Ben Thompson from Stratechery on AI ads, the end of SaaS, and the future of media

**John** (0:01)
Ben Thompson is the founder and author of Stratechery, the newsletter that everyone in Tech reads to make sense of what's happening. He's also heirly to the premium newsletter model that's become very popular in media nowadays. For many years, he ran Stratechery as a solo founder in Taiwan. Cheers. Good to see you.

**Ben Thompson** (0:16)
Cheers.

**John** (0:20)
It feels like people in San Francisco have not properly discovered Taiwan as a tourist destination. Do you agree with that characterization?

**Ben Thompson** (0:28)
Because people always ask me about Asia, and the way I always characterize Taiwan is there's lots of great places to visit in Asia. And I would also put Japan on the list. But I like to think I went to Japan before it was cool.

**John** (0:40)
Yeah, nothing against Japan.

**Ben Thompson** (0:41)
Well, the whole thing with Japan is going to Japan pre-smartphone was a completely different experience than going there post-smartphone. Like you think, oh, the subway system is amazing, the trains. Try navigating that with no smartphones and nothing's in English. Like Japan, you should be very low on English. It's still lower than places like Taiwan.

**John** (0:59)
It's surprisingly low.

**Ben Thompson** (1:00)
Yeah. In Japan, the way to visit Japan is you just walk. Don't go to set destinations. The way I would talk about this is places to visit, but the best place to live is on Dalai Lama. The one word everyone says for Taiwan sounds not that impressive, but the word is convenient. It is the most convenient place to live.

**John** (1:25)
7-Eleven has really good food.

**Ben Thompson** (1:27)
It's actually downstream from the Japanese, because Taiwan was a Japanese colony for the first 50 years of the 20th century, and it's laid out a lot like, why is it great to walk on Tokyo? Because Tokyo is all mixed use. That's how Taipei is as well. You have these big blocks where the exterior will be commercial, and the interior of these big blocks is all residential, and the first four is all small shops or restaurants, things like that. So wherever you live, you basically have access to everything all around you. But I think the downside as a tourist is, it's kind of an ugly city. Like Taiwan's kind of notorious for just these dumpy, dilapidated buildings, and you go inside, and they're like palatial on the inside. Taipei is very, very rich.
It's like in the top 10, I think, is like number of billionaires in the world or something like that, all downstream from building out China, things like that. It's a very beautiful country, from Taipei, 30 minutes to the ocean, 30 minutes to the mountains, East Coast is amazing.

**John** (2:25)
But if people listen to this or visiting, I feel like one thing they should do is, it's a mistake to try and use Yelp or anything like that too much, because you should maybe just try and go to a night market and follow your belly and see what looks good, and like a lot of excellent street food. And so that'd be one thing is to don't try to over plan.

**Ben Thompson** (2:42)
Well, here's the problem though, where tech has made it worse, I would argue, as a tourist, which is Taiwan is arguably the greatest Uber Eats market ever, because there's amazing options. It's all delivered by scooter, so it's always like 10 minutes to get to get dinner and things along those lines. I think you're going to ask me about difficulties moving to the States, not having access to that is definitely one of them. But the problem is that it's such a huge market now, that I think there are fewer and fewer restaurants, in that a lot of these places actually just straight up close their storefronts are just ghost kitchens basically, and all they do is just make Uber Eats orders all day.

**John** (3:19)
I see. So I mean, famously, the restaurant economy and places like Taipei would have been really good, but it's gotten worse because people are eating in more with Uber Eats and stuff.

**Ben Thompson** (3:28)
I think so. I think so. As far as the walking around, there's still plenty of places, it's still great. But there's a number of restaurants that I used to always take people to, like Holes in the Wall that I knew were a super good beef noodles or something. And I remember a couple of times like, oh, you can't actually go eat there anymore, but they're still on Uber Eats.

**John** (3:45)
That's a bummer. It's like a separate problem. The San Francisco problem at restaurants is that nobody drinks anymore. And so the restaurants, they've lost a major reference.