The Abundance Agenda
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By the way, how are your relatives handling this? They're pissed, man. They're pissed. I know. They really are. Like, this is like, it's kind of crazy. Don't poke the beaver. Okay. On that note, let's get started. I always forget to say, welcome to People vs. Algorithms. I'm Brian Morrison. Technology, culture, culture.

I'm coming to you with AirPods. Joined by Troy Young and Alex Schleifer. I wanted to start this week by talking a little bit about Abundance. Have you guys... I got my copy. I haven't started reading it yet. It's a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The DC dork set have been waiting for this with bated breath. And it's landing at a great time, right? Because...

The whole book is about how progressives in particular need a more positive agenda to put forward to counter, obviously, what they're losing right now, which is supportive people. One poll that came out recently had the approval rating of the Democratic Party at 27%.

That's low. That's not good. So they're advocating for a pro-growth, progressive agenda that shifts away a little bit from redistribution and focuses on building more. More housing, more infrastructure, more energy, more innovation, etc. And I think this is an interesting marketing challenge. And I will sort of then weave it into the media industry, which I think needs its own abundance.

I thought it had an abundance agenda already. Well, I think it needs a different abundance agenda. There's an abundance of like SEO content. That's true. Alex, were you in the 27% in support of the Democrats? You found that they're doing a good job.

Yeah. No, I wasn't. I don't think that. I'm not surprised. I think everybody, even people that will 100% vote Democrat don't seem to be happy with them. I'm surprised that they're. I'm surprised anybody can say that they're doing a good job. Like whether, you know, I mean, whether it was like Schumer agreeing with Schumer or not, it was just all a mess. They don't look aligned on anything. They're not reaching out to people.

They seem confused. The Gavin Newsom podcast, they seem entirely split on that as a strategy as well. Meanwhile, I think the Republicans look like, for whatever it's worth, are totally behind this guy. So it looks weak.

Hey, do you think the book, I mean, the timing is extraordinary. What a dream for the publisher and for... And a great duo. Yeah, for those guys. But maybe it should be called the naive agenda. Why is that? Well, these are big ideas, right? To shift our thinking to...

build mindset to outcomes to making you know this to making government effective right making the bureaucracy effective but like has it ever been effective i mean isn't like it's great if if the government can can can make more things for more people and make more people happy and we can do all the things i mean there's complete alignment on many levels with what

What Ezra would say is that there's a kind of a build priority or kind of build agenda, and then there's the moral agenda.

the kind of decision making that informs you know what is the right thing to build and do and that the liberals are are better equipped to make good good kind of moral decisions but like it that it feels like knights just like shockingly naive to me it's just like i i i want so we're gonna make

I mean, I guess if you look at it in a broad historical context faced with urgency in, you know, fighting a war, coming out of a war, you know, putting a person on the moon, we've seen the government activated. But and maybe maybe there's we just have to admit there's way too much plaque in government right now. And so we've we've set kind of rule set upon rule set, which has prevented us from from doing anything. But.

I get it. Well-timed and all of that, but does it feel just naive to you? I mean, I don't know if it feels naive. Like, I understand saying, well, it's impossible to do. I mean, the government has created an interstate highway system, the man on the moon thing. It's done a bunch of stuff, won some wars and whatnot. Yeah.

No, wars are good for mobilization, for sure. Yeah, it's good marketing. Look at what's happening to Canada. Yeah. Or Europe. People are coming together. Or Europe. I mean, Europe's never felt as united. But to me, it's more about putting together... But if Donald Trump hadn't come along, and I'm not like supporting Donald Trump, I'm just saying that if he hadn't been this free radical disrupting the way we think about all of this, would this moment have arrived? No. No.

I don't think so, because this is like, you know, usually political parties need to be cast out into the wilderness in order to reform themselves. This is just the right... Otherwise, they're like any bureaucracy. They're not going to change unless forced to change. And so that's an interesting time, and that's why this is like setting off what's kind of been a delayed civil war to me within the Democratic Party about what it really wants to be. Dude, I think this is problematic. Basically, what he's saying is...

outsourcing right to contractors creating this gigantic you know outsource bureaucracy where government is used as flow through contracting requirements that have made it impossible to get anything done and the ability to sue people has created this stasis in government and what Ezra would say the best place to listen to him I think his problem did you guys listen he was on Tyler Cohen's podcast

He's been all over the podcast world, Ezra House, doing the rounds. But he's like, I love Doge. It's just, I think that they don't have to do it that way. It becomes a question of how, not what they are doing. The work that they're doing is important and essential, but they're bad people making some questionable decisions, but that thing is needed. Yeah.

I don't know. I think it's it's it's it only feeds into the kind of GOP agenda. You think the book does? I think that it's hard for people to say, well, yeah, you got to radically downsize and disrupt the

you know, government and bureaucracies, but do it nicely. I just don't, I don't know that it's ever done nicely. I don't think you can. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But there's, there's, I mean, there's doing it not nicely and there's doing it with just like a bludgeoned way does now. I know the glee and with,

you know, holding chainsaws. I think people are getting, might get a little tired of that. There's the reality show aspect to it, right? I mean, I think that's part of the marketing, you know, right? Like, so I think to me, what was interesting is less almost the substance of it and more as a branding exercise, right? Like you have to brand a party and like in America, you're basically, this is a product you're selling to all of America. And generally, this consumer market needs subcontractors

some kind of coherent vision, right, around, and you can't just be for a bunch of collection of niche special interest issues and you need to come up with some kind of underlying philosophy that you can then pack

package up and sell. Trump has been really good at spectacle. He's been very good at very simple messaging that breaks through to low information voters. We talk on this podcast all the time about the information space and the decentralization of media and all of the implications of that. I think there's a lot of similarities between what the institutional media world faces and

with what the Democratic Party faces. I know they're sort of thought of, at least on the right, as intertwined.

but really they do need to come up with some kind of positive agenda and i'm often thought struck by this and i wrote about it a little bit today about how so many publishers are so mired in cost cutting and rationalizing their businesses that they're depressing they're depressing to talk to who they're depressing to hear from yeah and

And it's just like, people say to, they're like, I, sometimes people are like, oh, wow, you're so, I'm like you, like, I'm not even negative. This is like, this is, and when you don't have that sort of positive viewpoint, people don't really aren't attracted to you. I mean, you know what? Having you, Brian Morrissey, be a cheerleader for the publishing industry is really bizarre. Yeah.

I mean, given... He was your leader. I mean, how... Is that... Given my history with you, I used to have this argument with you about being a cynical bastard all the time. I would march on over to the Digiday offices and do my spiel. I was just being clairvoyant. I was just being clairvoyant.

But, you know, it should no longer come as a surprise to anyone that Donald Trump rolls out of bed in the morning and thinks of the most outrageous thing that he can say within the kind of boundaries of a broader platform and philosophy. And even this week, like I'm Canadian, obviously I tune into some of these things, but, you know, repeatedly calling it

you know, Governor Trudeau, the 51st state, they would be better off if they just like gave it all up. We're protecting them anyway. We don't need anything from Canada. And just like completely doubling down on something that clearly, you know, I would say in lots of ways is not being well received other than it's an incendiary message that

you know, people can, that will win the media battle that day. It's insane. If, if, if you look at as our clients book, by the way, great beard, huh? Like the, whoever told whoever like he's handsome now, he's very handsome. Oh yeah. He's hot. He's all jacked up too. He's all ripped up. Yeah. He got, he got ready for this press tour. I, I think, I mean, you read that book and it's like a good strategy. Wait, you read the book.

No, but let's say, I mean, I'm saying you, but essentially, right, isn't it like, you know, spend more on infrastructure, just like reduce like...

I need kind of like, what is it, like regulatory stuff that slows it down, infrastructure, infrastructure, stop fighting between each other and let's get this done. I mean, that sounds like a great plan. It's just, it feels like the way people are reviewing it is that in today's world of messaging and the way Trump messages things and the way everything's just like,

fucking trash fire every day that's not going to reach out and i don't think the the plan doesn't seem to be right on its merits and people don't think the democrats can win with it because it is not a media strategy in for today's world right should should the you know v 3.0 or whatever we want to call it of the democratic party be something that's more of like a

a beast that's more capable of fighting Trump in his arena? Or is it, or should it be about like, hey, people are going to get tired of this shit, you know, and, and, you know, maybe just like a reasonable plan is what we'll want in three years. I think the case for that is that, you know,

I think Tesla is down on like 30% like on the year. I track it every day in the morning. I watch it when I brush my teeth. That's what you first do when you wake up. It's wonderful. Pretty soon you're going to be tracking the Lucid stock.

It's a penny stock. Elon Musk's role in Doge and the fact that the spectacle, right? There's only so much I think people can take with the spectacle of this. I suspect, as always, that they're overplaying their hand here. I don't know.

Time will tell. Listen, if someone told me that you could align a more reasonable moral agenda, a more reasonable liberal agenda with a high functioning government, I'm all in. I mean, you got me out. I'll walk with Alex to the to the voting booth.

But in the meantime... I can't vote, so, you know, I'll just watch you do it. Okay, you can drive me and you're lucid. But in the meantime, I just, I can't see it. But good on them. I mean, they're desperate. The Dems are desperate. What is it that they do? I mean, I think for me... What is it that they do is a really good question. I mean, you know, the only kind of messaging that I've seen breakthrough is like, you

you know, cyber trucks and fires and free Luigi's, you know, it's like the rebellion, the rebellion seems to be, you know, where it's got to go, Alex. And, and, and I think this is just inevitable and it has to go to a pro technology message.

Invariably, AI is going to massively change how services are delivered through the bureaucracy. And the party that is best able to convince voters that that's in their interest and they can actually affect that is going to have an advantage. But it has to come.

AI is the substrate on which the new kind of... People don't see that as a win. Like, people don't... I mean, it's early on that message. I'm just saying it will go there. Part of the conversation between Tyler Cohen and Ezra Klein was that, like...

Tyler was just saying, you got to admit that if you were to fund something like the new USAID or whatever government department you want to talk about, you're going to be able to do it with a couple hundred people. And they kept saying AGI. It's interesting to me that AGI has become part of the lexicon as being not speculative, but real.

It's sort of like, to be clear, it is entirely speculative. We don't know if we're going to, right. But I'm just saying that, that the Tyler throws it around. Like it's not, if it's, it's just when, right. Yeah. That type of talk is crazy though. It's, it's absolutely crazy. The, the jump from AGI from what we have today to AGI, it is, it is so massive. And I know that I'm like,

the usually the the ai pusher here but that that type of language is really not useful because we have yet to see like large-scale

you know, use of the current generative AI models in ways that are reliable enough to get anything done that's particularly useful. And so I don't know if that's a great messaging. I think we see it when we see it. I think if anything, this type of talk, it needs to kind of be underplayed and maybe brought into a conversation about the modernization of government for efficiency using technology. I wouldn't use AI at all. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Practical, you're right.

Thank you for clarifying. Okay. Wow. That's about as political as I'd like to get, Brian. But no, I want to say that because I think the sort of counter to that is to look backwards. And I see a lot of that in the media industry, a lot of nostalgia. I like some nostalgia. I did not get to enjoy the 1990s magazine industry.

But there's a lot of nostalgia out there. Oh, that's where the chip on the shoulder comes from. You see, Troy did. That's why he has great affinity. I don't know. I worked with a Montreal magazine. I don't know if there was that much. There was no talent. Oh, 90s magazines. No, I got there to refactor them, Alex. I made a lot of money in the magazine business, but I was there to break it, not to embrace it. You were the original. You were the dojo of French media. Yeah.

Right. Pretty much. But Creighton Carter has a new book out about the sort of heyday of magazines. Michael Greenbaum, New York Times Media editor, I believe, he has a Condé Nast history coming out. Trey, I think you shared that guy's tweet about making $500,000 for three magazine stores. This was in the 90s. That's a lot more than $500,000 today. I know.

I wrote today, I was like, every single freelance magazine writer today probably read that with the same face that the Rick character had during that monologue on White Lotus. Stupifies. Because that's the alternative, right? And that's why there needs to be some kind of positive and dynamic agenda, not just managing decline. Yeah.

But Troy, so you wrote in the PVA newsletter, we talked about it a little bit last week, about this idea of franchise value and how most, not most, I'd say a lot of particularly publishing brands are sort of moving more towards the right. They're moving into survivor category or arbitrage. And that's just, it's not, that's the point I'm trying to get at is like, that's not very inspiring. Right.

You're not going to attract the best people to an industry that's managing decline at the end of the day. I know media always attracts it, but that to me is a fundamental challenge, is how you get out of triage mode and start to paint some kind of picture of growth at the end of the day, and not just financializing these assets, in quotes. Right. What's your question? Well, how do you do that? Yeah.

What a great question. Good question, Brian. That was always when people... Well, I turned it just for a moment. Can we pause on this? Like that you're making a couple hundred grand a story and that Vanity Fair as a whole was nicely profitable at the time. And that in order to get there, and by the way, paying lots of people, including like...

I mean, just amazing cost structure, you know, Annie Leibovitz shoots crazy, crazy, you know, expense lines, all that. And you have the premium, the perception of premium and the massive benefit of, of complete access, the best writers, the best photographers such that your, your ad rates are so high and advertisers are willing to pay a premium that you can still, uh,

run a profitable business, one that's leveraged. Magazines were beautifully leveraged because you made one thing and sold it over and over and over and over again, right? Like it was a really nice, that's why media when it works is so beautiful because it's a business. And that's why software is even better. Yeah, well, it's the same idea, right? And it's all about marginal revenue and marginal profit, not unit costs.

So, yeah, no, I long for those days. And I sort of came into the business with the attitudes and cost structures of those days. So, you know, we had, I think, in the U.S., 22 or 24 after the Rodale acquisition, something like that, you know, magazine brands and, you know, more than a dozen publishers and, you know, 20 plus editors, all that made really good money.

And, you know, facing a market where I would say that the talent was way more highly leveraged in digital media, that even the senior people in digital media companies that magazine people look down their nose at made, you know, far, far less money. And now we're completely on the other side of that where, you know, the businesses just aren't sustainable anymore and are really being harvested for profit.

What is really great IP value in many cases where these brands have built up that kind of brand equity over years and years and years? So I don't know. I don't know where you see this kind of leverage, I think, Brian, in something like a podcast. Like your friend Kara Swisher came out and said she's making $20 million a year. We know that the P&L is...

you know, decent over at Vox Media on their, you know, podcast. Are they making $20 million a year? That is how she, you know, I don't know what that particular podcast makes. I know it's really popular and I don't know what else she does to make money, you know, speaking gigs. And, you know, she has a couple of podcasts, all that. My point is, is it something that has the cost structure of pivot makes a lot of money.

Because it's 10 people, you know. And so you do see that media leverage in those kinds of business. You see it with creators. You just don't see, you know, it at an industrial scale. Yeah, I think what I was listening to Sarah Personette, the POC CEO, she was talking about revenue per head. Like, I think that is like an interesting metric for a lot of these businesses and how you get that revenue.

to find you're not going to get it to Nvidia levels, but you know during the last year it's like it would be like $200,000 you know revenue per employee at some of these companies and When you look at you know just to be clear that's very that's very low. Yeah, punchbowl is like a million right and

And that's sort of where I think a lot of these businesses go, where the numbers of people... Until they get doged, but yeah. Well, that's what I mean. Like, I mean, you have to get that efficient in these, and you can in some of these businesses. They're just not...

per head. You think that the punch bowl, well, maybe, I mean, I don't know how much of it. I think they probably run a good business. Hats off to them, but I think they have a nice subscription business. But there's leverage in a lot of these different like businesses. I did, I have a podcast coming out with the dude. Perfect CEO. You're making, you have leverage in your business. Yeah. I mean, per employee, it's, it's a very, it's very high. It starts to smell a little like a million dollars. Probably. There's a lot of, I got to smear myself in many directions. However,

But no, but I did it with like, did you know Dude Perfect? Yeah. Yeah, very well. You know, trick shots. They started Texas A&M students, I guess in 2009, they uploaded some video to YouTube. Trying to bounce a ping pong ball into a red cup. So early mover advantage. I mean, they had like 73% margins. Well, sure. Ping pong balls are cheap. Yeah.

So it's not like media is a terrible business, but then you look at some of these old sectors. You know the New York Times now represents 7% of all US newspaper jobs? Just the New York Times.

It's interesting how much of that, if you took out games and stuff like that on top of it, right? I know. It would probably be higher. But I mean, in particular, something like The Economist, that's not that big of a company, really. 300 people, 300 in the newsroom. Yeah. I mean, to cover the whole world with that, that's pretty effective. I thought that's pretty impressive. Is The Economist a good business?

It's a profitable business. It's probably 10%, Alex. Okay. I mean, it's a one-of-one. It's definitely, back to Brian's original question, it definitely has on the continuum from franchise value in the middle survivor on the far right arbitrage. It's a franchise business. It's a business that has, I think, pricing power, market power, a global brand, etc.

prestige, and through all of that just has a kind of the associated economic benefits. You know, I think that they have a rare luxury of being able to employ 300 people's a big newsroom these days.

It is among the handful of media businesses that still have franchise value. And then, I don't know if you saw this week, but the Skimm got traded. Now, this would have been big news about like 10 years ago, or less than 10 years ago. But it was just kind of like a footnote. Ziff Davis acquired it, which is firmly, I believe we can say, on the right side of the...

of your continuum. Correct, Troy? Am I being fair? I mean, we would put them between survivor and arbitrage, yeah. But we would also put them in the bucket of Vivek is kind of a genius. Yeah, no disrespect to the arbitrage. I think enviable from a profit perspective if their stock price is lagging, the market doesn't like it, it's a really complicated business, it has a lot of weird platform dependent shit in there.

But he's like, you know, the garbage man of the industry. That's unfair. He's the... You know what they say in Washington, a gaffe is when you tell the truth. No, he's like the Fred, you know, he's the Fred Sanford of media. It keeps getting better.

We should have the VEC on. No, look, a lot of brands have gone that have maybe, I would say, lost their luster a bit. You know, Mashable, Quartz, et cetera. You know, that's part of the life cycle. CNET went over to Zip. PCMag was what started it. Yeah, they operate these businesses really well. But yeah, I mean, that to me is like...

it's going to end up becoming the skim is another sort of cautionary tale. Do you know the skim at all? I was going to say, I'm embarrassed to not know the skim. What is the skim? No, that's okay. They're really tight, kind of sultry pants made by Kim Kardashian. Exercise wear. Appalachia. I'm wearing some now.

No, it was one of the original sort of email companies. It was an email newsletter for young women that would summarize the news in a very relatable way. It inherited the legacy of Daily Candy. If Daily Candy was the original, that would have been like, talk about a business that should have been started at a different time.

It was one of the original newsletters, built a big list. They monetized. They kept going. And then people forgot about it. They raised $30 million. $30 million for a newsletter. That was the mistake. I mean, you know what? But honestly, if I heard that today, I wouldn't be surprised because we're hearing of some newsletters like Lenny's and stuff like that reaching a million subscribers. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me today one of these Substack newsletters raised $30 million. I wouldn't be surprised if Kara Swisher

Paris Swisher's making 20. And I know most of that is podcasts are much more viable than newsletters, but doesn't like selling to... So explain it to me because I hope there are people in the audience that are as up to speed as me about this, but isn't selling to Ziff Davis kind of like, you know, going to a farm upstate? That's right.

Like, I don't know, you know, when you tell a kid the dog went to a farm upstate. Like, isn't it like... You kind of... It sounds nice, but it really isn't.

It's definitely on SEO glue factory highway. Maybe it's not. He's not a trash collector. Maybe he's just composting. It's a recycling factory. But it doesn't sound like a great exit, right? Look, they have a playbook. They have a, right? I mean, is that fair? You know the business better than I do, Troy. They have a playbook. They're never going to run the playbook. They're going to do what they do, which is central infrastructure, infrastructure,

Very business minded GMs manage the business extremely, you know, tightly. And, you know, I think that these days you're better to be on the side of, you know, buying stuff cheap than buying stuff expensively and hoping that you're going to maintain or create premium value or franchise value. So it's smart.

You know what? What is it? It's 3 million email addresses and decent readership. Why not? Oh, they raised 30 million on 3 million email addresses? No, they raised 30 million a while ago. Well, no, they've been shrinking. So, I mean, you know, this is... Used to be five, I think. Anyway, it's not that... I hate to be a dick here, but it's not that interesting. LAUGHTER

That's sex and hwap hwap hwap. We should just fucking move on. All right, let's move on. That's fine. That's fine. This is something that was brought up by AB. He talked about this acquisition that just happened. But to me, what was interesting is this idea of, you know, we're really past the era of keyword targeting. I mean, keywords were like,

sort of they built the search advertising ecosystem. It's the one sort of home run of digital advertising really. And now we're moving to a world where you just describe your perfect customer and then, you know, it's the outcomes era. And that is the, you know, describe your perfect customer and then let the machine go find that customer.

I think that's going to be, I mean, I want to have a positive agenda for publishers, but that's a very attractive proposition for just about any marketer, I would think. And that's going to have major impacts as that happens throughout the entire media ecosystem.

Your thoughts, Troy? Sorry, I was texting AB. What was the question? Basically about moving beyond keyword targeting and moving into just describing your perfect customer and then letting the machines do the work and how that's going to have

a massive impact on the entire ecosystem. I mean, this is sort of where we've been going with PMAX and all these things. Yeah, I think that it will happen, but marketing, as you know, like everything that's scarce in the world, is a zero-sum game.

So eventually, if that's an effective acquisition method, it just gets priced into your cost of goods sold and prices go up and it benefits the people that own the algorithm and the distribution. And, you know, then people get forced out because their ROAS or their return on that spend goes up.

gets to a place where it's not economically sensible to keep spending more on a customer. But we're already there. Like we're already there with like automating acquisition and in effect turning marketing into distribution as a COGS item.

So I don't really think that changes anything. You know, what's it called? It's Google Max or whatever, or, you know, Meta has their own version of it. And to me, that's at the scale level, that's going to be a cost of entry. And you're going to see people like, I know that Neil was,

is really encouraged by his, what is this thing called? Decipher. Now Decipher Plus. That was actually very interesting. Well, is it interesting? I mean, it is interesting in that Good for Neil, he's realized... Wait, let's describe it. Well, I will describe it. It's an ad network owned by a publisher that attempts to use non-cookie data and give you something that rivals...

or builds on contextual ad placement. Effectively... It's intent data. Neil would brand it intent data. Great. So where it starts is publishers like Neil have a lot of clicks on buy now buttons and pick...

pages in his portfolio that show where consumers interested in a product, right? Alex, you land on a page that says best air fryers, you know, for someone in Northern California or whatever. And so, you know, that is a light signal or a strong signal, depending on how far down the funnel you go to say that you're interested in air funnels, you start to, or air funnels, air

Air funnels, air fryers. And then you put that into your DMP and you start building a profile around the consumer that says that they're interested in X, Y, and Z. And you do that over enough pages and you can get a good profile of someone. That's what he's building. And now, like everybody in a publishing business of that scale would want to do is say, it's not only useful to us, we can target customers on your pages as well.

right? So you can become part of our ad network, not dissimilar by the way, to what Vox does with their ad network, which is called, it's called concert. So it's logical that he's doing this because back to the franchise value to arbitrage, you know, big picture is, you know, dot dash Meredith, isn't going to sit pretty on that. Continual, right? All recipes. Well, I,

I mean, I will say this. I've been very impressed that by, you know, because they're publicly traded, you know, they report their grids and they have defied a lot of these headwinds in many ways. Now, they sort of divide out their core properties. I mean, God forbid if you work on one of the non-core properties and they're just telling the world like that...

He's good. He's good. He's smart. He's a good leader. You know, there's good assets in there. But big picture, there's lots of pressure on the business. You want to have him back on? Okay, so you're not that bullish on Decipher Plus. I just think it's good that a publisher is even coming out with stuff like this. I mean, my bar is fairly low at this point because, like, all...

I mean, I joke with Mark Stenberg all the time about, I'm like, my God, like another layoff story. I love it, Brian. I love your optimism. I'm very optimistic. I've been in Miami for two days. No, it's just the turnaround is astounding. It's astounding. Because I would have walked into your office talking about Decipher and you would have crapped all over me. But you would have said something like, isn't it just an ad network? Really?

Isn't it? It's a managed service for Vox. That's what you would tell me. And I would say, right, an ad network. On a happier note, do you see that one in four programming jobs has vanished? Apparently. That's the new...

That's the new metric. Is this going to be the sort of metric for so many of these different fields? Like one in four go away? I mean, programming is pretty much the only job that can be pretty efficiently replaced in parts by AI today. You know, I'm not a believer that like maybe as many jobs will be replaced by as are being touted now. Like programming is so specific when you think about it. It's really like...

people who talk to machines and we've invented this new

language that supports that tasks really, really well because, you know, programming is a contained number of things that you just put together and you can run it in your computer and see how it works. So, yeah, I mean, I see it coming for programming or engineering pretty rapidly. I think there will be all sorts of jobs built around computers. You know, it used to be like the job used to be to be able to, like,

think through math problems and put them into punch cards. And then, you know, people invented languages that became closer and closer to human language. And now it's just, it's human language, but you still need a very tactical mindset and to make anything worth of value. It's just, you need less people.

It's just that when your mom would say, oh, what does your son do? And your mom would say, my son works in computers. You can't say that anymore. Because everybody works in computers now. We're all just computers. Yeah, I had an Uber driver the other week. He was a student. And my wife was like, oh, what are you studying? He said, oh, programming.

And I was like, oh, and you'll have like lots of job opportunities. And I was like going to speak up and I was like, no. Yeah. I mean, I guess the answer that you're looking for is we're all going to be more technologically leveraged, I would say, Alex. And yeah, you can't build a system just by like typing things.

like an English language request into an LLM and getting some software back. You can't. You still have to understand interconnectivity between different components. You have to understand system design. You have to understand databases. You have to understand relationships between different parts of the system. This isn't going away tomorrow. This isn't safe. The jobs that I think working in computers, like our moms used to say,

You know, those jobs are changing. I think there was a mass of jobs which was pretty low-level engineering at the top line, right? So a lot of people building interface stuff, front-end stuff, stuff that is pretty basic but was being rebuilt over and over. I think some of these jobs are going away. But I think with the demand scaling up,

there's still people putting those servers together and configuring everything and making all that stuff happen. Take five people to make a website, Alex. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I know. And so I think the demand is just going to become higher. But it's just that we're becoming, a few decades ago, you needed to be somebody who knew how to use a computer to use a computer, right? Like today, we all have a phone in our pocket. That's fine. And I think it's a pretty natural progression. What I don't like is that people conflate that with the replacement of jobs across many other industries.

I think there is definitely some risk in the creative arts. And it's very strange because like both...

The way generative AI works, it can create art, which is very non-deterministic, right? Very, yeah. And then it can also replace people code, which is very deterministic because it's easy to test code. But then everything in between all the other jobs, I think it's a lot harder to see just a direct path of like... Okay, so you're saying this is not like a harbinger of things that come to other professions, but this is...

It's fairly unique to programming because it's so deterministic. I think it's very subtle. I think there are a few minor...

technology miracles that need to happen. The way I see AGI is like speed of light. We can get close to it potentially, but I don't think it's certain right now that we can ever reach it. And the systems will become smarter. The systems will become more specialized, but it is not a direct limitation

Light and it won't impact everything similarly meanwhile Like we're still not seeing enough happening around making these systems more reliable and I think unless they become very very reliable a lot of stuff that People talk about is kind of is a flight, you know It's like is vaporware the challenges right now and what I find is very frustrating is that all the AI companies to keep their kind of their value up and to raise the insane amount of monies that they need to burn to compete and

treating open AI have to be parabolic in the way they talk about stuff because you can't raise, you know, if you open AI, you can't raise $40 million that you're just essentially going to put in an incinerator if it's just going to be like, yeah, and it'll, you know, it'll generate emoji faster or it'll be able to write a book better because there's no money in that.

So they have to talk about kind of these incredible agentic systems that will do all these tasks for you and stuff like that. And we're nowhere near. Like, we're nowhere near in that area. So, you know, I'm not saying it won't happen. I think there just needs to be a little bit more of an intelligent conversation around it. And engineering programming is...

is exceptionally geared towards being able to be replaced by AI or fundamentally changed by AI. But maybe just that changes a lot of stuff because it means

Software keeps eating the world, but at a much faster pace. And other jobs get replaced by stuff that isn't AI, but was facilitated because all of a sudden, a bunch of people starting creating a bunch more software and that software replaces jobs. If I'm making any sense here, I think the conversation needs to be a little bit more nuanced than it is today. Does it make sense? You know what I've been using AI for lately?

I started a project for... Companionship? Yeah, companionship. But actually, it's partially that because I started a project with... I think I've mentioned it here. I've been writing this journal for the last two and a half years where I just write every day about business with mine and stuff. And it was just useless data. Little did I know. I uploaded all of it to a project with my PNLs for the last few years, and it

It's like this financial analyst that is this business analyst that I'm, it, it gave me all kinds of different things. I mean, I think the problem is it's like what I realized with this, when I ask it to like analyze things is it's spitting back at me, just my view. Like I'm not getting a different view, but it's sort of packaged as if it's like a consultant perspective.

who knows, you know, like in consulting deals, it's like, well, just tell me what the result you want, because like, that's why I'm here to you can use it like internally. Yeah, it does validate your own opinion. Yeah, it does. It validates your own. My own thoughts. I don't it's not very, it's not unbiased. But it is I find it useful for sure.

I had two items that I wanted to bring up, and one was really an extension of what you guys were talking about. By the way, Alex, one thing to watch out for on the LLM progress side, or I think there's a lot of conversation this week around model context protocol, MCP.

which there's a client and a server and essentially standardizes like HTTP connections between LLMs and databases and other services, which makes it easier to plug in different LLMs to an end up like a service stack. And we'll kind of start to facilitate more practical agentic behavior from LLMs in a way that I think is, and all it is, is I'm not trying to sort of nerd out here other than just saying that like,

the layers are going to slowly emerge where basically LLMs and related reasoning technologies has become the kind of baseline technology that everything's based built off. Yeah, but I agree. And I think we're going to see a lot of rapid growth. All I'm saying is like the, the, the, these types of technology can, and I don't know, but can, and often show the fact that like you make a ton of progress in the beginning, you know, as humans, we got,

faster and we started riding horses and we made faster cars and then we build rockets. And if you, if you, if you looked at that trajectory, we would say, well, in a hundred years, we'll be going faster than light. That doesn't happen. You know, I think the light is the, the approaching light, which is sort of insight, abstraction,

Asking right questions, not being prompted those kinds of human like connections that are born of us being, you know, long standing sensory creatures, right?

right? Like that is not coming immediately. I totally agree with you. I think it's a great example. I think it's a, or analogy rather. So I had two items, Brian, and one was a sort of just slight reflection on the newsletter. And the other one was trying, I, Alex sort of shows up in my dreams sometimes. And it, it was really trying to envision, I

I think it's really interesting. Let's start here. It's really interesting right now to try to envision what the new normal is or the new model or the new system that replaces what we know as the system of the open web.

Okay. Which is, you know, Google is center, you know, referrals via links, web pages, affiliate revenue, banners, YouTube, you know, the pressure of social media challenging kind of, you know, old, old legacy media conventions. All of those things are what we understand to be the web happening for a long time. Right. And now we've got this new thing and we,

where knowledge is abstracted in real time from, you know,

all of human knowledge where everything starting with, you know, evergreen content and service content can be sort of infinitely personalized for you. And it's super cool. And everybody I talked to from like, you know, the people in my circle, my wife, my wife's friends, stuff like are shifting quicker than I would have thought to using, you know, chat GPT as, as an effective or related tools as effective tools. And,

And so like what it's, it's interesting for me to think about what that new model looks like and how it sustains itself. And I think we get really caught up in the fact that, well, we'll have the snake eating its tail problem where, you know, there will be no content because there's no banners to run on web pages and people can't, aren't incented to make content and get traffic from Google.

And, and I actually don't think, I think that there is a new ecosystem and it won't work. And, and we will find ways obviously to, to make it pay. And, and that, that like slowly kind of like Alex's analogy. First, we're going to see the quick, you know, slurping of the most fundamental tier of knowledge. And then we're going to move into news and more real time stuff. And,

And there'll be new pressures on, you know, whose content is that? How am I getting paid and all of that? And other stuff will become more conversational, as you've pointed out, Brian. So we're going to see more media move to, you know, audio video. And yeah, there'll still be newsletters and there'll still be the odd website and people will still like to read humans and all of that. But the shape of the web, I'm really interested in how we start to think about the new shape.

Does that make sense? Like what it actually, what is the new normal that we all sort of see as this ecosystem that's replaced the open web? And while we can, you know, and it's top of mind right now because, you know, like open AI is going out, the government's doing this process led by what's this dingle from all in?

David Sachs. Jason is an insurance. They're asking for comments around the new AI policy. Yeah, Jason's the dingle. Right. Okay. So they're asking for comments. What OpenAI is saying is you can't restrict us from sucking up knowledge that should be considered open and available to us, right? And what Meta is saying is you got to encourage the growth of open source models.

And what Anthropic is saying is, oh, please make sure that we're safe. You know, create a mechanism so government can review and shut down, you know, models that become too powerful. And everybody's sort of talking their book. Right. And oh, yeah. Google saying don't sue us if someone uses our model to make a bomb.

Like that's their line. So all of these things are coming from the big lobbying efforts of these big, you know, organizations. And we're, we're, we're just in the middle of working through kind of what this new world is going to look like and who gets what, like who becomes the subsistent farmer and who's going to have all the power, much like we have today and what the rest of the ecosystem looks like. And I think that like,

what I'd like to get to between us or in my mind is a very simple way of describing this new world, what it looks like. And it's, it all starts with your kind of like view, Alex, that started, I would say a year or two ago or a year and a half ago on the podcast is like, everything's changing the spaceships over the white house and, you know, media, as you know, it is dead and it's all good. It's all going to be okay. Yeah.

Because I can listen to fucking- I don't know if I said that. Because I can listen to Snoop Dogg. Is that where step two is a question mark? It's all good as step three. What does it look like? Is that it? I mean, that's me doing this. Step two, that's where we are. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I laid a lot out there. But what does that new world look like to you, Brian? Is that what this podcast is about? Right.

Answer the question. You just asked me a question. Well, you don't want to ask me a question about what the podcast is about. I don't know what that was. I think we're just still, we're trying to figure it out. Does anyone know what it is? Alex knows. No, I mean, I don't. Can you feel me at least?

Yeah, I can feel you. I mean, it feels like a trailer for this podcast, what you just said, because that's essentially what we talk about. I thought that was what it was about. I mean, other than the midlife crises, I thought that was what this is about. Yeah, I've heard that. No, I think you're right, though. The thing is, it feels like in some ways that you can kind of look at the

consumer proposition pretty clearly, which is, you know, I'm going to talk to my computer and my computer is going to give me stuff. And that stuff is going to either be regurgitated, you know, in any format that I want, audio, video, text, or, you know, it might be able to surface a specific piece of content from YouTube, et cetera, that I can consume like that. But, you know, everybody, the most valuable space in technology, what everybody realized is that it's, you

you want to be the interface, right? Google started showing flights, Google started showing weather, you know, like, because they don't technically, the Europeans don't want Google doing that. Right. But I mean, good for them. Right. I agree. But like everybody wants to own the interface. Apple wants you to stay on their Apple news product. Every, nobody wants you to go to the web. Nobody wants you to go to the web. So that the tension there now is that these systems require a

people on the web, you know, which is this kind of great distribution mechanism to make things so that they can feed it to their consumers, right? And the trade used to be like, you know, we'll put ads on that and you'll get a sense on the click. I don't think that any mechanism right now has been figured out

to generate that transaction and in part because they've just stolen all that stuff. I mean, let's be fair. They're using fair use, but they've just gobbled it all up. And that's fine for now, but a lot of these sites are going to be running on fumes. And when they shut down...

they're just going to run out of data or they're going to be ingesting data that otherwise-- Or they make you a subsistence farmer, which is really what will happen. I mean, yes, but I think like the subsistence-- it feels a little bit like in the Mediterranean at some point they were kind of scraping the ocean with those nets to just capture all the food there and they decimated escaping the sea bottom and they decimated parts of that ocean floor and there's nothing there anymore.

I think that that's the risk right now. - Still a great place to visit. - Well, yeah, I was in Corsica and there's no fish, like fresh fish from Corsica. It's messed up. - I think there's subsistence farming era was Google.

Now it's the kind of like scorched earth era because I don't see how anybody makes money. I see all the value for the consumer, 100%. I keep saying that. This is the interface that people want. But there is...

very little brand building in that equation. - I would just ask you, dude, when the robots are making everything, which is gonna happen and it's not gonna take that long, right? When they're doing the assembly lines and they're fixing my sink and all that stuff,

we need something to do we make media that's all we got to do we make and we consume media that's true it's almost just be i mean are you saying so so your hypothesis is i think i we had talked about that before but like it's the pleasure principle yeah

Yeah, people will always create media, right? People create media. They won't be peeling carrots or cleaning toilets for fun, but they will always create media for fun. And with the right amount of algorithm. And the rest of them will be paid a little bit and then they'll be the crafts people, the pucks, the people like that. Yeah, look at us. Look at the amount of value we generate for free.

Sorry, somebody's at the door. Is it the milkman? It's my heart stop. It's my heart stop. Yeah, I know. This is Alex has a heart stop. Alex, I love you. Thank you for coming by. Okay, Brian, before we bring on AAB, Banana Spanker, I also had a thought about emotion and how sometimes I feel like our newsletter is

has like too much substance and not enough emotion. Like we should just be kind of lighter. Or we should talk about things that make people feel things like productivity. Because people like that productivity newsletter was shared and read by more people than any of the other stuff that seemed smarter to me. What, why do you think everyone who creates content on the internet becomes a life coach?

It's the inevitable arc. You can start wherever you want, but if you create content on the internet long enough, you become a life coach. That's my theory. Scott Galloway is now like, he's like trying to save young men. He was like a marketing professor at NYU, wasn't he? Yeah.

I mean, I admire it. It's not a direction. Will you do me a favor? Will you write a little bit about that notion in my question to you? Because I love that idea. Yeah, no, I mean, if this ad tech thing doesn't work out, I mean, I'm happy to go into it. If anyone wants any life advice, I'm open for business. No, I think people do like that. I agree. I was inspired with that thought by listening to, God help me, a Semaphore podcast.

where they were interviewing this guy, Frank Cooper, who's now the CMO of Visa, who used to work at Def Jam. Yeah, was he at Pepsi? Yeah, he was at Pepsi. And his point was, like, what makes good hip-hop...

And his answer was, it's like, it's not about the best guys or the best rappers or the best lines. It's like finding something that's within people, making them feel something. All right. AB is here. Hey, how's it going? Good. Can we go back to talk about the skim? No. The AB thesis for this week is,

was that there's the cleanup acts in media that are going on right now. I think that's what you were saying. Yeah, that's the skim. That is the skim thing, the cleanup acts. And Tastemade, too. Tastemade? That's another, yeah. So these are just like capitulation deals? I mean, this is like going to the scrapyard? I think people make a decision that the growth ahead is, there's a big question mark, and so there's a point in time now where you can potentially get out. There's a ton of these...

Media names that people would recognize that are either for sale by bankers or informally you can acquire. Do they say for sale by owner in the capital markets? No.

I think it's just, I mean, people just know where the for sale signs are. I mean, one interesting thing someone asked me earlier this week is like, where's the whiz in media? I don't think it can ever exist, right? What do you mean? Nobody beats the whiz? No, no, no. The cyber security company that sold for $32 billion. See, my mind was in a totally different place. I'm like, oh, it was good. You're watching YouTube too much, Peter.

Well, no, discounts, discounting. I mean, nobody beats the Wiz. The Wiz's whole thing was that like, you know, he's got, he gets, you know, he has the lowest prices. So I was just thinking. Four Israeli dudes just sold their company for $32 billion to Google. Yeah. And under five years, right? They created it in 2020. Yeah.

And it's funny because in the press release, it's all cash, there's no earn out. And it says subject to adjustments, but the adjustments are pretty de minimis probably. Like for coffee and like other sundry expenses. Working capital, yeah. But yeah, it's an interesting thought exercise of where some value can be created at that speed and scale. I think a more easy thing to replicate is like the poppy example, right? I don't know if you guys have, it's really interesting to watch their Shark Tank episode

Because it was a completely different idea back then. And then they turned it, you know, they got a 25% investor. One of the guests on Short Take invested in it. He changed the branding. He basically figured out that they had a great product. They just needed to fix the branding and their go-to-market strategy and created something that- But you can just look for those characteristics in different markets, maybe. Yeah.

And those are the ability to leverage business against a bigger distribution system and particularly something that's high margin. Right. So in the case of this, the whiz, basically the hope would be that their product supercharges Google's cloud offering.

which is very high margin and very important competitively. In the case of poppy, they go to Pepsi. Pepsi has distributions in every distribution into every corner store on the planet. And they could take you into any facility basically that they're in. So the leverage on that brand is great. It's the same thing when you see the eye rolling multiples at a revenue level with someone who sells

a tequila company to one of the big, the two or three big, you know, hard liquor companies where they get the distribution advantage. It happens in packaged goods too. So. Well, they actually pick up a ton because right now poppy is distributed through the Anheuser-Busch network. So you automatically actually pick up

20 to 30% of margin just by changing to the Pepsi distribution network. So what does that look like in media? Well, the only place it looks like that in media, I think is where you have super valuable IP. That's not whose monetization is not being realized because of either some, you know, subscription ad selling or distribution mechanism that's underutilized.

So if you owned before it was a big thing, like Pixar going to Disney, right? Like Disney could make a lot out of that asset. So that would be the example that I would give you. Or on the small side, I don't know who's got great IP that sells it, you know, in a limited way, bar still selling to Penn.

Yeah, you see some of this. It's an interesting way to gauge IP, but I bumped into a company last week that is going to do, it's like an agency with college creators and they did a couple million of revenue last year and they're on track to do 50 million of revenue this year, basically because there's so much brand dollars flowing into the creator space and there's not amazing places to spend it. So this

operating team has basically become a beacon of a lot of brand money and it's profitable. It's growing. The other place I see, because I think there's like a deal news that the Boston Celtics just sold for six or seven billion is in this

Need around sports rights to continue to monetize the media side because as the linear deals go down in value They're gonna have to figure out ways to monetize the YouTube and other digital rights because that's the only thing underpinning a lot of the value of the sports teams So I I think there will be continued new company creation and values growing in companies around sports teams and athletes and creators to better monetize that content

Yeah, did you see Unilever wants to spend 50% on their marketing on creators? I just wonder, where is that going to go? I think what the consumer's

I think we wrote about this like 30 to 50% of their time is on, are on these different social platforms. So it's more about chasing the eyeballs, but it's tough, right? It's like, it's going to go either to the platforms directly or some of these different, you know, there's a business that's about to be sold that layers on top of YouTube that helps to better, uh,

Organize the inventory for brands to spend. It's a big business. It's 30 million of EBITDA. It will trade out a really good multiple. And it's just like layered on top of the YouTube advertising ecosystem, and it helps brands better target their consumers. Yeah, and on the ad side, I wonder if we don't see those multiples happening

in what's the name of that ad network that's trading at bunkers multiples, the mobile game? Applovin. Applovin. I wonder if that one isn't driven partly because it would be very useful to someone like Apple. Well, it's like an alternative to Apple, isn't it? Right, but someone sees an opportunity. I mean, it's beyond multiple comprehension, isn't it? Yeah. And it's trading, yeah. And then, I mean, the whole thing is like they've cornered the market in terms of drawbacks.

driving app installs. And there's a couple of ecosystems that they play into. For example, like casual gaming, it exists because it's basically farming a user for three to six months in terms of showing them ads. And then as soon as they get tired of that game, moving on to the next. So you need

these ad networks that can do app installs and other things to drive consumers to the next app. Most mobile gaming is arbitrage. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Arbitrage is everything. It's like plugging people into this matrix of just taking their attention for an hour or two a day, getting them highly addicted to a game for three to six months, and then moving them to the next. You know what's amazing, AB, is that the contrast between mobile

market reception to something like Applovin, which is an ad network that focuses on a certain inventory type and consumer behavior. Taboola that focuses on a different inventory type that has incredibly broad distribution penetration, but can't seem to get out of the doldrums from a valuation perspective. Yeah. I mean, I think the ad product, I mean, Taboola continues to try to innovate

It's different ad products, and they mentioned they're getting into performance with Microsoft and MSN. I think that the Applovin ad product actually works at a pretty high fidelity, and they're getting paid significantly for those app installs, whereas everyone's encountered the Taboola ads. You land on pages...

that you're like what is this right it's like very weird before and after it's before and after man it's tricking us it's tricking a subset of consumers to buy stuff but the majority of people literally exit out and choose they're like where how did i accidentally land on this

page. Toning, skin toning, dental replacements. Yeah, just to put numbers here, Applovin' stock is up 333% in the last year, and Taboola's is down 31%. Hey, what is going on with the Trade Desk? It's funny because they were the standout of the ad tech publicly traded stocks, and now they're going through this period where everyone's down on Trade Desk.

Do you follow that at all? AB? I mean, I just Googled it. So they didn't meet the revenue expectations. So once out of the last 20 quarters, yeah.

And they got hammered. They're down 52% year to date. Yeah, I don't follow close enough to have a good perspective. My take, the market is seeing that they're too reliant on, they have a lot of revenue in the page-based ecosystem. They didn't defy gravity and that they're not penetrating, you know, video is, or what do you call it? CTV as well as people maybe hoped.

Yeah, if you look at like the Criteo stock, you know, so much of when it was... It's back to a relatively good price, but so much of what was priced into it is their expectations of retail media and the growth. And so a lot of these stocks, the reason why they trade up or down is because they come up with a thesis. They say, we're going to be able to grow to this much revenue in three years because we believe the ad market is going to shift in this direction. We know that agents...

There's a lot of blockers for change in the ad world. And so when that doesn't come to fruition as fast as people think, that's what happened to Criteo is like they basically, this was two Decembers ago, they turned off their, they said, we're not going to be able to hit our projections. You know, this isn't coming to fruition as quickly as we thought. And then the stock dropped 50% overnight. And it was literally the last question on an earnings call, someone pushed in and figured this out. And so I think that's what a lot of these companies are based on is,

market forces, they're not completely in control of themselves. They're hoping the buyers shift in a certain direction. They can command more of the ad dollars and then take a higher margin. Should we leave it there? I can give you a little good product taste if you want. Yeah, do it. Good product.

I'll get back to, to, you know, grocery items soon. And then maybe electronic products. Like nobody wants to know that Dyson is a, you know, good cordless vacuum, right? You know, clearly comedy is having a moment and now comedy and politics are seemingly inseparable, but there's a show I tuned on last night. I'm not going to put it up as good product, but it's maybe at a little bit of a lead in and it's called last one laughing. Do you

Do you know the show? It's being franchised into every, there's one in Germany, one in Canada. And basically they put 10, 10 comedians in a room. And if you laugh, you lose.

And so then they set up a bunch of pranks that they can all do. Like they put one of them on stage and he or she tries to get the room to laugh or they have, I don't know, just different kind of gags that are like, there's one thing where you put the person on a stool and then all the other comedians get to come up and whisper something in their ear and to see if they can make them laugh. And it's like, not great.

six hours of entertainment but it's a really interesting new format and it's on amazon prime the uk one because the british are the funniest people i mean if you loaded it up with really funny people in america you might be able to make it work in the you know people in the uk are i mean generally speaking the british are funny i don't know about the german one that might be just ironically funny but anyway last one laughing not quite a good product but interesting experiment

There's a good new movie. Black Bag is a good movie, by the way. It's a Steven Soderbergh movie starring Cate Blanchett and Fassbender, Marisa Albella from Industry, Tom Burke, and it's perfect 90 minutes of entertainment.

It's like a stylish spy thriller. Everybody needs those. And so I recommend, that's a good product for sure. And the last one I would say is your friend, Alex Kanowitz interviews Juan Lacoon on YouTube, where they talk about this sort of existential question that we were talking about with Alex, which is when will AI make its own discoveries? When will it show insight? When will it ask questions?

Not answer questions, but maybe ask them. Well, Jan LeCun is like a, he's a doomer, isn't he? I don't know. No, I don't think so. I think he's more of a kind of realist. He's great. We'll put the link in the notes. I think Alex is a really informed, good interviewer. I like watching his stuff. Yeah, good. I like Alex. All right. You have a good product, AB? Well, I've...

two comments. One interesting thing in this world of content creation, comedians seem to be brought up more and more around, like there's a business called Donut Media that sold to Recurrent a few years ago, all in the auto space. And they were basically able to arb the cost of content creators by going to these like second tier comedians and getting them to do YouTube shows. So it's an interesting thesis that people are

using to basically find cheap content creators that are good, that can do shows.

be funny on the fly and they're not worried about them necessarily taking over a YouTube channel or a brand where they become like the, the focus of attention. So I, I feel like being, there's never been a better time to be a second tier comedian. So in other words, there's good multiples on second tier comedians right now. You can, you can ARB second tier comedians. Most of them, you know, can't make, they're just happy to pay their rent and get health insurance and their desires to be a comedian, not to be, not to be a media. The other thing is,

Some things don't change. This is how media got built. I mean, right? Yeah. The other thing is it feels like

So I ask people all the time, like, are you using AI? And it, it finally feels like it's turning more into a tool versus a toy. And even across age ranges, everyone seems to be using it now. Like every call, even people that are older that I would never think would use AI are like, oh yeah, I'm using it every day now. So I think that's, that's happened in the last few weeks and I've just been surprised.

the broad group of people that say they're using it on a daily basis and actually big investors, other bankers, people in corporate development. It's just surprising to me. It's the moment like when grandpa got on Facebook. Yeah, 100%. How is it used in your field?

Like, how do you use, I mean, so the, the simple example is you're going to a meeting with someone. You didn't have time to prep. You put in their name, you put in their company and you tell deep research to tell you the things that have happened in the last year. Like what you should talk about, like simple things like that. Say, if we're taking a company to market and that model you sent me the other day, did it do that? No.

No, there's a, there's a couple companies that we're testing out right now that are supposed to do this stuff. But I think what's interesting is the, the underlying foundational models are actually getting better than the rappers, right? So there's a company called Rogo that's at a bunch of the banks helping people do presentations, but ChatGPT has actually gotten better than that, than that, that program at, at doing the, the work. So it, there's nothing good in Excel modeling right now for

for buyer lists. I mean, it's all the basics of a first or second year analyst the models can do now. And I think we're

The junior level staff is gonna move as more of a manager of these AI tools to just produce a lot more work. Will it buy me lunch this afternoon? Will it send me a bottle of good tequila? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the, that's the future. And that's what I push a couple of these folks on is like the kinetic basically where it's sitting on top of your CRM and saying, Hey, you should reach out to this person, da, da, da, like that hasn't happened yet.

That's it for this episode of People vs. Algorithms, where each week we uncover patterns shaping media, culture, and technology. Big thanks, as always, to our producer, Vanya Arsinov. She always makes us a little clearer and more understandable, and we appreciate her very, very much. If you're enjoying these conversations, we'd love for you to leave us a review. It helps us get the word out and keeps our community growing.

Remember, you can find People vs. Algorithms on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and now on YouTube. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next week. All right. This is a little bit of an uneven episode. All right. Thank you, boys.