Hi YouTube Cortexans. I have something special for you today, which is a full video version of this interview with my guest, Ben Thompson. Let me talk about why I'm doing this and why I've never done it. So we edit this show really tightly. We always have, we always will. I want the show to sound as good as it can, and you just get the best parts of the episode. That results in hundreds and hundreds of cuts over the course of the conversations.
Doing a video edit that would be the same is essentially impossible, because it's going to be lots more cuts. It may be would be done by somebody else who would be like a whole different thing. My friend Jason Snell, who I produce the Daring Fireball podcast with, has actually built a tool that can take an audio edit and replicate it into a video edit when you give it all the files. So I've tried that on this episode. So what that means is this episode's going to have lots and lots of cuts in it. It may look strange to you. It may look fine to you. I don't know. I want to know what you think. So let me know in the comments if you like having a full video version of the show, if you notice anything weird in the way that it's edited, you can also let me know. And maybe if you want to see some previous episodes, if we decide to continue doing this. I'm not sure, but I wanted to test it because why not?
So please enjoy this episode. This time on State of the Workflow, I'm joined by Ben Thompson. Ben is the writer behind Stratechery, which for the last 13 years has been one of the most influential publications in technology. A one-person operation that's read inside of every company that he writes about. Stratechery started in 2013 as a blog about the business and strategy of tech. It's grown into a daily paid update, a weekly free article, a bundle of podcasts including Sharp Tech and Dithering, a run of interviews with the CEOs of Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Google, OpenAI, and many more. And along the way, Ben built his own publishing platform to run it all on, which now powers some other publications, too. It's a lot of output to manage for one person. So for this conversation, I wanted to understand how Ben is able to find his focus and put together an update. So we're going to follow that process from start to finish.
You're going to hear about this more later in the show, but the Subtle range is back on sale at cortexmerch.com. I am so proud of this clothing line that we produce, and we have some wonderful updates this year. It is only available until November 19th. So check it out. But for right now, let's get on with the show.
Ben, I want to get started by asking you, what is an app that you're using right now that you're really enjoying?
Honestly, the real answer to apps is like Codex or like ChatGPT or Claude whatever, because we're making more and more of our own apps for just little workflow jobs.
Yeah, I guess that is the funny thing. Like I ask this question to everyone, and I think over time it does feel like we're going to start trending towards the 'my favorite app is the app that makes my apps.'
It's totally true. There was like that article floating around about where's the great AI app, and I don't know that we're ever going to get one, because from my perspective, I'm making incredible apps. Not that they're incredible technically, but they are tailor-fit to solve specific problems that we have, which by definition makes it the best possible app. And I'm never going to release any of these publicly. And not just me doing it. Like people that I work with are doing these little things. So if you think about that, number one, great software, as in it solves a problem, is increasingly not going to be released to anyone, which didn't make sense before. You know, to put all the effort to put in to build software, you would want it to be broadly used just to make your money back if anything else. But then number two, I was previously the best customer for software developers, because I would buy expensive software. I would gladly pay. I'd pay a subscription, whatever it might be, if that software solved my needs. And I'm increasingly just not a customer for new software, because I'm just going to make it myself.
This is interesting. See, I feel like I am very happy to make tools that are very specific to a specific use case. But if it's something general purpose, I have no interest in vibe coding it. Like a to-do app, I'm never going to do it.
Oh, for sure. I never plan to have any of the vibe coded stuff that I'm making broadly available. Customer support is a nightmare. Customer support for a product that you did not deeply think about and think through from an architectural perspective, or particularly security perspective, and the vibe coding goes wrong, you have to tell it continuously explicitly, 'There isn't a privacy concern here. This is running on a private network. It's fine.' And then that's where it spins out of control, is it's trying to cover every possible edge case, usually for privacy or security reasons, and so you have to tell it continuously, 'Best effort. It's fine. It's running on a private network. I have a server here that runs the apps that we make that you can only access if you're on my Tailscale network. It's fine. Relax.' And then that usually stops the 'Oh, this job ran for two hours, what's going on here?'
We could probably speak for two hours about this today. I want to talk to you about what it takes to make Stratechery. What is Stratechery?
Well, it's become more and more things, but at its core, it's a newsletter about the intersection of strategy and technology. Thus the name, which is very obvious once you know that, and not at all obvious before then.
I think we've long passed the horizon line on the name. Like the name is just what it is now. It's not really...
I'm the one that always goes back to the well. It's a great talking point. The word-of-mouth newsletter that you can't pronounce.
When someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you answer that question?
I just say I write about technology.
Okay. Do you consider yourself an analyst?
Yeah, that's the title that I use if I have to fill in a form. I just say analyst. And I mean, I also tongue-in-cheek say that I'm a blogger, which I do consider myself to be, and I enjoy that because amongst technology, it's fine. Of course, bloggers are bloggers. Amongst other people it's like, 'you're a blogger', which I sort of relish in. So I'm just a lowly blogger trying to make my way in the world.
Because I guess it's just whatever suits the scenario, right? Because not all analysts are bloggers.
Yeah, I am not a Substacker. That is the one that irritates me. I'm like, well no, Substack copied me.
We're going to get to this.
So yeah, Stratechery at its core is delivered by email.
I'm going to interrupt you because actually that's the same mistake Substack made early on, is they got too indexed on email. Stratechery is a blog. That actually is the conception I have in my mind, and I will deliver you the content that I write in the way that is easiest for you.
Yeah.
Do you think your customers think of it as a blog over an email?
I think the core ethos of Stratechery is I don't care what my customers think.
I write what is interesting to me, what's important to me, and I think about my business in those terms. Stratechery is in many senses a journal of my attempts to understand the technology industry, and I will continually update my views and write them down and then share them with you in the format that's easiest for you. Now I don't mean this to be dismissive of my customers. I love my customers. They make this possible. But the moment I start catering to them or letting that influence what I write about or my views, like audience capture is obviously a real thing, and not only would that be bad in terms of the content that I do, but it would be bad for me, and that's when you start burning out.
Is when you do stuff that is not for you, it's for someone else.
I think that is what I like about your work, is that I don't always agree with you. I often disagree with you, but I like that I disagree with you. It's what I enjoy about reading, right? I don't want to subscribe to Stratechery to have someone tell me all the things I already think. It's what I appreciate about your writing, is that you challenge me, and sometimes I didn't agree with what you had to say, but then as the days go on, I'm like, you know what? Ben made a bunch of really interesting points there. You know, they kind of turn over in my head.
No, it sounds like cliche, but that is the ideal. At one level, I'm selling my views of the world. On a deeper level and on an idealized level, I am selling an ongoing trigger to make you think.
So I'll say what I think, I'll try to lay it out very logically. If I get it wrong, I'll come back and not just say I got it wrong, but also say, this is the thought process that led me to this conclusion, and here's where I messed up. But the idea is you should read it and say, I disagree, but you'll at least be forced to think about why you disagree. I should strengthen your disagreement in the best scenario, because it's very clear why you disagree, and then you have a better understanding of your underlying precepts and why that led you in a different direction.
So Stratechery started off as a blog delivered by email for the majority of its customers, but now Stratechery is so much more. You have Stratechery Plus, which you also refer to as the Stratechery Bundle, because it is a bundle. But what are people getting with Stratechery now? Like, what is the overall suite of products that you offer?
Stratechery did start out as just a blog. It was only on the web, but it started with the idea of Stratechery as a business embedded from the beginning. But at the beginning, when I was writing Stratechery, I limited myself to two things a week. And these were all sort of just regular blog front page articles. The other real pioneer in this space was Andrew Sullivan. So he had this super high volume blog. It was hosted by The Atlantic, and then I think he went independent at some point, called The Daily Dish. And this was like just the volume was ridiculous, like 50 items a day. Just like the ultimate blogger. And I think what happened was he was at The Atlantic, he left The Atlantic, and he wanted to do a subscription, but he never changed the format of what he did. It was just like, now there's a paywall, and then the paywall was like super loose. You had to hit more than 30 or something. And so it was like he was almost taxing his best customers. That was the way people thought about paywalls, is well, sucks, there's a paywall now. And when I started Stratechery, I wanted the experience of customers to be happy about paying. In that I like what's here, and if I pay, I can get more. And I'm like, wait, this is the right model. Stripe had just come out with Stripe Billing, and I want this to be a psychologically pleasing experience. And so when I started Stratechery, knowing I wanted to do subscriptions, I limited the amount of content. And then the idea was if you're a subscriber, you get more.
Now, the whole way I launched it was a total mess. I had like a super convoluted website. The logged-in experience was way different than the logged-out experience. And what happened was I'm like, this is totally wrong. I ripped it all out and just said, if you're a subscriber, I'll send you an email. And so I fell totally backwards into email actually. It wasn't this great strategic plan. And then it turned out, oh, email is actually the thing. It's funny, like now it's like remembered what Stratechery was. Stratechery pioneered emails. Like, over the weekend this website didn't work, it was super confusing, it was a mess, 'I'll just send you an email' is actually how it came about.
Yeah, but it was the core business, as you say, was the thing that people wanted, and it was just you had to work out the right delivery mechanism, and it turned out that email newsletter was the right delivery mechanism. Because it wasn't really something people were monetizing at that point, right? Like it wasn't a thing that you paid for. Like the idea of paying for email at that point is kind of a funny thing. [Laughter] You know, like why would I pay to get more email? But now, I mean, you really did pioneer a business model that exists now through many different companies trying to do a similar thing, and many publications doing the same thing.
Which is awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's what I'll always be most well known for, Stratechery, but to me, it is just as if not more rewarding to know there's so many people out there making a living doing this sort of thing. It's very gratifying.
It's funny really, like one of the things in the Stratechery Plus bundle is Dithering, which is a show that you do with previous Cortex guest John Gruber. And John is known for a lot of things, but one of the things people kind of in my business remember him for is his membership, right? Like the Daring Fireball membership was basically the first thing of its kind. Like you pay the money and you'd get something in return, and it was the RSS feed. But it is funny how what you have given to other creators, both of you, in the form of business models, but that also probably makes sense for the whole reason behind it in the first place.
I mean, the Gruber story is actually really interesting too, because I think the degree to which he's a pioneer is actually even more underrated. So he started out selling memberships, which I should actually cite going forward. I didn't even think about it. I usually give the credit to Andrew Sullivan. But what happened was Google Reader came along, and Google Reader didn't support customized RSS feeds. And so basically it broke his business model. And so what he did was then, oh yeah, I'm just going to put sponsor content in the RSS feed. And I think that's the creation of in-feed advertising, which is basically the advertising model for the internet. That is what Meta does. Before, ads were just around the content. Now the ads were in the content. And I think it's very underappreciated. I've long given him credit for this. He basically pioneered in-feed advertising, which is the business model of the internet, in addition to inventing Markdown, which is now like AI is putting everywhere. Yeah, I think that specific point is actually very interesting to me and underrated.
This episode is brought to you by the Sateen range from Cortex brand. The Sateen range is a line of high-quality apparel that is designed to be simple, tasteful, and genuinely wearable every single day in every situation. That's not just something that I say. I wear them every day. Today, I am wearing one of our Subtle sweaters, the nice gray one, real favorite. We've built up a small collection over the past years, and every piece is something I reach for in my wardrobe, as do thousands of other Cortexans. We have a couple of styles of t-shirt, a lightweight cut, which is soft, perfectly fitted, easy to wear with anything. There's a heavyweight tee, which has more of an oversized elevated fit. That is still my personal favorite. There's the classic sweatshirt, the lightweight hoodie, the quarter-zip pullover that we introduced last year, which I had no idea I was going to love as much as I do.
And this year, we're adding some heavier styles. We have a heavyweight hoodie in both a pullover and full zip. This is the first time we've done the Subtle line with either of these types of products. There's also a heavyweight crewneck sweatshirt and new midweight pullovers. There's tons of different options for the type of clothes you want to wear. These are the kinds of pieces that feel substantial the moment you put them on. They are well-chosen from great materials with our subtle logo. The Subtle range is only available for a limited time. We open up sales just once a year, and that window is just a few weeks long. So if you've been thinking about picking something up, or you want to check it out, now's the time to do it. Get your orders in by November 19th. You can check out the full collection, including all of our new pieces, over at cortexbrand.com. That is cortexbrand.com.
So let's talk about what it takes to build an issue of Stratechery. So as we've mentioned, you know, Stratechery is a website, it's an email newsletter, and there are supporting podcasts as well that make up the Stratechery Plus bundle. But I am assuming the majority of your customers are subscribing, first and foremost, to get the Stratechery update. And there's a free article, and you have interviews as well as part of the kind of Stratechery piece. So I want to talk about what it takes to put an update together. So this is just one of your emails that you send a couple of times a week. How does work start for you in the morning on an update day? Do you begin by digging into news? Are you checking email? What are the first kind of things you're doing?
I think the reality of Stratechery and of the daily updates is I am always thinking about it 24/7.
So I'm on Twitter. I'm checking TechMeme. It's sort of like a background process is always running in my head. And so I kind of know what I'm going to write about on Monday. So I call them big articles and then updates. The articles are the free ones, and the free ones are more challenging because I'm writing for a very disparate audience.
Some people are seeing the site for the first time. Existing customers. It might go viral and get spread. And a key aspect of Stratechery's success is my best pieces tell a story. There's a beginning and a middle and an end, and it's like compelling, and so you're along for the ride with it. That is hard. Whereas the daily updates are much easier in that figuring out what to write and writing it is hard, but I give myself more leeway in terms of assuming more knowledge on my audience, assuming they read Stratechery regularly, so I can be much more self-referential without having to quote myself a bunch. And also, it's just like, here's an excerpt from a story and here's my commentary on it. I don't need to think of an introduction. I don't need to think of a conclusion. The best ones still tie together. They still have a narrative, but I don't hold myself to needing to deliver on a narrative. And that sort of makes it easier. So, for an article...
I'm already thinking like, what's the narrative? What's the hook? I kind of have this concept, this idea. For an update, it's more a matter of what just happened. So it might be an Apple event, like the iPhone event. Like it's funny, iPhone events used to be articles and narratives. Now they're just updates. I'll have some commentary on the iPhone. It might be earnings, which is like a kind of an obvious one. Earnings are great in that I know exactly what I'm going to write about. They always take way longer than I expect, because I'm actually going through the numbers, reading through the earnings calls. Like there's a lot of sort of laborious work that goes with it to make sure you have, you know, come up with your take. But yeah, I'm thinking about it sort of 24/7. Ideally I know what I'm going to write about, but sometimes you sit down and sometimes you have to write what I call a professional update. And a professional update is you're not feeling it, you don't have any ideas, and you're going to come up with an update that is maybe not going to be the best thing you ever wrote, but it's going to be something that is of sufficient quality that you're going to deliver what you promised. Now, that's not my goal, to be clear, but that's the reality of writing every day is sometimes they're like that.
Yeah, I think of that similarly as doing the job. Like you really have content that comes out on a schedule, it comes out weekly, it comes out monthly. Sometimes on a weekly news show, there's not news, and you have to come up with your own things to talk about. You're doing the job that day.
Or the news is you got to write about the DMA for the 50th time. You know, [laughter] it's like you're doing the job.
Regulation and court cases, just awful. Yeah. I think the challenge that I have, and this was much easier in... So I was in Taiwan for the first, you know, many years of Stratechery, and now I'm in the US. And the worst part about being in the US, and the best part about that was being in Taiwan, is...
For actual writing, I do need to get in the zone and sort of lock in. And it's funny, once I'm in the zone, it's fine. I'll get it done. The process of getting in the zone can be like a multi-hour sort of thing. And the reality is the forcing function to get in the zone is usually an impending deadline. People think that I'm very productive, and the reality is I have a daily deadline that I have to write and get it out. So I'm thinking about it, but it's hard for me to get stuff done during the day just because there's people around, I have to go pick up my son, I have to do this, and also the deadline is not till tomorrow. And so I don't do as much during the day now as I would have liked. In Taiwan, because it was 12 hours ahead, the deadline was like 6:00 p.m. And so that meant the afternoons were perfect, kids were at school, could sort of get it done. In the States, the reality is I usually do most of my writing at night. The house is quiet, and the deadline is impending, and I have to lock in and get it done.
Yeah, you see, I hadn't realized the change in time, because Stratechery always comes out relatively early for me.
It is, it's much more regular now, because now I finish writing at night, and then it's scheduled to come out at 6:00 a.m. So it always comes out at 6:00 a.m. now, Eastern time. Before, it would come out when I was done. So it's better in some respects. Like for example, the podcast now, the podcast comes out at the same time as the update. Whereas before, the update would go out, and then like an hour later the podcast would come out because it had to actually be produced. So there's aspects where this new system is better in terms of I deliver to my customers at the same time every single day, which I think is really important, because I think Stratechery, particularly being four days a week, it's a part of people's routine. They're used to reading it in the same place or listening to it at the same time every single day. And it's good to deliver on that, and that was a problem in Taiwan. I sometimes would be really late. But from a personal standpoint, it was nicer to write in the afternoon than at night, but that's the time that works for me.
And I guess even though it's changed from when something was done you would publish it, the fact that you're writing late in the evening, and it publishes early in the morning, it's unlikely that anything is going to change now.
I was trying to get super disciplined about writing during the day, and I wrote this long thing when OpenAI released ChatGPT-5, which, you know, reduced the models, there's only three, defaulted to using like a router where it chose the model for you, and I wrote this whole thing about it, and it was very controversial. And I was fairly defending what they had done. And between me writing that, because I wrote it during the day and I was going to publish it the next morning, then that evening they completely rejiggered it and rolled everything back, and I was like, 'This sucks.' [Laughter] That was a big advantage. Like you post it, it's always up to date. And Taiwan did give a sense of sort of living in the future that I had lost. And that night, as I'm up super late rewriting a whole update that I'd already done, I'm like, 'Ugh, this is very annoying.'
And I guess that is actually an interesting thing about where technology is right now, is that the AI companies do move at a speed that the existing tech companies did not.
That definitely is the case.
They can put out a lot of content, but they can change very quickly on a decision that they've made. In the daytime then, are you doing any administrative work? I mean, businesses just require administrative work. Where does that fit into your day?
So I write Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights. And then usually by the time Wednesday rolls around, I'm pretty exhausted. It's probably I haven't gotten enough sleep. But sometime on Monday, Tuesday, ideally not Wednesday, but sometimes Wednesday, I record an interview. So I do an interview every week except during the summer. I stop in July and August. So right now we release the transcript and the recording. So Wednesdays I'm 'done' with content. I always edit the interviews. So my assistant runs through it first, but I do a read-through, and we do lightly edit them, as it says in there, for clarity. So for the written one, I will make it clearer and more readable. Some people you interview, it can be a little sort of hard to read, even if it's fine to listen to.
Reading the text of a podcast is a terrible experience. Because people do not speak the way they would write. Filler words are fine to listen to. They are terrible to read.
That's right. And so we clean that up just for clarity. And then occasionally we edit for content, and you'll know I did, because I will change my 'this is lightly edited for clarity' to 'this is lightly edited for clarity and content.'
So that's the interview, which happens during the week. And then my podcast day is Thursdays, because it lines up... I actually think a lot about my physical and mental state in terms of producing content. And for podcasts I want to be well rested. I want to be fresh and ready to go. So part of this design is by Wednesday I'm pretty tired. All I need to do is edit the interview. Wednesday night I get a great night's sleep, and I wake up Thursday I'm ready to podcast. And so I do Dithering first. Get some lunch, then do Sharp Tech.
And then by the end of Sharp Tech, an hour and a half very highly engaged, I'm usually wiped all over again. That's just sort of the nature of that. And then we put together This Week in Stratechery, which is just a summary of the various stuff across the bundle that we email out on Fridays. And then if I do other interviews, I do think about the energy bit. So we are recording on a Friday afternoon for this reason. The other thing too is I do have lots of administrative work. In all these areas I've hired people, but I have to meet with them regularly.
You can get rid of a lot of the actual day-to-day work, but as a business owner you can't just be like, I'm just never going to engage with this. Eventually it has to come to you.
That is Fridays. Fridays is usually all admin work. It ends up being admin work until I will tell my assistant I'm done. I can't do it. Because like decision making is tiring. And responding to emails is tiring. I'm just trying to be very in touch with and continually monitoring and optimizing my schedule for that mental clarity. I talked about getting in the zone, but part of getting in the zone is not having stuff on your plate. I referenced the Getting Things Done David Allen book in a recent article. I actually got a chance to talk to him after that. And it's super interesting. He's got a very non-traditional background. Even though his book is like him in a suit and he's hired by executives. I mean, I think he's retired now, but he's like a black belt in karate or something. [Laughter] But the whole book is flow state, your mind being clear, mind like water. That's why it always appealed to me so deeply, because it's been always super clear how that's important to me. And so I end up having a fairly structured life. All the people that I hire, they all understand their role, and the reason why things are the way they are is about me being in a place to write every day. And if I write good things every day, everything else will take care of itself.
This is actually the description of a lot of people that I've spoken to, really, and I think you've put it beautifully. Of creator-facing businesses, you can build up a business around you, and you can bring people in, you know, like people will turn to selling products and they'll do all kinds of stuff. But ultimately, there's still that person who is the face, the voice of the organization. The best thing that can happen for that person is for them to be protected as much as they can, so they can produce the thing that people came for in the first place.
100%. Could not agree more. And I impress that like everyone who works with me understands that. And there's times that I'm not to be bothered. And this has actually been really interesting. I always hesitate to make any sort of comparison between me and very famous people, but Steve Jobs is kind of like the extreme case of just being known for being a total jerk to everyone around him. What's interesting is this aspect of you being a decision maker, but also you needing to be on. Whether that on be to write or on be to podcast. The human capacity to always be modulating yourself and your impulses is limited. The times I'm on, I have to be super on. And that means there needs to be times where I'm just not on at all, and I'm tired and grumpy and whatever it might be.
I want to go back to talking about topics that you choose for the daily update. Because there's lots of news going on in tech and business and media. Especially certain times of the year, there's lots of stories, lots of threads that you could pull on. How do you decide on a given day what might make the cut? Is there a tension between something that you're the most interested in and what the biggest news of the day is? Like how do you balance that out?
Yeah, it varies. There is certainly an extent where I feel compelled to write about something. I wrote about, you know, Dario Amodei's post on Monday, even though I feel like I've sort of said my piece about Anthropic generally, about the doomerism, whatever it might be. And you know, I'm pretty satisfied with what I wrote. I think it actually ended up presaging a lot of the conversation that developed later in the week. But that is all anyone talked about in tech this week, and I did not have any interest in writing about it every day. Now, it's on the background processes, because this is obviously a big deal. We talked a lot about it on Sharp Tech, where I think some of these topics are much better suited to podcasting than to writing. It's interesting, the balance there. Things that are more subtle or lots of angles, lots of threads to pull on, harder to wrap into a bow. You know, a podcast you can sort of have digressions. And it's not just that a digression is possible, it's more entertaining in a podcast. If you have a million digressions in writing, it's like, oh, what's going on here? [Laughter] Writing needs the thread much more clearly in my experience.
But then you get to other days and it's like all anyone in tech is talking about is this. I've written about it. I don't want to write about this today. There's other things going on that I have interest in. I would say Tuesday was fairly professional update. I wrote about OpenAI and Amazon and ads, and then I talked about Walmart and Apple Pay. That's more like just checking in. I've talked about those things before. There's updates in these areas. I thought there was an interesting connection there. Why did Amazon ultimately win out versus OpenAI, where OpenAI wanted Amazon to sell stuff on their platform, and in the end Amazon is selling ads on OpenAI's platform, versus Walmart and Apple where Apple won, right?
It took a decade, but Apple Pay is going to be in Walmart. Apple's not giving them any funds. Apple Pay locks in credit cards, which Walmart hates, for a generation. That was a satisfying one because there were two items that were worth touching on. I wasn't feeling it a ton. But then as I put it together, I'm like, 'Oh, there's actually an interesting contrast here. Why did power work in one place and sort of not in the other?'
And then on Wednesday, I wrote about Salesforce and Dreamforce, which is like... I don't really cover enterprise software super deeply. I think Marc Benioff is a very entertaining presenter. And it was kind of a fun touchback to a reference I'd made about Salesforce previously, when a few years ago Marc Benioff sort of mocked Microsoft for the whole Copilot thing. He's like, 'No, we're jumping ahead to agents.' And now they basically want to plug in for Claude code. And this is a fun one because if you read it on its surface, it's like, 'Oh, Salesforce did this.' But people who read it closely, I'm kind of mocking Salesforce here. And so I enjoyed that one, and it was... no one else is writing about Dreamforce this week, particularly in this space that I do, but I think I got a lot of good feedback on that one. The people are like, 'No one was thinking about it.' But it was angles that were actually very pertinent to the AI stuff. And there's a bit where when everyone's talking about one thing, I think for me anyway, but hopefully for my readers, it's actually kind of nice to get an email about something else for once.
This episode of Cortex is brought to you by Fitbod. If you're looking to make changes to your personal fitness, how do you know where to start? Well, you check out Fitbod. It is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that is made for you, because everybody has their own path to personal fitness, which is why Fitbod uses data to make sure they customize things to suit you. It will adapt as you improve, making sure every workout is challenging, pushing you to make the progress you want, because you will see the best results when a workout program is tailored to your body, experience, environment, and goals. Fitbod stores this information in your Fitbod gym profile. It will track your muscle recovery, so you can avoid burnout and keep up your momentum, and they build the best possible workout for you by combining AI and exercise science. Fitbod have analyzed billions of data points, fine-tuned by certified personal trainers, and you're going to be learning the movements that you're being taught the right way, all the new stuff, thanks to their more than 1,000 demonstration videos. I love these in the app. If I get to an exercise I've not done before, I can watch a quick, really nicely made video. It shows me exactly what I need and gives me the confidence to move on.
You will see the best results when all of your muscles are working together. Overworking some and underworking others, you're going to see a bad result. That's why Fitbod tracks your muscle fatigue and recovery to design a well-balanced workout routine for you. This is also mixed up with new exercises, rep schemes, and circuits. You can stay informed with their progress tracking charts, reports, and sharing cards inside of their really great app, which also integrates with Apple Watch, Wear OS smartwatch, and other apps you might use like Strava and Apple Health. Personalized training of this quality can be expensive, and Fitbod, though, it's just $15.99 a month or $95.99 a year, which is a great price, but you can get an even better one. Get 25% off your membership by signing up at fitbod.me/cortex. That's f-i-t-b-o-d dot m-e slash cortex. Go now and get your customized fitness plan at fitbod.me/cortex. That is fitbod.me/cortex for 25% off your membership. Thanks to Fitbod for the support of this show and Relay.
When you're sitting down to write either an update or an article, where does research come into the process? Are you a person who retains a lot of information? What is research like?
The answer is I've been thinking about and reading about tech since I was like 10 years old, and I have a very high capacity for sort of retention and recall. And I am also the heaviest user of search research function. And I'm a Google master. And AI is obviously great in this regard. There's a bit where my true competitive advantage... I think quality is very underrated. Quality is obviously important. Quality with quantity is a killer combination. And that's sort of number one. But number two is I've been doing this for so long that almost everything that happens, I already kind of know what I think about it. And the way I think about it is there's like a contraption in my head where you put a news item in and an opinion comes out. And that contraption is like my understanding and view of the world. So there's some things that happen that's super straightforward. You put it in. I could dash off that segment of a daily update in like literally 20 minutes. Like it's obvious. You just write it out. Some stuff, there's stuff missing. It's like, that's where predictions come from. It's like there's another shoe that's going to drop here. Like this doesn't make sense absent something coming down the pike.
And then sometimes I'm wrong. Those are the most interesting ones, because those are where the machine needs work. It needs a new addition. Something needs to be adjusted. And that's often where, not always, but it's always where like the big articles come from. The big articles are like updates on the machine. And the daily updates are the output of the machine. It's sort of a way that I think about it. So when it...
When it comes to research, I'm always reading about stuff. Like earnings, I read all the earnings calls. My assistant keeps a spreadsheet of all the earnings. I have a bunch of graphs that I've used over the years, and that's very useful because it's something, it's like I've written about this before. There's a change in the graph, I can go back to what I said previously, think about what goes with that. Some stuff like the AIs, the degree to which they're useful is directly related to how much you know about a topic. So there was a court case that came down, something App Store related. I can't remember what it was. This was somewhat early on, might have been GPT-4 era. And I was remarking to a friend how useful the AI was in me doing research for that particular article and writing about it. And he's like, 'Really? I thought it was terrible.' And we compared our prompts. And he had just asked, 'Explain this case to me' to the AI. And I went in and I already knew all the context about the case.
There was one specific question, it was something antitrust related. And like, 'Oh wait, this case da da da da da.' I'm like, 'But how does it impact this provision?' That was some arcane detail about antitrust law. And then we had this very productive back and forth. It brought up a few cases I didn't know about that I think I might have actually ended up citing in that Daily Update. But in that case, I did quote ChatGPT. I went and got the Supreme Court case and read the Supreme Court case and then cited it. So, two parts. Number one, you really get out of these what you put in. These are mirrors. You bring in a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge, you will get a lot of expertise and knowledge back. You bring in, I don't know, you'll get a lot of broad generalizations that might be hallucinated sort of back. Number two, I always do go back to primary sources. I read a lot and then I do have a very good recall and then I'm very good at Google so I can find it again. The extent to which Google's gotten worse is very painful for me. I understand the dynamics of why that happens, but I am a very heavy Google user even today, even in the age of AI.
So, you know, you mentioned keeping records on financial calls and obviously you're Googling a lot to get information that you need. Do you keep any other kinds of notes on the companies that you cover?
So I use Workflowy, it's like an outliner document. I think I used OmniOutliner back in the day. I always... well, honestly, I want to be cross-platform on the web. My view, through painful lessons learned, is I should be able to go to an internet cafe, which I don't know if those exist anymore, or walk into an Apple Store or Best Buy, get a computer, and be up and able to write within an hour.
I think a library is probably the thing now, right? Rather than internet cafes. I feel like that's probably the place where you can publicly use a computer.
I came up with this whole system when I was in Asia, which I think internet cafes were much more common.
I mean, I'm of the internet cafe era as well. I don't think it's like, I just don't think they exist anymore.
No, I know. I haven't been in one in a very long time. It's very true. So, I use Workflowy as a web app as a thing. So in that, I'm continually putting in links. In there, I also have an earnings segment, where I read through every earnings call, and I copy and paste all the things that I thought were interesting. I have a keynote segment, where I watch a lot of keynotes. I love the opening of keynotes because the opening of keynotes is where they're trying to set the narrative. They're trying to put it in context what is sort of going to come afterwards. So even if it's random stuff, I'll try to at least watch the first 10 minutes of every keynote that is out there. But if I watch the whole keynote, then I take notes in that section. And then, like in earnings, it is organized by company. So I have like all my notes from every Meta earnings call for the last 10 years is in one place.
So, you have that all. That's what I was wondering, if like, is this just a thing that you get rid of? But you just keep them and they're categorized by company?
I do. I don't really go back, honestly, but they're there. So that's the main stuff that I write down. If I have the outlines of an article that is sort of... Like, I did start one. I have this app called... Are you familiar with Notational Velocity?
Oh, one of the best apps ever. The interface paradigm, you hit a shortcut, you're typing, if the note exists, it will come up. If the note doesn't exist, you press enter and you're immediately typing a new note. It's awesome.
So, what happened was there's Notational Velocity, which was replaced by NV Alt, where someone basically forked it and made it better. This website's been promising NV Alt 3 for over a decade.
