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Exponent

Episode 156 — Rent-Seeking

Exponent

Ben Thompson / James Allworth

Technology

4.6832 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Exponent is back, kind of. Ben and James talk about Apple’s case in front of the Supreme Court, and debate whether the company is acting anti-competitively with its App Store policies. Links Ben Thompson: Antitrust, the App Store, and Apple — Stratechery Ben Thompson: Apple App Store Follow-up — Stratechery Daily Update Apple Inc. v. Robert Pepper, et al. oral arguments — Supreme Court of the United States Ben Thompson: Apple’s Middle Age — Stratechery Hosts Ben Thompson, @benthompson, Stratechery James Allworth, @jamesallworth, Harvard Business Review Podcast Information Feed iTunes SoundCloud Twitter Feedback

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, James. Ben, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Oh, it feels good to say those words again.

0:06.6

So we said, just to be clear, we said we were going on hiatus and we wanted to sort of step back, sort of reset, take care of some other things.

0:14.1

And the number of people that like refuse to believe like the clear words that we spoke, whereas kind of amusing and slightly annoying,

0:25.2

but mostly amusing. Yeah, we seem to have a lot of listeners that go for the worst case scenario, which is interesting. I know, like, what's the real reason? Like, did you guys have a

0:29.3

big fight or whatever? It's like, no, it's exactly what we said. Like, we felt we needed to take a

0:33.9

break. We wanted to sort of step back and think about how we're doing this and approaching it. And that's what we did. And now we are kind of back. I think that condition to seeing

0:42.3

the headline of the news and assuming that there's a deepest story because of all the analysis,

0:46.8

that that's what they wanted when we said we were taking a break too. Yes, we took a break. We are

0:51.0

now back. We are not back on a weekly basis. It's not quite what it was before. We don't have a sponsor. So I can't torture you with sponsorship readings. Yeah. But we are back. And I think going forward, I think both of us got some stuff taken care of in our personal lives. You've started a new job. I've got a bunch of just built up stuff taken care of that I need to take care of. Again, don't assume the worst.

1:23.3

There's nothing bad going on. We just had stuff to do. And I think now, particularly as topics come up that we're both super interested in talking about, that we will be back, not a weekly schedule, but on a relatively regular schedule.

1:28.0

So make sure you have your subscribed to Exponent and you will see a new episode come up and everything will be good.

1:28.7

Yes.

1:30.9

Sounds like a good strategy in general.

1:31.5

Yes.

1:38.9

So this was a good week though to get back at it because speaking of arguing in fights, if I might say so myself, we talked about what I wrote about this week.

1:43.2

And I felt like a little bit of the old James Apple fanboy came out if I might say so myself.

1:46.1

I mean, you can take the,

1:50.3

I was going to do a take the boy out of Apple, but can't take the Apple out of the boy. I don't know.

1:55.7

That's not going to work exactly. But yeah, there was definitely a little bit in our discussion where I was like,

2:01.6

the 16 year old came back where I was back on the internet and like, are you really telling me Apple has a monopoly and charges monopoly prices? Like, are we really winding back to that argument way back when?

2:07.4

And I don't know. Well, we'll get into it and we'll see whether I really am misapplying the

2:12.4

arguments of my youth. We will. And in fact, just to emphasize the point that there was nothing like nefarious about or taking a break, we've actually continued talking every week. We actually have a time set aside to talk about the articles that I'm working on. We just haven't been recording them. And now we are.

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