Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Have you guys ever been to like a Mexican pharmacy? Yeah. They've got them everywhere, but they're like, they're just for tourists. They're in the tourist zone. I could have gotten steroids for you guys. Yeah, I know. This is what happened to me. I went to buy Advil and I got pitched steroids as an add-on to it. They have knockoff a Zempik there now too. The market fills every need. It's wonderful. I got ID'd buying THC seltzers last night.
You did? You like this. Do you have to go to a specialty store for them? There's a place in my neighborhood called Minus Moonshine. Sounds like a specialty store.
You know, you guys made me feel for all of the consultants that have ever been involved in a change program in a company trying to get, you know, creative types or people that are not sympathetic to new types of software to change a routine for context. Is this the WhatsApp thing?
It's going to tear this podcast apart. It might not be next. There might not be a podcast next. The audience needs some context. I was about to provide it.
So you would explain why I'm slightly annoyed in this podcast. It's a kind of self-perpetuating entity that survives surprisingly, you know, because of the love of making this content and not because of some kind of administrative structure. It survives because the people on the podcast do the fucking work.
Now, in the kind of ontology or structure or hierarchy of work, there's, I think, me, Brian, and then Alex. And some weeks, Brian does more. You know, Alex will spend a long time explaining why he's got, you know, water pouring into his basement or he's got to go to the dentist or something like that. I mean, mostly I have a full-time job. Correct. Other people have obligations. I have a full-time job.
Yeah. Yeah. Creator B2B creator. Yeah. Alex, Brian is a B2B creator and he's, I think probably busier than you are. Right. There's one exception and I will give it to you. You have a child. You don't do any webinars. What do you do with that extra time? Two webinars every day, man.
In an attempt to make the process work better and improve the product, I said, we need to move over to WhatsApp. That created a huge amount of controversy. Suddenly, Brian was thrust into using a new application that he's not accustomed to, and he started complaining. Alex said, I can check this, but only infrequently.
I might not be able to post as much. And, and I, and I rescued us all true things. Yeah. I rescued us from this messages. We've been writing, we've been writing podcast notes. This is too much for the audience, but we've been writing podcasts. This is amazing. We've been writing podcast notes in the notes app. Cause people like Alex, like native applications and it sucks because
And so I switched us to Google Docs, which is infinitely more civilized and a better tool. And that also annoyed Alex. And he couldn't find the document after me pasting it five times into WhatsApp.
And so, yeah, this is not going to be a good... Here we are. Here we are. I mean, if we're showing people a look behind the curtain, the reason I couldn't find the Google Doc is because I had now WhatsApp and messages full of non-sequiturs, links shared, names dropped that I didn't recognize. Aww.
or do you have to look for it? Depending on Troy's Zin or CBD intake, they were either all caps or no caps. And I was like, okay, where's this goddamn link? And he was telling me to stop what I was doing to update the document. I'm running a studio here. I'm running a studio. It's like the Warner Brothers over there. Jesus. No, it's definitely following the arc of that Fleetwood Mac documentary.
So with less sex.
Yeah, I should start by saying- At least they were all banging each other. We still got time. I forgot to do the intro. I'm Brian Marcy. I'm joined by Troy Young, Alex Schleifer. That's me. People versus algorithms. So I want to start with AI, of course, because I think AI should be solving for this problem. These are the basic problems that I don't understand why AI is not solving for. And
You know, we keep talking about AI and I keep getting to... Like, I believe in it, so I don't want to be like...
positioned as some kind of like Luddite because that's usually the positioning that like if you ask any questions of any sort of technology trend or thing that is supposed to be the next big thing, whether it's the Apple Vision Pro or if it's crypto or whatever, you get like struck down as some sort of Luddite. So I'm not a Luddite. At the same time, I spent last week in Puerto Vallarta with a lot of people from the Midwest and Canada.
Okay, which is basically the Upper Midwest as far as I'm concerned.
And I keep asking about AI and regular people are not using any of this stuff. Like they're lucky if they went to like chat GBT, it's not part of their everyday life. No one can really tell me. And even when I do dinners with, you know, supposedly savvy New Yorkers who work in media and maybe that's why they're Luddites or something. They don't use this stuff. Like I'm like, did you talk to the Canadians about some good use cases, how to defend your nation?
How to skin a beaver? How to chop wood? No, although I will say this. Michael from the Ottawa Business Journal is a big fan. Shout out, Michael. He listens to us while he's vacuuming. Nice. You know, if there's something... It drowns out Troy's moaning. He turns off the vacuum cleaner and like rewinds. So...
But I want to get at with... Because OpenAI came out with deep research, which is not to be confused with Google Gemini Advanced Deep Research. We'll talk about the branding later. And...
And to me, this is sort of where it's going. Alex Kantrowitz, who we should have on sometime, he writes big technology. He wrote this week about how OpenAI is an apps company. I've just been like itching for this thing to get into the apps phase and we can stop talking about data centers. Like build the data centers you need. I really don't care. I don't care about your GPUs. Like I want this stuff to actually be useful. And I think I speak for like regular people on this one. You're bringing the energy today, Brian. You're bringing... I am. I'm trying to. Yeah. Yeah.
He's a populist agitator today.
Yeah, well, that's the vibe. Keep going. Don't let us stop you. I spent four days with Midwesterners and Canadians, so I feel like I have a pulse. I got my fingers on the pulse. You characterizing Canadians as kind of not AI forward because of some stupid regional media conference you were at is a little bit... It wasn't stupid. It was very nice. It was a very good conference. I met this woman, this very impressive woman, and then we'll get back to this.
She's 90. This is media, man. It's longevity. She's 93. Her name's Connie Weimer. She started the business record in Des Moines. She had innovated into a title company there in Iowa and then went into B2B publishing. She's been at it
for 41 years. She's still in the business. Does she use AI? Of the business. I didn't ask her about AI. I didn't ask her about AI. I don't think Connie has time for that. She went skydiving right before her 91st birthday. She's still active. She's still after it. That's the thing with media. You got to be into it and you also have to work well under your knife. We should get Connie on the pod. Can you work on that? Yeah, she'd be great. She'd be great. She's like sharp as a tack and
And she's really accomplished like a tremendous amount. And so you can still make great businesses in media. Anyway, OpenAI came up with this deep research. I haven't used it because it's $200 a month and I'm paying for the producer on this podcast. So it's going to have to come out of your budgets. Have either of you guys used this deep research?
No, I've used their mini model, not their deep research one. Yeah, no, not their deep research. I've read a lot about it and I've looked into it. And it looks like, honestly, what I'm seeing from different industries is that it can definitely replace jobs that used to take a day or two for a researcher in certain industries. Like, you know, looking into kind of, you know,
Do you have financial reports, researching specific type of papers that have been released and compiling them? And looks like it's doing a pretty great job at formatting all that into a way that's contextually relevant. I mean, I've seen examples. It's really impressive. I mean, you know what it's going to do if you use the other tools. You can use a kind of facsimile of it.
elsewhere, but like that guy who reported, they called it sort of PhD level report on the McKinley tariffs, posted it to, to X and,
You can see that it processes a lot of sources and writes you a nice research paper. It's cool. Yeah. I mean, obviously any of the kind of knowledge industries, consulting, law, banking, is all going to be inevitably massively impacted by this stuff. Now, whether it means headcount reduction or people evolve their roles into...
higher value services, you know, consulting companies make reports for big companies, you know, as a matter of course. Ironically, this might be great for writers. It does a lot of the work. Cool. The thing I'm seeing is that this seems to be able to replace a lot of jobs that were transitional jobs into these bigger roles, right? Like in law firms, you know, like people keep throwing in the fact that it works like an intern, right? And
I wonder how disruptive it is to not have that intern space to get into the work. But it's moving up. I mean, it's moving from intern. I forget which podcast I was listening to, but the Goldman Sachs CEO, David Solomon, I think he's also a DJ. He said that right now AI, I mean...
he's probably overestimating, can do like a 95% of an IPO filing. And to be fair, like 70% of IPO filings are like copy and paste because they repeat the same things again and again and again. Anyone who has read. I mean, I can imagine. I imagine like, you know, the formation of a company, you know,
that is a, you know, or like, or like doing a series A around, et cetera. This is a lot of just repetitive tasks that have contextual changes attached to it, all that stuff.
should be made by AI. But today, firms are charging between 20 and 40, 50 grand to do that type of stuff. That's a big slice of the pie. Is this how this is going to go in that it's like a drip, drip, drip of innovation until we look up and are like, wow, this has really changed how we work and live and interact with
Or is there going to be an iPhone moment? Because I guess what I'm waiting for, and I think...
regular people don't necessarily see this in that there hasn't been a breakthrough product. There's been a lot of promises. There's been Three Mile Island. The fear meme has been marketed quite a bit. And I don't think that's a coincidence because everyone's in on this. It's Silicon Valley. It's Wall Street. It's the VCs. Everyone's pumping this thing up. They use fear as a way to market it. It's like, oh my God, this is so powerful. It might destroy humanity.
And meanwhile, we're like, okay, it can summarize. All right, that's cool. And we're left with, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's going after just information retrieval and summary and not say, hey, book me a trip to Puerto Vallarta because it can't do that. It can't do that. But is this going to be it or is there going to be like a breakthrough? Yeah, that's always a stupid example they give. Right.
You know, so my take on that question, I think it's a reasonable question. I think that the consumer use cases are really about making you better and more productive and more efficient. If you were going to contrast it with a series of kind of product breakthroughs that characterized innovation from the late 90s to 2020 on the internet, you would just look at all the
you know, the sort of product slash tech company brands that, that kind of filled that period from, you know, Yahoo, Google, you know, marketplaces, eBay, Amazon, new services, Uber, you know, any of the kind of collective, like, you know, stuff like, you know, DoorDash, Thumbtack, you know, all the social networks. So they all had, you know, a kind of a new way of,
you know either activating an audience providing information giving you an application either on your computer on your phone that you could understand and were kind of like became just part of how we lived it seems like all of this stuff right now i mean i i i can say personally that from you know doing
analysis of my Amex to, to 10 K report analysis to being a better thesaurus. This is a useful tool, but it's a tool I have to use and find personally find a use case for to operate more effectively. In other words, I sort of have to operationalize it. And, and I think that's true in companies too. You've got to operationalize it. And the companies that have done it like
you know, as a kind of fundamental part of how they operate, particularly in the data space. I think that Palantir and, and Andriel are good examples of next generation companies where, you know,
Sort of data to AI to like sophisticated intelligent coordination is the defining characteristic of these new companies and they're crushing it. Palantir is crushing it. And so is Endro. And it's and it's and I think that.
So companies that have made this kind of foundational are changing the landscape in the industries in which they operate. But it's not like, okay, here's an application like Instagram that means that I can kind of post a photo and share it with friends. So I think it's different than the last wave.
But like equally powerful, but it's not maybe as obvious to someone who's not kind of technology forward how to deploy it and take advantage of it. There's definitely going to be, just by osmosis, everything that people use is going to be somewhat affected by AI, right? I'm sure that these people say they never use it, use it every day, right? They just don't know. Yeah.
But, you know, we keep talking about the iPhone moment. The iPhone moment wasn't, you know, it took a while, right? The iPhone was just an idea. And conceptually, I think we've already had our iPhone moment. I mean, I think we've received, if anything, we've had... What, chat GPT, the iPhone moment? Yes, correct. Because we've had so... And the iPhone wasn't mass market until the iPhone 4. You know, it was 3G, it was only on AT&T, et cetera, right? But I think that...
The psychology has been strange to me because...
We've received so many... The news cycle around this stuff has been so dense that I think we've shut ourselves out of it. And part of the issue is that it's both groundbreaking stuff, like that deep research stuff, or when the live audio conversations were released, etc. But it's also a fair amount of duds, like the experience that you have every day opening your iPhone and using the AI in there, and it's a terrible integration and just doesn't really work well.
All the way to just having people like Sam Altman and the other gang just always having all these hyperbolic expectations about the future. It's going to destroy us. It's going to save us. And I think we've become numb to it. But three years ago, you couldn't talk to a computer. Now you can. And maybe the computer is a little dumb sometimes.
But you can talk to a computer. And I think that as this gets further integrated into the operating system and people get to use it, you know, it might be like the Diet Coke thing, right? If Diet Coke, Coca-Cola knows that if you buy Diet Coke seven times, you're a lifelong customer. Like how many times does somebody need to use AI successfully to feel like it's part of their life?
Maybe. I'd love to see data about how habitual use is. Yeah, because people talk about having used it. But like, I agree with Troy, at least for me, I kind of have to force the habit of it. And maybe that's just being older and being ingrained with just using Google. Yeah, and there is, Alex, you make a great point. There's a lot of fails.
So, and I think it's also important when you use it a lot, you start to recognize the limitations of it. So if you're using deep research and it's going out and much of what it's looking at is historical knowledge, it's
It's it's good because it's out there. But like on the kind of frontier of knowledge, the act of gathering news, doing research, talking to people is not what it's good at. That doesn't exist yet. Right. For that to exist, that you would have to have these kind of autonomous things that go out and actually gather.
So you run out of data. And even little things that are sort of dependent on point of view and taste, like I've been trying to find a prompt that would
And part of this admittedly is the fact that, that AI doesn't have authentication to go into all the sources of information that I use every day, whether that's wall street journal or financial times or New York times or whatever. But like, I've been trying to get a news summary out of the AI where every morning I can kind of put a query in and it goes back and fetches all the relevant stuff against, you know, my, my criteria. And it really sucks at that.
And if you just compare that to like, you know, someone like, you know, I don't know who does good aggregation, you know, like Ben Thompson is an analyst, not an aggregator, but anybody that does good aggregation, you know, just brings a kind of humanity and a kind of, you know, taste and human touch and insight to doing that, which makes it infinitely better than what AI can do. I feel like,
there's been a failure in these AI companies to properly communicate
the shift in the interface and the expectation from the user. And I think it's exemplified by the fact that the example they keep trying to push on us is that it's going to book a trip for you. It is the worst example you can give because there are so many micro decisions that you can make, so many points of context or preferences that happen. And even just saying like, go out and find me all this stuff. First of all, that stuff's getting a lot better. But I think the best way
to work with AI is in a conversation. It's just, you know, like I've seen so many tests and even the way, you know, the folks at Diverge talk about it. I asked it to do this and it made a mistake.
Well, ask it for a follow-up. I do that all the time. You know, I use it to help me write and I say, oh, this is wrong. I don't want that. And then it comes back and you're going back and forth with the computer. And if you have, if you're not just acting like an empty vessel and you have some context of what you're trying to do and some intuition as to what could be right or wrong.
it's transformational. But I think people have just been told, hey, use it like Google. Just drop a thing in here and it gives you all the answers. And then somebody laughs about the fact I asked it to tell me what to feed my cat and it told me to feed it rocks. All right, well, say, hey, I'm not going to feed rocks to my cat. Give me another answer. And it will. Hey, Alex, when do you talk to your computer? When is that happening? All the time.
I mean, that's what you're doing. That's what you're doing is talking to your computer. Do you want me to, do you want to talk more? We can talk more. When are you talking to your computer, Alex? You were talking about talking to chat GPT, right? When you were driving. Yeah. Yeah. No, I have done that. It's cool. But you say, it sounds like you do it a lot. I'm curious.
What I'm saying is that whenever you engage with AI, you should be engaging with it in a conversational style. The first answer you get is not going to be the perfect answer. And I think it's a behavioral change that people haven't gotten used to yet. I think people don't, I mean, we can move on to the next because I want to talk about the Super Bowl ads that they're going to try to make this.
I don't know our mainstream. I don't think people outside of you, Alex, want to talk to computers a lot. Like, I don't think that's a normal behavior. I think the experiences of talking to computers are those horrible phone trees. I mean, this is what, like, AI is. In some ways, sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in one of those operator, operator, operator, get me out of this loop.
I don't have that experience. I think that maybe a simpler way to do it is the core behavior of the Internet is searching something on Google, right? And then Google maybe gets you to a link, and then within that link, you might not find what you want, and you go back to the search results and click back and forth, right? There's no...
experience on the internet right now, not Netflix recommending a movie, not looking for something on Google. That is purely like a one and done experience, right? So we got used to that. You know, yesterday I was looking for a product. It sent me to Amazon. Then I go into the Amazon product page and then I look at similar products and, you know, and that's how we use the internet.
The paradigm isn't, well, we're switching to AI and you just ask it for the thing and it delivers it. It's similarly, you have to continue the conversation until you get to a better place. And I feel that that isn't, you know, I think we're not teaching that behavior enough. So a lot of people who've tried AI and bounced off of it said, I just tried typing the thing and I didn't like the answer.
Because I think it's new. Have you been surprised, Alex, at how resilient the search traffic is? Google's results were great. Search results were very strong, too. I mean, yes, first of all, people are being... I mean, a lot of that stuff at the top is AI now. But no, behaviors are hard to change. Like, it's hard to change behaviors. Just like getting your friends to move from iMessage to WhatsApp? Yeah. But you know, this stuff to me is always like a dam, right?
It's always like a dam, right? You see it, well, you know, like...
At some points, people are going to drop off using cable, and it's all going to be app-based. And then the dam breaks, right? And until the dam breaks, you can build a perfectly reasonable business on the calm waters of that dam. But at some point, it's going to break. And there's zero chance this dam's not going to break. So you know what helps break this? Dam's marketing. That's what it does. Advertising, too. Advertising, yeah. The Super Bowl is coming up. I know that all of us are very excited to...
Good segue, Brian. Good segue. No problem from a professional. The Philadelphia Eagles are probably going to win. I think they're going to win against the Chiefs. I'm pretty confident going into the game. But really, what we're all there for is the commercials. This is the one time of the year that America celebrates the beating heart of capitalism, which is capitalism.
advertising, our friend advertising. The ad creatives, this is not just their Super Bowl. This is their Christmas morning. This is everything wrapped into one. It is just the one time of the year that people do not flee away from those messages, but actually seek them out. It's not going to quite be the dot-com Super Bowl of 2000 with the, what was it? The pets.com sock puppet and various other things.
But there's going to be a lot of AI ads. The Perplexity is apparently running an ad. OpenAI, the journal just reported that OpenAI will have its ad. We don't have the ads just yet. Although, there's no longer that surprise, I feel like, with the Super Bowl ads. Usually, they're published ahead of time. I wonder, though, how many of these ads are going to... Salesforce. Wait, wait, wait. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. Of course, Salesforce is going to be in. They got Matthew McConaughey, and I think...
Robert Downey Jr. in some kind of agent force ad. I'm sure, I don't know if Microsoft, I'm sure Microsoft- Do these guys need more money? I just saw Ryan, one of the Ryan, what's his name? Reynolds? Ryan. Reynolds, like advertising, like some sort of Abu Dhabi resort. I wonder how bad, I think most AI advertising has been terrible. Have you, did you guys see those Apple AI ads? Yes.
Apple's been on a tear lately with their tone-deaf advertising. A lot of the AI ads shows people just being dumb and lazy and saved by AI. There's literally a mom that forgets a big family event and sees the dad dazzling the kids with something, asks Siri to generate something, and then pushes the dad away, saying, look what I did. Well, Doofus Dad is like an old trope of advertising. Doofus Dad is like...
Yeah. That's what it's built on. They're standing on the shoulders of giants. That's true. But it's just showing like the worst behaviors are going to be, you know, kind of bolstered by this AI. And I wonder how much of that. Yeah, I think the advertising being part of this like miscommunication of what this stuff can do. It's either like looking too far ahead or it's showing examples that if you go home and try them will not work.
Does that make sense? And I wonder if they're going to keep doing these mistakes. It will be really interesting to see how the AI is pitched. Well, what is Perplexity doing? Some sort of giving away like a million dollars? I mean, giveaways are always good to try. Are they actually doing an ad or is this something they're promoting around the Super Bowl? They're not even like buying. No, I think that what they're trying to do is they reward downloads and questions and
And there's a kind of formula that you get points and they're going to draw from that and give away a million dollars. Perplexity is a hard sell, huh?
Perplexity, I think they're good marketers, though. They're very opportunistic. I thought that their integration of the deep seek model and then when they promoted it with a guy from Silicon Valley. Yeah, Jimmy O. Yang was clever and this giveaway is clever. They're good. They're good.
They realized that this is the big game. So yeah, they don't have anything to do with it. Oh, they're doing it on cheap. They're scrappy. Good for them. Just a million dollars. I mean, it's cheaper than a slot. Well, it's $7 million for, I think, a 30-second, each 30-second spot this year. How much of that spend is just like,
executive pride to just have an ad doing the Super Bowl? Look, advertising serves multiple roles and one of them is internal. I think people at a company feel pride in it and it jazzes them up. I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. It is the one area of legacy media that keeps growing. You do benefit from ad spend, so...
Probably not. Me? No. I'm way downstream of that. I'm in demand, Jan. Why aren't you? But it, yeah. Doesn't it all like sprinkle down from big ad spend? Doesn't your business do better? I'm not going to watch the Super Bowl, but I will watch the ads. And run some webinars with me then to...
wasted on some Super Bowl ad, but that's me. Yeah, we should pool our money and just buy a three-second spot of Troy just saying the F word. I noticed that the scrappy Pirate Wires guys had taken over Times Square with their cute message that the moon should be a state. Did you see that?
I haven't been to Times Square lately, thankfully. I mean, that makes sense. I mean, the people in Times Square are not from New York, so I guess they're targeting them. Yeah. Pirate Wires is a right-leaning, scrappy media upstart. And who's the principal, Brian? What's the name of the guy? Do you remember? Mike Solana? Yeah. He's like a teal guy.
Yeah, he's a Teal guy. We're reaching... Oh boy, yeah. Just a PSA for the audience. If you want to remain sane, just don't listen to a Peter Teal interview for two hours.
It is. It is something else. But it's funny. Articulation is not one of his many strong suits, I've noticed. But also, I thought, well, maybe what's behind it? And not much. I've got to say, not much. Because his speaking style is so awkward and strange that I think in a previous era, he would be dismissed because he's so...
outlandishly inarticulate but now it's perceived as being thoughtful and I'm like no he can't he can't complete a sentence like that I think that's it but but even if you if you well you cut the guy some slack when you've been as influential as he has the problem is is that he might not all the people that won the the the people on the right are uh you know they're they're suffering from massive fart sniffing oh yeah they're they're emboldened
Well, Jim VandeHei had an interview from Axios, Alex. He had an interview this week. Jim always has smart things, I feel like, to say about media. You know, he made the point that, you know, this is the first time he can think of where the right media
side, the right part of the media ecosystem is more influential than the left. I mean, if you think about the alternative media world, particularly where it touches on politics, is dominated by conservatives, the manosphere, etc. Whereas the institutional media, which is mostly left to center-left, is
is in turmoil and decline. So interesting point. And I think you see that even in Driesen Horowitz's
You know, it's like they went to the free press to announce their groundbreaking hiring of the subway vigilante. What is that guy's name? Daniel Penny. I didn't think we would have to like hear about him forever, but apparently he's going into venture capital now. I don't guess that's a qualification. I'm not sure. Do we need to add a fourth host? Like somebody who did something really terrible?
There's got to be somebody out there who strangled the kitten just in an effort to end wokeness. He's joining the American Dynamism group inside of Andreessen Horowitz as a deal partner. And that's a practice that supports American interests.
It's another kind of... It's performative. Do you remember... It's virtue signaling? Yeah, do you remember when the virtue signaling... No, I mean, he might be a great investor. Wait a second. We were told to stop virtue signaling by the right because it was bad. What's going on? I thought it was after merits. I don't know. Also like... The choking some guy out on a... It looks to me like DEI is still in full effect except now the groups are wife beaters and alcoholics.
And finally, finally, they're getting jobs. Okay. Okay. Let's move on. Host. Where are we going? Where are we going? Moderator. I don't know. I like that one. Okay. So he doesn't want to get political. It just makes it uncomfortable when he goes to dinner parties. Yeah.
Anyway, to sum up, the Super Bowl ads, I do think that it's going to be interesting to see how they present AI, particularly because it's a technology that comes with a lot of... We've heard all about the downsides. I think that's the tough part of this particular paradigm shift. I genuinely think, and I wish I had kept that research. I can't find the link right now. But as a sentiment, sentiment on AI is negative. Yes.
People don't want it. People don't like it. People don't like the term. People don't like what it's doing to art. People, when Coca-Cola did their ad with AI, people didn't like it. People have responded negatively to that Beatles win that had AI in it, even though that AI was essentially just like splitting, you know, John Lennon's voice. It wasn't, you know, recreating stuff. People have an icky reaction to AI. And I wonder, like, it's one of those technology where that is...
pretty repulsive to people at a conceptual level. I think the same way the metaverse is like putting on goggles and being outside of reality. - Yeah, it's anti-human. - It's anti-human. And, you know, if they're smart about it, I think we're gonna start seeing, you know, lessening the terms like AI and GPTs and stuff like that, and trying to see if you can actually sell utility, which might be a better sell.
Google is trying to do that. I mean, their ad is for Gemini and the Pixel. And Google's been in the Super Bowl for a while. So they're--
They have like an approach. It's like years ago they did this love story, which is trying to make search and then they made it into a narrative, but it's actually like a product demo. And I thought it was good. Ad people loved it. And they're taking a similar approach here. I think the funny part of it is they had to correct it because the AI had a mistake. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, and that's, I actually think that there's been a strategic marketing mistake in naming all of these things. And there's been kind of different strategies, which is the naming of AI specifically and LLM and just like beating us with those terms. But also, you know, sometimes humanizing them like a clod, sometimes just trying to create a brand around like Gemini. And it feels to me that there was a
a different way of communicating this around utility, which would have, A, confused the audience less and maybe allowed those companies to release products that are just like accepted better. Like right now what I'm seeing and I'm hearing it from people, like you go to Google and you get Gemini, like what the fuck is Gemini? I don't even understand.
What am I doing? I'm turning on Apple intelligence. What is it? Is it just like the emojis? Like now Siri glows weird. Like people don't remember things like that. They don't want to think about the pipes and the weird thinking computer. It does feel like we're in an intermediate stage. Absolutely. We're trying to talk about these sort of empowering things.
ingredients, LLMs, whose model numbers change every week. And the application requires someone that's really comfortable with technology. And I think that if anything, that's where kind of perplexity gets it right because it's manifest in an app. The only problem is it's called perplexity.
Yeah. Good point. I'm in Gemini advanced right now. Okay. It's not Gemini. We're in Gemini advanced 1.5 pro with deep research. Then I can have 2.0 flash, 2.0 flash thinking experimental, uh,
2.0 Flash thinking experimental with apps. 2.0 Pro experimental. Can you add a muffler to that thing? 1.5 Pro with deep research. Wait, that's-- I think I already have it. 1.5 Pro and then 1.5 Flash. Yeah. And the question is, why isn't there mass adoption yet?
Are the engineers doing the marketing too? Or maybe AI is doing the marketing. I mean, if you listen to Sam Altman, you know, I don't think... He's a good marketer. Well, I think he's a good fear monger. That's marketing.
Yeah, I guess so. I actually, I think that is part of, because I want to talk about this meme-ification. I actually am taking this from the More and Less podcast, the one with Jessica Lessen and Britt Morin and their husbands. Is there a more insufferable podcast? I don't mind. Well, Sam's Sam. Two hours of rich, entitled West Coast people that think they're really smart talking. It's great.
Yeah, no. Wait, isn't that our thing? We're of the people, you know? I mean, Alex is dealing with flooding on his estate this week. It's not an estate. Okay, what is it? I don't know. I've never been there.
It's a farm. It's a farm. It's a farm. Homestead compound. Anyway, it was about the meme-ification of everything. Because every time one of these meme coins drop, I thought the meme coins thing were a scam, like the you broke my sunglasses thing in Times Square. By the way, they are. They are a scam. But I just think usually with scams, they run their course, I thought, when people sort of understand that they're scams.
But I guess they just keep going on in some ways. I mean, I was reminded of Twitter. Hey, buddy, it's...
In the point to my heart to airport, these guys were like, "Oh, you need a voucher for the taxi." And they had the airport badges and everything. And I'm over at some counter and they're trying to give me a margarita. And I'm like, "I really just need the cab. Where do I get the cab?" And then next thing you know, they're talking about a free breakfast and it was a timeshare thing. And I was like, "This is still going on?" And I nearly fell for it. But the breakfast was amazing.
And if you guys ever want to spend some time in Puerto Vallarta, I've got a place. The blackout. Honestly, Brian, I can't believe you fell for that. I know. I mean, Brian, you learned that in New York, man. Anybody that's hustling you with a sign that reads Uber, that's not how it works. Well, it was in the airport. First of all, I had a six-day flight, so I had to get up before 28. Brian, you don't even trust us with anything.
I know, but I was like, I had to go through Detroit. It was a really long morning. And I don't know, right when he said free breakfast, I was like, all right, I appreciate it. I love it. But I got a good story. But like the meme coins, these shit coins keep dropping. Our friend CoffeeZilla was, you know, this Enron thing. The people with Birds Aren't Real are now doing...
And these are all like memes to me. And I don't really understand them, but I think that this is like something that... Well, maybe explain. Let's back up. Let's back up. Yeah, let's back up. Okay. What are... Where do you want to start? What is... Well, okay, meme... What are birds...
Birds are not real. So let's go back. There was a performance art piece called Birds Aren't Real where to play up against all the kind of like crazy theories going around in the world, this group of people, I think they're San Francisco based, created this whole story about Birds Aren't Real, their devices that are spying on us. They did like a TEDx conference. They had a website, et cetera. The latest project by this group is that they bought the Enron rights to the logo from
for a very small amount. And they're always talking in character how they're going to revolutionize energy, etc. And it was up to now just seen as like a funny kind of like onion style spoof of capitalism. However, they've just released a meme coin probably as a spoof. The problem is the second you release a meme coin, whether you want to or not, you will have what's called snipers and people that get in early and dump a lot of that
buy out coins, watch the value go out and dump it all on people who are silly enough to buy them late. So there's always people who profiteer on top of these mean coins. Most of the time it's insiders. So we decide to do a PVA coin. I tell you guys, hey, let's, you know, I'm going to drop it at midnight tonight, buy a bunch of it.
Everybody else will find out 10 minutes later, and then we can dump all of those coins on them. And it's apparently totally legal right now. And, you know, it destroyed the Hawk Tua podcast in person. She's gone into hiding, right? She's gone into hiding. The last thing she said is like on a public...
ex-voice chat thing. It's like, I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed. And she never came out of bed, apparently. Wow. She's a psyop. Also, Trump and Melania. Trump and Melania had one of these coins. And I wonder, what is going on? Why are these things popular? I would think people would say, oh, these are known scams. And does it speak to different dynamics that are going on right now? Because...
I don't really understand why this is still a thing. I mean, it's a mixture of gambling, participating in culture, and just a full-on scam. I mean, you know... Well, it's the full manifestation of the connection between attention and the financialization of everything, right? And it's just gambling. It's just a fun way to participate in a meme. Yeah. And if you decided to put...
you know, a material amount of money. And you're the same person that got breakfast at the airport with Brian, you know, like you're a sucker. It's like, of course, you know what? I think too bad. So sad. Don't be a fucking idiot. Don't buy the Enron coin. I mean, it's,
You know, it's like a, you know, you can do it. So people do it. These guys wanted to make Enron a joke. I think it's a terrific joke. They wanted to. It's a really good joke. Just like, you know, birds aren't real was great. And then they turned it into coin. And now, you know, some people are losing money. So it's the attraction of this that.
Look, it's very attractive. Get-rich-quick schemes have always been popular, but they seem even more popular than ever now. And there might be a bunch of structural reasons where younger generations don't think that...
But you can go in and buy a thousand lottery tickets and you're not going to make any money. Technology is also... I mean, it's the same thing over and over again. However, once again, it is different because technology has made it frictionless. You can go to a website, create a shitcoin, right? And
And there are people literally kind of, you know, that have like these dashboards set up with like Reddit forums and Twitter feeds and stuff to see what's hitting, you know, what's becoming a meme so that they can jump in and create the latest, the new HawkTua coin or whatever. And whenever, and it's so unregulated that there'll be multiple versions of the same coin. So you don't even know if you're buying the good shit coin. There is such.
I feel like it's all... There is no good shit coin, Alex. What is the decision? I didn't hear quotes. No, I know, but why do you think... I mean, other than you're in the game to opportunistically dump the coin and make money, why would you buy a Hawk 2A coin?
Like on what could possibly be the reason to buy a Hawk 2? So that you can sell it for more? Right. You think other people will? I mean, it's a different... I mean, I think the argument that was made by a guy named Dave Morin was mostly that it is a way to participate in something that is coursing through culture and it holds the promise of, you know...
of getting rich at the end of the day. Is it any different than investing in stocks? I think it is because there's underlying value within that, but that is just a
Right. But the issue is that people are financially quite illiterate and the difference is marginal at best. I mean, also, it's legitimized, right? I can go to Yahoo. Did you know that you can go to Yahoo Finance right now and check where Fartcoin is? That's good.
It sounds like they're innovating. Is that FTC? Oh, there are charts. There are charts. It's all very serious looking and they're selling ads against it. I'm seeing an ad to visit Germany.
Actually, it makes me want to visit Germany. Well, that's the thing. It's like Coinbase, for instance, they can't actually screen. There's so many of these things. They can't possibly screen them. They either have to like... And they're an asset that people want to own. So...
For whatever reason. What's the market cap of fart coin? Can you see it there, Alex? Yeah, let me check the market cap of fart coin. But I think this is all like one piece. When you think about sports gambling, I hate to bring gaming into it, but I really do think that that has a impact in how people...
operate in life. If you grow up gaming, I think that you're more, I would bet, like, I'd love to see the research. You're more likely to go into a lot of these things. And a lot of them start out at gaming culture. But if you look at sports gambling, which is finally getting the backlash that I've called for for two years now, because legalizing sports gambling is going to be seen as mostly a disaster. It's now coming out that these sports books are actually banning you if you're actually really good at
Yeah, big surprise.
On top of the fact that it's terrible societally to have just like a casino in your pocket. The other thing that we're seeing is those... There's a flip side to it, though, because we really enjoy here at head office doing small bets and parlays against games that we're actively consuming. I'm sure. I think it's fun. If you're a Zen consumer, you are definitely a Zen player. You know, my son will have a bet going. He'll bet 10 bucks.
You know, 20 bucks. We always have a bet, John. Sure, sure, sure. Because just to redo that connection to gaming, a lot of the games that are, you know, the Monopoly goes and the Candy Crushes and stuff like that in the industry, they're called like whale supported games, which means that, you know, 1% of that audience actually supports the business. The rest of it does like little bets or maybe buys a few gems once in a while. But there's like,
a small percentage that spends an inordinate amount, $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month on these things. Gambling is the same thing. It's supported by whales. And what they're trying to do is make sure that they don't maintain the people like you who might do little bets or who might do well and make sure the whales... And that is a problem because these people need to be protected, I think. There's a lot of... I mean, the more access you give to these things, the more that gambling addiction can be...
Apparently, last year, Americans bet $121 billion on sports. Great. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed it. Well, it's also been linked to credit problems because it's leading to bankruptcy. It's also been linked to spousal abuse rates increasing.
So, I mean, you know, Alex, have a glass of wine. You know, it's linked to all kinds of bad things. You know, people have to... I think that once you start carrying... What is this? What is this? The nanny cast? Well, right now, what you're going to see, and I'm pretty sure I would
I'm pretty sure we're going to see one at the Super Bowl is like ads for these like casinos, which are no money casinos, by the way. Right. Like slot machine roulettes, you know, stuff like that. The thing is that they're using a loophole because you can spend money on those. And when you have a casino in your pocket, bad things happen. And by the way, Troy, just to answer your question, Fartcoin current market cap is $460 million, $461 million.
Do you guys want to take a position today? It's good. I'm feeling a little farty. PVA hedge fund. Yeah, so we'll wrap up on the sports gambling thing. But I definitely think that a comeuppance is happening. And the downstream impact of this on media would be extreme if they start to cut back on the amount of advertising that supports gambling. Because it is supporting the sports media space.
It's not going to happen. All of those contracts are based off of massive deals with these companies. It used to be you couldn't have a team in Las Vegas. They wanted to get as far away from gambling as possible. And forget all the, you know, there'll be like little mini scandals of players betting and whatnot. But they're tied to this. And there's too many people. It's just like RFK Jr. wanting to ban pharma advertising. Good luck, RFK.
That's not happening. Watch an NFL game. It's all pharma ads. There's too much money at stake. Anyway, let's move on. I want to talk just the final thing is there was this Semaphore Media actually had a good podcast with Kara Swisher. And
She talked a lot about the business of being Kara Swisher. And I thought it was very informative for a lot of these, quote unquote, creator type businesses. Because in a previous generation, people who broke out as personalities or talent or whatever you want to call them, they generally tried to parlay that into building basically new institutional media brands. Nate Silver broke off from the New York Times, but then he got backing from ESPN to do FiveThirtyEight.
Bill Simmons built his own company with the ringer. And we saw that a lot. Kara Swisher did something very similar with Recode after she left the journal or News Corp with Walt Mossberg.
And she talked a lot about the benefits of not going down that path and staying sort of solo because it's very low cost and you don't have a lot of the headaches. And I think that there is this fork in the road that exists. I wrote about it in my newsletter today for the people who do achieve that kind of breakout about whether they're going to go down the path of like a Barry Weiss and build the free press.
Or, you know, be a personality like Kara Swisher and make like, you know, millions of dollars a year, but without the long term sort of equity. I mean, you still own the IP, but like you don't have the same leverage as you do with an institutional media company. Troy, any analysis on that? Please say yes. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I have to say that you guys made me listen to that podcast and I and it was about as tolerable as Kara Swisher can be. You know, I loved her transparency and Kara Swisher, particularly when you're in, you know, the podcasting business, your talent, and we know that it's a.
You know, it's kind of a winner take most game in podcasting so that if you're, you know, if you're talent in the top, you know, 1%, you're going to, you're going to have a lot of economic options. So I think that being talent there and kind of using that, that power is not unlike Hollywood. And it makes a lot of sense that, that you would be independent and manage your business like you would with an agent, right?
I see a lot of the other scenarios where people are building, have built really good followings on, say, Substack with a kind of more text-oriented business that requires you to sell advertising yourself and or do events and do all the things that you do. And then you do arrive at this kind of fork in the road where you're like, am I going to turn this into a kind of media brand and invest in a business, which means...
hiring people that are sharing in that with me and hiring senior people and really making an effort to grow it materially. And I think that's the fork in the road that you're talking about where it gets hard for people. I think that there's a lot of good businesses today that are being built around kind of IP between podcasting and YouTube that are
really, you know, impressive businesses and, and, and, you know, Kara kind of made the case that you could make a really good living like that, but not a lot of people can do it. It's, it's a, it's sacred ground.
Should we go on to... Do you have any comments on Alex? That's it. Because I know you're a hard stop. Well, I know Alex has a hard stop and I want to get to good product. I agree with what Troy said. I think everyone should just try to build a good business that's also a lifestyle business so you don't have a bunch of employees and stuff. Well, she said her goal is to have like zero employees. Yeah. But she sounded like she was like at an age and having had a career that she, you know...
She has few fucks to give and doesn't want to get into that. I think her partner in crime, Galloway, is more entrepreneurial and actually, I think, would enjoy building a massive media empire. But I think she's more into... She likes being Kara Swisher. And also, I mean, I don't know. Even I noticed on her podcast, she used to have a producer on and then she disappeared and it's all the Kara show now. So I think she just likes to be...
on her own. I'm surprised the Scott thing survived, you know, but he's got nice apartments everywhere. So that would make me tolerate him too. Should we get to good product? Yeah, let's do it. Let's kick it off with your bad product. It really, it's an app connected to some, to a clock. I got an alarm clock to try to get my, not have my phone in the room. And then the alarm clock, it's lofty. It arrived. I got like the high-end one. It's like $150 alarm clock.
I haven't owned an alarm clock in a long time. And then it was like, to set it up, I needed an app. I'm like, so I got to get my phone out. I get an app and it's Wi-Fi connected. It'll connect it to my Wi-Fi, all for an alarm clock. And there's a subscription program. Of course. There we go. Lofty Plus. Yeah. I didn't go for Lofty Plus. After the timeshare, I'm like, I'm out. No way.
All right. We got a good product? Well, that was your Andy Rooney moment, Brian. It was good. That's the other spinoff. You know, I would say that this one is one that I noticed, I think, last week. First of all, I thought that the Grammys were terrific this year. Has anyone watched that stuff anymore? Well, 17 million people watched it. And I got to say that there were like at least five outstanding performances there.
And that included Japperone and Charlie XCX and Billie Eilish and the brutal Mars. And well, that's what I'm getting to. Lady Gaga did this California Dreaming rendition that was great. And this tribute to Quincy Jones by Cynthia Everill was amazing. Sabrina Carpenter. They were all so good. What's that guy's name? Benson Boone, who did the flip off the piano.
was great. But I before the Grammys came on, I had watched Dochi on Tiny Desk and her performance in her band on Tiny Desk was unreal. And then I landed on her performance on Colbert. She was all Gucci'd up and her
her and two other women did this amazing performance where the braids of their hair was connected and it was just, it was really great. Obviously there's huge Missy Elliott vibes in the music, but their Grammy performance, and they won the Grammy for what? Best New Artist, Alex? Is that what it was? Their Grammy performance was outstanding. The choreography and the dance and the song and like the whole thing. Dochi's like a huge talent. She's from Tampa. Yeah.
And she's a good product. There's a video of her talking on recording herself five years ago on social media saying she lost her job and she doesn't know what to do. And she's just going to go knock at every record company's door and try to become an intern. And that was just like an interesting kind of fun thing to see. She's great. Also, you know that Drake diss track, Not Like Us.
took over and being Drake watching TV this year must not be fun when and he's also going to be at the Super Bowl so that's going to be fun to see you know when everybody calls you a pedophile in a giant arena it must it must it must sting the Grammys viewership peaked in 1984 John Denver was the host
52 million. Let's bring back John Denver. What was the number? The number was 52? I think it was 16 or 17 this year. Yeah, it had gone down. That is a big comeback. I mean, in 2021 and 2022, it was only 9.3 and 9.6 million. So a little bit of a...
We'll have a comeback. All right. I'll see you guys later. I got to run. All right. Appreciate it. Anything else, Troy? PVA overtime when Alex drops out? PVA overtime. You didn't get to take your victory lap because the Wall Street Journal had an article that, you know, they're going around to sell the debt. And Linda Iaccarino, look, these are not like public numbers, not a publicly traded company, but, you know, they can't.
They can't lie, I don't think. But that on an EBITDA basis that they returned $1.25 billion, that's far bigger than it was before. Not far bigger, marginally bigger. They
It was, it was down. You can pull the numbers, Brian, but it was down materially on the top line. But, but cause there's no cost, there's so much less cost. The top line doesn't like it's profits. They don't even run businesses for profits. I mean, I think the headline is, is that the X isn't losing money and any business that's throwing off a billion dollars in the kind of mass, you know, attention category is going to be worth a whole lot of money these days. I mean,
I mean, they got 95 cents on the dollar for the debt. So that's incredibly impressive considering that there was a lot of predictions that, particularly right after his wholesale changes and gutting the company, that it was going to zero. And, you know, look, it has a 10% stake in XAI. This stuff will all be...
It's kind of like Yahoo's valuation with the Alibaba stake. So some of this is just financial engineering, I think. But to be fair, X is an important part, I guess, of XAI because it uses the X data to train its model. But you can see this. If you want to get in on XAI, you can buy. This is like a backdoor to that too. So whatever. Elon Musk, don't
don't bet against them, I guess. And I do think that if this continues, it will just give more
I don't even know if they need more impetus behind these fork in the road changes that he has foisted on First X. And I guess now he's trying to do it to the federal government too. And we're already seeing this. I mean, just, you know, times are really good for businesses and man, the cuts keep coming. Like these tech companies, they just keep, they keep cutting. I don't know. Is it an achievement to take a company and,
I guess it is. I mean, everybody will say that the real returns of X are everywhere else in his portfolio. Yeah, but it's a combination of the two. I mean, to be able to run... I mean, look at how much money Jeff Bezos is losing at the Washington Post. And I would say that the... I mean, granted, it was a far smaller bet. He only paid $200 million for it only. But...
So X has been more beneficial, I think, to Elon Musk by far than the Washington Post has been to, it's been nothing but a headache as far as I can tell, to Jeff Bezos. Maybe got him into a few parties. And I assume he could get into any party he wanted to.
Yeah, the media business hostile right now. There was also quite a little bit of a nasty article in BI yesterday about Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood's efforts at Daily Beast. Was it nasty? Well, a little bit. They got it to break even, right? Yeah.
I mean, not in 25. I don't think it's going to break even, no. I think that, you know, I don't know, but it said that their financial performance had improved and revenue was up. And I think they probably pushed a lot of cost out. But the, you know, a kind of high-end tabloid model with a really, you know, with a kind of subscription dependency and kind of a bad ad offering is challenging, as you know.
Yeah, so you're going to have to cut costs. And they swung the ax all over the place. And let me tell you, as someone who's been an editor before,
Former employees who got the ax are really great sources if you're doing some story about a company. I'm just saying. You just go on LinkedIn, you find some ax, you're going to find some axes to grind pretty quickly. Whenever I see the stories of like, according to 23 current and former employees, I'm like, yeah, this is going to be bad. Yeah, so Joanna kind of jokingly says in an editorial meeting, someone should write about Trump farting in the courtroom and
you know someone you know repackages that as her not being you know a serious editor or something yeah you can make these stories about any company that's what i always anytime like i was like these stories could exist about i mean they're like based on a true story but then like i would always say yeah but you could write that story about this place like and choose some of the things and like frame it that way i mean it just depends yeah
Yeah. Have to get out an approximation of the truth. Well, the last thing that you had put in there and all of these this week, I'm going to put, I'm going to put all these links in the PVA email because every week we go back and forth in a chat thread, which is now on WhatsApp.
And I sort of harvested all those links out of there and threw them into an email, and I think people will like them. Included in that was the link you sent around, Brian, on that study on sort of U.S. economic supremacy versus other kind of mental health or happiness measures. Oh, yeah. That was fascinating. The New York Times wrote about it, but the study I recommend, we'll put it, it's stateofthenation.org, a national progress report.
And it's basically, it's billed as a comprehensive and objective national progress report assessing how we are doing as a country. And the conclusion is really, really, really well if you look at economic factors. Like economic output compared to other countries, 98% outperforms, the US does. Productivity, 88% outperforms. Long-term unemployment rate, 84% outperforms. It's like, this is amazing.
Then you get down to areas like mental health. Depression and anxiety, the U.S. outperforms 11% of countries. Fatal overdoses, number one, baby, 0%. Nobody outperforms the U.S. when it comes to fatal overdoses. Suicide rate, 16%. And that's without being in the dark all the time. Imagine if we were like Finland, although I think Finland is usually pretty top.
Trust in criminal justice, very low. Trust in federal government, among the lowest, only 6% or lower, etc., etc., etc. Children living with a single parent, only 3%. The U.S. only outperforms 3%. Youth depression, almost number one. I guess it's 1% or above the U.S. Who's number one there? Did they show who's number one? They didn't say who the number one, who got the number one in youth depression.
It may be like the Ukraine or somewhere that's not. Yeah, that probably has has some more. The U.S. ranks second to last, just behind countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal. And we have been falling further and further behind. But we're kicking ass economically.
Yeah, but those are the trade-offs. And I think that sort of explains why there's so much angst out there when the economic numbers look really good, they're unevenly distributed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a lot of other problems that, you know, we have that other places don't have. And I admire, I like how other countries and regions sort of go their own way and don't.
There's more diversity of... There's a lot of different ways to live. You look at Japan. If I read The Economist, I've been reading The Economist now for a long time. And I've been reading about how Japan is a complete basket case. Just horrible. Bad bank loans, stagnant, hasn't grown, lost generation. And then you go there and it's like, whoa, this is kind of amazing. Yeah.
eight-year-olds are taking like the subway school and stuff like this and just walking on their own in the streets and like or you go to like you know you go to like you see the collectivist spirit in action when you get on a train in switzerland to go to the alps and you're like this is tight this works this shit and so you know you know sometimes the collective can do
Good things. Other times it's suffocating. I like living in America. It's messy and it's a wild pendulum swinging nation. But yeah, there's a lot of externalities for sure. But that's the volatility. That's the other thing I wanted. Like volatility to me is just the overwhelming feature of this time. And part of it is like Trump just I can't believe all the stuff that happened this week. And like why anyone would want to pay attention to the minutiae? I think you could bring back Newsweek at this point because it's like why?
Why be like the sky is falling from tariffs in the morning and then they're off in the afternoon? Like who needs that? I would just like, just give me the summary at the end of the week. Like what happened? What didn't? Let me know how it went.
I mean, and this is, you know, I think Trump has this just natural inclination for how the information system works now. And he is just jamming it. And this is going to continue for four years. But it's the volatility is beyond just, you know, if you look at like the VIX numbers.
of equities, it's never been more volatile. Strategies have to change when everything is so volatile. Just like the news of DeepSeek, it was out there. They released this thing in December, and then all of a sudden, a trillion dollars got wiped off the stock market. The stock market always has gyrations, and there's always volatility, and traders love volatility.
But I just feel like we're living in a time where there's more volatility than ever. And there's all this uncertainty with AI and everything. And if you're a company or just person, you just have to be comfortable with the volatility. And the people who are more inclined and the companies that are built for volatility will probably do better than those that aren't. There you go. Enjoy the volatility, Troy. Closing words, you too.
That's it for this episode of People vs. Algorithms, where each week we uncover patterns shaping media, culture, and technology. Big thanks, as always, to our producer, Vanya Arsinov. She always makes us a little clearer and more understandable, and we appreciate her very, very much. If you're enjoying these conversations, we'd love for you to leave us a review. It helps us get the word out and keeps our community growing.
Remember, you can find People vs. Algorithms on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and now on YouTube. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next week. All right. Thanks. Bye.