Transcript

Paul Ford Bay Ridge, starring Richard—it’s based on the life story of Rich Ziade. It’s a lot of really slow scenes of you using a deli slicer while an uncle yells at you. Right? [Paul and Rich laugh.] Rich! What are you doing? 

[Intro music fades in, ramps up, plays 10 seconds.]

Rich Ziade Paul!

PF Richard.

RZ How are you doing?

PF I’m doing alright. Have a little internet connectivity issue, but you know, that’s just par for the course, just getting by.

RZ  Do you know what I’ve been thinking about lately, Paul?

PF What have you been thinking about lately, Rich?

RZ Really, really rich people.

PF Oh. As opposed to most of the other time, when we think about really, really rich people. You ever notice how many times we have to talk about really, really rich people in our industry?

RZ Rich people are fascinating. Their behaviors are fascinating.

PF I don’t know if they’re that fascinating, actually, but regardless, they’re up to stuff again. There they go. The extremely wealthy.

[1:00]

RZ Yeah, fun rich person story. This person came into the office once. I’m not going to name who it is. It was a billionaire, definitely a billionaire, a founding billionaire, tech billionaire—came in and didn’t speak to us, spoke to the ceiling and said absolute gibberish for 35 minutes and then asked for a follow-up meeting. [Paul laughs.] I kid you not, Paul.

PF That was a good one!

RZ And then he came back and he started talking gibberish again.

PF This is not a billionaire anybody knows by the way.

RZ It’s probably not a billionaire anybody knows.

PF Not a client. Not a, yeah—

RZ No, not a client now. Comes back and starts talking gibberish again. And about seven minutes in I said, you know, your time is incredibly valuable.

PF Oh, it is. It’s very valuable.

RZ Do you know what people start to think about when they make outlandish amounts of money?

PF Yesss—

RZ What?

PF Solid gold hats.

RZ Dying.

[1:49]

PF Actually. Hold on. Let’s put that in context. Starting around your mid-thirties, especially if you happen to have children, you think about dying. That is a normal thing.

RZ Speak for yourself, Paul. I’ve got this sorted out.

PF The difference between billionaires and everybody else is that when billionaires think about dying, they’re pretty sure they should do something about it.

RZ [Laughs.] They’re like let’s get some consultants in the room.

PF Hold on. I’ve solved other problems at scale—at scale. Right?

RZ Exactly.

PF I have created value for a tremendous number of shareholders. And now I’m looking at mortality. Nobody expected for financial transactions to cost pennies and be able to talk across multiple bank systems. So maybe we should be looking at cellular degeneration. [Rich laughs.] I am a problem solver. All the billionaires became genius statisticians once COVID hit, right? Like they’re all just like, well, let me get on this for you.

[2:45]

RZ You know what’s funny too, is it puts you in a very, very weird world, right? Because everybody’s sort of around you. Everybody’s kind of trying to reinforce what you’re saying. Maybe you’ve got a childhood friend who tells you you’re an idiot every once in a while, but that becomes a rare commodity. Right? It becomes a very valuable, valuable thing.

PF You’re also honestly, I mean, let’s take this a little bit further, right? So like you’re very good at communicating what you want and how to make money. Right? So the people around you are very motivated to listen to you. You may not have the awareness of epidemiology of say a well-educated epidemiologist. [Rich laughs.] That may not be your thing, but everybody around you is like, what do you need them for man? You have Excel.

RZ But one of the things billionaires do is they buy—I call them vanity purchases, right? One is the professional sports league team—football team, basketball team, baseball. Steve Ballmer famously bought the Clippers for an outlandish amount of money at one point.

PF Imagine the sports team like Bill Gates would buy. Like is SeaWorld, is SeaWorld a sport? You know? Where the dolphins swim.

RZ Maybe like lacrosse or something. I don’t know what he would buy. Bill Gates? I think tennis. He could buy one of the top tennis talents. He could buy like Djokovic.

[4:03]

PF Yeah I’m sure.

RZ There’s another thing they do. There’s another kind of purchase they make, which is these sort of storied publication purchases. And I’m not talking about like TV guide. The guy who made 50 million bucks in his chain of grocery stores in Kansas bought TV guide. I’m talking about storied publications—give me some examples, Paul.

PF Jeff Bezos and The Washington post, you know, he was like, I was a paper boy, and now I own Amazon. I might as well get myself that Washington Post.

RZ Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic.

PF She’s a whole thing. She’s the Emerson Collective.

RZ Yeah I mean, look, a lot of—we’re not sitting here, you know, speaking—

[4:42]

PF I always feel for them actually, because journalists and editors are very, very difficult employees and there’s always an incredibly painful process where they realize that even though they can kind of run the world in their specific domain, these are just the stereotypical sort of biting the hand that feed you employees. [Laughs.]

RZ Totally. And also there’s a self-destruct button, right? The Atlantic and The Washington Post and The New York Times think very, very highly of themselves. Very highly of themselves.

PF Oh boy, do they. You know, Michael Bloomberg wants to buy The New York Times. That’s always been the story. I don’t know how true it is.

RZ I mean, it’s not that surprising. Right?

PF Can’t get it. The Sulzberger family just won’t sell it to them, right? And, you know, and there’s a little element of like, well, he’s new money—

RZ [Laughs.] So there’s old money, right? Which is the Gilded Age, then there’s new money. And then there is really, really, really new money and now—

PF Shiny money.

RZ Yeah. Good, shiny money. Our good friend Elon Musk. 

PF Yeah. 

RZ Wants to make the ultimate vanity purchase.

PF I was hoping we weren’t going to have to discuss this.

[5:50]

RZ I think we gotta go there, dude. I think we have to talk about it.

PF Alright, alright, alright. Let’s get in there. Let’s talk about this. I really don’t want to talk about this. [Laughs.] You know why?

RZ We don’t have to talk about it? We could talk about—

PF No, we have to talk about it. There’s nothing else. If you go on to Postlight Slack right now, you know what people are doing? They’re talking about Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter, which as of—as we are recording—looks very possible.

RZ The board.

PF So Elon Musk is Twitter’s number one shit poster. Just an absolute—he’s bad at it. He has a zillion followers, an unbelievable amount of money. He produces garbage content.

RZ Yeah. That’s not what Elon Musk is known for. Right? And look—

PF No, he’s not a good poster.

RZ And look, I’m not going to sit here and like judge Elon Musk’s innovation and business acumen. I mean, holy hell. Let’s just put—let’s just say it out loud. Disrupted some of the biggest industries in the world. Right?

PF I just wish he’d taken like one film class.

RZ Yeah. Liberal arts is not where we’re sorted out.

PF Just one. I just ugh—but regardless we’re here now. We’ve got to work within the boundaries of what’s in front of us.

RZ And look, the board has to do this. Like that’s worth saying, how can the board even consider it—

PF Elon Musk shows up with 44 billion or whatever.

RZ You’ve got to do it. It’s part of your job actually. Yeah. Yeah.

PF The board has to consider—

[7:13]

RZ That’s right. And so now all of a sudden this place that everyone secretly hates everyone secretly loves, openly loves. [Both laugh.] I think that’s the irony. It’s like—

PF I don’t know.

RZ You really want this pile of drivel?! Do you really want buckets and buckets of drivel now everyone’s like, wait a minute. Twitter’s important. [Laughs.] It’s—nobody knows which Twitter they have in their hands. Right?

PF Everyone is just like, I can’t wait to get off this hell site. Please free me from this pain.

RZ I took a break this weekend. My skin is clearing up ever since I quit Twitter.

PF And then Elon shows up with his checkbook and everyone’s like, you are going to ruin the one good thing that exists on earth. First of all, I mean, organizations at this scale with this much culture and so on. I don’t really know what levers he has. Like the big one in my head is, are you going to unblock Donald Trump? Because it was getting real bad before they blocked Donald.

RZ I mean, he’s probably going to unblock Donald Trump. He’s probably going to do a lot of weird things. Here’s the thing. Here’s why this is dangerous. Elon Musk isn’t an evil villain. I’m going to just say that out loud. He’s just a particular—

PF Okay.

RZ Quirky, weird kind of dude who happens to be probably one of the boldest—

PF He’s good at money, one of the boldest risk takers in the last 30, 40 years. But here’s the thing. Here’s what is dangerous. What is dangerous is—

PF But do you remember, too? There was a point like not long ago where everybody was like, yeah, that’s it. He kind of bet the farm and he’s really underwater now and we’re never going to hear from him again. And now he’s the richest man in the world. Like that guy just, okay. More roulette, keep spinning the wheel.

RZ I think what’s dangerous isn’t Elon Musk. I think what’s dangerous is Elon Musk pretty much burning this to the ground and not thinking twice about it. It’s like, okay, well that was a bad move. Like that can happen. Right?

PF Hey, they don’t always work out, you know?

RZ They don’t always work out—I can write it off. [Laughs.] It’s a capital loss or whatever.

[9:09]

PF That guy—that is a thing. That guy is like, oof, boy did the best we could. And it’s also like, when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, it’s easy to look at it at that point and be like, okay, this is an institution in decline. And the people who own it want to get out. Okay. So like for better or for worse, when he came in he bolstered it—

RZ It found a benefactor, right? Yeah, exactly.

PF Yes. He grew it. And so, and so forth. Twitter, you know, Musk is talking about all this unlocked, untouched value, right? My instinct is more like, it’s just Twitter is essentially a war of attrition. Like it’s World War I trench warfare as a social media company. And like, yeah, you might be able to move one or two inches in one way or the other, but everybody dies.

RZ Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what this highlights, right, are the protection mechanisms that come with maintaining your integrity as the press, right? The Washington Post, no matter what Jeff Bezos did, he knew that the thing had a self-destruct button, meaning if you even come near the Washington Post in any untoward way—its integrity, it’s reputation, it’s goodwill that was built over whatever hundred number of years—

PF Yes. You’re not allowed to destroy the institution. If you do, you get a billionaire, like the opposite of a gold star, you get a demerit by your billionaire name.

RZ Yeah. Yeah. And so the problem with Twitter, I think the challenge for Twitter, is it has no Goodwill. It has nothing. It is just this place [Paul laughs.] And so there’s not like, oh, you’re going to ruin the reputation. You know, I mean, it is a place, right? And I think what can happen is it is a place that we are just now starting to understand how to reign in these products, these technology platforms, so that they don’t get away from us. And that’s the hazard here, right?

PF He’s got this real big thing where he’s going to unlock the value by making it a better place for free speech, which whoa boy.

RZ Yeah.

[11:15]

PF Oh boy.

RZ Well look, this is what happens when technologists start thinking—this is about dying. Back to dying, Paul. We’re back to dying.

PF We definitely are if Elon Musk buys Twitter.

RZ We’re back to thinking in more philosophical terms, in more abstract terms, about what’s important in the world and values and ideas. And the truth is they started by default as free speech platforms. Like what happened over the last 20 years is, little by little, you had to hire hundreds and thousands of people to kind of reign it all in because the Arab Spring was supposed to be great. But the Arab Spring ended up with a lot of bad things also, right? Like all of it had to be reigned in.

PF This is a critical thing to understand. Okay. So the people—and I was part of this cohort and I think you were too—you come into the internet in the nineties and two thousands. And suddenly there are many, many voices. And despite where we are now, many of those voices were not white dudes. There were lots of them, but there were all kinds of people suddenly with blogs and talking and experiences that you, you could never get these experiences anywhere else. And in particular, in contrast, I remember really clearly sitting somewhere and reading an article where it was a Black woman writing about being a dancer in a wheelchair. And it was like, oh my God, I’ve never even considered this experience before. This never shows up in my daily newspaper. This never shows up in my magazine. And this is a person—cause she was writing about like how sweaty the chair got. Right? Like it was just like, oh it was very visceral and real. It was like the Times was not gonna publish this.

RZ It’s raw right? No exactly.

PF It was delightful. It was a delightful time because you would realize all the time how little you actually knew of the world and how big and weird the world was and how dumb you were over and over. It would teach you. And it was just like these voices were showing up and you realized that you were just this little tiny speck of a person, but you could have your voice too. And it was cool and it was exciting. And man, if we could just turn that up even more, get all the voices, get everybody talking. It is gonna be the absolute revolution in culture that we know humans can bring about together. We’re going to have everybody here and we’re all going to be better as a result and let’s do it. Let’s do it because it’s so cheap. You can just put a text box up and people fill in the text box and yes! Yes! We did it! That was where we were.

RZ That’s where we were and we could have stayed there. But what happened was technology weaponized the sort of viral capabilities of these platforms. And once that happened—

[14:00]

PF Well, and also everybody showed up. That initial filter of I will write six paragraphs about my experience. That was a filter. It was a filter that actually only led in a tiny part of 1% of humanity that felt that doing that for free in their spare time was important and emotionally rewarding.

RZ I mean this is a quaint time you’re talking about. Right?

PF But this was the time that people showed up and were like, let’s build these platforms. That was the vibe.

RZ Yeah. But eventually it became about money.

PF Money. Well, no. So actually it’s worth looking at what happened. The bloggers were like, and I was one of them like, had a sandwich today. And then somebody was like, you know what? This is a good place to talk about politics and message boards. And suddenly everybody was talking about—so then this like blogging revolution was actually like a political revolution. And once that happens, everybody shows up.

RZ No, but that’s not bad either. I think you’re missing the key ingredient, which are the amplification mechanisms that were put in place.

PF That would never have showed up if it was just people talking about wheelchair dancing and having a good lunch or sharing recipes, right? That showed up because the politics showed up and then the rest of the media showed up and then people were like, huh, we could put ads on this. And then they went, huh. We could start spreading this around. And then they started to do the social networking and blah, blah, blah. But you know, that ethos was there in the beginning. And then it just sort of slowly spread out into this amorphous mass and then you couldn’t assume good actors. You actually could assume good actors in the very early days. You’re just like, well, I might not agree with that person, but you know, they’re just kind of figuring out HTML with the rest of us. And then it became a territory that people wanted to control.

RZ It was controlled by two or three companies. And that was the end of it. 

PF Yeah. And those companies created algorithms so that they could put advertising into the experience and the byproduct of that is that you could game those algorithms in pretty aggressive ways. I mean, we don’t have to get—we’ve talked in the past about Facebook is probably the most egregious actor here in their passivity, in this sort of tightrope they walk between money and damage they cause, right? That’s real.

PF Well between money and lying. Right?

RZ Right exactly.

PF Like they just get caught in lies.

RZ Again and again, right? And you know, you can always—this is what’s dangerous. You can always fall into the cocoon of saying we are not responsible for the content. We are bringing people together. We are—to use Elon Musk’s words—enhancing free speech and enforcing free speech. That is a very wicked judo move. Right? To be able to dodge the ethical consequences, the moral consequences of what’s going on, you say, yeah, but everybody’s gotta have a right to talk.

PF Okay but look, we live in, we live in chaos right now. By the time people listen to this, Elon Musk might have literally gone to Mars. That could have happened. But let’s assume he buys it. Okay. And he’s like people are being banned. People are blah, blah, free speech needs to prosper. And I can unlock the value of this platform, which God help us all if more Twitter is—What are your predictions for what that actually means? Okay? It’s a product. It’s a product that would have to change. What would change?

[17:17]

RZ You know what this makes me think of. And there’s a Wikipedia page for it. There’s something called the exceptions to free speech in Wikipedia. And these are, these are born out of case precedent and legal doctrine that just took a couple hundred years. For example, you can’t yell fire in a theater, right? If you’re gonna cause physical harm—that is free speech. You can’t do it. There are like seven or eight exceptions to free speech.

PF No, there’s—hate speech is prohibited. And then there are also like the social contexts in which speech occurs. Like Twitter is a private, or it’s a public company, but it’s a company, it’s not a government. And so it might choose to regulate speech in its own interest as a platform.

RZ I think to see it all the way through what you have here is that those exceptions to free speech are outdated now because this isn’t about free speech because you’re allowed to lie. Lying is not an exception to free speech by law. You can lie. And then people are supposed to say, you’re a liar. I don’t trust you. You’re not credible. And then the world is supposed to sort itself out. What is missing now is that there are wickedly powerful amplification mechanisms that can weaponize lies. So you’re not just lying in the barbershop. You are actually creating mass disinformation and you are creating environments that can be disruptive. In fact, enemies of the United States have used these mechanisms. Well that’s the thing—

PF State actors, state actors are doing this right?

RZ Dude everybody’s doing it. Not just state actors. Right? If I need to promote my new HBO show, I’ll do it. Right? But that’s a narrower purpose.

PF But that’s exciting that you got a new HBO show.

RZ It’s very cool. It’s about coming of age in the eighties. Actually. It’s really cool.

[19:04]

PF As like a young guy in Bay Ridge, like riding the trains, working to put—

RZ As a young guy in Bay Ridge, it’s called Bay Ridge. Yeah. It’s really good. It’s really, really good. And so I don’t think you have that here with this person. Here’s the thing about Elon Musk. And he reminds me of other like savant-type Silicon Valley people. When they think they’re right, there’s no discussion to have because the intellectual Lego pieces fit so neatly together, you could be bleeding to death in front of them and you’re not going to sway them. That’s just what you’ve got here.

PF Money is the validation of the thesis. Right?

RZ Of course. Of course. Bankers are said to make tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, on this deal alone. So they’re going to tell him absolutely man, we need free speech.

PF Let’s play out a few different scenarios. So I think scenario one is he buys this thing and it actually, because it is essentially trench warfare as a product, not much happens. Because you turn a little dial here, but the workforce is like, yeah, I’m not moderating that. And you know, you say we’re going to turn Donald Trump back on and half the employees quit and just like, it’s just kind of like at a certain point, there will be like two or three moves he makes that just drives everybody bananas. And then he’ll be like, okay, whoa, I don’t want to lose 20 billion in value. I’m going to have to wind that back a little bit. Like ultimately he is a pretty good businessman.

RZ I don’t know. This is a side dish for him. He may be crazy enough to be like, you know what, how else do I become immortal right? And I become immortal by causing absolute chaos to happen. Right?

PF He likes chaos.

RZ He likes chaos. He likes chaos.

PF Most CEOs don’t like chaos. The other thing though, is that Twitter’s product roadmap. I mean, somebody once made the joke—there’s a guy named Andrew Smailes made this joke. And it was just like in the year 20-something-whatever Facebook will be like, we have released total general AI and Twitter will go, you can have a second pinned tweet. Right? [Rich laughs.] That roadmap, that roadmap has not been on fire. It’s the same product. If you looked at that thing like 12 years ago, and you look at it today, you’d be like, huh, it’s still Twitter. Whereas Facebook has literally, you know, has a moon colony they’re about to announce and the Metaverse too. I mean, at least Twitter didn’t say like, you’re gonna tweet in goggles.

RZ Look, I’ve got to give Twitter credit. They have been more diligent about reigning in toxic and manipulative practices on the platform than Facebook. Let’s just say that out loud. I feel like a lot of those product cycles happened around that versus new features.

PF Oh yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of tremendous work that got done in there.

RZ Tons of work. And you have to respect that. Look, the place can be very toxic and negative, but—

PF This is what’s tricky. Right? A successful moderation policy is absolutely invisible. It’s only the leakage that people notice.

RZ Exactly. Exactly. So that’s, that’s expensive and hard and they had to solve for that. So you’ve got to give him credit for that. I do hope he doesn’t get it because I do think he’ll bring Trump back on. I think he’ll let anybody who isn’t, you know, breaking the law back on. And so the manipulation I think will kick back in. I think there is one mechanism that can reign him in and that is advertisers. And that is like a mass campaign around, frankly, the revenue stream that comes into Twitter and them not tolerating it going into—

PF Well that’s real. Right? If your customers are constantly telling you I hate you for advertising on this platform. Why won’t you do something to keep—

RZ It is one of the most powerful mechanisms. Right? And the thing you have though with this guy is like, well, we can’t let private industry dictate who can speak. Everyone can speak. And he made you like—like, look, I’m telling you, dude, this guy is what, 50 something years old. He’s going to front the bill. He’s like, you know what, Kentucky Fried Chicken, you don’t want to advertise on Twitter? This is more important than chicken. Even thoughKentucky Fried Chicken is very delicious.

[23:03]

PF Yeah, we’ll run more Tesla ads, you know?

RZ Exactly like I will—I’ll pay the bill to protect free speech. Like that’s what I think you’ve got here because that’s the only—his revenue, his profit margins. It’s not going to make him live forever. This is the stuff that he thinks will help him live forever.

PF Oh Richard, this is going to be a rough one isn’t it? We’re just going to have to hold on.

RZ Yeah. That’s my read of how it plays out.

PF What’s our worst case here? Our worst case is just an endless screed of misery as the worst actors possible, the most toxic sort of shitposting people are doing like, you know, pornographic images of people on Twitter, like placing their heads and posting, you know, deep fakes while everyone else just essentially grieves their community. So just pain every day. Absolute pain every day is very possible.

RZ I think so. I think there’s millions of people who will come back on because, you know, controversial figures that were banned are let back on kind of a thing. And you might have a successful platform. I mean, you might have a successful business. Let me put it that way.

PF But there are no successful platforms, right? There’s no platform where you’re like, that’s been really good for the commons. Right? [Laughs.] The internet archive, right?

[24:21]

RZ Maybe Pinterest? Like swimming pool photos on Pinterest. I don’t know. Did Pinterest go bad?

PF Pinterest? Yeah, I don’t know. I think Pinterest is ultimately, okay. You get those nice curtain swaying GIFS and you get watches, you know, shoes—

RZ Flatbread. [Laughs.]

PF The internet archive is a good platform, you know? It’s yeah—

RZ There’s some out there. There’s some out there. I don’t know how this ends, Paul. I feel like we may look ridiculous on the other side of this podcast and be completely wrong and paranoid.

PF I mean like, you know, Tesla makes good cars and they eventually, I mean, people—

RZ I think they make very nice cars. I’d want to own one. I just don’t have enough charging stations in New York City.

PF New York City doesn’t really work that way. But SpaceX seems to make good rockets I guess like, I mean—you know, it’s maybe, oh boy though. Oh dude—

RZ There’s credible stuff going on there.

PF Oh dude. I don’t know. [Laughs.] I actually, I think we’re in for hell. I think we’re just in for, just kind of right at the moment—

RZ He is going to turn the background into—you remember like when, for a while, background tiling was possible on HTML?

PF But also imagine Jack Dorsey being like the boss, your boss, and then you get the big job and you’re like, okay, here we go. Finally, phewf. [Laughs.] That poor guy. He thought he got it. Like, okay, here we go. And now Dorsey’s out there—

RZ Yeah. But look, you made the point earlier, everybody lines up to money. Right? And this guy just got the job. He’s like Elon, man, this is going to be a wild and an interesting ride. Let’s do it together. I think that’s what you have there.

[25:56]

PF If anyone can save it, Elon, it’s you.

RZ Exactly. The fact that he thinks it needs saving tells you a lot. Right?

PF Well, that’s the thing like—

RZ That’s the interesting bid.

PF This is what actually—so the billionaires would like to defeat death. And in fact they continually fund that. A lot of their startups, the quieter investments, tend to be in like death fighting.

RZ Cryogenics and yeah.

PF And I’ll tell you, they also, ultra high networth individuals do like to sit down and look you in the eye and say, look I just think I’m the only guy who really can save this thing. And it’ll be like, publishing—

RZ Without flinching. Yeah.

PF Yeah. And then, you know, in the back of my head, I’m always like, there’s a lot of foster kids. I’m just like, ugh— they always want to save something cool. Right? Any who—

RZ Paul, we’ll see how this movie ends. We’ll probably follow up with another podcast. This has been the Postlight podcast. Postlight is a hot, fast-growing digital product studio.

PF Boy, we’re good. We can build you just about anything. In fact, if you wanted to build your own platform for communicating with the world, social media or related to it, oh, we could do that for you. We could do that for you.

RZ Amazing talent. Designers, engineers, product strategist, product managers—

PF Make a new website instead of buying an old one. That’s what I would say to Elon Musk, but no one would, yeah, he doesn’t reply to my emails. [Rich laughs.]

RZ Yeah. I know they keep bouncing on you. Sorry. Reach out: hello@postlight.com and we’d love to talk, tell us what you need and let’s see how this movie ends. Paul. I don’t know how it ends. We’ll see.

[27:27]

PF The thing about the movies of 2022, Rich. They don’t end.

RZ They kind of don’t seem to end. 

[Outro music fades in, ramps up.]

PF [Laughs.] No, we are in the worst—this is like a Netflix binge watch where you just never quite—

RZ At the final episode of the binge watch, like episode 10, they leave you with like, and then maybe I won’t see you tomorrow. And it’s like, wait, is there going to be another season? And then everybody searches—

PF So many cliff hangers.

RZ Dude, if you type in any show, space, season, space, Google will auto complete seasons that don’t exist because people keep searching as to whether there is another season or whether there will be another season of anything. All the time.

PF I mean this is society. [Both laugh.] I’ve got to be honest. I need to know what happens in Severance. I do.

[28:14]

RZ Severance is good. If you don’t have HBO, get HBO, just cancel Showtime. Showtime gets HBOs leftovers.

PF Stars Plus. So Richard, hello@postlight.com.

RZ Reach out. We still use old-school email and check out postlight.com.

PF We may be going back to email soon, right? I think email might be the—

RZ [Laughs.] Yeah, back to email.

PF That’s the social network I prefer. Alright my friend let’s get back to work and let everybody else get back to work. And we will talk to everybody soon.

RZ Have a lovely week.