Hyperpunditry
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Welcome, guys. How are you? We're good. I'm good. I don't know how Alex is. I'm good. I'm great. I'm in Palm Springs. Not Palm Springs. I'm in the desert now. I'm in 29 Palms. Is that that kind of little hotel thing called 29 Palms? There's more than one hotel. That's a fun spot, really. It's very nice. I like the desert. It's peaceful. Okay, we got a lot to get to today, so I want to get started. Got a lot on the docket. The vacation travelogue has been fascinating. Maybe we cut it out. Maybe we leave it there.

All right, let's get started. Welcome to People vs. Algorithms. I'm Brian Morrissey, joined as always by Troy Young and Alex Schleifer. We're going to have an anonymous banker is coming on later. I'd like them to discuss golf media because banking, golf, seems like it makes a lot of sense. And I think golf is actually really interesting. We want to get started with

A little bit of a carryover from last week, although we got some negative feedback, and I'll share that in a little bit.

But one of the things I think I got wrong about the decentralization of media was this assumption that I had that in a world flooded with content, expertise would naturally rise in value. And the idea was like there's more noise, so the signal will emerge. It will be more valuable than ever. And there's definitely examples of this, but I think what it's led to is a creation of what Alex expertly branded and Troy tried to rip off as the hyper pundits idea.

And I'm gonna do my best of sort of framing this, but to me,

I think it's a flattening of hierarchy and punditry works better than say like news reporting in this kind of environment. First of all, it's scalable, it's flexible, and it's cheap. The margins are great on punditry. Kara Swisher probably makes orders of magnitude more doing hyper punditry than she did when she was running a news operation, a recode. Same with Scott Galloway. I mean, I give this guy a lot of credit.

I remember watching his videos when he was doing an L2, that luxury consultancy. And I was like, why is this bald guy doing these videos? People don't want to look at that.

And he just put in the 10,000 hours, became really good at it, and it didn't stay in his lane. I mean, he's now got like prof-cheap markets. He like holds court on politics. He's going to reinvent masculinity. He's telling the young men how to do all sorts of things. Hey, Brian, as a sign of the times, I kind of found this staggering, and maybe we can answer your question about whether you were wrong or not around expertise, because I don't think you're wrong.

But Scott interviewed the Prime Minister of Canada on his Prof G pod yesterday. Yeah. I just think that's like a kind of important sign of where we're at. Well, Jason Calacanis had to buy all these suits because, you know, they're like interviewing like cabinet secretaries and hanging out at the White House. Although it seems like when they go to the White House, Jason doesn't get invited. But this is, you know, part and parcel of this world. Jason seems like a guy that doesn't get invited to parties. Yeah.

I'm not going to comment on that. But just a couple of weeks ago, we had Nick Denton on, and he was like a short seller. I kept trying to ask him about media, and he kept wanting to go over the Chinese battery production statistics and whatnot. Yeah.

And that's just the way of the world these days. And to me, this is the way I look at it. And then I want to get into the conversation. This is just another market that has just been democratized. And it's the marketplace of ideas has become this insane bizarre. And that was because the supply was always artificially constricted. Now, it's always one of those, be careful what you wish for. But to me, the expert class, in quotes,

they're going to just need to compete with these information entrepreneurs. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Whining about the fact that venture capitalists are holding forth on Ukraine and all the rest of it isn't really going to do much. The experts have to get better at what the information entrepreneurs are running laps around them at. That's mostly in presentation and format.

and being able to mix it up. And look, infotainment has always done better than like, quote unquote, hard news. So I don't think this is anything particularly new. So I want to give it first to you, Alex, since you coined the term hyperpundit, I think. There's some controversy about that, but I think you did. There's no controversy about that. We have the receipts. I think actually the AI invented it and you appropriated it.

No, I mean, that's the risk, though. Like, you go out and you start using my term without telling who it is, and then... I didn't do it. And then you ask AI, and they say, Troy... We're getting into the decline of IP next, so we can circle back. But first, Brian, what was the... You said we had some blowback. Oh, well, the negative feedback was, you know, because...

Nobody stays in their lanes. And so like, but to me, like we, obviously this is media and tech and culture. So that's very broad. And you can't avoid the overall environment. Otherwise you're just going to be myopic. Right.

And so I think last week we had a very, I thought it was an enjoyable discussion about expertise. And Troy had his, it should be like a viral, would it be a screed, Troy? Yeah, a screed. Like about Chamath Palihapitiya. I think it was a screed. Anyway, there was some politics in there, but I didn't think it was too heavy politics. But I got an email from a listener. I'll keep them anonymous. Yeah.

And this is what it said. Brian, the PVA pod is just a very bad political show. Between Alex and his Trump slash Elon derangement syndrome and Troy's embrace of the clearly impaired Taylor Lawrence, you have all lost the PVA plot. The show was great. Using the past tense there is tough.

Although this person, this correspondent did say that they're happy that my other podcast seems insulated for now. That was, I guess, a bit of a threat. And they urged, go back and ask why PVA exists. And I bet you'll find there isn't much of a reason if you break down the last six months of shows. Yeah.

So there's that. Not enough I totally agree on all of that. But I do think that that is just a sign of the times. I mean, you can't. To me, I like this show because we can go into a lot of different areas. Comments? Troy, I mean, you got compared to Taylor. What is it that you're Taylor? This is offensive to both you and Taylor. It's more to me. It's an absurd note. But no, we appreciate the feedback, but I don't.

likening me to Taylor and I mean Alex does have Elon Duran syndrome so I think that's fine I mean it's true and I have no no reason for it it's absolutely fine he's fine he's fine he guys every he's fine I didn't mean to trigger you Alex we're talking we're let's focus on the question I'm not I'm not triggered he's fine he's fine

Yeah, he's fine. He's fine, right? Like, we all like him. He's fine. Okay, but this is a symptom. You know what the funny thing is? This is happening again. It's happening. Hang on, hang on. The funny thing, the irony, I just want to point out the irony of being, of someone telling you to stay in your lane when you're complaining about Elon staying in his lane. Like, you know, when he was done building rockets, he decided to reformat the government. So, like, yeah, we all have opinions, man. I don't know who this is.

But I think that is the core of this, is we do all have opinions and we got our like hot takes and whatnot. But I think that gets at the heart of what becomes hyper punditry. And I think it is like an enduring feature of the information space. So unpack it for us, Alex. This is your turn. This is trademarked.

Yeah, unpack it. I don't know. This podcast, you know, we say it's about the intersection or the patterns in media, technology, and culture. So we're going to talk about media, technology, and culture. And unfortunately or fortunately, these are very broad topics. It's a very kind of wide circles that form this really broad Venn diagram. And I wish we could have, you know, I wish I was part of more like of a focused tech podcast. I like talking about this stuff, but unfortunately...

No offense taken. No, I mean, it's mostly because that's what I know most about. And I appreciate that I don't know much about a lot of the other topics, but

What happens is things are constantly brought into the fray. Like it's impossible to talk about culture and media without slipping into politics. It's very hard to keep your opinion away from your takes. But I don't want to kind of dwell too much on that email. I kind of regret asking you to read it, actually. But feedback is always welcome, but not always agreed to.

I think the challenge for me with those new types of pundits is that there are no real stakes

because you don't really have to be right. I think a lot of the tech journalists that I used to read, and even Kara Swisher used to have takes, and they were playing within their field, and therefore that was their currency, that they would exist within tech, and the quality of their takes in tech would build up the equity that they had in that market. But right now, everybody is able to be brought in, and they deliver so much content, it's kind of hard to see, to translate,

to track what bullshit Scott Galloway might have said. You know, he might say 80% of stuff that sounds correct and then it gets all chopped up and he has opinions about everything. So it's hard to grade those people. I think that's part of that challenge for me.

And whether it's Chamath or Scott or any one of these guys, everybody's got an opinion about everything. And a part of that is because, I mean, we're kind of in the middle of it because culture, technology, and media has all blended together. Like, you know, the business of media, everybody participates in it. We're seeing kind of these...

you know, a hundred year old brands that are, you know, competing against kind of dudes in their bedrooms. Everybody has access to technology. Everybody has opinions. And it's because it's, and it's made this market where the only thing that you really need is, um,

some form of measure of success. So it could be, you know, oh, this guy's got 16 million Twitter followers, Scott Galloway and Chamath are both rich guys. Like the amount of the pipeline from rich guy to influencer is huge because rich guys immediately get more attention. Immediately their words come out truer because they say, well, this person's rich. The amount of times that I hear that, well, you know, he is a billionaire, right?

you know, he must know, right? Well, maybe that's the new credential. You don't need to get the PhD. Well, but let's deconstruct it in maybe a bit different way, talking about, you know, trying to understand why. And the first is, Brian, I think that if you're going to read about something, expertise does really matter, right? Expertise in, you know, articulating a position through,

well-crafted argument in, you know, a written format. And so I think that, you know, faced with a lot of options, you know, in what you consume from, you know, people putting, you know, text-based content primarily out into the internet, you're going to go to where you find substance and expertise. I think that once you move to, you know, audio and video, it's a very different equation.

And that's why comedians do so well here, because your ability to engage in banter back and forth, to, you know, juggle both sides of a position without maybe the depth, substance, you know, bona fides, whatever, becomes, you know, the thing that wins in the medium. And then as, you know, institutionalized media starts to disintegrate,

Where do people that are important, like this is like, it's pretty interesting, right? Like, where does Carney, the prime minister of like, you know, a big country go to be heard in America, and he's going to go to where the people are. And, you know, so.

Is Scott Galloway a credible interviewer? I think he can do an okay job in that forum. Does he have the structure and all of the things that we would expect in institutional media to prepare for that discussion and to maybe intersect it with experts or provide the right kind of forum? Maybe it's not perfect, but it's still a place for discussion. And we're seeing this kind of emergence of this kind of public discussion

commons where people kind of talk it out. And so then we see and we know that the first and most important thing is, as you said, this kind of infotainment equation. That's why you see the emergence of debate, because debate is something that creates, you know, tension and throws the audience into the frame because now I can take a side, I can participate.

But also, you know, we're getting this other sort of slightly performative thing where Ezra Klein goes on the All In podcast, right? Where Steve Bannon is invited on to the Newsome podcast. Yeah, it's the man in the arena. Yeah.

Yeah, and is it a display of courage from Ezra? Is it his social obligation that he feels he needs to defend the virtues of liberal thinking inside of the lion's den? I'm not quite sure. Is he promoting the book? I think sort of all of the above, right? But really what's happening is podcasting has, in my mind, it's sort of like

If text, like democratic publishing of upended media, like legacy media, podcasting is building on that. Now all of the people that are in my podcast feed, I mean, some of them may be monetized by established media like Vox, but they're all independents.

Like no one listens to, I mean, maybe you listen to like Morning Update from NPR, but you're not listening to like CBS podcasts. You're not listening to Fox podcasts. You're listening to independents.

You know, the structure is completely broken down. And therefore, the people that win from an audience perspective are the ones that have, you know, manufactured a product that travels. And so that's what's going on. I mean, it's kind of like the packaging is almost more important than the quote on what used to be the substance of the product.

Which is to me indicative of where we are just overall. The tariffs have brought very clear that most of our companies in America don't make anything. They're brands.

And they might design it or something. They might send the CAD design over to the supply chain in China. I don't know if you've seen all these TikTok videos from the OEM manufacturers, which, by the way, has been a great advertisement for those who want to ban TikTok because it's very clear what the Chinese government could do with TikTok, for instance, to get their viewpoints in front of the American people. But they've all been basically pulling back the curtain on the fact that none of these

quote-unquote luxury brands make anything, really. I mean, they might do a little bit of final stitching in Italy, but it's all done in China. And, you know, they got really mad, I think, for a good reason when J.D. Vance called them peasants. I've never been to China. Everything I see from there, they're not peasants. They've got some

I saw some drone delivery. Somebody got a cheeseburger delivered by drone. Anyway, I think that that is part of all of this in that the packaging in some ways becomes more important than the substance. And I think when you're talking about this, when you talk about infotainment,

Being able to package an argument and being entertaining and being compelling was more important than being credentialed. Yeah, I mean, which is why I kind of think Troy's point, and we had another email from someone who mentioned that, I mean, Troy's point last week was

that sometimes he wants to hear from the economist or from an economist or a scientist about a scientific topic. But I think pundits were never that. And if they were economists and scientists, they might have not been the best one, but they were definitely the most entertaining, right? And it is entirely entertainment, right?

But the challenge I have, and I wonder if it's like, do you think it's kind of the death of the, you know, we've talked about this before, just the death of the written word. And the fact that even that term podcast is not the right, it's not the right media format. Those are like just little shows. They exist on, you know, they're distributed on podcasts, they exist on YouTube, etc.,

And because of the format, because of the long form format, there's a lot less scrutiny on what's being said. Like I know that if we had to record a 20 minute podcast that then had to be transcribed into something readable, I would definitely fail. Right. Well, you're actually arguing against yourself. You're the anti-writing person on this podcast. I'm not the anti-writing. I'll turn on you.

This is what makes good infotainment. I know what retails. No, but Bryan said he's calling you illiterate. Yeah, that's right. I didn't go that far. Yeah. Yeah.

No, but you're anti-writing. Because to me, writing-- the reason that Jeff Bezos has this thing about writing out everything in a memo is because you can't hide. When you have shitty logic, you cannot hide it in writing if someone knows how to truly do critical reading. Whereas you can do all kinds of performative hand-waving stuff verbally, and particularly in person too. I mean, there's people who are always great at meetings, right?

And then you started unpacking, you're like, oh, that's just charisma and confidence. There's literally no substance here. We've all had that experience, I think. Yeah, I just was sort of breaking down, maybe you guys can help me, what would have happened before. So Mark Carney has an agenda.

And so Mark Carney has legions of PR people and, you know, foreign service people that would say, you're going to, how do we influence this, you know, people from, you know, tanking our economy?

And so Mark Carney has to go somewhere, do something, travel to Washington, get on CNN, you know, I don't know, do a long form interview on 60 Minutes or something. And there used to be a structure for that, or maybe it was less important before because we didn't pass these things out in public.

And so you have basically a new mechanism for someone that has an old-fashioned PR objective, like the prime minister of a country wanting to influence the dialogue in another country. And then you have a whole, a different kind of thing where

a whole new kind of legion of entitled sort of quote unquote first principle thinkers out of Silicon Valley who've succeeded in building a product and accumulating wealth now asserting themselves, which is the big shift that's happened in Washington on the public space. Right. So this is, you know, everyone that's got money and influence from Silicon Valley kind of marching on Washington.

And there it's a different thing because you've got a new type of participant in this kind of information space wanting to influence policy and how we think. And that ranges from, you know, people that have been absorbed into, you know, into Washington like Sachs, to the guys in the All In podcast, to like, I would argue, Palmer Luckey on being interviewed by Rick Rubin.

and advancing you know his new kind of point of view on the failure of the american kind of military industrial complex right like the and where would palmer lucky have gone before to do that it didn't exist i mean he would get like a fortune article or something right massively processed through a machine yeah i mean he'd write he'd need to write a i mean here's what it used to happen you'd write a book

And then you do a press tour and you'd repeat your talking points on that press tour. You'd get some media training to make sure that you get all your points across. And you do that for a month and a half, right? Isn't that what people would do? Sure. Probably. But now it can be, I'm going to drop a tweet and then I'm going to go, you know, and I'm going on these podcasts. Everybody wins because, I mean, even Ezra Klein appearing on the all-in, that's like,

that's audience capture in a lot of ways. We bring an audience that has less of an overlap with ours, and so it grows our audience, everybody wins, and everybody's in on it because Ezra Klein also wants to do audience capture. Our governor here in California has his own podcast, so that becomes the deal with him. It really is bizarre, and it got me thinking because I would contrast...

two types of formats or podcast formats, because I listened to them back to back yesterday in the car. And one was Newsom interviewing Raul Emmanuel, Raul Emmanuel, who is a very compelling speaker and may well be the Democratic candidate for president. And so it was kind of interesting because they're both vying for that, right? But with Newsom, what you get is

I think he was civil to Bannon in some ways engaged them. This is one of the problems on the left where they've been effectively deplatformed by Trump and they're trying to figure out where they sit alongside right-wing media or the right-wing influencer class. But you've got a guy doing a podcast who has an agenda. Newsom has an agenda. So he brings that to his podcast as opposed to,

Rick Rubin, who just comes as a sort of like music kind of geek who doesn't know anything and just asks good questions. And so he sits and he gives Palmer Luckey an immense amount of space and just tries to find a way to guide the conversation by not really saying anything, not having a point of view, not inserting himself into the debate.

But just giving someone a platform with really intelligent prompts, which I would sort of say probably mirrors how he operates in the studio. I'm not here to make music for you. I'm here to help you make the best music you can make.

Yeah, the problem with that is that there's absolutely no boundaries to what's being said. There's no attention to what's being said. I think Lex Friedman is also guilty of that, playing the I'm just here to listen. But what you're creating is you're packaging a media product for people and you're authenticating the stuff that's being said just by having it on your podcast. Because the format is meant to be debate, right?

Troy, you must have done it. It's the Firesat format where you go in, it's a friendly crowd, somebody's just prompting you so you can say things, so you can frame your argument to the audience. By doing that, you're legitimizing whatever content comes out of your mouth because that person on the other side is not there to debate you.

you know, Rick Rubin and Lex Freeman oftentimes just are incredibly passive and just reinforce the thing that you're saying. And I think that's a disservice to the audience, honestly. But, you know, who are you to say, honestly? Like, I mean, that's just preference. But why is one better than the other? I mean, there's plenty of adversarial interviews out there. I mean, why can this...

format, this approach not exist alongside and be additive. I think you get different. I don't expect Theo Vaughn to be grilling Trump on the intricacies of the tariff policy. I mean, I'd actually like to see that, but I don't expect it. So here's the thing. I don't disagree with you. The problem is that when there's so much choice between

And there's so many ways of getting my message out there. I'm not going to go to the one that gets grilled. I'm not going to do the 60 minute interview anymore. I'm not going to go to the thing that's actually going to, you know. Which is why the Ezra thing was cool, Alex. Because like, Sax came at him in Larry Summers. Like it was, it had the feeling of a kind of hostile debate club in high school. So who won?

Nobody wins. Nobody wins in any way. No one ever wins. It's like, did you enjoy the performance? Yeah. Were you entertained? That's what's important. And the important thing is to have the clips that your supporters can use to validate their viewpoints. That's the end goal.

Do you think that's valuable? Well, I had a little back and forth with Ben Smith about that. He just sent me like three words about it. But like, you know, like he had on Jubilee Media's CEO, Jason Lee. And they do a lot of these debate things. They're almost like that, like, do you know Lily Phillips? The like,

porn stars like sleeping with a thousand dudes in a day or something. It's like the stunt thing. Like even like porn now has this like element of the spectacle element. You got to get, you got to get picked up by the algorithm. It never had it before.

Well, I don't know. I haven't followed. This is outside of my lane. So I'm going to defer to you on that one. We found one thing that was outside of Brian's lane. Yeah, exactly. There's just no market for that. I'm smart. Smart enough to know that. But they do a lot of these videos like Pete Buttigieg. I don't know how to say his name still. Poor porn star's father. I mean, God, that's horrible.

It's the marketplace. Awful. Look, it's a very crowded marketplace. You got OnlyFans has like exploded that. And so you got to, again, it's competitive like any of these marketplaces. But Jubilee Media does a lot of this with Pete Buttigieg trying to convince 35 people

undecided voters or Charlie Kirk taking on like, I don't know, like 100 like angry Gen Z women. And to me, it's spectacle. It's not, and that's fine. Like, and the reality is, like you said, you know, you're not going to have Cheetos for dinner, but like you can have Cheetos for dinner. Like if you want to have Cheetos for dinner, nobody's going to stop you from having Cheetos for dinner.

So, you know, ultimately, I think that this needs to be hashed out by people just be choosing to have a more nutritious information diet. And I understand that in the marketplace, just like in food, you know, fast food does well because it's convenient, it's cheap, it's got a lot of carbs and it's satisfying in the moment. I don't think we should expect people to go out and choose the best information diet. I think

At the very least with food, you have some sort of labeling. I mean, here you don't. It's really hard to understand what is a valid source. I mean, I don't even know. I know that I'm picking off my biases and the thing I, you know, I listen to what I want to hear. And I totally get the thing where you go into a debate. Then you, I mean, it's so funny. Every time there's one of those left versus right debates, you'll find little clips on YouTube. And you saw destiny destroys right-wing pundit. And then, you know, the other one is like Charlie Kirk destroys destiny. It's the same fucking thing.

It's the same fucking interview. And of course, that's the deal. And we've talked for a long time on this podcast about everything being entertainment. And that's what's winning right now. And it's definitely reinforced by the way the algorithms work.

and what they surface. But I don't know if it's really practical to have a healthy media diet these days. I don't think mine's entirely healthy. But I do think it plays into something that you've astutely mentioned before, which is the participatory nature of media that is ascendant right now. If you look at

Just take like the Minecraft movie. What is it called? A Minecraft movie? It's getting all these kids to go out. They're having like mini riots in the theater. Like it's a participatory experience. I mean, Mr. Beast built like his empire on basically content that's a game. Taylor Swift concerts or rituals. You know, Fox. Did you see this new Fox? It's like a game show slash reality show that they're making. I think this is a great idea. They basically locked four people in some sort of

upstate asylum right after the inauguration until recently. And then they're, they're surfacing them and then they're going to have a game show in which they try to guess which headline is real. This is a brilliant, brilliant concept. It's just fake. I think it's super smart. It's super smart. It also sounds like something that,

made up for a dystopian movie doesn't it it's just crazy it's i mean it is amazing that i gotta give it to them that sounds so really what it is is an admission that you cannot predict the shit that we're experiencing right now so we're gonna put people in a box and then expose them to the reality of our times just to show you how ridiculous and crazy this scene i love it i love this stuff i mean i liked even the david blaine stuff so like i'm a sucker for this sure

It's like that Japanese World War II soldier that was discovered 20 years after the war ended. So Alex, what is your take? Participation is the point, right? To me, that's the interesting thing. It's like, how do you design media around participation? Because this is a real challenge for the industrial side of media, where all the processes, all of the skill sets, all of the rewards were...

were around really a passive one-way experience. And this participatory experience, and you're from the video game world, you know, it's not one that comes easily to a lot of people from the traditional media industry. No, it's actually across media and art. And we talked last week about, I mentioned how

superstardom or or the the traditional concept of of a superstar kind of like this like a list or george clooney it's kind of it's going away it used to be like everybody kind of were and with that a lot of like the paparazzi stuff is going away as well there were these celebrities that nobody had access to right and you just you use them for being famous and you really wanted you

access to them. So the way to get access was through, you know, either a late night interview or Vanity Fair cover or a paparazzi shotling. Like that stuff I feel is slowly dying because the act of celebrity right now is the act of access.

YouTubers start with, hey guys, they're talking straight to their audience. They're communicating straight to their audience. Destiny has these feeds where chat is just running while he's having an interview with someone. And

it's all become just like this parasocial access game where you're, you're, you know, connecting with your audience. You bring your audience along with you, you know, when you go for an interview somewhere else, which is why that whole exchange works so well. You know, you jump on my podcast and bring some of my audience with you. They jump, you know, and then, and then we do the same game in reverse. And so having that audience that you carry along with you and communicating with them and, and,

managing them through all sorts of ways, right? I think we want to do more stuff on Substack. We want to do more stuff between podcasts and newsletters where we communicate with our users. We definitely have users that have followed us since the beginning that, you know, send us notes, you know, that don't feel like this kind of traditional, like we're making media, we're putting it out there and people are consuming it.

So I think that whole thing is changing and I don't know where it's headed, but it's very different. And it also creates this content that exists outside of the entertainer, outside of the pundit class, where if you like, Troy, you talked about those Chamath fanboys, right? Like every one of these guys, Ezra has the same, right? The All In podcast is the same. You'll go to these folks, Discord and Reddit, and there's stuff happening around the,

their celebrity and their content all the time by a community, all the time, very active, people fighting for them in the trenches, you know, pulling stuff out from another podcast that somebody said about them and making sure that they see the- You need a legion. Alex, you're developing a legion. You know, Elon is developing his legion and you're developing in your own way, your legion. That's right. Am I? Where are you-

I get notes all the time. I'm not seeing those numbers. I think for growth, we need to throw Troy into the all-in Thunderdome. I mean, that's what we need to do. Let Sax and Chamath maul him. Do you think he's going to let Sax red pill him? You've always been our Sax, Troy.

I mean, these guys are brutal. The debate guys you don't want to get involved in. I mean, Sax is very good at what he does. He's very good. He's debate club. Debate club is innocent. Any thoughts on this before we move on to IP law and its discontents? No, I think Alex did a good job. I mean, I think once again, we're seeing the cultural importance of a generation raised on gaming.

And I think that that visual is really influential to me of like having the chat flow down the side while you're engaged with the headphone on like in the media. I think that for a lot of people, the idea of sitting back and reading an article is lost on their generation.

It's either coming at you via video or you're participating in it or you're making it, you know, you know, or you're engaged in some shape or form. And I think that

It's kind of a requirement for the next generation of successful media. This is why I am very, just as an aside, this is why I'm very excited for my upcoming online forum next week on email. You end up positioning yourself as like a B2B grandpa. Like you should cool it. It's not cool. Well,

What are you talking about? It's very pertinent. You talked about it being participatory. The great thing about the online forum with Marigold about email newsletter personalization is that I've got one pane. It's like destiny. I'm like destiny on these things, except we're talking about email and open rates. And so we've got people incoming. We've got a lot of questions. We weave it in there. It's totally participatory. Otherwise, it's just like a video people watch live. Why would they want that? So you've got to have the participation.

Let's move on to IP law. Just before we go there. Oh, what, do you want the time? It's at 1 p.m. Eastern, Alex. Yes, that's what I wanted. Also, do you want to... I've talked to a few teachers, and my wife works in schools, and 90% of the kids, when you ask them what they want to be, they want to be a streamer. They want to be a YouTuber. It used to be fucking astronaut. And now that is... And I'm pretty sure it applies...

across the board. And so if you're in media and you're trying to think like, where's the world change? Where's the world going?

Those changes are profound and we're seeing them and it's not going to get, I think, it's not going to get any better or worse. Right. That's why some of the complaints on this I take with a grain of salt, the pearl clutching, because it's sort of boxing your own corner. You're just trying to crowd out competition. I mean, who wants, nobody wants more competition. Let's be real. People don't like change and they don't want competition. Yeah. But that doesn't mean you can't have, you can't be critical of the quality of the content.

And I think that people like Chamath, for example, are...

The value per word from somebody coming from Chamath, when he steps outside of his lane, starts dropping pretty fast. There are some people who can carry over. You listen to Alan Tooze talking about anything from some 1813 German industrial strike to the Chinese economy, and he seems to know everything. But we should also remain very critical about...

about the type of punditry that we have because it's becoming more important. Because I don't think Rick Rubin talking about the military-industrial complex is something that we need in this world. Although I have my doubts about Adam Tooze. I think he's doing an academic parlor trick that's pretty adjacent to what Chamath does. No, I think that there are certain people, particularly in academia, that if you give them like –

eight hours they can like basically come out and yeah he does his research knowing everything about everything no but it's fine he does his research but I can't do that like it's like saying you know like you know hey can you come can you sure can you come back tomorrow and juggle I can't but Adam too can he can juggle

And the next day he'll swallow our sword. Okay, let's talk about IP law. Jack Dorsey released... We talked about how you want to release memes these days, and he's pretty good at it. He's trying to be a Rick Rubin type. He's certainly looking more and more like Rick Rubin as the years go by. He just posted an X. Is that what we're calling it? A tweet, an X, whatever it is. Delete IP laws. And Elon agreed with this. And...

You know, this is obviously people get very upset about IP on both sides, right? And it is pretty clear though with where we're going that IP laws will need to be modernized. And so the people taking like extremist positions on one side, to me, it's like free speech content moderation. It's like, come on.

Like, you got to be grownups because this stuff is getting very, very, very messy. I mean, you look at the Studio Ghibli. Is it Ghibli or Ghibli? I don't know. Style, like, art through Chachi PT. You know, I can understand how the artists are very upset. At the same time, it was very fun to make a Studio Ghibli image of, like, Troy on the Mission Accomplished stage.

banner when GDPR fell. Yeah, no, you know what else was fun? Napster was super fun. BitTorrent was super fun. I mean, I think it was great. But at the end of the day, somebody has to pay artists. And I don't want this to sound like I'm just like, IP law, I think is perfect today. But you always have to look at people's motivations. And one thing's for sure is that

But because crypto didn't work out so well, Dorsey is now all in on AI because he's very much a legacy guy and he wants to have a legacy. I think you have to look at the motivations behind the things that they're saying. Oh yeah, everyone's biased. Everyone has their own sort of, you know,

As what Nick said, like, you know, he's got skin in the game now. Everyone's got skin in the game and that's fine. That's fine. Yeah. So, so actually there was a conversation with James Cameron and he said something interesting that got me thinking about is that, you know, in the age of AI and I'm paraphrasing, what we're really going to have to do is look at the output and not the input, which is, which is the way IP has always worked, right? Like when I'm,

making my movie, I can use somebody's copyrighted material as something to inspire me. But once it goes out into the public, you know, I need to have those rights. And in the same way with AI, I think we should be paying more attention to the outputs than the inputs. So the problem isn't really what these things ingest, but what you create with them. Now, I think

It becomes complicated because like, does that mean OpenAI should be forced to regulate the stuff because it looks like Ghibli, right? Or it looks like Disney, or it looks like a character that is copyrighted. But that's the type of stuff that's going to be very, very, very difficult. But it does mean, that wouldn't mean such a huge rewrite of copyright law, but it would mean something. I don't know what I mean. Agreed. Troy? Well, first observation is saying extreme things.

you know, is the modern distribution tactic. So Jack can say, get rid of IP law and Elon can agree with him. It's hard to, on some level, you can appreciate, again, these sort of

we're getting used to the kind of proclamations from you know whatever these you know big big big thinkers that built things like that we would be that the death of ip would accelerate innovation and you know get more people you know kind of using other people's ideas to build on them and make things and propel us forward as a civilization

So I get it. I think what it also meant to your point around, you know, what are the motivations? I think it massively creates, it creates massive value for the aggregators and who, if you're an AI company, the last thing you want is to wade through, you know, a bunch of pesky IP litigation. So I think it makes sense. But you have to ask yourself what happens to like pharma and entertainment companies when there's a little longer incentives to invest and make things.

to really do, you know, kind of scaled innovation around an idea that can only be paid back through IP protection. And then we hear, you know, some fuzzy principles that, you know, we're going to use blockchain somehow to kind of register the provenance of an idea and that will somehow protect...

You know, the creator. I don't really understand that. Yeah. The issue with all these things is IP like law is a regulation. It's like anything. Regulations are just rules. These are rules. Right. And rules are always twisted by incumbents to crowd out competition. They always are.

That's why regulations, a lot of them end up being very well-meaning, but they end up doing the opposite of what they're intended to do because incumbent players use that to make sure that they don't have to face new entrants. And IP law is typical of that. You see

You see that the kinds of business process patents over the years and things like this entire area is rife with true waste, fraud, and abuse. And yeah, you want to have incentives for people to make breakthrough biotech, et cetera, but-

Particularly when it comes to media and IP, it's pretty clear that the genie is not going back in the bottle with AI. But time will tell, as they say. Did you see Andre Karpathy? I think he's actually an AI expert. I think he qualifies as one, right? He had an interesting post this week where he pointed out something kind of basic, but I think it's important, which is that

At this point of AI adoption, like individuals are ahead of

the enterprise. I think originally it was, "Oh, this is going to flood the enterprise." But it seems like enterprise adoption is lagging behind what just individuals can do because obviously individuals can move quickly. They're not siloed into groups of supposed experts within a company. Individuals don't have legal departments, at least. They don't need permissions.

And that's where the momentum is coming from. I thought this was pretty interesting. Is this how you see things developing, Alex? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there's always the large company kind of change tax that needs to happen. I think sentiment around AI is generally negative, right, from every study that we're seeing. And it's been shown that people are reluctant to apply it to their work.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw Toby from Shopify try to really engage the company by saying that performance reviews would be based on AI adoption. Seems to be working pretty well at Shopify, but I know it's not working well at other companies. I know it's creating chaos at other companies where people are like, I don't know where to use this. I'm being told to use this. It doesn't really work for me. And also, I think part of the thing is that the tools require...

a fair amount of flexibility and, and the qualities of like being able to try shit out, which actually don't apply really well to cooperative work at scale. Right. So when you're like vibe coding something, your vibe code is not something that you can just merge into like,

the bigger code base and it's going to make a lot of sense. You know, a lot of this stuff is messier, sloppy, it's less organized, it's harder to plan. So there's a lot of structural reasons why just being a solo developer right now, you can probably like do 80% more than you could before. Because now you can do stuff that a designer could do, you could do stuff that an engineer could do, you could put all these things together and working by yourself on your own code base is amazing.

you know, relatively straightforward. If you work in a group, it's actually much harder. Just like the tools themselves make all of this kind of harder. Yeah, so I think you're definitely going to see like two or three person companies doing things that are going to be pretty substantial. Yeah, small teams right now have a huge advantage, I think. It's going to be hard to change large companies to adopt this stuff. Like so hard. Yeah, but this is just another...

This is another example of how being very lean and nimble, as lean as possible, is such a competitive advantage. And there's just so many different areas where the bigger you are, the more challenging it can be these days, it seems.

It's always been like that, though, right? Like the bigger the shift. I think what's disruptive about it, Alex, you make a great point about merging your vibe code into the code base of a company. And I think that that's written across every department when you think about

how legal responds to the request to enable an AI feature whose output is unpredictable in a big company litigious scenario. It's a fuzzy... It's a technology that's the opposite of the history of most technology we use. It's not declarative. The results are unpredictable and fuzzy. But I think what it does do, and the point that he made in that ex-post was...

I think in some ways it creates a really important new input into what modern industrial structure looks like, where you have far more companies that are built around a small, empowered group of people.

that are using tools at the individual level in a new way. So I watch, you know, the example we brought up last week is how Brian works. And, you know, I've seen, you know, a new generation come into media companies and go, why are there so many people here? Like, we don't need that many people. And I think we're seeing that in software. We're seeing it all over the place. So it's probably great, actually. It probably means you're going to get

It's kind of like the creator economy, you know, and you're going to get, you know, lots of innovation in the economy. And I think, though, what you can't do at kind of micro scale is

but at least not yet, is the kind of large-scale Chinese-type manufacturing that requires lots of people, lots of investment, incredibly sophisticated technology at scale. Those kind of companies really benefit from industrial policy, huge amounts of investment, and lots of people.

It seems like we're going to have armies of one to 10 person companies and a bunch of Fox cons. Yeah. I was fascinated. China has a ton of Fox cons. Do you know this idea of dark factories? No.

It's a concept that you see in China and places. It'd be really interesting to see where there's no lights inside because you don't need lights because it's just robots working. Robots don't need lights. Talk about dystopia. Dark factories. Is that what we're going to get?

I thought you were going to talk about ghost kitchens. But yeah, I think having a lot of the infrastructure now for software kind of works like the Foxconn industrial system where, you know, when you're making a piece of software, you're outsourcing a lot of the big stuff, a lot of the big stuff like the AWS, the server hosting, the AI itself, right? All of that stuff, the payment processing, all of these things that actually require big teams and a lot of, you know,

legal experts and infrastructure and services, stuff like that. All that stuff you can plug into, right? So the software environment is already made for that. So a small team can build something at real scale now. Yeah. Meanwhile, Brian, it was interesting that Elon Musk is trying to create a baby factory.

Yeah, a legion, his own legion. Alex has his legion and Elon is going a different direction. We should stay in our lane. Apparently you're not allowed to talk about Elon. By making his own legion. To me, what was nowhere, this was a Wall Street Journal, I guess it was an expose. They've had a few good ones on the Elon beat. They were the ones who got the apparent liaison that he had with former vice presidential candidate and Sergey Brin's ex-wife. This is a strange timeline we're living on.

I think he's great. I just want to put for the record. Hold on, Alex. Let him make the point. But the Wall Street Journal has, it's become friskier. I think we've mentioned it a few times here, but this is a great example. I don't think there was anything necessarily quote unquote wrong with the Wall Street Journal. It was just stodgy. It's the Wall Street Journal. And they brought in Emma Tucker, I guess it's been like a year and a half or so now, and

I've noticed it just, I think it's a much better and livelier read. That was a great story. This is the most under, this is the most over-covered, over-exposed individual in the history of humanity probably at this point. And they came out with a new, original, and gripping story about him. So kudos to the Wall Street Journal. Kudos. Just, I would say cancel the New York Times.

And replace it with Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. It would be fun. Where do you get your games? Yeah, it's too business-y. Just get a games membership for connection. All right. Well, there you have it. That's your media diet. That one kind of like went over like a fart in an elevator. I thought it was going to be a little bit better. Should we have anonymous banker join? Yeah, because I got to talk with Janice Min in like 20 minutes. And I've got a hard stop now, so...

Okay, so let's swap out Alex. That's hard. What do you call it? Thought swap. Say hi to anonymous banker for me. Okay, great. We got AB on. AB, thank you for joining us. I want to talk about golf media because you're a banker, so you must know golf.

And I think it's a very vibrant area. I don't golf, so I'm not totally in on it, but I keep getting notes about the different, like how interesting, like YouTube-centric golf media is. And we're seeing a lot of like activities in this area. What's interesting about golf?

So when people look at sports, they sort of group all of them together, but golf is unique. It's similar to like a Formula One in that there's effectively like one, one and a half governing bodies, right? You have the PGA and live. So it's a streamlined ownership of the tournament component. And then the...

teams or in the situation of golf, the players are all independent contractors. So you have a lot more flexibility when it comes to the participatory nature of the athletes in the content. Whereas in other sports like NBA, MLB, things like that, there's a lot more rules around how the athletes can participate. And the other thing that's really interesting about golf, I was looking up some of these numbers, the amount of people that play both on and off course, it's like 45 million people a year.

So there's like 25 million people that are going to the actual golf courses and then another large chunk that are going to like Topgolf and things like that. So between the media side where people are watching the sports and then playing them, buying all the equipment, it's a big industry. But who are they? So I saw like Good Good Golf raised $40 million.

And then Full Swing, which is from Chad Mumm, who encouraged me, actually is the reason I got a pizza steal. I did a podcast with him over the pandemic and he convinced me to get a pizza steal. But he started this with X, I think the former Puck CEO is in this too, called Full Swing. They raised 20 million. Who are the other players in this? Because there's a lot of them. We talked about that one guy. There's a bunch of smaller YouTube channels. I think...

Good, good golf. This is one of these, we've talked about this before, where some of these businesses have been in market trying to find capital or some M&A for over a year. And the markets come around to appreciating what can be done on the digital side. But what's interesting about both of these businesses is they have legitimate partnerships with companies.

like the actual league in the sense of Pro Shop, the full swing business. It's like basically they're pulling out from PGA, the production apparatus, and then looking to stand up the digital side and then commerce. And then Good Good Golf has a partnership with one of the large networks. So they're...

Yes, they're focused on YouTube and going after this younger demographic, but they also have ties into the incumbents in the space. So they're, I think, looking... Yeah, it's not just digital. They have an eye towards... And that's like one of the things that has to happen to get people to watch golf on TV is to push the audience further.

from digital back to the traditional media channels. The commerce angle on it's interesting too, because there's this, you know, not only is the sport something you can watch, by the way, legendary masters last weekend, you know, record numbers, great story for the people of Ireland, you know, just incredible entertainment.

With Rory McIlroy winning that, coming from a really uneven game to win it was great entertainment. But it really is a kind of unique lifestyle integration where you watch, you play, you can live in the clothing. And as a result, we see commerce brands emerging around these media brands in ways that maybe will work better than it has elsewhere.

right they're full they're full-on like life's lifestyle kind of integration with the sport i mean and they're perfect for this content to commerce thing that has a a rocky history but i'm i got i got a note from from one of our listeners about this a few months ago i'd mentioned it like he talked about the youtubers like grant horvat and he's like selling clubs and whatnot he's got he's got licensing deals

I guess Bryson, Busta Jack. I don't know who these people are. Taco Golf. Do you know Taco Golf? That's another one. But I mean, the good thing, there's very, if you compare this to like a UFC, right, that's also big among this 18 to 35 year old demographic. The only way that that,

sport is getting monetized is through like pay-per-view buys, right? The athletes, even though if you follow the UFC, there's notable names, no, there's, there's very few endemic brands in the, the fighting game. And then all those athletes have a hard time getting sports deals, getting the sponsorship deals elsewhere. But sports,

But golf is one of these things, like Troy mentioned, like you're going to buy a golf shirt, you're buying golf clubs. There's all these things that you're buying around participating in the sport and people are actually playing golf. You're not going to go, maybe you join a UFC gym, but otherwise you're not going to really play the sport. And then more broadly speaking, brands love to be tied to the athletes, right?

car OEMs. It's like tennis in that it's a really brand safe space. One other thing, this is not golf related, and that's OpenAI had raised, I think, $40 billion a couple weeks ago. At this point, it's interesting to me because an AI company raising $40 billion gets a little bit of attention for a couple days and then people just move on from it. But they have a lot of money, obviously, and they're now talking about building a social network

which gives me some amount of pause. But it is pretty clear that, at least to me, I think of them like, it seems like they're moving into being like a real product company. What is your analysis about what direction they'll end up going as a company?

I mean, the new model just came out, the 03 yesterday. And it's amazing, like the progression of the tech from just an output. Have you guys tried it? It's cool. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the last one was like, you know, people would term it the intern. This one feels like it's 25 year old. What's weird is the sort of parasocial relationship you have with a piece of technology because its beauty is in the nuance of how it responds to things.

Right. It's in the language and what it sounds like and how it assembles it. I gravitate to the OpenAI product just because I like the way they make the output feel.

Well, I trust that it remembers things. Before they even came out with this memory thing, I'm like, they have all my data. I've uploaded all my key data. And I'm always going to go to it. I'll go to Grok for a few things. Claude, no, I'm done with Claude. I'm just going all in on ChatGP. Well, that's one of the reasons that the social networking thing is interesting, because Grok is good, particularly when you want to dig something out of Axe.

And one of the reasons you might want your own social network is to kind of create your own native data repository. I bring up the new model because I think that OpenAI will continue to get into more areas where it's sort of unintentional, but it just happens because of the power of the model. For example, we're testing right now a lot of the investment banking AI companies' platforms and platforms.

To justify the additional cost per seat, I've been just sort of testing between these more specialized platforms, which say we can go get better data. We know what you're doing versus what OpenAI can do. And in a lot of cases, OpenAI is actually providing a better result. You know what on that?

AB, you get a sense of how truly disruptive it is when you see it applying horizontally like that better than a vertical company could do it. And I noticed this in a simple way yesterday. I used to scan bottles of wine with Vivinio because I wanted to know the provenance and where to buy them or how expensive they were, that kind of stuff. Yesterday, I scanned it with OpenAI, with ChachiBT, and it was a better result.

100%. And so people use these analogies like when Google came out, it didn't try to get into every business line that it impacted because they had such a large opportunity to go after advertising. But in order for Google to move into any category, it was an intentional thing where they had to put people against it. I think what's completely different here, and I think what's going to catch a lot of people off guard, is the improvements in these models will just make...

in the example i gave these specialized finance products like not that useful it's everyone's just going to be going to open ai which is a weird you imagine also collaborative features where let's say i use projects a lot now where i put a bunch of documents into a folder and essentially use it i did it with the newsletter this week i put a bunch of transcripts in there but imagine that

we had a project folder for this podcast. Imagine that you have a project folder for your neighborhood. Imagine that you have it for, you know, a national, you know, like any kind of project that requires people to put information in and share in a kind of common set of data. You can see social dimensions to that as a product, right? Where you can share across lots and lots of people.

So I would view, I would view that the social thing to me is like a distraction. I think that's Sam just messing with Elon. I think the more interesting news was them looking at buying windsurf, which is like the coding. That's a $3 billion apparently. And, but this is also, this was, I mean, isn't this one of those like rappers? I mean, at first it was saying don't build like rappers with a W that don't build like, you know, rappers, but like clearly there's value in some of these.

Yeah, and we don't know all the details. There might be a talented team there where Sam effectively has unlimited money to spend now, and he's going after 20 really good developers because he wants to win. Oh my God, $3 billion acquihires. We live in amazing times. Yeah. Well, think about the original opening idea with Microsoft. It was like $10 billion. And so I think that's what

Coding is probably one of the first things that is getting the biggest impact with these models because coders are really good at prompting. And so it's like this positive. And so that's probably just a land grab and to starve off other competitors from leaning into that space. But I just think that the evolution of this tech is going to usurp a lot of wrapper business models that

have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and they have this like unique go-to-market in a specific vertical where the power of these models just kind of

comes over the top and can do a better job? Well, I wouldn't just go back to our earlier conversation. Like if you're like Harvey in the legal community, now I'm getting definitely outside of any area of expertise, you're going to need to comply with literally so many different things. So like ChatGPT can, you know, if I'm doing like some kind of like basic agreement or something, yeah, I might go to like ChatGPT ESQ, but you're going to need something a little bit more specialized in these fields, right? With all the regulations and

I mean, that's what I thought, right? And so on the finance platform side, I thought they would do a better job. They have access to a few data sources that OpenAI hasn't tapped into yet, but just the overall power of the technology is getting better results. So maybe it's more on the consumer side first, and then they start to go into Harvey-like scenarios. Troy, any final thoughts before I regale everyone with my good product?

No, other than you can hear me, right, guys? This has been a week of wonderful technology snafus. One thing I find interesting about the product evolution at OpenAPI is the need that will emerge to manage different identities.

you don't have the same conversation in all aspects of your life. You might have a private one, you might have a public one, you might have a professional one. And I think there's going to be a lot of thought put towards how you show up. Well, it's going to understand that. I have different projects for different things that I want it to focus on, but to me, that'll end up going away. Well, it's almost like people using different Twitter accounts, right? For a different thing. True. Yeah.

Anyway, Noah, I'm handing good product over to you because I know you're passionate about turtles. All right, this is experimental because I have a hard stop. I've been very into sea turtles lately because...

It is sea turtle season in Miami. There's a lot of sea turtle nesting that goes on here. And there's all these warning signs up that you need to keep your lights low if you have a place on the beach. I don't, across the street. But I didn't really quite understand it. I went to Chachibuti, and I learned a lot about it. It turns out that sea turtles are born with a single-use tool called a caruncle that is almost like one of those Ikea tools. It's like you use it, and then it's useless.

And so they use that to bust out of the egg. And then they actually have, they wait a day and they feed off of the like sack juice and whatnot and get their strength up to make the dash juice.

relatively speaking, to the ocean, where they then go off for decades. They can float like hundreds or even over a thousand miles away. What's amazing is the female turtles make their way back using something called magnetic imaging of the Earth's magnetic field in order to find the exact location where they were born, and they return to then lay eggs to repeat the cycle decades later. It can be 30 plus years later. Pretty remarkable, all because of the caruncle.

I don't know where we take that. It's perfect. We'll go back to your woofers next week. I have a good, can I do my good product? I know I'm not a regular, or I'm not on the podcast. I've been using this AI agent called Blockit for scheduling. I think I showed it to you guys. And what's interesting is like, it can really pick up on the context and conversation. So people have tried these different scheduling bots before in the past, and they're always pretty shitty. But this one,

is better than like an assistant because you, you, I can talk to it and tell it what to do. And then you can have different sort of code words. If you don't actually want to schedule a meeting with somebody where it picks up on that and it will kind of just like play around with that person to kind of push off ever doing a real meeting. It knows like when you're traveling, it knows to put time in between in-person and zoom meetings. It

It just has all it basically they've captured all of the edge cases. And I think the most interesting thing, because it kind of shows you how these AI agents are going to be priced when you do the demo and you do the two week trial, they give you like a range of pricing. So they say, hey, this is going to be between one hundred and fifty and five hundred dollars.

And then once it's basically, you've started using it all the time, two weeks later, they come back and tell you the price and you're kind of already stuck using it. So- Wait, $500 total? A month. A month? Yeah. They say it's based on the number of meetings, but there's no, it's completely opaque pricing.

They came back and kind of picked a price in the middle of the range saying, you're right below a power user. This is what we think you need. So wait, I thought that all of this AI stuff was going to make SaaS obsolete because it's all bloated and overpriced. And now you're telling me that Calendly is going to cost $500 a month. Yeah, but this provides a real utility. All right, we should leave it there. I'm not happy, A.B. Yeah.

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. See you guys later. Bye. All right. We'll leave it there. Thank you all.