

when he drives the basketball is like sipping an open mug of coffee in rush hour traffic. It's just like, as you said, he's herky jerky. The hesitation moves are there. I found that when he picks up his dribble in the paint, that's when he does the most damage. He just pivots through until he finds this little window, this little crease to get his shot off or find an open shooter on the perimeter. He's just amazing. And he's just, he's so patient and his decision-making is so intelligent and advanced. And I think that you really hit the nail on the head at the beginning when you talked about how he's abandoned, not abandoned, but he doesn't need the three-point line to just average over 30, which is kind of remarkable. And I don't know anyone else who really does that

beyond like DeMar DeRozan last season who didn't even average 30. If you look at his three-point rate two years ago, it was 30. Three-point rate two years ago, or last season, I should say it was 28. And this year it's 13. So that slide is, I don't even know how to, like, it's just, it's absolutely amazing. And the fact that he's shooting 50% from the mid-range, 72% in the restricted area, just such a talent. You know, they doubled him a few times last night and I was watching it going, damn, that's like the ultimate sign of respect from the Celtics because they really pride themselves. Like if they're doubling a year, like Giannis basically. And then Scalabrini said it on the broadcast. He's like, man, they're doubling Shea. So he thought the same thing. Um, to me, that's like when you're shifting the game where the entire

defense is so worried about you, they're either sending the second guy to you. That's like, that's the level I want you to be at offensively. And conversely, if you're not getting treated like that, I always wonder how good you are. You know, where it's like, oh, this guy's getting his points. But yeah, when I watch the games, they don't seem that worried about him. Like they're happy to go have just one-on-one and they'll shade a little bit, but not really. He was getting treated completely different.

Part of that is his team's not great, but for the Celtics to concede, we need multiple guys on this one, I thought was kind of a last video game level for him. I was really impressed. Yeah. I think early in the game, you load up to stop him because he's the entire scouting report, right? Everyone knows what he wants to do. He wants to go down. He wants to get into the paint. And the Celtics load up behind him. They pack the paint. And he just finds Jalen Williams, who hits a couple of threes. He finds Lou Dort, who hits a three. I think Poku hit a corner three. And as the game goes on, Celtics defenders are drifting you know, drifting a little bit more towards the perimeter and respecting those shots and contesting those shots.

And then that's when it opens up for Shea. So he's just really smart with how he paces himself and paces the game. And I mean, again, I don't know to your original question, I don't know why the Oklahoma City Thunder would ever trade this guy. It's not happening. The other thing is, I look at the arc. The usual arc for the young guy is, he's usually a high lottery pick. They go to a shitty team. Like what Jalen Green's going through right now in Houston, right? Lottery pick. It's going to be a bad team last year. This year's team's going to be bad. Maybe by year four,

year five, it'll be a good team. Shea starts out, he's on the Clippers. They win 48 games. He's playing in the playoffs. He's playing 29 minutes a game for them. And that team was like, they were in a playoff series of the Warriors. That's a really nice rookie experience. Got Doc Rivers as a coach. Then goes to OKC in the trade and gets to play with, was Chris on that team at that point? Yeah. Chris Paul and Dennis Schroeder. He was, right? Yeah. That was the team when they would go the three guard offense. And so he gets to go to Chris Paul graduate school for a year and learn whatever tricks you're going to learn from Chris Paul, right? You could have gone and gone with like what happened to Oladipo.

You go to OKC and here's your new teammate, Russell Westbrook. Stand over there. Russ is going to shoot 30 times. Your job is to just stand there and pretend you're going to shoot. Instead, he goes to this team that was another really fun team. They made the playoffs. They played a seven-game series against Houston. So those are his first two years. And then the next two are just tank a palooza. And now we're in this weird, I don't know what this team is. Are they going to tank? Are they

not going to tank? But he's almost too good to tank. So I don't know what they do. They're a 500 team and they hang in all these games. And I don't know what you would do. Like they said, Holmgren's out for the year. Like now I'm looking at this going, is he, what if he's ready in February? But if you're a 500 team with a chance to make a playing game, you have all these picks anyway. Like maybe you say, fuck it. I don't know. The case for trading him is, which I want to be adamant I would not do, is let's say you trade him to a team like the Knicks and you just take basically everything that the Knicks have. And you have the Knicks first round pick unprotected this year. You have your own unprotected first round pick as the Thunder this year. And you've just mutilated yourself if you trade SGA. So now

that's a top five pick. Exactly. And the Thunder are terrible this season when sj is on the bench we should mention so you are really dramatically increasing your odds to get one of the great prizes in the history of the lottery so that's the argument for trading him but i still i don't even think twice about it he's just such a special player and it's kind of like when you do get really talented lottery picks, Chet next year is going to be hopefully healthy and able to play. You want guys like Shea around them so that you can just be good right away. And I think that this team can make a leap sooner rather than later, even though they're very young. Well, and they have cap space and they have a ton of picks. So I would say keep them. I did, I messed around with my first official trade value list, which I'm not going to read here,

but maybe mid-December. And I was shocked by where I had a couple of guys. Shea was the most shocking to me. He just kept kept going up and I'll tell you where he landed. Number 12. I had him as the 12th best trade value guy. Yeah. Good contract. He's young. And I'm just like, yeah, I don't like if, if Miami called them as good as Jimmy Butler's been, who's 33 years old, who makes like $50 million. And if Miami called them, I was like, we'll give you Jimmy Butler for Shea straight up. Okay. So he's hanging up. Like they're just not doing that. So if you're talking like age, salary and all that, he's, he's higher than, uh, than you think. And I think to me, he's like, I have Trey young 11th. And I think, I think that's an interesting conversation, at least from what you've seen this year, because I think Shea, I think,

is a better two-way player than the Trey is. But anyway, the point is, these conversations weren't happening. I remember doing pods with Priscilla this summer, and we were talking about how, when the Knicks didn't get Donovan Mitchell, I was like, why not move to Shea? Why not just offer them that same package?

And maybe they did, and we don't know about it, but I wonder what the price would have been this summer. I know what the price is now. He's hanging up. But in the summer, I feel like you might've been able to steal him. You have me now thinking about the comedy potential of Jimmy Butler in Oklahoma City

and just what that would look like. So my brain got a little frazzled there, but it's a toss-up question, honestly, with Trey and Shea. And Shea's defense, he's averaging a block and a half a game. He's second, I think, in steals. And he's really good at doing

what Rondo used to do years ago, which just poking, fighting over screens and then poke guys think they're home free. Paint's clear. And he just comes out of nowhere, pokes the ball from behind. He's got such long arms, and he's caring on the defensive end.

He's long and he's big. So he's a two-way player as well. And I think you might... I don't want to convince you either way, but you might have to flop Shea and Trey. And I'm a huge Trey Young fan. So that's how good Shea's been. Yeah, that's a tough one. I have to look at that some more. And I gave Trey the legacy because Trey at least made the conference finals and Shea

hasn't done anything. But it's funny you mentioned the defense and the Rondo thing. That was the thing that jumped out with him as a rookie. It was hard to say what he was going to be offensively, but the things that he definitely had, he, he moved a certain way on defense that was just always productive and he had long arms and he was just kind of bothersome and he was really fun to play with was the other thing. Like he was never, that's why it's been so interesting to watch him this year where he just all of a sudden now is this, you know, the fulcrum of every offensive possession. I never thought he was going to be that type of player. I always thought he was going to be this, you know, kind of inclusive, doesn't have a lot of shots. And I just didn't

see the offensive side. If you're the Knicks, this was the big chess piece you were kind of hoping for as like the, we didn't get Donovan Mitchell, but we still have the picks to move in on somebody. And now I think the ship's probably sailed. Davis would be the other one, maybe. But everybody's like, well, what's the Knicks big deal going to be? And I just don't think the player's there yet, unless there's somebody I'm not seeing. To me, SGA would still be the number one, but I don't think it's conceivable. Unfortunately for the Knicks, Sam Presti watched the Thunder score 145 points on Sunday afternoon against all the players that actually, well, R.J. Barrett was benched in the second half for that game, so he didn't even get

to play. So I don't think that that's such an attractive package anymore. And it's funny, Obi Toppin is actually four months older than Shea Gilgis-Alexander. I looked that up before. So I don't know. They have a ton of picks. That's great. A lot of them are protected firsts from other teams.

So I just, I don't see it, unfortunately, for the Knicks. Sorry, Knicks fans. Yeah, Shea, Shea's still 24, which is just unbelievable to me. Also, the other thing with him, I think he's eligible for the Canadian team, right? Yes. The Canadian team might be pretty good this year or whenever the next Olympic year is, like if Shea's going to look like this. Shea's like your worst case scenario for an Olympic battle.

Let's take a break. And then I want to talk about the Knicks. Start the NFL week off right with a no sweat, same game parlay every Thursday from Fando, America's number one sports book. It doesn't matter if you're new to Fando or if you already have an account. Every Thursday night, you'll get free bets back.

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host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right. So quickly, we mentioned the Knicks and how SGA has fallen through the cracks, in my opinion. Davis, you'd be crazy, I think, to just, that would be an all-time panic move. He's like, here's everything for Anthony Davis. I don't know what that is anymore. I don't know if he's capable of playing 65 regular season games. He looked awesome on Sunday night, and that's the rub. If you see the Sunday night game, you're like, of course you should trade for him. And Thursday he could have back tightness and be out for two weeks. I just wouldn't trust it. I don't really feel like there's anybody else out there right now for them. And you could make the case. They're actually probably better off zagging the other way and trying to get into the, the Wemby scoot sweepstakes, but you have Thibodeau in year three. He's not wired to do that. You have Leon Rose in year three. If you're the front office, that can't be your plan in year three. It could be your plan in year one after you've gotten the extension. Year three is a little tougher. And I don't really know where they go because they are clearly not one of the

best seven teams in the East. They might make a plan. I don't know what that means. I was looking at the trade value list I did, which had 70 guys on it, which I was surprised by. The league's really deep this year. They had nobody in the top 64 for me. And I won't even tell you who it was. But that was them and Washington were the latest of any trade value guy that I had. And I was like, that's a bad sign if you're either of those teams where it's like, we don't have

a single trade value guy in the top 60, like a single true asset, not great. So basically you could say their best asset is this first round pick that they have. And whatever that might be over everybody else in their roster. Trading that pick would be catastrophic. You want RJ Barrett, if you're the Knicks, to be that asset, but he just signed a $120 million contract and doesn't look great. And he's kind of stunk this year. What happened to him?

He doesn't look great. I think that the adjustment period of bringing in someone like Jalen Brunson, Julius Randle's trying to find his touches and his shots. And, you know, Barrett's numbers are okay and he started really slow. But I think you'd like to see him just in a different situation. Can I throw out a star that I think the Knicks could target, not this year, but in the offseason? Let's hear it. Cat.

Oh, man, I'm thinking that's February. But is he a star and is putting Cat in New York the worst idea of all time? I can't think of anybody who would turn off the Knicks fans faster and more furiously than the first terrible Cat game when he gives the weird press conference after. I just think that, I can't imagine a worse fit. I hear that, absolutely.

I think Cat, you you know i totally understand the struggles that he's had the postseason and i've listened to your wonderful podcast for years and i know how you feel about carla 30 towns um i think he's just a super special offensive player still and obviously there's the the connection with le Rose, who was his agent. And it's also just a situation. You did mention the situation he's in now. I think that's a factor. That's what I'm getting to right now. Yeah.

Minnesota is just in my small sample size theory column. They won the saddest team award so far. And I don't really know how they get out of the lull that they're in without... Cat's kind of the exit strategy for them. And you don't trade them this year. I think you kind of wait and see, and you'd be a little bit more patient here. But because of just what they gave up to get Rudy Gobert, which is just potentially like one of the worst trades of my entire life. And I, I like any sport, not even just basketball. Yeah. I like Rudy a lot. Uh, but you just watching him out of the spread pick and roll

offense that Quinn Snyder had him in, in Utah, he just like, doesn't know what to do on offense at all. And, you know, they threw him the ball. There was a game the other night against the Cavs that they actually won. And they threw, there was one play with a, I think Anthony Edwards threw him the pass, standing along the baseline. And it's like the Timberwolves are expecting him to be able to do something with the ball and he immediately traveled. I like, I don't, it's just, it's, it's very uncomfortable and awkward and the fit is very strange. And the defense is not super tip top elite, which is why you got him in the first place. So I would explore moving on from Cat. I think that's the only real way

to get out of this mess and recoup some of the draft equity. And maybe RJ Barrett looks much better next to Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert. I don't know, but it's, it's a mess, um, in Minnesota. Kind of a bummer. They extended him. So you can't even trade them. I forget when the date is when you can actually trade them. But I watched, I watched a lot of that Cleveland game too. And what was weird about it was Russell. Who's been dog shit the whole season, but he was really good in the Cleveland game. Right. And he finally got going, made some shots. Cleveland makes his late run. Garland's like out of control. He's, you know, finally had his first grade. He got hit in the eye and like first quarter of the season.

So he hasn't been right. And he goes nuts and Cleveland kind of claws back and it's sitting there to, to, for an all-time Minnesota collapse. I think there are 20 in the fourth quarter, but they, they kind of staved them off and they won. And you would have thought, and I was, I could only see it on TV. I wasn't there, obviously, but I'm watching going, all right, this is the moment for them. Like I can't, I'll be really interested to see how they react to each other. You can go watch it. If you have league pass, go watch the end of that game. This is not a team that was reacting like, Oh my God, huge win guys. Here we go. High fives around back slaps. They looked like a pickup team that just, uh, we got to 11. All right. Who's who's got next. And I was

like, that's alarming because their body language all year has been alarming. Verno texted me. He went to the game Friday and he got to see it firsthand. And he was like, that's alarming because their body language all year has been alarming. Verno texted me. He went to the game Friday and he got to see it firsthand. And he was like, that team, eye rolls, the whole thing. They just don't have the vibe. And when you don't have it when you win, that's even more alarming to me. Because that was a game where it's like, great job, guys. We got Russell going, boom. And you can just tell there's something wrong. Edwards is not the same guy this year as the other thing, but maybe that's a different really used an end-to-end, wire-to-wire route.

They really needed a big win, dominant win. And Donovan Mitchell didn't play in that game. Jared Allen didn't play in that game. And I'm watching the end, and I'm like, I think they're going to lose now. And I was kind of expecting them to. I was expecting Darius Garland to just finish with, like, 57 points. And it just to be one of the more embarrassing losses. And then I don't even know where you go from there, but it kind of

had the feeling of, okay, this is now a must win for us. And I'm just like, we're not even at Thanksgiving guys. Like, I don't know. It was kind of depressing to watch that one. The shot selection is so bad. I remember it was like in the last minute, they're up five and they got to stop. I think they were up five. And Edwards came down and just chucked up like a 26 footer. It's like, what are you doing? You're up five. It's a terrible shot. You're not down five, you're up five. But he's been a mess. The chemistry is a mess. And I asked that question of Verno and House on Thursday about, did they just trade for the wrong jazz guy? And could they have just done all the stuff they gave up for Gobert, just put Russell in the trade, kept the other pieces, kept Vanderbilt, and would they have

been better off? And I think the answer is unequivocally yes, because part of the problem for them is Russell, I don't know if he's the worst starting point guard in the league, but he's in the bottom four, right? Bottom five from what we get from him. He's not good. He's not a starting point guard anymore. He's a guy who should come off the bench like how Colin Sexton comes off for Utah. So the fact that they made that all in trade, but didn't fix a position where that is now that's the dominant position in the sport.

You need the creator and he's not the creator. I guess they think Edwards is going that's the dominant position in the sport. You need the creator and he's not the creator. I guess they think Edwards is going to be the creator, but he's 21. So I don't know. I never liked the trade and now I hate it. I hated it already, but now I despise it. I think your instincts are right. I think it's going to go down as one of the worst trades that we've had, at least in modern basketball. I think we'll mention it often. It's pretty gross. It's a pretty gross trade, Bill. But listen, I'm older than you. Sometimes this happens. When Khan took Rubio and Johnny Flynn back to back, he was immediately terrible. And Curry went the next

pick and it was like, this is immediately terrible. There's no way this is a good idea. These guys make no sense together. This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. And that was proven out. So sometimes it'll happen. So I'm looking at the Knicks. Right now they are taping this. They're playing tonight.

They're playing Utah. Taping this 2.30 Pacific time. The Knicks are 6-7. The teams behind them in the 11th through 15 are Chicago, Brooklyn, Orlando, Charlotte, and Detroit. And I think Orlando, Charlotte, and Detroit probably stay behind them, but Brooklyn and Chicago probably jumped them. So they're not one of the three worst teams in these, but they're probably the fourth worst team. Then you look at the teams that are ahead of them. It's them or the Wizards.

And I don't know. I think the Wizards probably have more talent. So I don't know. It's those two. And then Indiana would be the other one. But Indiana is pretty frisky. Like you watch them play, you know, they can score. They have an identity.

They have a good coach. I kind of know what they are. They could trade Turner tomorrow and blow it up. But so New York's going to be in that I would say 9 to 12 range

and if you're going to be there you can't get Wimbinyama yeah I mean you would hope that cooler heads would prevail and that they would go

in the other direction I think that that's the wisest maneuver for them, obviously. But yeah, like I don't see them doing any, I'm kind of disappointed in them, frankly, because I thought that they were, I thought they had nice depth coming into this season. I don't, I'm not a huge fan of Jalen Brunson's contract,

but I think he's a wonderful fit on the team and can have a really positive impact on everything. And he's played pretty well. And Randall, I thought would be somewhere in between the all NBA season and whatever happened last year. And that's kind of born true. Love Isaiah Hartenstein, one of my favorite backup bigs in the league. But, you know, the defense is just so terrible.

And that game against the Thunder on Sunday at MSG, I know it was like a matinee game and weird stuff happens when tip off is noon, but you score like a franchise record, 48 points, I think in the first quarter, I want to say, and lose by 10 and give up one 45.

And it's the most points that the Knicks have given up since Isaiah Thomas was their coach in 2006. Like I, it's just, it's, it's just a mess. So I know it's too soon to say just blow it up, tank, whatever, but adding a blue chip asset in this year's draft would be very important, I think, for their long-term future. I would never advocate somebody getting fired. but I just think they have the wrong coach for whatever team they have. And it's not his fault necessarily. I do wonder if he's a relic from

another era. And when he succeeded the most as defensive coordinator for the Celtics and then those Bulls teams, Basketball is just different. And basketball now is so wide open and so spread out. It's a little like what's happened in football where the Dolphins coach might be Daniel. It's just this new type of football coach that we didn't have 10, 15 years ago. And a lot of teams have rolled the dice with guys like that. Some have hit, some haven't. I just think I want to see

before I blow this team up, I'd want to see this team with somebody that could look at all the pieces they have offensively and be like, wait, are we doing this correctly? Is there another iteration of this? What are we doing wrong? Versus like, I don't think this is ever going to be a good defensive team. And if it's not a good defensive team, why do you have tips? It's not like he's an offensive genius, you know? So I, I don't, I almost feel like the coach would be the first move for me before I blew it up. On the other hand, like, I don't even know, what are you blowing up that none of these guys really have that much value either, you know? So it's not like, like, okay, so you could be like, let's, we're blowing it up.

We're trading SGA, you know, and that would have a profound impact on their season. I don't feel like there's a guy in the Knicks that could do that. Even if Indiana traded Miles Turner, that's going to impact their season. Miles Turner's playing well this year, you know, and he'll, he'll go somewhere and they won't have them anymore. And they're, they'll suffer in three, four different ways. I don't see the guy, unless it was Brunson who they're not trading. I don't even see the move. So man, you don't want to be in that 38 to 42 win range. You just don't, especially this year with a generational guy coming. No, I mean, the move is just to develop your young guys, play Toppin,

who I said was 24 years old already. Play him more than 17 minutes a game. I don't think that Quentin Grimes is the difference maker here between qualifying for the play-in and being competitive in it and not. But not having him available this season I think

is hurt because he would be a really great starting two and Evan Fournier is just he's not really not what you want. Yeah, I mean... Well, there is a move. Hold on. There is a move, though. Okay. Why aren't the

Knicks the Westbrook team? And I know the Knicks fans are going to get mad at that. But if I'm a GM in the league that can't win the title and isn't bad enough to guarantee myself a top four pick, I want those Laker picks. I'm focused on them. I think that's a panic.

The fact that they won on Sunday night, they're 3-10. Maybe they could be 6-11 when LeBron comes back. Maybe they'll get to 7-11. They'll start talking themselves into, oh, if we only, the way AD's playing, I just want those picks. And if I'm the Knicks, that's my number one goal. Get me those fucking picks.

Who on the Knicks roster is helping the Lakers to the point where it validates giving up two of those, I mean, two of the best trade assets in the league right now? Phenomenal question. So my answer is I don't really have the guys unless RJ Barrett is involved, who I just gave this giant contract to, who's now really hard to trade. And Randall makes no sense on that team. So you'd have to go three-way. That's why the Knicks are kind of, that's why I brought it up 15 minutes into the Knicks thing, because they don't have the trade. But other teams do, like Indiana definitely does.

You know, and if I'm Indiana, I'm thinking about it. You just, you make, you trade whatever and get at least one of the picks. The other thing is you could try to just get one of the picks, not two, right? It doesn't have to be both. And the Lakers can put protection on them too. They can also say it's a top three protected, but I want those picks. I still feel like the Lakers are a panic trade waiting to happen. I'm trying to get them if I'm in the week.

Incredible trade assets. Incredible picks to have. LeBron's going to be retired, AD might not be on the team anymore. If you can get any one of them unprotected, it's a golden ticket. And if I'm Mitch Kupchak and Charlotte, that's the team that I would be calling them every single day offering. Do you want Terry Rozier? Do you want PJ Washington? Do you like anyone on my roster?

I know Gordon Hayward is old and hurt all the time. Do you want him? Just, I would take, I would, I would be offering anyone on the roster except LaMelo Ball. Yeah. So they could, and they could take some salary back too. I mean, that could potentially be PJ Washington with Rozier, with Hayward.

We'll give you Kelly Oubre too. What else do you want? We'll take anything. And then you just let Russ cook in Charlotte. Speaking of that division before we go, I said that I thought Miami might be done on Thursday's pod, which we taped before Thursday night's game. They were four and seven. They won three straight.

They had a dramatic win against Phoenix last night. Atlanta has looked better than them. And it feels like it's Atlanta's division. And everyone gets mad when you count out the heat. I just feel like there's still a 15 game Jimmy Butler injury that's coming. That team's older. Lowry's going to go down for three weeks. They don't have any depth. And it feels like it's Atlanta's division to take on FanDuel. I think Miami is still favored to win the division. I'll look at it as we're talking. But I feel like that's Atlanta's division now. And I've been impressed. Murray and Trey fit together better than I expected. I think Capella has been the big

revelation this year that he kind of looks like the Capella from three years ago. And then they could bring in a Kongu up the bench and they have some big guy stuff. They have some trade assets. They have the ability to maybe even improve what they have, but they seem like a way safer bet to me than Miami does. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. I really agree with your point about just how thin Miami is and the on-off numbers right

now with Jimmy on offense, when he plays good offense, when he sits, everything craters. When Bam Adebayo plays, great defense. When Bam Adebayo sits, it's just one of the worst defenses in basketball. And I'm waiting, as you said, Jimmy's going to have his annual 10, 12 games and betting against Eric Spolstra and this team that knows its identity, knows its defensive identity. Didn't really play a good defensive game against the Suns, a Suns team that obviously didn't have Cam Johnson, didn't have Chris Paul. Dwayne Washington was going off from three, but just kept kind of churning through on the defensive end and then had a scheme in place to every time Devin Booker had the ball or in a ball screen action, they would switch it and then double them and force a pass and force someone else to beat them. And they just kind

of know what they are, who they are, and still managed to win that game with Jimmy at the end, getting that great stop against Devin Booker. But the fact that it was so close at home and their schedule right now, they're about to go on the road, road-heavy schedule coming up. It could get pretty, I don't want to say ugly. I think this team is just average. I don't think they're very good. I don't think they're very bad. They're average, but that's just not really going to cut it. They have these sequences here and there where things look good, but Duncan Robinson is not hitting his threes. Game Vincent's not hitting his threes. It's just a thin team, really dependent on Jimmy Butler. And Jimmy Butler's third on the team right now in usage. And I always want him to be a little bit

more aggressive offensively as a scorer. They needed him in that Charlotte game and overtime. I want him to be like that more often, and then that's just not who he is until the playoffs happen. But yeah, going back to the Hawks. Wait, hold on. Can we finish Miami, then we'll go to the Hawks? Sure, absolutely. The Butler thing. So last night, if you just watch the last three minutes,

you're like, oh my God, Jimmy Butler. But he only took 12 shots. He's, he has the ability to kind of, I don't want to say coast, but he picks his spots cause he's older. Um, but then you watch the last five minutes, like the defense he played on Booker on that last play was out of control. That was like game seven defense. And I was watching it wondering like in the back of my head, I wonder if he's putting on a little show just in case, just in case Phoenix wants to make an offer to a 500 Miami team in two months. Maybe, I don't know what it is, but I do wonder, like, I just don't think Butler's made to be on a 500 team.

And I think that's another subplot to watch with them. Clearly they won three in a row. They kind of ready their ship a tiny bit, but I just think that's a subplot that we have to watch. If that team is 24 and 28, because a couple of injuries happen or whatever, like I don't, I don't trust him to just be happy in a bad situation. Anyway, putting a bow on that Hawks. What do you see? Always been a sucker for the Hawks. love Trey Young I think he's one of the five best offensive players in basketball pick and roll genius his shot has not been falling this year so I see a little bit of upside when he kind of things turn around a little bit for him

34 percent of his shots last year were pull-up threes now it's down to 25 percent I want him to you know jack things up a little bit more. They're not really falling. They will. DeJounte Murray is just... The offense is still bad when Trey's off the floor regardless of who's on it, which is a little concerning, but their net rating is positive because of DeJounte, I think. He's just such a great table setter, such a great pick-and- and roll playmaker settles things down. There was one play last night against the Bucs. By the way, they beat the Bucs twice this season. One of those games was without Trey. The Bucs are 10 and three, two losses against the open floor, and he screams for John Collins to run through the paint, run through, run through, drag his man, hits DeAndre Hunter in the corner for a corner three. Just like a really smart communicator, settles things down. I've always been a huge fan of his game, all-around player. Doesn't really need the ball, even though his spot-up shooting from the outside is terrible, but his pull-up from the mid-range is great. The one thing I'll say is really concerning about this team.

Really miss Bogdan Bogdanovich. Really miss Kevin Herter. Dead last in three-point rate. First in mid-range frequency. I just don't understand. There's some players on this team that just should shoot more threes, and I don't understand why they don't. And I hope that that kind of tilts back in the right direction as the season goes on. But

you nailed it with Capella. He looks great. Onyeka Okonwu basically guards Giannis Antetokounmpo better than anybody in the league. Incredible player. So I just love the depth at Atlanta. And what's really funny, I just want to say, is that they make this trade. I don't want to say it's a panic trade for DeJounte Murray, but you give up three firsts, which is a lot. And you look at the roster, and it's like they want to win right now. But in two or three years, that is when this team is going to peak, in my opinion,

when Onyeka is kind of coming into his own, when AJ Griffin, who looks terrific, the rookie from Duke, looks great. When he's coming into his own into the NBA, Jalen Johnson looks just, I think he's like a really good replacement whenever John Collins moves on and they trade him and they get whatever they can for John Collins, whose usage has completely plummeted. He's basically PJ Tucker for them. That could go south in the locker room at some point this season. We'll see.

But just a lot of really young DeAndre Hunter, who I love. I'm the only person who liked that DeAndre Hunter extension and thought it was a steal for the Hawks. I think I'm the only person alive. 95 million, I think. Something around there. So, yeah. I mean, when he plays, it makes sense. It's just you never know. 95 million, I think. Something around there. So yeah, I'm not... I mean, when he plays, it makes sense.

It's just, you never know. Yeah. I like that he gets to the free throw line. Yes. I'm with you. I like him too. I just wish he played. Yeah, so there's...

I think there's a lot to like. A lot of the pieces fit. A lot of the young pieces fit as well. I think they can be good right now, but I think they can be... I don't know if they're a championship contender, but just a very, very good team for years to come with the young pieces once those guys develop. I'm with you. I wish they had Herter. I think they're missing, or even like a Sam Houser type. They're missing that one guy who's just like the 6'8 guy who just hits five

threes in the first half of some game and whatever. Just a little bit of three-point variance. But other than that, I like what I've seen. They're better than I thought. And I thought, you know, I was really concerned about the Trey-Murray combo, just like how that was going to work with the steering wheel, but it seems okay so far. Trey will get hot. He'll get going. Yeah, my money would be on Atlanta. By the way, I checked, and Atlanta's actually favored for that division now. They're minus 135, and Miami is plus 125, but I don't know. I think they're a much safer bet.

All right. When's your next piece? We have a Luca Christian Wood piece on the site tomorrow. Okay. Really loving their pick and roll chemistry. See how that keeps up. Hopefully it does. But yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Bill.

This was great. Really enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for coming on. It's been great to have you at the ringer too. I'm glad we finally did it. So thanks for coming on. Good luck with everything. it's been great to have you at the ringer too. I'm glad, I'm glad we finally did it. So, uh, thanks for coming on. Good luck with everything.

When you ride transit, please be safe. Yeah. Be safe. Because what you do, others will do too. Others will do it too. So don't take shortcuts across tracks.

Don't do that. In fact, just don't walk on tracks at all. Not at all. Trains move quietly. so you won't hear them coming. You won't hear them coming. See? Safe riding sets an example. Yeah. An example for me. Because safety

is learned. It's learned. Okay. Give it up. Give what up? Really? Really, really. Ugh. This message is brought to you by Metrolinks. Alright, Derek Thompson is here. He hosts our excellent Plain English podcast. I went on there last month and we talked about baseball

and gave a whole bunch of theories on baseball. So now Derek had to come back and I'm going to throw a theory at him. He doesn't really know what my theory is, but I'm going to throw it at you and we're going to go. So it's a little Smart Guy Tuesday here. Good to see you, Derek. It's great to see you.

I truly have no idea what you're about to... I don't even know the subject matter. I don't know if we're talking politics, we're talking tech, economics. This is very exciting for me. Okay. So the Elon Musk Twitter thing, which I don't know what's going to happen to Twitter, but it feels like it's going to morph into something else. Whether it implodes or not. I find hard to believe. I think a lot of people are going to threaten that they're going to leave, but I bet they don't.

And I just feel like it's too embedded in people's lives for it to just disappear, whether it morphs into something that we don't like for a while or whatever. We can litigate that later. But it struck me that we're at the end of some sort of an era. And you're looking at all the stuff that's happening right now with all the streaming services starting to cut back content. Facebook was announced this week. They're getting out of news and Facebook doing the weird metaverse and that whole thing. If you go back to 2007, which is basically right around when Twitter starts, you have Facebook starting to gain momentum back then.

You have the rise of the blogs at that point. You have Disney starting to realize, what's the next iteration of us and all these things. And you go 07 to 2022, Snapchat started maybe three years later. That feels like an era of innovation where social starts to meld with content, where everything becomes a lot more interactive and human beings just have the ability to get their content out right away. Anybody can be a celebrity. And I think we're going to look back like when I'm old,

when I'm in my 80s, I'll be like, oh, the different eras. And I'm going to look at 07 to 22, and I'm going to be like, that was a specific era. This happened, this happened. Spotify blew up and became a thing and so on and so on. And then in 2023, blank. Because I feel like next year, we are now moving into a different era.

So my first question to you, do you feel like this was an era? Do you think I have the right years? And do you feel like we are now at the finish line of whatever it was? I love this. Okay. Not only do I love this, I am in the process right now of writing an article that is basically tech is entering its midlife crisis. All these people who gave us the consumer internet, that gave us social media, they were really young. They were often in their 20s when they

founded this stuff in 2003. I think that was Facebook or Snap or Twitter in the 2000s. And you had this era where you go back to, you said 2007, maybe you can go back to before the iPhone 2003. You had mostly an era of low interest rates, low smartphone adoption, and low social media use. That's what you have at the beginning of this era. And it means that you have this incredible ability to invest a ton of money in building out the smartphone social media nexus world. And it gives us everything you just described. It gives us Facebook. It gives us a connected world. It gives us these apps on our phones to allow us to hail cars and bring food to our doorstep. And you do get the feeling that something has been exhausted. A kind of paradigm has been exhausted. There's been a turning of the page. Facebook just announced they're laying off 11,000 people. Amazon is going to

lay off another 10,000 people. Snap's stock price has declined. Twitter, Jack Dorsey left. He had his own midlife crisis, grew a beard, and then tapped in Elon Musk, who's like the permanent manchild who runs a thousand companies and says, hey, can you fill in for me at Twitter? So I really see this as a midlife crisis, not only because you're at the end of one era, right? The sort of extended adolescence of consumer tech, but also because like, all right, what is a midlife crisis? It's like, it's let's say a guy deciding that a certain era of his life is over, and he's going

to do something kind of crazy. He's going to do a kind of personal moonshot, right? He's going to maybe go out to the bars a little bit longer. He's going to buy a car that maybe he can't afford. He's going to do some crazy things. Look what all these guys, these titans of the last era of tech, are doing. Elon Musk is a hardware engineer dude. He should not be running Twitter, but he is. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to build a metaverse, but he is. He's going to put $200 billion into this new platform for our virtual consciousness. I mean, talk about a midlife crisis. That's like the most expensive Corvette ever bought. So I think that what we're seeing now is tech having

this kind of identity crisis, this kind of midlife crisis, as it's climbed the mountain of consumer tech, and it's casting around for what's next? What can we spend a zillion dollars on next? And I think the flailing that you're seeing in the metaverse, on Twitter, even maybe in crypto, comes from this desperation to find the next mountain now that that frontier has been closed for consumer tech. So then you go into the content piece. I agree with everything you just said. You go to the content piece of it where the content engines were kind of flailing there for a little bit, right? Like newspapers, oh, we're going under. Magazines, oh my God,

we're not going to have those anymore. And eventually we realize, everybody kind of collectively realizes, oh, a la carte, just pay for, people should pay for what they want. And now you look back and you think with newspapers, my God, what were we doing? Why were they, why didn't they just go subscription the whole time? How stupid was that? And you'd be like, whoa, well, we already had it, but not really, not in the way it is now. And now everyone's like, you know, you're seeing that with Substack and all of these different things where it's like, do you like this content? Do you like this person? Come get it. Here's what it costs.

And then people kind of decide what to do. Whereas you look at the 2010s, all of it was about like building users. We had more users, we had more people. Well, how much did you spend? Oh, fine. We spent way more than we made, but look at all these users we have. And then it's good. And in three years from now, we're going to have what we have. And that plan didn't work. And the stock market turned on that plan at some point during the pandemic where they're looking at, you name the media company, name the content company, like, okay, cool. You have all these users, but how are you monetizing it? Like, wait, monetizing what? And so now we're seeing all of those people shifting, which I think leads us to

a pretty fun Twitter discussion that we can have in a second. But so in a weird way, the Alucard thing has come back. The spend as much money as possible to acquire as many users as possible thing, that feels like it's on the end. And then you think about the fact that the iPhone has changed behavior to a point that it's almost unrecognizable. Like Grantland is a site that just, there's no way it could have existed in the way we had it in 2012. It was designed for people on desktops, people who sat down.

Now people want to do five things at once. And then TikTok comes in and they're just like, we're taking all the things that are already starting to blow up consumer habits and we're taking it to the nth degree. It's a rabbit hole. You're just going to be on here. You'll go to the next thing and you won't leave. And we're just going to take people. They're like, almost like zombies. We're just like, we're, we're, we're removing them. And then YouTube, same thing. They were doing it for the last 70 years. Come to our rabbit hole. Well, you like that video. Here's the next one. Stay here. So you have a combination of the stay here platforms and then the a la carte platforms. And I don't know if there's the same possibility to have a place in scale, which is what Facebook was trying to do there for 10 years, right?

Facebook news, Facebook watch, Facebook, we're making content now. Hey, we're going to have shows. And it's like, you know what? People are going on Facebook to repost and look at pictures and maybe they don't want a lot more than that. And now Mark Zuckerberg's like, well, how about this? What if I offer you an alternate universe? Would you like to go there? People are like, not really. I actually wouldn't like to go there. And Facebook to me is like Kodak. It's like Kodak dominant, 1970. Oh my God.

Or Polaroid. Oh, Kodak and Polaroid. Look at those two. They're just slugging it out. And then all of a sudden, oh yeah, it's over. So that's what I mean by that era that we're kind of done with. But I can also see a little of what the new era is going to look like, right? So remember what I said, that this era started with low interest rates, low smartphone adoption, and low social media use. Now all of that is over. Now everyone has a smartphone. Everyone is on social media. That frontier is closed. And also interest rates are going up. And that means that companies can't focus on growth alone anymore. They have to focus on what they sometimes call unit economics.

Am I making a profit on the next marginal customer? I wrote this article about what I call the millennial consumer subsidy, which is this idea that the typical 27-year year old, and let's just say, you know, 2015 could like wake up on a Casper mattress and like order DoorDash for breakfast and like ride an Uber to work and then get DoorDash again at work and then take a Lyft back home and then get, you know, Blue Apron for dinner. And I, at one point added up all of these companies and how much money they were losing in a given year. And I was like, in any given day, a millennial is interacting with companies. They're going to lose about $15 billion this year. And I called it the millennial consumer subsidy because one way you could think

of it kind of nerdily is like the venture capitalists were basically paying the millennials to be on their platforms. They didn't need to make a profit on every young person in New York or Austin or Denver. They didn't need to make a profit. every young person in New York or Austin or Denver. They didn't need to make a profit. They just needed to grow, grow, grow. That's what was valuable. But suddenly, the paradigm changed. Interest rates went up.

Inflation went up. And all these companies realized, oh, wait, we can't just grow infinitely. We actually have to make a profit on each individual person. So what happened? The subsidy went away. DoorDash got more expensive. Uber and Lyftash got more expensive. Uber and Lyft got way more expensive. All these next sort of blue apron clones, they suddenly kind of went

away. I don't know where they are anymore, but they certainly seem to be fading. And so you saw these companies realize, wait, we really do need to make money. And that clicks into exactly what you're saying. We can't just rely on advertising and venture capital money to grow money. And that clicks into exactly what you're saying. We can't just rely on advertising and venture capital money to grow forever. We do actually have to charge our users a little bit more for what they're consuming. And that gives you not only Substack, which is just exclusively subscription, but it also gives you changes that you see at big media companies like the New York Times. If you go back and look at the investor relations reports for the New York Times in say 2003, you'll see that they're basically a 70% advertising business. Today, they're about a 70% subscription business with the bulk of that growth coming from cooking and games and not even

news, just people subscribing to cooking and games. And so I think it's really interesting how you're seeing all these tech companies recognize that the future of their business is asking their users to pay. And that really forces you to focus on the quality of the product because you have to make it good enough for people to actually pay for it, not just to use it because it's free. And I totally agree. You're starting to see this everywhere. And frankly, you're starting to see it even in places that might not even belong. I'm not sure, and maybe we disagree here, I'm not sure that Twitter makes sense as a subscription product, but you are seeing Elon lean really, really heavily into the idea that the future of Twitter is people paying $8 a month, $96 a year to get on Twitter. I mean, this is an entirely new vision of how social media can work. And it fits exactly into the

first theory that we talked about, that this paradigm shift is going from venture capitalists subsidizing users to users paying for themselves. In a weird way, it's going back to the early days of the internet. Remember AOL? So I've had AOL since I think 96 or 97. And they used to have those disks and it would be like, you get 30 free hours of AOL. You used to pay for AOL by the hour. Remember? And you could do a subscription for a to pay for AOL by the hour. Remember? And you could do a subscription

for a month or you could pay by the hour. But if it went over the 30 hours or whatever it was, then it was like, yeah, 31st hour is going to now be whatever the price was. And they figured out all these ways. And then eventually people were like, fuck this. And they morphed into whatever they morphed into. To me, that's the key to saving Snapchat. Because I think Snapchat, and this is going to be a hot take and people will probably disagree, but the key with Snapchat, I watch how my kids use it. My kids are on Snapchat and TikTok more than anything else. And they're on Snapchat. It's basically a messenger for them, right? And they're on there all the time and they're looking and they're back and forth and they're

sending pictures and there's no way to monetize it. And Snapchat's tried to do a whole bunch of different content stuff and all these different ways to make success. But ultimately people like my son are just there to send messages to their friends. Now, Snapchat, there's two ways to go. One, it could say like, all right, it's now $5 a month. That's it. If you want to be on Snapchat, it's $5 a month. I think a lot of people would pay the $5 a month. That's it. If you want to be on Snapchat, it's $5 a month. I think a lot of people would pay the $5 a month. That's one way to do it. The other way is, hey, it's $0 for the first 20 hours on Snapchat. And then hours 20 to 75, that's $4.99 a month. And if you're like 75 hours and up, that's $20 a month. And you decide.

So it's like metered social media, right? Like free up to X hours and then above that. That's interesting for two reasons. One, it's a clever way to charge your power users who are most likely to pay more money. So it's smart in that way that you're not allowing free writing. You're not allowing

the people who are absolutely addicted to essentially skate by without paying anything. It's also, it's kind of like a tax on overuse of the platform. Which makes sense. Right. There's all these concerns among psychologists in the US and in Europe, even in China, that people are getting addicted or are using social media compulsively. And the same way that we have sin taxes on cigarettes, right companies would essentially being, be in effect syntaxing their own product by saying, if you use Snapchat or if you use Instagram, if you log in, you know, more than 25 hours a week, we're going to start charging you a lot of money. Um, and that, that, that might actually, you know, ironically keep people, uh, from, from overusing it.

So I guess it's, it's clever in, in, in those two ways, even though they cut against each other, because it means that fewer people are likely to enter that sort of highest premium level because in a way you are taxing the overuse of social media. Or maybe it's just 20, maybe it's 20 hours a month and you go over that

and now it's 9.99. But just fundamentally, it doesn't make sense to me why Snapchat doesn't make money from all the people that use their platform. Like if I just pick a golf course, if I just was like, Hey, I'm going to play at this golf course every day. And they're like, great. We're so happy to have you as a customer. And it's just free. And I'm like, I'm going to go to the golf course again. I'm going to play at some

point. That's insane. But that's how Snapchat is built. And that's how Twitter is built. And I think like, I don't know whether Twitter should be $8 a month or whatever, but Twitter doesn't make money. Twitter loses money, which is why Elon went in there and cut half the staff, which was callous, but it at least came from the principle of we lose money. Why do we need a 15? I don't agree with what he did, but I kind of understand the logic behind, well, wait, if we're just going to lose money, is there a different way to do this company? Now people are on Twitter all the time. Could you monetize that? Like what we just talked about with Snapchat, where it's like, you can read Twitter. If you want to tweet, that's $3.99 a month. If you want

to tweet more than 30 times a month, that's $4.99. If you're 100 times a month, that's now $7.99. Could that 1997 AOL strategy actually apply to the social platforms? And I kind of feel like it could, because otherwise, I think they're just going to go under. The best argument against charging for something like Twitter or Snapchat is, how hard is it to build a replacement? If you're Mark Zuckerberg, let's say, and you are trying to figure out the next thing because people under 65 or under 50 aren't really using Facebook Blue and Instagram is basically tapped out in terms of its growth. Wait, Facebook Blue? Is that something that exists? No, the Facebook Blue, the blue Facebook, right?

You could have sold me into believing Facebook Blue existed and I didn't know about it. You could have just made up things that you get. Yeah, for boomers who really, really love those memes and just want to pay $8 a month for Facebook. So you've got OG Facebook, you've got Instagram. He's trying to build out this metaverse. I've seen a couple of people speculate about this.

He's got a ton of engineers. He's got thousands and thousands of some of the most talented and top paid engineers on the planet. If he perceives that Twitter is about to go down because they're pricing themselves out of their user base, couldn't he just create a kind of news feed that allows people to do on a Facebook engineered product that which they are doing on Twitter. Everyone already has a Facebook account. I mean, I don't use OG Facebook very often. I don't really use Instagram that often, but I have an account there. It wouldn't be that hard to go

back on and use essentially Facebook, Twitter. And so the question is that of replaceability. How hard is it if you are going to charge people a lot of money for a service? Is it for someone else to come along and create the exact same thing for free? I think that's something that these CEOs are probably thinking about. Wait, hold on though. There's a flaw in that argument with Zuckerberg. I just don't see him copying something that worked for somebody else. Oh, wait a second. That's all he's done for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, back to whatever he stole from the Winklevoss twins. The newsfeed, right, the central column of the OG Facebook product was stolen from Twitter.

When Twitter was ascendant, he said, oh, a reverse chronological, but sometimes algorithmically sorted feed of all the updates from within people's networks should be people's sort of front page of Facebook. Yeah. So people's networks should be people's sort of, you know, front page of Facebook. Yeah. So he's already stolen the central concept of Twitter. He could, in the scenario that I'm painting, just reinvent it. I just think we're going to look back at this error and think it's crazy that all this stuff, that all these companies made this stuff free, basically. The same way, like, I look back at the newspaper stuff now, and I think it's kind of crazy. I think it's crazy that ESPN.com was free forever and that they thought they could advertise

on it. You're just going down the line. And that was the great thing about the internet, right? Which is why this feels like a distinct era to me where it was like things were free and it was awesome. And at some point things just can't be free and you have to kind of pick and choose. And I feel like we're shifting away from that model. And now we're heading toward a model that I think is going to, well, actually let's take a break and I'll give you what I'm worried about with this. All right. So if we move toward this pay a la carte, this thing we were talking about in the previous segment, there's a couple of bad things that happen. One is people without the means to

just throw money around these different platforms. Now you're losing them. I was texting with Van Lathan about this. Van Lathan's like, what happens to Black Twitter if it's $8 a month? Like, I really want to know what happens to it. And I was, we didn't know. And that would be one of the downsides, right? You're losing, by not having something that's available to everybody, you're losing different communities that come with that, which is super dangerous. The other thing is, and this is why, you know, at a couple of points of my career and people were, you know, people were like people were like, are you going to do a subscription thing? Especially when I wrote, could you just write and charge people for what you wrote? And I was like, I would never want to do that. And I still feel this way in 2022. I want as many people as possible to consume whatever content I'm doing. That's what I care about. And that's never going to change. When you go into this culture that we're entering, now you have all these little smaller groups of readers, listeners, whoever, that are like tailor-made for the person who's creating the

content. But you're not getting any new people. You're getting all the people initially, but then how do you churn? How do you get more people? How do you bring people in? How do you keep people? What happens if you leave some people? It gets super dangerous really fast versus people just stumbling into your ecosystem because it's free. And that's the thing that I think scares me the most. This is the key trade-off. In thinking like a journalist and thinking about my own life, not trying to put on the hat of Evan Spiegel or Mark Zuckerberg, but in my own life, I want to be read and listened to by as many people as possible. You know, I want my ideas to enter the cultural bloodstream. I want people to use the language that I use to talk about the news and tech and, you know, say COVID theater and

talk about the abundance agenda. I want these ideas that I coined to become as popular as possible. And it is absolutely the case that if you gate your work, you're probably reducing its audience by something like an order of magnitude, like at least 10X, I think. It's really rare that if you make something free and then you ask people to pay for it, more than 10% of that audience pays for it. It's typically a single digit percentage point. But some people are fine with that. And by the way, it's everybody to each their own. Some people are like, cool,

I can make as much as I would have made them and I have all these people that come and I'm good. I get to do what I love and I don't really care how many people it is, but I'm doing what I love. That's right. Yeah, no, different people have different values and it's an inherent trade-off. There's no way around this trade-off of reach for maximizing on per person revenue, right? That's just an inherent trade-off.

I do think that you put your finger on something really important, which is that we're in an environment right now, and this goes a little bit toward macroeconomics, but I think it's actually really core to this. We're in an environment right now where we're going to have high inflation and high interest rates for a while. And that means that the conditions in which go for growth was born, the conditions in which this mentality of just grow as big as possible and support it with advertising, those are going to change. And these companies are going to have to think about entirely new businesses. And even if they aren't thinking about charging their individual consumers for the product of Snapchat or for the product of Instagram, they're still trying to charge

their consumers. What is the new business line of Snap and Meta? For Snap, it's glasses. They're trying to become an augmented reality company because people have to pay for the product, the hardware of glasses in a way that they don't pay for Snap. So they're already making this pivot. They're just thinking in a way maybe of Snap as like sort of the gateway drug into the universe in which they might buy Snap glasses. Same with Meta. Their next product line is not an ad-supported platform necessarily. It is Oculus. It's things you have to pay hundreds of dollars for. So you can already see in a way that these CEOs are making exactly the determination that you're suggesting. They're just asking users to pay for a new product rather

than ask them to pay for the free thing that they've always expected for free. But maybe in a few years, if interest rates are still high and inflation is still high and we have a recession, the advertising market that we've already seen, they'll start to think about, well, you know, what if we make it $1 a year? What if we make it $2 a year? What if we try to just take a little bit more out of our users? I think it's absolutely possible that you could see more people talking about asking people to pay for social media. Last point on this is that, you know, I don't think Elon's doing a very good job at Twitter. I think it's utterly chaotic. I think he's mad. Like, it's not exactly a hot take. The coldest take possible. Elon Musk isn't doing so hot in his new job at Twitter. That said, history is long and it is possible that asking

power users on Twitter to pay will work. And if it works, if asking power users on Twitter works and the biggest Twitter users are paying essentially $100 a year to use that platform, the odds are near 100% that Evan Spiegel at Snap, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook are going to say, wait, Elon, crazy person that he is, stumbled into something. Social media users, Eureka, will actually pay for the thing that they're used to consuming for free. And it might kick off a sort of new wave

of paid social media, for sure. Yeah, it's funny. I think there's been a lot of bad decisions. Even I look at Netflix that has been, I think, one of the most successful whatever's that we've had in the 21st century, but they're, you know, their growth stalled. And instead of kind of really looking at the reasons why that happened, they just kind of panicked and did this ad revenue tear and all that stuff, which I just disagreed with. Cause to me, it's like, you guys are making too much content. You're too trapped to the algorithm. And the content just isn't consistently good enough. And if you actually cut back on the amount of stuff you were making and made it feel a little more special, you're probably solving your own problem. But they were just firing shit out week after week.

And they'd have eight, nine, 10 new things a week that have, what, 700 pieces of content a year, not counting all the international stuff. And I think HBO Max, which I don't even know how intentional this was because they were going through incredible upheaval and they had two different mergers and three different game plans. But for the most part, they pulled off whatever their weird achievement goal was that was set for them by people higher than the people running it, which was make it feel a little different than HBO, go for a little bit of a different audience and, you know, make, make decent bets. Right. So that worked for them.

Apple. And I don't really, I haven't really liked most of their shows, but there's definitely some sort of game plan. They don't do that many things. They usually have a celebrity involved that they can put in their box in the top and be like, oh, Jason Momoa, season three of some show I've never heard of. Oh, Reese Witherspoon's in this. So it's very star power driven. And they've had a couple of good shows, but they don't do a lot. Whereas Netflix was doing way too much. And it was the algorithm just was kind of destroying Netflix content. How many fucking horror movies can they have that are the same horror movie? You know, how many, how many different, um, you know, high school comedies can you have? It's, it's like a merry-go-round.

What's interesting to me about the streaming platforms right now is that there's a way in which it's not a winner-take-all situation. All of them are doing badly compared to where they should have been a year ago. I mean, Disney stock was tanked when it was revealed. Disney's doing the worst, yeah. Disney stock absolutely tanked when it was revealed how much their streaming product is losing. Netflix is obviously down, what now, 60, 65% from its high a year ago. HBO is going through this absolutely wrenching corporate transformation. Bizarre. Utterly bizarre. So, you know, I don't want to make the mistake of only analyzing this from the business standpoint, but it is just fascinating that from a business standpoint, there really isn't a company in streaming you can look to and say, ah, they're the ones who are really weathering the storm of 2022.

They're all just struggling because it turned out that streaming was, and this goes back to your very first point, the perfect strategy, the perfect strategy for an old paradigm. Low interest rates, lots of low hanging fruit to pick for streaming customers in the US and all over the world. Let's go for broke and the markets will reward us. In a different climate where it's like, it's okay to lose money, lose a staggering amount of money for years and years because the end game will be you can sell your company. Like I even look in the second half of the 2010s, the athletic forums, they lose $40 million a year, basically every year until they get bought by the New York Times for like, what, 500 million?

And then the New York Times report came out, whatever the recent one was, where it was like the athletic lost 10 million in the second quarter or whatever. The athletic, whatever their plan was, and I subscribe to the athletic and I like the writing and all that, but it loses money every year. And I subscribed to the athletic and I liked the writing and all that, but it loses money every year. And that was okay in the 2010s because

the end game was you might get pot. Maybe they were the last one that pulled that off. But I don't think that's a game plan in the 2020s where it's like, I think now people are going to be like, do you make money or do you not? I don't care what, I don't care what your audience is, what you're growing. You're losing this. Why are you losing that? How can you make that better because of all the stuff you laid out, the interest and everything else? Yeah. But it really is this incredible shift between chapters. I remember I did an interview in San Francisco with Ted Sarandos at Netflix. And I asked him, why do you do so light touch on all of your movies and your television shows? And he said, it's a strategic advantage for us because there's a

lot of really brilliant showrunners and movie directors and stars who don't like going to HBO or wherever else and giving them the pilot. And there's 17,000 pages of notes back after the pilot, and you have to spend years before they green light it. We give them a different kind of strategic advantage. We say, let your vision breathe free without executives hanging over your shoulder. And this was Netflix had to say this because they didn't have enough producers to have high touch in every single project, but also worked out really well for them. It was a beautiful sort of coincident of interest between all sides. And you think about it, that thing, that perspective,

which might have helped to make Netflix so successful in getting all these projects and getting people like Cuaron and some of the greatest directors in Hollywood to work with them, all of a sudden, the second the stock starts to plunge, the narrative shifts. And that strategy is not what's responsible for them leapfrogging HBO. It's the anchor on the business. They're approving too much stuff. They're taking Cuaron's seventh best idea and letting Paramount take the best, and they're

only getting the scraps. And people are saying, oh, this thing that made you so successful is now the thing that's making you unsuccessful. I think it just goes to this idea that something very, very important has changed not only in the macro environment, but also strategically for all these companies in the tech industry. Yeah, I wonder with Netflix, the big mistake in retrospect, instead of just cranking out as much content as they're cranking out, they should have bought some sort of engine that they could have put in within, you know, get the library and all that stuff. There were opportunities the last couple of years with some

of the smaller ones. And now it'll be interesting to see. Matt Bellany does a good job on the town talking to Lucas about this. Like, how does this play out? Who's the first streamer that's going to be in like real trouble? Because we have too many streamers now. It's unsustainable. I think Netflix in a weird way, even though they had an awful year by 19 different metrics, but some of their bets actually played off down the stretch. Like they did that huge Ryan Murphy deal and bang, bang, back to back, the Watcher and that Dahmer thing became two like in the Zeitgeist shows back to back for themer and that Dahmer thing became two, like in the Zeitgeist shows back to back for them. So that deal paid off. Um, some of their movie stuff has paid off. It's to me, it's just like, they just were making so much content that there's no way it was sustainable.

And also like how much content do you need, especially coming out of a pandemic now people can go outside, they can, can go to games and concerts and all these different things. It's not 2020 where it's just like, I guess I'll watch Ozark. I've turned it down 20 times in my house, but I'm at the point where I'll give it a whirl and then you like it and you go. Same thing with Yellowstone. That was another show that took off during the pandemic, but I don't think that can happen in the same way anymore anyway, but I don't know how it plays out with the streamers. We're clearly going to have content. The one that I think is impossible to predict is the big social platforms and what's next

for them. And like, what is Facebook in five years? My kids, I don't even think have Facebook accounts anymore. They're not going to get anyone under 25 aging into their demo. So maybe you're right. Maybe it's ripping off Twitter would be the way to sustain themselves. I don't know. Are your kids not on Instagram?

My kids are on Instagram, yeah. But they really, it's TikTok, then Snapchat, some YouTube, and some Instagram. And that's really the big four. No Facebook. Well, look, TikTok is the demon that is haunting this entire scene from the outside. Because TikTok is not only eating attention among young people, it's also, I think, changing in many ways the music industry, changing the way that people discover songs, discover, discover movies and television shows, you know, anything that absorbs people's attention like this is going to be the next frontier in

advertising. And I, well, and it's also going to change how people configure their apps to be used because now I'm doing the thing with my hand for the people listening, but now it's just scroll the next one, scroll the next one, scroll the next one. And if your app can't do that in some form, you feel like you're a dinosaur, right? Yes. And TikTok, I think, is a very interesting place because bringing in politics just a little bit, the Biden administration has moved against the Chinese Communist Party quite a bit in the last few months when it comes to things like semiconductor chips and certain strategic production of goods like that. And I could see in a divided government, there being a real push to ban Chinese control of TikTok, which is going to create even more chaos in the social media sphere. You're not just going to

have Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg having a midlife crisis and trying to build out the metaverse. You're not just going to have Elon doing whatever it is that he's doing at Twitter and Snapchat being 80% less valuable than it was a year ago. The most popular social media platform in the world might have a kind of forced change of hands where someone like Microsoft or Oracle has to buy the American version of TikTok because the US doesn't want the Chinese Communist Party having any kind of oversight on an algorithm that dominates the attention span of young Americans, which, by the way, I find a relatively reasonable perspective. So there's a way in which if we had this conversation in six months,

social media is even crazier, right? Like Twitter's gone through a bankruptcy proceeding. Facebook's stock has fallen another 50% because Zuckerberg says, I'm going to spend essentially an Apollo Project's amount of money on building out the metaverse. Snap hasn't recovered. Things could get crazier in the next few months. Well, and we didn't even talk about all the crypto stuff and the stuff that's just happened this month and how people are like, that's the wild, wild West. I don't get it. The people that didn't get that whole world. Wait, there's, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of laws going on. Wait, I, I have my friend telling me to do this and there's something I don't trust. And now there's been some vindication for that, whether that's completely fair, half fair, a little unfair. Everything that's gone on,

I would say in the last four months has made that whole side of the world feel really, really, really volatile. And that was one of the, I think, more interesting innovations of the last five, six years. It's like, hey, look at this. This could be a whole new currency. Now I think people, I think we're more prone to be scared of it, right? Well, if listeners, by the time this episode goes up, if listeners go to the plain English feed, you're probably going to see that the latest episode is an interview about the crash of FTX and this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, who may be the Elizabeth Holmes of crypto. I mean, it is conceivable. We don't know yet.

Maybe. Michael Lewis was like, I've sniffed this out. I'm following this guy. Michael Lewis always knows a year before everybody else. Incredible. My God, that man. I mean, he's already the best nonfiction book. It's almost unfair to have the best nonfiction book writer in bed with someone who turns out to be basically Elizabeth Holmes with worse hair and cargo shorts. Like it's really, really astonishing. But I mean, it's an astonishing story, FTX and SBF, the CEO. So I think that, again, I think the interest in crypto also flows from the first story that we told. You don't have this level of interest in an utterly unproven technology if consumer tech and social media is still in its vertical hour. There's too much attention that's going to go to building

the next Uber, the next DoorDash, the next Spotify. But once all of those frontiers are closed, once it's clear that Uber is best in class and Spotify has its thing and et cetera, you have to look for the next margin. You have to look for the next margin. You have to look for the next big thing. And there was all of this attention built around crypto, which I think made a really fascinating mistake. Crypto is not a product. It's a technology. It's the opportunity to create a product. But who in your life can you say their life has been changed because of a crypto product? Not that it's changed their bank account, but it's actually changed the way that they live.

There isn't yet a mass consumer use case, this technology that's now been in our lives for 10 years. And it's really hard to think of another example of something like that. So I've always been of the mind that crypto was interesting from a technological standpoint, but was kind of fraudy from a use case standpoint. And this has utterly vindicated, I think, the hypothesis that crypto, however interesting you think it is from a mathematical point of view, has been just a snake's pit of fraud. And this particular episode is just one of the most bizarre fraud stories we've seen recently. Yeah, I steered clear of it. I had a couple of friends that were really into it. And I just, I didn't get it. And anytime I don't get something, I'm just like, I'm out. Like I, I just, I trust my shit detector. Not that that's right or wrong, but that's just,

it's just how I operate. I've been wrong though. Like I always felt like cash was going to matter. I was like, you know what? I know digital and everything will be credit card and the iPhone and Apple cash. And I'm like, you know what? Cash is still going to matter. But like, I went to Sweden for a week and I brought $500 and I landed and I still had $500. And that was the first time where I really thought to myself, like, what am I going to need cash for other than like tipping valets? Why did you like cash? I don't know. It's harder to carry around.

You're always worried you don't have it. It's like I got a smaller wallet, which it took forever. I used to have like a big wallet because I was always one of those people who was terrified I was going to run out of cash, even when I had no cash. I was like, I never want to have like $2 and be trapped somewhere. And now it's like, I don't know when I use cash. So the fact that that changed so dramatically and everything now is just like sliding credit card into whatever makes me wonder if we're moving toward a new form of currency. Maybe crypto will be a part of that, but I think everyone in the 2010s was in such a rush to become massively successful because of some of the stuff that happened in the 2000s. And I think that's another legacy of that 07 to 22 era is just people in a rush, people trying to cut corners, people trying to get to the finish line instead of like actually like building a real business. Twitter, I think is a small piece of

that. Twitter knew it was a business, but didn't know how it was a business. And you think of all the different ways, all the things they tried. And we did deals with them where we were doing like live reaction shows for the ringer after game of Thrones, stuff like that. And they would get ad and it was cool. But ultimately, like if it's really a business, it has to be subscription or I don't see a path. I don't see another way that they're going to make money. It's, it's a terrible, it's, well, it's not a terrible, it's, it's not a very good advertising product because it is a stream of outraged opinions about news. And if there's two things that advertisers don't necessarily want to be next to, it's highly negative things about extremely polarizing

subjects. That's really, really tough for Colgate to want to advertise with. Colgate doesn't want to be associated with the most controversial opinions about Republicans. It wants to be associated with whatever, good feelings about your teeth. And I think Twitter has always been at a natural disadvantage compared to something like Instagram and Snapchat, because it's not a visual medium, it's textual, and it's often negatively textual. It's a lot of sadness and outrage. So it already had that working against it. Then you have Elon Musk coming on board and being somewhat critical of the advertising companies that are most important to his bottom line. Then some of the ad companies pull out because they don't want to be associated with a chaotic product. And now he seems to be pivoting even more chaotically towards subscription.

So, I mean, we're in the Musk zone when it comes to Twitter. I have no idea. We're in the Musk zone. We're there. I'll believe any story. Name a story. I'll believe it. I was talking to Koppelman today and I was like, Billy in season 11, you wouldn't have even written a guy like this. You would have brought the actor and And I was like, Billions season 11, you wouldn't have even written a guy like this. You would have brought the actor and he'd be like, this is too weird. Nobody's going to buy this guy. And that's Elon Musk. He's too weird even for a crazy season 11 of Billions. You just wouldn't buy it. You'd be like, come on, this guy can't exist. Stop it. Yeah. Well, it's my midlife crisis theory of tech. I'm not anti-Elon Musk in terms of his

capacities as a CEO. SpaceX makes incredible rockets. Tesla makes really good cars. Those are hardware problems. Yeah, those aren't content things. They're not content problems and they're not human problems. Building a site that discourages people from impersonating other people has nothing to do with, you know, whatever aerodynamics or whatever kind of physics are necessary for the construction of rockets and cars. It's just a totally different psychological problem. And he's not very good at thinking through those problems, it seems to me. So, you know, it's the Musk zone. If he doubles Twitter's market cap in the next two years, I suppose it's possible and I won't be shocked. But right now things are going about as dumpster

fiery as you can imagine. All right, we have to go. So there's my last question. We just agreed that 07, 22, wherever you want to start it, 03, whatever, that we're nearing the end of some sort of era. 23 on, what would that era be called? And how long will it last? Obviously, no way to answer this. This is just your best guess, gut feeling.

I think there are intermissions between technological eras. I don't think it's like an act that goes right into another act. I think sometimes there are lulls as people and technologists and investors try to figure out the next wave. But gun to my head, what's the next big thing? It's not a hard question for me. It's AI. The things that GPT-3 and DALI are capable of are extraordinary. And just to give one little taste, there's a language learning model called GPT-3 that was developed by OpenAI, which is basically a really, really smart chatbot. It's like an amazing disembodied brain. So you can ask it any kind of question and it will answer it.

You know, give me a brief one paragraph history of the Ottoman Empire. What is DVOA? You know, and it'll be able to tell you in one paragraph. But it can do a lot more than that. You can say, summarize Les Miserables for me, but in one paragraph, in the voice of Michael Lewis. And a certain kind of AI can do exactly that. So why is this interesting? Well, of course, it's a nice little curio to have in the world. But think about what we use Google for. We use Google to answer questions.

What if AI accidentally builds a better Google? Because what we want when we ask a question is not a link. When we feel something in our leg and want to figure out what the problem is with our leg, we don't want 17 links to healthline.com and webmd.com. We want to know the answer. And so what if- So you're basically building like Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid crossed with Siri, crossed with Google.

And you'd be like- Crossed with how? Right. And you're just like, hey, my hamstring hurts. What should I do? And they would just have an immediate one paragraph succinct answer for you. So you're building something that only thinks like a person, but also might be a better Google than Google. And when you think about how valuable Google is, close to a $1 trillion company, or at least recently was, that's an extraordinary thing.

And that's the tip of the iceberg. That's one possibility of what's happening with our ability to essentially synthesize and simulate human thought with the next generation of artificial intelligence. So I think that the same way that in 1993, it was hard to explain to someone that 20, 30 years from now, we'll basically build a virtual strip mall so that rather than drive to a strip mall and sit down and shop at different stores, you can actually just do that from the comfort of your home. We're going to be able to build virtual intelligences, essentially build people into software. And the ethical and economic and cultural implications of that technology, I think,

are going to be the definitive fights of the next 20 years. I can't wait till Spotify can just replicate me so I don't have to host the podcast anymore. I mean, I have like, you know, my hundred takes on everything at this point. They'll put in some bad football bets. I could just go away for a year. Nobody will know. They'll just, they'll be able to do my voice.

It'll be great. Bill, this is going to freak you out. There already are AIs that can imitate famous podcasters. I'm aware. I'm aware that there's some ad possibilities that I've heard about where I was like, really? So you don't even need me to do a read? All right. Go listen to Derek Thompson's podcast on Plain English about crypto. I can't wait to hear that tonight. I'm glad we did this. Thanks for rolling with no outline whatsoever. I knew you could do it. And now I have to come on your pod next. So this was fun. We'd love it. Thanks, Bill. All right. That's it for

the podcast. Thanks to Isaiah Blakely for producing this one. Nephew Kyle's in Denver with Rosillo. He did a live show. I hope he returns. Who knows? Kyle's 50-50 to come back. Thanks to Michael and thanks to Derek as well. And I will see you on this feed on Thursday.