#40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World
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You need to learn to consistently and repeatedly start with new assumptions. Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out. To learn more about the show or our previous guests, go to fs.blog.com.

My guest today is Ben Thompson, author of the technology site Stratechery. I reached out to Ben because Stratechery, which provides an analysis on the strategy and business side of technology on society, is one of the few sites that I read. Just like us at FS, Stratechery also offers both free content and paid content as a means to sustain a living. As you'll soon find out, Ben has an interesting take on most things. Enjoy the conversation.

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Stratechery? Is that even how you say it? Is it stratechery?

It is, it is strategy and tech. I like to say that naming things is clearly not my forte. It's weird though. I mean, you can, I, it's kind of a running joke with me and my subscribers about the name, but there is, there is a good reason that I chose it. And it's very, you know, sort of prosaic, which is it was, I was poor in debt and I was starting a website and it was available. It returned zero Google search results. There was a Twitter handle available.

And, you know, it was broadly in line with where I was going. And I think someone I was inspired by was Horace Deju with Asimco. And Asimco is such a great name. I think the mistake could

clearly that I made is a name that is unclear to pronounce and unclear how to spell is is a bad idea. And so if I could do it over, would I do something different? Probably. But, you know, I think it just, you know, the challenge of building the brand is just a more pressing one, given that sort of like hurdles I managed to put my own way. But yes, it is. There's a long way to say, yes, it is trajectory.

It's kind of interesting. I mean, it's like a super unique take on business in the sense that you're hitting on the intersection kind of between technology, media, business strategy, but also like you're hitting on undercurrents of psychology and behavior to a degree. I mean, your insights are pretty consistently incredible. What is it about to you? What does stratechery mean?

That's a good question. I mean, I think the way I describe it, as you kind of noted, is the sort of strategy and business of technology. And I've kind of appended – and its sort of impact on society. I think one of the great things about writing about technology is it kind of gives you a license to write about almost everything because technology is impacting everything, whether that be – I mean clearly we've seen in the context of politics –

You know, I wrote about Zuckerberg being in in Washington, D.C. this week. But, you know, I've written other articles about, you know, how the structural changes that Facebook has imposed on the media, which is inextricably linked to the power of political parties, is what enabled the rise of Trump, for example. Right. And, you know, that was that was very much a in my wheelhouse of what I read about. But it was it was.

also a deeply sort of like political, you know, piece, not a partisan piece, but just kind of like a political science more sort of piece. And so that's definitely kind of a cool thing about being where I'm at. And I think just kind of backing up broadly, I view Stratechery as sort of my personal intellectual journal in many respects of trying to understand the world and how it works. And I start from technology. I start with technology lens. But again, just the nature of the industry, right?

fortunately aligns well with my sort of personal interest and desire to understand a whole bunch of things, not just Google or Apple or Facebook. How did you get interesting in tech? I mean, you worked at Microsoft, you worked at Apple, you worked at Automatic, and

Like, where did this sort of tech interest come from? Well, I've always been interested in technology. So, I mean, going back to, you know, I remember being in, you know, the stereotypical sort of being in middle school and getting a computer and was very into it and very interested in, you know, discovering the web when it came out. And, you know, all those sorts of things. But also kind of like a stereotype sort of thing. I lived, you know, my family was...

you know, I would say probably blue class, lower, lower white class depends on how you define it. Um, you know, we grew up small town, Wisconsin and you know, no one around me had any interest or understanding about this stuff. It was really just me. But interestingly, I didn't gravitate to the sort of traditional like a computer science angle or, or, or programming likes would be a, be a better way of put it. Uh,

I did pick up some sort of programming skills along the way, but it never sort of like gripped me the way that you often hear from other folks that are in my situation. I was always much more interested in sort of the – just the broader picture, the broader implications. And –

So that started from junior high school. But I think going back to my background, my family was – didn't really have any sort of background. Both my parents grew up extremely poor. They –

You kind of like broken, broken households. And no one was there pushing me to go into business or go into things like that. And so for me, the most obvious outcome was I would go work in academia like that. That that was something that was visible to me and accessible. But but even then, you know, my world was very small. I mean, for me, it was a big sort of like.

jump to go to the big public school, that being the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even apply to like, you know, your Ivy schools or something like that. Like that world wasn't even a world that I was even aware of. That was even a possibility for me. And so this weird sort of juxtaposition of growing up in a very sort of like small world environment while having this sort of innate curiosity and the access that the internet enabled to me to there being a bigger world out there.

You know, it was kind of where it all started. And you could probably see, you know, reflections of that even in what I do today. And kind of from there, I just always follow technology. Technology is my hobby. But again, it never occurred to me to make it a career. I was just going to, you know, take a lot of classes, was an honor student, probably go to graduate school and, you know, maybe be a professor. Like that seemed like the thing to do.

And I ended up, uh, going to Taiwan after I graduated, thought that I would, you know, just kind of take a year travel, see the world. And I ended up loving it here. I really enjoyed it. Uh, enjoyed being here, enjoy the country, enjoy the people, met a girl, you know, all, all the sorts, all the sorts of things. And, uh,

And all along, my hobby was technology. I was obsessed with technology, always reading about it, always wanted to know what was going on. I read it all the way through college, been reading all the sites, understanding how everything worked. And really a background that has benefited me greatly is I wasn't a programmer per se, although even in college I took multiple classes and stuff like that. I could do it. But more just having a broad sort of understanding of how stuff works, like how does a computer actually work? How does the internet actually work?

Like what is possible? What isn't possible? And what happened was I was in Taiwan and at some point my wife's like, all you do when you're free time is read about and obsess about technology. Why don't you go work in technology? And at this point, I'm like 27, 28 years old. I'm like, that's probably a good idea. I should probably do that. And so that's when I went back to the States and attended business school and my

With business school, I kind of had the – technology has always had a sort of bias against the MBA. So I certainly picked up on that. But the reason I did it was it was the sort of shortest, fastest route to legitimacy in the US job market. And it ended up being along the way I got a tremendous benefit from it.

And perhaps because I went there with the – not thinking it was going to be an end-all, be-all that I ended up getting more out of it than most. But it worked. I mean because of being at business school, I was introduced to recruiters. I got this opportunity at Apple to work at Apple University, which was a fantastic experience. Once you had Apple on your resume, it was easier to get more interviews. I ended up going to work at Microsoft.

And and then, you know, that that got me sort of the foot in. But the that's just where tech first showed up on a resume, like where tech first showed up in my head, as it were, you know, goes back to middle school. Was it was it an escape in Wisconsin or was it a mechanism for you to kind of like zone out of the reality that you were living or was it something else that was just engaging?

Yeah, I had a happy childhood. I wasn't one of those like I just got to sort of get out of here sort of thing. I generally had a happy childhood, no big complaints. I just was genuinely interested in it. Like I just found this stuff fascinating. And when I was in high school was sort of the – when the World Wide Web came out and then my first year of college was sort of the dot-com bubble really starting to take off like crazy.

And, you know, like we would – I actually had a little business in the dorms putting computers together and selling them because you could get like all the pieces on like ValueAct.com or something like that or something, ValueMart or something. I remember you could buy Intel processors for like a quarter of the price because of the stupid .com bubble stuff. And so I would buy all this stuff and put it together and sell it to get spending money. So it was just –

There's an aspect of, you know, my age was just, you know, there's a really interesting article I've linked to a few times just on Twitter about the it's called the Oregon Trail Generation. And the idea is there's a sort of really distinct group of people around kind of five or six year range where we grew up.

such that we had basically no internet stuff in our lives and then switched to having internet lives in our lives completely. It was interesting is everyone before us, the internet sort of came along when they were already into their life and they learned it and a lot of them created it, but it was a different experience. Whereas the ones after us grew up immersed,

Whereas our sort of generation, we had a very clear delineation between before and after and could remember what it was like to go to a payphone, remember what it's like to not be able to find a friend at a party, but was also young enough to become fully immersed in sort of a digitally native, as it were, while retaining the memory of what came before.

It's quite a unique place to be. You're also operating in this... I mean, everybody's writing about technology and...

media today, but you're different. You stand out. When I talk to people consistently, it's like, oh, I read Stratechery, Ben Thompson. He's my guy. What makes you so different? Why is your take so different on this than all of these other smart, educated people who are operating in the same space, trying to provide people insight into technology?

So when I started Shotekery, it was interesting because at the time, I actually felt pretty confident about the prospects for the site. I had sort of like a five-year plan. I wanted it to be my job from the beginning. I thought it would take longer than it did. But I did feel there was an opportunity. And specifically, you're right. There were tons of sites writing about technology, but the vast majority – all of them basically were writing about technology from a product perspective, from a sort of product lens.

And I thought there was a real opportunity to write about things from the other side, from the business side, from the strategic side. Like to the extent I would write about products, it would be how does a company's business model influence the type of products it creates or the way it thinks about them or the way it does decision making. And,

I thought there was a significant void in that area that I felt pretty confident that I could fill. And I think that's turned out to be the case. So I think to the extent my viewpoint is unique, it's the starting point is different. I start from business models. I start from trying to gain an understanding of a company's culture, which I think goes back to a company's founding and the lessons it learned early on. And from that, look at what they do, look at what they might do, look at the

products that come out. Whereas, you know, most sites start with the products then kind of go backwards. Where did you develop the ability to pull apart the business model? Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, I showed up at business school and certainly business school gave me a lot of the language to do this, but it was, it was almost like a, wow, I'm actually really good at this stuff. Like this, this comes very easy and,

naturally to me and you know business I think was a lot more about giving me the language and specifics to understand this stuff just in general I'm a very very extremely to the extreme very systematic thinker where I see things in systems and the way they interconnect and how you know one thing over here will connect the other thing over there you know all the way down the chain and

Whereas, you know, I'm not a great detail person, right? When it gets into like zooming all the way down and getting into specifics, like I'm not great at that, which is why, you know, I think

working in corporate America, it was challenging because on one hand I could see where to go, what we needed to do, but I didn't know how to communicate that well 'cause I was a young whippersnapper that thought I knew everything. And on the flip side, when you're young and just implementing stuff, you have to take care of all the little stuff and that's a pain. I'm a strong believer that anyone, their strengths are their weaknesses and one is the same if you're super strong one area, you're inevitably gonna be weak in its sort of corresponding area.

And so I think my talent, such that it is, is this ability to view things systematically and to see very clearly and quickly how a business model flows through to product decisions. And I say that, you know, I hope with sufficient humility, knowing that just because I can see that, it means that there's –

Other stuff I'm not very good at. I just I'm just fortunate, I think, enough to have found a career and a job where that is rewarded and I can sort of minimize the other stuff, my exposure to the other stuff, as it were. So you have a model where you release like, you know, one article a week that I think is free to the world, the four articles a week to to kind of paying content. How did you arrive at that? Was that business model driven? Like, how did you come up with that model of making a living?

So I mentioned when I started that, I started with the goal of making money. And well, in the first couple of months, I was sort of figuring – kind of figuring out what the public schedule was going to be. But quickly arrived at I'm going to only do one or two articles a week. And the goal of it was – the reason I didn't want to write every day at the beginning even though I was trying to build an audience –

is that in the long run, I knew I wanted to have a subscription offering. And I wanted that subscription offering to be get more as opposed to – and it's a very subtle distinction. But I think paywalls to that day, like the only really person who had done the one-person blog sort of paywall thing was Andrew Sullivan. And he went from this – he was publishing like crazy.

with an advertising-based model, which the incentives are that you should publish more, not less. And they just kind of threw a paywall up. And it worked because he had such fervent fans and such a large audience. But he never sort of adjusted his editorial strategy. He just kept pumping stuff out. I think that's part of the reason why he burned out. Whereas I had the sort of luxury of starting with the knowledge of the business model I wanted to have in the future. And I always wanted to be a –

I'm going to deliver this product consistently for free. It's going to always be there for free. And then if you want more, you can pay to get more. So I wanted the, the feeling of paying to be a positive feeling where you're getting, this is such great stuff. I want more. Can I pay to get more as opposed to, Oh, you've been in this for free and I'm going to drop a wall on you and tough luck. It's gone now. And I think, you know, I,

Obviously, that sort of psychological impact only really applied to the earliest subscribers, but I think there's still – I still hope I have that spirit sort of on the Stryker site as a whole. I don't push the paywall hard at all. A lot of people will say, wow, I didn't even know you had a product for months or years, and that's OK because I want the sense of being –

People who are exploring the site will find the paywall. They will find the content. But those are the people that I want to attract anyway, the people who are eager for more, that want to read more things. And so that's sort of the – that's the model as a whole. And I think a way to illustrate this is the metric that I used when figuring out when I wanted to actually launch it was I was looking at the number of visitors to the homepage on days that I didn't post.

Because those were people that were searching out new content. They were going to just check or he's saying, did Ben post something today? And those were the people that were sort of my initial customers, the people that already demonstrated they were hoping that I would publish more stuff. And so and so that that that is the model sort of today. So today, as it is, I do one free article. I do three, three additional articles a week. So and then I do a podcast. So basically, I do one piece of content a day.

And it actually started out being much more aggressive. You know, this is sort of when you start a company, you're hustling, you want to make it work. So when I actually started the Data Update, I was doing –

I was doing two free articles a week plus five daily updates plus a podcast. Oh, my God. Yeah, that was pretty insane. So I pretty soon cut it down to one free article and five daily updates. Then I went to one and four and then I settled on the one and three plus a podcast a couple of years ago. It's it's stayed at this level for for a while now. And I think it's a much more sustainable sort of level.

But like I said, I just do one piece every day. And it'd be nice to have an extra day to do administrative stuff and things like that. But I think it's a good level for now. So I'm sticking with it. So you mentioned one of the metrics you looked at was number of visitors to your site when you didn't post. What sort of metrics do you look at today to see in sort of like your relevance to people you're offering and...

how it's resonating? I honestly don't look at metrics at all, to be totally honest. I mean, every day when I send the email, I see how many people are receiving the update. And as long as that number is larger than it was the day before, then I figure everything's going fine. And certainly it's a sort of luxury. You know, the brilliant thing about sort of this subscription model is it

All you have to do is keep your existing subscribers happy and everything else is going to take care of itself. I don't need to worry about the – I mean I stress a lot about the weekly articles like the free ones. They're usually – I want them to be great. And they're a little harder to write because they're spread much more widely, which means your readers have less of a sort of like shared background. Yeah.

Whereas the daily update, I write much more. I think I'm much more familiarly and I presume much more knowledge on the side of my readers.

But or at least some at least some extent knowledge on having registered before. And so it's a different sort of writing, a little more challenging in that regard. But but at the end of the day, what really matters is that my subscribers are happy because if they're happy, they will not cancel. And I'll just keep making money from them and they will tell their they will tell people to sign up. And, you know, I've never done any marketing. You know, this is, I think, a thing where the Internet is.

is a huge benefit for publishers if you have this sort of model because the friction for my subscribers to tell other people to try it out is zero. They can, they can post it, social media, they can email, they can tell folks to go, go sign up and there's no sort of like it's a self serve. You walk up, put in a credit card and, and there you go. And, um, the, the other thing that I do that I think is, um, maybe, uh, folks don't expect is I don't have trials, um,

And the reason I don't have a trial is, one, I'm already giving away 25 percent of my content. If that's not enough to convince you that you should try it out, then like a couple extra articles really make a difference. But to the you know, I'm writing around 2000 words every day. It's a you know, so it'd be I think I did a trial tomorrow. I'd get all kinds of people to sign up. But then they start getting this huge email every day. People are busy. They don't they don't want to read that. And then the trial is over and like, oh, well, good.

I guess that wasn't worth it. Whereas, you know, there's a human sort of like the sunk cost fallacy. Once someone has given you $10, like they're going to carve out the time because they feel like they already paid for it. They better do it. And what's great about that is it's a forcing function for habit building where people get in the habit of reading it every day using the same place on the subway or over coffee or whatever it might be.

And, and once they're in the habit, then they can't imagine not reading it. And then you have that sort of subscriber for, for a long time. And, you know, it's absolutely the case that the, my business model and my editorial content and all the different pieces of my business, all,

interact and all interact with each other. And I think that's what publishers of all of all types, whatever their business model have to be thinking about. Your editorial strategy has to be aligned with your business strategy, has to be designed, aligned with your customer acquisition strategy, has to be aligned to go to market strategy like all they have to all be working in concert, given that the Internet just makes the competition so much greater because you're you're quite literally competing with everyone in the world. Do people take your paid for stuff and then make it free, but in their own words?

Oh, absolutely. All the time. I mean, that's that's something you just have to get over and accept that that's that's going to happen. I mean, there's you'll see it show up in in other columns or opinion pieces a day or two later. And, you know, not always, but sometimes more with some pieces than others. And, you know, I think at some point it's a little frustrating at first, but once

what I quickly realized was what's kind of my goal here. Like my, my goal here and it sounds cliche, but my goal is to check it is not to make money or, or, or get rich or what it might be. I wanted, obviously I wanted to, to make a living and to, you know, be, have a good provision for, for, for my family. But at the end of the day, like this is stuff that I care about and I'm passionate about. And the, the opportunity to literally spend every day thinking and writing about stuff that I'm really fascinated and interested about is a tremendous privilege.

And so to the extent that I am influencing other people to also write similar things that I've written in similar lines, that's actually a tremendous – that's a tremendous outcome because it shows that –

You can never have – the brilliance of the business model is the way it scales on the back end, right? The amount of work I do for one subscriber is the same amount of work I do for 100 subscribers. But the way to truly scale, to truly have impact is not to just influence the people who read you directly. It's to influence the influencers as it were and to – and so to the extent that people –

People do echo themes that I've written about. That's actually if my goal is to have a positive change and not to sort of feed my ego and not to be credited, then it's actually a tremendous thing. We have very similar sort of business models. You mentioned that you kind of didn't promote –

And, you know, that resonates with us because we also have like a membership site. We don't really promote it. People are surprised when they find it. And it's extra. It's not like we cut you off and then we sell you something. One of the differences when I was doing some research between you and I is you offer a monthly, whereas we only offer a yearly. Why do you offer a monthly? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I already don't offer a trial. I think monthly gives you a way in that, you know, it's pretty accessible. It's, you know, it's $10. Like, it's kind of on the edge of, fine, I'll give it a try, sort of territory. And actually what happens is, you know, the –

people will try for a month and a lot of people will sign up and immediately cancel their auto renew. Cause like, I'm just trying it out. I don't, I don't want to get charged again. And that's fine. So, but it means when I look at churn numbers, I need to like exclude the one month folks because they, they kind of mess it up. But what happens is a lot of times is people start out with a month and then they switch to a year because they're like, Oh, this is great. Of course I'm going to keep getting this. And the year happens to be, you know, $20 cheaper because it's, you know, a hundred dollars a year. So, um, so, so I think it's, it's just an easier, more accessible entry point. Um,

And, you know, I feel, you know, over time, you know, I see people moving, more people go from monthly to annual than I think churn out by and large. And, you know, at this point, for a long time, they're actually 50-50. But at this point, my annual membership is actually a fair bit larger than my monthly membership. And I think that's great. Yeah, that's awesome. What's your day like now? Like, walk me through, like, you wake up, I

I want to know kind of like what it looks like in a broad strokes, but also what are your habits, your routines? And then I want to like deep dive on some of like how you read content, how you consume information. I wake up and I deal with this with this super annoying puppy.

And then make breakfast for my daughter, walk her to school, come back. My son grabs a bus. And then I sit down and I have a meeting. So I now have like someone that assists me with some of the – a lot of the administrative stuff. And so that's usually the first thing because he's based in the US. And so given the time zone sort of alignment, then –

That's the first like hour or two of my day is just dealing with administrative stuff, which isn't great. It's kind of sometimes a pain to dive right into it. It's kind of just a matter of time zone that it has to be first. But that's usually what happens. And then after that, once we're done –

Theoretically, I dive into research and planning from Daily Update and work diligently. Usually, it's a much more sort of winding road where I'm reading stuff and I'm on Twitter and I'm floating around. I'm usually thinking about – one thing I do very early right when I wake up is I do look at all the headlines and see if that happened the day before. And so kind of ongoing through my head is –

is an outline of what I'm probably going to write about that day. And, and this is where also the, the other distinction is weekly updates. I, I usually have an idea of what to write about for weekly update quite a while in advance. Like I knew this week I was probably gonna write about Zuckerberg in, in, in Congress, you know, a while ago. Um,

you know, the case of Mike, I wrote about Microsoft last week in the reorganization, like the reorganization happened on a Thursday. And so I knew I would write about the following week. And so usually I'm thinking about those for, for several days ahead of times. I usually already know which day I'm going to write them. And so those, those days are different. The daily update is usually more responsive to what happened the day before.

Again, not always. I always have a sort of like a list of stuff that's going on such that if – what if nothing happened, I can go back to it or two if a bunch happened one day and there's multiple things I want to cover. I'll take a few days to get over everything. So again, the days vary a little bit. But usually I want to have an idea of what I'm writing about and then it's kind of percolating. So it's kind of in the back of my mind. I'm thinking about it. What are the points I'm going to make?

And that middle part of the day is spent sort of fleshing it out, making sure I have the angle, you know, the, the, what I'm going to write about generally. And then, you know, sometime in the early to mid afternoon, uh,

I receive the necessary sort of dose of sheer panic and terror that I have a deadline coming up in three or four hours. And I better buckle down and start writing. And so then I spend the afternoon and early evening writing. And my goal is to publish by 7 o'clock. Or my goal is 6 o'clock. Usually it ends up being closer to 7 o'clock. And then go have dinner, hang out with the kids, play with the dog, and then go to bed and do it again the next day.

It's a fascinating approach. So you never have writer's block because you always have this list. Is that list ever empty?

Well, I think the most common misconception people have about what I do, especially given the amount of things I write about, is it's not like every day you're starting from nothing and kind of scratching together an opinion on stuff that goes on. Like I have a view of the world. I have – the way I think that things work is sort of like mental model in my head of –

And so things happen. I kind of pass them through that model. And most of the time they fit the model and it's easy to read about it. Like I – it's pretty easy to see what's going on here. Sometimes they don't and usually that means there's something else going on. There's like, oh, maybe something else is going to happen soon or sometimes I'm wrong. And when I'm wrong, these articles are the most interesting and the spur of a lot of weekly articles where –

it's really sort of modifying the model, like expanding and better articulating my sort of view of the world. And so I think from my perspective, uh, it's, it's less the coming up with opinions that is difficult and more the, uh,

Trying to keep a very strong sort of guard up against like confirmation bias where things happen and oh, that fits my view of the world. That must be true. Whereas making sure you always take the time to go back and say, wait, let me double check, make sure this is right because it would be awful.

awfully easy to follow this or say something, oh, that must be wrong. Well, maybe no, maybe it's right, maybe I'm wrong. And so I think it's more about the discipline of avoiding confirmation biases. I think the bigger challenge as opposed to consistently coming up with things to write about.

How much pressure do you have to agree with things you've already written about versus going, the world's changed or something is different and I was wrong? Like when's the last time you came out and were like, I was completely wrong. I blew this. And how,

How is that meant all the time? I did. I did it a couple weeks ago. Um, and actually it turned out, I think I was probably right, but, uh, but the, no, I do it all the time. And I, I think a strong commitment to that is, is, is critical and key to, to what I do. Like, so it's key in a few areas. So, so one, it's very free. A friend of mine once said, uh,

I love to be right, which is why I always say when I'm wrong, because that's the fastest and shortest way to be right. So, so one, if you want to be right, like admit you're wrong. Uh, number two, I write with a fairly sort of authoritative tone and voice just because that's better writing in general. And also I'm saying what I think, but you know, the cliche strong opinions weekly held is exactly what I abide by. Like I,

I'm going to pursue what I believe to be true and I'm going to always be testing the assumptions and underlying it. And again, this is where the sort of having a systematic sort of view of the world is very beneficial because it's sort of my innate nature to always be challenging the assumptions that are underlying something as opposed to just looking at the sort of outcomes. And then the other end, it aligns with my business model. Like people are paying me money because they think what I read – what I write is worth reading.

And from that perspective, for me to come out and say, I got this wrong. And not only that, every time I get something wrong, I always try to recount what I was thinking when I got it wrong, what led me to make a mistake. And I, I,

probably 60% of the time it's confirmation bias. I will come out and say, I got this wrong because of confirmation bias. I was looking, I presumed it would be this and I didn't consider this and this is why it was wrong. And you ask my readers, like you probably do a search for confirmation bias. You'll get several examples of me saying where I got it wrong. Other times, yeah, circumstances change or, or, um,

or other, you know, sometimes circumstances change. It was because I wasn't wrong, but my opinion changed. A lot of times things that get wrong are issues of timing. Like where I can see structurally why a company is facing a particular issue, but I maybe don't appreciate the extent to which their current route has lots of legs in it. Right. So what I say is correct. It's just not going to be correct until like 2020, but you know, that's no excuse because to be wrong in timing is, is, is to be wrong. Uh,

But no, I am wrong all the time and I relish the opportunity to say when I'm wrong. Is it painful? Sometimes it's painful. It certainly is. I think there was – probably one of my more painful ones was like the Snapchat Spectacles thing. It was painful, one, because there was a few people that just always kind of rubbed it in my face constantly. And so it's always irritating. It's like, yes, you were right. I was wrong. But it was also painful because it was one of those things where I –

knew better. Like I should have known better. And those are the most irritating ones where it wasn't even a confirmation bias thing. It was, it was a, I kind of fell in love with my own sort of theory and the theory wasn't wrong. It was just misapplied. I think in that particular case. And, and those are the irritating ones. But at the same time, you know, if I don't come out and say that, say, this is why I got it wrong. I did this. I made this mistake. Then why should people trust me or pay me money to, to read what I have to say?

Completely agree with that line of reasoning. How do you filter what you read? Like the information that goes in, you said you wake up, you kind of read the headlines. What are your trusted sources if you're other people's trusted sources?

Yeah, so I very much – I start at sort of like first principles by which I – in the case of content, by which I mean like just news. So I read – so I wake up, I open up Tech Meme, just like what are the headlines of the day? And when I'm reading something, I try to get into like original sources as much as possible. Sometimes if something comes up, I will try to find –

like more opinion analysis people have written about it more just because I find a useful way. It's like a knife sharper where it prompts me to think through my own sort of view. But, but usually by and large, I form my opinions directly from the sort of the core content. And so people are like, Oh, who are the writers you read or whatever?

usually if I read other writers, it's more as a happenstance of researching a particular topic. What I actually read on a day-to-day basis is just news, like what is actually happening. And then in the context of writing a daily update, I will do extensive amounts of research. I mean, my typical day, I end with like 150 browser tabs of Finn, right? I have an iMac with

40 gigabytes of RAM because I have so many browser... She really thought of handling browser tabs. That was going to be my question for you. I was going to see how many browser tabs you had open. Oh, hundreds. Every day. When I write about stuff, I want to... It's really important for me to get everything right down to the details. Because I see... You see things like...

Like, for example, like Mark Zuckerberg's in Congress this week and he was let off the hook on at least three occasions in the Senate. And I didn't count times in the House because people talked about Facebook selling data. Well, Facebook doesn't sell data like that is Facebook's handling of data. OK, of course not. But if you are not precise and understand exactly how the business works.

then your analysis may be right in spirit, but it's, it's not right because of the details are wrong. And, and more importantly, the people that matter are not going to hear what you have to say because they're gonna get caught up on the details. And so for me, getting the details right is critical, uh, not just to make sure my analysis is right, but to make sure that people will hear the analysis because people won't hear what you have to say. If you get details wrong, even if those details don't matter. So to me, getting stuff right is really important. It,

just from a sort of rhetorical standpoint, but then also like, I want to know, I don't want to say stuff that I don't think I understand. And, and sometimes it's things like, like I wrote an article about, about GPUs a year ago. I remember this one. I was, I was really proud of in part because I knew how they worked at a sort of high level. But to me, that was a great example where I really got down into the weeds on understanding a very granular level, how they work. And to my mind, that was a, that was an example of a,

of a daily article where it read like any other daily update, but there, there were hours of research that went into that to make it feel like just another daily update. And, you know, I think the, my absolute favorite compliments that I get from people is when people in other fields are like,

This is the first time someone's actually written something about this field that understands how it works. And those are gratifying because it shows that the time I put in to make sure I got the details right were worth it. And I think that's the flip part, too, of saying when you're wrong. Like if you say when you're wrong and you put in the time to get the details right the rest of the time, that's the best way to sort of build sort of trust and reputation in the long run. There's always –

a challenge about a broad-based sort of publication where it's like, oh, this publication is really great. They always know what they're talking about. And then they write about the field that you're in. And if they get the details wrong, it's like, wait, I know about this one. They're getting it wrong. And you start to question everything else. And so to me, it's so important to take the time to get the details right.

There's so many things I want to go into there. Let's rewind a little bit to Facebook. To what extent do you think these people are asking questions based on what they believe or based on what they believe their constituents believe in its posturing or signaling? I mean, Facebook is an entire morass there. I think the –

part of the challenge with Facebook currently is I think there's an aspect where Facebook is a bit of a scapegoat for the last election. But, and I think Facebook is very attuned to that and feels resentful about that, but that doesn't change the fact that Facebook did a lot of bad things. And, you know, I actually think Facebook is responsible for the last election, not because of Russian ads or fake news, but because of the, you know, I kind of referenced earlier the way they fundamentally changed the structure of politics and media in America. But that's a very different sort of cause

And so, you know, it's hard to, I think it's challenging to pull apart what are the causes here. And I think it's such a challenge just in general. Facebook is probably the most prominent example, particularly currently, but by and large to sort of break out of your bubble. And, you know,

And it feels like the bubble has gotten so much stronger and more pervasive, particularly since the last election. And I think to this point, I'm grateful for, one, having grown up in the sort of environment that I did because I feel at least more –

aware of the just, I mean, imagine growing up and not even knowing that you should apply to like, to like a Harvard or something like that was me. Like, and I think that's a mindset and a view of the world that most people that I deal with on a daily basis can't even fathom like, like to, to grow up in that sort of, but that's the experience of a lot of people.

That's one. But then two, on a day-to-day basis, to not be in San Francisco, to not be immersed in tech in a sort of environmental basis, but to be living abroad, living in a different country, talking to people who mostly –

aren't really interested or don't really care that much, I think is tremendously, you know, there are certainly downsides, many of which are ameliorated by the internet, you know, things like Twitter and messaging that lets you stay in touch with people. But there are tremendous upsides, which is being on the sort of outside looking in brings, I think, a lot of clarity and clarity

skepticism, I think probably more than anything. You probably see the system better than anybody because you're outside of it, right? You're not a part of it and you don't have these nudges to see only what's right in front of you. Yeah. I mean, like I said, everything is a strength and a weakness, you know, so I'm less in touch with the details and the day to day by just by definition because I'm not immersed in it. But the payoff is, yeah, being on the outside looking in and

And that happens to align with, again, my sort of natural way to view the world. So, again, I think it's another area where my life and sort of business model is in alignment, I think, to sort of my benefit. Two questions I want to follow up on before we get back to kind of like your habits, which one is like, okay, so tell me about Facebook and how they work.

had an effect on the election because I don't think anybody listening or not everybody listening will be familiar with your work. And the second is, talk to me about this information bubble that we're in. Well, I mean, my theory with Facebook is there's that famous book, The Party Decides, and that was sort of the theories in that kind of drove like Nate Ziller, for example, to to ignore his own polling data and to say that Trump wasn't going anywhere. And what

the sort of thesis of that book, the party decides is that, uh, after the sort of like democratic reforms of the, of the parties of the presidential nomination process in the sixties and seventies, I mean, it used to be like a smoky room, like a smoky room. They would go choose the presidential nominee, but then there was this push to be more democratic. I think particularly the democratic side after, uh,

Was it Herbert Hoover was sort of just like picked out of nowhere. And and the thesis of the book is that, yes, it became more democratic with the primary and caucuses and all those things. But it actually was still the party's deciding who is who is the president's nominee. And their point was the party is not like politicians. The party is all the broad sort of interest groups and donors and activists who are.

care about outcomes and their collective sort of preferences drive the decision-making. Because they're the ones that actually do stuff. They actually do the work. They actually pay the money. They actually do all this sort of stuff. And they will make the selection

By virtue of there only being a possible selection, which means only some candidates would get money. Only some candidates would get the sort of necessary support. Only some candidates get the sort of media coverage that's driven by all sorts of other things that is necessary to even make a presidential run. And I think what was implicit in that and what was missed and underappreciated is all that sort of implicit power, no longer explicit power, but implicit power was inextricably tied up to

the gate holders, gatekeepers in media in that to in order to get your name out, you need money for advertising or you needed earned media was called where the newspapers are right about you and television stations would cover you and all sorts of things. And that only happened if you were in a position that was enabled by sort of the party in the party speaking broadly, not just the politicians. And so people would vote in primaries, but they were always voting for broadly acceptable candidates to the sort of party as a whole.

And so that's kind of part one. Part two is what has happened to the media over the last 20 years. The media has completely lost its sort of gatekeeper status. The media was predicated on controlling – the media was not predicated on writing content that people wanted to read. They were predicated on owning printing presses and owning delivery trucks. They own the mechanism for delivery. Exactly. And so what the internet did is completely made all that obsolete, and the internet –

made distribution cost zero, made transaction cost zero, made it possible for anyone to go anywhere to read anything, and basically destroyed the power on which those gatekeeper functions rested. And so what happened was the media completely –

switch to being from being a gatekeeper to being a subservient supplier to platforms like Google and Facebook where they had to go on the platforms according to the platform's dictates and could compete for readers

According the way they were allowed which is by quicks or getting attention or whatever it might be as opposed to being we are Sort of like we own the printing presses you will read what we have to say And so the implication of that is once the media lost its power and its gatekeeper status the parties at the same time because they were inextricably tied to the media lost their power and geeky status and no one sort of realized this happened until really Obama came along and

And came out of nowhere and totally overwhelmed the party's choice, which was Clinton. And he did it through grassroots, through being someone that broke through and people were attracted to. And then Trump took it up to 11. No one in the party establishment wanted him or supported him. But he had celebrity. He had attraction. And why did the news cover Trump? The news didn't make Trump. The news covered Trump because people wanted to see more Trump. They wanted – and so the news –

in media organizations were responding to the incentives that they had in a world where they were no longer gatekeepers. They were sort of surfs in Google and Facebook's kingdoms. And what else would they do if they didn't cover Trump? Someone else would. And that's where the audience would go. And so and so this is the this is the effect that Facebook had in Trump being elected is by virtue of being the meccanist.

by which media and media entities lost the sort of gatekeeper status and what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. They were, by extension, the mechanism by which political parties lost their sort of controlling function such that no one could control it. And once no one could control it,

It weighed the groundwork for Trump to come along and be nominated and be elected, which is what the actual voters wanted, whether you agree with it or not, even though the party didn't want that. And so it just flipped it around on its head.

Do you think we're going to see more sort of implications along these lines as technology continues to expand its role and ubiquity in our lives? Unquestionably. I mean, we are switching from a world where it used to be a world where market power and economic power and social power was gained by controlling supply.

to a new world where power is gained by controlling demand. The fundamental difference between, let's say, a newspaper previously that controlled the printing presses and Facebook is that Facebook has the users such that suppliers, and this being content organizations, have no choice but to

go-to users on Facebook's terms. A great example is Google. Google is kind of the king of what I call these sort of arrogators. Like, what does any website do? What do I do? What do you do? What does the New York Times do? What does anyone do? They put up a map of their website

that according to Google's terms, that makes their site easier for Google to understand and to put in a search index, right? Like we are all doing work on Google's behalf to make Google's service better. That is because Google controls demand. They control the customer in where they enter the internet. And that's a

perfect example of how controlling demand is the true locus of power going forward, not controlling supply. Do you think that's sticky? Or do you think that they'll be these like Google came out of nowhere to where they are today and, you know, like

Do you think?

gets. And if you had two search engines and they had, they started out with identical technology and wanted 51% share, 149% share over time, the 51% share would grow and would improve just because they have a data advantage. So that's number one. Number two is you get a two sided network, a

where the more users, the users come to a platform initially because it has a great user experience or it fits their specific need. And those users give that aggregator power over suppliers. So the suppliers will come onto their platform on the aggregator's terms. You can see this with Google, with Facebook, you can see this with Netflix, for example, where they go there to get access to the customers and that makes the offering more attractive to end users such that they get more users. And you get more users, now you have more,

more power over suppliers. You get more attractive suppliers. Exactly. And so you get a virtuous cycle. And so there's sort of the, and you're seeing this play out where the sort of the end game of the,

controlling demand. And because again, the two key things are there being zero distribution costs, which means you can, you can pull all suppliers of all types on your platform and reach all customers at effectively zero marginal costs. Whereas it used to be, you know, to, to print a newspaper and deliver it to doorstep that, that costs money such that a newspaper couldn't scale infinitely. Google can scale infinitely and there's no transaction costs. Like it,

Google can legitimately serve every person in the world. Facebook can legitimately serve 2 billion people. There's no way any business with any sort of marginal cost could ever serve 2 billion people. And so it's the fact that there are no marginal costs is a consequence of the internet. And

You know, the thing with internet, the thing with business school is always very critical. I remember going to business school in a strategy class and there was no classes about like the internet that involved internet companies. And I went to the professor. I'm like, how can you have a strategy class without anything about the internet? Like, well, the thing about strategy and doing case studies is you learn these broad principles that can be applied.

And it's bullshit because it's true. But what the internet has effectively done is if you think there's like this big complex math equation, if you put a zero into that equation, like the whole thing kind of blows up, right? Like you can still use the equation and with zeros in it. But it's – most people don't think that way. They can't think through all the implications. And so again, my sort of systematic view of the world sort of let me sort of figure out what happens if you put a zero in this equation. What are the implications of that equation?

But a lot of what I write about with aggregation theory is, okay, this equation – let's lose the equation. Let's go through to the simplified equation, which looks completely different than the equation that came before because after the zeros are there, it looks totally different. And now how does this actually apply to the real world? How can this actually apply to your business and your industry and things along those lines? Yeah.

What would you teach an MBA strategy class for internet strategy? If you came in to give a lecture on internet strategy, what would be the core ideas of that sort of lecture? I think the most important takeaway would be – I'm sure I could do case studies about different industries and companies. But I think the more important thing is examining the

implications of changing assumptions. Like what, what happens when you start with, start with zero marginal costs? And, and I would probably want to go through different industries and show how, when you change the assumptions, the implication for that business and what is attractive completely changes. Like, like take like CPG companies, like a consumer packaged goods, which is a huge focus at Kellogg where I went to, went to school.

These sort of companies, they were predicated. The single most important thing to understand about a CPG company is that their most important sort of strategic tool was shelf space. Like if you control shelf space, then what you do, then you do R&D to get like sort of – they invest a lot in R&D to get marginally better products. Then they would –

run a bunch of TV advertising reaching the lowest condo denominator and they'd go to the store and it would be a brand extension where they'd be next to the Tide detergent because, oh, if a grocery store owner, if you want Tide detergent, you better carry this brand extension next to it. And then it would be there and you'd buy it. And that's how they would drive growth. And if you think about it, if you have a strategy – and this is obviously dramatically simplified – but if you have a strategy that is quite literally predicated on physical space, that probably is not going to be a very –

Like if you think about the internet, what happens if there are no shelves? And if you start with no shelves, everything changes. It turns out that brand actually – brand already mattered, but brand matters –

more in a different way on the internet where it used to be a brand matter from a recognition perspective, like recognition perspective. Like you're in the grocery store. Oh, I need some deodorant. You, and you're looking at a, at a shelf with like 20 kinds of deodorant. Why do you pick the one that you pick? Most people don't know, but, but a lot of it has to do with advertising and, and sort of, uh,

implied preference and things that they've picked up over time. Whereas on the, if you go to Amazon for deodorant, you search for deodorant, you search for old spice or you search for Reichardt, which means the recollection of a specific brand name is much more important than the sort of recognition of a brand. If that makes sense, which means your advertising strategy needs to be different.

All those things need – like everything you do about your business needs to be different. You probably want fewer brand extension and more investment in a sort of like standout sort of thing. And you have to deal with competitors that are super niche-focused because the internet enables niche in an unbelievable sort of way. I mean like our businesses are examples of that. And so my point would not – so if I were to guest lecture in an MBA program, I would not –

Maybe I would use CPG as a case study, but my goal would be you need to learn to consistently and repeatedly start with new assumptions. Like what is the controlling assumption in this industry? What happens if that controlling assumption goes to completely changes? Here's another example.

Like if you're trying to figure out what is the most important thing for a hotel traditionally, it's, it's the name on the sign. Why you are going to go and close your eyes in a strange place and you need to feel safe. And so if you don't feel safe, if you don't feel like that, it's a place that is trustworthy. It,

It doesn't matter. Location doesn't matter. Amenities don't matter. You know, all the quality of the sheets don't matter. Like nothing matters unless that that one priority is taken care of. And so it would come like Airbnb, for example, did was it took that trust, which is very hard to build and develop in companies that spend, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of time on building brands.

They basically digitized trust to being this sort of reputation system and ratings and things like that. Again, credit for eBay, for example. eBay is a huge pioneer in lots of this stuff. But they digitized trust. And what that did was it didn't make trust not matter. What it did was it lowered trust from being the only thing that matters to being one of many things that matter along with maybe I want a kitchen. Maybe I want to live in a particular neighborhood. Maybe I want to do all these sorts of things.

And that's just – you can see this in industry after industry where the assumptions fundamentally change. And so again, the lesson I would want to impart is how can you train yourself to question and look at assumptions because most people don't. They stay on the surface. Yeah.

You mentioned the shelf space. I think that's super interesting. You go to Amazon, you search for deodorant, but you also have this weird thing where if you're not in a physical store, I mean, when you reach for a product in a physical store, even if you're searching for it, it's there. But on the internet, you could reach for deodorant on Amazon and it can show you like six deodorants before you get to the one you want, even if you're searching by the brand name.

Yeah, I think that's a mistake by the brands. Like it should – like they have too many versions, too many variations, and that's a problem I think of the world that came before. And I think all these brands and so much of the sort of modern economy was built on this like mass market lowest-count denominator sort of model where you're going to watch the big sports game that everybody watches and you're going to see the commercial for the big beer or the big deodorant or the big whatever it might be that everyone sees.

And you're going to drive your big car to a big box retailer and you're going to bump into it on the shelf. You're going to grab it. You're going to go home. And every single piece of that story that I just told is being fundamentally disrupted by the internet. Sports, like the shared experience of watching a football game, certainly still strong and

And there's a reason why it's still valuable and still drives a lot of – particularly the bundle and things on those lines. But there's so many more things to watch. There's eSports. There's Reddit. There's listening to podcasts. Like there's so many more outlets for free time that that is inevitably going to weaken over time. You see the – driving a car. Well, or maybe you're going to take an Uber or maybe you're going to ride a bus or maybe you're going to –

the fundamental nature of our cities is going to slowly transform as new forms of transportation become viable. Big box retailers. Well, what about just going to Amazon? What about searching for it? You know, a lowest commoner brand that sort of applies. What about the micro brand that can target me on Facebook or Instagram because it understands who I am and what is it about? And like, oh, that's actually really interesting. And they can reach me spending a fraction of the price that these companies spend to do these mass market advertising and

But the implication of being very niche is they can be much more specialized. Like if you don't have to bear huge fixed costs of being on shelf space and running TV ads, you can spend that money on building a better product that appeals to a narrower segment and charge more. And now I'm buying my custom deodorant that's meant for men in the Oregon Trail generation and –

I'm lost as a customer for P&G kind of completely, and there's no real way to get me back. So I'm like the board of Heinz. We bring you in. What do you tell us? What do you tell us about what we're doing wrong and what we should be doing differently then? I say you're owned by Warren Buffett, so you should probably do what he says.

But that's a prototypical example of a CPG company, right? How would you tangibly, other than reduce brand extensions and invest in brand, how is the internet changing that business in your eyes? I think you just said it. I think the internet has a barbell effect.

where there are returns to the biggest and returns to the smallest. And if you're stuck in the middle, it's just a very dangerous sort of place to be. And so if I were Heinz, I would double down on Heinz and the Heinz brand. And I would seek to dominate even further all the traditional distribution channels that I do, whether that be restaurants, whether that be schools or all the sort of like the B2B sort of selling space because that's going to be a space where being dominant

big and bring to bear your assets is going to be much more impactful than the sort of consumer space where it's getting more challenging. So, so if I were, so that, that would be another aspect of what I would do. And, um, and you know, and, and, and I think that that's probably relatively consistent advice, but, but you know, it certainly, it's going to be, I think Heinz is probably in better shape than a lot of folks to be honest, because you know, did you read that New York article about trying to invent new kinds of ketchup? Yeah.

No. Oh, it's a classic. It's one of those Gladwell pieces from a few years ago. But it turns out it's really hard to improve on Heinz, which is which is a good place to be. But but yeah, but no, I think. But yeah, I think thinking about your go to market, your target customers, what your brand is, is it worth doubling down on? Can you do extensions? What makes sense? Oh, yeah. All those are going to be key questions.

You mentioned controlling demand is kind of the future. Who do you think and why has a better controlling demand position in a relative basis between not only now but going forward between Google, Facebook, and maybe Amazon? Well, I think they're in pretty distinct categories, I think, going forward. In that, you know, Amazon is clearly –

clearly focused on from a consumer perspective anyway on they want to be where you buy everything and kind of the one-stop shop and you're if you want something to buy you should just go to amazon even bother going going anywhere else

And they've been very effective in that regard. Google, if you want to know something, you go to Google. And Facebook is where you waste time. And that is a surprisingly valuable thing to be where you waste time because – in part because, one, people have a lot of time to waste.

more than they think. And mobile has really unlocked huge amounts of new places for people to waste time. Whether it be waiting for the bus, going to the bathroom, whatever it might be. There's lots of places where time is wasted. And the good thing about wasting time is that is one of the most attractive and compelling places to advertise. Because

when you are focused, like Google is about focus. Like I want this thing and Google's gonna help me find it. And to that extent, Google search ads are very compelling because they are helping you find the thing that you want. And it's really a win-win sort of thing. Whereas what about the things that you don't know that you want, that you don't know about, that you're not aware of that even exist?

And if you're in a focus state where your attention is – you're thinking about one thing, you're not open to new things, to new ideas, to new things coming in. You're much more open when your mind is kind of shut off, when you're just absently scrolling through your Facebook feed or through Instagram. And so Facebook is actually an incredibly powerful advertising platform for precisely that reason because the mental state that people are in when they're on Facebook is different than the one they're in when they're on Google, for example, or even on Amazon.

The other thing to think about in this case and why those are the kind of big companies is you have to think about from an advertiser perspective as well. Advertisers think about it from an ROI. Everyone thinks about the R. What's the return? Like how many purchases do I get from this app? But the I matters as well. Like how much work do I have to do to get this ad out there? Like do I have to learn the platform? Do I have to invest? Do I have to make –

special creative for it. And this is where Instagram is such a, is such a powerful tool for, for Facebook in that if you want to reach say teenagers, maybe Snapchat is a better way to reach teenagers and Instagram is only 80% as good, but you're already buying Facebook ads. You're already on the platform. You know, the background tools are so much better. Yeah. That the,

overwhelms whatever our advantage Snapchat might have. And so the real sort of problematic angle to Google and Facebook is less the consumer front end and more the advertiser back end such that it's not really viable to build a mass market advertising business in the current day because Facebook and Google are so dominant. Which company would you rather be?

I don't know. I mean, I think – I mean, probably – I mean, Google has one of the most perfect models of all time in part because they're such a perfect aggregator where Google – Google's goal is to know everything and the nature of their model is that everyone voluntarily gives them everything. Like users go and literally tell Google –

you go, what they want, advertise me shoes, right? Yeah. No, they're not saying areas. You're just saying they're searching for shoes, but like, it couldn't be clearer what they're going for. Right. Like Google certainly has a ton of data on you and they do do targeting and all those sorts of things. But at the end of the day, the most powerful piece of targeting Google has is what you tell them in their search box. And if all targeting and data collection went away tomorrow, Google would still be in fantastic shape. Uh,

And on the backside, like all the suppliers, the websites and all those things, they give Google all their data. Google is like, oh, we have a new format for recipes. Put your recipes in our format. Everyone is like, okay, we'll do your format. Why? Because it's a win-win-win sort of situation. In the long run, Google, when we move to voice, is their business model going to make sense? They have challenges certainly going forward. Google is again less attractive for the sort of brand advertising, although YouTube is obviously a massive –

advantage in this case. You know, Amazon, there's a it's pretty straightforward. Like you, you buy from Amazon and they'll take a skim off it. And there are shifting more and more to being a platform model where third parties on Amazon and the third parties pay Amazon to put their stuff in Amazon's warehouses.

And then they give Amazon percentage of the sale and Amazon is just facilitating it. And again, all because they own the storefront. They own the customer relationship. So Facebook is probably the least attractive just because all those things that I talked about, the ability to reach people when they're bored and the downtime, to understand what those people want implies this sort of like data collection and stuff that Facebook is getting grief about currently. And also –

People are more likely I think to be critical of just a leisure activity in general. Like it's less clear what societal value Facebook contributes that gives them a defense against their actions. Whereas Google is like we – you don't use Google. Everyone uses Google and finds it very valuable. Again, I think that's a little unfair to Facebook.

I think like it's like when you're raising kids, like it's very easy to say like, oh, my kids should be studying more and taking more classes and doing stuff. But kids need to play it right. They need downtime. You know, I think there's an aspect of it's OK to be a leisure focused company. It's OK that to be something that people do when they're bored. And but it's also a much easier way to attack. And does Facebook have addictive qualities? Are there issues about it? I don't know. I'm glad they're opening up to more research. Yeah.

I think that there is a personal responsibility aspect that goes into this, but it's a much bigger sort of danger zone for Facebook where they get branded as being like the new smoking or something like that. And given that these companies gain their power through owning the customer relationship, the greatest danger is always a turning customer sentiment.

I mean, it is becoming harder. Is it insurmountable now that the person in their garage could compete with Google? Like, is that data advantage cumulative for Google and Facebook and Amazon in the sense that like, the longer it goes on, the harder it will be to effectively compete with them?

Well, it was impossible for someone in their garage to compete with Microsoft. And I think that's what people don't appreciate about these sort of dominant players in these sort of epochs is they are tied to the paradigm of the moment. And their sort of upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift

that makes it impossible for the powers that be to compete. I mean, the issue with Microsoft was mobile, well, two issues. One, the internet sort of, it changed the layer of lock-in, if that makes sense, where it didn't matter if you were on the Windows API or not because everything was within a browser window. It actually mattered what was the first site people went to the browser window, which was Google.

And sort of the layer of the chokehold kind of moved up. In the case of mobile, the Microsoft didn't have the right business model. The business model was either you own the device and sell the device like Apple did or you give the software for free, building this massive sort of network effect. And then you have another means of monetizing it, which Google and Android did. And Microsoft was stuck with a licensing business model that just didn't make sense, that didn't work.

And they also had the wrong mindset. All of Microsoft's mobile phones before the iPhone came along all presumed the presence of a PC. They all assumed the PC would be central to people's lives, and the phone was an adjunct to that. And it turned out, actually, no, the phone is your center of your life, and the PC is an adjunct to that. And Microsoft could never get over that culturally and from a mindset perspective. And so that's what took Microsoft down. It was not someone in a garage. It was that the world changed. And I think this is underappreciated. And they didn't recognize it.

No one would have recognized it. I think that Microsoft gets a lot of unfair grief for a fate that would have befallen any manager and any company in the same position because it was a matter of culture and it was a matter of broad changes in the competitive space. It had nothing to do with Microsoft itself. Microsoft didn't miss mobile. Microsoft started building mobile phones in the late 90s. They didn't miss it. They just were fundamentally in-equipped to compete in it.

And that's what happens. That's how disruption happens. And the stories of companies moving seamlessly from one paradigm to another are basically nonexistent because all the things that make you strong and competitive in one paradigm make you fundamentally ill-equipped to be in the next one. It's what I said at the beginning. Strengths are weaknesses. You're fragile. Yeah, I mean, so I –

If I'm competing right now with systematic analysis of technology and society, if it turned out tomorrow that the only newsletters that matter are ones that got into the nitty-gritty details and whatever, I'd be screwed. Like I'm not going to fundamentally change who I am. And that's a very obviously isolated, narrow example, but it absolutely applies broadly to companies as big as Microsoft.

Switching gears just a little bit. I mean, there's a massive kind of consolidation going on in old media. So like cable networks, cable providers, broadcasters, telecoms, even cell phone providers to that extent. I mean, I feel like a new merger is basically being announced, you know, if not daily, kind of weekly. Why do you think this is happening now? What's the driving force? And how does this find an equilibrium? Yeah.

Well, it's for the reason that story that I told before about watching the big sports game and then going to the store and buying deodorant. The, there was a way of organizing the world, uh,

That held true for 60 some years after the post-World War II order, and that order is ending. And when orders and eras come to an end, the inevitable outcome is sort of consolidation and coming together. And there's an aspect too where technology enables this.

There's almost like two eras of technology. Like the first era of technology made existing companies and processes better and more efficient. So it was the big companies that would buy big accounting systems and back-end mainframes, this sort of stuff, and it made what they did better. The internet fundamentally changed the assumptions undergirding their business.

And to some extent, it made it more possible to run large companies efficiently. So doing a merger became a more viable process. But the broader trend is that the world in which these companies grew up in, in which they're built to operate in, that world is shrinking and the obvious –

way to deal with that is to merge and to see if we can figure it out together because we don't have time to compete with each other because we have to deal with sort of fundamental secular impacts on our companies and businesses.

Talk to me. You mentioned earlier about bundling and unbundling. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on there, what you see and what you feel is happening and where we're going to land. Well, what happens with these paradigm shifts is that the point of integration changes, you know, sort of changes in the value chain where it used to be, you

you integrate at a particular point and that's where... And everyone around the point of integration sort of modulates and fits into that framework. So there used to be a point of integration around sort of putting all the TV channels together and then...

on one side you would have customers that would, that would sign up and decide you would have show creators that would make a show and sell it to the highest bidder. And then they'd sell it elsewhere, international rights and rerun rights, all these sorts of things. And you had sort of very modular pieces in this integration in the middle. And then what happened was like Netflix came along and they, what was the key thing that they digitize? If, if Airbnb sort of digitized trust, uh,

Netflix digitized time, like the linear sort of TV schedule that was the sort of like the key constraint on TV was now completely gone. And there's a there's a great example here, which is Netflix. It's well known their initial foray into streaming was made possible by a deal with stars for 11000 movies. And the day that Netflix launched streaming, what was the effective

effective catalog size for stars. It was one, it was whatever movie they were showing on their channel at that time. Right. Whereas for Netflix, the moment they launched the effective catalog size was 11,000 because you could choose any one of the movies to watch.

And what this did was, and then Netflix combined that with that, created this fantastic user experience that let them gain customers. They gain customers, they gain more economic power over suppliers. They can start signing up new suppliers. Eventually they can get to the point where they can start creating their own shows. And what happened is you, you,

The entire value chain has been broken up and reformed around this new integration that Netflix has between their service and owning the customer relationship. And now it's broken down into individual shows selling to Netflix. It's no longer like the studio system and all those sorts of things. All that's been is breaking up into pieces. And so there's a famous quote, the bundling on bundling quote from Jim Barksdale, the co-founder of Netscape, which is there are two ways to make money in business. One is to bundle and the other is to unbundle. And what this gets at is

if you find a point of differentiation, a way to integrate in a value chain, you can

build a new value chain such as the rest, you build a new bundle and everyone around you unbundles and aligns themselves to you. It's like when you have a bunch of magnets and you move, you know, you build a connection where they all kind of scurry around and line up. Right. That's what happens in business is is in and it happens on paradigm shifts. It happens with the Internet where where new areas become possible, new points of integration and then everything else in the value chain reorganizes itself around that.

And where do you think that that lands? Is it just the seesaw between bundling and unbundling indefinitely or is it? No, no, I know. I think we're in the middle of a huge transition and probably will have more stability going forward. I think, you know, the long run for TV, for example, the long run is likely that there's a

The traditional bundle becomes basically all about sports because sports is better live. Sports is advertising-driven. And so the business model on that side is going to be different. It's going to be very expensive. You're going to pay a lot of money to get not that many channels that are mostly all sports. And it's going to become an accidental sports bundle for people that only want sports. And it's going to back into that. You're going to have Netflix and you're probably going to have Disney Fox, for example.

and maybe one or two other services like Amazon Prime. But the goal there is Amazon. It's not to be an entertainment panel itself. And what's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today. They're just going to be paying different people. And I think that that's going to be the case. This idea that there's going to be this – you're going to suddenly be paying $15 a month for all the entertainment you want is a fantasy. That's not going to happen. What's going to happen is you're going to be paying different people than you paid before.

Yeah, I'll see that in lots of industries. Like there will be new giants that emerge in the new area that are created with – like when I started Shrinkwraith, I started it with the business model in place, which gave me lots of advantages relative to other folks, right? You're going to see the same thing at a much larger scale, companies that are started with internet assumptions, that are started with a view of how the world works today, or started with the assumption of zero distribution costs for internet.

and the ability to sort of scale are going to be the new giants. And we're just kind of, I think, in the middle of this, what's going to be a multi-year, probably multi-decade sort of shift. Talk to me about how VC is shaping companies

kind of this space. I mean, we have things that have never really happened before. We have private companies that are allegedly valued at like $60 billion. We have companies staying private longer. We have companies willing to sustain losses longer in order to try and compete with these companies. How is that all playing out?

Well, I would say there's two points. One, I think VC is inextricably tied to technology. And the reason is that the nature of technology is massive upfront investment followed by basically zero marginal costs and huge amounts of scale. If you write a piece of software, it takes –

a lot of time, a lot of money. But once that software is written, it could be reproduced infinitely. And, you know, the same thing with like chips, which is where VC really started was it was in chip production. Like chips are made out of sand, right? For all kinds of purposes. The marginal cost is nothing. Astronomical amounts of fixed costs up front. And so VC is, is,

VC is the financial equivalent of software. It is the mechanism by which to put a lot of money in upfront such that you can earn uncapped returns on the back end. So it's always been a key component of technology. You can't pull them apart. That said, VC has been –

fundamentally shifted. I think like, like AWS has been a huge factor here where it used to be, you needed funding to build something to get something off the ground. So you, you, you would have to get funding with a PowerPoint just to even do anything. Whereas now, cause you had to buy servers. Like even if you want to do it in your spare time, you still have to get a server right now. You can walk up to Amazon and basically you have as many servers as you could possibly want, but

on a pay-as-you-go basis such that you can build something, get off the ground, prove a concept, and now you walk into a pitch meeting and you're actually demonstrating a working app as opposed to a

a PowerPoint. And so that you've seen the entire ecosystem of, of, of funding shift where what used to be a series a today is a pre-seed and then there's a seed and then there's a series a, which is basically the old series C. So part of that is sort of the structural shift in VCs. Everything's sort of shifted up the chain as far as the huge amounts of, of private capital being available at the highest ends. I think that's sort of, that's almost a separate category than VC in many respects. It's, it's more a matter of if,

It's a new investment class, I would say completely. It's called venture capital funding once you're funding an Uber at billions of dollars. But to me, it's a completely different –

It is called growth investing basically. And in this case, you're not – because VC, you're hoping for the 10x return, right? You're doing a bunch of bets and you want a couple to maybe hit in one grand slam and that will make the return for your entire fund. Growth investing is not like that. No one is investing at Uber at a $75 billion valuation hoping to get a 10x return.

It is much more akin to, I think, traditional sort of equity investing, but obviously with a higher risk profile, a chance which implies a chance for a higher return. But the fundamental mechanics and thinking and modeling that goes into those investments is completely different than regular venture capital investing.

You said it's changed a lot over the years, and that's because Amazon has equal and Shopify, to some extent, I would imagine, have given people the tools that were commonly unavailable. What do you see as kind of like the next stage of this transition? Well, I would say, I mean, since you mentioned Shopify, I don't think Shopify generally has much to do with a VC startup, for example. What I think is...

Startups in sort of my world are generally like VC funded, right? And they are – the goal is to build a – at least $100 million company, ideally like a billion-dollar company and get a huge amount of return. I actually think though there is a massive opportunity –

And for a completely new type of businesses, derogatorily referred to as lifestyle businesses, but businesses that are uniquely enabled by the internet and the ability to access the entire world as your market. And you and I are examples of this. I can sit in Taiwan and I have customers in literally hundreds of countries around the world because –

because of the internet. But the fact I can build that business is reliant on, for example, Stripe, like Stripe making it trivial for me to get payments or WordPress, like the fact that, you know, I can have this platform and all these sorts of pieces. And, you know, and Shopify is a classic example of that sort of company. And these are the companies I'm the most excited about and the most passionate about because I think

We need to dramatically reduce the barriers for people to build new kinds of business uniquely nailed to the internet, and I think those are where the jobs of the future are going to come from. They're not going to come from a Facebook or – I mean I guess a lot are coming from Amazon frankly, but they're –

And people tell it, oh, there's the long run trend in lower business formation going in the US. And I'm not surprised by that, in part because a lot of the consolidation and the reduction in friction at the internet allowed bigger companies to be bigger and reach out into small towns more and more. I suspect that rate of decline would be even faster if it weren't for these new types of businesses. And my hope...

hope and belief in the long run is that kind of like music like the music industry their their revenue declined for many years it's like oh the music industry is screwed it turns out the music industry is actually in fantastic shape and their revenue has been increasing a lot and they're actually gonna have they're on pace to have like their best year ever in like the next couple of years like even more than like the cd era why because streaming came along and just a fundamentally a

changed everything. More cohesive model. Yeah, and it took time, and you had to weather the decline of the old model, but the new model came through, and I believe and...

And a lot of the sort of policy prescriptions that I have to the extent that I do are all about enabling this new model for the world where people are – there are platforms. People are uniquely enabled to build new kinds of businesses that were not possible before the internet. It's kind of by definition, right? If the internet is screwing up all these other businesses, then the businesses that take the place –

Almost – but that doesn't have to be predicated on the internet because like the strength has to be the weakness in that regard. And so I don't write about partisan politics much, but things like I do endorse are things like universal healthcare for example. I'm well aware of all the arguments against it and the challenges in the US in particular, but people need to not worry about their family getting sick and to invent –

these sort of new jobs of the future, for example. And so that's one of the things that I'm extremely passionate about and is a core belief and and for me about how we deal with this sort of ongoing disruption. How do you see like tech influencing payments? So like Stripe came along, but I mean, Visa and MasterCard and where that's going?

I mean, I think the people, the thing that people forget about Visa MasterCard is they're incredibly convenient. I mean, the reason why they credit cards are everywhere is because they solved a real pain problem and they, and anything that, that wants to replace them has to not just be a little bit better. It has to be massively better and massively better in multiple directions. And again, the, you

you know, I am well aware of, of how expensive credit cards are. It's my largest expense by, by a lot. Uh, but at the same time, it's not, I'm going to ever not support credit cards because they cost a lot. Like the, the payoff inconvenience for being customers be able to sign up from anywhere over the world is, is well worth it. And, and so, you know, I think we're probably have the credit card with us for, uh,

a lot longer than some of the proponents of alternative payment methods might think. Well, it seems like everything that's new, even like Apple Pay, I mean, it's run on the back end of existing kind of credit card companies or platforms. Yeah, and you can sketch out a scenario where in the long run, if enough people use Apple Pay, then Apple Pay could, you know, Apple could do something to switch out the back end. But frankly, why would Apple want to do that? I mean, what Apple does, Apple wants to control the user experience and then get, you know,

get other people to do the very expensive sort of like infrastructure build out. Like think about the iPhone, right? They leveraged the iPhone to sort of control customers and made it so that customers would switch carriers to get the iPhone, which gave them power over the carriers. And the carriers had to spend billions and billions of dollars to build out new infrastructure, support all the data. These iPhone you were using and Apple would have to pay a dime. And so that's what Apple wants to do in industry of industry. The messy infrastructure,

high investment, relatively low-character capital stuff. They would rather gain leverage over other people and force them to do it, to get access to Apple's customers. I know we're kind of butting up on time here, so I've got a couple questions left. But do you think that ultimately, like social media, the ecosphere is healthy for people? I mean, there seems to be a recognition now that, well, Facebook and Instagram and all of these services give us leisure time. Do you think they're good for society? Yeah.

I would say probably not, but it doesn't really matter. And, and, and what I mean is, you know, there, there's something I read a long time, but I can't remember where, but this idea where it used to be, I think it was the issue goes beyond social media. And what I mean is it used to be that the world that mattered to us day to day was our local world. And occasionally the outside world would intrude in like, uh,

Whereas we've shifted to a world where we're all obsessed with the outside world and occasionally the inside world, the close-by world breaks in. And I think that's challenging I think for humans probably generally. I mean it's not healthy I think to be obsessed with the tosses and turns of what happens in Washington, D.C. and let that affect your sort of emotional mood on an ongoing basis. And I think social media exacerbates that and exaggerates that greatly.

And it, I think, perpetrates the sort of filter bubbles and the bubbles in general where you think lots of people agree with you. Whereas if you're in your small town, to find people that agree with you, you're geographically constrained to people that don't agree with you or view the world differently. Whereas you can surround yourself with people that think the same thing as you online. And I think all those are probably problematic. And the reason why I think it doesn't matter though is the genie is not going back in the bottle.

And I think this applies to lots of things. It applies to social media, applies to the economy, applies to advertising, applies to privacy. The temptation is going to be strong to fight battles that have already been decided when we'd be much better off pushing forward and figuring out what we're going to do going forward. How are we going to build this sort of like

structures going forward that are healthy, that make sense? How are we going to train people to be able to handle 24/7 news, to handle social media? How are we going to create the conditions for the companies of the future going forward? Like, to bemoan that the world, the post-World War II order is falling apart is completely counterproductive and is an opportunity cost to actually figure out what's next.

To an extension of that, to some part, do you think government plays a role in making Facebook or Google provide data to everybody?

so that everybody can access it? Yeah, this is the real sort of paradox of what's going on right now is Facebook's response, and they're being cheered on as they do it for all its purposes, is to lock down their data. Which basically entrenches them. And there's lots of regulation throughout the GDPR. The GDPR is... Is it going to be very costly for Google and Facebook? Absolutely. But it's going to be... But...

What's a GDPR for people who don't know? The European General Data Privacy Regulation. And it poses all these things around data and data retention. You have to get permission from customers and all these sorts of things. And everyone's like, oh, Facebook and Google are being a big trouble. Well, they are.

But if you realize that there is still going to be digital advertising, the alternatives to Google and Facebook are going to be hurt way more. Like is every site with advertising on it going to get permission from users for each of the individual ad networks that runs on the site? Like if you think about the barriers as opposed to a Google or Facebook, which –

has so much internal data. Facebook has lots of data. You already told Facebook. If they were cut off from all third-party data, they would still be fine. If Google is cut off from all third-party data, they're still fine. If a publication is cut off from all third-party data, are they going to be fine? No, they're going to be in much more trouble. And I think this is going to be such a challenge with government action going forward is the most obvious solutions are –

are going to lock in the biggest players are going to lock in the incumbents. And, and something that is important to me is continuing to raise a voice and like, remember, remember the future little guy that whose business hasn't been started yet. And let's make sure we maintain the conditions for, for the,

him or her to get off the ground because we need new jobs. We need jobs that don't exist. We need new industries that are uniquely nailed by the internet. It's going to be awfully easy to shut that off before it even gets started. That begs the question, like what regulations would you look at enacting if you were in government to give the little guy kind of a chance, but more so to not further embed these or entrench these larger tech companies? Well, I mean...

It's very – there's two ways to argue this. So one is that these companies need to be broken up or they need to be – like maybe Google or Facebook needs to be separated. So there's more competition in the ad market would be one argument. Another argument though on the flip side is maybe they actually should be heavily regulated because

And such that we have sort of stable platforms and foundations on which the future can be built. And you think about something like AT&T, right? Phone service was costly and didn't evolve very much, but it was a stable sort of base that other stuff could be built on. And I'm not totally sure, to be honest. It's something I've been wrestling about a lot, about what should this sort of

regulatory response be to these platforms? Because there's an aspect of the implication of aggregation theory is that to be large and to be dominant is the natural state of affairs because of these feedback loops. Like the end state for an aggregator is to win it all, to take it all.

And if I think that the future is – I use it on the X1 podcast, this jungle analogy where you're going to have the huge trees that tower of everything and then a huge amount of like undergrowth and like just massive amounts of like life and all kinds of vegetation on the floor and kind of nothing in the middle. If that's sort of the future where you have these massive platforms and you have that stuff in the middle, then maybe –

maybe like seeking out stability and a fair playing field on top of the platforms is more important than ensuring platform competition, if that makes sense. And, and there's something I, I, I'm not sure that I've fully articulated that specifically on Shrek yet, but it's certainly something that I am trying to come to terms with in my own head. And I, like, there's just going to be different, this barbell effect, there's going to be big, there's going to be small. And, and,

And how do we deal with the one while maintaining room for the other, I think, is going to be sort of the critical policy question going forward.

That's a great segue into kind of my last question, which is you've been running Stratechery, I think, five years now? I started Stratechery five years ago, and then it became a business four years ago. Right. So tell me what's changed in those years about what you thought about going into running Stratechery because you had this business model in mind and kind of what you've learned and honed or changed your mind on over the past five years. Like, what have you learned from running this? Like about technology or about Stratechery? No, but the Stratechery, the business.

I mean, first and foremost, I would say one is the speed with which you can grow and word of mouth can spread was kind of mind-blowing. Like I said, it's five years now. My goal when I started trajectory was that in five years, it could become my job. It actually became my job in a year and I am now five years in and five years later,

far more successful than I would have ever imagined or made possible. And frankly, and a lot of that success was really seeded in the first few months, you know, going from having, you know, a few readers to having thousands of readers in a remarkably short amount of time. And I think, you know, the social media,

is viewed as such a bad thing for publications, but that's because they don't have the right business model. For me, social media is absolutely incredible. It's the most amazing channel that could ever be invented, and I get to use it for free. So I think that's probably the biggest surprise. The second one is probably just, it's a big market out there. There's so many people, and

You know, I constantly on Twitter will encounter people who they don't follow me. And like you, like, I think this person would actually really enjoy not saying that, you know, I'm the and I'll be all Twitter followers. This person clearly doesn't know who I am because I see their tweets with the writing about and they would almost certainly be interested in stuff that I read about or they follow people that that would make sense. They would want to follow me. And.

And that's actually kind of a great feeling. I'm not resentful. They don't know who I am. It reminds me that there's still sort of upside. There's still room to grow here. And I think this is a mistake that people make. People are like, oh, yeah, how many subscription sites can there be? Like not everyone can have like 50 subscriptions. And no, that's not the outcome. The outcome is breadth. There's going to be so many niches and there's so many people out there that –

there's gonna be enough for everyone. There's enough to go around. We kind of talked about this offline before we started recording that, yeah, we both have subscription models, but like, are we competitors? I mean, no, we're not, it's not like there's a thousand people who will pay for content in the world and we have to fight over those thousand people. There are hundreds of thousands, probably,

almost certainly millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions that will. And it's more a matter of, it's a great problem to have that, to know that I have customers out there and the issue is not that I need to convince them to pay. It's that they just don't know who I am yet. And that's a pretty sort of great place to be. Yeah, I like that a lot. And one of the other things that we touched on earlier, before we started recording was

We didn't explicitly call it this, but there's the value you create and the value you capture. And there needs to be a means for people to capture a percentage of the value you create. And if you overcapture, you kind of go out of business. And if you undercapture, you go out of business.

And there has to be a mechanism sort of in the middle where you can earn a living and still provide high quality, meaningful content to people. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, the, you know, the Internet, like, I don't know, I'm cognizant of the fact that I am inherently biased because my personal life and business have benefited so greatly from the Internet. But I am also biased.

pushed back strongly against the, it was kind of a running joke, like, that's fine for Ben, or that's great for Ben, which I think I stole from Merlin Mann, like, that's fine for Merlin. And this idea that, oh, that my success rests on

on things that are unique to me. Now, do I bring things to the table that are valuable? I mean, obviously, I'm not saying anyone can write an internet publication or anyone can start a business. You have to deliver something of value that is differentiated. But I strongly reject that I am the only person in the world that can deliver differentiated content. I think lots of people can about lots of areas that I know nothing about. And there are lots of examples of that more and more, more than people know and appreciate. And

It's like the example of saying Microsoft failed because of the actions of Steve Ballmer. It's such a presumptuous and – it's human nature to ascribe things to people, but it's wrong. Like what matters far more is the context and environment around Microsoft. And I think it's the same thing with me. Am I successful because of my hard work? I am, and that's true. But it's –

I reject the idea that I am solely responsible. I could write the exact same things, the exact same sort of person I was, and I've come along 10 years earlier or five years earlier and would not be successful. Had a completely different outcome than you have now. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be writing for some –

magazine or whatever, probably scratching out a living. I was in the right place at the right time. And frankly, if I came along 10 years later, I probably wouldn't be successful either because someone would be in my space. Someone would be in my niche. And I'm very cognizant I just was in the right place at the right time. And

There's nothing wrong. It can be both. It can be both. And I think to the extent I succeed in writing about companies and writing about strategy, it's acknowledging and describing all those contextual factors beyond the sort of like great man theory of history that Steve Jobs was such a great person. That's why Apple succeeded. Well, what are the other things that sort of go into that? It's easy to write the one. It's more difficult to write the other, but it's very important. Yeah. Yeah.

I totally agree. One more question. Sorry, I lied about last question because I could talk to you for hours, but I'd get a ton of emails afterwards if I didn't ask you how you organize and retain the knowledge that you're consuming. Like what is your backend sort of organization system for what you're reading and how you're thinking about things and how that evolves? Like how do you create your own personal Google or what's your backend system for that? Or is it all

literally in your head, in which case the rest of us have no hope. So all that said, all that said, I have three sort of like unique skills that definitely benefit what I do. One is I read extremely fast. Two is I write extremely fast. And three is I have a very good memory. Like I just like, so I will remember stuff and like Google's my best friend. Or I use like, one of the reasons I want to upgrade is search engine checker. Like I just launched a new version of the site with a new search experience. It's because I use search more than anyone.

I'm like, I know I've written about this. I need to find it. So that said, I'm definitely getting old, man. Like I can feel – I just don't – I could retain stuff like nobody's business when I was younger. It's getting harder. So I am trying to be better about that. What I do do is I keep a –

an outline. I use Workflowy and where I'm constantly filling it with links of stories of interest and notes like that. And it does have a search function. And I don't always rely on it exclusively, but I'm always trying to capture stuff as I go along that I think is of interest. And I'll put it in. I'll just put a few notes about what the article is about and then I'll link.

And then I rely on search. I remember at Microsoft, the email team did a study about the different kinds of the way people use email, like the filer versus the searcher or the holder or whatever. I am definitely in the, if there was no search, I would be screwed. So I vaguely recall that I saw something about this one time and let me exercise my Google fool or my email inbox search capabilities to find what I was searching for.

I agree with you. I'm very search oriented as well. Ben, this has been phenomenal. I want to thank you so much for such an amazing conversation. We might have to do this again. Sounds good. I'm happy to be here. And thanks again for the multiple delays and getting it out. But we've done it. So there you go. That's awesome. Hey, guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up.

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