Holiday Mailbag: The Next Intel, Google’s AI Revival, Modern Sportswriting, TSMC Mugs, Tutoring Takes, and Lots More

Ending the year with a slew of great emails from listeners, including questions about the next U. S. flagship to fail, Google's advantages in AI, an iOS 18 autopsy, the classes that Ben and Andrew would teach as professors, AI for chip production, TSMC mugs, recommendations for X usage, and the return of the TikTot segment to discuss tutoring and children. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the whole Sharp Tech family!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, talking to an NBA champion today, Ben Thompson. How you doing?

• 0:16Ben Thompson?

  I was gonna break into song, but you spoiled my intro.

• 0:20Andrew Sharp?

  Hey, don't let me stop you. We are the champions. I feel some ownership too, as a member of Giannis' team. So it's a celebratory occasion today.

• 0:33Ben Thompson?

  I mean, things become meaningful by meaningful people making them happen, Andrew. That's my takeaway. Now that Giannis has won the NBA Cup, it is

• 0:42Andrew Sharp?

  It matters.

• 0:43Ben Thompson?

  An important part of a true champion's resume. And congratulations to him and to the Milwaukee Bucks and to me as a Milwaukee Bucks fan.

• 0:50Andrew Sharp?

  My two thoughts on that game. Number one, what a masterpiece from Giannis. My God, he controlled that game in every conceivable way and looked like the best player alive. So it was delightful in that respect. Number two, aside from Giannis, my favorite part of the game was texting with you throughout. It's nice to have the Bucks respectable again because I get to talk basketball with my friend Ben again. Couple of weeks ago, you were ready to retire from NBA fandom entirely, but now the Bucks are alive and you're back. I'm grateful for that this holiday season.

• 1:26Ben Thompson?

  We're busy, we're expanding. It's been actually harder to fit games into the schedule. I did clear, clear the day yesterday and had to make up for lost time. The group chats, a lot of tweets were fired out.

• 1:39Andrew Sharp?

  Oh yeah, feisty energy from you in the midst of that win. Well, welcome back to the NBA community. It's great to have you and welcome to the holiday mailbag. We've got a bunch of great questions to get through on this episode. We're going to start with Nicholas, who writes, Ben and Andrew, after listening to the episode about the Pat Gelsinger firing, I was struck by the high level similarities between Boeing and Intel, which each of you highlighted at various points. Both companies are flagship US Engineering companies, both went from being run by engineers to being run by finance types. And both companies started prioritizing short term financial results over long term investment into the product and company.

• 2:24Andrew Sharp?

  This got me thinking, who's next? I think back to my previous experience at GE, another flagship US company that's had a similar downfall. Are there other flagship US companies that might be losing their way? Specifically, those where engineering is allegedly, in parentheses, the culture that made them so successful. So Ben, I have some thoughts here, but are there any names that come to mind for you, reading that email from Nicholas?

• 2:51Ben Thompson?

  I don't know. I'm actually kind of curious what your thoughts are and what other readers are going to say. I did put it to, uh, put it to chat GPT. And a, a list of companies that came up pretty quickly, actually, were all the defense contractors. And I think it's sort of their, you know, Boeing sort of falls into that. You could make the case that actually you could think about Intel as falling into that. But, you know, to what extent, and maybe this is something we won't truly see until, God forbid, there is some sort of large scale conflict. That we find out that these entities that we're relying on, that were basically granted de facto monopoly status by

• 3:29Andrew Sharp?

  Yep.

• 3:30Ben Thompson?

  The US government are actually completely rotten and incapable of scaling up or doing things beyond sort of what is possible. I mean, there's lots of criticisms about sort of current weapons platforms, how long they take, um, you know, and all, all the software problems that there are. What happens in an actual fight? Do they perform well? I mean, there's, there are reports that actually they do. Um, it turns out that some of the most criticized platforms turn out to be pretty effective at, at their jobs. Hopefully that's the case for lots of things.

• 4:00Andrew Sharp?

  That's encouraging to hear. They certainly seem like a pretty sclerotic base right now, but maybe they're better than they seem. That would be nice.

• 4:08Ben Thompson?

  Right. Well, and is there any capability of sort of scaling up? I mean, you know, it used to be, we talked about on a previous episode, our defense contractors back in the day were our regular big companies. And now there's been Sort of this specialization. And I do think sort of broadly speaking, it's just sort of. You know, I, I sort of did a little year in review, sort of daily update. Uh, and it, it just sort of strikes, you know. And I, I've been wondering when this moment would happen for a while. I've actually written some variation of this a couple of times over the past few years. But we've gone through this era of all decisions are economic decisions. And I think that's a way to think about globalization, sort of broadly, at sort of the biggest level.

• 4:52Ben Thompson?

  It applies to things like aggregation theory, but in a world where all the sort of constraints are loosened. It's good for me as an analyst. You just sort of think through the economics, think through the way things like work. And you could predict what's going to happen, you know, the example I used.

• 5:09Andrew Sharp?

  That's right. If it's all rational, it's all fairly predictable, right?

• 5:13Ben Thompson?

  Right. And rational in a, not in a like an individual's making decisions, but in a, the inexorable sort of advantages that come to scale. For example, or like in a world, we might have this beautiful romantic notion of the decentralized internet. But the reality is without any constraints and zero marginal costs of sort of distribution. You're actually going to get more centralization, not less, because the returns to, to being centralized and discovery are, are so massive. And they sort of build on themselves. And, you know, the, there's a bit that, that describes what went wrong at these companies.

• 5:51Ben Thompson?

  If you keep making sort of the quote unquote economic decision, which may be sort of deprioritizing R and D. Or elevating sort of your cost structures in certain ways, or your pricing, or whatever it might be. You make decisions that you only come to regret 15, 20 years down the road. Because you weren't making the long-term sort of investments. And so I, I, I would, I'm curious if our readers are going to have like killer examples of this. But I would imagine there are more than we know of.

• 6:23Andrew Sharp?

  Okay, so please submit your nominations for the next Boeing and Intel over the holiday break. We can return from the holiday break with just sort of a haters rundown of different companies that people should be shorting as we head toward 2025 and beyond.

• 6:39Ben Thompson?

  Well, that's the hard thing, though. That's the hard thing. I talked about the context of Intel. You would have gotten killed by shorting Intel if you went back to shorting them when I started pointing out that they have big problems ahead. And that gets it, right? Like, I felt in 2013, when I wrote that Intel was in big trouble and they needed to shift to being a foundry instead of being an integrated device manufacturer. I'm like, I'm years late writing this. Unfortunately, I just started Schecky this year, so whatever, I'll just get it out now. Turned out, if you listened to me, you took a bath.

• 7:13Andrew Sharp?

  10 years early.

• 7:14Ben Thompson?

  But I was also totally right. And that is the real challenge with a lot of these,

• 7:20Ben Thompson?

  that captures the issue, right? From a stockholder perspective, what complaints are there? If you actually understood this, you would say, no, I'm getting in. I'm going to capture all this upside from these short-term decisions. And whatever, I'll just get out when the top hits, and it'll be fine.

• 7:37Andrew Sharp?

  Well, and also, I mean, you mentioned the defense industrial base, and even Intel was part of this story as well. A lot of these companies, if they make the wrong decision, they don't feel it for a while because they have a lot of structural advantages that have locked in massively successful businesses. And that can last a decade, two decades. And so it takes a little while for sort of the cycles to catch up with them. My nomination on this question, just reading the email from Nicholas, would be almost too easy, but Nike has to be mentioned here as we chronicled over the summer.

• 8:14Ben Thompson?

  That's a good one.

• 8:15Andrew Sharp?

  They've been slipping on tech innovation. They're not really pushing forward in design anymore. Like, I can't remember the last pair of new Nike shoes where I was like, man, those look cool. Granted, I'm not really the target audience for Nike anymore, but even young people are not like lusting after Nike shoes the way they were.

• 8:33Ben Thompson?

  Other shoes are like, are like colorways.

• 8:35Andrew Sharp?

  Retros.

• 8:36Ben Thompson?

  Old shoes, yeah.

• 8:37Andrew Sharp?

  Like designs from the mid 90s. And I am the target audience for that. But they're also seeing some of their core business disrupted by structural changes to the market, where the cost structure in e-commerce is just way less favorable to their business. And it requires a lot of investment from them. And the board went out and hired John Donahoe a few years ago, specifically.

• 9:00Ben Thompson?

  Former Intel board member, I believe.

• 9:02Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, interesting. So there are a lot of overlapping trends with Nike and Intel. Nike also overreacted to the COVID spending and the success that they had during the COVID years, and wound up going down the wrong path as a result. So they're too easy. But alongside that nomination, I do have a question for you. If we're talking like real flagship tech companies, is iOS 18 bad enough for you to wonder about Apple's long-term vulnerability? Are we invoking the Charles Barkley meme? Do we need to have an Apple dialogue here?

• 9:44Ben Thompson?

  I mean, I, the, well, I have another, I was gonna actually bring this up later on. You have an email about Android and Google and stuff along those lines. And I feel like my instincts were right. It was time to go to Android and I bailed too early. Yeah, iOS 18 is horrible. I mean, the, I don't know that, I don't know that this applies to the question, other than just a couple. Everyone's talking about the Photos app. They did weird stuff to Control Center, like my, the whole connectivity panel. It's like promoting AirDrop and you don't have actual access to things like Bluetooth. I had to like do all the individual ones.

• 10:18Andrew Sharp?

  I saw you and several other people were really upset about that particular tweak from Apple.

• 10:23Ben Thompson?

  Uh, I find the connect, I mean, this is the ironic thing is I had problems with the modem on, on the Google Pixel. The connectivity on, on, I don't know if this is an iPhone 16 thing or iOS 18 is terrible. Like the wifi is bad, the cellular connection, when you, like if you lose the connection in an elevator, it just doesn't reconnect. Like I have to turn it off and turn it back on. Another reason to be annoyed at the control panel, uh, interaction thing. Uh, there's, there's some other feature or some other, oh, the emoji situation? Absolute disaster. They're cramming all this other stuff in there. Uh, I don't know. I, I, I hesitate to draw a lot. Like Apple's had bad iOS releases before. There's a lot of talk that they pulled basically

• 11:06Ben Thompson?

  everything to focus on this Gen AI stuff, which is a separate discussion. And it does feel like lots of stuff sort of got neglected.

• 11:12Andrew Sharp?

  This is like the B team or C team putting together iOS 18?

• 11:16Ben Thompson?

  Right. I mean, I, I don't know. The, is Apple focused on, I mean, what's the evidence though? What, what decisions would they do differently? That wasn't focused on short-term results. And I guess you could make the case about the generative AI stuff, like their sort of approach and not doing their own large model in particular. But that's not, it's, that's not sort of an insane way to think about it. It is. But I guess a lot of stuff isn't always insane, right?

• 11:43Andrew Sharp?

  Right. It's arguably rational for the short and medium term. I mean, that's part of the deal.

• 11:48Ben Thompson?

  You know, they, they did put out the Apple Vision Pro. It might be a mistake, but it's not like they, you know, it's not like they're, they're just not doing anything. Um, so, but the, all the pieces are in place, certainly. Like you have a long-running run of dominance. That's basically undergirded by risks and decisions that were made a long time ago and sort of cemented them in place. I'm not ready to go there, but certainly the.

• 12:17Andrew Sharp?

  Neither am I, but it came to mind and I think you could make the case that they're not, like Apple hasn't produced anything new and great in a long time and it's not about iOS 18.

• 12:29Ben Thompson?

  Well, you're the one who doesn't use AirPods to be fair, but.

• 12:31Andrew Sharp?

  Well, well, I would say. AirPods, I mean, like, that's a counter example that people always invoke. But the AirPods and the Apple Watch are both impressive, but they're ultimately just iPhone accessories.

• 12:44Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, they're iPhone accessories, that's right.

• 12:45Andrew Sharp?

  Right. Apple was smart to release them and they're both good products. At least some people think the AirPods are good products. But they also have massive advantages.

• 12:54Ben Thompson?

  I understand you like the Apple Watch. I've just, I've not, every time I pull it on for a few weeks, I'm like, yeah, this sucks. I don't want to wear this.

• 13:01Andrew Sharp?

  Why? And people point to their success and it's like, Apple doesn't allow third parties to have access to certain functionality on the iPhone. So there's a real competitive advantage. They're not playing on a level playing field in some of those markets. And, you know, where has Apple pushed forward over the last 10 or 15 years? And why should we believe that Apple has like the cultural and technical chops to capitalize if and when there's a paradigm shift in the next five to 10 years? That would be sort of the skeptics case. Again, I'm not ready to really make that case. It's terrifying to bet against Apple. But I think there are fair questions to raise after the last 15 years.

• 13:41Ben Thompson?

  Well, so is Google now in our good graces that they've blown everyone's mind this week?

• 13:47Andrew Sharp?

  They have blown everyone's mind. Should we just skip to the Google question here? Because we got this from Sirab. He says, Hello, Andrew and Ben. I recently attended a physiotherapy assessment and received a hard copy printout detailing my bi-weekly sessions for the next five weeks. On the drive home, the thought of manually creating each calendar entry felt daunting. Once I got back, however, I decided to see if one of these new advanced LLM tools could help. Using Gemini Advanced on my Pixel 9 Pro, which Ben returned, I snapped a photo of the schedule and asked it to create calendar appointments for each session.

• 14:28Andrew Sharp?

  To my surprise, it not only recognized all the session details accurately, but also added them directly to my Google Calendar. A process that would have taken me 15 minutes was completed in seconds. Out of curiosity, I tried the same with ChatGPT. While it correctly parsed all the session details, it understandably couldn't automate the calendar entries and instead provided instructions to add them manually, essentially no different from referencing the paper schedule myself. This experience underscored Google's current edge in certain areas with its combination of TPUs, optimized AI infrastructure, in-house models, consumer apps used by billions and hardware like the Pixel 9 Pro, which Ben returned, Google stands apart.

• 15:13Ben Thompson?

  We got the message, okay?

• 15:14Andrew Sharp?

  He's such an Android guy. In contrast, Apple lacks comparable AI infrastructure and large-scale models. OpenAI doesn't have consumer hardware or widely-used apps. Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and others each face gaps in areas where Google excels. This raises an important question. Given Google's unparalleled position in AI right now, how might they mismanage this opportunity and risk losing their technical leadership once again? Do you have any thoughts?

• 15:45Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I mean, the, you know, I mentioned one of my favorite use cases for my brief foray with the Pixel Pro, which everyone, I think this happened last time with Android, everyone's like, just buy a Samsung phone, like, just like all that edge stuff, like the modem stuff and all the things, they're like, it works better, the Twitter app works fine, so I promise, I'm gonna get another Android phone, maybe not right away.

• 16:07Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, boy.

• 16:08Ben Thompson?

  I just bought another one.

• 16:09Andrew Sharp?

  Don't make promises you can't keep, Ben.

• 16:10Ben Thompson?

  No, I'm getting a Samsung next time. No, honestly, this, my iPhone experience this time has been terrible.

• 16:14Andrew Sharp?

  Wow, that, that.

• 16:16Ben Thompson?

  Like, it's, it's, so I'm, but I also, I mentioned I translate stuff all the time, and the Google, like, sort of when, sort of like, take a screenshot and then you can interact with stuff on the screen right there is great. So, so, yes, they have all the pieces. I, I think the, the big issue for Google was actually sort of captured this week, which is, they have all these incredible announcements, their sort of new video generation model is amazing. It blows sort of the water. It's kind of embarrassing how, how much better it is, it is than Sora. And Sora, meanwhile, it's the separate site, it's not even part of ChatGPT, which is probably sort of a capacity issue, but like, then what are you actually bringing to the table? Like, like, you don't have the distribution advantage, you don't have the consumer sort

• 17:01Ben Thompson?

  of zeitgeist, like, everyone knows ChatGPT, that's a thing. I've made the case that ChatGPT.com, or, which I think they bought Chat.com, so it might change soon, but it is. It is like that is the value i- i- in chat GPT to make the case like it's i- i- is it actually the models or is it actually the consumer sort of mind share again, which is sort of a counterintuitive take and a little controversial, but I think there's there's something there. They don't have that for Sora and meanwhile, Google just has this new product that's sort of blowing them out of the water. And everyone's like, oh, this is so much more interesting than chat GPT's boring announcement of like chat GPT's search is now available to everyone. But chat GPT search being free to everyone is a big problem for Google like like the,

• 17:46Ben Thompson?

  you know, I think there's that, you know, we're doing a good way of segueing to other question. But yet my default search is is in the vast majority of cases, maybe not default search. That's putting a bit strongly. I think I gave a challenge to you. Try to catalog every time you use Google search in a day. It's like, it's such an astronomical number. You you don't even appreciate it. But there's a lot of times that I go to chat GPT first. I took the Google app off of my home screen, uh, so I could add another chat app. So I have now I have both Claude and chat GPT are on the home screen. I figure I need to give Claude sort of more of a shake, since everyone keeps raving about it. But that's the problem for Google is that's where they make all their money, right? They're like the and

• 18:30Andrew Sharp?

  You get the VO cash from Google search. That's how and you get the Willow cash from Google search. And so that goes away. That's a problem.

• 18:39Ben Thompson?

  That's right. And and this isn't a management issue. This is more like a real disruption challenge, which is a different technology comes along, uh, and it's not competitive with what you do on some aspects and but it's it is in others and it's sort of screws with your business model. And that is, that's a problem. Like in chat and you know, OpenAI is going to work to build some sort of advertising model to fund this sort of free level and increase the rate limits and things over time. And it's going to be pretty crappy at monetization relative to a Google search. But for a chat GPT or for an OpenAI, it's fine because they don't make any money from advertising to It's all sort of additive and they can figure it out. For Google, it's not fine.

• 19:24Ben Thompson?

  They, they, they, if they're cannibalizing their core business, that is a problem. But that doesn't fit in like the, the engineering culture bits, I think we were talking about before. Because that's just a, that's a business problem to be managed and it might be. It's still unclear if they're going to fully manage it over time. But, you know, I, I'm pretty sympathetic to companies going through that challenge. I do have to give Google credit as someone who's been very critical of their management. They are actually shipping this stuff. And the sort of morass and, and, and slowness with which they sort of responded. And the sort of layers of bureaucracy that, that you sort of heard about that these things had to go through.

• 20:10Ben Thompson?

  That didn't just make them slow, but actually made the products bad. Maybe there's been actual real changes there. I mean, we'll, we'll see how this gets when it rolls out. I mean, hopefully we don't have to sort of rehash the, the problems with their image models and their, and their text models that came up a year ago. But to the extent they fixed that, hopefully they did get sort of the kick in the rear end. Because we do need great engineering companies and Google's a great engineering companies and you got to let the engineers ship. And to their credit, they are shipping. That is good news. They still face this business challenge. But yeah, like if you went back to 2020 and said, oh yeah, Google has all these advantages and they're crushing it.

• 20:54Ben Thompson?

  Everyone would be like, yep, that's exactly what I expected. And a lot of the angst and perhaps going too far in criticism, but then again, maybe not. Was because they weren't fulfilling their destiny. They weren't doing what you expected of them. For several years, they're sort of in the middle and Android should be the best choice. Like in an AI world because of all these advantages. And what does that mean sort of in the long run? Are they better placed than Apple? Yeah, they are. Uh, does Apple still have a lot of the advantages in the lock-in and the consumer mind share and, and all the sorts of things? Yes, they do. Can Apple recover? Can they have good enough models? They don't, Apple doesn't have to have the leading edge model necessarily.

• 21:39Ben Thompson?

  They, you know, one of the big themes over the last year. Has been, we haven't had the big like GPT five sort of breakthrough. But what we have had is a massive array of models that are GPT four level, but cost a lot less to create and a lot less to run. And it's interesting because there's a bit of an issue, I think, in the model landscape, which is the big payoff from doing a leading edge model is that model helps you create more efficient models. But that model never is actually economic to operate and run and you never make your money back. Like, so where, where is the incentive? Like, there's, there's almost a long-term concern about who's going to fund this leading edge model

• 22:22Ben Thompson?

  that everyone uses to make the efficient models that are actually make money in the marketplace. And, you know, OpenAI gripes about this, oh, everyone train their models using GPT for outputs, which is, as we noted, is a great irony, given their liberal interpretation of the use of other people's sort of textual outputs. But, you know, it is, it is an issue going forward, but that's an advantage to Apple. Like, it's actually, this might be a case where being a fairly fast follower, if you have the places to leverage it and distribute it, is a good place to be. So we'll see to what extent they can sort of systemically take advantage of that.

• 22:57Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, I mean, strategically speaking on the Apple side, I think that they are well-placed to sort of draft off of the leading edge market participants and just sort of capitalize on the progress without having to invest a ton upfront alongside Google and OpenAI. I would also say though, and it isn't about iOS 18, but just, it seems like people hate the Apple intelligence product thus far, or at least are just wildly underwhelmed by the Apple intelligence product thus far. And I think the efforts there could be indicative of just a more general malaise and lack of dynamism.

• 23:37Ben Thompson?

  Well, I mean, I think, I think one example is like their whole image playground sort of thing, which, you know, Gruber made the case on Dithering, maybe this is just, it's almost more of a demo app. But it does speak to, oh, we're, we'll do like stylized output of things you generate. It like, it speaks to like a place of fear. Like, we don't want to accidentally generate something that's good.

• 23:55Andrew Sharp?

  Let's not upset the apple cart.

• 23:57Ben Thompson?

  That's right. That's not a good, that's not a good sort of like sense you want from a company like, well, let's not give you the cool stuff because you might do something bad with it.

• 24:05Andrew Sharp?

  It's like, well, especially everything is about to change. I mean, that much is clear. And so as far as skating where the puck's gonna be, it just feels like a question as to how capable and willing apple is gonna be in the new era here. But they do have tons of advantages and they have me locked in. I will not be getting a Samsung phone to run Google products over the next couple of years because I'm an apple guy.

• 24:30Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm gonna know, I am, I am gonna do it again and sort of at some point in part because, and honestly, I think this is even relative to a couple of months ago. When, again, and I think some of the issues I had, maybe they were pixel specific, maybe they were just user specific. That like the Twitter issue was a real one, like it just, which lots of people have said, I don't have that issue. So I don't know what was going on there. But, uh, and the modem one was a real one. Again, might've been me specific, but you know, just the, the, it, it was what it was. That there was good reasons for me to bail on that phone specifically. But as my usage of these AI products increases and my desire to use them more increases.

• 25:16Ben Thompson?

  And I have to deal with annoying workarounds to interact with stuff. It increases the salience of, man, I would like this to be more deeply built in.

• 25:26Andrew Sharp?

  Seamless and easy.

• 25:26Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. And, and my assumption is I would like it to be chat GPT or Claude. But I am just gonna assume that the Google alternatives are going to be better than the apple ones. And that's starting to be a meaningful differentiator for me, something that I need to think about. Because if I'm depending on these and using them and want to use them, that's a reason to choose a different platform. Now, again, I'm hardly representative of the normal user, but this has always been the theory of Androids or of, in a pixel in particular, in the long run. Is whenever we shift away to apps being the key paradigm and apple sort of.

• 26:11Ben Thompson?

  Advantages in that space to services being the more important paradigm. It wasn't enough to have like native Gmail incorporation. You needed something more than that. Oh yeah, the email situation is kind of a mess too, but whatever. The AI though is is good enough and useful enough that that could be that could be the thing. But it this stuff, it does take time. It doesn't happen overnight, that's for sure.

• 26:34Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, you're not the average user in 2024, but your preferences might be a lot more common by the time we get to like 2028, 2029. And so we'll see how it all shakes out. Matt, while we're talking.

• 26:49Ben Thompson?

  One of the challenge from an Apple incentive perspective is their goal just needs to be good enough that, oh yeah, I can do that too. And you don't realize that it's way better elsewhere. It's just, it's good enough that you don't feel like you don't need to change. That's good from like a business perspective. They don't need to be great. It's kind of corrosive from a cultural perspective where our goal is not to be great. Our goal is to be sufficiently good that people can tell their friends, oh yeah, I have that too.

• 27:15Andrew Sharp?

  Right, and they're not sufficiently good right now. They're mediocre on the Apple intelligence side, but it's still early. Matt says, now that ChatGPT is becoming one of my go to apps, it's causing me to rethink how I use my phone. Phone, email, browser and messaging have always been in my iPhone dock. I want to swap in the ChatGPT app, but I can't decide which app to demote. Any suggestions from Ben has ChatGPT made it into his iPhone dock. Do you have any advice for Matt there?

• 27:48Ben Thompson?

  Well, so I have a very particular approach to my phone.

• 27:55Andrew Sharp?

  I never had any doubt.

• 27:57Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, so the idea of the dock is those are the, those are the apps that are there all the time, no matter which screen you're on. I treat the whole home screen basically as a dock. I only have one screen of apps. So you're either on the home screen or you're in the app library and I invoke you by searching for you. So there's no multiple screens of apps. So it's based, so if you're at that level, you're at that level. So my doc is X, of course, because I'm an addict. A folder, people don't think about this, you put a folder in your doc, a folder of all my messaging apps, but then if you put all your messaging apps in the folder, then the folder has the like the unified notification count of what's in there.

• 28:40Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 28:40Ben Thompson?

  The only apps that are in there are apps where I do check every message. So like my email is definitely not in there. I don't want notifications for like, it's too much that that's somewhere else. I have the camera, which is probably not necessary because there's all these dedicated buttons and stuff now, maybe that's just sort of muscle memory. That's, I should probably demote that. And I have Google Maps, uh, because you actually use, I use it all the time and I want it right there. Uh, but on, on the home screen, like I said, I did, I did devote, uh, the Google search. I just, the other thing is like, just, uh, I don't know, Safari's there, I can, I can search Safari, uh, the, but I do have perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT all on there. I don't really use perplexity, to be honest. When I use it, I tend to enjoy using it.

• 29:24Ben Thompson?

  It's just, it's never quite broken through for me. And I think like ChatGPT adding search actually for me kind of killed any desire I had to use, uh, you use perplexity. So, um, I'm there, uh, as far as them being on the home screen and the ChatGPT is in the spot right above the dock on the right where the Google app was. That's sort of my default and I like it. I use it all the time.

• 29:50Andrew Sharp?

  Well, do you have any recommendations for people looking to incorporate AI capabilities into their daily life? Because like if you're not already using LLMs on an hourly basis, it seems like you have to be intentional about the way you incorporate them into your workflow. And I imagine that process takes some time. I mean, how did you approach it?

• 30:14Ben Thompson?

  Well, I mean, for me, uh, for me, the, the anchor is I just always want to know everything. I hate it when I get a question or I think of something, I don't know the answer. So I look it up like, so I, like I've been.

• 30:26Andrew Sharp?

  And so LLMs have just wholly replaced search when you go to look up for a certain answer.

• 30:33Ben Thompson?

  Right. Yeah, I just wanted like, I, like, I, and I mean, this is an incredible way to sort of accrue knowledge sort of over time in the long run. If every time you don't know something, you look it up immediately, um, you're, you're gonna accumulate a lot of information, so.

• 30:48Andrew Sharp?

  Do you worry about the accuracy, though?

• 30:51Ben Thompson?

  Sure. I mean, for sure, when I'm, I never go straight from an L M to say stratechery to sort of put something in. And, uh, and I mean, I don't know. I think like I've been doing this for so long. I have generally a wide base of knowledge in whatever I'm looking up where I can usually, if something doesn't seem quite right, I can catch it pretty quickly. Like there was something, um, I was using it for the, uh, the CISC risk discussion that I did in the Intel article. It just like, I was like checking a couple of things and, and actually I think I got a pretty bad error about something about like preserving die space or something. I'm like, that's not right. I think CISC actually uses more die space. And so like, but so I knew to look into it. Yeah,

• 31:33Ben Thompson?

  sure enough. It actually got that. It actually got that wrong. Had I depended on it directly, I would have gotten in trouble, but I knew enough about how it worked that I immediately knew it was wrong. And so it's, it's hard to give advice about that. Everything's a trade off, right? Like I recognize there's a risky way to do this, but my time savings are so astronomical, particularly as just the quality of search. Again, which I think is mostly out of Google's control. Just, you know, that's the problem with abundance. You get an abundant amount of crap. Right? Uh, well, also I hate how Google's search is so biased to recency. It's really like you have, I, I use the date function all the time. And even then I feel

• 32:14Ben Thompson?

  like that's even gotten worse. Would, cause I'm always trying to find older stuff. And you know, and this is, it actually, one of the things I'm iffy about is I feel chat G P invoke search too often. I actually kind of like that quad doesn't have search built in because it's like, it just has to pull on its internal knowledge, which is risky sometimes, but sometimes that's what I want. I want like, yes, you're only up to date as of like six months ago. That's great. I don't want anything from the last six months. I've been trying to get sort of historical context there. So for me, that's the in, but there's a good example like this, the, the email that you just read about like reading, reading or invoking, putting all your stuff in your calendar. Like that's like, and, and so there's another example, like, uh, you

• 32:59Ben Thompson?

  know, I was talking to someone that had a A medical sort of issue. They sent me a screenshot of their printout. And this is actually a friend here in Taiwan. So I asked it to like translate and explain what was going on and it did it all in one step. And it was incredible. And the That's awesome. For me to have go through and translate it and then look it all up would have taken me an hour to sort of like do. And it did it in 15 seconds. So the it's one of those things that sort of builds on itself. You you just have to start recognizing opportunities like this could really help me do this thing really quickly. Uh, which is, I mean, there's an analogy here, which is like automating like stuff you do on your on your on your desktop.

• 33:38Ben Thompson?

  Like this is super nerdy, but if you if there's something on your computer, you sort of just keep doing the same thing all the time. You should automate that. Unfortunately, automation is generally a little out of reach for people. Actually, I think it was John Gruber had a good point. I don't know if it was on Daring Fireball, if he said on Dithering or something. Where this was the idea of Apple Script back in the day. Apple had this sort of scripting language for the computer that was like. It was meant to be normal language. So you could like write little programs to do stuff for you. The problem was it was still deterministic. So it actually was horrible. Because it was pretending to be normal language, but you had to have the exact right normal language.

• 34:20Ben Thompson?

  And there's a bit where having like actual programming terms is better because you know exactly what they are and how they work. Right? Like it it and and so Apple Script was super powerful, but it was like this art. It was really hard to write a good. There was no like real good debugging mode and all this sort of it was. It was a coding language that was trying to not be a coding language that actually made it worse. Yeah. But there's a bit where the idea is now being realized with these L M's. Where you can use natural language to get them to do something for you. And and a part of the There's different aspects of this whole agent discussion, but one of the more exciting

• 35:00Ben Thompson?

  ones is can you trivially get sort of a process in place that just does stuff for you automatically that you did all the time? And part of this is, and this is almost a marketing challenge, is how do you make people aware that this is possible?

• 35:14Andrew Sharp?

  Right?

• 35:15Ben Thompson?

  Like our emailer is going to use the calendar ad thing all the time, but also what happens if it screws up the calendar ad?

• 35:22Andrew Sharp?

  Honestly, that's why, yeah, that's why I asked the question. Sirav's email inspired the question as we talk here. And I, in my own life, this is embarrassing to admit, but like the mistake that I made with ChatGPT over the summer with the DeMar DeRozan sign and trade. And then again, I checked some salary cap information that I think it was ChatGPT, it may have been Gemini, but one of them got it wrong and led to me making a bad argument in a group chat. Those two experiences have me reluctant to trust the ChatGPT or Gemini information on anything.

• 36:03Andrew Sharp?

  And that's stupid, because obviously these are really powerful tools. But as I like project forward to 2025, that's one of my goals is to be more intentional and more proactive about finding ways to incorporate these into my daily workflow and just daily life. Like you said, they're great information resources, but I do still have that sort of trust barrier on some of the, on some of the searches.

• 36:30Ben Thompson?

  No, I think that that's a really good point. And like my core use case of like looking stuff up all the time is arguably one of the most dangerous areas because it's right so often and then it's wrong and you trust it and then you're screwed, right? And so there's a bit where I almost don't recommend what I do because I am sort of... Again, I I'm just, this is just the way I operate. I've accumulated so much knowledge just because that's the way, like, since I'm a little kid. I'm like, I was the kid who would get a dictionary or go to encyclopedia when I would didn't know something because it bugged me to not know something like, so like, this is before we even had computers.

• 37:08Andrew Sharp?

  I was also that kid, just for the record. I remember the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. I sat down.

• 37:16Ben Thompson?

  You learned about the world?

• 37:17Andrew Sharp?

  A physical dictionary, like a giant dictionary. And I looked up every word that I didn't understand on the Drudge Report. It was a very educational experience for me. And the dictionary had it all. Everything I needed to know was in the dictionary. So, thank you.

• 37:35Ben Thompson?

  That is amazing. That is incredible.

• 37:37Andrew Sharp?

  So, I was, we were, we were like minded, uh, elementary schoolers, I would say.

• 37:43Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, there is a, so there is a, an aspect of this stuff not being ready for primetime. On the other hand, it does, it reminds me of the self-driving car issue, which is, I think there's a good chance that self-driving technology is good enough that actually it should be deployed and be allowed to be used everywhere. And even though there will be bad accidents, but because the, the number of, uh, an intensity of the bad accidents is still going to be less than distracted humans or whatever sort of operating, that it would be worth it. But the reality is that's not going to happen because the status quo is so powerful, is such a powerful sort of bias.

• 38:28Ben Thompson?

  And often for sort of very good reasons that self-driving cars need to get to a point where they're exceptionally massively. The delta is, is, is so huge that they're inexor, the, the, the drive for them is sort of like, or the necessity is, is, is so massive. That then they can sort of become a dominant sort of thing and it's this huge sort of leap forward. And that's might be the case for a lot of folks like on balance, the amount of time that I think you can save with these tools is probably worth the mistakes you will make along the way. But the mistakes feel so catastrophic and.

• 39:07Andrew Sharp?

  They hurt. It feel like betrayals. Yes.

• 39:09Ben Thompson?

  Right. And and you feel like such a moron when sort of it happens to your point.

• 39:15Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:16Ben Thompson?

  So I don't know, to proceed at your own risk to a certain extent, but this is, this is the like, here's another example. It's well known in sort of digital advertising that the best bang for your buck ever is whatever Facebook introduces a new ad unit. Because what happens is they can't be measured very well, but it's Facebook, it works. And so like when Facebook added story advertising, like companies, there were individuals and companies that made astronomical amounts of money by just pouring all their ads into stories, even though they had no idea or no real good measurements, whether it was working, but because of that, there was much less competition for those ads.

• 39:57Ben Thompson?

  So they were super cheap and they were definitely working. Facebook just couldn't measure it very well yet. And so it's like you sort of took the risk, but the problem is if it didn't work, and sometimes it didn't work, you weren't getting that super granular feedback on every ad, right? So you were running the risk of putting a bunch of money in and not working and oops, we just lost a whole bunch of money. Unlike most digital advertising where you know exactly your return. So what do you want? Do you want a guarantee you put this money in and you're going to get this return and this lifetime value of a customer? But it's a relatively small margin, or you put a bunch of money in, and by the way, if you screw it up because you're having to do it yourself, you just lost all the money because it just went down the black hole and it's gone forever.

• 40:37Ben Thompson?

  But if it works, you get this big return. Same thing happened with sort of reels and you have like this one to two year window where you have this huge opportunity, but if it goes wrong, it's pretty catastrophic because the money's down the black hole. You got into sort of no return on it. And like, like that's the state of like, I think, using a lot of these L M's is, is there's high risk, but there's real high return. And you know, it's going to be interesting to see how long this persists. This gets into my, why I think a big bit of these rollouts is going to be top down, big job wipeout sort of domains. If you're an employee in a company, the risk of using an LM and screwing up, yes, you'll do it. You want to tell anyone,

• 41:19Ben Thompson?

  but like i- if you, i- if you relied on an LM to make a business decision and it was wrong, it's on you, right? And so you're going to be risk averse to do it. If you're a CFO and a CIO thinking about this, you're like, okay, it's going to be wrong X percent of the time, but the costs of them are so much lower. And by the way, we already know humans are wrong sort of Y percent of the time. And for now, Y is lower than X, but the cost of the humans is so much greater. We can just sort of wipe out this whole department, use AI. We can run the cost benefit analysis, assuming a certain level of screw ups. And while the overall expected value is still lower.

• 42:00Andrew Sharp?

  Still net positive. Yeah.

• 42:02Ben Thompson?

  That's right. You're, it's like if you were the czar of the roads in America, you can come in from the top and say, we're putting in self, like we're allowing self-driving, we're banning human drivers, we're going all the way, right? It's just going to be a better situation. Are there going to be accidents? Yes, but I'm king of the world. No one's going to like, it doesn't matter.

• 42:19Andrew Sharp?

  Well, are there going to be accidents? Yes, but will there be fewer accidents overall in that world?

• 42:26Ben Thompson?

  Right. But in a decentralized sort of like, like way, one self-driving car accident is front page news, right? And that is such a retardant on adoption of these new technologies. Even though on an objective basis, it might, no, again, I'm not saying that categorically about self-driving cars. I suspect that's the case, but let's just assume, assume that that's sort of the case. And I think this is going to apply to this generally, which is, I think is good news. If you're sort of an individual that can figure out how to leverage these, because you have this meaningful arbitrage opportunity for a while, if you can accept the risk.

• 43:02Andrew Sharp?

  There you go. Let's all seize the day over the next couple of years until the rest of the world catches up.

• 43:08Ben Thompson?

  The real shift though, and this is where people really get left behind, is when it becomes table stakes, right? And this will probably happen in sort of, sort of coding environments or development generally. At what point does using LMs make you more productive? Shift to if you don't use an LM, you're just not nearly productive enough. Like, and that is. That's the difficult shift and it's also the really profitable shift if you're sort of the toolmaker.

• 43:35Andrew Sharp?

  All right, well, one pronunciation watch, a couple of times on this show, you've said inexorably. And I don't know whether that's the correct way to pronounce it or not. I've always pronounced that word inexorably. And so I guess we'll have to rely on the emailers to let us know which one of us is right. But I'm glad that one of us is wrong. Okay. All right. So inexorably. But it's an appropriate way for us to end the year here on Sharptech. Your pronunciation is fancier. I like inexorably more than inexorably. But in any event, Jonathan says, if Ben could teach any business school class, what would he choose? The obvious answer, some macro

• 44:20Andrew Sharp?

  class about internet economics, since most business classes pretty, since most business school classes pretty much ignore zero marginal cost goods. However, I personally would love a class where Ben examines different business models using real world examples. Meanwhile, if Andrew could teach any class in sports media or law school, what would he choose? Ben, do you have an answer for Jonathan?

• 44:46Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I mean, I'll probably do this at some point. I enjoy, I enjoy teaching.

• 44:50Andrew Sharp?

  Giving back.

• 44:51Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, it just, you know, certainly, I would like to think and hope that business schools are talking more about zero marginal cost markets than they were when I was there. That was, you know, a long time ago at this point, and a lot has happened in the space since then. So, and I do get lots of requests to use my articles from professors, you know, like get clearance or whatever. So at least some people are out there. I have some sort of proof in that regard. What I think is more interesting generally, though, beyond the sort of like technical, like, looking at the economics of how things work, and that Sharptech has certainly been about that, but there is a broader point about general

• 45:34Ben Thompson?

  alignment between culture and business model and sort of outcomes, and the degree of success that comes from that. And I don't know, like, I'm sort of just thinking about this off the top of my head, but. Putting together a macro understanding of companies and what impact does that have on their performance, right? And this is almost a fuzzier area. There's lots of famous business books that like lay out, oh, this is how great companies operate. And you go back like 10 years later, like half the companies are out of business or bankrupt or got acquired or something along those lines. But I think that's also interesting in its own right. And we kind of got to it a little bit earlier with discussions about Google or Apple or whatever it might be. Companies form

• 46:18Ben Thompson?

  around sort of a moment in time and or like an Intel, right? You have this sort of culture that we've talked about is arrogant and, you know, our way or the highway. That was a culture that was written about glowingly when it meant pushing Moore's Law forward and taking big risks and sort of doing new things. And that was aligned with their overall strategy of Sisk versus risk, for example. We're going to stick with Sisk even though it is less efficient because we already have a software ecosystem advantage and we'll make up for it in manufacturing. You go back to those decisions and discussions in the late 80s and early 90s. Those are like,

• 47:01Ben Thompson?

  Pat Gelsinger was a driver of that. He was the Sisk guy. And Pat Gelsinger comes back in 2021 and realizing from a macro perspective, Intel needs to become a foundry and he is fighting with the ghost of Pat Gelsinger in 1990 to do that. That's pretty interesting, right? And that is really integral in understanding these long run trends of companies. Every bad culture you hear about is downstream from a good culture that made it happen. And what changed? Did the culture suddenly change? Actually, no, the culture is usually the same. The context changed.

• 47:41Ben Thompson?

  And, and I think that that's pretty interesting. And that's what you see happen to a lot of these companies again and again.

• 47:50Andrew Sharp?

  I would say I would take that course, but I'm sort of already signed up for that course, hosting this podcast with you.

• 47:56Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, you're a good point. I just, I just want to keep, I just want to keep having the same takes over and over again.

• 48:00Andrew Sharp?

  Podcasting for the next 25 years.

• 48:02Ben Thompson?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 48:02Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. Uh, well, in law school, the two classes that I would like to teach, and to be clear, I would need to do a lot more studying to feel comfortable teaching either of these courses, but criminal procedure and constitutional law are just very interesting studies of American history generally, and the way courts have adapted to solve problems over the years. And you end up with a bunch of good philosophical questions that don't have clear cut answers. So I think for me selfishly, it would be intellectually stimulating to teach in those two areas if I ever went to teach at law school. In sports media, I feel like I would be very good as a professor of podcasting.

• 48:47Andrew Sharp?

  My true passion project though, would be to work with the next generation to restore the lost art of good sports column writing. Because I feel like people just don't really do that anymore. And there's a lot of analytics writing out there that is frankly, pretty boring. And the youth of America has forgotten how to just have a take and write it in 800 words. Say something interesting, say something that challenges the audience and make it fun. Um, I would enjoy trying to implore a bunch of 22-year-old, you know, grad students

• 49:29Andrew Sharp?

  to do that with their writing. I unfortunately don't think there's much of a market for that sort of work anymore.

• 49:34Ben Thompson?

  People should probably not be going to grad school for, uh, for column writing, given the current environment. Yeah. Well, I do think it's a huge, it's a huge problem. The, I think there's an entire generation of sports writers that I just can't stand, um, that, that has basically single-handedly driven me to make clear to everyone, no, I am still Gen X. It might be the last year of Gen X, but I'm not one of these millennial, like, and it's this sort of. Sort of sense that you have to sort of ironically always be aligned with a zeitgeist.

• 50:05Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 50:05Ben Thompson?

  And, and you like you, you, there's a real fear to your point of takes. I think the, the analytics movement is part of this. Where people just like throw a number at you and it's funny because like this is an issue in business, right? Like there's, there's, there's a whole wave of, you know, what's the phrase, you know, God gets opinions, everyone else brings data or something along those lines. Like I butcher, I'm butchering the concept.

• 50:28Andrew Sharp?

  They throw numbers at you because they're afraid to be wrong. And if they have numbers to support a given opinion, it feels more solidified.

• 50:38Ben Thompson?

  Right. You gotta blame the numbers.

• 50:40Andrew Sharp?

  For retroactive criticism. And it's like, all right, well, what are we doing here?

• 50:43Ben Thompson?

  No, but this is the same thing. This is the Intel Boeing thing. It's this sort of retreat to numbers. And what you see again and again, you see this in sports, you see this in sports analysis, you see this in companies is everyone gives, not everything can be measured. You say that and everyone's like, that's right. Not everything can be measured. We agree. Then you say like, well, so we need to make sure to not depend on just the numbers and making decisions. Everyone's like, that's right. We need to make sure to not depend on the numbers and making decisions. But when it actually, the rubber hits the road, if numbers are available, people retreat to them again and again.

• 51:21Ben Thompson?

  And they just win arguments and, and this leads to, this is the recipe for short-term optimization and long-term screw ups. Because what, what, the, the, the long-term is the bit that's uncertain. The long-term is about uncertainty. It's the unknown. And, and you're sort of hedging against that or investing in something that is not sure. And if you're gonna put numbers against it, the numbers are made up. And, and, and this is just a real danger, I think you see all over the place. And it's one of the things that, that, that you could apply this to the whole globalization discussion, right? Like if you pencil it out, if you, if you do everything based on numbers, the choice is always obvious.

• 52:00Ben Thompson?

  What you can't pencil out is what does it mean to hollow out your sort of industrial base over the next 50 to 100 years, right? Like, like sure, there's no war. Wars on the horizon, but if there ever were to be in the grand scheme of history, which by the way, if you look at the grand scheme of history, wars are a regular occurrence. It might be something to sort of like, just assume it might happen. Is there anything you would do differently? Well, the numbers say XYZ. It's like, then the

• 52:25Andrew Sharp?

  Numbers go out the window in certain scenarios. Yeah.

• 52:29Ben Thompson?

  And this is arguably a tech derived issue. Like, what was the big killer app for the PC? The spreadsheet. Like, like, maybe we can blame tech. If you want to blame tech for everything, start there. Like, once you had the means for everyone to apply numbers to a problem, you got massive amounts of optimizations in all sorts of areas. There was all this low hanging fruit that was addressed. The problem is the lure of having a number is irresistible for anyone but the strongest leaders. This is part of the reason why founders are are feeded in tech and given so much leeway. Cause they have the cultural authority to do stuff that's not in the numbers. Everyone else has to bring data like that.

• 53:13Ben Thompson?

  That like, that's maybe the, the, how the statement should be changed. It's not God and data, it's founders and data. And the reason why founders are treasured is there's just this sense. They're the ones that don't have to have the numbers and people will still listen to them and do it. This is why Mark Zuckerberg is like king of the hill. He's still there. He's still engaged. Of course, Facebook is one of the most data driven companies on earth. But there's still someone who can say

• 53:41Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, there's the feel. Exactly. And, and you, once you see this in one area, you realize how it's pervasive everywhere. And, and you like, one of the reasons NBA Twitter is so irritating. Like there was, like, people just, they'll literally make up numbers. And then it's like, am I going to spend the time to go in and investigate this number and see what's going into it? Right? Like, did you know that defensive plus minus incorporates assists on the offensive end? Who knows that?

• 54:10Andrew Sharp?

  Does it really?

• 54:11Ben Thompson?

  Yes, that's why Joker's DPM numbers are so high and it's used as evidence, oh, like, his defense is really good. It's not that like Giannis is like, it's pretty comparable on that end. It's like, if you actually dig in and understand how these numbers are calculated and these weird assumptions that were made because you're sort of fitting the data to a curve. So you get someone, a center that passes, has a ton of assists, who breaks the model. And then you use that to say, oh, we're going to decide who's the best player in the world, XYZ, who's going to win the gazillion MVPs. I love Joker. This isn't an anti Joker thing. It's a

• 54:45Andrew Sharp?

  The discourse is broken.

• 54:46Ben Thompson?

  The eye test matters. The eye test, the eye test matters. It matters in sports. It matters in business. It matters like, like, one way to think about Intel and Boeing is they stopped relying on the eye test. They, they started relying on spreadsheets. And again, this isn't an anti spreadsheet bit. It's not even an anti analytics bit. It's an observation about human nature that people will give lip service to. Yes, there's things that can't be measured when you think about more than numbers. But when you're in the boardroom, when you're in the meeting room, the numbers tend to win again and again.

• 55:23Andrew Sharp?

  Yes, it's absolutely human nature to seek the comfort of numbers that could support whatever argument you might be making.

• 55:31Ben Thompson?

  That's right. It's an abdication of accountability because you could just point to, point to the spreadsheet.

• 55:36Andrew Sharp?

  Well, and as far as human nature, and you mentioned this is all sort of a tech story. The other aspect of the story is that in the past, 30 years ago, when every newspaper paid columnists to write interesting things that challenged consensus and made readers think, you didn't instantly get feedback from anybody who disagreed with you. And I think particularly for young people, that feedback, the negative feedback that they encounter, also incentivizes just sort of going with the crowd on any given issue. And that's unfortunate, but I, I think it's also sort of a byproduct of human nature where we internalize negative criticism far more

• 56:19Andrew Sharp?

  Or then we internalize any sort of positive feedback.

• 56:23Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, no, this whole generation likes to say about, oh, we're the first ones that are native to the internet. We're the only ones that know how computers work, blah, blah, blah, blah. Actually, no, the problem is you're native to the, you're the first ones on the internet. So you had zero antibodies against the massive force for consensus and sort of like, so you have that like, you just see people who their opinion, you zoom out and their opinion is so clearly motivated by trying to fit in with zeitgeist, right? And so you, you have, you know, I was.

• 56:52Andrew Sharp?

  It's just self preservation and psychological preservation.

• 56:55Ben Thompson?

  And it's so entrenched at this point that, that people don't even realize that they're doing it, right? They're, they're, and so you end up with this absence of independent thought. And yeah, this was a real value to having the random newspaper columnist in a geographic area who, yeah, maybe you get a letter to the editor.

• 57:14Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly. You get a letter or so. There's a lot more friction in that process than there is today.

• 57:20Ben Thompson?

  I, I, yeah, the, the, the, I insulate myself. This is one of the reasons I'm not super active on Twitter as sort of Ben Thompson. Because it's like, I'm one of the most disagreeable people in sort of like the personality sense ever. Like all those tests, I get like zero percentile or whatever. Like, I just don't really like, like you're going to have to convince me I'm not going to be cowed. But even with that being said, it's hard. Like, and, and it, it, it does have an effect on your mood and sort of the way that you, you feel about things. And you can understand why there's a, there's a, there is a self preservation instinct that kicks in.

• 57:58Ben Thompson?

  And you get this irritating, ironic detached tone that is perfectly aligned with what everyone else thinks. It's like, what is the, what's the value here, right? Like the.

• 58:10Andrew Sharp?

  This is, this is what I'm going to fix when I go to journalism school. I'll go teach at Northwestern. I can, you know, commute to see you in the summers.

• 58:17Ben Thompson?

  Maybe we've reached the point where going to journalism school is going to be sort of a big enough zag. Everyone's like, don't do that. What a waste of money that you'll actually get the disagreeable source.

• 58:28Andrew Sharp?

  You know, that would be my number one bit. Advice to anybody out there. Don't go to journalism school. I don't know what you're paying for at this point.

• 58:34Ben Thompson?

  I mean, you see this in the independent publishing sort of area, right? It's the folks that succeed are ones that have pretty distinct views and opinions. And, you know, like, there's a bit where Substack sort of bore the brunt of that in a certain extent, where it's like, the mainstream critiques them because look who's succeeding on your site. And is that a function of Substack, like promoting a certain point of view? Or is that a function that the only way to succeed with sort of takes on the internet is to be different than the consensus? Like, what value is there? You're not going to succeed because your style of prose is slightly more attractive,

• 59:17Ben Thompson?

  but your opinion is the exact same as everybody else. And, um, and so, yeah, the, again, it sucks. Like, this is one of the, I think, bad things about the internet, like, and social media in particular. It's this massive consensus driver that pushes people to sort of extremes because people just don't want to be criticized. But hopefully, the next generation, there are more sort of antibodies against this. And, you know, but

• 59:46Andrew Sharp?

  R I P millennials, though. We were the first off the boat, and it didn't go well, but such is life. I'm doing fine. I remain disagreeable. Although agreeable on podcasts, I'm a weird mix between agreeable and disagreeable. But I like to think I can maintain original thoughts and am, uh, operating independent of the group think machine.

• 1:00:07Ben Thompson?

  No, you're, you're, you're, my, my feedback to you, uh, is you're an inherent, I mean, we, the, the, the tech word is contrarian. Uh, your sort of podcast word is, is a zagger. Uh, you, you ought to zag when everyone is zigging. The problem for me in terms of basketball coverage is I feel like, you know, you talk about being a member of Yannis Inc. I just feel like after you became friends with me, you became much more critical and anti-bucks.

• 1:00:36Andrew Sharp?

  That's true. It's true.

• 1:00:37Ben Thompson?

  Because you weren't, you were just constantly. Only respond being contrarian to me. And so it actually ruined my listening experience.

• 1:00:45Andrew Sharp?

  But that is, so that's also a reflection of the current state of basketball media. Because I don't consume very much other basketball media. I watch the games, I form my own opinions and then I'm not exposed to a lot of the national conversation. And so a lot of the conversation that I'm getting is text messages from you. The most relentless propaganda campaign. I can't help but resist it.

• 1:01:10Ben Thompson?

  No, I, I take responsibility. I'm not blaming you. This is, this is, this is a me problem, not a you problem. That is an interesting point, though. I don't read much tech analysis, I would say, by and large. And, and like Twitter generally, it's not super tech heavy. And maybe, maybe that is sort of a surprisingly consistent angle. I wonder to what extent that applies to some of the more interesting folks in any arena. Like, like is there, I, I read a lot, like I said, I, I dive very deeply into information about things. But I usually am less interested, or I don't go out of my way to read other analysts. And I don't know, maybe that, that, that, that helps.

• 1:01:51Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, well, speaking of other analysts, Mark says, in a recent Dwarkesh episode with Dylan Patel, Patel described TSMC chip production as incredibly complicated, where a bunch of hyper specialized individuals on an assembly line know their narrow specialties, but very few people, if anyone, understand the big picture. Hence, the real value of TSMC is not in the physical fabs, but in the human capital or tacit knowledge that this network of highly specialized workers possess. Patel then suggested that AI can actually help the chip design process by being a super intelligent systems designer sitting on top of the process

• 1:02:33Andrew Sharp?

  that understands each specialty quite well and can thus optimize chip design with overlapping knowledge. Is this an accurate description of chip production? Do I understand it right? Do you have takes on what Patel said? Ben, do you have takes?

• 1:02:49Ben Thompson?

  I do have this episode queued up. I haven't, I haven't listened to it, but those are, you know, it also, also Asianometry. Those are like three of my favorite people that were on that. So I will, I will listen to it. Just based on this summary, uh, yes, this is, and this is a point that comes up a lot where people are like, oh, you think TSMC is so great? Why don't you just buy ASML or whatever? And it's like, no, actually there, there is, this is the tacit knowledge point is you have, there's hundreds of steps or maybe the dollar or whatever in making a chip and all those have to work well and, and, and, and the way to get them to work well is there's just a massive amount of understanding that

• 1:03:30Ben Thompson?

  comes from actually doing it. And it's why it's so hard to sort of move down the chain. Like what Intel, yes, you can do five nodes in four years in the lab. What do you actually learn when you're doing it at high scale? And can you actually just jump down when there's all these lessons you needed to learn at each step along the way that you're trying to do all at one time? And they all interact with each other. So one variable changing here changes other ones elsewhere, right? And, and, and if you're trying, the more variables you're introducing into equation, the massively like it's an exponential increase in, in complexity or quadratic increase or whatever it might be. And the overwhelming possibilities just

• 1:04:12Ben Thompson?

  overwhelm you and, and, and you fail. That like, that's why you kind of have to just move down the line and why TSMC is in such a powerful position because they're the ones that have stepped down this line to where we are today. Everyone else is trying to skip steps. That's really hard. You don't just go buy some ASL machines and make a chip. Like this is not, it's not how it works. Now this bit, could AI actually have the capacity and understanding to internalize not just broadly speaking how chips works, chip manufacturing works, but actually all the individual details along the way and how those might interact? Yeah, I think that's possible. It, it's actually a pretty good articulation of, of what, like, how do you actually solve?

• 1:04:57Ben Thompson?

  A sort of multivariate sort of problem, right? Where you change one thing and you do the other thing. It kind of goes almost back to our quantum mechanic. Like, there's a bit where AI is like the quantum mechanic sort of bit here. It's not at all, to be clear, I'm just making an analogy. But deep learning, going through and basically just inhaling all the data and discovering and picking out the patterns that actually matter and make sense. It's this capability that humans don't have because of the vastness of the data. And it's sort of like, it's exploring all the possibilities all at the same time and picking out, like, and understanding the right ones. And it's this degree of parallelism and exploration.

• 1:05:42Ben Thompson?

  There's a bit where the mistake with AI is trying to fit it into human patterns. And what you need to understand is patterns that no human would do because it's not possible. But AI actually can because it approaches things differently. And actually, there's some human things it doesn't do well because it like, humans have this learning functionality. Like, humans are very slow to an extent, but every time we're doing something, we're learning. So the second time we do it, we, we, we literally just incorporated what just happened. A big problem with LMS today is they don't do that. They're like, they had this massive learning stage and then they're just kind of dumb going forward.

• 1:06:23Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Ben Thompson?

  And so you think about this tacit knowledge piece. It's a bit where every single iteration and every single run, you're adding to your knowledge base. And it's that slow accumulation. But the fact that it accumulates immediately, that makes the human aspect of TSMC very hard to replace. But at the same time, can you

• 1:06:46Andrew Sharp?

  The top layer.

• 1:06:47Ben Thompson?

  Catch up? Right, right, by, by somehow getting all that sort of in place. So, I don't know, I guess I'm almost talking myself now out of the analogy because of this, this incremental learning sort of, sort of bit. There is a bit where I think for LMS generally. Iterating on them quickly is important. Like, like, like, the iteration speed is, is critical. And I do think iteration speed, though, iteration learning is the area where humans, like, we, we do something that we haven't figured out how to do on computers yet.

• 1:07:20Andrew Sharp?

  Hmm. Well, we'll stay tuned on that front, but while we're talking TSMC, EW says, I saw Ben's tweet about his latest mug acquisition from the TSMC Starbucks. So this is a lower stakes TSMC question.

• 1:07:34Ben Thompson?

  Not if you've seen this mug. It's incredible.

• 1:07:36Andrew Sharp?

  It's a really cool mug. So EW says, as an avid mug collector myself, I'd love to hear about some of Ben's favorites from his tech company coffee cup collection. So for anybody who missed it, on December 1st, Ben tweeted, acquired the best Starbucks mug of all time, and the pinnacle of my tech company coffee cup collection. This was only available at the TSMC Starbucks, and features the Starbucks logo as a chip on a silicon wafer. So I, I wanted to ask you about this like 25 days ago, and I'm grateful for EW emailing in with this question.

• 1:08:16Andrew Sharp?

  Can you explain the tech company coffee cup collection and this particular TSMC Starbucks mug?

• 1:08:22Ben Thompson?

  Well, just back in the day, every time I'd visit a tech company, I would, I would just try to get one of their coffee cups. Sometimes it's a good shop, sometimes, uh, you know, someone would, would let me lift one from the cafeteria or whatever it might be. So by and large, they, they mostly stink. I mean, the, the TSMC one looks awesome. It is, however, from my estimation, low functionality. Because, so, the perfect coffee cup that has never been beaten from a functionality perspective, uh, which also looks bad, and this really just fits perfectly, is the Microsoft coffee mug that I was given on my first day of work.

• 1:08:56Andrew Sharp?

  The clunker.

• 1:08:57Ben Thompson?

  It, it, uh, it was for 2011. I still have it. It has a little chip in it. I will, I will be so sad when it breaks. What it is, is, so first off, it has the old Microsoft logo, like, the, the original one, like, the little thing in it. Um, it has some sort of phrase on the side. I can't remember what it is, but it's like, it's all faded out at this point. But what it is, it has a very fat base, super wide. But then it curves up into a very narrow top that sort of comes out a little bit. So it's super stable, it doesn't spill, but the narrow top makes it really easy to drink from. You don't get like the splash of like coffee over you. I've actually bought, I actually have one here. This is just a one I got off Amazon where I bought, I know, once this coffee cup breaks,

• 1:09:42Ben Thompson?

  the functionality is so high, I need to have replacements in place.

• 1:09:46Andrew Sharp?

  You're gonna be despondent without it.

• 1:09:48Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, that's right. So that is the best coffee mug ever. Again, we're coming up on 15 years. I still use it. It's my still my most used coffee cup. Kudos to Microsoft, looks terrible, but whatever. The second best coffee, tech coffee mug I had from a functionality perspective was actually an Apple one I got from the gift shop.

• 1:10:07Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 1:10:07Ben Thompson?

  It was just, it was a normal shaped one, but the handle, you could get all your, you could get all your fingers in. It was big, but it wasn't too wide. It was just like, so it was a straight up and down one. It looked good. It was black with like a small white Apple logo on it. Again, again, Apple like a very good marriage of form and function. It couldn't give up the form enough to make it perfect functionality like Microsoft. But it didn't sort of like wean all the, you know, this was pre Johnny Ive Apple. It didn't wean all the way into the sort of form too. Yeah. So the TSMC mug is too wide. It's a big coffee. I hate big ones like that.

• 1:10:46Andrew Sharp?

  So is it just difficult to drink out of? Is that the issue?

• 1:10:48Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, your coffee gets colder faster. It's just like, it's in the handle, you can't like fit your whole hand into it. It's, it looks amazing, but it's not like, honestly, I did check cream mugs a few years ago. I didn't love them because they're too big, way too big also, and the handle's too small. So the marriage, the marriage is, is tough to get right. Nothing will beat my Microsoft cup sort of from back in the day.

• 1:11:09Andrew Sharp?

  But does anything look cooler than the TSMC mug?

• 1:11:12Ben Thompson?

  No.

• 1:11:12Andrew Sharp?

  And we'll link it, we'll link Ben's tweet and photo in the show notes for people who want to check it out. Because it does, it looks like a microchip.

• 1:11:20Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, you could buy them on eBay, I think so. Like I had a friend who's a, works for a TSMC supplier, was from TSMC. I saw, I actually, I think I, I saw a tweet about it. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, oh, this is amazing. He's like, oh yeah, I have one. He's like, he's like, uh, and so he gave it to me.

• 1:11:35Andrew Sharp?

  Five hundred dollars for it?

• 1:11:36Ben Thompson?

  No, I'm like, no, I'll go buy it. He's like, no, no, I actually have two of them. So I, I use one myself. So I'll give you the other one. So thank you.

• 1:11:41Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:11:42Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Uh, but, uh, it is, it looks very cool. Uh, but it is not as functional.

• 1:11:49Andrew Sharp?

  Well, while we're talking unbelievably nerdy collector's items, uh, I do feel obligated to make our audience aware that there's a Lego version of the TwinScan EXZ 5000, which is ASML's top of the line EUV lithography machine. We'll link that in the show notes as well. I was reading about that EUV machine. The real machine weighs 165 tons and costs around $380 million, which is just staggering. The Lego version is only $225, uh, but tragically they only sell it to ASML employees. I tried to buy one and I thought I had beaten the system because my purchase initially went through,

• 1:12:34Andrew Sharp?

  but then 10 minutes later it was canceled by the system. So I won't have a lithograph, a lithography machine Lego, but I'm glad that it exists for the nerds out there at ASML. I'm glad they have a Lego version of their lithography machine.

• 1:12:50Ben Thompson?

  I was, I'm trying to make some sort of joke about coal in your stocking, given that we're dealing with sand or whatever. So let's just move on.

• 1:12:57Andrew Sharp?

  No, but a good effort, a good thought. So I hope the audience gives you credit for that. Uh, Dan says, "I'm sick of the neutral TV announcers. RSNs are the only outlets with Homer announcers and they are dying. So what are your thoughts on national telecasts offering a choice of audio streams? I'm sure plenty of Twitch streamers would call games for free if given the platform." Ben, do you have thoughts?

• 1:13:26Ben Thompson?

  Well, I, we know that Dan isn't a Celtics fan because you, if you were, he'd be happy to know that the national announcers are-

• 1:13:32Andrew Sharp?

  Takes care of you. Don't worry, Dan.

• 1:13:34Ben Thompson?

  That's right. Um, so, uh, no, that, well, it is interesting. There is a, actually a really interesting startup called Playback, where you can sign, now, because all the rights issues, you have to like, sign in with your subscription, or with your cable subscription, or, or whatever it might be, but you can watch games with, anyone can be an announcer. So you and I could sort of announce a game. Maybe we'll do this at some point. Uh, and-

• 1:13:58Andrew Sharp?

  I would love that. That'd be great.

• 1:14:00Ben Thompson?

  And you got interaction and the audit- Yeah. Or you could just be on with your buddies and you could just have an ongoing conversation and the streams all, the streams all synced up. Because actually like, we'll go through Playback servers, so you know you're all watching the stream at the exact same time.

• 1:14:14Andrew Sharp?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:14Ben Thompson?

  That's probably, realistically, in the long, in the future. I mean, Playback, I think, I don't know if they'll, as standalone entity, or if they should be acquired by one of the leagues, or whatever it might be, but the concept of, you're going to have the barbell effect. You're going to have sort of the national big platform ones, and you're going to have user-generated content on the other. Like, that kind of comes for everything. And it's already, probably the one we're going to come for this. Like, like, the RSN model is just fundamentally economically broken. It still works in some markets, which is why it's going to be hard to sort of move on. But, uh, that fits very much in the middle with your newspaper columnist that used to have good takes.

• 1:14:53Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, well, and I mean, my thoughts, having been a member of sports media, I guess I'm still technically a member of sports media with the GOAT, but announcing a game is harder than it looks, and so I don't know that-

• 1:15:06Ben Thompson?

  Most of these announcers are terrible.

• 1:15:07Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. It's not that appealing to me, uh, in practice, but the theory, uh, is appealing, and maybe that is the direction that things will go. I've never been that invested in announcers, one way or another. An announcer has to be aggressively bad for me to care.

• 1:15:23Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, the thing with user-generated content is the vast majority is horrible and terrible.

• 1:15:30Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Ben Thompson?

  And so that's the challenge of building a meaningful user-generated content platform is you need so much volume and then you need sort of the algorithms to pick out what's good such that the absolute amount of your good content is very high, but the absolute amount being high is a function of the total content being astronomical because your hit rate is super low. So this is only something that would, and this would be a challenge like a playback, for example, right? Is how do you get, particularly if you have this constraint of signing up for other, you have to sign in with your other actual service and tie it in, like the, how do you get the volume high enough such that your absolute amount

• 1:16:14Ben Thompson?

  is good because the relative quality is always going to be terrible?

• 1:16:18Andrew Sharp?

  Right. Yeah. You need a bunch of people to buy in and try it and then hope that a fraction of them are actually decent and appealing to the 90% of people who don't post. Well, to keep it moving, a couple more questions toward the end here. Two quick notes on Twitter. Carthick says, "I moved to using Twitter exclusively on my Chromebook a couple of months ago and have been very happy with the change. There are differences in my own behavior. For example, I'm more inclined to open a new tab and follow up on a lead myself, and thus I find myself reading more long-form articles. But also I wonder if the algorithm presents laptop or web users with less slop than app users."

• 1:17:00Andrew Sharp?

  I wonder that too. I don't imagine they can, well, I don't know. What do you think on that second question?

• 1:17:06Ben Thompson?

  I don't know. I mean, I think it's hard to divorce that from just, it is striking how different your own behavior will be with like

• 1:17:15Andrew Sharp?

  It's amazing.

• 1:17:16Ben Thompson?

  a different input method, right? Like the doom scroll is a real thing. It's just so easy to swipe and move back and forth, whereas moving a mouse and clicking is a very sort of deliberate action. And it's a really powerful example of what a difference friction makes. Right? Like this is why you talk about all the time. This seems so innocuous, the sort of difference. But it, yeah, I think about my behavior when I'm looking at Twitter on the web versus on the phone. And it's totally different. It's much more deliberate on the web. I'm more likely to stop and read something or go off another tangent or flip over to chat GPT to look something up. And on the phone, it's scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

• 1:17:56Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. And it's just a lot more compulsive. So thank you, Karthik, because he sent this about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago. And I actually made this change in my own behavior and it's just much better. So great tip from Karthik and another note from Kendra. She says, Andrew, here is a trick to make Twitter great again. Just mute the thread emoji. It filters out the most annoying of all threads. I've also found the pointing down emoji is worth muting for the same reason. I haven't tried this yet, but I will try that. And Kendra says, PS, please bring back the TikTok segment. I don't have kids yet, but I love hearing you and Ben give your tips.

• 1:18:39Andrew Sharp?

  So on that note, we have Hocken here who says, I have a question for your next TikTok segment. Is tutoring a good idea? We have three kids and our oldest is heading for elementary school next autumn. I'm not worried about grades or getting into the right university, but my wish for them is to gain confidence from learning and being allowed to deep dive into what interests them. Parentheses, play to their strengths as per Ben's life advice. Short of opening my own school like Elon, has Elon opened his own school? I was not familiar with that, uh, in my Elon lore. How can I give my kids the best chance at being pilots in the future?

• 1:19:23Andrew Sharp?

  Which is of course a reference to Ben's Wally metaphor in the MKH, MKHBDs for everything article.

• 1:19:30Ben Thompson?

  MKBHD, uh, but yeah, okay, look, this is.

• 1:19:35Ben Thompson?

  I'm hesitant. I don't know why. Well, maybe I do have reasons why. I don't want to give. Here's the way I think about it. So I'm presenting what I think.

• 1:19:46Andrew Sharp?

  This is not prescriptive. This is just your own experience. Okay.

• 1:19:49Ben Thompson?

  What it is interesting because it's a very intense sort of topic and subject. Being here in Taiwan where tutoring or bushy bond, which is like cram school, like after school school that you go to and has extra homework and then you stay up till 2 a.m. doing it is the expectation. It's the norm.

• 1:20:08Andrew Sharp?

  It's like voluntary workouts in the NFL.

• 1:20:10Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, exactly. And so it's a tough. So that's the context that I am thinking about this question. And so I'll just say what worked for me and what may or may not sort of work for you. So I'm generally opposed to this viewpoint, but again, that's the context. Like I do think by and large, one to one instruction and meeting a student where they are is a good thing. However, in the context where I'm at here, that's not the way it manifests. It manifests as a sort of a baseline expectation. And yes, of course, to get good grades is a good thing, but what actually matters in life? Grades don't matter, right? They're a proxy at some point to sort of help you achieve something.

• 1:20:55Ben Thompson?

  The question is, did you actually learn? And the problem with a lot of sort of intense academic environments is actually what people want is good grades. They don't want to learn. It's like the measurement bit. People optimize for what is measured and you end up sort of focusing on grades and no one cares if you sort of learned anything.

• 1:21:18Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, yeah. Talk to Ivy League professors these days. Apparently people are very, very annoying about grades and that's all any student cares about and parents. And it's just like that's a lot of professors spend their entire time responding to angry students and angry parents who are hectoring them about, you know, an A minus instead of an A.

• 1:21:40Ben Thompson?

  Well, then there's other things to learn in life beyond subjects, right? I think like sort of the whole AP approach or whatever, which is more and more, I think, out of favor in like the most sort of cutting edge schools for a good reason. I have chat GPT right here. Why do I need to look up the like the king of XYZ country in whatever, right? Like, so there's a bit about sort of how like.

• 1:22:03Ben Thompson?

  Curiosity and desire to learn is actually increasingly rewarded, given the capabilities we have to learn on the spot. If I could impart anything to my kids, I would want to impart my desire to look stuff up all the time, recognizing now in my 40s, the degree to which that has accumulated. I am superpowered by AI, not just because I'm willing to use it, but because I have so much contextual knowledge. I know when the AI is screwing with me, right? And I'm not gonna like, like, get XYZ wrong. But there's also things like resilience in working through something. When you're struggling in a class, are you going to buckle down? Are you gonna have the courage to go talk to your teacher, to work at something and to get better at it?

• 1:22:48Ben Thompson?

  Or are you gonna have your parents go complain, sign you up for a class? And yeah, you got a good grade. But number one, did you actually learn something? Or you just sort of taught the formulas to sort of like reproduce an answer? And number two, did you actually dig down within yourself to work through it and figure it out? And maybe fail. Like, the degree to which we avoid failure is a big problem.

• 1:23:14Andrew Sharp?

  Learning how to handle failure, yeah.

• 1:23:15Ben Thompson?

  Not just to handle failure, but failures how you, like, it's cliche, but it's a forgotten cliche. It's one of those cases, like, yeah, we know everything can't be measured. We know you need failure to succeed. Except no one actually operates that way. No one actually sets their kids up to fail. And I'm not, that sounded wrong. You're not trying to set your kids up to fail. But failure is useful. And, and, and to sort of work through something and figure it out. And, you know, the, this is something that I actually credit, you know, my wife listens to the podcast, so I can tell her. But like, I was, I was more, even though she is Taiwanese, I was much more inclined to be the sort of tiger parent and wanting to help my kids and make sure they have all, every advantage and sort of getting ahead and, you know, XYZ.

• 1:24:00Ben Thompson?

  And she was much more of the, like, let them figure it out. Even from a very young age. Like, they're smart, they can figure it out, though. Even just dumb stuff or whatever, like, that has nothing to do with academics. And it's something that I emulated and tried to learn from. And also turned out I picked out a career where I'm pretty busy and I can't be deeply invested. And the kids just sort of have been have been raised that way. And I am feeling pretty salvatory because you know, like my, my daughter's like going through, you know, she's going through college applications, these on those lines, wouldn't even let me look at them. She's like, no, she's, she's doing it all herself. We didn't hire a consultant. We do, didn't do X, Y, Z. She hasn't gone to Bushy Band.

• 1:24:42Ben Thompson?

  She has good grades, not the best in her school because she doesn't have an A plus in every sort of advanced class. Probably in part, she's not going to tutors and sort of X, Y, Z. Well, and maybe she's not smart enough. I don't know, whatever. Um, I think, I think she's pretty smart, but whatever. And, uh, and you know, applications coming in and she got into great school. So congratulations to me.

• 1:25:01Andrew Sharp?

  Absolutely. And her.

• 1:25:03Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. That was, that's a joke. I think it probably came across as the wrong way.

• 1:25:08Andrew Sharp?

  Sorry, I wasn't looking. I, I clicked out of the camera for that part.

• 1:25:11Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Uh, the, no, no, I'm glad you called it out. So I realized, wait, that came across the wrong way. It does. I don't want to overindex on me and my experience, but what I do feel very pleased about and confident about is there were times that were hard and there were times that she had to overcome difficult things and work through them on her own. I didn't go fix them for her. She is empowered and independent and maybe overly so. I mentioned, I'm very disagreeable, like, uh, there is genetic components to this. She's going to do it her way for, for better or worse. And it's funny because you have like, we're in the middle of this and, uh, there's lots of kids that got all the good grades and they didn't get into their schools.

• 1:25:56Ben Thompson?

  And, uh, I'm not trying to, it's, this isn't a taunt or anything otherwise, other than to say like what they, grades aren't everything. What, like, what, what? In defense of universities, since no one in these universities wants to defend them, but I do think there's validity, and this is a critique I have about a lot of the complaints about college admissions generally, the obsession with grades and everyone who got a high SAT score is the only thing that should matter. And by the way, I'm pro SAT. Like, I think standardized tests are good. I grew up in a pretty lower, blue collar, like, went to a non-prestigious school. The reason why, like, or even you fast forward as an English teacher, why did I get into a top business school? Because I had good

• 1:26:38Ben Thompson?

  test scores. Like, test scores, I think, level the playing field, even if there are advantages that come from going to classes or sort of XYZ. So this isn't an anti-test score rant, but there's a lot more to success in life than good test scores or good grades. Like, the people that succeed think for themselves. Our whole complaint about the current generation of sports writers is the lack of independent thinking. And there's a general sort of lack of resilience. My big critique of parenting generally is exactly what you talked about, this sort of helicopter parenting approach that, by the way, is miserable for the parents, and it creates kids who live up to the paper marks. Yeah, they got

• 1:27:22Ben Thompson?

  good grades, they did all the extracurriculars, XYZ, and are deeply, deeply uninteresting people who are not, who are not going to do anything, right?

• 1:27:31Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Ben Thompson?

  Congratulations. You can go to a good school and then be a consultant and then go work for a company. And I guess that's good from a material perspective. You'll make a good living and you will not have any impact on the world.

• 1:27:43Andrew Sharp?

  Be boring.

• 1:27:44Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. I mean, so...

• 1:27:46Andrew Sharp?

  Well, good takes. My son is 21 months old, so we're not at the tutoring stage yet. My wife informed me on Sunday that Charles is at stage three on Mildred Parton Newhall's Six Stages of Play. So Charles is at onlooker play, where he watches other kids' plays and learns social cues without participating himself. He went to his first birthday party on Sunday. And a two-year-old girl just came up out of nowhere and shoved him to the ground. And he was resilient. He was unperturbed, did not cry, just looked up at the two-year-old girl like, what the hell is your issue?

• 1:28:28Andrew Sharp?

  And went about his business. So his tutoring era is still like 10 years away.

• 1:28:34Ben Thompson?

  I, I think there's two areas for tutoring, just to defend it. I think number one, if you're just really struggling, like, like one-to-one is like, the best sort of educational experience is like perfectly customized to the child, right? So like, if you could do like all tutoring and like, and then move the child, that's probably ideal. But if you're in a industrial level, assembly line schooling situation, like if you are behind, definitely useful. And by the pine, I don't mean you're getting B pluses or A minuses, like you're getting Ds, right? You just don't know what's going on. And especially things like math, if you fall behind in your foundation, it's going to be a struggle for life because it's to the degree that it sort of builds on itself. So that's definitely valid. The other one is, I think there's kids, school's too easy.

• 1:29:18Ben Thompson?

  And they're actually deeply interested in a subject. They want to push further. And that's another example where I think a tutor is totally appropriate. Where you're leaning into your kid's strengths and you're enabling them. I mean, it's horrible, these school districts that are like cutting off like the advanced classes or trying to keep kids sort of locked in together. Like kids are different. They're good at different things. They have different strengths. And I think one thing, as a parent, you can lean into your kid. Where I have a big problem is the broad-based, you know, you have to get perfect grades. Doesn't matter if you're interested or not, you're going to do sort of XYZ.

• 1:29:52Andrew Sharp?

  See, that's my instinct. As I imagine how I'll handle all this. If you're doing it because of social pressure from other parents, or because it's something you think your child doesn't like and just needs to be good at to succeed in life and have the right profile for colleges, it's going to feel like work for the kid. And I think you probably see diminishing returns from any sort of tutor in that scenario. But I also, when I was about 16, I had the sort of experience you were describing with parents leaning. Into their strengths where my mom recognized, I mean, I was starting to really like English and my mom took note of that. And I really liked writing and there was one teacher I had who was like 24 years old.

• 1:30:37Andrew Sharp?

  He had played college sports and he just made it cooler to care about English. He was an English teacher. Mr. Piazza, shout out to you. Uh, so the summer after my sophomore year. I had a job and then for one hour a week, I would meet with this teacher. My mom hired this teacher to just meet with me for an hour every week. And I would write a 2000 word essay, we'd talk it through, and then he'd assign me something else for the following week. And I did that the entire summer. I'm not going to say that whole experience directly led me to where I am today. But it helped solidify my confidence in my writing and my interest in pursuing writing further. As I continued through high school and college and beyond. And that's an example of where I think tutoring can be really great.

• 1:31:21Andrew Sharp?

  If you're leaning into something that your child already likes. Um, and so I think if you're Hawken. I would lean toward that as opposed to the like socially enforced tutoring to get into the right university. But it sounds like he's already not interested in going that direction, but those are my tutoring instincts.

• 1:31:41Ben Thompson?

  It's so, it's so, you see this in lots of places. It's so hard. And in this, again, I think there is a big tie in back to this. Uh, you know, for kudos to your mom. But sort of in present day, the, the spreadsheet mentality I'm talking about. Where if I feel like I can control it, I have to control it, right? Like, yes, I theoretically, I know. Colleges don't just care about grades. Yes, theoretically, I know that like resilience and things actually really matter for success in life. But grades matter too. Wouldn't it be better if they got all A's and then like, and it's just, it's really hard to push back on it. And it's hard for the kid, like, again, I might be over indexing on being in a nation, country and sort of going through this.

• 1:32:26Andrew Sharp?

  No, it's like that in Northwest DC. I mean, you could talk to Bill Bishop about the environment in Northwest DC. It's like that here and there's a ton of social pressure and it's insane.

• 1:32:36Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, it's so crazy because we were kids like they, you know, the all good grades. They're the nerds, right? Like it's amazing how that is the sort of prerequisite now. But you know, once you've submitted some applications or whatever, and my daughter came in, she's like, she's like, I thought I had good grades, but I heard about some of my other friends, blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, X, Y, Z. And again, she's like A, A minus, like sort of, sort of level by and large. I usually don't get too personal, but like they're good. It's not, I know she's not like valedictorian or anything on those lines. And it's like you get like very, I remember like I was at, um, uh, this happens at business school, right? Everyone, I was always a big proponent of look, I want to work in tech. I'm not going to apply to a consulting job. I'm not going to do X, Y, Z. And then everyone, the consultants all hire their first, like they're super early in the process.

• 1:33:21Ben Thompson?

  And so you have all these people that are getting jobs or whatever, and you start to feel like, so I've done that. Like, what if I don't get a job? Like, what am I going to do? Right? Like, it's like, that sort of environment.

• 1:33:30Andrew Sharp?

  Interview. Yep.

• 1:33:30Ben Thompson?

  Right. And, and, and I told her, I'm like, and I, this is actually a bit of parenting too. There's a bit, I think everyone, as they grow up and get older, there's at some point, you're always going to be mad at your parents for something. And I was actually always a bit of a result for my parents for not pushing me into my strengths more. And I'm like, what? Like, no one's told me to go to a good school. I just went to the University of Wisconsin because that was like, that's where smart kids went, like in Wisconsin, like I was, you know, small, little town, small little school. No one even told me to apply like somewhere better. And I was always like, sort of like bitter and resentful about that. Even as I'm sitting here extremely successful and widely regarded as being smart.

• 1:34:06Andrew Sharp?

  It's worked out.

• 1:34:06Ben Thompson?

  Things, right? Yeah, it was fine. And honestly, I think I benefited greatly from not going through the quote unquote elite pipeline and having.

• 1:34:14Andrew Sharp?

  You're also wearing a Wisconsin sweatshirt as we record this podcast.

• 1:34:18Ben Thompson?

  Which is really hot. I'm kind of getting sweaty here as I'm getting worked up, right? But the, the, yeah, I always like, I've always credited, like, I've gotten so much mileage out of being right on Facebook. And I'm like, that's just a function of me coming from normal people where they actually care most about being connected to their friends and family instead of all you weirdos that are running away from them. Right? Like, and so, so the, I bet, I remember I was going through this, I'm like, I'm like, this is that point, like in my thirties, I'm like, Why am I hold, this is ridiculous. Like, it's my life. I'm responsible for what has happened. Like, they did what they did. Ever since then, it's up to me. Holding on to any aspect of this is dumb. And there's a bit to there where that actually made me a better parent.

• 1:35:03Ben Thompson?

  In that, know what? Someday, my kids are gonna be in their twenties or thirties. They might be mad at me for choices I made. And you know what? That's gonna be their problem. They're going to have to deal with it. It's going to be their life. And I'm just gonna be the best parent that I can, make the choices that I think is right. Some of which are going to be wrong. But it is going to be what it is. And, you know, there, I told that to my daughter when she was there. I'm like, look, I've not pushed you on grades at all. I didn't send you to tutors. Because I don't think that's the right way to approach it. I think high school is 5% of your life. And ideally should be the most, some of the most enjoyable aspect of your life. I'm like, look at some of your friends who are miserable and they hate their parents

• 1:35:48Ben Thompson?

  because their nose to the grindstone, sort of constantly. I'm like, I just don't agree with that. And I'm like, maybe is the wrong choice. Maybe all that, like, you did need better grades. You're not gonna get into, she had her heart set on one school she really wanted to go to. And I'm like, maybe it's not gonna happen. And if that happens someday, you're going to have to forgive me for that. But that's the choice that I made. And I think it's the right one. But that's just sort of what it is. And like I said, I'm flying high because it worked out. She got in. She got in. But even if she hadn't, you know what? Like, I did what I thought was right. And it's going to be her life. And I think that's a broader point to think about your kids. At, at some point, you, you do your best.

• 1:36:30Ben Thompson?

  And the best thing you can actually give them is letting it be their life. And the way for it to be their life in the future, if you want them to forgive you when they're adults, is let them start thinking for themselves today. And to be, grow up feeling and thinking that I'm in control of my life. It's my choices. I'm accountable. And when you fast forward, that'll actually be to your benefit in the long run because they already learned, they already learned it's not your fault. It's their fault.

• 1:36:59Andrew Sharp?

  There you go. Well, TikTok always gets a little profound, but a nice note to end on and also a huge congratulations to you and your daughter. And thank you for the question, Hocken. Thank you to everybody who wrote in.

• 1:37:14Ben Thompson?

  I've always, I'm like, I do want to do the virtual. I see, I was totally right. My approach worked. But of course it's an anecdote.

• 1:37:21Andrew Sharp?

  But it's not about results. It's about the process, you know?

• 1:37:24Ben Thompson?

  There is a little bit where like, some of her like, her like more like crazy intense friends. I feel really bad for them because they're devastated because the whole college process is weird. It's much worse than like when we were younger, but this whole like early decision thing versus early action versus regular decision that existed in like a couple of schools when I started out. Now it's like sort of everything. And so the early decisions, things are coming out and like some of our friends, it's like, uh, it's like a betrayal.

• 1:37:50Andrew Sharp?

  And it's unbelievably stressful and unbelievably competitive.

• 1:37:54Ben Thompson?

  To get all A pluses and I didn't even get what I wanted to. And then it's like, uh, you know,

• 1:37:59Andrew Sharp?

  Just sailing through.

• 1:38:01Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, you're like, you, it feels, but hey.

• 1:38:05Andrew Sharp?

  But hey, it's a great way to enter the holiday break for her as well. So.

• 1:38:09Ben Thompson?

  Vacation is going to be so much less stressful. I was already, I was already thinking like this vacation is going to be very binary. Either my daughter's just going to be stressed out to all get out the entire time, or she's going to be in sort of like the best mood ever. Uh, so fortunately, I think it's.

• 1:38:25Andrew Sharp?

  Honestly, it's one of the best feelings in life. When you get into college, you don't have to care about school for the remainder of your senior year. That's not prescriptive for your daughter, but that's certainly how I handled it at 18 years old. And, uh, and you just, that weight is lifted. It feels like the most important decision and sequence of your entire life at 18 years old. In reality, it's really not, uh, but it's hap, I'm happy for her that she has the weight off her shoulders.

• 1:38:52Ben Thompson?

  This is such an area where my background is just so much different. It may be like this. Worked, I got lucky that it worked out because I don't understand like the elite world and elite parenting. Like for me, of course, I'm going to Wisconsin. Of course, I'm going to get in like, like even though I didn't actually get accepted to like March, it was like, it was, it wasn't very sort of dramatic sort of at all. Um, but so it's funny. Like, yeah. So yeah, maybe don't take advice from me. I have no idea. I just lucked into everything. So.

• 1:39:21Andrew Sharp?

  Well, I come from a very over programmed, uptight, elite ecosystem here in DC. And once you get past that first acceptance, man, oh, man, life gets so much easier. So enjoy the holiday break with your daughter. Ben, we didn't get to hit everything on this rundown. We'll roll some of these over. We're going to do a mailbag in early January coming out of the break. Thank you to everybody who's written in all year long. God, I love doing this podcast. Always fun. And I look forward to lots more in 2025. So I will talk to you on the other side, my friend.

• 1:39:58Ben Thompson?

  Talk to you in two weeks.

• 1:39:59Andrew Sharp?

  There you go.