Productive Tension
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Why did they ask us to do this? Because they like the podcast? Yeah. Are you surprised? You sound surprised. Why do you sound surprised that people like the podcast? I don't know what people like, Alex. Yeah, it's on October 10th. It's the, I don't know, it's like the closing keynote of it. They say that to everyone.

Yeah, I'm... You got to butter people up. Everyone gets a keynote. Let's commit to it live on air. You're going to do it, guys? I'm going to the West Coast. I'll fly back the day before, so I'll come back. Good. It'll be fun. Welcome to People vs. Algorithms, a show about detecting patterns in media, technology, and culture. Alex is back this week. You were on, what was it, an ayahuasca retreat? Yeah, yeah, mostly, with other CEOs.

And we are also joined by Troy Young, who has just recently christened the Kingmaker in Puck by Dylan Byers. Stop it. What are you doing? That must feel pretty good, right? Not bad. Because you can't be a king unless you're born into it or you're in private equity. Okay, so I'll never get the king, but Kingmaker's not bad. Yeah. Do you want to tell us all about the Forbes plan or do you not want to talk about it?

Let's just keep going. We'll go on other stuff. All right. I have to do – people would give me shit if I didn't ask you about it, and I respect confidentiality. People would give you shit for what? For putting me on the spot? Well, because we're going to talk about this later today. On my very own podcast?

about the role of journalism and all that. I appreciate that you're not going to spill the beans if there are any beans to spill. It's up to you. Speculation, Brian, speculation. We don't comment on rumors and speculation. I love that. It's a great business in an available position given the media climate. And I'm proud to be in some minor way associated with

Oh, so you're confirming. No, I'm not confirming anything. It's public knowledge that I'm on the board of Forbes Marketplace. So that's not a secret. There's a lot of stuff being written. There's more stuff being written about because I don't think anyone. So just read what they're writing and then you'll get all that you need to know.

Okay, so it's accurate, this stuff about. I never said it's accurate. You said it's accurate. Okay. See how this goes, Alex? Isn't this good content? Isn't this good content? It's gotcha journalism, Troy. This is my Kara Swisher. Okay.

impersonation. Why don't we move into it? Next question. Next question. I did want to talk about the ayahuasca because I think the VCs are down bad. They've gone from blaming like Jerome Powell to, well, that was the media, quote unquote, the media to Jerome Powell to now there's, have you seen this? It's maybe it hasn't made it to threads, Alex, but some of the VCs now are blaming ayahuasca for the lack of,

good founders. They say a lot of founders have gone off and gone to some ayahuasca retreat and come back and been like, I'm not doing this. I don't want to spend my entire life in San Francisco where restaurants close at 8 p.m. and I have to go back to my little apartment and make B2B SaaS software. Is there any accuracy in this? You're on the scene. Well, that's a lot to put on me. He lives off the grid. It's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle.

I used to have a big, high-powered job in the city and now I live on a farm. So there you go. Have I done psychedelics? Maybe. Were they involved in those decisions? I think I've done them with you before, so I can confirm. I like this. You don't comment on rumors and speculation either, I take it. Yeah.

No, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, California and the Bay Area is a place where you can come and experiment with psychedelics if you're interested in those. There are a lot of ways to access them. Oh, is that where you go to experiment? Well, I mean, seriously, right? I thought it was Nevada. I thought it was the Black Rock Desert.

But I think you have a lot of access to them and it's culturally acceptable and people are doing all sorts of. Yeah, but I just want to get to the business angle. On a business angle, I think it's been happening in tech for a long time. Are you high right now, Alex? I'm always a little high. Actually, I'm drinking fucking decaf so that I can be on and coming down. Have you done the ADD meds this morning?

I stopped doing those, actually. No, but what I'm saying is just like the culture of Northern California and psychedelics has always been, what I'm trying to say is it's always been there. It's always been intermingled with tech. I don't know what's changed so that it's become the new scapegoat, the new kind of satanic panic of VCs now, but I think they just need an excuse of why things aren't working. Alex, better ayahuasca than Trust Falls.

That's true. Sure. Yeah. But I think the ayahuasca thing is interesting because if you have a, you know, such a, you know, after draining your internal mental ocean, if the first thing you think about is I got to quit my job, then, hey, that's better now than later. Right. Is that what happened to the executive team at OpenAI? Yeah.

They all did ayahuasca on a retreat. They all quit. I mean, talking of kingmakers, I think Sam Altman is just like Game of Thrones-ing himself to the top of the Iron Throne. Finally, you and Elon Musk agree on something, Alex. Well, we agree on a lot of things. The drama of the tech scene is kind of off the charts. I mean, OpenAI is a great example of this. I don't

I can't, like maybe Twitter had this similar level of drama, but Twitter was always like a bit player really. I mean, it wasn't, you know, as a company, it was never a massive platform. It was obviously major impact on the information space. But I mean, OpenAI is trying to at least purportedly, you know, build this entire new technology paradigm and lead in it and billions and billions of dollars and, you

It seems a total mess. It seems completely dysfunctional. It gives me a lot of hope, to be honest with you. Sorry, hope for...

Well, I mean, because I think we all, I don't know, maybe I'm speaking out of turn, but like end up thinking, you know, inside any organization, I feel like you feel like, wait, is everywhere kind of a shit show or is it just here? And, you know, any organization I've been part of has been a shit show internally. Right. But this seems like on a different level. Yeah. Open AI is a different level. I mean, maybe it's simple. Maybe it's, you know, they start it.

with this ambition, with a very research-minded organization where people thought that they could run this as an organization and it wouldn't ever amount to that much.

But then, you know, and apparently it was Sam Altman who pushed for it. You know, they released ChatGPT and they became the kind of coolest kid in school all of a sudden. And they said like, well, you know, fuck all the research and other ambitions we had. This is a big business and we're going to raise a bunch of money. And it created, you know, a rift in the organization. And now at this stage, I think everyone that was part of the old world has left. And it's now...

a tech company that's going to move as fast as- Wait, are we going to start getting 404 errors in chat GPT? Well, he said he's going to focus on the product now. And I'm like, wait a second, you're not even technical. Okay. But what I find interesting with this is something you've mentioned it, Troy, which is tension in organizations, right? And I think in media organizations, there's always tension. I wrote about this in a newsletter, so I stole it again from you.

There's always tension between sales and editorial, but about rushing out products versus, you know, making sure. You mean like a productive tension? Well, that's the thing. You have productive tension and then it becomes a rift, right? Like you can have productive tension and you need productive tension, right? Well, production tension to me kind of defines a lot of media organizations because it's essentially about the,

the sort of push-pull and collaboration between sales and content.

And that's what those orgs are. And productive tension in the magazine world, for example, was the interplay between the publishing and editorial organizations. And one would always need to find new things to sell and the other side wanted to make what they wanted to make and have the other people sell it. And it was that kind of tension that grew the business. The problem with the tension here, right, is not that like, oh, you're going to release a product and it's going to be like,

an AI pin that people are not going to buy and you're going to look like a fool. I mean, you know, even that they've released a new open AI has released a new one engine that has been deemed a medium risk for chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats. Like it's not, you know, the tension is, you know, this whole company. It's existential. I agree with that. Yeah. It's at the, it's, it's, it's mission level.

Yeah, the question is, do you trust Sam Altman or not? And it started with a, you know, don't worry, we're a non-profit. Don't worry, we're a non-profit with a for-profit arm. Don't worry, we still have researchers. Don't worry, all the old founders are still there. Now, don't worry, Sam Altman's got it. And then the ayahuasca weekend, it's don't worry, be happy. I mean, maybe after Sam Altman does ayahuasca, he'll be like,

shut it all down. I don't know. But it is. I mean, they are kind of at the forefront, their technology, that O1 engine. People hate us using those words, but it simulates reasoning a lot better. Finally, something that can solve connections on the New York Times.

for example, which is when you think about it. Yeah, have you seen that AI is already ruined, apparently, like online poker? When are we going to get the benefits? My tension is when are we going to get the upsides without all the downsides? Oh, yeah, because it's a tragedy that online poker

Well, have you guys been using, have you guys tried using Notebook LM, Google's kind of like research and learning? I have, but I haven't used it in a little while. I uploaded 100 episodes of transcripts and I asked... From this particular show? From this show. Oh, really? First of all, listening to the podcast, about our podcast, it's kind of incredible. Maybe we can slice a couple of clips here.

All right, so today we're diving into people versus algorithms. This podcast, right, that's all about AI and how it's changing media and tech. One of the things that really jumped out from this people versus algorithms stuff was this idea of a huge interface shift. Alex, he's the design guy on the show. He's saying we're about to see something as big as when we went from like

physical buttons on everything to those, you know, sleek search bars we use now. Okay, so it's not just that it's convenient, it's that the AI understands what you need in a human way almost. Yeah, and that's where Alex really gets going, like mind blown by it all. But people versus algorithms doesn't sugarcoat things either. It makes you think,

If anyone can easily make content now, how do we find the good stuff? And that's where Troy comes in. He's the media expert on the show. He's got a different take. He thinks AI could actually be the solution to this too. Imagine AI as a filter. But AI could give more power to the platforms, the ones controlling these algorithms. And that's what worries Troy.

He sees media companies becoming way too reliant on these platforms, basically at the mercy of their algorithms for, like, everything. Does people versus algorithms offer any hope there? Well, Brian, the journalist on the show, he's surprisingly optimistic. He actually thinks independent creators could do really well.

even if it seems counterintuitive. Really? He says they need to focus on what algorithms can't do yet. Really unique, high quality content for a specific audience. So find your people, build that loyal following, offer something that stands out from all the AI generated stuff. Exactly. I uploaded it. Oh, did it like our podcast?

Yeah, it says this is a podcast that's talking about media, subject about media with heavy hitters like Troy Young from Hearst and media analyst Brian Morrissey and Alex Schleifer, head of design at Facebook. I wish I would have said fallen angels. Well, I mean, the fact that it said Facebook is... That's funny. It's funny. So I asked it to rate our characters and our...

But wait, can you just back up for those who are not total AI nerds and just explain? There's so many of these freaking things. Notebook LM, and there's a really good Verge cast interviewing one of the people on it. It's basically, you know, there's similar things with Cloud, but Notebook LM is specifically a learning resource tool where you can upload a lot of different documents or links or content.

copy paste stuff into it. And then it will absorb all this knowledge, have access to it all at all times. So you can ask it questions. So for example, you could upload literary work and say, when does this author, when does Frodo get the ring or more, more abstract stuff? Like when does this author use romantic language to actually build tension? Right? Like there was a great example, Alex, when he had no book, LMD, this author had him deconstruct when in the text,

the instances where the author used foreshadowing and how they were resolved, which is pretty amazing. Some more kind of everyday practical stuff is that I'm downloading PDFs for every appliance that I have in my apartment.

And I'm going to upload them in there so that if somebody... Is this why you missed the last episode? No, that's deviant behavior. That's, you know, so that I can... Yeah, go back to the ayahuasca. This is... I think, is this what happened after the ayahuasca? You're like, I'm going to get straight with my... I think people listening, I think at least half the people listening will think this is great. We don't all want people to do like, to turn on a coffee maker or learning like music theory, kind of, you know,

So did you make an announcement at the dinner table that, you know, moving forward, if you have any questions about appliances in the house, you have a model? No, Troy, it's for guests. It's for guests. If ever, like, Brian, or you want to come to San Francisco and you want to crash in my place, you'll know how to use my German appliances because they're inscrutable. Okay.

Now we're getting too deep into this. Like a European washing machine? I mean, I need an LLM for one of those. They're very efficient. Anyway, so I asked it to see who speaks the most. It's Troy. No, it's not Troy. Hang on. It says it's hard.

without a quantitative analysis of each speaker's work and all the transcripts. But anyway, it weaseled itself out of it. It says, in general, Troy frequently steers the conversation. He enjoys playful banter and frequently teases his co-hosts. This suggests that Troy is a very active participant.

Brian often plays the role of moderator. Brian is the main host. He sets the agenda for the episodes and sometimes tries to keep the conversation going. And Alex is what, the pain sponge? Alex's conversational style is more reactive. Alex participates actively. He's often responding to points made by Troy or Brian. He occasionally expresses frustration with the direction of the conversation. However, feedback from listeners suggests that Alex's contributions are valuable. This is a revelation. Yeah.

Yeah, you're like the 2D character in Facts and Life. And then I asked her to judge our characters. And Troy's opinionated and insightful, playful and provocative and connected and in the know. Brian is measured and analytical, respectful and diplomatic. Except when he freaks out. Self-aware and open to feedback. Self-aware, open to feedback. I love this shit. And Alex is direct and candid.

values authenticity and appreciates design and user experience, which means I must talk about this shit a lot. These AI things, I appreciate that, but they're all suck-ups, I find. They are. They're sycophants. They're sycophants, yeah. Did it say you were bullish on this? Alex, did it call you woke? Did it ever bring that up? No, I'm not using Grok. I'm using Google's.

Croc told me to go eat shit, you cuck. Yeah. But you know, the sycophancy thing is interesting, but it's also for me why I tend to go to Claude or OpenAI. So I had questions about

A specific technical issue I was having with some hardware I was having. And I know that if I go into a forum or Reddit forum, there's always going to be something. Well, that's because you're using a Mac. You should be using a PC or, you know, like there's always somebody in there that's upset about what you're trying to do or how you're trying to do it. It's kind of nice to get an answer from somebody.

No matter how stupid your question is. I think it's a great way to learn. So Troy, apply this to media. Like, okay, this is very early, but we've all played around with this. And so where does this take us if this really does catch on and really does develop the way it seems it's going to develop?

Well, we brought this up last week and at the risk of exceeding my word count. I think that there's something going on that challenges the fundamental structure and that we've been playing with as digital media people for a long time, which is the website. The website and then the website augmented with social media. And the way I see it is that there's a couple of kind of things that stand out in my mind. The first is that

Newsletters were really, I think, a route around a broken web. So they offered a finite amount of space with way fewer disruptive ads that came to me. And as such, were a welcome departure from the noisy, cacophonous, terrible things that we did with advertising on the internet. And then platforms, I remember this. I think Alex and I in the old, old days used to talk about how platforms train consumers.

Because that's where they spend the majority of their time, right? And so it started with feeds. And what did feeds do? They showed you that content was short and connected and algorithmically delivered and you could move it with your thumb and they were perfectly suited for the phone. Now we're educating people with question and answer, right? Which is you have a question, you get something perfectly customized to you. Like that's

Personalization is manifest in an answer to yours and only your question, and mostly or potentially per the case of Notebook LM, something that's trained on your corpus of information. So we're now snippets without headlines, without bylines, without decks, without the trappings of these very clunky, what seem clunky to me now,

you know, web page article as a construct, right? And so the web originally, if you went back, was a document repository. I think communication, but also a document repository. And its defining characteristic was that it was interconnected with links, right? That was the web, right? Documents connected with links. And

And it was a new medium. And when we created media on it, we basically were, it kind of was an elegant extension of the print world where we thought, okay, well, there's, you know, homepage is my cover and articles are article pages and we're going to put advertising in there, right? Except that we broke a couple of rules is because the print was a way better ad model.

Because it was sequential. It was like article, mostly article, ad, article, ad, article, article, ad, ad.

And what we did on the web is we, I'm answering this question. Maybe I do talk more than you guys. You don't need iOS to have a revelation. Yeah, yeah, but I'm going to get to the point. We should do an ayahuasca episode for- Well, I had an ayahuasca, guys, I had an ayahuasca-like moment when I used network at LM because I realized that it was kind of pointing to what the future looked like. And what did we do that kind of made the modern web

kind of shitty. One was we put ads on pages and basically ask consumers to do two things at once, look at an ad and look at content. To me, that was a troubling construct. I think there was tension there. Publishers handed ad rights to middlemen, right? So in the old days back, I remember this very, very explicitly when I was working at a newspaper in Montreal, we would never give a third party the rights to sell our advertising because it was undercut what we're able to do in the market. But on the internet, we gave our ad rights to everybody.

That's really the foundation of programmatic. Well, you had to, right? There was no economic thing. Well, because the aggregators sat on top of you, both aggregators in terms of interface and aggregators in terms of ad sellers. So then that kind of made this all up. Now, when I looked at Notebook LM, I was like, the more I use ChatGPT on my phone or Gemini, the more I get comfortable with a frictionless model. I have a need.

I get an answer. And to me, that's going to influence how content is delivered and publishers and media companies need to respond to that. The second thing I thought is that maybe Notebook LM

is really just the new CMS where the job of the content creators in companies is to load the knowledge base. And that doesn't mean there's not features or articles or things that need to be delivered intact. But like if your CMS is a repository for a document construct and all the content that you put out as a publisher.

And now Notebook LM is the same kind of repository, but you query it differently, right? And it delivers things back that are sort of personalized and it's multimodal because it'll create a podcast for you or it'll give you an answer to a question. So to me, I think that what it sort of

you know points to is a world where the fundamental construct of you know home page section page article page all connect together by google and then social comes along and it delivers things in the feed there's a new paradigm coming up that's way more personalized and and there's still room for people to create ownable ip inside of that world but it's going to change radically

And the notion is that a citation sort of replaces the link.

And what is the difference between a link and a citation? Well, a citation is the reference point when the question is already answered. If you want more information, whereas a link sends you somewhere to get the answer. Right. Different, right? So I think all of those things together are what our audience and people in the industry need to figure out, which is where do all your people creating content and selling access to those audiences, where do they live in this new world? And you got to map it.

Yeah. Because it's way different. I think a few things. One, anyone in our audience who isn't using these tools really should. I think this goes back to early social media. I remember just talking to a lot of CEOs and executives who are closer to my age now, but they weren't using the tools and they didn't really get an understanding of how fundamentally social media was going to change how information was distributed.

I think the other thing is this is same day delivery for information, right? When Amazon came out with same day delivery, it set a totally different expectation. I can remember after that going to buy a gift for, I guess, my now wife and then girlfriend. And it was like an expense. I don't know. It was kind of expensive, I guess, some piece of jewelry or something. Was it a Vitamix?

It wasn't. It was like five. But you had like seven-day delivery or something. It was like, this does not compute. Wait, you bought your girlfriend jewelry on Amazon? I don't remember. It wasn't on Amazon. But my point is, it just changes expectations. And I think when you start to use these tools, you start to realize, that's why I keep saying about the back button, it's really difficult to understand how a publisher is going to compete in

with those kind of expectations that are set when you use one of these tools. And the more I use them, the more I see it. Like I use Claude this weekend because I was doing this research report, which everyone should check out, Sustainable News Businesses.

It was really helpful in going through a ton of information. I'm not going to say it was the editor, but it did editing absolutely, you know, and not like line editing, but it was, I uploaded transcripts of interviews. I uploaded a ton of data. I uploaded, you know, the survey that we'd done and, you know, it was absolutely part of this. And to me, the experience, that's just the creation experience.

but actually retrieving information is going to be, it's clearly going to be more interactive. It's going to be more, I think of it as a choose your own adventure kind of thing. Absolutely. We've been talking about how profound this change is. And I'm pretty sure a lot of people that are running media companies can also see it. But the issue is,

I think you have inertia in organization to adopt new technology. I was listening to the Ben Thompson podcast and he was talking about the volition of people in organization to accept new technology. And when the computer came out, it's not a people's thought like, hey, this is going to make my job easier. Most people were pretty reluctant to start learning a computer. So the first changes that happened were the ones where you could replace one-to-one a person with a human being because you could do that decision at the top and say, well, we used to have a person

crunching those numbers and now we have a database computer that's doing that. I think it's similar with AI because I can see it. I can see my behavior changing. I can see that I can adjust my tone of voice via an AI and it makes my writing easier. Then I see that I use the AI to adjust the content that I'm receiving and reshape it in a way where I can absorb it better. I can't see anyone like

you know, not doing that over time. I mean, maybe not with fiction or things like this, but it's becoming totally malleable, right? The way you can absorb information and then put information. Alex, when do you think you need to preserve the integrity of the artist's work? I don't know. And I don't think it's when you need. I think people are just going to do what they do. And I shared this experience where I was reading this fiction book, the science fiction book,

And I wasn't liking it. And I was like, I see where this is going. I'm the third in. There's another 400 pages. I don't want to read this. So I asked Chad GPT, like, hey, without spoiling the book, can you tell me if I should continue? Can you tell me if it's heading in that direction? It says, yes, without spoiling the book, it's heading in this broad direction. I was like, okay, I'm not going to read it. But can we talk through the ending and kind of the philosophical? And it helped me through it. And you know what? I would have stopped reading the book.

book. But the thing I want to talk about is I shared that on social media. AI gave you like 20 hours of your life back. Yeah. And I think it would have been like if I had a friend that read the book, I might have asked a friend, hey, I feel this book is going in that direction. So most people were interested when I shared it on social media. But there's like 30, a good 30% that said this is the dumbest thing. You're killing art.

You know, how dare you? And don't you know, it's probably imagined that whole ending, et cetera. Now, here's the issue, right? Forget these folks. Are they getting snarky in your threads, Alex? Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. This is the downside of becoming a threat. They're getting snarky on threads, Alex. Welcome to the Thunderdome. All right, here's the context, though. Here's what's important. Everyone listening, you have people like that, or you might be one of those people in your organization.

You need this volition to say, hey, there's this new technology. It comes with flaws. It is not perfect, right? But I'm noticing it as well. And sometimes in my team, we say, hey, AI coding tools. And then an engineer, their first task is to try to find everything wrong with it rather than to try things...

And it was the same way with computers when I was, or digital video editing, right? Where I had video editors telling me, we'll never switch from film. And I would show them, but look what this can do. And they would be so good at figuring out every fractional issue that there is with it.

But this is the thing that's going to keep companies back, right? This is where – and I'm not going into my own founder mode here. It's just like you need to hire people that have the energy, volition, spirit to say, hey, this is something really interesting and we're going to kind of work around the rough edges and we're going to try to figure out philosophically what it means to us rather than the people are going to sit back and just constantly say no.

Yeah, but here's the thing. In reality, you need, and just to try to shoehorn the theme in even more, is you need that tension. You need the sort of, I think they call them insultants, right? You need people who pump the brakes, right? Because otherwise you're just going to be taking ayahuasca, taking all your clothes off and like worshiping the AI gods, right? I would say that there's a balance and I would say...

Tech companies are maybe shifting too much on the like gung-ho, let's just go for it. But media, I think on average, media people feel more threatened by AI than many, many other industries. And I think you need to figure out that balance, right? You need to figure out that balance. This is my free radical theory. All societies and organizations need free radicals.

To disrupt. You just need to disrupt. Like, you know, for better or worse, you know, Trump, Elon, whatever, they're free radicals. They shake the foundations of how we live and how we think. And, you know, as such, I think are really valuable. You know, something kind of interesting to that, just a little sidebar. Yeah.

You know how a lot of people when they're running organizations, they say, we have a no assholes policy, which I'm always like, God, you got to be kidding me. Who has a yes assholes policy? It's just such a dumb thing to say. But the more interesting thing is what is your troublemaker policy? What is the ratio of troublemakers you're willing to have in your organization? Because I think...

the highest functioning organizations, they do need some troublemakers. A lot of salespeople are troublemakers. I noticed the really good salespeople, they're feral. And- I think that with AI, there's a balance. That notebook LM thing I tried, the first thing it did was get my old job wrong. And there are some people that would have jumped on that and say, "Well, throw it all out the window." And

I think we, you can't have people in your organization that, that say, throw it all out the window. I think you need critical thinkers. I'm not saying everybody should just go out blindly and be, you know, pro replacing everything with AI, but there are, you know, I think a litmus test is always like, it's not like it made you a

junior designer at Microsoft. But it doesn't matter if it didn't even. I have seen computers being able to struggle to move a white dot around the screen and now rendering somebody's sweat in 4K like in an NBA video game. We've seen this transition. So I can look at this and project it out into the future. And I don't know if you guys have noticed, every two months there's something

mind-blowing that comes out. Everyone, please go to Notebook.LM, upload anything and render one of those fake podcasts. It is uncanny. And sure, it is silly. But I do think, do that litmus test. The people who will come back with the first three points of feedback is everything that I got marginally wrong when you have a computer that is absorbing information and outputting it in a way that is coherent without seeing the wonder of that, or at least the

terrifying change that this implies to your industry, I think you've got to have a serious talk with those people. The spaceship remains over the White House. You're using your word count up.

Well, I'm trying to catch up with you. Yeah. Well, can we transition from this, Brian, if you don't mind me doing what the AI says I do? Just a quick, not a long one. Can you make it a tension? Because that's the theme I'm trying to weave in. Well, this is, sure, anything can be made a tension. This is about how Meta so massively outsmarted Apple. Yeah, that's tension. They have a tension in their different approaches.

I know that Alex is not using his Vision Pro. He's going to lie. He might say it's going to be great to have it, Alex, but it is a bookshelf item. Now, just like my, you know, that little orange thing that I have here, Alex, you were at the house, you saw it. What was that device called? The Rabbit? The Rabbit. I barely even turned it on. It's just going to go on the bookshelf. Stupidest device ever. Now, okay, so meta...

Does this partnership with Luxottica, genius partnership, right? And the glasses are nice. It's a brand that people will put on their faces and they have a basic use case, right? Record videos connected to the meta apps and make calls apparently really great for making calls. You'll use it for that and keep the sun out of your eyes if you need that. So it's actually useful. Now you have a starting point with a device that you can iterate on and put more and more technology into. Yeah.

So they've started, they've spent whatever it is, $50 billion building a kind of future oriented version of this that they showed the market this week that combines a wristband with a heavier glass that's not quite ready for prime time with an offloaded some of the compute into something you put in your pocket, like a little transponder unit. And now what you have in this unit is basically all the functionality that you have in the Vision Pro.

So you can see things on top of the world. You could watch a movie. You can do a voice call. You can play or you can do a video call. You can play Pong with someone. And you have basically something that you can start to see people actually using because they don't look utterly ridiculous and you're not cut off from the world. At the same time, they release their new VR product, right? Which you can see through basically does everything that Vision Pro does. But it's $299.

It's $299, not $2,000. You're talking about $3,500, the Vision Pro. Okay, $3,500, right? So for $299, parents will put that under the tree, right? It's $300. It's a cool gift, right? You can play a ninja game with somebody. So to me...

Unless you have enough people buying at a low enough price point, you can't create the ecosystem that allows you to get developers making content because there's no incentive to do it. They've gotten all the cost out of that technology at $209. I think that people will actually buy it as a toy. It will mature from there. And at the same time, they have these new glasses. They are absolutely checkmating the industry right now.

And at the same time, they have an open source AI project that will start to create the environments without costing huge amounts of money.

It's amazing, actually. I think it's really amazing. Did you listen to the Zuckerberg podcast on the acquired podcast that he ended up doing? I mean, he talked very clearly about they're taking a, I guess in Silicon Valley, they would call it an orthogonal approach, which makes sense. I mean, you're not going to out-Apple Apple, right? So you're going to have to go mass. They're not going to do close. They're going to do open and close.

whatever. And he says it's like pragmatic. Sometimes open makes sense. Sometimes closed makes sense. I think people try to make it ideological. It's whatever is best for your competitive position in the market. So, I mean, right? I mean, why would you want to try to compete with Apple on high end, everything like integrated perfectly? Why not go mass? It just makes a ton of sense. And we'll see. I think that's the best thing is people taking different

approaches and then the market deciding which is right. So Apple is going to spaz out and they're going to need to compete with glasses for sure. There's no doubt. They got to make that product.

Google's got to make that product, right? Now, there's three companies in the race, Google, Meta, Apple. They're all going to try to compete around the glasses and potentially around VR, although I think it's a smaller market. Wait, what about Microsoft? Microsoft won't even be in the game. They just can't do it. And Snap is going to get completely decimated. There's no way that Snap can play the game.

They should bring the Zune back. The Snap doesn't have the infrastructure. I mean, I think even, so I agree with you, Troy. I think maybe a couple of things that really changed the game were those Ray-Ban glasses that didn't try to put stuff in front of your eyes because they made a useful product today rather than. I want those things. Yeah, no, I don't have them. I would potentially buy them. I think the other thing is that the reason I don't use the MyVision Pro as much is that Apple has completely given up on it.

They didn't build an ecosystem around it, right? My expectation was that a bunch of developers would buy this, but that Apple would be funneling money into it. But the updates aren't even coming out. And there's one that would be truly useful for me, which is a new widescreen where you can have an extra large computer display when you're working on certain things. And I'm just waiting for that update. It's meant to come out in fall, so we'll see. If you go to an Apple store, it's like in a corner now.

You just look at real estate. And Apple, I don't think it's doing particularly well on a lot of fronts right now. I mean, I think the OS is getting overly complicated. I think they got caught completely flat-footed with the AI stuff. And then three, I think Zuckerberg's

reinvention has made him more confident. I mean, he's still an awkward person. I don't love Zuckerberg. I think he looks really good right now. It's incredible what a multi-billion dollar fortune can do. No, but he used to have that Roman Emperor cut and now he's got kind of teased curly hair. He's jacked. He looks good.

Yeah, remember everyone that's available to everyone. Wait, did you see the shirt that he came out with it said odd suck on the heel like Nothing I Look like hey, you know what?

He's one of the billionaires that hasn't been red-pilled yet, so I'm pretty good. He's been red-pilled. I will say this for Zuckerberg. I don't know if I said this on a previous podcast. I think being a child prodigy is just the worst fate someone can have. Having success extremely young rarely works out well to being a functioning adult. Yeah, I mean, that's true. For everything, considering he didn't really have a young adulthood at all,

And I think you've got to grade how you – like on a curve because, I mean, look at how many child prodigies become complete weirdos and failures. It's been tough for me, I've got to tell you. I think a lot of that's been linked to coming from a poor family and having this massive leap. I mean, I think –

Poor family. Was his dad a dentist? No, that's what I'm saying. He lived in Scarsdale, I think. That's what I'm saying. His leap wasn't as big as growing up and all of a sudden being pulled into... Look, I...

still don't love Zuckerberg. I still don't love Meta, but I think they are doing it right. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple completely resets their ambition around. And I mean, after last Apple event, their big push is going to be health stuff.

And honestly, if they release glasses, I would probably buy the Apple glasses because they would connect to my phone. They have an ecosystem play. And unless that is dismantled. Well, that's Meta's biggest fear, right? Is that the ecosystem of Apple is so powerful. But I would make one last observation on this, Alex. Is that I said this before and I don't, I have, someone just texted me from Apple. I love both of these people that I have a couple of friends are.

Great company. You know, it's been one of the great pleasures of my life using their products. Their current presentation of their products and their brands gives me the icks. It makes me sick.

It's so polished. It feels so fake. It feels so sort of Northern California, idealistic, sanctimonious that I don't like it. I like their products and I think their new phone will do really well. Having said that, contrast that with what Zuckerberg did two days ago.

And what they did is they made mistakes on stage. It was kind of haphazard. They showed off uncompleted technology. To me, it was more like, it was more, this is how the life is. This is how the world is. I, I found it better. I liked it better. I,

But isn't that the tension between the Apple approach is ship things that are finished. And I think maybe they're embarrassed by the Vision Pro because it went against their ethos. But Zuckerberg on the Acquired podcast was talking about they had to get back to shipping things that are imperfect to iterate on. That is their view of how to build technology.

Because they're software people. Yeah, but I would say that part of the tension with Apple, and there's been a turn with how people see the brand. I don't know if it's, I mean, we're in our own bubble, but people would call me after Apple events and say, what should I get? And I used to be able to explain what the fuck was going on.

I actually don't know what Apple intelligence is and what it can do and not. And they've kind of broken, and I don't know if it was a rule at Apple, where they went from talking about feature and how they can impact your life to talking about an underlying technology because they feel like they have to. And they feel like they're on the back foot, right? And what you're sensing now with Meta is that there's a company that's confident. And with Apple, there's a company that's like lacked confidence.

That's like losing confidence. They're adding more buttons, which is great. The AI stuff is just being sold and it's actually unfinished. Can you make it go? Can you show us on the screen? Make the little thing around the perimeter flash or pulse or whatever. Yeah, here. It actually doesn't look as nice as old Siri. Oh, that little shake is cool.

It is cool. It gets pretty old pretty quickly. All right. But when the phone comes out, let's move on. Move us to the next topic. All right. The next topic is I want to talk a little bit about MKBHD.

He came out with a new product, you know, and look, a lot of times you use attention, right? And this is the new playbook is you get the attention and maybe it's ads, sure. Maybe it's subs, but maybe you use it to turn that attention to a better business, like making a product. He came out with this wallpaper app, I guess. You're talking Marcus Brownlee, the famous YouTube reviewer. The famous YouTube reviewer. I think he's mostly known as MKBHD now.

but that's the brand. MKBHD. He has a little, I guess, product studio. He came out with this wallpaper app that's been, you know,

utterly panned but i don't know maybe it's the twitter thing but it just seems like it's a wallpaper app guys it's a grifting app with like well it costs like 12 bucks a month like i don't know how much more of a story this is not a tech story and this is more a story about reputation right and and software being hard and i mean he's still going to probably make a bunch of money but i think his his standing software being hard it's a grifting story

Well, I mean, it's incredible how his brand suffers from this, right? There's been plenty of influencer products, you know, like Logan Paul has this prime hydration stuff. Is that a good product? No, it's terrible. But you know what? It's sold to kids. Feastables?

It's sold to kids which are not discerning, right? I know. That's where you want to make your products. That's where you want to make your money, right? But if you look at... I mean, what do you want to be? You want to be like a Rihanna with Fenty or, you know, Jenner with Kylie Cosmetics or something like that. These things are... You can do that transition into a good product. And...

Marcus Brownlee has had like interesting product collaboration with this wallet brand and shoes and stuff like that. And those have been well-received. That's a collaboration. Yeah. That's just a marketing deal. I think what has dropped is also where there's a tension where...

People are sick and tired of applications on the app stores. And I think Apple's really guilty at allowing stuff to happen, which are so there's so many dark patterns, right? There's so many rules around the app stores. You're not allowed to say this and that. And here's how you place a link all around, like making sure the payments funnel through Apple, right?

But then there can be such misleading tactics like tracking, overuse of advertising, weird subscription system. And I think people are genuinely tired of this. I don't think there's one person that is not tired and not suspicious of an app. So when somebody... You should download the ad app. It's just ads all the time. Yeah. When somebody that you trust...

When somebody that you trust tells you to do this thing, and now you have a place to voice your frustration, that is actually a frustration with the entire ecosystem of apps. Alex, we should build this. Seriously, we'll get AI. We'll build this. We should build just as a lark, just ads. And the app is called AdWords.

Yeah. I mean, this is a million dollar homepage. It's a nice idea, right? It's a good idea. Remember the million dollar homepage? No, but we'll do it better. This is way better because it's going to have animations and leaderboards and all that stuff. Yeah, rich media, eye blasters. I think it's a good idea. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are looking for different ways to launder attention, right? That's our first product, you guys. People versus algorithms ad. And it's just ads. It'd be really funny. I would say...

Troy, what did the AI say? He says, Troy often likes to inject humor into discussion. Displacefulness, however, sometimes borders on being dismissive. Borders. See, as I said, AI is a suck up. That's the problem with it. Oh, no. You know what we can also do? The second app we'll do is just called Paywall.

Just a paywall, different paywall types. Yeah, just take the money. Just a paywall. I mean, isn't that every media app? But I think this is the story of, again, I'm just going to keep going, attention. But in modern media, you're trying to launder attention in different ways and influence, and you're trying to redirect it into better economics, basically.

Basically, whether that's establishing a reputation over many decades and laundering that into, let's just say, SEO optimized content for affiliate, or it's something like this. He's just trying to launder attention at the end of the day. And I think that can work, right? And there are examples of it working, but we also see tons of examples on the media side and on the influencer side where you try to launder that attention, but

into an area like a product. And look, this is, we've talked about the content and commerce problems a lot on this and it just doesn't work. I mean, these are different skill sets. I think that's true. I think it can work. I think we've, we've seen, you know, like influencers or artists, you know, very successfully going into products, you know,

whether it's like Clooney with tequila or whatever. George Foreman with the grill. George Foreman with the grill. I do feel like the story here is more about a tech journalist or somebody that you trust releasing a tech product that suffers from the issues that so many apps suffer now, which is this kind of they've been weaponized to extract as much

attention or money out of you as possible. And I think there's like people at a breaking point with a lot of these interactions. It's incredible that you cannot...

that you cannot find a video game right now on the App Store that isn't somewhat structured to either make you see an ad or take more and more of your money. I hate to fulfill my destiny as the AI would predict, but this is getting... Okay, yeah. They sat in a meeting. They said, we need to make more money. How are we going to monetize our fame?

Oh, let's make an app. What kind of app do you want to make? Oh, let's make one of those apps that makes lots of money. Oh, we could do a what's the easiest app to make? We're not going to do a social network. We're going to do a screensaver app or a wallpaper app. And they make a stupid app and he someone makes it and they put it out and it's not well thought through. And that's the end of the story. It's not that complicated. This is bad judgment.

It's bad judgment. He made a fucking screw. 100% it's bad judgment. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, okay. Let's move on then. All right. Let's move on. I mean, I'm sorry to end this conversation, but it's like I feel like we're not doing our best. No, no, no. Thank you. Thank you for fulfilling your role. Thank you for being dismissive. I'm not bordering. I am being dismissive. Yeah.

Do you want to talk about the Trump-Elon mechanic? Yeah, but then let's get into a good product because Alex has a hard stop.

Okay. Wow. I better not say anything about that Trump topic because- We're talking Trump again. Okay. So my Trump thing that I want to talk about this week a little bit, but then you can take it in your own direction, is it's going to be fascinating to see Kamala Harris is going to weigh, she's way outspending the Trump campaign in advertising. And I don't know if it's going to be as effective. Trump has hacked this system. He's hacked all of the information space.

And his basic thing is why pay for the ads when you can be the show? And whether that means creating crazy conspiracies where they're eating the pets and whatnot, it doesn't matter, as JD Vance said, because it's going to get people talking about an issue that Trump wants them to talk about, which is immigration and its impact.

And it is going to bring up that it doesn't really matter if it's true or not. Basically, that's what it is. So I'm interested to see if the traditional approach, which I think Kamala Harris is really taking a very traditional campaign approach, how it fares against Trump, who always goes in a different direction. Troy, what is your take on that? Okay, so the first thing is my favorite thing

political campaign ad of the season is the remix of the part from the Trump-Harris debate where he says they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs. I mean, everybody at this point has probably seen it, but that genius guy puts that sort of Latin dance track behind it and it's, they're eating the cats. They slow Trump down. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats.

They're eating the pets and the people that live there. It's hilarious, right? I can't quite understand who it's an ad for. Is that an ad for Trump or is it an ad for Harris? But it's the one I remember most and it's the one I see the most. And it's distributed for free because it's distributed by the people.

To per your point, Brian, one thing that you and I have talked about a lot is I always tried to sort of deconstruct the Trump mechanic. Right. And it's one that I think he understood before us, before most people. Right. And it's that democratic media, the Internet in particular, would fuck the rules up.

And that the next winners would throw out the long bomb, right? A radical idea that was like, what the fuck? What's this idea? This is crazy. They're eating the cats? Who eats cats? And it's weird enough that we all move to it like moth to flame, right? It's like, this is weird enough. And sort of like, this is a, it's just a disruptive notion.

And so then people go there. So he owns the moment. He owns attention in that moment. We move to it. He defines the conversation around that weird thing. And it defines the discussion for a day or two. But interestingly, is that underneath of the crazy, there's always the shred of a story.

He always does something that will lead you somewhere where you're not completely empty handed. So, for example, if you watch, you know, Channel 5 News on YouTube, that great little sort of Gonzo documentary thing that that kid does. He did like the people living under Las Vegas. He did people on the streets of San Francisco. So he just did one around what the hell is going on in Aurora.

Right. Are the Venezuelan gangs taking over Aurora? Have they really occupied this condominium complex? And did they do it with guns and all of that? And of course, the truth is, yes. And.

Yes, migrants come up from Venezuela through into Colorado. And do they do disruptive things? Some of them. The other side of it is, is that there's lots of hard work and people that live there and are trying to figure out how to get away from a nasty authoritarian place and build a new life. So it's both right. There's criminal elements. It's nasty. There's lots of stories there. It's

You know, we're letting people into the country without any kind of systematic filter. So there's going to be problems. And at the same time, there's a lot of people that are coming here and contributing to the country and making a better life for themselves. So I guess what's been interesting is.

This mechanic is throw out the long bomb, make sure it's connected in some way to something that people are going to be, wait, look, there is something here. Where there's smoke, there's fire. And he's done it brilliantly. I think he's just a natural. He gets memes. I think he gets memes without even knowing what memes are. That's why he's killing with Gen Z men. That's why he is. You're looking at someone who's just...

reflexively saying shit, right? And then you apply... Reflexively what I'm... Wait, wait, no, no, let me be dismissive for once because I think that is not an interesting conversation. You're saying, well, every person that talks about conspiracies, it is always linked in some truth. It is always connected to something that happened.

Nothing ever comes out of thin air. You can go talk to that crazy guy next to the bodega and you'll go, hmm, you know what? This guy might be drunk, but actually there was some weird stuff with aliens or there are UFOs. You can always find a source of truth. He's not...

Like the way people are applying genius because this guy is so shameless and just like rattles off whatever comes in his head as a way to protect himself or gain some sort of power and then start thinking that there's like he's some sort of media genius. He's just craving attention. So you don't think he's a media genius? I think he's a media savant, which is different. He was a reality star.

Are you kidding me? Someone said to me, someone said that he, you know, he is maybe we'll go down for the next. With Jared Kushner running his campaign. No, I think he's a media genius. He's definitely a media genius. He's the new Barnum. And someone would say that someone said to me yesterday, he'll go down for the next like hundreds of years. They'll look at him as the greatest salesperson of all time. Guys, guys, guys, guys. All right. You can dislike him. That's okay. But you got to like put that to a side.

Right. I am putting that to a side. Let's have a reasonable conversation here. You can put a gorilla in the ring and say the gorilla is going to tear the guy's arms off. But what's happening is you put the gorilla in the ring and you're saying, look at this gorilla.

He is so strategic. He's thinking this through. Look at that, how he flung that shit at the other fighter. I don't give a shit. No, but like, I want us to be just like... I care about results, Alex. No, let him go. He's actually on to something here. I want us to be intellectually honest here. There's logic and then there's just instinct. This guy runs on instinct. No, I know...

But okay, instinct isn't genius. You can call it anything you want. But the fact you're saying, you know, when he said this cats and dog thing, he was thinking that people will trace it back and then figure out. And he was like beautiful minding this thing. He just didn't know. Somebody told him cats and dogs. He goes, yeah, I hate brown people. And that's probably true.

true or it'll get the people going. And he just said it. All right. So what you're dealing with is a guy that's purely made of it. That's just, of course, he's a savant, but he's a gorilla. So here's the thing. And then we can move on. He's not Bruce Lee. He's a gorilla. He's going to win the fight, but that's not because he's smart. This is a bugbear of mine because I find that there are different

forms of intelligence that people of the, and this is where a lot of the resentments that they put, there's different types of intelligence that people have. And we as societies, particularly in the quote unquote elite areas,

overrate a particular type of intelligence. It's usually the type that you get from learning books and being very like, quote unquote, traditionally smart. There's totally different kinds of intelligence that someone like Trump has. It's very instinctual. And I'm sorry, he understands more

He's not precise, but he is accurate. He understood more about where the country was than all of the people from Yale who spoke in complete, perfect paragraphs. And I think there's different forms of intelligence. Salespeople have a different form of intelligence. That's why I honor my friends on the sales side.

The problem with me is that we're implying thoughtfulness in this process, which then kind of elevates him to something who can be reasoned with. No, I don't think it's thoughtful at all. I think he's got a preternatural feel for this stuff. He just sniffs it out like a dog. He's very easy to manipulate, right? And the people who know him can do that. There's a lot of... And so when he did the cats and dogs thing, he's just responding. He's just like an

He's like an animal in his element and he's responding to the moment. I think just the language we use is important because there are different convictions to how you're doing something. And I don't think he's calculating. I think just the way he responds to the world has hacked the media ecosystem, has hacked our attention because he is just so... Well, that's where we started and that was actually the point we were making. So thank you.

He's an amoral genius. Okay, let's get on to Good Product. All right, all right. And you could say I'm gold, but I would say I'm lonely. Moving on, it turns to dawn. Like ass coming. Moving on, does me, the rest is gone. Second to nothing was meeting you.

My good product is this week my son, like yesterday or the day before, released an album, and I think it's a good product. So his name is Seb, and he's on a journey, and he recorded this album traveling across the U.S., mostly spending time in California last, well, I guess about six months ago. And his project is called, I don't know if this project is his band, I don't really know actually, it's called Chronically Offline.

Brian, I think that you would like that. So his, that's what, that's the way to live moniker he's using. And the album is called made with longing. So it's kind of, I think of our time and it's about a young man coming to terms with his place in the world. And,

and, you know, dealing with childhood shit. To me, it feels like a California record. And he doesn't love to compromise. He wanted to make a whole record. He wanted to make art. He wanted to make something. He played everything on it. He wrote it. He sang it. He did the harmonies. He produced it. He had the help of this great guy, Tim, in California that helped him do some of the production.

And the part he hates actually is marketing it. And in it, I feel I won't review it. It's hard. You know, whenever your kids make music, you think it's great because it's like your DNA making music. But yeah,

It feels a little like the Beatles, who's a huge influence of his, a little like kind of Fountains of Wayne, a little Mac DeMarco in there, who he loves, and Elliot Smith, and maybe a bit of Bon Ivar. He plays a little banjo on it, so that's cool. And it's kind of deeply inspiring to me. And, you know, I personally don't want to stop growing as a human being, and it's really great to watch him grow and kind of produce something that's so deeply personal and

And we should play a clip of it and see what people think. But it's cool. And it's definitely like every week when I do the good product, it's sort of, I don't pick a good product. I kind of encounter something in my life that got my attention that made me feel something that I

that I want to highlight. And this is what I wanted to highlight this week. I think you, and you know, Seb, you don't know Seb, Brian, but Alex, you know, Seb. Well, he was on the podcast. I mean, I know him as a podcast guest. Well, yeah, he was on the podcast, but Alex, you might be, maybe even listen to the record. I don't know. I will. I will listen to the record.

So if you were to go back to when he was like eight, are you, would you be surprised that like he made a, cause I'm interested cause I don't have children, but you have two kids and they went in totally different paths. I have three kids actually. Three kids. I was sorry. But like your daughter and like Seb went in different paths. My daughter's a banker. Right. So were you surprised at where they ended up if you were to go back when they were like young or are you not surprised?

You know, and maybe a little bit. I remember when I first bought Seb electric guitar, we lived in Mill Valley at the time, and he never touched it for three years. So a little bit, he then, he, yeah, he kind of, he has, Seb isn't the kind of person that, you know, like you couldn't sit him down at a piano and say, you know, learn the piano as a young person. He has to discover things himself. That's who he is.

Yeah, a little bit surprised. My other daughter's kind of super, super driven analytical, you know, like kind of, you know, banker type. So she was she a banker child?

She's a, I'm going to outwork you and I'm going to beat you kind of person. You got to do the 80 hour weeks. Alex, what do you, what profession do you think your son is going to have? You're going to have to predict right now. Oh boy. I don't know. I think it's either going to be making video games or working on a farm. I think it's like he's, you know, between those two worlds right now. So it's safer to go into, I think the farm. Maybe what he'll do is make the new FarmVille.

The amount of farming, cozy farming simulators that are coming out in gaming, I don't think you know, but it's a massive industry of just chore simulators of people managing. And I think post-pandemic and just, you know, people can't buy their own houses and they...

they don't have time to go out and touch the grass so they play these video games where they plant beets and harvest. We can maybe make that our third game after add and paywall. Yeah. And then we'll do farm. Farming is a great tax strategy right if you're super rich.

I think. Is it? Yeah. Tell me more. I think that's why Bill Gates owns... That's why the conspiracy theory about Bill Gates because he owns so much farmland. Well, I know that there's a lot of benefits to having farmland because you can just apparently make an ag building and build whatever you want in it, which is what people are doing around here. If you're in the EU, they'll pay you not to farm on it too, depending on the market. So it's good. You keep coming back to...

tech hijacking media. Me or Brian? Brian, you put it in your notes. Well, it has. Does that even have to be said? Well, but at first you talked about it like it was a new format where this sort of conversational go direct to the audience format and tech people saying we can make media too. We don't need your shit. And then to me, I just sort of thought of it as

I don't know, having lived in Silicon Valley and worked with lots of technologists, it's sort of the job of tech as it applies to media and most things is put a new layer on top, right? To aggregate and to take it directly to the user and take data control and break shit to get there if necessary, right? That's what Facebook is and that's what Google is. It's the layer on top of the media. And through that, you find immense power.

And what you see in the way tech thinks is this kind of black and white, you know, they're all really kind of fundamentally smart, the good ones, obviously. And there's this kind of tech righteousness that understands the world as a sort of solvable problem where they have better solutions for media.

They do media better than media, right? And, you know, they were also neglected in high school, mostly. But they also looked down on media. I mean, it's very clear. I mean, Zuckerberg is now- Precisely, because they can do it better. Most of these publishers don't even have, he goes, we won't even take their content if they don't want it, but it's not that valuable anyway. So yeah, they make media, right? And they should make media, because if they make media that's better than the media that you make, good on them.

Like, amazingly, say what you want, Alex, All In made media that people like better than other media. Right. I mean, not a lot of business media can sell out 6,000, 7,000 tickets at 7,000 perks. But you conflate me not liking them and not liking their politics and not liking their message with...

with me thinking they're not successful. I promise I'm not dictating. I can say that Fox is really successful, Troy. Really successful. Alex Jones had a massive podcast. Joe Rogan is hugely successful. But success to me doesn't validate why I should listen to them.

Well, I think to me, it's more like I like to look at things and learn from them and understand them and then sort of take them and like recast to them. Because I think if you just dismiss things that are clearly successful, you're not going to... Aren't there lots of video games that you see that you don't like the dynamics of them or whatever it is? I think it's a similar thing. But you're a media analyst and maybe there's value to that. But even let's say...

Jason speaks like 20 minutes, 40, 30 minutes on this show. Saks speaks another 20 minutes on this show. I'm not wasting 45 minutes of my week on these guys. Like why? They're successful. They ran a successful show. People come in their show because they're successful.

Good for them. I have other things to do. I just don't like them. And I don't find them particularly insightful. And once you've heard that shtick over and over, it's kind of, you get it. Yeah, I get it. I get it.

And I also know that there's a huge kind of industry around successful people. People want to listen to successful people. I can tell you from firsthand experience that when I was head of design at Airbnb, I could fill a room of thousands of people that wanted to listen to me speak about

how I run the team and how I got here and stuff like that. I couldn't give them that knowledge. I got lucky. I did what I did for 15, 20 years. So I was good enough to get the job. Who discovered you, I'm wondering. But we'll get to that, Troy. But I think that at the end of the day, people want to be close to what they see as power or success because they feel that they can learn from it, which is why, and if you're an NFL star or whatever, then if you have a modicum of like, you know,

media smarts, you can create a product. I think it's completely unfair comparing like a billionaire to like some upstart journalists because the billionaire has like the light to the moth attraction and that people want to hear like, well, I'll hear about their life. And part of it is like... Oh, I get it. No, no, it's an unfair, it's leverage. It's an unfair advantage, quote unquote unfair. Once again, we're applying media genius to all this stuff. It's not. It's just, that's the way it is. No, no.

It's like saying the housewives of whatever Minnesota are media geniuses. It's like people just like to watch the car wreck and like to see the wealth and like to hear the thing. And it's great. I'm happy for them. Like I'm so happy that Jason's successful. He's so deserving of it. I mean, you know, like he's been brown nosing for 20 years. That guy deserves a break. No, it's inspiring. It is inspiring. And I think it should teach us all to just suck up.

Just do it. Just shamelessly. On air. Just do it. That is true. If there's one lesson we can take from this episode, it's that the ends absolutely justify the means. Yes. Okay. Thanks, guys. This is fun. I'm glad we stayed on. Bye. I can breathe, finally breathe, let it jump by. Love until hate. And reverse the whole thing.

but the colors they are great the dogs chasing the ducks in the sunshine yeah they don't mind see the fish swimming along through the high tide and i think we should take a little drive with the birds and the