Decentralized Work
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I don't know if you guys knew, but today is Data Privacy Day. I found this out from AdExchanger. Do you read AdExchanger, Alex? Daily. It is all about programmatic advertising. Oh, wow. It's just like, it's nonstop programmatic advertising. And they inform you that today is Data Privacy Day. Alex, will they break up the article with nudes? Oh, yeah. It's pretty weird.

I was actually thinking about that when I was going to bring this up. Alex, do you think you could design a really elegant, as Troy would say, and just very thoughtful cookie consent implementation? Like, can that be done? Because I feel like the Japanese are really good at that, where they take these very quotidian things and they just like break it down and they're like, how can we make this as good as it can be? I mean, yes. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't think it's that interesting, but I always thought it should just be built into the browser. It should just be built into the browser. Can't you say that about everything? It's like payments should be built into the browser. Everything should just be built into the browser. Right. I mean, I think that the second you let people build their own websites, they suck. I mean, that's pretty much the rule of the internet. So, you know, these things should be... It would be fine if it was just like a browser level or an operating system level.

you know, thing that you can just tag on the data privacy stuff should definitely be built in the browser. It's like, it's like taking a train into the Alps. It's just works. And the collective had to decide that it was a good thing rather than, you know, traffic jams and honking horns and chaos. So, you know, sometimes the collective makes sense. And that's, that's what Alex is saying about the browser. Yeah.

Yes. And you can, you know, if you, I don't know why we're talking about GDRP now, because this is definitely not of the moment, but there is a Chrome plugin called Consent-O-Matic, and I think there might be others, where you can just preset and it will just handle it for you. Oh, I love Consent-O-Matic. That's perfect. Cool. Let's talk about DeepSeek. This was the sort of... But Privacy Day was a joke. You don't celebrate it. You don't go to dinner with your...

You know, if you're at exchange or friends or something like that? No, I mean, you just... I think you reflect on it for the most part. So we're done? I feel like we've reflected enough. I think we're all...

You know, I'm in favor of data privacy, I guess. I don't really fully understand what it means. I remember like early in my career doing like one of these stories when it was just all about, you know, the advertisers were worried about people deleting their cookies. Like that was the big problem. What do you think that GDPR accomplished? Can you name a couple of things that it accomplished? Did it make you safer?

Did it prevent someone from watching what you were browsing? It's unknown. It's unknown what it did because my defense of GDPR, and it's a very weak one, I admit, is that it forced every organization, large and small, to have meetings that they weren't going to have otherwise about how they handle people's data. Now, whether that, it's impossible to know whether that really had any real impact on people, particularly at the cost of you needing particularly data.

the fact this is about you try that you have to like click out of all that is like cookie consent windows and i know you're just you're just off europe and like that is a real problem it's worse there but you know you know the the thing isn't isn't me brian it's that we are all invested in making the open web work for publishers big and small for creators big and small outside of platforms that don't have to put buttons on everything

And once you're in a platform, you have consent. So I think the big tragedy of is it made the web shittier. And that's not good for something I care about, which is free and open expression of people big and small.

Okay, so enough for expression. Yeah, I think it's a little more complicated than that because those platforms were the ones tracking you across the web. So it's, you know, I don't think the execution was right, but our attention is valuable. And the more we let these people track us, the more they...

get better at siphoning it off. It will be interesting to see if all of this is, to me, it's just all going to be wiped away with this like moving towards this agentic AI. Because I think I'm hearing a lot more people talk about the end of websites really now. We've talked about it a little bit here, but like the website itself seems like it's just a clunky interface for like a database, right? It's still totally vital and will be around for a long time. But

I got some feedback. We got to infuse this podcast with some positivity. Negative media's dying junk is not the subject of this podcast today. At least I would hope it's not. It's change. It's evolution. In evolution, things die. A healthy ecosystem has death.

You know how some people have talked about the future of Mars being maybe a space where you just put a bunch of robots doing things because, you know, it's a great way of kind of retrofitting a space and just...

I haven't heard this, Alex. Some people are talking about this. The idea that a robotic future is coming and when you have robots, you can just kind of put them everywhere and get them to do stuff for you, like industry and reuse kind of these empty spaces that we have. I think the internet might become that. I think websites might remain and

that they might be mostly used by agentic systems because the web is actually a really good way for these systems to do the jobs you need to do. So you got to tell it to go

buy something or do some research. And it turns out that Google forced us all to start making websites that were easy to SEO and easy to read by robots. And it turns out that in the future, websites might only be read by robots. That's the way it's going. I use websites every day. You know what I did just as a test? Yeah, but you listen to music on vinyl, Troy. Sure. You know what? I had a...

Can I finish, please? I had a chance to change out my default web or my search engine on Chrome, and I changed it to ChatGPT, and it lasted about four minutes. Then I went nuts because, you know, you don't want... I mean, and I didn't have little agents running around. Like, it's fun when everybody talks about agents, but that's like talking about... or robots, for that matter. Like, when was the last time you saw a robot, Alex? I saw a robot in Davos, and...

But like, you know, robots are not around. I'm seeing more and more robots in Miami. I see delivery. I mean, maybe it's California, but we see delivery robots. Where? Up in Sonoma? You don't see them. Self-driving cars? New York is like 50 years in the past, like with technological adoption. My point is that I don't need AI sitting between me and a website interpreting it for me. You already do even when you use Google, sir. Right.

Right, but Google also has a list of destinations that I'm looking for and I can efficiently go to those. I'm just saying it's going to take time. I'm not trying to be, you know, it's going to like, I mean, maybe more time than this podcast has in its entire arc of its life. I did. Let me just, and then we'll move on because I can tell Troy's very antsy. There's this like anonymous account like on X. I try to avoid X, but I go back every now and again. It's called Signal with a U and an umlaut.

And this is what Signal had said. "Most of the internet will be completely obsolete very soon. It already feels like an abstraction we tolerate for lack of a better alternative. AI agents replacing it would essentially reduce the web to a set of APIs and scrape data repositories, just raw material for agent-mediated interaction. No need for direct user involvement.

You ask, they fetch, synthesize, and act. Search engines obsolete social platforms distilled into personalized outputs. Even quote-unquote websites as a concept might evaporate. Why visit a web page when your agent brings you the content or makes decisions for you? I mean, I can see how you get to that logic of that dirty future porn talk, but like it's not realistic. It's 100% realistic. Over what time frame? Over what time frame, Alex? Well,

Three to five years. Yeah. I don't know.

This podcast isn't going to last that long, so we'll have a reunion episode. This may be our last episode. You just saw the release of DeepSeek, and we can talk about it, but that shot up to number one on the App Store downloads. Well, let's talk about DeepSeek, because that is the first topic. Then we're going to get into what work and careers are in the future. DeepSeek, it came out in December. It's DeepSeek R1, and it's really caused the stock market to crash.

And all of a sudden, you know, people to wonder about Silicon Valley's approach to AI, which is mostly about using financial firepower. And that's mostly because this research paper came out last week and people started to dig into it. And what they're claiming, and this is from a Chinese research lab that I guess that spun out of a hedge fund, which is kind of hilarious, that they were able to do this.

at a fraction of the cost, like, I don't know, 5 million or something. They didn't fire up a nuclear reactor. They didn't raise, what was Sam Altman talking about? $7 trillion. $500 billion. Building billion, billion. $500 billion, sorry. Building a data center, like a third of the size of Manhattan. Yeah, our leading AI expert, according to Donald Trump, even though he has two years in computer science under his belt.

So this caused a lot of consternation. NVIDIA's stock got whacked. And beyond that, I don't care about the stock market stuff. I mean, personally, yeah, I do. But I don't think that's really here nor there. These companies are...

Completely overvalued, probably. So, Alex, give us your sort of gobsmacked, I guess, over this. Why is this so significant beyond the fact that the Chinese have yet again proven that having a lack of resources drives true ingenuity rather than having every single resource possibly at your finger like our tech oligarchs?

Yeah, well, to just frame it, you know, there was a chip ban that meant that the Chinese AI companies didn't have access to the same kind of advanced chipsets, specifically the ones that can access a ton of memory, which were the big sellers by NVIDIA. And it seems to have forced them down a path where they just, you know, constraints breeds innovation and they built chips.

a system which was likely, you know, to be fair, also trained off existing LLMs. So, you know, I think everybody's kind of doing that where they're training their models. What's the dirty word for that, Alex? Distillation. Distillation, yeah. Where they train their models off other models. Everybody's kind of doing it. You can do it through API calls or by having, you know, something reading off a screen as you type into the GPTs. But here's what they've managed to do. They've managed to build a

First, their V3 model, which was comparable to Chatch EPT, which was pretty impressive. And they said that they built that for $5 million. Now, they could be exaggerating that. But even if it's tenfolds, it's still tenfolds less than what other people seem to be spending. It's a little like your proclamation last week that you designed the logo in half an hour, but it took you 30 years to be able to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

But they also proved something that folks thought was impossible and they lit a fire on everyone. Now, the stock market reacted impulsively as it does, right? The stock market reacts like it's seeing a tiger in the forest every time. But I think when it settled, it kind of...

told the story of who this is going to benefit. There's now an open source engine and they released a lot of the things that are called weights, et cetera, just the logic of this system. And some of the technologies that they use have already been validated in labs. So it shows that this thing is actually the real deal.

at a fraction of the cost it takes a fraction of the cost to run and it and it and it matches up with chat gpt's responses on top of that they also released a reasoning engine you know chat gpt released this reasoning engine where you ask a query and it does kind of multiple queries that it tags together and that reasoning engine is available for free on the app store now you know and it

And it competes with ChatGPT. And it was done literally for the price of what the compensation is for one engineer at these companies. And I think the guys that are looking the worst right now are Altman and OpenAI because they've been talking about these incredible costs, but mostly because I think they've...

They really are like the poster child for this closed source thing. We're going to close this source and we're going to keep it to ourselves because it's too dangerous for humanity, right? And there comes this Chinese company with a fraction of the budget and catches up with them, which is just a sign that if anything, I think a lot of people should be angry that OpenAI has slowed everything down by keeping everything closed source and going against its founding principles.

Am I detecting a hint of accelerationism in your voice? I'm not an accelerationist. I mean, I'm as scared as anyone else. I just want to know where you stand on all this.

Wait, this is a good thing. Wait, I'm sorry. Beyond people's 401ks or whatever, just because Nvidia and all these companies are overweight in the S&P 500, why is this not... I found myself actually agreeing with Donald Trump's reaction to this, which is not a common feeling. He said the release of deep-seek...

AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that they need to be laser-focused on competing. I think absolutely. He's actually really, really nailed the issue because the time to build stuff, and this is the start that I get because we've sort of had this bargain with our tech oligarchs, which is like you get all these spoils, you get untold riches and everything, but the United States is going to be dominant in...

in tech. You have access. You have every advantage in the book. Our capital markets are not only broad, they're unbelievably deep. Try to do any of this stuff in China, it's way harder. We've got export controls. They've got access to the best chips. They've got the government now behind them. They're part of the government, many. And that's the bargain. And so it should be a wake-up call because

Because there is a reaction overall against all institutions out there. And the tech is another freaking institution. If anything, it's our most powerful institution. And it seems to me like they've got egg on their face here.

I mean, yes. I mean, open the eyes to one that looks absolutely the worst here. And same, same all the kind of the myth that everything needs to be closed source because, you know, otherwise it's going to get out there. Well, it turns out it's out there. Turns out that maybe the constraints we put on China forced them down a path where they built something super efficient and

But on top of that, I mean, DeepSeek didn't have to release this into the open source. It's an incredible gift. It's an incredible gift to anyone. It's especially an incredible gift to Amazon, who didn't really have, you know, wasn't really building the best LLM or Apple, right? People were saying they were behind.

Or even Microsoft, who I think they just started really noticing that the LLMs are going to become, you know, pretty common and table stakes. So therefore, that's not where the money is going to be. The money is going to be in building tools, selling access to them, etc. So companies like OpenAI and a lot of these VCs who have been investing in these companies are kind of scrambling right now. But for the rest of us... Well, you can be sure the patriotism is going to come out real quick. Yeah.

Everyone's going to get on their USA Speedos. You know what? It nearly doesn't matter anymore because this thing's out and it's open source and people are already learning from it. You know, it's pretty impressive. One thing that's really great, because I think also I think it's a great consumer story, consumer product story. One thing that they did with their reasoning model, which

which OpenAI decided not to do is share the thought process. So when you ask it a question, you can see a little bubble that shows up. It says, okay, so the person just asked me to look into this, but I also remember that they told me that. And it shows you the entire thought process of the AI. And this is something that OpenAI does

really like decided not to do because they didn't want to share any of that of that information but turns out that was a huge mistake because i think consumers love it people find it cute it makes you trust the system more it teaches you how to ask better questions i think it's a it's a pretty landmark moment in this you know i was telling my wife yesterday it's like as if you know

Sam Altman has been telling us that we need to build this giant rockets, but somebody just strapped an engine to a Subaru and just shot it into space. I have to say, I, I'm a proud American, but I kind of feel like I'm rooting for like the Soviet hockey team here a little bit because like, you're rooting for Ivan Drago. I'm rooting for Ivan Drago because in some ways, like this is a really great story and it's very reminiscent of what happened with Sputnik. And that's why I think it's actually telling to,

to describe it as a Sputnik moment because the Soviets didn't have nearly the resources that Americans had. And Sputnik was such a shock because it showed technological superiority to the American system. Now, it happened in '57. The next year, NASA got formed.

And the US government, in some ways, had led to Kennedy getting elected, and the space race took off. And what was really interesting about the space race is that America was a very centralized approach, and the Soviet Union was very decentralized. And in some ways, it's sort of similar here, where we've got the Chinese, the communist-dominated China taking an open approach, and America...

awash in all this capital and these oligarchs taking a very closed approach. I don't know, some similarities, history does run. - Yeah, I think this is all, I mean, I genuinely think this is good news. You know, the proliferation of software cannot be stopped. It's not like you can contain this stuff.

And having this be open source is going to benefit everyone, I think, long term. What's your take? What's your angle? What is my angle here? Well, I remember the competitive positioning, like...

during the development of search engines, where at the time, Brian Helmy, there was Lycos, Google, AltaVista. And early on, it was Excite, Excite at Home, yeah. It wasn't clear who was going to win that. And the spoils did go to one company. And Google kind of burst onto the scene. I actually remember the day when it was like, oh my God, this thing...

uses a different approach of creating authority and relevance on the internet and it just works better and they had built more efficient delivery infrastructure to make it possible in scale and Google became a household name, the interface was Spartan and they kind of pulled ahead but what really reinforced that win was the execution or the development of a good business model and an ad model that became dominant for

and filled up the coffers and made it the world's most valuable company and enabled them to invest in kind of product reinforcement around the core product in all kinds of ways that made Google an inevitable part of your life, whether that was mail or docs or eventually self-driving cars. I guess my point is the LLM as the product is... The LLM is not the product.

It's a step towards the product. And so I think that what this kind of points out is that, you know, ChatGPT is cool and we're seeing it develop slowly into a product. They're trying to add...

things like, you know, agentic capabilities that'll enable it to become a bigger and bigger part of your life. But we are like in the early chapters of a race to create a product that consumers love. And right now we're just sort of seeing the scaffolding and, and we're not there yet. So we don't have a product and, and the, and what wins longterm. And I actually think this is kind of refreshing is brand UX and

like great product and vitally always distribution. And in this case, OpenAI got a little jump on distribution because there was so much buzz around the chat GPT launch that they had, you know, a fair bit of usage and chat became the household name, just like Google eventually became a household name. And I think what this shows is that the war, you know, this battle for dominance of the new interface isn't over yet.

And we're going to see better products that come out and delight us in new ways. Like Alex gave the great example of reasoning as a dimension to the product that's a nice addition. Just because you mentioned Google winning, one of the key reasons that Google won is that they came out

and it was things shared during their S1 filing, it came out that they had built their data centers off the shelf parts. Commodity machines. Commodity machines. And then therefore, their cost structure was completely different. And this is also where in media, this is...

We're saying the product isn't there yet. Maybe the consumer product is being developed, but I think there's already... Facebook meta, for example, will benefit hugely from this because all its ad systems are going to be run and generated by AI. It's already happening.

This stuff is everywhere. MARK BLYTH: And Apple, as you pointed out, will benefit because these models can run on small devices or on your desktop. There's other things too. MARK BLYTH: And they have the best small device-- their devices-- and it's not talked about enough--

I mean, they seem... The way they use memory. Which is why Zuckerberg's comment about Apple not inventing anything is crazy because they've just actually completely reinvented their chips and built chips that are entirely ready for AI because they can access so much memory. So this stuff is... The interesting thing is that there's still so many kind of chess plays to be played here, right? Like we're going to see huge swings like...

Apple looked weak. Now it looks really strong. OpenAI looked unbeatable. Now it looks incredibly fragile. Well, I always thought, you know, I named off a bunch of search engines. There was also, you know, iterations in who was going to win the browser war. I've always thought that OpenAI will be our, you know, this generation's, you know, Netscape.

And I think it will. Ethan Mollock, who's an AI researcher at the Wharton School, made the point, by the way, that the cost for GPT-4 dropped 1000x in the last 18 months.

So he wrote that like a 95% price drop in reasoning models, which is what this deep seek represents, isn't going to destroy the marketplace. And not only that, we saw Google last week release its own kind of reasoning model, very, very inexpensively built on similar techniques. And the market didn't freak out.

So I actually think that there's a kind of a little bit of an overcorrection happening. And I think that the models that the frontier models that are the best that win will actually find some novel executions, just like Google did with the search engine. And then they'll build better product on top of it. So DeepSeek, if you use it, by the way, I know we're all smitten with it. And it's kind of cool because it's at the top of the list on the app store. It's not that good.

It's kind of cool, but it's not... Bullshit. It's great. Bullshit. I've been using it all morning, so, you know... Okay, that's enough. It's not better than ChatGPT, Alex. It's just not. Yeah, I think what I wonder, because I think a little bit more in narratives, is I just find it... To me, it's like...

The most interesting part of this, and we'll see how it plays out in the future, is that there were a lot of seemingly bad bets that were made. And I think incentives come into play. You had a bunch of players who were trying to lock up an industry, right? And so, the best way to lock up an industry is make it too expensive to compete. And you're always going to have the advantage, these multi-trillion dollar companies, of locking out potential competitors. Because again,

It stands to repeat, Silicon Valley hates competition. These companies do not want competition. They want the rest of us fighting it out in a giant squid game. But for themselves, they do not want competition at all. And what I like about this is it's throwing open the doors to all kinds of competition. So forget time to build. It's time to compete. They've got untold resources.

And the fact that they were caught unaware while they were having all these dumbass academic debates about whether we've achieved AGI or anything that nobody really gives a shit about.

Instead of building real products, a lot of this stuff right now has been such a boring story of could, it might, these agents could do this stuff. Whereas like on the day-to-day product level, I don't know, is it worth reopening Three Mile Island for like Clippy? Like on steroids? It just doesn't seem there. You know, if...

I think that any of the investments we do in power generation and power distribution is actually pretty good, even if it turns out that a lot of this is a bubble. You know, the same way that people laying down fiber at the beginning of the internet didn't turn out to be a great business case, but we're still using that fiber today. So I'm okay for anything that gets a grid up to speed and generates more power. Okay, so if they have an overcapacity of GPUs or whatever, that is not going to be a complete waste of power.

Yeah, I mean, if you believe some people that capacity will get used at some point, the problem with GPUs is that they're depreciating and they're kind of useless after three years. So there's going to be a tremendous amount of waste there. And that's not real kind of lasting infrastructure. It's Satya's thing that everybody's quoting today about Jevons paradox. Is that the way you pronounce it? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Which is that as AI gets more...

efficient and accessible you see usage skyrocket you know turning it into some kind of commodity we just you know we want more and more of so i think it'll just lead to you know kind of you know computing ubiquity and just free availability of this kind of tool okay so it's which will then well then but then yeah it's like wi-fi brand but then the one thing it will do is that

I love that these models like deep seek will be free and my thought was always that they would end up being free like Google's free.

And we're going to, by necessity, see kind of an acceleration in needing to have ad-driven model to support them. I saw a clever post that noted the irony of the fact that a quote-unquote non-profit is charging us $200 a month for access and that a hedge fund is giving it to us for free. I mean, yeah, that's great. I mean, OpenAI is looking ickier by the day, you know, and I think that... If only there was a sign.

Brian has a real thing. I don't like Sam Altman. He doesn't like Sam at all. I think he could be like the Adam Neumann of AI. Just because, again, where there's smoke, there's fire. And I just believe that you should believe people when they tell you who they are. And this is not like a Three's Company misunderstanding with Sam. It's like a repeated...

instances of him acting in slimy ways. - What was the misunderstanding in Three's Company? - It was always, every single episode was a misunderstanding. - Jack's gay? - Yeah, well, that was just a sort of play to get to. - That's a recurring B segment, yeah.

But yeah, every episode boiled down to it was a giant misunderstanding. Mr. Furley thought something that wasn't actually true. And then the sort of resolution was, oh, no, it's just a misunderstanding. It just seems as well, like just seeing how the relationship with Microsoft is going, et cetera, it just feels like there's a little bit of shiftiness in there that doesn't make it

It makes him seem pretty self-serving. Either way, I think they're probably sweating right now because this was...

probably the look here's the thing there's going to be cheaper ai that people can build stuff with it's not going to cost as much money to run these are all good things good for the environment they mean like you can test things out more efficiently right now this stuff is really capital intensive and it's also showing people that you know things can be built in a better way so that's going to be exciting to see but you know these everyone is going to be fine

So one side note I just wanna like sort of stray into from this is,

Did you say the perplexity is, I don't know if this is serious. This is another guy I'm not sure about, the perplexity CEO. He certainly has a nose for PR. Yeah, I don't know. Like when he jumped in on the New York Times and the tech unions, I'm like, is this guy serious? And some of his statements, I was like, hmm, you might be smoking your own supply here. Anyway, supposedly they want to own TikTok. And maybe this goes to the, and of course cut like Trump in somehow or the government.

But maybe this goes to the distribution question because perplexity, you talk about being like the Netscape. I don't know, this is like Netscape Junior where it's pretty much impossible for perplexity to win against Google and even like ChatGPT. I think it's best...

It's best outcome here. It gets bought by Apple, you know, or something like that. You know, that's what happens. I can't see. I mean, I think, and the news, I mean, the actual news about DeepSeek is great for the dominant players. It's great for Facebook because it just shows to them that they can, you know, generate more AI to generate more surface area for their ads and more,

ad logic and it's going to cost them less and less so the economics are better. It's great for Amazon because they're also an ad network and they just want to rent you servers. It's great for Apple because they can run it on their phones. It's great for Google because they want to run AI everywhere and it just shows them that they can run it for much cheaper. For companies like Perplexity,

but I think it's going to be really hard to just like beat out the operating systems. Like here's the thing as this, if, if this AI stuff and every day we're seeing signs that yes, it is, you know, I know Troy's disappointed by deep seek, but it's like,

It's genuinely incredible what it's accomplishing. Well, it's not that I'm disappointed. I don't think it's superior. It's like, imagine, Troy, there was a baby that could dunk. And the baby, there's like a tiny little baby and it's six months old. I love it. I love it when you use babies in your analysis. You put the baby on a field or whatever, and the baby can dunk, like beautiful back dunks.

And you're like there and you're saying, yeah, but I've seen better in the NBA. Like that's what we're saying here. And the fact that there's a baby that can dunk is actually the most impressive thing. Not that he's slightly worse than, you know,

that's going to be our first line of schwag to baby can dunk. Baby can dunk. So now that baby can dunk, we need, you know, you kind of need to look at, you know, what happens. So therefore, the small players have less of an advantage over the big players because all that Apple needs to do and it's what they've been doing is turn it on and all of a sudden, you know, am I going to go into a website and download perplexity to do my searches or ask Siri, you know, and they'll get it right over time.

I think that's right. And I think actually what will happen is seeing that kind of picture play out, perplexity is going to try to mature their ad model and they're doing really aggressive partnerships and they will get sold based on their ability to become someone's ad model in the AI market.

That's what will happen. Fun times, everyone. All right. Hey, Brian, baby can dunk, brother. Yeah, I know. I'm going to make a t-shirt. I'm making a t-shirt, baby can dunk, and I'm also making a t-shirt, baby noose. Baby noose, baby can dunk. I realize I use babies in my analogies a lot. I once called the Airbnb a baby with a chainsaw. Is that me? I don't know. I thought because it's unintended consequences. Yeah.

I don't remember. It made sense. I thought you meant that the company comes off as being kind of benevolent with the vaginal logo and all that. And then Brian's a monster CEO behind the scenes, you know? Yeah. He's not a monster. No, no, no. In the best way. Oh, in the best way. Yeah. I wanted us to take a moment to think about rethinking work. Our...

I think he's a friend of the pod. Rashad Tabakawala has a new book out on this. Troy, you and I went to his little event here. And, you know, look, there's a lot of like focus. Again, the return to office stuff is finally playing itself out. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg came out with his idea that companies need more masculine energy. We can talk about what that means. But I do think we're a few years behind.

We're a few years down the road, right, from the pandemic, right? And I think one of the lasting changes really has been the relationship of people to work and career. And, you know, I think AI just complicates this more. It accelerates it. I know a lot of my conversations that I have with people, particularly in middle age, because middle-aged people should be hanging out with other middle-aged people. Otherwise, it'd be weird. Does that mean I got to stop hanging out with my kids and their friends? Yeah.

No, I mean, you should hang out with other middle-aged people. That's just normal, I think. I mean, you should be aware of what young people, but you'll never be cool. I think one of the essential things about being middle-aged is recognizing you're not going to be cool. The lamest middle-aged people are those that think that they're cool. I think you want to say you're pretty hip.

But anyway, I keep basically, this is a really weird and difficult time, I feel like. And this is for the laptop class. This is not for factory workers, right? Of figuring out where work fits in lives and also what careers mean. Because I think that that is going to be

completely upended with the way the economy and society is going. This return to office stuff to me is a sideshow to a much more modern way of working that is more fluid, that's more networked. I don't understand if the rest of society is becoming this way, why would work still be hierarchical? Why would it be fixed? It just doesn't make sense to me.

So let's have a conversation about this. I like it. Troy, do you have any opening remarks on how I feel? Yeah. I mean, maybe, just maybe, we created a construct in sort of civilized corporate kind of norms and structures where we normalize the idea of being a kind of middle managing corporate patsy.

And that for the millions of people, say like my son, who never decided to go on that path because he's got a different trajectory in life. He still has time to become a metal manager. But he never will. He never will. And I will advise him to never do that. But for the millions that never belonged as the kind of structure inside of corporations, get the fuck out.

Like, it's not worth it. And it's not rewarding. It's not fulfilling. And, you know, you have no agency and you'll hate the way you spend a third of your life.

And so I think that there are still going to be people that strive to get ahead in corporations and big companies will exist. And, you know, people will do everything they can to kind of climb the ladder in those. But like for a lot of people that used to occupy the safe positions of kind of middle management, there's a lot of other ways to make a living and have more agency. And that's what I want for people.

And that means, you know, that, you know, working across, you know, depends on what you want to do, but like working as a, you know, consultant across lots of companies, starting your own company, just finding a way where.

You kind of eat what you kill and you're taking care of yourself. And I think there's something like, what was the number? Six million new companies started in the US this year. I think we're seeing a lot of people decide that

The, you know, kind of tools and technologies and architecture of modern society is going to enable us to create a new type of employment relationship that doesn't look like what it used to. And I think that's a great thing. I think it's a great thing, to be honest. And to me, the return to work thing is, I'm very confused by the return to work thing. We're returned to office. We've been returned to work. We never left work. Yeah, I haven't returned to work, but...

Return to tennis lessons. Yeah. The return to office thing is, now I'm kind of rambling, but the return to office thing is very confusing for me because I would want to create and use it as an opportunity to create a company that did meet

the needs of the customers of that company that did it in a way that allowed people to live better lives and be more efficient. I just am constantly reminded how much time we wasted, uh,

With all of the kind of artifice of going into the office, particularly in places where you spent an hour going in each direction. And, you know, I still advocate, obviously, for doing everything you can to create culture and connections with your coworkers. But the way we structured work before was inefficient. And I think that you can think about it differently and people can lead better lives. And that makes me happy.

with their families and for their kids and stuff. Alex, how are you building your work environment? You're not in an office, right? Are your people everywhere? Yeah, I mean, right now, I mean, this is my studio. I'm remaking it, so it's a bit of a mess. But no, we're distributed. Honestly, we all wish we could go to an office and work together because I think for the type of work we're doing, it's great to have proximity.

You can get an office in San Francisco? Oh my God. Yeah, I think we all, I mean, everybody lives a little bit, you know, there's like Portland, Sonoma, San Francisco, and then LA. So, you know, it would require people to move, but... Make a move.

Yeah, my company, we're building it with very determined to keep it small and expand as needed with, you know, collaborating with other companies or working with contractors. So like a collection of, you know, individual contributors and other studios. So we don't want to have like, you know, 600 people at the company. But I think at a certain point,

And I want that for everyone. That's what I'm choosing to do. I used to run a team that was like over 700 people and it's exhausting and it's inefficient. And there's a lot of reasons why that doesn't work. But there's also a lot of reasons why you kind of need certain structures at scale because it becomes really hard to manage a collection of cats who run independently.

It works when we meet every morning and we chat and yes, we're working remotely, but communication is happening all the time. That's fine and easy when it's five people. When it's like a thousand people, you get kind of that overhead and that structure that actually brings a lot of people comfort. A lot of people want to go to work and be just told what to do and

and do their night five at home and do the thing that they actually enjoy. And they don't want the whole agency of making all the decisions and being... Oh, yeah, it sucks. Yeah, I mean, yes. And so, especially when you're getting paid very little when you're starting out, you kind of just want to be told what to do and not having any of these responsibilities. So I think it's hard. I think it's beyond that, honestly. I don't think it's just necessarily an experience thing. Like, I think a lot of people want...

And like you were saying, Troy, like there's so many advantages to having agency, right? But usually people would exchange eating shit for stability, right? For 401k matches, for healthcare, for honestly, you can go into work and have a bad day and there's other people to cover up for you. Like, you know, if you're eating what you kill and you have bad days, then you're not eating. You're making a good point, but you're assuming that there's

you know, you're inside of the beast and you have all of those benefits or you're outside and you have, you know, you have to kind of fend for yourself in all aspects. What if we imagined a different work relationship where there were structures that helped us to take care of some of those things, but still be independent? Well, that is the, that's the, that's the sort of dream. I mean, I was like,

briefly interested in like dowels and whatnot because alternative structures of working because like we've got this issue where I think all of us feel like we want autonomy but then we want collaboration and it's just like you're saying with your company Alex like you guys wish you could all live together but like whoever you have who's living in LA does no interest in moving to San Francisco to make that happen. It's worth noting by your company Alex is that

That you think about it, you know, like that that's a natural amalgamation of people and talents that live across, you know, five different locations. In the old days, we would have forced everybody to move to the city. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, like when I met you, Alex, if we had bought your company, you know, today in Cyprus, you know, you might not have moved to the U.S.,

You might have just stayed in Cyprus. So I just think that our mindset around how we think about location and commuting has changed materially. And it needs to. I think commuting is... I always said, I don't know if people hate working at an office as much as they hate the commute. It's always been the commute. That's the issue. It's being stuck in traffic. I mean, you can see that a lot of people making decisions for return to home have great commutes. Like those executives at Apple, it's a bike ride away.

It sounds great to them. But one thing I'm wondering is, as if the agent kind of AI future is upon us and companies are going to hire humans as well as robots to get jobs done, and a lot of these AI agents are going to exist in the cloud,

it's going to be kind of weird to ask people to come to an office. By definition, that's a fully distributed workforce. Some of them are in the cloud, some of them are in Minnesota, some of them are in New York, and it doesn't really matter where they are. And the tools are definitely going to help with that. I think part of the issue right now, it's definitely structural, but it's also very much tools-based, and it's the way people use their tools, our communication tools,

aren't really great. It's either you write an email, you're on Slack, or you're on a Zoom call. None of these things are particularly really good at getting information across. It's hard for people to track information when things are-- Google Docs is great, but you look into anybody's Google Docs, and it's just like hundreds of documents, and people are losing track of things.

And this is where I think like, you know, the future of the SaaS model and of these tools is really going to make some of that stuff feel so much easier and so much less of an overhead, right? Because people are getting tired of sitting in front of screens with meetings and reading through hundreds of Slack messages a day. Like you see people working remote and a lot of them that I talked to really hate it, you know? Same, I hear people saying they need human connection. I do hear that.

So they're, well, I, it was like, so the, I think it's, I, I should have gotten the statistic, but basically like people are spending more time at home now than at the peak pandemic. And like, so there, I think it's hard to disentangle the two of those, right? Like, I mean, while there is like a lot of high profile,

profile efforts to drive people back in the office. A lot of people are working from home. And I just had a dinner last week and saw a former colleague. And he went from our old company that was remote to it. He's basically been like, man, there's some days I don't leave my apartment. It's great to come to this dinner. It's really, it's truly, it's truly, I mean, when you consider the societal impacts of that, a lot of people met their partners at work, right?

a staggering amount. And I was talking to some young folks who were working at Airbnb at the time. - There's ways to do this via Slack. I mean, I'm out of that game, but like I think that-- - Sure, sure. But I think like if you look at that lifestyle where you're not separating your work life

from your home life, right? I think it's a psychological toll. I could afford just having this little office that's just outside my house. So at least I need to walk out the house. And that I think is beneficial. But some guy I was talking to said, yeah, I use this computer all day to work.

And then I make dinner and I bring my dinner to my table. And then I watch my shows on the same fucking computer. It's dystopian. A lot of people do that because, you know, that's their TV and that's whatever. And there's no gap between work and life. And while I think hypothetically the idea of being completely free of where you work

is really great because it saves us from a lot of time wasted and it means that young parents can spend more time with their kids, et cetera. It also, I think, kind of creates this, you know, just blurred lines between your home life and your work life and you're kind of always doing neither.

We should have saved this episode, honestly, because I'm actually, I didn't tell you guys, I'm pitching a, I won't say which one because I'm pitching them. I'm pitching like a large landlord in New York City to sponsor people versus algorithms to get people into offices. So everyone, you should go to offices. This particular landlord's very heavy in Dumbo and Williamsburg.

You made a comment, though, related to that, Brian, about what you're seeing inside of WeWork. So I wondered if you could. Yeah. So I have switched. So I work from home a little bit, but I have an industrious. I had WeWork for a couple of years. WeWork's a pit of despair. It's the bankruptcy, post-bankruptcy WeWork thing.

Yeah, they got more efficient, but it got pretty grimy in there. I mean, it's still fine. It's like Starbucks. It's like late Starbucks, not the 1990s Starbucks. So I switched to industrious, which is, to me- Are the bathrooms clean? So, well, the WeWork's greatest innovation was that there were two innovations. One was to have the staircase connecting the floors, to have that kind of connectivity. And the other was the floor-to-ceiling bathroom stalls. Okay.

And honestly, I think that's a big part of why people don't want to go back to the office, which I don't blame them. It's an unnecessary humiliation. We're the richest country on earth. You should have private bathroom stalls. It's ridiculous. Industrious is a little higher end. I find more carpeting, which I like. You know WeWork because it's always like hardwood floors. And it seemed like WeWork was designed for assuming that everyone was developers.

And it's in fact, they're always filled with salespeople. I know this because I hear the salespeople selling all day in WeWorks. And so they didn't really think that through because they're too loud. But I like Industrious. Industrious is a good, you know, you still get out. I'm going there this afternoon. They have free coffee.

Free coffee, but I don't drink the coffee there. But they have little snacks too. You know, popcorn, seasoned pretzels. Those are pretty good. Not those like little vegetable straws. Those are terrible. That's like... I love working in co-working spaces. I mean, I think I also... Oh my gosh, said no one ever. Yeah.

I like working in coffee shops. I think the way my brain works, I enjoy being surrounded by activity. I write in coffee shops. I do my sales work. I have some really nice ones. I have some really nice co-working spaces that aren't chains in the North Bays. You know, they're kind of one-offs. And people have opened these as...

And I would recommend to everyone that's working from home, like look around, you do a search. Don't just look at industrious and, and we work. I don't know if, if, if I'm talking against one of our future sponsors here, but there are individual little coworking spaces that open up and some of them have really nice little perks and you get to know the people. And I actually enjoy working,

My week is spent working in a whole bunch of different spaces. The space I'm in now is the one where I have a lot of equipment for recording and music making and stuff like that. But otherwise, I'm just on the laptop. And the working from home thing, I think, is... I don't think it's particularly healthy, but working from anywhere, that's awesome. Yeah. So I'm wondering, I had a couple of questions for you guys about this. So you have... I get your point, Alex, that...

Meeting and socializing and company culture, particularly in, I think, creative industries is really important. Do you think that the kind of core role of manager, which is directing, coordinating, evaluating, measuring work has suffered because of remote work?

Has that part of it, are we still effective? Because, you know, I'm on the board of a company of 600 people. It's all remote, has only ever been remote. You know, it seems to be doing, you know, an effective job at, you know, kind of efficiently creating the products that they create.

And the only thing is I've always thought that, oh, my God, if like a bunch of the leadership left, this would be fragile because the bonds that exist between people are maybe superficially created, you know, by through digital connections. But like our...

Is the role of management as effective in a remote setting, do you think? Can I go first on this? Because I have a lot of thoughts on this. I think it has exposed poor management and poor managers because the office is a command and control center and it is a blunt instrument.

It doesn't require a lot of finesse. You get to sit at the head of the table. You get to see, you know, you can gauge who's doing what and whatnot. The connectivity is easier. You do drop-bys and whatnot. You have to work harder, I feel like, as a manager. And I think a lot of the war on middle managers, maybe it just exposed that many of them were worthless at the end of the day. And that is my sort of take. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's really exposed...

a class of management, which was basically just there to fill in the gaps. I think there's another thing that the office provides is the fact that there's space and the fact that there is this kind of understanding that the levels, you know, the levels of reporting are respected because they kind of line up with space, right? Okay, well, you go talk to your boss and then your boss goes to talk to your boss and then that person goes to the CEO. What happens when you...

make everyone distributed is that it completely flattens out that process. Like, why the hell should I send a Slack message to you so you can send one to him? I'm just going to send it to him. And it's turning out that people are noticing that I don't need two layers of management between me and these people.

And so it's kind of exposed all that. And once again, that's like a big tool story. The integration of Slack into the workforce and the ability to just kind of jump in a Zoom call with everyone is one of the secondary effects that came from the pandemic and working at home that showed a lot of people that, wait, I don't need these people. Right.

I had experiences when the pandemic hit and we all started working from home where...

We stopped some manager meetings. Like they just didn't become useful. Like I didn't realize it at the time, but we would just like end up doing like these bigger meeting where stuff was communicated to a bunch of people rather than these kind of like staged meetings where I communicate things to one layer and then they communicate to another. So you're saying these are great points, you guys. You're saying that you can have a much broader pyramid in it.

in that Hollywood Squares kind of environment. - I love Hollywood Squares. It's like the Peter Principle brought to life. Do you know the Peter Principle?

It's this management concept. It was by Lawrence Peter. And it was that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence. Employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they're no longer competent. And I think that's fair. I think it does require, these flatter pyramids do require competence.

leaders that are much able to get much closer to the work. You got to do the work anymore. The ridiculousness I feel like of companies was the idea that you had to get really good at work. You had to be a great designer or not design. Like that's how you got ahead was to stop designing. Right. Like in like writing, like, I don't know how many times as a reporter, I was always, I was going to like an editor and editor,

I'm like, the last time you filed a story was like 15, 20 years ago. It is. The amount of feedback that I got that I was too close to the work as head of design at a company is staggering. And the thing I always thought is like, wait, here's how you reward people for being great at what they do. Stop doing it.

Just stop doing it. But I think in these organizations, and as you go to a flatter, more networked organization, having your hands dirty and being able to do the work and being really good at doing the work is even more important. You can't just coast on hierarchy and the fact that you have some title and maybe your office is in a nicer part of the office.

Like you have to lead by having not just competence, but having like really being really highly skilled. It's practitioner leadership. I couldn't agree more. And I mean, I even remember, you know, the wonderfully designed, you know, Hearst Tower was completely built around the notion of reinforcing, you know, your sort of pay grade with architecture, right?

And the entire, every floor plate was built that way. And a lot were for old, but once you got executive dining room, those guys, you know, I had two bays outside of my office, wood walls. I had basically, you know, a 2000 square foot office or a thousand square foot office. And, you know, like when you went up there, it was awesome.

It was almost kind of ritualistic, like you were going to see someone really important. Where did Alice go? Did he have enough? No. He lost his connection. Starlink. Do you want to continue? Yeah. And so what I did is I actually put my desk in a cubicle.

And it, it culturally, it was really awkward. It was really awkward because the whole system was about kind of distance and reverence for leadership. When someone's sitting in a cube next to you and the person's president of the company, like it was odd. So I went back up to the office. Yeah.

I don't know. No, I mean, but yeah, it was-

The rank and file know who's like real and who's not. And the respect levels sort of rise and fall to me with that. And I just think now that's more accentuated and that in order to be a leader of any organization, it's going to be more...

consensual at some point. It's going to be more... I agree with you. And I think that's why I never really could understand this kind of, I don't know, this bullshit masculine energy thing that was coming from... Oh, yeah. Like, first of all, if you know him or the legend of him, he's always been sort of like ruthlessly competitive and, you know, the kind of attributes of masculinity to me were always kind of manifest at Facebook and it's also reflected in...

I think, as you pointed out, what, last week in the composition of their workforce, but like, doesn't, I don't know, doesn't the future of the workplace look more like the attributes that we would have associated with female leadership?

I think so. It's more about networked and more about like getting people on the same page in some ways. I think what he meant by masculine energy, it's like basically it's code for aggression, right? At the end of the day. Ruthlessness, meritocracy, you know, fighting to win. I don't know. All those characteristics. I mean, I would have thought were always manifest at Facebook. I think that the...

the modern kind of leadership position would be better compared to like how we kind of grow, nurture, mentor, you know, which would be characteristics that I would associate with female leadership. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And I think one of the other things that I would say is like, I don't know if he was flicking at this, but I do think within companies, I haven't worked in a company since whatever, October 2020, so I take it for what it's worth.

But like the culture of offense that sort of rose up, I think maybe is like flicking at that a little bit. I think in the very understandable and correct drive to make offices more respectful environments, more open and welcoming environments to people of all backgrounds and types, that there can be when that becomes bureaucratized.

And this is to me the most substantive arguments against the quote unquote DEI is that when it becomes bureaucratized, it can go in weird directions. And this is any bureaucracy basically exists to continue itself. And sometimes I feel like it gave rise to a culture of offense. And I think one of the realities of being able...

Having a more, having a work environment that's more consensual and more autonomous and gives people that autonomy and is very accepting is you have to accept that, you know, people aren't perfect and that people have like rough edges that we've always sanded down and should continue to sand down in professional environments. But like, you're always going to have like screw ups at the end of the day. And I think that is something that,

the modern sort of organization will have to come to grips with. And I just think it's like why it's so much easier to deal with like smaller organizations because you can solve a lot of issues and issues are always gonna come up, particularly interpersonal issues.

in smaller groups rather than having sweeping, having it intermediated by a bureaucracy always sucks. I think that's why anyone, not anyone, I think most people in companies sort of has like a weird relationship with HR. Maybe that's my family. My family has always had a weird thing with HR. What do you mean by that? I,

I don't know. Like, I mean, HR is always like the, the boogeyman of like, you know, like they're the dumping ground for like lots of like, you know, issues that like executives don't want to deal with. And, you know, they're just like some kind of intermediary that, but maybe that's my, that's my thing. Yeah. I've been talking to some folks that, you know, are involved in their corporate DEI efforts and they,

They've said, you know, contrary to the pressures that you're seeing coming out of Washington, they still want to kind of maintain efforts to make their workplace more diverse. And I think that's probably a good thing, to be honest. I do think when it becomes the defining characteristics of advancement and the kind of, like you said, of kind of the rules of the bureaucracy that maybe, you know, merit can be a victim. But the idea of being...

a more inclusive environment, but maybe more slightly more permissive. And we maybe interpreted it a little bit wrong that, that people are, you know, people are complicated and that we need to have, we need to create an environment where people can kind of make mistakes and stuff is, is really what we need to get back to without throwing the whole thing out. Okay. Alex, you're back. Just in time for a good product. Okay.

I have somebody working in a basement and they took the power out. You have a lot of people working on things. Yeah. And you look, how do you manage that? Well, he dresses like the Unabomber.

Is he working on your boiler? Do you have heat? We're building a pantry in the basement. It's very nice. Oh, fun. That's creepy. Are you a prepper? Yeah. We do our own canning. We have a garden. Oh, I can attest to the fact that they make unbelievably nice preserves. I had some this weekend, Alex. I went back to Shelter Island. Your guys' preserves were there.

The spiced peach chutney or whatever it was. Delicious. You guys should come to the farm and we should record an episode here. I'd love to. One of the great things that you made are those homemade dried tomatoes. I am. My wife is mostly responsible for all this. I'm the muscle sometimes. You do the actual canning? Well, some of it.

Some of the picking. Do you sell this at all? Do you go to flea markets? No, we just give it away. We give it away or we give stuff to the food pantry. But it's, you know, AI is coming to take over. You got to learn out of the skills, man. Send some more my way. I wouldn't mind getting a gift from you.

All right. Well, that is a good product. But what else do we have? Well, you know, I was debating this because I had some folks over to watch that sad football game. I'm a big Buffalo Bills fan. Oh, yeah. The Eagles game was very... I hate the Eagles.

And I really wanted to see a Buffalo Washington final. So that's what I came back for. Bad weekend. No, let me get to it, Alex. Just be patient, please. And, and I was, I hadn't eaten all day. I was really hungry. And in my mind, I don't know if whether I'd seen an ad or my son and I had talked about it. I wanted Domino's pizza. And you know, when you're in New York, you don't order, you don't order Domino's pizza. I always wonder who gets Domino's pizza. The app is excellent. It tells you Abdul is making your pizza. Yeah.

And like it tells you that it's ready for quality checking and then it's out for delivery and you can track the guy. It's really nice. The pizza came and I had custom ordered it. It was decent, actually. You know, it was a little processed. So I actually went down the street and got kind of a locally made one.

Nothing endorses a good product that you ordered and got a different one. Well, a few more people came over, so I ordered some more people. Anyway, the Domino's Pizza app kind of delighted me, to be honest. And I like the pizza, too, because I got Hawaiian. I'm a big fan of Hawaiian pizza. I really like Hawaiian. Is that because you're Canadian? I'm all in on Hawaiian. I think you might take a little bit of sweet. I mean, Hawaiian is a good product. It's not my product this week. I put onions on it, which wasn't a terrible idea.

but I like, I like just a lot of ham and a lot of pineapple on my pizza. I think that's terrific. It is a Canadian thing, by the way. I was also reading, and I don't know if I brought this up in the, but you know, Tina Brown's newsletter. I love Tina Brown and it's called fresh. Well-written. Yeah. It's so was, she's a good writer, really great writer.

But she's not my good product this week. I'll tell you, I was very impressed with Willa Bennett's debut as the editor of Cosmo. And I think usually an editor joins a magazine brand or whatever, and Cosmo is a really difficult one because it's really suffered economically and financially.

You know, it's having a hard time kind of positioning itself in, you know, a market, you know, dominated by young people using social media. So it's a tough job. And it's made more difficult by, in some ways, when you're in the Hearst Tower and you're the editor of Cosmo, you're sort of suffocated by the kind of ghost of Helen Gurley Brown, who was the founder and the great kind of inaugural editor of that publication, who

who kind of led it for many, many years and created this kind of iconic, you know, kind of sex positive, you know, media brand that defined for lots of people, a kind of new mentality for a generation of women. It was really powerful. And the old timers at Hearst, uh,

who rightfully worshiped Helen Gurley Brown, were very nostalgic for that era. So it was always difficult for an editor, a young editor, to sort of step outside and kind of try to reinterpret the brand. Media is, of course, about reinvention and challenging convention and, you know, creating controversy. Hearst doesn't love controversy, so it's a tough job. So her first cover, right, she's been there for a couple of months, and her first cover I thought was really great.

And it's, you should look it up. It's Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song. So you never have two people, especially a man, or at least historically on the cover of a Cosmo. And Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song are very low key. You don't see much of him at all. And I thought that the spread was terrific. They're in their PJs hanging around the house.

And I thought, what a great way to introduce your version of this brand. They also reenacted the John Lennon Yoko Ono. Yeah, they did. And she's from High Symbiotic, right? Oh, the woman you mean? Willa Bennett. Willa Bennett, yeah. So both of them, Macaulay, I don't know, where did Brenda Song get famous? Was she a child actor too? I think she was.

Anyway, good cover. Good sort of, you know, introduction of a new editor to a magazine in a difficult spot. And I applaud them. Good for them. What's their business model? Ads? Webinars.

I have one tomorrow. If anyone wants to come by. I also want to say, you know, we. You just broke into his pitch, man. You're stepping onto my pitch. 1 p.m. tomorrow. That's one reason Brian's here is so he can shill all his webinars. Well, 1 p.m. tomorrow, guys, means nothing. Online forum. Because what we had to do this week, and we'll own up to the audience, is record early, which is why our deep seek information is probably out of step with what's

going on and this is gonna this is gonna air but here's the thing here's the thing troy even though people are gonna hear this after the online forum not webinar takes place they can still sign up and get the replay and so where did they sign up well we'll drop it in the show notes okay

Troy's not amused. Another good reason to go there. We didn't record this. It's going to be fascinating. Newsweek's chief product officer. By the way, Newsweek is a weird success story in publishing. Like I know it's grading with a curve, but Newsweek is growing. It is profitable. They're actually doing really well. And you know what it is? Because everyone needs a side hustle. It's the listings business. It's the lists. Affiliate?

Lists and affiliate or just lists? Just like lists, best hospitals, like, you know, that's, you know, that's accolades basically. Right. Yeah. Like licensing. And then you like license the, whatever the mark to, to people, but they, they've done really well. They just hired the, the former head of events at Digiday just went there, Megan Knapp. So they're going to get deeper into, into events. And yeah. Well, now that they have more traffic than the Washington Post. Yeah.

I did not know that's impressive. I did get a couple of notes saying it was refreshing for you to take a break from depressing media talk and do an episode on productivity. So, you know, people, I, I was, you know, I was skeptical about us doing a kind of, you know, evergreen episode like that. Turns out, you know, Brian, people liked it. Good. Or at least a small sample of people liked it.

Which is why I sent this note out to say we could talk about the future of work. We could. We waved it in. We waved it in. I'm going to have to bounce. I'm going to go too. Yeah.

Can you send me some preserves? Some of those tomatoes, Alex? I love those tomatoes. I'll see if I have some more. I think we might have run out. You need to come in. You need to start coming in the summer when it's picking season. We might have avocados this year. I'm going to come to San Francisco soon. I've got to see my... Just give me more than 24 hours warning. Just drop in. Hi, Alex. I'm here. Yeah, exactly. All right, guys. Bye. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

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