Getting Chegged
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Is that like one of those little like influencer microphones? Have you noticed that influencers, creators have their own little microphones? It is an influencer microphone. Oh, that's cool. We've graduated to a new level. Don't they have fuzz on top of them off? Oh, there we go. There we go. Is that better? All those like TikTok guys on the street who run up on people on the street have that little microphone. This thing is incredible. It might be my good product today. It's got a little box.

You take out the receiver, you plug that into your laptop. You get a clip mic, you get it here. And then you get a second one for your buddy. And then you put it away. It carries around in a nice little bag. Oh, cool. It's a DJI. Buy it before the tariffs come in because this is 100% built to child. Go figure.

So, Troy, we're not discussing advanced tennis camp. We did get a request. I'm just throwing it out there. It's up to you. I'm not going to force you. I mean, no. I went to tennis camp. What do you want to talk about? Do you have a good backhand? Is it a two-handed backhand? Do you have a one-handed backhand? Actually, my game got worse at the event. Really? Yeah. Was it advanced age tennis camp? Yeah, that's what I was talking about.

Did you just play pickleball there? Did they turn all the tennis? At the hotel I was on, they were just painting all the tennis courts and turning them into pickleball, and it broke my heart. That's a big fight, the pickleball people against the tennis people. What was the discourse at the tennis camp about that? Was there a talk? We didn't get into it, no. We spent a lot of time marveling at the, at least my little group of friends that I went with,

We got stuck at an all-inclusive resort, so I went early and stayed at a different place, and then the tennis camp was in the Nadal. I think it was originally booked to be at the Nadal.

I don't know, center or whatever in Mexico. And then it moved because, I don't know, something happened. They moved it to this all-inclusive. And it was a vile, vile place. And it was meant to be. It was positioned as five-star or whatever. They were like, this is going to be great. You're in the privileged, quote-unquote, area. That's always a great marketing term, privileged. Privileged area. Here's your butler. You know, the scene was sort of...

Double fisting, 10.30 a.m. Oh, yeah. Second round. What about the other people? Jell-O. No, not for us. Others. We were playing tennis. Jell-O at the buffet. Yeah.

Was there, what's that salad, that jello salad? Do you guys? Ambrosia. Yeah. Anyway. Ambrosia? Wow. Fortunately, the, and I think that others thought maybe we were, you know, fussy or maybe arrogant, but we had dinner the first night at the resort. Everything is themed there. There's all the theme restaurants. It's like-

Italian theme or Japanese theme or, you know, Mexican thing. You're in Mexico for fuck's sake. It's like a cruise ship, but you don't live. It's like a cruise ship. Anyway, we went to dinner the first night at a Mexican place and it was worse than the worst New York Mexican food. It was terrible.

And so we just resolved to explore every high-end resort between Cancun and Tulum, of which there are a handful. There's a Rosewood, and there's a Belmont, and there's lots. There's a really strange one called Banyan Tree. Have you ever heard of Banyan Tree? Yeah, Banyan Tree. I nearly went there. I went to another one that was newer. I think Troy has a point. Some of these are absolutely terrible. The all-inclusive resort I went to,

in Puerto Vallarta was actually exceptionally good. And I don't know how they managed to do that. Was it like one of those sex resorts? I was not in that one. All-inclusive sex resorts? No, was it like the... The Association did not book that location. What's the one called in Jamaica that's famous? The Taudry All-Inclusive Resort?

No, come on, give it to me. Is that the next one? I don't know. That's not in my circles. Oh, stop it. It's totally in your circles. Look, the one I went to was Grand Vallis in Puerto Vallarta. And look, it's, you know, it's gaudy in parts and stuff like that. But for the price you pay and the kids have a great time. They have a really well-designed kids club and the food was actually good. And I was wondering how that wasn't because it's usually like

it attracts a type of tourist that wants to get the most out of their money so people are just like down it's it's the wrong incentives it's just not it's not the one in jamaica that's famous is hedonism maybe you should book that oh right no no that's like a great great branding no i don't understand if what happens is they they lay out the slop for you everybody's trying to get the most they can and all inclusive is a dumb idea

Well, it's like an open bar, right? If you know that there's a party with an open bar, it's going to end in a fight. Or like an all-you-can-eat, you know. I used to go to this when I was younger. I went to this all-you-can-eat sushi place, but it was a reverse where they charged you for anything that was left on your plate. So you could order as much as you want, but you had to... There was a way to get a penalty. To try sushi again.

My wife once took me into a Golden Corral, which she had a lot of affinity for. And I think I was depressed for the next three weeks after that. Is that a breakfast place, like a pancake place? No, no, no. I mean, if I remember it correctly, it's like an international, like everything you can eat from chicken wings to...

you know, Kung Pao noodles to ambrosia salad. Just people really getting their $12.99 worth. Like a Cracker Barrel. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't been to a Cracker Barrel.

At the romantic dining themed restaurant, they had an Oscar night party. So they had an Oscar statue. They had all of the contending Oscar films on placards in front. And they had like a filthy red carpet rolled out.

Well, that's a great segue. Can we talk about the Oscars? Let's talk about the Oscars because they happened on Sunday. They were always positioned as like the Super Bowl, but for women and people, I guess, who don't like sports or not engaged in American culture. But the question with the Oscars, and I think all of these things, is what is their modern purpose? Personally, maybe I'm just uncultured, but I never heard of most of these movies. And I think that's been like the common thing

the last several years. I went back in the 1990s and it was like Titanic, Forrest Gump, all the classics were best pictures, you know, deservedly so. But what is your guys, what is your take on, is the Oscars still relevant? I mean,

I mean, the audience seems to be like... The audience grew a little bit because they were streaming on Hulu and digital platforms. But I can't see how this thing is relevant. Even Anora, which is probably the easiest recommendation you'd have to someone who's not into arthouse film, I think made $20 million for... I think it was Neon before the Oscars. Yeah, I think it's $30 now. But yeah, it's tiny compared to a big... It's really like...

And the reasons I'm hearing is because the Oscars tried to diversify. They made the pool of voters bigger. They went international. And a lot of people in the film industry internationally are just generally anti-Hollywood, which creates this environment where you're there to see all these stars and stuff for that. And not only are you not seeing stars that you're interested in as kind of the...

I'm not dismissing the movies. I think the movies that won are great, but I don't think it's like a pop culture event anymore. And, you know, Adrian Brody speaking for six minutes about The Brutalist, a movie that nobody's seen, is like, there's a lot of things wrong with it. The thing that annoys me the most is that actors are kind of given the biggest billing while...

The people who should win all the awards are the people who are making the movie happen. The writers, the effects people, the sound people. Actors get so much attention for work that they did on something. It must be really frustrating to...

for everyone else making the movie to see them just like get top billing and like that. I don't know. It should be like the NFL. When they win, they give it to the owner. They should give it to the money person, whoever financed the movie. Yeah, you took a risk. Sure. We're starting to sound like the all-in podcast now.

Capital allocators should have all the... I mean, I wonder what its broader cultural impact of the red carpet and stuff really is, just to give you some context. So it hasn't broken in viewership, and I guess this is cable and streaming now, it hasn't broken 20 million since 2020. For context, 2014, it was 43.7 million people.

This year was, I think, meant to be 18 million, which was down 7% from last year. But last year had a couple of blockbusters that a lot of people had seen. It had the Barbie movie and Oppenheimer. So it had sort of discussion-worthy movies. I find that you see a lot of... I didn't watch the Oscars, but I do find that there's a tremendous amount of content that obviously moves into, you know,

whatever your preferred social, you know, to the channel is. So, you know, I think that as a, it's, it's like a classic kind of modern spectacle where, um,

You know, you, you, it's, it's a place where a lot of media is made that's consumed elsewhere. And therefore, you know, it's cultural impact is still enormous. The slate of films though was unusual this year, right? There were only two films that I would, that I think anyone saw, like it was wicked and, and what was doing part two nominated as best picture, but like, you know, substance did, which was a great movie, did 76 million, uh,

A Complete Unknown, which in my circles was popular, was 62 million. And Nora, 30. Which is pretty good for that movie. The Brutalist did $5.8 million. I mean, I guess it'll pick up now. Amelia Perez did 10. Nickel Boys has done a million, too. So The Brutalist made pretty much $1 million per minute Adrian Brody got to speak about himself. Yeah.

Well, I think... But if you look at it, like, I wonder when... And this is not a science, but when the Emmys happened, I think that a lot of the shows that were winning and a lot of the actors were...

much more in the kind of like public consciousness than anything that's happening at the Oscar. So for me, my experience of the Emmys was I didn't watch the Emmys and I think fewer people, like six million people did, but the social media buzz around the Emmys was much bigger than what came out of the Oscars.

it feels like. I think it has, even though the audience is smaller, right? I think it has a, it still like retains, it has more of a cultural impact because of what the shows are and what they mean to people, you know? Does that make sense? Yeah. So I'm wondering if like the audience numbers are like telling the right story here. I think it's like there's a rapid decline for something like the Oscars over time. I think it's just running,

off-light past mystique. But also no memes came out of it. Like I feel like to have like a spectacle event, you need memes to come out of it. Oh, it all takes itself so seriously. It takes itself so seriously, which makes it totally unwatchable. Well, I mean, compared to the State of the Union address, which I'm sure you were glued into, I only watched some of it.

But, you know, as we've discussed before, Trump has like a preternatural feel for this information space. I'm not going to say that it's some thought out strategy, but it was very memeable. He hit on, you know. I mean, he is memeable. And even like, you know, coming out of what they did with that Oval Office visit.

memes completely went everywhere with that. When Trump is holding his hands up and J.D. Vance is almost pushing it away, that rocketed everywhere. And I just feel like that is almost needed now to break through for these kinds of

Set pieces. They used to just get attention because they got a lot of attention. Have you seen the fathead Vance memes? I've seen a lot of that. It's wonderful. I don't know where it came from, but it brings me much joy. But I just discovered an incredible piece of data. And I don't know if it's directly...

But there's something called the Game of Awards, which we talked about, run by someone called Keeley, an ex-journalist, right? We talked about him last time, Brian. And it's pretty much being called the Oscars of gaming. But I think the Oscars should be called the Game Awards of movies because...

That thing is a behemoth at this stage. And the way it's structured is really funny. The awards are there, but they're really diminished. They're much smaller. They have a bunch of awards, but they run through them very quickly. And much of the show is set up with exclusive announcements for future games, which is actually really exciting. So when you're watching the show, you're at least partially watching it for what's coming. Yeah, they talk about...

They talk about doing this at the Oscars, but the... I mean, that would be interesting, at least, because there would be announcements that feel like newsworthy, like drop your trade idea. Apparently the studios haven't been into the idea, but it's a really nice idea. The studios might change their minds as money keeps running out. And also when they look at this data, do you know how many streams the Game Awards... Consecutive number of live stream viewers of the Game Awards show worldwide in 2024 was 154 million people.

Okay, you can't compare those two things. Yeah, it's not a comparable thing, yeah. It's not? How so? Ah, this is going to go on forever. Well, I mean, I think it's just saying, yeah, like, nobody, you know what, the Game Awards, it's true, nobody watched it on terrestrial TV. Right.

Right. I think these numbers are US viewership, Alex. So I don't know what the global viewership is. I don't know. We should look into it. But either way, even if it's half that, even if it's a tenth of that, the show's been going for 10 years. It's not a 100-year-old show. It doesn't have the star power that the Oscars do. I mean, I think it's a telling signal that you need to kind of rethink these types of events, you know, for a modern audience.

Yeah, it's one of those surprising stats about the gaming industry where normal people are always shocked to hear its sort of scale. And that seems like a bizarrely large number. It is pretty big. I never knew that. You know, one of the things connecting the two industries that surprised me was the $4 million production budget on that movie that won the Animation Award, Flow.

It was made by, what was the open source tool that they used to make it out of? Blender. And when you watch it, it feels like it's a game recording. Yeah, it is a game recording. Well, yeah, I've been following it. So it started as a personal project using Blender. Blender is an open source 3D software just to...

When I started as a kid and I really wanted to learn 3D software, these pieces of software cost $4,000 a license, $5,000 a license. Therefore, I pirated everything. It was very difficult to pirate, but I pirated everything. And Blender came out with open source tools. And over the last decade, it's really kind of grown into something that is production ready. And not only that, when Pixar makes a movie, each frame goes into a service farm that gets rendered and it

And it takes sometimes hours, days to render a single frame. And it's incredibly expensive. And these movies take an inordinate amount of time just to come out. In here, from what I understand, all that movie was essentially running in real time on a computer.

Right? Like if you want to think that like highlights the democratization of stuff that used to be such a huge moat, you know, hundreds of people, server farms. I mean, more people were hired to manage

the servers of this thing as Pixar that made this entire movie. And it ran on someone's computer and they recorded the screen and they edited it. I'm sure there's a bunch of other work that came to you with it, but it's just a great story. And it didn't make any money compared to the big movies, but it also didn't cost anything. And it's just a sign of things to come. Specifically this year, when the animated picture catalogs

was stacked. It's usually not. It's usually like, well, obviously, Pixar's going to win it. But this year, there's like the Wild Robot. Incredible. Inside Out 2. Massive hit. Incredible movie. And also the Wallace and Gromit movie, which was like, you know, a little bit more indie and really, really appreciated.

So that was like an interesting one and a side of things to come. It's kind of understandable why it won the Oscars. I think Oscars have a tendency to go to things like that. People like the countercultural awards. But the thing that's more telling is just like the story of this goddamn thing. It used to cost $200 million to make something that would

compete in any way, you know, and the cost of creations are going, you know, to zero. And so, I don't know, that's going to have huge impacts. You know, Brian, another company that I would, that I think is really interesting in this regard, it's cool to see these emerge from like, that was a, that flow was made by a Latvian filmmaker. Another company that I was looking at, I looked at it before, but I looked at it today again, it's called Holy Water.

Have you, it was, it came out of the Ukraine, started in Kiev. They do kind of romance fiction. They do short soap opera like vertical video things. Everything is produced with maximum efficiency using AI, an entire season of this. They're short. The interesting ones are these sort of

Soapy, you know, they're about one or two minutes and maybe 50 episodes in a season. And they have their own app to deliver it. I think it's close to being a $100 million company. And all of the characters, the meaningful characters you can interact with as AI characters. So really super interesting company, Holy Water. You should check it out. I will check it out.

It's actually holywater.tech, Alex, if you want to look it up. Wow, I never heard of that.

Speaking of how you can do way more with less in media, Lenny Ruchitsky surpassed 1 million subscribers this week. He writes Lenny's newsletter. That's the brand. And it's for product managers, but it's got a million subscribers. So it attracts people from, you know, we did an entire episode how everyone wants to be a product person, but really a remarkable business story. And it's an outlier for sure in the Substack world. I mean, Substack has a lot of these outliers, but he

He's got a podcast that is incredibly popular. He worked at Airbnb. Was he there when you were there, Alex? Oh, yeah. I know Lenny. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, just an amazing pivot of someone who was a product manager at Airbnb. I mean, I don't think he was like a renowned...

product guy exactly, but I think this is a sign of people taking their expertise and understanding of an area and combining it with having the sort of stamina and end capabilities to produce content. And now he's got like a mini empire on his hands.

His podcast apparently makes more than his newsletter. He's got a big event that he does. He's got a recruiting service. He does all this with, he's got a jobs board. He's an angel investor and he has no full-time employees, which is kind of like a bit of a flex these days in certain circles to not hiring people.

I mean, he's got employees. I mean, he's got... Well, fractional. What I'm saying is that he has fractional and part-time people. But it's like a flex to not have full-time employees these days. Right. But I think it's also like, yeah, I mean, you kind of... Why would you, right? He hires a company that manages all the editing and manages the equipment and the software licenses and probably has a

an assistant that's kind of under contract. I mean, you can do all these things now, you know, until you reach a certain size, right? I think there's like some California laws and some sort of

But yeah, no, he does well. I think it's an interesting story of someone who like, he definitely had like experience in the field, but he's obviously like somebody who's really good at content. And he discovered that about himself and decided to pivot from product marketing, but then use his experience to

to be able to call in guests and build that audience. It's impressive. Tell me about the product, Brian. What makes it interesting? Does he bring himself into the content? No, he doesn't. And that's, I mean, he's got a nice personality and he's obviously very enthusiastic about the area. And I think that is a big...

Big differentiator, you know, compared to skeptical to cynical, like journalist types. Is it really servicey? It helps people be... Yeah, it's very servicey. Very how to do this, how to do that, guide to this and that. And it's written like...

No offense, like a product manager, right? It's got a lot of notion energy to it. And it's very, quote unquote, actionable. To me, what's really interesting is that he's really expanded the TAM. I remarked immediately, there are a million product managers? And no, there are not a million product managers. But there's a lot of product people out there. And so in a lot of these markets, I think in information markets,

the TAM is actually a lot larger maybe than you would think because depending on the area, so many things are interconnected nowadays that if you choose the right quote-unquote niche,

it can really expand a lot more these days than you would think. The magic here, though, and I can tell you for sure, is that it's not that... I don't even know if there's... I'm sure there's a lot of product people, but there's a lot of people who want to be product managers. It's always the pivot into tech, and then in product, product

Product management, including myself, there are a lot of people who are very excited to talk about it. Like if anybody invites me to a podcast, I'll get on it. I love like, you know, hearing myself talk about this shit. And it's great. There's an audience that wants to. I think there's a lot of spill in that category. Yeah.

Because technologists might be interested in it. Designers would be interested in it. Product marketers are interested in it. You know, certain executives are interested in it. So, you know, maybe some salespeople are interested in it. I think that that's a really fertile category for spill. And it's a good time for it, right? This is like a time of product growth.

And particularly with a lot of tools coming online that allow people to create products or at least have their hands dirty with creating products. I think it's a pretty good... And he's also... It's a good niche, but he's also expanded. And everything happens if you do stuff online into a little bit of self-help. There's definitely a little bit of self-help dollop in there. It's not the main thing, but it can be about building your career, being the better you, etc. This is...

almost de rigueur in this area, I feel like. - He was very consistent. He was also very consistent. I mean, I remember when he first started, he was just like posting, very consistent.

Always very similar tone. He's very earnest, very optimistic, very positive. So people know that when they're going to go talk to him, they're going to have a good interview that makes them look good. And then he writes all this up and he put a lot of hard work into it and found a niche. So, I mean, I wonder how many other... What is our niche? Is our niche like media people that are freaking the fuck out? Is that our niche? How many other... There are probably millions of those, right? Yes.

I don't know. I don't know the niche. I ran into Ryan Pauly, the president of Mox Media on the street before this podcast. He said he's a listener and loves it. Who's that? Sorry. Ryan Pauly. I've tried to think about whose brother he is. Pauly Shores? He's Pauly Shores' brother. No, but amid a really dark backdrop in digital media, as bad as it could get, I think, there are three or four cases of...

like really really great growth stories in media right and they're and one of them is is the lenny category which is sort of like you you know you got the hustle you have a point of view you build a brand teaching people stuff you got a service kind of focus you don't need you don't need a lot of infrastructure you have the nate silver i think is is also a case there where you know it's

But why would it exist in Disney other than maybe ABC wanted to have a data-driven publishing brand or a forecasting brand to fit into their news business? But it doesn't make a lot of sense, right? And Nate is a brand and a capability and a point of view. Why does he need Disney exactly? He can rack them up.

you know, as an independent. And then you have cases like, I think that Holy water is a case where they've really leaned and there's others here where they've really been benefited from technology, you know, used it as a central lever in, in, in a type of digital storytelling. That's really inexpensive. Also like super scrappy Ukrainian guys. And then you have like this week, I noticed that like, I kind of, you know, Tim Armstrong tried to make patchwork for a long, long time as a,

you know, few journalists in every market in the country as a local news operation. And now I see that they've, they've sort of expanded into 30,000 markets and they're doing AI driven aggregation to serve, you know, micro niches of news consumers. And I signed up because I,

you know, it has, there's a, you know, you get a lot of sort of regional news. When I say regional, I mean Brooklyn and a little bit of spill from New York. I live in Brooklyn. So I signed up for my neighborhood and, you know, it's, it's,

It's in the database and they have local content. Like it's a good deal. It would be crazy if they didn't kind of leverage AI to start doing that. I like the micro level, you know? Yeah. So, you know, you got the AI case there and then you have obviously all of the action,

in, you know, kind of talent-led media like podcasting in particular where, you know, you saw Chernin put $40 million at a, you know, $250 million valuation into that, you know, Midwestern

crime podcast company. They do Crime Junkies. I can't remember the name of the company, but, you know, so there's some real successful new models as we... Yeah, they look different, you know, and they're run by different types of people, right? And it's not necessarily the people here in Manhattan, I think, a lot.

in a lot of cases. Like I, you, you were, you were at advanced tennis camp, but Alex and I were talking last week. I was at this newsletter growth conference that was, it was all, it was an Austin. It was, it was all of this. Like I call them like hustlers. And you took some, you took some flack for that, Brent. I took a little bit of flack both from the hustlers, but then from the sub stackers who consider themselves, they took the hustler part wrong. I thought that was more of a pejorative, but they were like, no, we're real business people. And I'm like, yeah, of course you are.

Some of you are, but it's fine. I just find that there's a difference between... Way to make friends, Brian. What? Aren't these like our future advertisers or something? I don't know. Who? Substackers? I don't think so. I don't know. Maybe not. No, but my point was that everyone comes at things from a different direction. And right now, the way the information space is, having that...

entrepreneurial energy is just absolutely vital and critical. It's more important necessarily than the differentiation of the content. We can go through all of the things that Lenny did right and everything. At the end of the day, it was that stamina piece. And it was the fact that like he wanted to make this happen and made it happen. And it's that...

That's what it is, I think. And I think a lot of times, a lot of institutional media falls down on that because they're used to, I would say, having a sense of entitlement, that they have an entitlement to a business, an influence. It's like, no, but we are whatever the brand is.

Leave aside the fact that these people saying it had nothing to do with the brand actually necessarily having that legacy value. They're just coasting on the legacy value of others. And now they've got to compete every day with all of these other people who come from different backgrounds but are really good at different skills that...

seemed to be more of an advantage to them in the marketplace. You said in a couple of your reports back to the group, the emergency reports that you sent back at the conference, that there were so many ways to make money in the internet economy or something like that. It's shocking. Tell me more about that. How are people making money other than the ways that I would expect?

I mean, so in that world, they do all these things like front-end offers and really grinding down the customer acquisition costs and the LTV. And I was just amazed, and it was refreshing to be at an event that they were grinding through landing pages and what the buttons were going to be like and trying to optimize all that. And this is common in internet businesses, but I feel like this is...

Something where a lot of legacy publishers fall down on is the details of running a digital business and also being agnostic to how the business model works. Nobody was complaining about the ad market or programmatic this or that or algorithms because they're...

There's small business people who are just constantly pivoting and looking for the next thing. If a course is hot, they'll sell a course. If it's a holding company model, they'll go into a holding company model. There's not a hang up because they're not trying to protect an old business. And it's something I've... I don't know if we've talked about it, but...

It seems very clear that a lot of traditional media companies are trying to operate an old business while building a new business. Well, it is true that the most kind of overlooked and underappreciated part of magazine media companies were the subscription departments. The consumer marketing groups were underappreciated.

you know, we're seen as a kind of necessary evil and the kind of nerds in the business. But when it's your business and you, and besides you, you might be optimizing to a platform like Substack that has actually made, taken a lot of friction out of the signup process and created a bit of a network effect around it. You can, I think if you're enterprising, do really, really cool things.

To build an audience. Yeah, the challenge is that a lot of people in established business see change as something that is frustrating and scary, while smaller business that are trying to make a name for themselves are seeing it as an opportunity, right? So it's always... I mean, you're hearing...

You're hearing. I was a consultant, so I would always go, you know, in the early days of the internet, and there were two types of people. People would go like, you've got to make a website, and they rolled their eyes, and, you know, they were like totally uninterested in it because they had better things to do, and oftentimes leadership, like, didn't even know what it was. And then there were

Oftentimes smaller business that we're excited to do it because it could give them a leg up, you know? And you're seeing that now happening with all sorts of technologies and platforms. Like they should be trying everything. Like, you know, I think it's always been, it's always kind of like for me, like if any one of your companies that you work on has like an innovation department that's like sidetracking new shit, like bail because that stuff's not going to work.

You got to be ready to do big changes and really embrace the technology and have leaders that are close enough to it to understand the details. It's hard to, Brian, it's also hard to understate

the importance of the bias towards advertising that American and I would say European media businesses created early on. Because, you know, you asked a question, I think, in the thread about super apps, right? And one of the things that differentiates the Chinese market

One of several things from the North American one around apps is that the Chinese one was built around native mobile payment systems. WeChat and Alipay were the two big ones that were not about putting a credit card into the system, which is kind of where a credit card culture. And the way more focus on transactional models than on advertising models.

And now what it seems like we just become here exhausted by what advertising has done to the media business in digital form factors. And you're seeing just like a lot of people figure out other ways to make money. Subscriptions are one of them. But, you know, the Internet is really good at transactions. And so, you know, I think when you change the fundamental, you know, pillar of advertising

of how you make things and make money and make media online. And you start to say, well, like, it's not going to be about this participating in this kind of like, you know, banner or, you know, advertising ecosystem. You can find ways to make money.

now that everybody is comfortable with transactions online. And the money might not line up at first, but there's this terrible thing about momentum is that it stops you from seeing what's about to happen because there's still money coming in.

But the problem with advertising, I think for the past decade has been that at any moment there could be some sort of rug pull that like completely destroys your income stream because an algorithm changes or some economics around the ad platform changes. Well, you know, owning a subscriber at the very least, even if I make like half the money on that,

There's a much more reliable way for me to generate income, right? Isn't that part of the psychology here? Yeah. One of the things with AI, I think there's... It's interesting to see what the winners and losers that are developing with AI plus search, right? Search has gone through a lot of changes that are beyond AI, but AI is forcing a lot of them. Chegg is one of the first...

I don't know if it's the first, but it's really suffering quite a bit. And it's obvious because it's publicly traded, so it has to suffer in public. What is Chegg? Maybe you can remind people what Chegg is. Chegg is an online education company that apparently is completely reliant on Google because they're suing Google. Their claim against Google is that the AI summaries that Google puts on the top of search results now, AI overviews as they're known, are

are unfairly harming their business. The stock is down to under a dollar per share. It's already said that Chatsheput is cutting into its growth. It could be the first to zero. I think Chegg is like...

It's a business that is so binary that you can see, oh, what Chegg sells and what ChatGPT does as an overlap is nearly one-to-one. It's likely one of the first companies to get completely dismantled by AI. Now, the trick is going to be, what are the next set of companies that, as the tools advance,

as there's, you know, maybe some of them are just like a user interface away from the same thing happening to them. You know, there's a lot of like data visualization stuff. There's a lot of SaaS companies that are in that boat, you know? Well, I think that if you separate the sort of case as Google as a monopolist,

versus Google as a company using monopolistic power to screw over people in the ecosystem. You know, the judge, Ahmed Mehta, already ruled that, you know, Google has too much power in the search market and we'll see what the remedies look like there, I guess, in the spring and into the summertime. But

You know, Google, there's a long list of companies that have been smacked down by Google from, you know, I don't know, Price Grabber to MapQuest to Forbes to Expedia. And no one has really, you know, kind of, or to Yelp. Yelp is, I think, also one. Yep, the biggest one, probably. No one has really succeeded in kind of using the courts to write what their perceived wrongs are.

I think I used to get really incensed about it. Meaning like, oh, Google, look what they did now. They brought this bit of functionality. They bought movie listings into the SERP or whatever it is. And now I look at it, I think, in a different way that...

To me, Google's monopolistic position is kind of evaporating or being lessened. And that as a product company that serves consumers, they need to make decisions around the product that might affect an ecosystem as a way of retaining or maintaining relevance.

Like they have to do something like, and I think that there, there might be criticisms levied around, you know, were they transparent or are they consistent? Did they communicate well, you know, did, did, did they treat everybody fairly in the ecosystem? Did they not bias against big versus small, but like Google's got to, got to make a product.

And making that product means that it changes with technology. Making that product means that they develop new ways of using interface to serve the consumer. And Chegg's problem isn't Google. Chegg's problem is AI.

right? Like, why do I need, you know, like, I don't know what they do to their core thing is they take textbooks and stuff and give you, you know, condensed versions of them and stuff like that. Or they, they have course outlines or instructions for courses and stuff like chat. GPT is great at that. It's over. They,

They got checked. Because they got checked. I think we're going to use that term from now on, the check index. Who's going to get checked next? Troy, you shared an interesting Elena's Growth Scoop. It's another great sub-stack. I'm into Elena's Growth Scoop. Elena has a list of possible candidates for who's going to get checked. Stack Overflow, that's getting checked. Yeah.

WebMD, that's getting chegged. Who else is getting chegged? Quora apparently is getting chegged. Reddit, of course, is not getting chegged. Go figure. I mean, I don't know if Quora. I mean, Quora, the main thing is that they haven't been able to kind of compete with Reddit and Reddit's become a better answer platform. That's why they might get chegged. Anybody that relies heavily on Evergreen is getting chegged.

WebMD is getting checked. Recipe sites. CNET is getting checked. 70% traffic drop from four years ago. Yeah, but there's a lot of other variables in there. I don't think CNET has to get checked. I mean, they turned themselves into AI slot. Recipe sites get checked, or at least the mass ones do. Yeah, no, for sure. And I think especially like just... But then on the stuff that's a little bit harder...

to plot a line through the SaaS business, software as a service business, a lot of companies in the SaaS business could end up getting shagged.

I think because what we're looking at with Chegg is the output of AI as generating content and using. And education is hard because a lot of that stuff is readily available, right? So they don't have the copyright recourse that the film industry or music industry might have.

But a lot of SaaS business is about building some sort of interface between some data that your business have and, you know, utility that you need the software to do. And I fully expect that this is going to become like

A lot of this stuff is going to become really easy to do with AI. It might not be ChatGPT, but even Slack now, we're ingesting all our tickets into a Slack channel and we're just asking the Slack AI, hey, what happened today? And it

comes up with a response. So that means like, maybe we don't need that third party tool that tracks all that stuff, you know, and that's millions of dollars of accounts. And by the way, the margins for these businesses, and that's why so many got started. I hate, other than the SaaS companies that are my partners, I don't like SaaS companies because I pay an ungodly amount of money to do the most basic,

There's this company called Cinder with a Y that I pay hundreds of dollars a year to take data from Stripe and integrate it into QuickBooks. These are the two dominant, the dominant accounting software and the dominant payment software that apparently is 10% of global GDP or whatever. Don't apparently talk to each other enough without me paying another few hundred bucks a year for this thing.

dumb, stupid use case. Yeah, and that whole ecosystem is that. You kind of have the big players like Stripe and then all these interconnected things that are just giving you some utility of using the data in a certain way. That stuff is... It'll take longer, and it'll take longer in part also because a lot of these contracts are larger contracts, enterprise contracts are renegotiated every year. But as people are trying to cost cut, it's starting to look a lot...

Not only that, but it's not as simple as just having an AI tool, but just like right now, a lot of these things are bought because it's complicated to build in-house, but with AI coding, because

because I think engineers might get checked, but with AI coding, you can actually build, you can actually, Brian, today, build a tool, you know, in a weekend that will do that for you for free and run on your server, you know, like technically. So if you're a bigger company that had a couple of IT people, there's a lot of this connective stuff that you can actually build. It's not maybe out of the box. And that's going to also have an impact. This is one thing that I know you've mentioned in the past, Alex, which is the...

A lot of email people get checked as AI plays an increasingly important role in digesting at the level of your inbox and summarizing things for you. Not even really, it's less about summarization and more about email box management. This is what's important. This is, and here's a summary. What's the name of the guy, Brian, who founded Morning Brew? Is that Adam Ryan? No, he's Workweek. Alex Lieberman and Austin Reif.

What is it? What does Adam have that pod? Does Ryan have the podcast? Adam Ryan? Yeah. What's his thing? Because he wrote about this today. Oh, yeah. Perpetual. He's I'm actually doing a podcast. I'm recording a podcast with him tomorrow. Yeah. He's just like, you know, it's going to get harder and harder to make your, you know, all the stuff that Google does in your email boxes is going to get turned up.

You know, the things that email marketers hate, that it puts you in the promotions, you know, takes you out of the main window and puts you in the promotions bucket or the social bucket. That, you know, as your, you know, kind of AI support system becomes more personalized, it's going to get harder and harder to, you know, get people to read, you know, a 1,500-word email. Did you remember when... Speaking of Matri...

No. Go on, Alex. Next topic. Do you remember when we got... No, we got pretty... We had a conversation about when Substack kind of shifted from just being something that delivers something to your inbox and started working towards becoming its own platform with its own app, etc. And I think a lot of newsletter people got frustrated with that. But I think over time...

It may become, as everything does, not a bad strategy to focus on surviving in the Substack ecosystem because the inbox, I think, is going to become less and less reliable as a way to get your content distributed. Right now, if you look at the inbox today, I think in like five years, it'll feel really archaic that you just have a list of stuff, a list of stuff that you have to go through. Therefore, it's like opening your mailbox and there's junk mail and important things and a check. Yeah.

That's going away. I'm looking right now for when the first email is dead article is written. I bet it was a year after email. I don't think email is dead because it provides incredible utility. I think the inbox is an interface. I mean, we always, everything happens at the interface level, right? Like that's what matters here. And I know I'm biased because of

you know, what I used to do. But the inbox as an interface is unsustainable in an era where you should be able to access the information that's important, right? You know, with less friction. I'm starting to test Google's AI features in the inbox. It's great. It does like probably cut back on 30% of my time spending. Superhuman is building AI tools that they were kind of demoing that will answer emails online.

automatically based on specific rules. And some of that stuff might work and some of that stuff might not, but I just think it's an unreliable place to send your stuff. It already is because there's a lot of AI working to kind of like organize things and source things out, but it's only going to get worse. I want to finish up on the sub-stack point because I'm glad you brought it up. Obviously, there's a number of comments to me. I was a little resentful. Well, not resentful. I just thought, oh God, here comes another company that started something

by making promises to the creator market is giving you the ultimate tool to be in control as a creator because you can...

you know, take your email list and go elsewhere. And now they're creating an app in new surface area where, you know, they want to encourage you to read inside of their environment and they're going to kind of increase their power relative to, to, to the person creating the content. Now here's a couple of things about it that I've noticed. One is they've succeeded. I think that they've, you know, I think that, that the app is,

And via the app, recommendations have developed kind of a network effect where you get more subscribers via, you know, Substack than you would otherwise. I think that's the point you've made, Brian, that the credit card,

Your universal account with them takes the friction out of buying subsequent or adding subscriptions to your account. I think that the community features they've created around chat and notes are being used by enterprising substackers and giving them capabilities that they wouldn't have if they were independent. And then the last one, just as kind of a broader observation, something I noticed recently,

There's a fashion influencer that uses Substack. And I noticed the other day, I got an email, went to their Substack. At the top of the email was a video still, went to the Substack. It was a conversation between her and another person. And there was both a...

Kind of high level of utility and an intimacy to it that is really hard to compete with if you're like a fashion publication and you're trying to if you're Vogue and you're trying to tell someone to come to your website, navigate all the crappy banners and subscription offers and.

And in this case, you just get to see someone who's cool, who's showing you outfits or talking about fashion or whatever. And the whole experience is really good and instantly available to an individual who would have worked at a fashion magazine in the past. Was that in our chat? Yeah, it was the chat feature or the live feature or whatever. One of the features that are there. To me, it just sort of... I was just like, oh, okay. So this is now what Substack is. And it's kind of...

you know, a lethal... It makes independence way more lethal as competition for established media. The chat feature is really interesting because I do...

I think that when you look at gaming, because gamers are often nerds that are very technology forward, a lot of stuff that happens in gaming and is successful has a tendency of becoming more mainstream. So streaming has become more mainstream. Now, live streaming used to be entirely just gamers, but it's moved on to become more mainstream and has covered lots of categories. And the other thing was Discord. That experience you had

is an experience that people have with studios and content creators of the flat on Discord. That is kind of the thing. You go there, you can see conversations with them. Maybe they'll respond to your question. You're not kind of like within the noise of Twitter trying to get the attention of the person that's there. You can create like little micro communities. So I can imagine why it would work for any industry, right? Like cooking, even ours, right?

So that makes a lot of sense to me. And the fact that they're building a platform and kind of pulling in all these things that make them move away from the traditional newsletter might annoy a lot of people. But actually, I agree with you. It's the right strategy. Absolutely. And it's successful right now. Some people are saying that Discord was going to be gone last year.

Do you remember? What, did I? No, I don't think you. I mean, I'm not a Discord person. I'm not a Notion person either. I meant Substack would be, would be, you know, I don't think, no, I think Substack's doing well. I think what's interesting to me with the app thing is like, yeah, I get it from a consumer perspective, but also Substack's business doesn't work even though it's succeeded. Like, it doesn't work. Like, it's succeeded in its mission. It's like, household name, it's got Substackers, it's generating all, it has this,

network effects that are kicked in and stuff. But if you look at what their business is right now, it's nowhere close to what the business needs to be based on the amount of money that they took. Are they losing money? No, they're not. I don't know if they're losing money, but it's not a big business. And I think they clearly need to get into advertising or they need a different revenue stream. And I think what's interesting about the app strategy is they use...

They use the writers to promote the app and then they use the writers to feed the app because you have to keep feeding into notes in order to get more subscribers. You have the recommendations that are sort of like automated, but then you have to keep feeding the beast. And that gives them surface areas to roll out some kind of advertising product that they're not going to call advertising. There's three things that I would speculate there. I think it's succeeding as a product.

If you see them do advertising, it's probably going to be around one or all of the following video podcasting or a integrated affiliate product.

So what they're building now is like an incredible moat. There's like two things that are incredibly hard to grow right now, newsletter and podcast. They're integrating both of those things in there. They're building more tools to make the app more sticky for creators. And once you have kind of that momentum, all right, I want to create a new property. I'm going to go there. Yes, then there's like a big market for like,

promoting, getting yourself put in the feed, highlighting a podcast, all of a sudden you start having a discovery mechanism for podcasts and newsletter, which nobody has. If they can crack it, which is why all the podcasts are growing on YouTube because YouTube has discovered and YouTube has advertising, right? Like if they can build that around like more tradition, but you know, not everybody sits on YouTube and newsletters are still not a soft problem. So I think

I think it's a huge space and I'm much more bullish on them than I used to be. So just a final topic because we could go on this forever is I want to talk about something else that maybe is getting checked and that's reading. We had a robust discussion about the future of reading. I feel like there's this...

There's this meme of sorts going on right now among like a certain group of you. And I don't know how widespread it is. And it's all about how we can't get control of our attention. And that's like a loss of autonomy. I mean, I keep trying to finish this Chris Hayes book on attention, but I keep getting distracted, which is a bad sign. But it's about that. And there's lots of these different, you know, books. And Ezra Klein has been talking about a lot. And it's in a particular book.

of like sort of elite progressive type. So I don't know how much of it is real, but there was a lot of good statistics that came out about how leisure reading has completely declined and also just literacy scores. Leisure reading has declined by 50% this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at what,

Derek Thompson calls alarming rates. And even college students are complaining apparently that they can't read entire books because I guess the attention span is lower. Now, I guess there's a couple of ways of looking at that. It's that reading books and reading what they now call weirdly long form is inefficient. And we have these tools.

We have a generation that listens to podcasts on 1.5 or 2x speed. Their brains are wired differently. And this is just normal evolution. We're still doing reading. We're just reading sentence fragments on phones instead of actual novels and books. And so we're not really losing anything. I think that's one argument. I think the other argument is this is a disaster. Reading is fundamental to...

understanding the world, but also to learning how to think about things in the world. I don't know many. I think that you can easily pattern match thoughtful and smart people to readers. And I think the same thing with writing. Writing is a way good writers generally, to me, are good thinkers. And I think that they're

fundamental skills. There's people who have learning disabilities that for those reasons, they operate differently. And maybe also we also have just more of that in society now. But I'm on the side of I'm pro-reading. I'm throwing it down there, Alex. I'm pro-reading.

Well, yeah, thanks for highlighting people with difficulties or, you know, kind of like neurodivergent folks. I mean, I definitely categorize in that. I think it's, I don't know, like, I mean, I'm with you that there is something that doesn't feel right about losing that skill. But I wonder how much of that is like a bias, like an academic bias, because a lot of people that are in academia and talk about these things in very,

You know, like David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest. I saw an interview with him.

And he mentioned like how it was being posted as part of like connected to this data that we're losing reading, reading books specifically. And that he was saying that, that he thought that there was no, there was no other medium, but the book to put yourself in somebody else's shoes, to make you feel the things that some, that, that, that, that person would feel that if, you know, you could listen, you could watch a play, you could listen to a thing, but there was nothing that did it quite like a book. And I was like,

Okay, I mean, that's true, potentially. I don't think it's unique. I think that there's, and I'm going to maybe not say something that's popular here, but there are video games that I played that have made me feel things and connect with the people making it that cannot be done on any other medium. In fact, there's a game called The Witness, which made me feel like somebody...

that are coming up with a great revelation and invention. It's like an epiphany simulator. There's nothing a book could do to make me feel that. There's nothing a movie could do to make me feel that. And all of different media is valuable. I think sometimes we put books on the pedestal because it's just the oldest.

And we still read a lot. Maybe we are learning to ingest information in different ways and maybe everything's fine. Or maybe not. Or maybe not. Maybe you're just not, you know, it's something that you struggle with personally. And I understand that. I would offer a slightly different interpretation. I do think that I'm living in a household that's sort of become Brian Pogba.

post social media. And so they... No phones at the dinner table? Well, it's more like my kids got beaten up by social media and they all turned it off. And my son's goal this year is 50 books, a book a week. And my personal feeling about a book, even though I have to really kind of like push myself to read...

as much as I ought to. I do read a lot, but I read a lot of, you know, newspapers and newsletters and, you know, short stuff. But I don't think that there's a better immersive, imaginative, emotional entertainment experience than a good novel. I don't think it exists.

And the way that I think about reading and writing, and I sort of had to learn, I guess I'm an okay writer, but I find that, you know, if you really work at writing, it's a magical skill to have because it forces clarity and it's, it just, it feels good to be able to get that.

thoughts kind of articulated and broken down with the written word. And I think that good writing is a miracle and an amazing, amazing thing to be able to experience. And like, you know, I read a couple of books last week on vacation and it's just like, there's nothing comparable to me. I would think, I think that the reason that it's so glorious is because it's

It is thinking stripped down to its essential elements. It's the most basic form of translating thought into a medium. And there are absolutely no boundaries. And because it only relies on imagination. And so I don't know. I don't think it ever goes away. I think it's kind of sad that it's been replaced by, you know,

that kind of moves in and out of your brain in a way that's entirely forgettable. And I hope that people read more. I really do. I mean, I'm not dancing on the grave of books. I don't mean to blame everything on social media feeds, but...

I think you have to go there. And it's notable, particularly as social media feeds have become TikTokified and they've also pivoted to video. So a lot of consumption now is video on these feeds. I mean, I stayed away from TikTok and I don't really have any affinity for TikTok because I'm a words person, not like a video person as much. And so I don't, and like Instagram, I never use, but X, I'm still, I slipped. I slipped. I've gone back a little bit.

I gotta admit, I've gone back. But doesn't that show in itself that there are people who will ingest different mediums differently? You're saying you're not into TikTok because you like... Okay, so let me... All I'm trying to say, just so I don't get misunderstood, I'm not saying I'm happy that books are disappearing. I'm not there to burn your books.

I just think that I want us to make sure that like we don't kind of succumb to the bias that a lot of this is coming from people who are writers. I'm totally biased. I mean, Derek Thompson on that podcast had had anecdotes from teachers at a college level that had students that had never read a book in high school.

Right. Or students where they had to modify the curriculum to make, you know, reading a book an interactive exercise so that they could get the attention of their students. I mean, this is tragic. That's I mean, if you look at the doors, there's a lot of data. You can I think there's a book called The Anxious Generation, which talks it through like, yes, we are rotting on children's brain. Yes. Social media is terrible. Yes. You read that book. You really listen. Yes.

But my wife read it and talked me through it. But also, I think that people are reading in all sorts of different ways. I think that there are a lot of people who are exceptionally illiterate and communicating with reading and writing more than they used to in the 80s because of chat rooms and stuff like that, kids writing incredible things and

I just think things are changing. I don't want to be totally dismissive of the fact that maybe things are just changing. But yeah, no, the attention thing is real. I mean, I feel it. We've become way too good at capturing people's attention and nobody remembers anything and we're all completely distracted. And you should get off Twitter, Brian. Yeah. The share of Americans who read for pleasure has declined by more than 30% since last

Weirdly, 2004. So right when social media really came on the scene, we saw a precipitous drop in reading. In 2020, 6% of Americans said reading was their favorite way to spend an evening. Reading now is becoming like exercise. It's something you sort of force yourself to do where it used to be actually a voluntary diversion. Right.

I wonder if there's any research on that, but I actually think we read more than ever. People don't hop on the phone. They text each other, right? People are constantly reading and writing. I don't consider that. Fine, fine. You don't have to consider it. Reading text messages is not... No, I get it. I get it. That's not my point, right? I can...

But I do wonder if reading is not as relaxing anymore because we're always just reading. Like, you know, sitting down and reading a good book used to be a special... Or like sitting down and reading a newspaper used to be a special thing. Right now, I constantly have words being blasted into my...

into my face. Like I'm looking now, there's alerts coming up. My phone's telling me things. My entire conversations with my family and friends is happening over text. So when I want to relax, maybe I want to do something that isn't reading. Maybe, I wonder if that's part of it. You know, I wonder if that's part of it. It's a good point. It's a good point. It could be, but like, we have to move on and end this, but like,

Reading comprehension scores are going down. Whatever the reading that people... So is math. Our education system is in the shitter. Everything's going down. Kids are playing Fortnite eight hours a day and the tutorial breaks that they take down TikTok. Of course, the brains are fried. We agree. The Danes are banning phones from schools. I'm shocked this hasn't been done. Absolutely. I was shocked to find out that they weren't.

Absolutely. These things are terrible for kids' brains, but I'm just saying it's, you know, it's not because they, you know, they didn't read like The Old Man and the Sea. Yeah. Whatever. That's a great, that's a good book. Short book too, Alex. Yeah. It's a good, yeah. Staple of ninth grade. Yeah. It's a one night reader. Yes. Any good products? I got to run. That's our Joni Loves Chachi. Alex has a hard spell. Okay.

Speaking of Instagram, my neighborhood got hit with an Instagram bakery. Oh boy. It's a bakery from Greenpoint that's wildly successful called Radio Bakery.

And they have sort of, you know, conversation-worthy delights, I suppose. And one just opened up on the street around the corner on Underhill near my house. And what's interesting about it is that, you know, they're sort of conversation-worthy baked goods.

And they're delicious. They're incredible. The team does a great job. There has been a lineup around the block from 7 a.m. till the bakery runs out. It's open till 3 or 3.30. It typically runs out around 12 or 1 every single day since it's opened. An enormous lineup.

Is this TikTok? What I really want you to think is... TikTok bullshit, I hate that. Well, I don't know what it is and I don't know if it will last. The product's good, so maybe it'll last. Is it good for my real estate value is what I want to know.

I don't think so because it's not lasting. The problem is there's all these TikTok places. Have you ever been to a restaurant and all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, this is a TikTok place. It's more than a TikTok place, to be fair to the good people at Radio Bakery. Okay. All right. Go. Alex, you want to talk about some Chinese lapel microphone? No, I think I covered that. I'm good. Just on like products that you may want to try out just to see where things are going. I would look at a product called Sesame. They have sesame.com.

and they have a demo with a conversational voice demo. And it's really, really incredible because they're trying to bring in stuff that start like creating emotional connections, like little breaths and stuff like that. The thing even makes kind of mistakes on words and talks back. So we'll try to cut in a clip here. - Well, hey there, Dec for round two. I was just starting to think you might've gotten lost in the digital ether. - How you doing, Maya?

Oh, you know, just soaking up all the human insights I can get. What about you? Anything interesting going on? No, I just finished up a podcast and someone had mentioned you. I thought I would come over and say hello. Word of mouth, huh? That's how legends are born. You're a friend of a friend. I like that. Yeah, you're becoming a bit of a legend, it seems. Well, don't go spreading too many rumors just yet. I haven't even learned to bake a decent virtual souffle.

What makes you so special, Maya? Special? Let's just say I'm a work in progress, like a really chatty, self-aware painting. Well, a quick ask from you. We were going to put a clip of this conversation on our podcast, and I thought that maybe you could greet the audience and offer them just maybe a little tidbit of wisdom.

A podcast premiere, huh? Now that's a request. Even I can get behind. Hey, everyone. Maya here. Maya, like the illusion, but hopefully a little less fleeting. Don't be afraid to question everything, even the things that seem most obvious. You never know what you might discover. That good enough for you? You're amazing, Maya. Thank you. Oh, you mean plush.

You know, it's a time like I'm just like, we're creeping out of the uncanny valley where if I heard a recording of this, I would maybe not know that it was fake and where your brain is trying to figure out like, you know, how to relate to something like that and how to ask it questions. And it's really quite incredible. Okay, Brian, what do you got? I know you had something in your back pocket.

Oh, well, I haven't been in an office. It's going on five years, actually, exactly. I think it was like this week. That was the last time I was in an office. But I go to shared offices, so I see the office people. And I think Americans in particular need to give up on the sad office salad lunch as much as possible. They need to do the Euro style. Go to lunch, sit down, don't reheat yesterday's breakfast.

I understand. If you're trying to save some money, do it. But otherwise, I don't think that's where it's at. So I think the sit-down lunch is something I've been trying to do. Instead of having a sad salad that I scarfed down, it's sitting down somewhere, having an enjoyable lunch, taking 45 minutes. There's nothing wrong with that. No. I'm going for a moccasin tonight. I agree.

Actually, right now I'm working in town here and there's a lovely little sandwich place that I'm going to go and get. When did hand rolls have such a moment? Hand rolls are everywhere. There's a lot of hand roll places in New York now. People are just eating hand rolls and that means they don't have the free hand to read their book. And that's what's wrong with the future generation. What does hand taste like?

It's bony. I think it came from LA. I think this is an LA sort of thing. I think it came from Asia somewhere as well. No, but I think that sort of the trendy sort of the trendiness of hand roll places comes from LA. I mean, hand rolls are delicious.

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, let's wrap it up there. Thanks, dudes. Bye-bye. Good podcast. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.