Feb 12, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min · 14 segments
Ben Thompson, the internet’s premier tech analyst, joins John for a wide-ranging conversation on the mechanics of the internet economy. They discuss the origins of Stratechery and the "1,000 true…
John CollisonHost
So you've talked a lot over the years about aggregation theory and really popularized this idea where pre-internet, often power would live with the supply, whereas on the internet, because of the different marginal cost dynamics and things like that, power will rest with the demand aggregators.
And so booking.com is a much bigger company than any hotel chain, something like that.
And booking.com is the particularly interesting one because they aggregate all the hotels, but they are also aggregated by Google.
So they're like Google's biggest customer, even as they're also on the other side.
But if you invested a dollar in Booking.com and a dollar in Google 20 years ago, you made much more money as a Booking.com shareholder.
But where I was going with this is, how does aggregation theory apply to AI? How does one need to update the framework?
I mean, this is part of the huge, probably one of the most angsty debates that I have internally, generally, which is OpenAI's sort of welfare going forward.
And part of the problem issue that they have is that was definitely the case in 2023, 2024. but you have to actually build the business model around that.
I think fairly famously, at least based on all the tweets that I got when they announced that they're going to launch ads, I've been losing my mind about this fact for a long time.
And like, look, you know, when I'm a YouTube premium subscriber, when I see someone, you know, watch a video without premium.
So you've talked a lot over the years about aggregation theory and really popularized this idea where pre-internet, often power would live with the supply, whereas on the internet, because of the different marginal cost dynamics and things like that, power will rest with the demand aggregators.
And so booking.com is a much bigger company than any hotel chain, something like that.
And booking.com is the particularly interesting one because they aggregate all the hotels, but they are also aggregated by Google.
So they're like Google's biggest customer, even as they're also on the other side.
But if you invested a dollar in Booking.com and a dollar in Google 20 years ago, you made much more money as a Booking.com shareholder.
But where I was going with this is, how does aggregation theory apply to AI? How does one need to update the framework?
I mean, this is part of the huge, probably one of the most angsty debates that I have internally, generally, which is OpenAI's sort of welfare going forward.
And part of the problem issue that they have is that was definitely the case in 2023, 2024. but you have to actually build the business model around that.
I think fairly famously, at least based on all the tweets that I got when they announced that they're going to launch ads, I've been losing my mind about this fact for a long time.
And like, look, you know, when I'm a YouTube premium subscriber, when I see someone, you know, watch a video without premium.
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