The Media Media Edition

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S1: This ad free podcast is part of your slate plus membership.

S2: How? Welcome to the media media edition of Slate.

S3: Money or Guide to the Business and Finance News of what was a very busy week. I am Felix Salmon of axios. I’m joined by Emily Peck of HuffPost. Hello. I’m joined by Anna SHYMANSKY of Breakingviews. Hello. And because we love him so much, we have the best person coming back to join us. Ed Lee from The New York Times. The media, media, media reporter covers all things media at the Times and is here to talk to us about Spotify and the Plus segment, also about The New York Times itself. He’s getting very navel gazing in this particular issue as media reporters are are wont to do. We’re going to talk about Instagram. We’re going to talk about YouTube. Lots of media content this week, but also, of course, Tesla content because what’s going on with Tesla? If you want to know whether to buy it, it doesn’t stalk. You can do two things. You can just Google. Should I buy Tesla stock or even listen to fleet money? We will answer that question for you coming up on Slate Money. So this is this is the segment where we talk about Google searches. I have my Google up and we’ve all tried this with various degrees of logged in anonymous. And what’s it browsing for me when I type? Should I buy into Google? The first autofill is should I buy Tesla’s stock? And then it’s followed by should I buy Apple stalking? Should I buy bitcoin?

S4: So I guess, well, all have to type. It should, I guess. Should I buy a Tesla stock? Wow.

S5: But then after I get that, I get should I stay or should it go lyrics that I type should and I got should I buy a Tesla stock and should college athletes be paid which. Yes and no.

S3: Respectively do buy the stock. And no, they shouldn’t be.

S6: So I also got should I buy Tesla stock and then I got should I get bangs and should I text him to all of those is.

S4: No. Yeah. No, that’s easier. That’s good I think. Yeah. I don’t know what you thought.

S7: Again, I tell people whether or not to get back. I know. I don’t understand what kind of advice. Google doesn’t. I guess they know you well enough. They could just they know your knows you so well. I could just say not for you, honey.

S3: So the answer is who should I buy Tesla stock? It’s obviously yes, because it’s what’s crazy like is how to make lots of money.

S8: Right now, if you buy high, sell low, you’re contradicting yourself. I mean, everyone reads your newsletter and knows that you said what goes up really quickly must come down. Really?

S3: I didn’t say it must come down probably. Well, but I did say that if a stock can behave like that. If it can melt up and basically double in value in no time in the way that Tesla did, it is equally capable of melting down and having it happen 24 hours after it went up. Right. I mean, so we had wait, we had pause and. OK. Just take let’s have a let’s have a little brief history of Tesla stock, really, which like Tesla, was worth $31 billion back in June, which is probably a reasonable amount of money for Tesla, if not a lot of money for Tesla. We you know, it’s a car company and that’s how much car companies are worth. And then suddenly in 2020, the stock has gone on absolute terror and it went up and up and up. And then after going up, it went up and up and up. And then suddenly this week it stopped going off and it started screaming up and it would go up like $10 billion dollars a day. Seventeen billion dollars a 20 billion dollars a day. It hit a peak of like almost a thousand dollars. And then because it’s just at that point a gambling vehicle rather than an actual company, I think it’s been a gambling vehicle for a long time, actually.

S9: So the other issue around Tesla stock beyond it just being the sort of new company and worth more than GM and Ford, all these established car makers that produce like millions of cars a year versus task producing hundreds of thousands of year, there were a lot of short speculators against Tesla in addition to bulls. Sure. Speculators are basically people who bet that the stock will go down. Right. And I think that had an effect this week when it. Sir.

S10: OK. So. So like I have done a bunch of work. I’m like, let’s get into this as before.

S3: I think that Adam and I are in agreement on this one. So I looked at the Tesla chart because that’s how much of a nerd I am. And I immediately said this looks exactly the same as the chart of Volkswagen shares in 2008, because that’s how much of that I am. And those of us who remember Volkswagen in 2008 remember that it was the mother of all short squeezes and it was it briefly became the most valuable company on the planet. And this was all to do with a bunch of financial engineering by Porsche, which bought up a bunch of like options, which gave it control of the overwhelming majority of Volkswagen shares. So what you had was you had 12 percent of the shares with folks. Ragman was short, right? That the short sellers had borrowed 12 percent of the ordinary shares of Volkswagen and then had to buy them back. And they expected and hoped that they would be able to buy them back at a lower rate price than they paid for them between them. Porsche and the state of Saxony in Germany owned 94 percent of Volkswagen shares and they weren’t selling with the state of Sack’s had it now that state of sex he.

S9: Get.

S3: So there you go. So the state of Saxony on 20 percent of Volkswagen and they went about to sell. So these short-sellers you have basically 12 percent of Volkswagen was short and only 6 percent of Volkswagen was available to buy. So all of the short-sellers, when they when the press release went out saying we control this much of a Volkswagen, they desperately tried to buy the stock in order to be able to cover their shorts. But of course, only half of them could get to the exits in time. And there was this insane short squeeze. And this is still to this day, 12 years later, being litigated in various courts. And like Dan Loeb and a whole bunch of people lost a fortune. And it was great. It was that. That was his fees, though. That was his.

S6: That’s your short squeeze. That is a classic. Sure. Yeah. Often anytime there’s any type of short covering people like it’s a short squeeze. No, it’s like, yeah, it has an effect but it doesn’t have that dramatic effect. So it’s not a supply demand issue with it in this case.

S11: And so that Tesla.

S8: All right. Because I that’s when you said Saxony. I just drifted off with that. It was basically like they needed to buy the stock.

S12: But the other people weren’t seeing the stock.

S3: So it just there was no stock to buy. And why exactly did more? And then in general, bail out of the ship in general, the way that a short squeeze works, you don’t need that kind of artificial thing. But in general, the way that the short squeeze works is you borrow the stock and then sell it. The person who lent you the stock wants some kind of collateral because you’re entering into a loan agreement. And then if the value of the stock goes up, the person who lent you the stock enters what gives you what’s known as a margin call. And then like you have to put up a bunch of money in it if you want to keep on being short this stock. And then the more the stock goes up, the more money you need to keep on putting up, the more you’re usually a sickly or until eventually you end up capitulating and end up buying the stock at a crazy high level. And all of that buying pressure from the shorts keeps on pushing the price up. And so there’s this like dynamic where the more shorts there are, the more buying pressure there is on the stock, because the more shorts there are, the more people who need to buy the stock. That was not happening with Tesla. The Tesla short interest rate now is lower than it has been in years. The amount of activity in the stock means that shorts can cover super easily without affecting the price because the amount of volume in Tesla is enormous. So buying pressure from shorts doesn’t affect the price because literally we had one day this week where there were 60 billion dollars of volume in one day in Tesla. And so no amount of short covering is going to really even be a drop in that bucket. So the the idea that the reason it was going up was because shorts were covering and buying the stock and that was sending the stock up just doesn’t pass the smell.

S1: Meaning it even if that were the case, it wouldn’t count for that much of a ride. It would. We saw it.

S3: Great count for maybe like the price going up by a buck or two. So it doesn’t account for the price going up by $300.

S7: Well, was it it was just individual traders on Robinhood.

S3: OK. So this is what it was. You wanna know what it was? Yeah. I will tell you what it is that everyone here, everyone wanted to know. The answer is. The stock went up and that wasn’t a reason backpack.

S4: Come on. There you. That is the best answer. But it doesn’t explain the phenomenon. I mean, how much in this? Zero. I mean, why has you want to hear? I’m just like looking at the movement of bitcoin over time like that.

S13: There is not a tremendous there you off. You can get into these speculative bubbles and where there just simply is no good reason. And you can try to come up with a reason and you can come up with all these theories, but they’re all going to be somewhat false. The reality is that in theory, the stock price is supposed to represent something about the value of a company. And when you have something moving this dramatically, there is nothing possible that been that could have changed the market value of this company, the intrinsic value of that company.

S3: That dramatic but even even technical factors like, you know, I remember getting to a big discussion with Luke, however, Bloomberg about this. You know, he had this whole theory about people buying Coles and built a hedge.

S6: You know, that’s whenever anybody starts telling you Delta hedging. They absolutely know. That’s not the point.

S3: The point is that we as human beings are absolutely desperate for narratives and causation. And we see something happen in the markets and we like them. Must be a reason. There must be a narrative. There must be a causal relationship here somewhere. And sometimes that just isn’t.

S9: Isn’t that. I agree with that. But in this particular case, like the velocity of trades, the velocity of the movement was such that you kind of feel like there had to been something. I mean, isn’t as simple as I don’t know. Was it robot arbitrage? No, no, no, no.

S4: Well, how do you know that? How can you say that’s it? That’s it? No. Where does that coming? Because what?

S3: Because. OK. This is this is why I’m saying like I’m saying. This stock price is randoms to casta gambling vehicle thing, which is just behaving like a demented rollercoaster. And there’s no sort of causality there. And you’re saying, wait, this is so crazy, there must be a reason. And what I want you to do is to examine that statement and to say, what reason do you have to believe that whenever there’s crazy price activity, there’s always a reason?

S9: Because the market is not as diverse as we think it is. In other words, there are only so many. Like a lot of retail investors, regular mom and pop. There aren’t that many of them. It’s mostly big funds. And whether it’s it’s hedge funds and or, you know, CalPERS like retirement. There’s just there’s like maybe 100 big players that move the market in so many ways every single day. And it’s not like hundreds of thousands of individual people can.

S3: Can I Pennine? I’ll send you in an interesting little wrinkle here sharply. What is the biggest, largest, most solid pot of long term stock market investing capital in the world? But suddenly in America, the answer is S&P 500 index funds. They just sit there. They buy the entire index. They don’t do anything. Sometimes they’ll repo it out. Sometimes they won’t. Passive index is very, very. Not now. No, no, it’s not just passive. In terms of buying the the passive market, which is what they do, but passively buying the S&P 500. OK. And Adam is gonna tell you what is the single biggest company that is not in the S&P 500? Tesla. Tesla. Like Tesla has always been a weird outlier. Tesla is not in the S&P 500 because it hasn’t ever had four consecutive quarters of profit, and so that means it’s not eligible for the S&P 500 and said that makes the holders of Tesla much more diverse than the holders of virtually any other stock.

S9: Oh, there we go. I like that explanation. So it’s more diverse and there was no reason.

S8: Wait. But maybe at first there was no reason when it first started going up. But then as our Google search results show us, people went nuts. Yeah, I believe that is that’s part of the reason, because people are like Tesla is so cool. Elon Musk is like Iron Man. Oh, my God. Like, there is some some bit of that driving it.

S6: And you ever see any bubble has that type of element.

S3: There’s a kind of FOMO thing going on. But there’s also what happens and this is this bizarre phenomenon that you get in sort of late capitalism is that people think about think that the stock is a good investment precisely because it’s going up and and they see the stock going up and they’re like, oh, yeah, this is the market ratifying the thesis that everyone’s going to be buying electric vehicles. Yes. That Tesla has an insurmountable lead in the E.V. market, that it has this Gigafactory in Shanghai, which means it’s going to have an insurmountable lead in China, which is going to be the biggest car market in the world, that there’s this new news coming out from Panasonic saying that the batteries, it’s making it now a profit center and all of these different data points coming together. And then some random entity called ARC Research putting a price price tag at a seven thousand dollars a share by 2025 and all of this kind of stuff. And people say, yeah, this is going to this is going to be the the new big thing. And so Tesla at that point just becomes this dream. It’s almost like the financial equivalent of a lottery ticket. Yeah. And you go in there and you’re like, I’m going to buy the Dream Heights.

S11: I just I don’t know. I don’t down Sony that there are that many. That’s the that’s all the articles that The Times wrote that story. The Journal. But then also.

S3: But then combine that with let’s say that you are. You own Tesla’s stock. Right. Let’s say that you’re not buying that this up or just someone who happens to own it and it goes from, you know, 200 yet 200 dollars, 300 to 400, five, six, seven, eight, nine. You know. And then some some of these retail investors, Taiping, should I buy Tesla stock into Google? Come along to you. And light colored by your Tesla stock. Fuck, no. No. This is fucking awesome. I’m loving this rocket ship. You know, even if it folds another 50 percent, I’m still up like a gazillion dollars. Why would I want to sell? So what happens is it becomes harder and harder to find buyers because poled is like why? Why on earth would I want to sell?

S9: And there are no robots in this. There are no hedges and there are no guys.

S4: But there are programs. And yet he has huge volume. Exactly. Contradicting myself. Because the volume was way too high.

S13: But yeah, of course, those are gonna be involved. I think you also have to be a little careful because there’s a tendency when anything weird happens in the market now for everyone to be like it’s the robots. But the thing is, like the people who are making these these are not like simplistic things that are just like, oh, this tells me to keep buying. So I will keep buying. They’re very complicated. So it’s actually somewhat unlikely that you’re going to get that type of movement just from high frequency traders. Right. From like I don’t know.

S9: I think I have for contributive response for lots of weird news day to day moves.

S10: So not that type of move. So it’s true. Like you can see high frequency trading moves like these little mini flash crashes which happen in normal, almost every major stock and pretty much every single day. And they lot over. Yeah. I know the time period they last for. Maybe recall their Archon North a day. But you know, they’re robots responding to other robot. Yeah. But I’m saying what. Cause I’m saying those Kaskade, those kind of cascades, you can see them lost. You can see them every day and you could in the last four seconds. They dont last right in quiet traders.

S13: It’s not as simplistic. I think it’s sometimes portrayed as though like oh well you know it one thing happens and then it’s just cascading effect like no. Like these are these are very sophisticated.

S1: I have no doubt. Algorithms are sophisticated. I think the outcomes aren’t always sophisticated. That’s the difference. I think they’re they’re overly complicated at the outset. But the outcomes, what it ends up executing doesn’t always look like what you thought it was going to look like. Which explains which explains the complexity. But at the same time, it doesn’t suggest that the outcome is equally complexes. What you’re.

S3: In any case, my my big takeaway from all of this is that everyone is being including us, is being distracted by Tesla stock as this like weird animal which behaves in very odd and peculiar ways. No one can really understand me. And it is a distraction to us. It is a distraction to Tesla. It is not actually helpful for Tesla as a company. And this only serves to ratify Elon Musk’s desire in 2018. Funding security. Take take the fucking company public private rather. Take take the fucking company private at $420 check which was a perfectly good price. And then if he’d done that like. It looks possibly maybe as though that might, in hindsight have been a we would have been a bargain. Yeah, well, I don’t know what I and bargain. But then he wouldn’t have had all of this bullshit wouldn’t be happening and he could just concentrate on making curves.

S12: Yeah, but now he’s set to get some like insane payday. If the stock price holds right.

S9: So if it maintains a 100 million valuation of her six at six months. Yes. And you can’t fall below a certain amount that he gets.

S3: He gets a half a billion dollars. But but compared to how much he just like this guy’s net worth is up 20 billion dollars this year alone. So it’s like it’s a lot of money, but it’s less. But you know who else made a huge fortune this week, Jeff? Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison owns three million Tesla shares. So that, you know.

S7: And the Saudis, how are they? Do know they got out right before that?

S4: Oh, really? That was a bad trade on their part. Say good things do. So clearly they didn’t know anything.

S3: But in any case, Emily is the closest thing we have in this room to Google. I’m going to ask you, should I buy Tesla stock? I mean, it’s come down, though, right, from from the highs. Now, maybe it could bounce back up.

S12: No. Don’t do it unless you don’t care about losing money. I think don’t we always say don’t don’t gamble on individual stock?

S10: It is it is the new bitcoin. Yeah, I think it is probably.

S7: I mean, what that’s so much more kind of a reality to its valuation that bitcoin. There’s something there. They in fact do actually produce something highly seductive about the argument that like it has the lead and the like. Once the world finally stops relying on gas and switches over, it’s going to have a lead. And it’s just going like that is very low value in this company. Like I think.

S6: I don’t think there’s this much value in this company at this stage. But, you know, look, we’ve seen this with a lot of growth companies that have done very, very well over the past 10 years that, you know, when you’re buying a company like this, you are not buying it. Obviously, based on earnings. You’re buying it based on growth. You’re buying it based on expected earnings. You’re black and you can’t exactly put a great price on the future. You’re just like it seems like it’s at this moment where, as you said, either itself will become very large or at some point it’ll get acquired.

S3: So what one of the mechanisms here, which I think the Tesla bulls love to glom onto, and suddenly Elon Musk has been banging the drum a lot is this idea that it’s the first car company with like Internet scale network effects. He has a gazillion hours of data already from cores that have been driving around and know the auto manufacturer has anywhere near that much data. And because he has that much data, his cars become better and become closer to self-driving more quickly because it’s very data heavy kind of problem to solve. And so people wind up buying the Tesla cars because Tesla has better data. And the more people who buy Tesla cars, the better Tesla’s data becomes and it becomes his insurmountable lead and no one can compete. You know, I think that’s probably false. And I think that within a few years, there will be other E.V. manufacturers competing with Tesla. But it’s certainly true right now in terms of network effects, not only in data, but also in terms of charging stations. Tesla has this huge lead and it does make a lot of rational sense for someone buying an E.V. to buy a Tesla just because it’s both network.

S13: Yeah. And I’ve also heard people say that when you’re figuring out how you’re valuing this thing, that you’re not you’re looking at it not just like a normal car company, but you’re almost looking at it like something like an apple where you have hardware. In theory, you have software and you have services like yet you have to combine things you can it’s going to trade at a higher multiple.

S3: Right. So I’m talking about buying cars rather than stock. Here I’m saying that people buy a lot.

S6: Want to talk about the actual car?

S3: Well, I mean, Bill Musk has been making this case for a while that the car is an investment. Like at some point the data will become so rich that you’re going to be able to rent your car out to the right vehicle.

S6: Yeah, and that actually is very important. That is actually a big part of this idea behind this valuation. Is this kind of like robo taxi idea. And these ideas that that. Yes, exactly. You can actually make money when you’re sitting at work because your your car is self-driving cars is going to be gone.

S14: I think self-driving Yasuda is snake oil. That that’s not real. That’s not gonna happen. Not for decades and decades.

S3: It might happen in in a highly artificial parts of, you know, the bit of Toronto that Google is building or something like that, or if there’s like a special lane out of the airport that takes you a mile outside.

S9: Like, sure, fine, you can. But that’s basically mass transit, right? That’s just a rail system without rails. So.

S3: OK. So at least you are the media media correspondent.

S9: Well, I’m now going to rebrand myself as the media media reporter at The New York Times, or is it the media medium media report? Because they’re social media and there’s. Is there other media? I think social media is.

S3: But I feel like we’ve now we can now split media into media, media and social media very well. So the media media story is getting interesting. The New York Times, your very employer, just came out with some pretty amazing subscription numbers.

S15: Oh, yeah. I was surprised myself, actually. I mean, I’ve been tracking the company for a while, but I think we are now at 5.2 million subscribers altogether. That includes print. But if you’re looking at just the digital, it’s four point three and change, which again, I’m surprised by it. There was 70 that the Trump bump in 2016 that if you look at a chart, there’s this nice swoop up and then it levels a little bit, but then it continues to go up. So, you know, you could argue that that is still Trump, is he still in office? But even after things like the Mueller report, when that was he a big disappointment for the left, like the subscriptions still kept going up? You know, there was this sense that as soon as this sort of whole thing starts to fizzle one way or the other, no one will be interested, but not in a show of light.

S3: Interesting show of confidence in The New York Times for the first time I think ever has decided to increase the price of the digital only subscription. It’s a bit Netflix just did that, what, last year for the first time? The first big digital price hike. Now The New York Times is doing and they’re moving it up from 15 to 17 dollars a month.

S15: Right. Which so these all these prices are interesting, right? Netflix is about fifteen, sixteen or thirteen for for a basic subscription or the standard subscription. New York Times is about 15 is going up to 17. They’re all similarly priced.

S10: Or how much modify how much your Spotify Spotify is. What is it. Ten I think. Yeah. And yeah it’s a Spotify list and who knows a bit as to who’s like six. You have to have sex with ads or 12 without you know plus six plus a six. Granted I would say there’s some differences between like Disney plus in New York. Yes. But I think the price point forces consumers to immediately compare that and a lot of ways. Right. Exactly.

S3: And it’s fascinating to me that all of those The New York Times was basically at the top of the list. It was the most expensive. And now it’s becoming even more expensive. Well.

S9: But compared to like The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, it was less expensive. It was less expensive. But I guess that’s the other sort of value proposition. Right, which is, you know, the FTC and The Wall Street Journal, which I think are great papers. I like it. But it’s a sessional professional where it’s a niche or it’s it’s a more specified market as opposed to potentially everyone. Now, they would disagree with that. Right. I’m sure the journal especially would disagree. They know we’re meant for all educated readers everywhere. You’re interested in living in the world. And we live in a capital society. You want to read the journal? I think that’s a fair pitch. But if you look at the the array of content, I think part of what helps the times, frankly, is all the nonpolitical coverage as well as a political.

S12: Right. I mean, I think. Yeah, the the big story that’s really interesting is that the time The New York Times, a newspaper, has managed to I think we can say, confident we now transform itself from old media newspaper into a subscriber based media to a digital media driven new media are calling from advertiser driven because the advertiser advertising revenue keeps falling, falling, falling to subscription based revenue.

S5: And this is a different product. Now, it’s not just you could you could subscribe to The New York Times online. You can also subscribe to New York Times cooking, the cooking and the crossword app. They’re both do and their separate apps, too, interestingly enough.

S15: And I was told this anecdote like the cooking app. A lot of the subscribers are not New York Times readers. Right.

S10: Martin of Midwest and people in the Midwest. Do you read the New York Jets? But relative to it. No, it’s not a subset. The cooking and crossword. It’s really subscribers and not entirely a sub. So that was an wasn’t one. And the other thing which is fascinating to me was that digital ad revenue went down.

S9: So that is still a head scratcher. I’m surprised by that. Right. Because it’s a it’s a growing, qualified audience. Right. And you are not doing as well in advertising against as you did the previous year. So you have more readers this year than last year. But you’re selling fewer ads that I think is surprising. I don’t know. I wonder if what what’s going on there haven’t really gotten a good explanation for why that’s happening. Bill, more broadly across digital media display, advertising has start to flatten out.

S3: And I think I think more broadly, the big trend in digital advertising, which we’ve talked about many times on this show with and without Adley, is the it is all just getting sucked into the gaping more of Google and Facebook, the duopoly, and no one else can get a foot in.

S15: Which is why subscriber revenue is that much more important, whether The New York Times or Netflix or almost anything else at this point if you’re not Google or Facebook. The other thing about The New York Times, you talk about media, old versus new, print versus digital. They did surpass a pretty important mass in that they had set for themselves $800 million in digital revenue, which they just passed this the end of the end of last year.

S3: A year ahead of their intended target, despite the fact that digital ad revenue went down, they were making so much money and run digital subscription revenue that they hit and so make up.

S12: They made a lot of money from the make a lot of money from the daily podcast. That’s the one area area where their sponsorship against that, which is itemized and they are making money from from Hulu, from its Hulu.

S4: So I think that’s tiny. Yeah. That one time little revenue, that’s a relatively.

S9: Yeah, that’s a TV show, the weekly show that that airs both on SFX and on Hulu and they’re both supplying the times with money to fund it. So that certainly helps the top line. But it’s it’s very small.

S1: There’s also a wire cutter, which is the review site, and there’s affiliate revenue against that, which certainly helps. I mean, it was a very photogenic 800 million that it hit. Eight hundred point eight million was the precise number that the more important context around that, though, is the, you know, the conceit around having a big enough digital business so that you don’t just rely on print. So we’re print to just disappear tomorrow, which it won’t. But let’s say just happen offset. And you still have an eight million dollar business. Right. That’s growing. So I think that was the sort of the mental hurdle to get past that. Can we survive as a as online only business? Yes, most likely, again.

S12: And I think that’s really interesting because I was reading a piece this morning and I think was Business Week about Warren Buffett getting out of the newspaper business and the piece.

S7: Yeah, I never quite understood why he was in it. I mean, according to that, he love newspapers. Used to deliver them. I don’t whatever. And he’s so brilliant.

S12: Right. And there are these like investors getting into the newspaper business and sort like managing its decline.

S8: And these guys are just they’re not they’re not just smart about. They could have read the times, reinvented it.

S4: Why is that? Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna jump on you.

S3: But there is only one New York Times did the Warren Buffet newspapers are all local newspapers. No local newspaper can do what The New York Times did. You can’t get a local newspaper with 5 million digital subscribers, obviously, especially you not charging when you’re charging $17 a month, which is in order to be able to find 5 million people paying $17 a month. And as we’ve said like that, it’s not a mass market price is a premium price that you need to be targeting. And, you know, the one person who used to sell no time subscriptions. Explain this to me. Basically, the top 50 percent of college graduates, that’s who you’re going after. And most Americans aren’t college graduates.

S8: Everyone should have done what the Times did to reinvent themselves. I’m saying the Times had people running it that cared about the times and they did different stuff. Not everything they did was successful to reinvent themselves. Meanwhile, in the rest of America, newspapers, they just didn’t have the people behind it to reinvent that.

S11: Right. You’d have a bias. And the reason and the reason why that could have happened.

S3: But the reason why that’s not true and there’s a very good reason why that’s not true, is that if you look at across America, there are thousands of newspapers across America developing narrative, which are local newspapers. Only one newspaper has been able to do what The New York Times has done, and that’s The New York Times. And The New York Times is completely sweet, generous. And you would think if what you were saying was true, that like, oh, you just need to try a few different things and maybe one of them will work. If what if that was true, then you would think that statistically speaking, at least maybe eight or nine of these little local places would have been able to have some success.

S8: And you can’t point to anything if we also because as smart as everyone said, he could have taken his wealth and his alleged strategical brilliance and he had a bunch of newspapers, he could have turned out really let you down.

S9: He doesn’t do that. Warren Buffett is not someone who creates value in companies. He’s that he’s his investment thesis is I’m going to find value where other investors have not seen it and then own that versus I’m going he’s not a class if he’s not a class guy, he doesn’t like sort of trying to be fair to me.

S6: His whole thing is often like I’m going to find something that’s an excellent brand that has a moat around it, whereas that is decidedly not the case with a lot of these newspapers. And also I think it’s important to like the success of The New York Times is also gonna eat into all of those. It used to be that you had your local newspaper and that’s what you read. Now you can get The New York Times.

S15: And I think I think that’s the Internet has sort of broken that barrier down where I mean, sad to say, like so for every subscriber, new subscriber The New York Times gets is potentially one fear that The L.A. Times or The Chicago Tribune get right. So we then The New York Times, it sets itself up really as a national paper. And and in in a real way, in a very immediate way.

S9: And so it’s great for the times, but overall, it kind of shrinks the news pie, unfortunately. And I think that’s the bigger conundrum beyond just you know, I think you’re right, Felix. I think The New York Times is the only one that’s really doing it.

S3: Goodhand this brand, but you have these others trying to vie, and I think it’s I know I think this is a clear second tier, which is The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

S9: I think the poster probably argue with you in say, hey, actually, no, we are first here and there are people who like our deciding between the posts in the Times. You know, I think maybe the Journal is one of those who are like, you know what? I get the journal plus something else. Right. Whereas the post is trying to be a first here.

S3: Your first read said sames, L.A. Times, I think Chicago Tribune, like they’re in a complete different situation where all of us, all of the in order to all of these properties have national ambitions.

S4: Yes. That is you have you had not have. And that’s a thing.

S15: Maybe you can’t be a local paper anymore. Maybe that whole concept doesn’t exist is not not as a profit model.

S13: I mean, I think the only way you can have local papers as if it was something that was like publicly funded as a pie and not us. Yeah.

S9: Yeah. Which that is something that, you know, like Laurene Jobs who she’s thinking about that working on and trying to figure out ways that you can create a model around everyone is everyone is trying to make local news work.

S3: Apparently Patch still exists and is maybe it’s crazy to me that it’s maybe like making money somewhere doesn’t. There’s an interesting model going on in Berkeley side. They just opened a new publication covering Oakland and there are interesting local news things and they’re often based on some kind of non-profit model. But the idea that you could have a public company with what’s the market cap of The New York Times Nicholai billion plus well over that. Now I think maybe it’s getting closer to six.

S7: But like I feel like a few years ago it wasn’t a shirt. Like we’re all looking at the times now. You know one thing. Bang. No one is saying that this was in there.

S8: I just think that the and the inventiveness and the creativity they put into reinventing their business is not something seen at other in other places and other news outlets like The Washington Post. Maybe you can make that argument now, but more it’s just like they figured out the Internet a little bit, I think. Their daily. But they haven’t approached reinventing news media the way the Times has, which I think is interesting. And I I don’t think that other. So what do you think of that?

S3: What do you think that the really inventive thing was that the Times did in terms of reinventing news media?

S8: I think the way they I think the daily was inventive. They weren’t the first to do a daily news podcast, but they kind of I mean, not everyone listens to that to that show because they did it really well. And no one else had sort of done it before. Everyone has copied them since. I think the cooking app is really smart. I think people had tried to do just subscriptions before and it hadn’t worked. I think they approached everything with a level of excellence that I haven’t seen in other places.

S6: And I think they are almost more becoming like a less like a lifestyle brand. Like it’s not just news, like The Washington Post is still fundamentally news. And I think The Times has like a lot of what they do is not really let’s be hot is like hard news. I mean, it’s it’s stuff that’s fun. And it’s it’s it’s stuff that you used to more get in magazines like if they are using video and audio in really interesting ways. But it is it is just such a different animal to compare it to. Almost any other newspaper doesn’t make a lot of sense.

S9: It writes, I think I agree with what everyone’s saying here. I think it’s a success is a hard thing to explain, frankly, beyond the excellence argument. I mean, the journal was was charging people online from the first day of being on the Internet. So it’s not like The Times is just sort of following in the footsteps of what other companies had been doing. It’s just this specific blend of things that it had maybe and at the specific time that it did it, that it allowed it to succeed. But again, it’s hard to explain.

S3: And we yeah, we should be happy that The New York Times is succeeding. But I think it’s a stretch to then say, well, if you didn’t manage to succeed like The New York Times did.

S5: Now, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying. They tried really hard. And I don’t know. I think a bunch of people have tried hard and then it’s difficult. You know, it makes you sad to see these hedge funds coming in and buying up these newspapers and just managing their decline and not and not even trying. And there’s just I mean, there’s a stunning value out of newspaper.

S9: All those papers still generate a lot of cash flow. So I think that’s what they were, unfortunately. By the way, 6.2 billion, I don’t see that is the market, the current market cap of The New York Times. Like bloviating about men’s earnings, eminences is mean, he’s making nice money, but people should know, I mean, it is a public traded company. You can buy the shares and make money off of that, but is firmly control by the Ochs Sulzberger family. There’s a second class of shares that you aren’t openly traded that the family owns. And those who shared it for media company is very lucrative for many companies. And it’s to protect the journalism. It’s not just about profit and but anyway, the family controls two thirds of the board. So Carlos Slim could buy up every single openly traded share and still only control a third of the board.

S3: Right.

S9: We don’t need to worry about Cullison controlling the doctor or anyone, for that matter outside of the family for now.

S3: But I look forward to the day The New York Times stock becomes like the new gambling vehicle, like the new Tesla. But let’s talk about the social media, the other side of the media coin, which is where the real money.

S4: So real money. Media. Maybe I should call that real money.

S3: What is The New York Times annual revenue on? Oh, let’s just say annual ad revenue where we at now?

S15: Well, I think that digital is something around two hundred and sixty. And then another print, about another 260 or 300 something totally billion.

S10: Less than half a billion dollars or half a billion ish dollar. AD revenue. Now compare that to ad revenue at YouTube, which is fifteen point one billion. Compare that to ad revenue or Instagram, which is 20 billion.

S3: And these are subsidiaries of the real money business, right?

S15: Facebook Blue and Google Search.

S14: You know, these are the actual the daddy businesses, YouTube and Instagram are just sort of these one time errant hobbies that turned into massive, massive, massive things. I think, however, YouTube is not a real business. I suspected for years that it loses money, and I think even seeing its current financials, I still think what that doesn’t mean we didn’t they didn’t reveal whether.

S13: Because this is the difference between obviously YouTube and Instagram, that YouTube, most of its revenue is going to the content producers, which is not the case with Instagram. Does it smell like a lot? I think so.

S15: 55 cents that every dollar goes to the actual creators. Right. So the whole conceit of YouTube. Right. The original thesis around YouTube is you don’t need television anymore. You need to pay for programming. People create their own entertainment. And guess what? They do. 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s insane. So there is a whole wealth of expression out there that just sort of lives on this on this repository called YouTube. And so, you know, you play it. You let you download it. There’s advertising against it. Most of that then goes to the people creating the videos. YouTube isn’t create anything right where most most of what’s on there is not created by YouTube. So 55 cents out of every dollar goes the actual creators. They take 45 cents. So they their real revenue is more like 7 billion, let’s say. Right. So I looked at the thinking like, all right, 7 billion. How much is it cost to run? The fact that they didn’t reveal that. I think it’s very telling. Unfortunately, we don’t really have a good comparison. The best comparison, I think, is Netflix. They’re a similarly sized business in terms they spend a lot of video out of the Internet. Video on the Internet is actually very expensive. You know, we tend to think of it being zero, which it’s easy. It is relatively free and and date is cheap. But for as large an operation as it is the bandwidth that it sucks up, the staffing, everything. Cloud computing, servers, et cetera. So the close comparison being Netflix, if you take out all the content costs, what they spend on content, it’s something like 7 or 8 billion that Netflix spends every year just to maintain its business. Right. So if it’s as if there’s in any way a mirror of the costs at YouTube, I think YouTube loses money every year.

S3: But is this time suck for people with Google accounts and it just keeps people inside the Google ecosystem. I mean, put it put it this way. Google paid, what, like $400 in those YouTube something that was like one one a billion dollars or a billion dollars like that. I mean, that that has to be up there with Instagram is one of the great acquisitions.

S1: Oh, absolutely. It’s it’s it’s it’s a fundamental part of the Internet.

S12: We should just say the reason we’re talking about YouTube’s financials is because for the first time ever, Google actually said what they were. Because now that the boys are gone. Right. Yeah. OK.

S3: And and also just because. We have similar new information from Instagram. No one knew how much money Instagram was making.

S15: Well, that was the timing. That was curious, right? Because, you know, you Google releases YouTube financials, real flex by face. And then Alison and say hi. You know, if your Instagram, you’re like, how? My business is bigger. I want this known out there. One form or another, I think was Bloomberg News report. And that I think they have great reporters. I think that if for your job, but I do think the timing is is very interesting, is telling.

S3: But so Instagram does not share its 20 billion dollars with its content creators.

S9: They keep most of it. There’s still some portion of Instagram that is similar to YouTube, where they have creators and they pass along a bulk of the ad revenue against US creators to those people. But for the most part, Instagram, the advertising in that works very much like Facebook Blue, where it’s just it’s the in-between spaces where these ads come on, scram.

S5: Ads are active. Am I right? I cannot stop clicking.

S3: I know I can add my own area well-targeted. It is the only ad that anyone. It’s the only ad unit online that anyone ever. Ganic song 100 percent. Shopify is a multi-billion dollar business basically on this on the back of Instagram ads alone. As far as I can make out, it is probably the most well-designed and compelling ad unit that the entire ad industry or media industry has designed in decades. And what’s fascinating to me is the when Facebook bought Instagram, everyone was like, do you think there’s ever gonna be able to sell ads against this? And it turns out that it’s so much more powerful than YouTube ads, so much more powerful than didn’t like standard online banner ads, so much more powerful than anything you see in your Facebook feed. It is just insane how how especially luxury brands who don’t advertise anywhere else online are flocking to Instagram because it’s the beautiful platform, right?

S9: It’s the thing that comes closest to what, magazines once more? Right. In that way, I think a lot of luxury advertisers were lamenting just how the Internet was for them. And sudden Instagram comes along. It’s sort of the beautiful life platform, basically. And so it was tailor made for luxury brands and, you know, fancy car commercials, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I think in that way, it was sort of lightning in a bottle as a, you know, eclipse.

S12: Facebook was a quarter of Facebook’s revenue. Right now, I believe so. I mean, one day, could we see a flip? Given how powerful.

S13: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, I think they’re also starting to a much better job about figuring out e-commerce, which I think is obviously something Facebook in general wants to do on many platforms. But I think it makes far more sense on Instagram and they do seem to have a little bit of a head start. I know that’s is something that YouTube is also looking at. But I think YouTube has a much longer way to go. So I think if you were going to value if you were gonna value YouTube versus Instagram, I think no question.

S3: Instagram has a much more like I thought if I if I was a, you know, high end clothing companies say and Instagram came to me and said, we want to do something with e-commerce with you, I would be I would take that meeting in a second. If YouTube came to me and said, I want to do something with e-commerce with you, I’d be like, who? Go, Hey. No.

S4: Right. I’d want to be next to beheading video and white national security.

S15: There is a reason. So this whole YouTube question, which like I said, for years I suspected it’s been losing money. And I would anytime I come across a Google source that bug them. Hey, do you think YouTube like what? I think it loses money and they sort of like turn their heads and not kind of say anything. And eventually, like, you know, enough people sort of hinted to that. Yeah, it may not be profitable, but there’s a good reason why exist. I’m like, what’s the reason? They’re like the data. Right. Talk about data earlier in terms of Tesla having this network. So much of YouTube viewing feeds in to the algorithms and that and the data processing against advertising against search and their display ad network. And so it’s it gives them this extra edge that they otherwise wouldn’t.

S3: So the so the kind of videos I watch on YouTube helped to determine the ads. They get served on search and back the other way, too.

S1: Right. And so it is part of a larger ecosystem that it’s hard to divorce in a lot of ways if you really want to value. So they dominate this expanse of maps. I mean, maps, the most astonishing product.

S3: And as far as I can make out, revenue from maps is basically zero. I mean, it might be tiny, tiny, tiny, but it’s a really important part of the Google. And in an ecosystem, because of the data that they know about me, because of what I give them from using Google Maps, that then feeds into all manner of other revenue streams they can get somewhere, right?

S13: Yeah. And also thinking about kind of data moving it. I mean, this is slightly anecdotal, but I mean, I think from like the 0 to 4 set, YouTube has a lock on them. And in a way that also does. I have seen personally sell products like f.b.i.’s.

S9: Astounding to me. Right. But you’re right. You’re absolutely right. And it’s just at every stage of your life, there is something on there for you that it’s hard to. My daughter’s fifteen and she does you know, she’s got homework on occasion. And there’s something that. There’s YouTube video, explain something, it’s in some form or another. Everything from the math equations quadratic to, you know, what happened to Charlamagne and what is this area just there’s enough on there that there’s huge utility now, like my 3 year old nephew, all of the Christmas presents he wanted.

S10: He saw YouTube videos of kids playing with those Christmas presents, whereas telling of the Christmas presents that my wife once she gets from Instagram.

S3: Okay, let’s have a numbers round. Okay. What’s the number? Emily?

S8: My number is fifteen. 15 percent because that is the broker fee.

S7: I spent my first apartment in New York City with the values. I think it was about like twelve hundred dollars back then because my first partner was pretty cheap. Oh, all in. But it was really hard to come up with that twelve hundred dollars run thing.

S10: A lot of money on top of the first month’s rent on top of that last month. And on top of the salaries, it was really tough where you went to find all of you. How does anyone move to New York?

S8: I don’t know how some say I did it, actually, looking back. But the good news is no more brokers fees in New York City. Sort of snuck it on all of us.

S4: That is amazing that they snuck it into the bill and that basically this trade group just like were caught unawares. Right. It’s amazing to me.

S3: And then and then they came out with all of these like squeals of painting. But this is going to really hurt the rental brokers industry.

S4: Like, yeah, a point.

S8: No one is praying that no one is crying. And some people, Sergej, say, oh, but rent might go up. And it’s like, first of all, rent always goes up.

S3: And second of all, yeah, just the difference between trying to gather up that that broker fee versus just a little bit extra every month, but also but also broken that what they’re saying is that the broker’s fee is going to be reflected in the rent and that is possibly true. But what they’re not saying is that the broker fee is going to come down substantially because when the landlords weren’t paying.

S6: Yeah, they did. Yeah. Now that they’re paying it, they’re going to be price sensitive haha. And what’s going to be my number is four pounds and 50 pence. So this is maybe what the cost of the sandwich is that got the city trader fired. It was a sandwich. I’ve heard it was a sandwich. Now it may not. As I’ve said, I love this could be wrong. So there was this Citigroup trader in London who apparently stole possibly a sandwich from a county like this, like the cafeteria once. One image, I guess, you know, which I think is suspended.

S11: I’m not sure he’s actually. I think he got fire, thankfully fired. Yeah. Because they fired him before the bonuses of people. That’s right. So from the company. Yes. The company is making millions, literally millions or at least a million. How do you steal a sandwich? No one knows. No one knows who’s in a rush.

S15: No, I think I mean, I think there. Isn’t it just the thrill? Right. Like, ultimately, these guys, they just they’re in it.

S4: It’s like when candles stall. It’s like one day. Right. That’s like candles doing from you on a writer.

S15: You know, I remember one time in Sun Valley, like, you know, it’s this is the big sort of mobile retreat. And it was in the coffee shop. Yes, it is. And, you know, billionaires are going through there. Right.

S10: And I saw one of the billionaires that come in, take a paper and walk out and pay for name names. Adderly. I have to think about that.

S9: You know, so I’ve got a tricky number. It’s a little bit of a cheat. One million. That’s my number. OK. That is a number of subscribers that New York Times netted last year.

S10: That’s it. That’s the Delta. That is the Delta. OK.

S15: One million is also the number of subscribers that Disney generated in two weeks in January.

S9: All right. One million is also the number subscribers. Netflix netted over ten days. Oh, my God. Wow. So that’s a way to think about what we’ve been talking about earlier.

S3: My number is 80 billion because I love big numbers. This is I love this number so much. $80 billion is the number of sea urchins that ravaging the Norwegian kelp forests. There’s a bunch of kelp in Norway. And thanks to global warming and various other things, it’s not just noise. Also in California, it’s also in Australia, basically around the world. Everywhere you find kelp, there’s this horrible invasion of sea urchins and there are 80 billion sea urchins in Norway. And it’s super harmful for the life in the oceans because these coat for us support enormous numbers of fish and other things. And the urchins just come along and eat them all and destroy them, which means that there is a huge opportunity here. New food supply for us all to go completely batshit bonkers eating.

S15: Yes. I was about to say, like when you said Susan and I’m like.

S3: And so people are setting up loony farms in like Norway and all over the world to try and take these sea urchins and turn them into something delicious and profitable and good rather than just eat. And then once you start farming the urchins, that helps the kelp forests to grow back. So uni is the best thing you can eat and we should all be eating like fish.

S1: Let’s have him with breakfast. I left it with scrambled eggs. I mean, it does taste good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you eat that? I’m seeing a lot of blank stares on the other side.

S3: Sea urchins are a bit like oysters and then they have a make argument. They don’t have a nervous system. So if you are the kind of vegetarian who doesn’t eat. Things within I mean, they’re living things, but then Karatz are living things, right? It’s all living. So the question is, where do you draw the line?

S6: Yeah. Okay. Maybe maybe I did too many 1744 just for the count. I’ll do it to save the count.

S3: Does it go okay? Wow. On which note. I think we are going to wrap up slate money this week. Thank you, Ed Lee, for coming in. It was amazing to have you. Always a pleasure being. Thank you. Just me and Wally for producing. Thank you all for listening.

S16: Do stay tuned for the slate plus about Spotify and keep the e-mails coming. Clean slate. Money dot com. We will talk to you next week on sleep.

S3: Let’s have a quick slate plus on mortify buying, because I I want to talk about this because we have Adderly on and he’s another it for a lot of close observers is it feels like a head scratcher to some degree.

S15: It is the Spotify business. I mean, they I have Spotify. I think it’s great service. But the thing about the music industry that’s interesting is that, you know, the stuff that’s on Spotify is also on Apple music is also on Amazon music. So it’s effectively a commodity service. How do they differentiate one from the other? So, you know, if you have podcasts, if you have Bill Simmons producing original podcasts for you, all of sudden there’s something more special about Spotify relative to Apple. Music may become hooked on one of these podcasts. You can only listen to it on Spotify. There’s less churn, meaning I’m less likely to move over to an Apple music or something like that. The other thing to note, though, is that that all the popular podcast you see now from Bill Simmons will probably still be widely distributed.

S13: They’re trying to get it right. I think that that is true. The other thing I do think is interesting is that, you know, the music industry is a very like established industry. So to this day, obviously, much of what Spotify earns, it’s giving back to these content providers. Now, podcasting is a very, very new industry. And so I do think that’s part of it as well. Like it’s not actually paying that much for these podcasting. Zero for the podcasts.

S4: The podcast. No, no, no, no. This Spotify is paying lots of money for the podcast and things like Spotify is paying for the ringer.

S3: Now I’m sick. Yeah. I’m saying that if you lack complete money on Spotify, the amount that sleep money gets from Spotify is zero. Right? Right. We we we sleep money do not get. We are very happy for people to listen to us on Spotify.

S4: You’re talking about it from. In other words, the money that I as a Spotify subscriber paid to Spotify does not pass along to podcasts people. Exactly. Wherever you find myself, I’m ownership’s against the audience. All right. All right. It’s a new industry. That’s kind of the.

S3: The difference is, if I’m a recording artist and someone listens to my music on Spotify, then some of your subscription money does make it for me.

S1: Right. So here’s what they want.

S4: You want some of that Spotify money?

S15: Well, so here’s what’s tricky about the way the music services have worked is that the labels have sort of worked these really, really difficult deals where they get the majority of the subscription revenue. And it’s how is that divided up? It’s based on what you’re listening to. Right. So they sort of come up this really complicated sort of measure of what people might listen to and what each label gets out of that pot.

S1: What Spotify has been trying to do over time is, you know what, we should pay you out based on what is listened in total. In other words, if some portion of the Spotify community are listened to podcasts, more than 2 music, some of that music, that revenue dollars shouldn’t go to the labels. And of course, the labels have balked at that. But I think that is ultimately what Spotify is trying to do is fill the listen time with more stuff that they own, namely podcasts, thereby the pool of revenue that’s collected less of that goes to the labels and more that goes so.

S3: And this brings up this brings my theory in, which is different from your theory. OK, on here, which is that Spotify wants to get a new revenue stream in terms of podcast ads. And what you were saying was that what they want is to get Gimli in the ring and people to do podcasts, which are exclusively on Spotify. And they might do that. But I don’t think that’s the main issue.

S9: It’s the advertize, it’s the sponsorships, the advertising against that audience that so elect.

S3: One of one of the problems that, you know, we hear it’s like money in 100 percent of other podcasts have is that we all we can do when we’re selling ads and sell the show. And if we have a sponsor on this show, then the sponsor appears on the show. And if we don’t have a sponsor on the show, it doesn’t. We can’t sell audiences. Spotify can sell audiences. Spotify can say we have all of these podcasts from Bill Simmons and Gimli and everyone else. And we can sell one set of ads to people on iPhones and other set of as to people on Android, another set of ads to people in Germany and another set of ads, people in Spain and like and while there’s a little bit of that, a tiny bit of that that can happen online. Slate podcasts, we have this company called Megaphone, which does a bit of that. Spotify can do it with much more granularity because it has way more data on its listeners than sleep money has about our listeners.

S1: How much of it is because Apple is still not so great?

S3: Well, Aveda, right, because Apple is is genuinely quite good when it comes to privacy and it just doesn’t share that information.

S9: They also, I guess, don’t understand how media works maybe or that.

S12: The other thing I was gonna say, if you listen to the last season of the podcast startup, it’s all about how Spotify bought Gilette. It’s kind of like the behind the scenes on that and it’s very entertaining and worth listening to and. Was sort of interesting to learn how Spotify learned about podcasts and audiobooks. They just kind of like noticed people were listening to them. They did nothing to support it. And they were surprised, like people didn’t just want to listen to music. They actually want to listen to other people talking, whether it’s audio books or than podcasts. They part of the reason they said in the startup podcast, startup podcast that they wanted to get in the business is just to keep more people on the platform, like it’s a very addictive kind of medium. So, you know, people get tired of listening to music, which which happens. There’s just more stuff to listen to. Yeah, part of it as well.

S6: I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that, you know, they clearly want to become this like all audio company, all different versions out, especially cause they didn’t do video very well. So and and if you look at the prices of what they’re paying for these podcasts companies, it’s just not very much money. So if you’re thinking about it. Yeah, like your kind of option, like what you value can be long term. Why not? She Oh so you think they they underpaid for gimlet? I’m not saying they paid. I’m saying that it’s just not. And they don’t use a word that much in anything. Right. relatives’ rather big. If you look at the market for podcasts out of advertising right now, it’s still relatively small. So you’re not going to pay that much for these.

S12: And it’s almost like reality TV versus like, you know, prestige TV member when like reality TV got got popular in like the 2000s and because it was super, super cheap and TV networks were so excited about it.

S10: Podcasts and not giving the podcast, I have to say your podcasts in terms of in terms of podcasting apps, Spotify is very good. I mean, it is much better than Apple, but. Oh, yeah.

S9: It’s much more usable and it’s just easier.

S3: And like I I’m still for like historical you know, I’m I’m a lazy person. I can’t be bothered to switch. I still use overcast. But like I I do think that Spotify is better. No, because. No.

S9: I haven’t used overcast in a while. I use Spotify. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it works. Apple is just just the whole interface feels backwards and just the way things either download or haven’t downloaded, I don’t know. Is it on my phone right now? I have no idea. Yeah, I totally agree with that.