Tech Oligarchy
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You look great, Alex. How are you doing? Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. Met a super fan last night. I'm going to somewhat anonymize her. Her name is Peggy. Is that the name or the anonymization? That's her name. I'm not even trying to join her last name.

It was a good choice, Peggy. Well, I don't know. There's a lot of Peggy's around. But anyway, she had said, she said, I almost feel like I have a parasocial relationship with you. I love people versus algorithms. And I listen to it while I'm doing ceramics. And sometimes I sort of get lost in it.

And then I hear something that I need to like focus on. And so I stop my ceramics and rewind the podcast. That's so nice. Well, that's very nice though. Yeah, that is. So please, please keep compliments and the insults coming. Troy, do you want to give us a little quick report from Davos? Why are you there? Is there...

I have a friend. Is there an SEO panel there? No, I just kind of went on a bit. I wanted to go skiing and I have a friend. That's a perfect time to go. There's no crowds. There's nobody on the hill. My friend had an apartment in Davos. So I met him in Zurich, a person I like a great deal. So it was fun to hang out. And I went to a number of events. You know, I'm not like a card carrying Davos person. So I was locked out. There's a lot of security. Yeah.

It's like a shitty can, as far as I can tell. But I mean, I get it. You trade out the CMOs for the CEOs, right? It's policy people, the political set and CEOs and stuff. So it's fancy. But those people aren't as fun as the marketers at Care. Yeah.

But who are the ad tech people? There's no ad tech. They don't do ad tech. No, no, no. I know. But who are the, like ad tech people are the people who are really funding CAN, right? CAN is just presents as a marketing conference. Oh, the ad tech, the equivalent of ad tech are the consultancies.

definitely the extensions of the world so you know instead of the snaps you know a house on the cross either a deep can you have the palantir house that gives you a sense of the vibe difference right what is helping countries do intelligence and military and the other

And the other is making the world. So what's the vibe like? Are you guys all giving each other's high five and say, we can finally say what we want to do? Saying the R word. We can finally say all these words we weren't allowed to say. I'm not ready to do the R word. You know, I went to a nice party last night. It's not going over well in my circles. Is it a lot of Zeke Hiling over there? Like, is it back in fashion? It seems to be back.

Good point. I'm not picking up your vibe here, Alex. Well, I mean, it is Switzerland, so it's pretty neutral. I don't know. One needs to bring a sense of history to the moment, Alex, and look at there was other times when... I am. I really am. It is very much that. My question was more... It's actually a serious question. What is the vibe amongst the other powerful, you know, kind of...

maybe oligarch adjacent people. Oligarchalite.

I mean, listen, in any situation, I mean, I think it's a mix of, you know, your business people and there's, you know, a shock to the world. And it's very pro-business. And it's a time of change which brings, you know, opportunity, excitement, and apprehension. I think there's a lot of, you know, I think people are really don't even know what to think, right? Because, like, the last three or four days have been kind of unprecedented, right?

And so, you know, I think that the people are really processing it. But I think that for those people that think it's great for business and obviously, you

You know, that's a big part of the Davos crowd. There's excitement about what the future holds. But just to be very clear, though, Davos is an AI conference this year and probably will be next year. And so everything, every discussion, everything is about how we're applying AI in our business or how we're re-engineering processes or how we're doing better, you know, drug development, innovation, what we're doing on climate stuff with AI. Every single company is talking about AI. Okay, so that's the ad tech.

That's the ad tech. Okay. AI is the ad tech. It's very interesting because, you know, this week was the inauguration here and all the sort of tech oligarchs descended on Washington, not on Davos, which is where they normally would be. I don't want to read too much into it, but it does seem like, you know, Davos is kind of on the downslope. It's a thing of the past. It stands for globalization at a time when we're going to, I don't know, mercantilism. Not even sure where we are.

So I don't know. Did you get a sense of that on the ground there? Or no, you were just swooshing down the stairs? I think it's a new day. Someone said to me, which I thought was funny, that they were going to change...

their identifier on linkedin and take out the they part so just go with straight up her we're winning we're winning the w's keep piling up jesus christ you know when it filters down to linkedin it's it's for real alex but just like i mean just to take a breather this is grim and gross guys and there's a lot of things to solve but you know like punching down are the the first

10 items on that checklist is punch down and make sure we make some people's lives hard. Well, I wanted to talk about the sort of the capitulation that has continued. It's gotten a little unseemly, to be honest with you. It's across all of the sort of tech oligarch class. And I think that it's becoming more common really to view a lot of the tech billionaire leaders, the Sam Altmans, Elon Musk,

et cetera, as oligarchs, Jeff Bezos. I mean, we've always used that term for Russians or Ukrainians or other. And I remember my mom asking, why don't we have oligarchs? I'm like, well, well, well, they're more entwined with the government and they're pulling strings. And now I'm like, well, no, we've got oligarchs all our own. And I'm interested in how that sort of resets the

the view first of all how the tech industry operates because as we always say this podcast the rest of the rest of the economy is downstream of that nowadays and how that like sort of both gives them advantages but also might constrain them in some way i don't know any thoughts on that true please don't say no well i'll start with i won't say no but i'll start with a recycled tweet that caught my eye from 2016 and maybe this went viral i don't know but it was i

I feel bad for our country, but this is tremendous content. That's Darren Revell. Yeah, that made me chuckle. Isn't it an amazing acknowledgement of the importance of sort of discovery, communication, and commercial infrastructure that is manifested in these enormous companies, NAI, obviously, that they sat alongside the president's family at the inauguration and said,

Really, the TikTok ban became really central to the conversation in the, you know, at a huge, you know, moment in history or, you know, moment and certainly in American politics, I guess, in history. And it just shows you that. And there was that brilliant podcast where Ezra Klein had the conversation with Chris Hayes.

talking about, you know, the kind of modern requirements of politicians that you're good at attention or that you're good at vertical video. And at the same time, kind of pointing out that, which I thought was really interesting, that

The age old app, you know, kind of concept or, you know, functional purpose of media, i.e. small media companies aggregate audience, you know, by creating, you know, content, cut that up in meaningful ways and sell it off to advertisers is really becoming less and less of a business. And the...

The only things that really matter in the sort of, you know, media industrial complex are like platforms that can generate kind of attention at scale. Right. Like that's why TikTok is such a massive issue or, you know, I mean, I would say that there are, you know, scaled media companies like Disney that qualify here, but like, and IP entities like the NFL, but like,

you know, all of these companies have this formula that it's like you step back and you're like the creation of audience for, you know, that whole tier of media companies that, you know, prospered for decades in America and around the world, you know, magazines, newspapers. It is a massive, massive struggle for them to continue to kind of execute a media business plan that used to pay the bills, right?

It just doesn't work anymore. And you're competing with companies that have enormous repositories of data, incredible technology and free content. And apparently spineless malignant leaders that will do anything. But you know what, you know what you, the thing is though, like when you guys talk about media, I've been thinking about this a lot. I mean, first of all, no, we used to always poke at people calling out late stage capitalism, but it's,

But if this isn't a sign, I think it's maybe time to stop calling that out as kind of panicking or being overly anxious about the future. But here's the thing. The media pressures are beyond the business model thing. Yes, these companies have massive...

spin wheels that allow them to create enormous amount of free cash flow based on mostly free labor from creators. No creator gets too big so that they hold the platform hostage, which is different for media companies because media companies will have two or three of their main people that can hold the company hostage and then disappear. But on top of that, you have

They're completely at the whim of these like hyper, hyper billionaires, probably the first trillionaires, because they can essentially either be sued out of like, you know, out of existence by, you know, we've seen these kind of lawsuits going up against these media companies, or one of these billionaires can buy them with, you know, the money they make in a week. And so I don't understand how like our press apparatus and kind of media apparatus, the

traditional media as we call it remains because it needs it needs to like either be subservient or be bought out or or sued for defamation and apparently whether you're you're right or not you know you're gonna people are likely to settle because they don't want to get in trouble so i think it's grim times ahead for media you know for like well you know i get i guess just building on that alex what what i what i thought when i saw the you know group of of

of kind of new media or platform Titans standing there is these are the people that essentially provide the operating system for the modern world. And the only thing, and the most, the only time that they, they bend the knee to the people that can kind of disrupt their place as owners of the operating system of our world. That's it. That's the boss. Right. And so they've all done it.

They've all done it out of self-interest. Yeah, but on top of that, here's the thing is that the trade is at a different scale here. Because the trade is, you know, let me shoot more rockets into space and I will make sure that I flood the zone with lawsuits and attacks against your opponents. Because essentially, however much we say money is spent on politics, it's nothing for those people.

I'm just making the point that you have to reconceptualize media as really like a kind of public communication operating system that's owned by five companies, right? And we're also noticing owned by five companies.

But they're also very individualized, right? Like this is, you know, dealing with companies was different. Yeah, I think that's a defining feature of this age of oligarchs at the end of the day. Elon doesn't like what you say on Twitter and he bans you because free speech, you know, of course. So to take the counter, there's something a little bit refreshing is that you have like a person rather than some opaque person.

opaque sort of blame the algorithm and all this. Like, this is like very clear. I don't know how they get around, like how their responsibility, you know, because other countries, like I was like hearing last night, I didn't know. Did you know in Australia, you're as a publisher, you're liable for any comments, like if left in your commenting system, like if someone like goes into your commenting system and,

Yeah, they don't have a section 230. They just, you're liable for it. So like every comment is moderated. Australia is a really interesting, they're like,

Have they always been this way? They're like very like... I don't know. Go to Australia. Seems to be fine. You know? I've been once. I've been there for three days. It was like, it reminded me of like a cross between like London and San Francisco, but with some weird words. It's California, but it's far away from all the bullshit. It really is a cross between Vancouver and London is really the most accurate. Yeah.

I've never been to Vancouver. Yeah, it's just it's it's it's a really crazy time. Right. I mean, then what you're seeing is is it's not only that operating system requires power and compute. Right. So we're this five hundred billion dollar investment.

Yeah, that's what's supposed to start with. Supposedly. We'll see you, right? Stargate. Stargate is a... Masa would never sort of oversell something. It's an announcement that needs to now be filled in, right? But it's an aspiration with the approval of the government. So go do it, right? And you sort of have...

the LLM layer and open AI, you have Microsoft's blessing, you have the government's blessing, you can go build the data centers in Texas. It's really remarkable. And the justification for it all is, of course, that if you don't do it, we're going to lose this race.

I wonder whether this, how does this complicate like sort of big tech's relations with other power centers, including like their own employee base? There seems to be a growing gulf between what this sort of oligarchs at the head of these companies are doing and they're making business decisions.

and the sort of rank and file at these companies. Now, a few years ago, we saw that basically employees at Google put a stop to a cloud contract with the Defense Department, and that would be unthinkable today. I'm just wondering what the... Silicon Valley people love to talk about first principles thinking, but there's also second order impacts that don't seem to be top of mind a lot of times because there's all sorts of bad shit that happens from their first principles thinking that

doesn't seem to be like ever like thought about at all. I'm wondering if what the sort of second order impact of politicizing tech basically. Well, we don't know yet. I mean, I think, I think it's, it's also interesting.

somewhat distorted because it's coming outside the heels of layoffs so people are not as mobile as they used to be right so so people are likely to stay quiet and stay in their own job but the amount of people that have gotten in touch with me and saying that they regretted working for meta you know that that meme that meme is going out i don't know if you've seen there's a british show a sketch comedy mitchell and webb where there's these two nazis trying to figure out

if they're the bad guys, you know, they're like, well, we've got skulls on our hats. And at some point, one of them goes, Klaus, are we the baddies? And that meme's been surfacing a lot from people at Meta. I think there has been also, the thing that has been most resonant is how quaintly

quick to turn all of these folks are because I definitely know some of them permanently who were very much working in an effort to push you know things like DEI and the company would walk around with feminism a t-shirt that just said feminism or Black Lives Matters who today have just you know

probably in the audience clapping to somebody saying that they're going to repeal a bunch of laws that help people in need. So it's just that turn where a lot of people are very shell-shocked. There is less of a, you know, there's not walkouts. I think walkouts are easier when you've got other jobs.

Because you don't even know where to walk to, right? I think there was a chilling effect of seeing all these leaders of industry sitting at the front row there looking like some weird scene out of, you know, like the Hunger Games. So, you know, I'm pretty sure we're going to see a lot of people like moving to Alaska and starting to become like foragers or something. I think you're going to see a couple of things.

I think that you're going to see more distrust of the leaders of these companies who have just so blatantly acted opportunistically. And I think that companies, modern companies, sophisticated companies like Google, culture is really, really important. And I think that they're going to become more hostile environments. Yeah. The other thing is...

is I think that, you know, there's so much money swirling around in Silicon Valley right now. And so, for example, at OpenAI, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of engineers that are now taking between $5 and $10 million out of the company as secondary.

Right. And Sam Altman capped the amount you could take. Many of them have stock allocations that are worth far more than that, but they're taking out $10 million and that gives them several years of freedom to go out and build their own businesses. So I actually think what you're going to see is a lot more kind of entrepreneurial activity driven by people that have

real, intensely valuable knowledge sets and a little bit of money in their pocket. And that's true. We're just like, I mean, it's going to take some time to play out. It just hasn't been much of a big knee-jerk reaction. But I also think like, I wonder the game, and I'm just going to focus on Zuckerberg, but we could put a lot of people in that bucket. The game he's been playing, I mean, if you listen to the Rogan interview, he's very much talking about

He's very much talking to a set of people and giving them a lot of kind of soundbites that they will like. But if you think about them a little more, you know, then they start kind of, you know, falling apart. And the interesting thing is like when he's talking to that audience, he actually isn't talking to a lot of the people that work at his company because they can, you know, when he says like he wishes Facebook had more male energy when like...

Like masculine energy, masculine energy. When, when Facebook is like over, like, you know, you know, two thirds men and the entire tech industry. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a ridiculous statement. If you go to Facebook, it's got a lot of male nerd energy. Yeah.

You can have men and not have masculine energy, Alex. Oh, yes. Look in the mirror. And Zuckerberg exudes male energy now. So I think he was talking about things to a certain type of audience that is receptive to it, but that really turns off the people that work for him. I actually don't. I mean, I know a lot of people that are at the executive level that probably don't like it. As of 2022, it's 63% men. Yeah. Well,

One other thing I point out, Brian, is that part of it feels like a dorm room with 16-year-old boys. Facebook has male energy, you know, depending which one you call. It's not Sparta. It's not a bunch of people rubbing themselves in oil and punching each other in the face. It's more like the nerd kind, but, you know.

But Brian, I wanted to just reflect on the moment in another way. And I was in Davos and I turned on my computer and there was a live feed on YouTube from the All In Boys that had basically set up a studio in Washington and had a couple new characters in the cast as well as the doofus guy from Zynga. Yeah.

And we had the feed of the inauguration feed running on the side and we're commenting and literally broadcasting like real time for hours. And then had Chamath on the street interviewing people about, you know, what they were feeling and what they were most excited about and holding his camera up and man, I just want to kind of contract like that. To me, that's remarkable. And I'll just kind of set the context for it.

is that we used to say that everybody can create content now, right? And that even VCs can go out and create content. Well, that happened. Then they created a podcast, and that podcast arguably became a more important media entity than many large established media entities.

And then that podcast, you know, interviewed presidents or presidential candidates and, you know, many influential people. And then, you know, threw their lot in with Trump and then brought the whole posse to Washington through a big party and broadcasted, you know, live for like 12 hours on the day of the inauguration, including live, you know, interviews on the street.

And that's remarkable, right? So two things about it. One is I just find it amazing that the infrastructure is available for a VC to become CNN. And secondly, that the...

The thing about talking about public policy and politics is you've got to know history. You've got to be informed or you're just blabbering. Like, I don't want to talk about politics on this podcast because I don't want to talk about it, but also because I'm not qualified to talk about it. What you get is, in my view, is like a real lack of expertise. What at all end?

Well, at all in or any of the sort of purveyors of information. Well, that's the thing. It's like, I wonder, it's like, yeah, switching lanes is really difficult, right? And like they had a really good lane with tech. And then this switching into politics, it's not necessarily for me because like I'm like, well, I thought the whole point of this was you were going to bring me in the room where decisions were made about tech, like in this space.

this flight of fancy about like talking about ukraine and and it's sort of it shows up not only that i'm not sure that chamath is qualified to talk about i'm pretty sure public policy chamath is not qualified to talk about that but you know what what's so it's true it is truly impressive how billionaires can succeed at doing stuff like i mean the fact is like

Here's the thing. These people can step into any space. All the spaces we're talking about don't require... Hell, if we could afford a producer, imagine what we could do. Yeah, I know. But the thing is... Shriram had billboards for his podcast with his wife. I don't know if this is going to... I think that... I call it kind of... There's kind of the U2 effect, right? Where U2 is...

objectively like a good, important band that did important things. But at some point, and I think it was when Apple dumped their album on all the iPods, they just became too much. And people turned on them because they became too much. Because I think a lot of people want to be the underdog and want to be in the new. And a lot of these folks have managed to weave an incredible tale, which is that they weren't

That they were the underdogs, which is wild. But I wonder how long all that stuff sticks. And to me, I remember the precise moment when I was like all in, went from a podcast that I used to listen to thinking, I like none of these people, but they say interesting things to, you know, oh, there's a shift in tone here, which...

which was when Chamath said, you know, I didn't used to like him, but after thinking about it, I think Donald Trump was a B plus president as far as things go. I was like, all right. And you know, when you're that rich and powerful, you have access, you have money, you have a network of things. Things just happen easily. It's impossible to lose at this stage in America.

But I do think it is a dangerous thing. Because if you go into their reviews, it's like, needs to go back to basics. So boring. It's become a highly politicized show. Guys, this is the thing. If the fashion of culture war changes, if culture war becomes out of fashion and class war becomes more fashionable, yeah, there's a big turn that's going to happen. Yeah.

Yeah, but this is... In that podcast you mentioned with Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, I mean, they really went deep into it. And we've talked about it, like, here, sort of about rules of the information space, about, you know, it's just about the raw amount of attention you can get. And, like, that was...

And that is the sort of coin of the realm now. It's not like a Q score anymore where you want to have more favorables or unfavorables. I mean, the knock on Trump was always that his negatives were too high, right? And what he recognized, either rightly or wrongly, is if you flood the zone and if you just win the raw attention battle, that everyone's going to have a lower ceiling and you're going to have a higher floor, right?

And I wonder if we're seeing that more broadly because...

Obviously, some of these platforms, most of these platforms reward, I think, getting in there and mixing it up. Again, I'm down to very little X time, but anytime I open up that thing and put on the for you, just to see if I'm mistaken, I'm reminded, man, people are doing battle there. And it's like you say outrageous thing after outrageous thing, and it doesn't matter. You just get raw attention.

It seems to me, Brian, that there's something more than just the raw attention thing. There's a mechanic that Trump has understood and Plato's advanced for a long time, and it's this. It's that the more you alienate your establishment peers, the more the people cheer for you because they want to reject the kind of established power structure. And so you become a way for them to rebel.

Right. So the more outrageous, outlandish, stupid things that you say, you know, you think, oh, my God, did he really do that? That's crazy. And they cheer him on because they perceive it as him, you know, kind of challenging the things that they hate in the political world. And Troy, do you think Elon's Hitler salute was a step too far or do you think that's going to work for him?

It's under dispute. Well, as a half Austrian person that's seen a lot of Indiana Jones movies, I can tell you that... You do have expertise that we do not. Well, you know, it could be some sort of like, you know, people have said, well, he's neurodivergent and in some sort of tick. You know, have you guys seen Dr. Strangelove? There's a scene in Dr. Strangelove where he constantly is trying to stop his arm from going up.

Either way, I would have expected him to immediately say, oh, no, no, sorry, I messed up. You know, I hate Nazis, but that hasn't come either. But you never apologize. That's one of the rules. You never apologize. You never back down and you never apologize. If someone punches, you counterpunch. And if you ridicule the people that are ridiculing you. Yeah, that's what you do. I mean, as a European who's had grandfathers on either side of the war.

Really? Chilling. But either way, I mean, we've seen kind of a response to that apparently. And I don't know how big this is, but it apparently covers at least 40 million users. And Reddit forums have banned Xlinks after this, which it's the first time that, you know, there's kind of been this mass reaction on Reddit across Twitter.

across so many subreddits. And apparently, you know, there's like now 40 million people are not allowed to share X links on Reddit. And the thing that's interesting to me is that, you know, the kind of galvanization potentially of different platforms for different political groups. I mean, you know, X is becoming more and more and more single voice. Like I'm seeing more and more people who have kind of kept...

kept up there that are slowly kind of moving away. Threads is definitely becoming something else, but then has taken a turn now with the Zuckerberg stuff. A lot of folks are kind of joining in blue sky, but I wonder as things go on that we're going to have politically disparate

social networks like we have you know the msnbc versus fox yeah but for me though though that i don't know how i think about it it's sort of like in this kind of exuberant moment this kind of autistic guy was kind of overwhelmed with emotion and and and just said that's what you do when you're overwhelmed it's a very specific it's very specific guys i don't know i don't know

He just, he just happened, had the lighter and the cross was there and then burst into flames. And then this towel fell on his head. And I don't know, man, it's kind of either way, either way. It is not being, even if you don't apologize, there's certain things you should apologize for. Hold it, Alex, turn it around though. On the, on the flip side, do you really think that he,

thought before going up there that I really admire Hitler. And this is kind of my opportunity to introduce this idea to America. And I'm going to like,

I'm going to appropriate that gesture as a signal of white power. It just seems unlikely that that was his calculus. That doesn't make sense to me. Okay, well, let's just say there wasn't a calculus. There was just some sort of nervous reflex tick. That's an interesting one to have. What? It's a nervous tick that you act like Hitler? I don't know.

Shit, man. I don't know why we're saying, well, it is so shocking that we think it probably didn't happen. I don't want to dwell on that. What I was trying to say is that there are things happening right now which are pushing the envelope so much that it looks like there's kind of like a galvanization of different groups and different social networks, different platforms, starting to take political sides, which is interesting for Reddit specifically because there has been mass action like that on Reddit and

But I don't know if it was at this scale. And I think Reddit has always kind of kept itself pretty open. Well, it'll be interesting to see if Reddit can avoid picking a side, so to speak, right? Because I do think the politicization of tech platforms and then the tech oligarchs, it's all of one piece. And also, by the way, the geographical...

reality is in Europe, they're going to have completely different-- they're going to be clamping down on all kinds of things that we think of as mostly here as free speech.

And, you know, the U.S. will be an outlier to a lot of different parts of the world. And it would be interesting to me to see if these tech platforms, if any of them ever just say, forget it, Australia. Like, I mean, I can see like, you know, quitting Australia, I don't think would be that. Man, Australia would be, it's a boon for Australia. Yeah.

I was having a meeting with a publisher actually just this morning, and this person was telling me a lot of the complying with the laws, just on things like recurring payments in all of these geographies eats up so much time. There's so many lawyers that have to get thrown at companies.

any of these American companies' international operations in these jurisdictions because they're basically regulatory states at the end of the day.

And they do have an interest, obviously. It's just a form of taxation. Zuckerberg had a point. The billions of dollars in fines that these companies are paying in Europe is just a tax at the end of the day. Or you change the way you think a little bit, Brian, and you realize we're moving into an age where we basically have techno nation states. Right?

Right. And your sovereignty and your value and your worth and your sort of strategic capability is tied up in the amount of compute you have, the quality of your models, the autonomous weapons that are connected to those models, and all the communication infrastructure that you use to manage a civilization.

And, you know, China is a distinct group of technology. America's fighting to be the dominant, you know, AI-driven kind of source of... I mean, it's a very bizarre time that we're living in. I think it's pretty...

It's pretty rich, though, for Zuckerberg to complain about the way Europe's doing things. There are many rules that exist within... Europe only allows 25 chemicals in our food chain. America has 600 or 700. People...

are expecting different things from their government. Are you defecting back to Europe? No, I mean, I'm just saying I choose to live here. I just say that these are different cultures and different civilizations that handle things differently. And when you have a multi-billionaire that runs a trillion dollar company say, oh my God, making business in Europe costs us a little bit more money. I want to say like, just go fuck yourself then.

Like, but you know, what's interesting guys is that like, when you think, when you think about it, like defense, defense,

Power is a platform, right? It's a platform. And if you're if it's like NATO is a platform, it's like the American kind of defense system is a platform. And now if you're Portugal or you're Hungary or you're Sweden, you can't afford to, you know, control and invest in the next generation of AI platforms. Right.

to compete at like with, you know, super intelligence. It is unclear. It is, it is unclear if that's the case because we've seen out of China now. And I wonder how much of that is like, there's a fabrication of the messaging that's happening right now. China that has, uh,

has been crippled by the fact that they can't get access to the main, the right GPUs, have been consistently launching LLMs that match or beat. But China is a massive centrally led economy that can invest a huge amount of money in infrastructure and development. But what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, a lot of this technology, if the LLMs themselves and even the hyper-intelligent one LLMs

are open source table stake available to run on machines that, you know, NVIDIA is going to put one on your desktop and you can run the entire internet on it. I think that this kind of like, it is different than building nukes. It is different than stockpiling kind of,

If you can run it on your desktop, why are you putting $500 billion into a data center? Well, that's a good question. That is a great question. And one that I actually wonder, like, it is... Look, OpenAI, ChangeGPT is still the product of choice for consumers wanting to use LLMs. It's a great thing. However, we're seeing that more and more. And we saw this thing with...

Microsoft basically announced that the large language models themselves are going to be kind of table stakes and readily available. They're not divesting from chat GPT, but they're sending out the messaging that they're less tied to it. When one year ago, they said that their entire strategic move was to rely a lot on open AI's

IP and technology. The thing with technology is that it's a very leaky platform. Things leak out. Engineers want to open source stuff. A lot of this technology is stuff that you can replicate. So I feel like what we're heading towards is maybe like a pretty broad availability. And who has like, you know,

the billions of dollars in data centers, it might not make as much of a difference. The same way the US is inventing the internet, like it definitely benefited the US, but that thing spread across the world and benefited all sorts of societies across. Yeah, but we controlled the regulatory framework with ICANN and various things that directed its evolution. Sure, but China is still using it to hack our water supply. So like, you know, let's...

What I'm saying is there's a potential where the cat's kind of out of the bag. We're noticing that open source models running on much lower machines can achieve similar effects. We have no idea what generalized intelligence looks like. And a lot of this stuff is accessible to a lot of people. So I don't know if this is an arms, because I've seen it compared to an arms race, but I don't know if this is the same type of arms race as nukes, which requires...

You know, different types of... Can we get into just a little media news? Let's do some media talk. We got into the nukes. When nukes come up. Yeah. So this week, a couple of things. One, the Washington Post came out with a new mission statement. They've got a BHAG. I love a good BHAG. It's to reach 200 million users. I don't think people know what a BHAG is. It's a big, hairy, audacious goal. It is a staple of any of those sort of like corporate, like what is our mission goal?

exercises you haven't done a b-hag before a b-hag yeah no i haven't no really yeah oh my god even i haven't i haven't been in the belly of the corporate beast that much well maybe i have but i just don't remember the acronym yeah yeah jeff bezos loves a b-hag

And then CNN, kind of related, I'll make them fit. You know, they've come out, they just cut about 6%, about 200. Mark Thompson is now promising a second streaming service. Now, there's CNN Max. They already put a bullet in CNN Plus really before it launched. And now they're going to have another. Well, I mean, we talked about it. CNN Plus was a bad idea. Well, it's coming back.

It seems like... Well, I think CNN Max is actually what CNN Plus should have been, which is just a streaming version of CNN. But they're coming out with another streaming. But get back to your BHAG. Yeah, so anyway, the BHAG of the Washington Post is... Look, it's been going through...

To me, it's like a fascinating story because it's an accumulation of all of these things. They pivoted very hard into the hashtag resistance, democracy dies in darkness, which is not dead. Washington Post sent me an email to make clear that it's not dead, in fact, although I don't think you'll be hearing it a lot. They have a new mission statement that is riveting storytelling for all of America,

as a way to... It's going to be riveting for sure. It's going to be riveting. Storytelling I have a problem with. I mean, look, these things are always workshopped by like a million people. So anything that comes out is going to be kind of

Yeah, it sounds like bullshit to me. Bullshit. Yeah, but anything that they said, you probably would have called bullshit. Well, that's what I'm saying. You do the exercise. It's an internal exercise. And then it's in Puck and it's in the New York Times or whatever. And these things, it's impossible for it not to come out. The reason I say it's bullshit is just mostly like I'm putting my brand person on is that it's got no opinion. And therefore...

At least there's nothing that makes me feel anything about that statement. And so I wonder how you sustain or build out a media brand without an opinion, without something that gets people to react to it.

And without something you stand for, there's so much like access to media. I wouldn't even know where to go. Well, you have to choose a lane and they, and they have chosen the lane. And I think it's probably Jeff Bezos related where the gift of the internet is you can reach pretty much everyone. And so, um,

to deny the gift is a crime or whatever the Prefontaine quote is. And so, you know, you have to like go with that. Whereas all the currents, that's why I find it very fascinating are go niche, you know, own Washington, buy Punchbowl, et cetera. Those are like kind of obvious things to say. I was focused on the Washington Post yesterday. And I think that they said if we were going to look favorably upon the BHAG

It would be that we are kind of redefining our goal from being a sort of successful media subscription company that would maybe get to half of where the world's most successful news subscription company, the New York Times, is at about 11 million, right? Isn't that the number? That they would have to think about their business really differently. It doesn't matter if it was 100 million or 200 million. And they would have to think about providing...

you know, customers, audience, whoever it is with just a different group or a different sort of constellation of services and utility that could enable them to kind of reframe the way they look at the business and not just look at it through the lens of we are a news where we create content every day and we provide that as a service to the people of the city.

And so they're just trying to kind of look at the challenge really, really differently. And they're starting, you know, I think in some of the same territory, and I've been in this exercise many times inside of media companies where we say, what else are we going to give the consumer as a benefit, as part of a package that will augment our, you know, content delivery value proposition, right?

that might create value for them and encourage them to subscribe. So would that be discounts to local restaurants, the opportunity to get tickets to see the commanders, like any kind of local event that would make, I guess, living at the most sort of local level would make living in Washington a better thing, right? Where it wasn't just about content. Yeah.

And then how could that become the basis for just like, you know, in other words, they would aspire to be more like Amex.

you know, in terms of Amex, if you have a platinum card, it's a $700 a year cost and you get a whole bunch of benefits with that, right? That's how they're thinking about it. How can we be relevant to people? We have the content. What can we add to it to create a subscription proposition that's very unlike what media does today? I think it's very hard to...

To get yourself out of trouble by expanding your audience. You know, in general, it stands that if you're trying to do something for everyone, you make something for no one. And it's especially difficult when you're starting from a place of weakness. Like it's way more feasible. It's already hard, but it's more feasible if you own a specific slice of audience and you manage to make that like a very solid foundation and then you build on top of that.

I can't imagine a strategy like that, which I don't fully understand, granted, about expanding your reach and broadening your appeal is actually going to succeed. I've never seen it succeed. And I would never recommend anyone do that. I would say, pick an audience. You never want to build something outwards. You want to build something upwards. So you build a strong foundation and then you stack bricks on top of that. Like functionally in a business, that always makes more sense.

You know what else? I think it's a great point. And you know what else people typically do in these scenarios is they look at volume of benefits, not the kind of gravity of them. So they're like, what if we could give you this and this and this and this? Instead, the only reason, for example, that I have an Amex card

I don't know why you do it. And why do I pay $700 for each of those Amex cards that I have on the phone? It's because, what, airport lounge access? Why do I need to do it? I shouldn't do it. If it gets you to diamond, it's worth it. Just the math works. I mean, I think it provides enough utility. Every year I kind of reconsider it. Points?

But you really got to do like one thing well. And the more you broaden it out and the more you spread it out, the less of the things you're doing are sticky. And the more, you know, you're always constantly going to be fighting kind of the attrition of members and stuff like that. So you want to build a really solid membership. It's the same as Prime. It's the same as Prime. You start with free delivery and then you expand outwards. I've got to go. All right, Alex. I'll let you guys do a good product. Don't mess it up. Hard stop.

Okay. See ya. See ya. Bye. Take care. All right. Should we get, should we go right into good product? We can do good product. You know what? Just before we get to that on the, on the media, I do find that, that it really is a moment. And, and I was with a media company yesterday and, and let's just say that this, you know, good brand legacy media losing money. And I said, let's say you guys own this company.

And, you know, when you lose money as a company, it means that you're paying to go to work. This is an obvious observation. And so, you know, there's an urgency because it's your money to get to a place, you know, to build a healthy business and make some money. What would you do?

And the answer was concerning to me because it was like, well, there's going to be a culling and we're going to have less competition because it's such a hostile environment. There'll be fewer people competing for ad dollars. And we've upped the number of events we're doing from five to 50. And on and on. Meanwhile, it's still the old fashioned mechanics of competition.

Creating content, building an audience, engaging that audience is like harrowing. It's a really, really difficult business. Yeah. And... You need a side hustle. That's your main hustle. Right. At the end of the day. And then, you know, you wonder, like, it's cool. Listen, there's so many of us that love this business, that love media, that grew up in it, that...

that want to make it work. But I've just kind of never seen it at a point where the kind of math for scaled media companies is starting, unless you have some monetization scheme that's very, very different than traditional media monetization. Do you know what the last good, I won't say great media company, I'm not sure they're already great media companies, but the last good media company is Bloomberg. Yeah.

Because they've got the right oligarch. They have, Mike Bloomberg continues to invest in the business. They're very ambitious and they do really good work. They're not having Cullings or any of that. They have a model that works because they're the front for, they do the marketing for the terminal business.

I actually think that people kind of make, you know, dismiss them because they're like, oh, they don't have to make money anyway, or they make all their money off the terminal business. Actually, yeah, they're kind of a break-even business. But actually, what they're executing and creating a kind of omni-channel media presence is really impressive. Right?

Right. So they're all over YouTube. They have really, really good experts in verticals supported by like really good email newsletter products. They have personalities like Levine and stuff that are, you know, played by the kind of rules of modern media and that their personality driven their their video feed is everywhere. Right. Like you see it in Europe. You see it on YouTube. You see it. It's there everywhere. Right.

Yeah, and big events business too. They do it all. They touch it all. Big events business. And actually, their on-air product isn't fussy. They have dozens of podcasts. They really are creating content with velocity, with expertise, and distributing it everywhere.

I mean, the problem with the model is it's not very replicable. As we've seen, like with the oligarchs, there aren't that many that are like, you know, Mike Bloomberg, who's like, oh, you want to pull out of the Paris Accords? That's okay, I'll cover it. We're still going to do it. You know, it's a unique situation. It's a privately held company. Everything about it is unique. And maybe that's why, I don't know, I've long been impressed by them and

Of all of the doom and gloom that are around a lot of these media companies, it's one of the few that doesn't have that, really. It doesn't mean it's easy. Which makes you wonder, what would you do if someone handed you the Washington Post?

Fun exercise, fundamental exercise. They'll do the things, right? They'll do M&A. Maybe they'll buy Punchbowl. Maybe they'll buy a lifestyle publication. Maybe they'll... But what I think that they're going to spend a lot of time on is how do they augment the bundle? How do they make a bundle that is more attractive than just local content with national aspirations? Yeah. Although I don't believe in the...

And adding like ancillary things like discounts to like local, like the zoo and things of that nature. It reminds me of, I always go back to the Sports Illustrated commercial in the 1980s with the football phone. I mentioned it last night at dinner. It was like they ticked through all of the benefits of getting the SI. And you get the swimsuit issue and you get this. And then it seems like they ran out of stuff. And they're like, and if you order now, you get a football phone. Well, you know what usually happens, Brian, is that

All organizations have their high priests and their centers of gravity. And, you know, at a place like Washington Post, it's the newsroom. And if you really want to build a organization that delights people,

over and above the content that you created every day, you have to create an extraordinary group of people that's hyper fixated when they get out of bed every morning on how they're going to make your life better with, you know, by thinking about the things that are really important to you, getting low friction delivery of benefits to you that really, really matters. It works really well with a credit card because it's in your pocket and you use it every day and you get points for using it. And, you know, it's an essential.

And I think it's really, really hard to do it as something that augments a media product. But it would be fun to watch.

But I would just say this and then we can get the good product. You know, you got to fix the product, your main product. It's a journalism product with the, I think a lot of times people learn the lesson of the New York Times success as, oh, they added all these things to the bundle. They added cooking, they added games and all this thing. But I think if you go back, it would actually be good to do a case study of this between the three of us. Is the New York Times just invested in their core journalism product and all that stuff was layered on top of it and they fixed the product. They have good app.

groups they the the their tech works they've got like a massive data science team you know and they they really did the foundational work to me that I think the the technical execution was really important to their success it's one of the few media products that are founded like that that I use every day and I'm like this is nice to use I like this product

cooking games and content. It's a really, really good technical problem. Okay. Well, as that is a segue, do you have a good product? I remember someone, my friend, a guy who makes me laugh all the time, Mark Howard, brought up the other day that I had actually featured him as a good product once on this. Mark is a good product?

Yeah. I think I jokingly referred to him as you could party. And he also said that, that I had been too hard on time or something like that, or Jess said that. And,

Oh, about the chatbot? I think it was Alex that was slandering the chatbot. I said in that reply that I was the one who was giving it kudos. Yeah. It's fun to be in Switzerland. It's so quiet and chill. It's a different life. You know, if you like skiing, the Swiss know they do it incredibly well. I mean, the train that takes you to the top of the mountain, the, like, the...

the grooming of the runs, the quality of the mountain, the food at the top. I mean, it's just good. But you ski in the little villages, don't you? You can, yeah. And the mountain is expansive and you can kind of move from one place to another. Davos connects to another resort and stuff. So it was really, really nice. I mean, skiing, you know, in Davos is a really nice thing and I think it was a good product. But I actually would

would have to talk about this restaurant that I just ate at an hour ago. And I think that it's really nice when you can eat at a place that's kind of defined the sort of culinary vibe in a city for like a century,

where the room feels like so many people have enjoyed themselves in it. And there's just, it's an incredible place. 1864 in the bar. There's like, there's like, you know, there's a Picasso. It's like a wonderful, incredible vibe. And you, you order what they, you know, you order the one thing that they make better than anyone else, which is something that really appeals to me. And it was a roasty with veal.

in kind of a creamy sauce with a glass of Riesling. And it feels local. It feels like the thing you should eat here. It's been fortified over many, many, many years.

And they can do like a little thing where they serve you, they bring a carp to the table, they serve you half the roasty and, and, you know, and the sort of veal, whatever it is, stew or whatever. And then they come back after you finish that, they heat up the roasty beside the table and then serve you the other half, which is a nice touch. Okay. A little bit of a theatrical nature to it. There's a good roasty place. There's a Swiss place. Have you ever been to Cafe Select in Soho?

They've got a good roast, too. Highly recommend it. That was fun, but I'm looking forward to getting home. I've got to say, as I get older, the jet lag is harder and harder to escape. Do you have a jet lag secret to try to combat it? No, I'm terrible at it. What happens is I go to bed and I wake up in the middle of the night. Melatonin works.

Just an FYI. Do you use melatonin or something more pharmacy-grade? I just read that melatonin works. Or three glasses of Riesling. Either one. You do that. By the way, before we go, I went to dinner in New York. A few things about New York. One is, because I got here on Monday, congestion pricing is amazing. I don't know if people here recognize it, but I got in at 5 p.m. and it took a half hour to get to our apartment. Wow.

At 5 p.m. Just amazing. From JFK? From LaGuardia. The other thing is I went to dinner and like nobody's drinking anymore.

Like nobody in the restaurant was drinking. There was an entire group of people like from, I don't know if they were from work or just friends or something. And they had like two Cokes out on the table and like nobody was drinking. I think drinking could become like smoking. That's my, that's my prediction. Well, I'll tell you my observation on that. Like I went to the liquor store over the holidays to stock up as I always do and get, you know, hard liquor and wine and beer and stuff. And all of my kids and their friends and guests drank.

And you're right. Very few people drink. You know what got drank the most in my house are the THC seltzers, the five milligram ones. You drink a five milligram THC seltzer. They're available at a place called Interesting Sign of the Times. On my block in Brooklyn, there's a place called Minus Moonshine. Minus Moonshine is like a store that sells, you know, kind of fancy nootropics and THC drinks and all that stuff. No alcohol.

And all this stuff is actually fairly priced similarly to alcohol. It's expensive. Well, that's the bullshit part with the mocktails. I had like an elderflower mojito for like 16 bucks. I'm telling you, my kids and their friends just hammered the THC drinks. And they can really do a lot of them because I do like a five milligram and I'm getting a little bit like loopy. And they can hit two or three of those. So,

So I do think, and the other thing, I'm an investor in a wine company, like a platform for selling wine. I'm very concerned about it, actually, because I do think that there's a kind of macro headwind against wine consumption. Well, they're also seeing these GLP-1s suppress alcohol.

I don't know. Every week I find that they come out with something else that the GLP-1s do. It just seems a little suspicious. But supposedly that suppresses the desire to drink too. And then when you see... I did a dinner last night and I was looking around the table and...

Out of 15 people, I think about like three or four were drinking the wine, which sort of upset me because these places have like big F&B minimums. I did the outer flower. I was hopped up on the outer flower mojito. You know, I got to keep the conversation moving. Something that was interesting, it was about like paywall technology. And then is this guy, Jonathan Harris from Zuora is like super smart about all the AI stuff when it comes to like paywalls.

And I was like asking him, you know, as I were dessert, like, okay, like three years in advance, like, cause everyone, you know, you're talking about using AI to combat like churn and like, you know, to convert more and having to chat. And it's like very, I mean, what about in three years with all these agents? And he was saying, yeah,

that his belief is that you will have agents on the user side and agents on the publisher side that will be negotiating access to like paywalled content. So you're just going to have publishers will be deploying their own agents to negotiate with the agents that are being set out there by users. You know, I think any media consumer that consumes media expansively runs into paywalls

that they'll never to products they'll never subscribe to because it just there's no frequency or depth that were you know you just want one article and I think that if there was an intelligent system that would either take a small tool or let you in more often or just kind of make the experience better for someone who was an infrequent user there's probably business opportunity it's Apple news plus

Like a lot of publishers are relying on. Why do I hate Apple news? Plus though, because I have to go in through their app. I hate when Alex shares a link to that. I'm like, bummer. I got to like Google this because I don't want to go, but it is very successful. It was a, it was a big, it was a big topic of conversation because they're,

you know, they see a lot of publishers see it in, in their, you know, churn reporting when they ask why, and they're like, get it through Apple plus, you know, I get, I only need like two articles a month and it's fine. And it's interesting how they compensate publishers with Apple news plus is basically they're like, look,

We're not in the business of taking risks. We're taking half of the revenue. The other half goes to you guys and we're going to like cut it up just based on like the amount of time spent on the articles. When the product was being built, it used to be called Texture, Apple Purchase Texture. And

And it was texture was an all you can eat magazine platform. And the magazines that had strong independent subscription bases, there's not that many of them. But like the New Yorker, we're very concerned that the Apple subscription would become a substitute for the direct subscription relationship with the consumer to the New Yorker. But if you use Apple News, right, like you can get a little bit of all the Wall Street Journal, a little bit of almost all of the New Yorker, a little bit of the Atlantic or all of the Atlantic, you can get a lot with it.

Yeah. And I think the reality for a lot of publishers is that is probably enough for a lot of people. I mean, their subscriber bases will be the hardcore loyalists, but for most people, they're not going to have like 25 news subscriptions. It's just not right. If you really want the full experience of the Wall Street Journal, you can't get it through Apple News. Yeah.

Yeah, and the journal's expensive. But if you want a little bit of it. I paid like 400 bucks or something for the journal. I went to the FT party last night, or the night before. They were serving Japanese whiskey. It was nice. Oh, I bet. They were doing a good thing. They were doing a live show from Davos.

I find it interesting, the publications that are big there, the media companies, it's like Bloomberg, right? Semaphore is doing 40 events there, I think. It's a completely different cast of characters. It's Semaphore, Bloomberg, FT, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time Magazine, Forbes. That's who's doing it. And the Washington Post.

That's it for this episode of People vs. Algorithms, where each week we uncover patterns shaping media, culture and technology. Big thanks, as always, to our producer Vanya Arsinov. She always makes us a little clearer and more understandable, and we appreciate her very, very much.

If you're enjoying these conversations, we'd love for you to leave us a review. It helps us get the word out and keeps our community growing. Remember, you can find People vs. Algorithms on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and now on YouTube. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next week. All righty, Brian. Great to see you. You want me to bring you some chocolate? I'll bring you some chocolate. Okay, Troy. Well, have a good trip back. I'd love some chocolate. Okay. Bye. All right. See you. Bye. Bye.

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