The End of Artifice
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What's wrong with you, Troy?

I'm feeling a lot of sympathy coming from you. Sympathetic energy. No, I'm just... I basically have the cold that you've never experienced before. It's the worst cold that's ever existed in New York City. It's the worst man cold ever. It all comes back to the oyster. It comes back to the oyster at the end of the day. I'm never eating oysters again in my life. It's not oysters, dude. Well, we should maybe tell the audience. You guys threw a super spreader event.

Not from what I know. I've done some check-ins. It's media influenza.

One of the things that stuck out, I think, to a few of us this week was this really interesting press tour that Timothee Chalamet is going on for his, I guess it drops on Christmas. It's good to see movies dropping on Christmas again. His new Bob Dylan biopic, Complete Unknown. We talked a little bit about him going on college game day, being like,

weirdly very astute with his picks. He's shown up at University of Minnesota marching bands. He's going on all kinds of different podcasts. He was on Theo Vaughn this week, and he sat down for like a 90-minute conversation. I have to admit, I only saw the clips of the conversation, which were shared quite widely, but...

It's an interesting contrast because to me, there are elements that he is adapting from the sort of manosphere playbook that Trump ran. But I think it's yet another proof point that so much has changed with the traditional role of mainstream media. It used to be the go-to for these kinds of press junkets.

And what you got was like Harrison Ford giving, you know, these kind of grumpy sort of interviews to late night hosts with these canned stories. And this is very different. I think Chalamet is a different type of character, but, you know, he's...

I think you got to show your real self in these kind of the press tours now. And the alternative media route seems better. The New York Times was doing follow-up. This is not the first time. They're doing follow-up stories on Theo Vaughan podcasts because they discuss the Mitchell-Lama artist's housing Timothy Chalamet lived in New York City.

during the podcast. And so the New York Times then was reporting out afterwards. Seems kind of significant in a degree. Troy? I mean, I think it is really significant, if not just a moment to contrast the before and after. And in my mind, the only way you can see the broadcast product, largely news, talk shows, et cetera, is...

the sort of compressive force that broadcast puts on a piece of content where it needs to be, you know, kind of homogenized, I suppose, and shortened and, you know, a couple of gags and packaged up and sent down the wire. Like, you know, I'll never forget Alex calling it baby food or he didn't call it baby food. So I I'll call this baby food. And, you know, I, I, I thought that, that,

I watched the whole thing. I think Theo Vaughn is a real interesting character because he's got this kind of Oshuk Southern thing. Yeah, he's kind of disarming.

Yeah, and he's not afraid to lay out his insecurities and routinely cries on the podcast and doesn't care if he doesn't know something, he'll admit it. It's just refreshing. It's like a dude that you would meet at a college bar. And then Timothee Chalamet presents nothing like he looks. He's kind of like a... First of all, he looks like he's 18. And he's like a dude. He's...

you know, very lovable. And, you know, he's, you can see him kind of wrestling with his overwhelming celebrity in this. And, you know, it's sort of like he digs it, but he's, you know, he doesn't want to be that guy. And he knows that, that this, you know, the kind of undercurrent of authenticity is really what matters now. So he, you can see him playing with those two sort of countervailing forces and,

And what turns out, the format's just great because you get to see the fidgety people, you know, talking about real stuff, the conversations veering all over the place. They routinely bring up supporting information next, you know, in the YouTube podcast, whether it's, you know, a link or a clip or a picture of a friend of Chalamet's that played soccer at UNC or something like that.

So I think it's a really, really fun format. And I guess for me, it was just a moment to... It's not just podcasts, right? It's podcasts turned into video replacing late-night TV. And so it's much bigger than podcasts. It's much more connected to the deterioration of that old kind of media industrial economy. And I think it's significant for that reason. That and, Brian...

Bob Dylan's the GOAT. And one of the reasons that, you know, Chalamet was so, you know, charged about doing this is because he, you know, felt, he fell in love with Dylan and doing this. And it took a long time to make and he put a lot of energy and he's really proud of it. But it sent me on a little, you know, deep dive on Bob Dylan, including to, what year was it? 2003 interview with Bill Bradley on 60 Minutes. And then before that, a

an interview, like, Bob Dylan is surrounded by journalists. Seemingly everybody's smoking cigarettes in 1963 San Francisco. And he's responding to the press with just this complete kind of lackadaisical, you know, I don't give a fuck, you know, presentation, which felt really rock and roll and also, I think, really appeals to

Yeah.

We heard that. This is like the Michael Jordan flu game. It's inspiring. I mean, I think a Bob Dylan biopic is getting oversized attention because of all this. I mean, I like Bob Dylan too-ish. I wish he could sing. But I think what you have here is like in Chalamet is like,

A kid that grew up entirely, became famous entirely at a very young age and on the internet. You know, when he was very young, he had like 50-year-old women like proclaiming their desire to bang him, you know, which is kind of weird. And I think it shows that these kids are...

kind of resilient growing up in that space. And what he's doing now is very smart. I mean, he's doing podcasts, but he's also doing everything. He's also coming up with like different outfits that are totally memeable. He's just everywhere. He's just, you know, rushing the zone. And he's affecting kind of what I'm calling like the hyper algorithm, which is like

You're there, you've got 90 minutes of content on Theo Vaughn. You know that all the other, the real old media things are just going to cut and clip this and repost it. It's like really efficient to do that. And as this comes up everywhere, it feeds the algorithm and it shows up everywhere. And I think...

That's what these new campaigns are about. And honestly, my guess is that it's way less work. It's a great point and a really nice way of framing it. It's cool. It is so dependent on the person, right? Can you imagine they tried to run this playbook with, let's say, Jeremy Strong from Succession? It'd be totally different. Because I think a lot of actors, particularly, they're not that interesting. Yeah.

Well, that's the thing, right? They're not interested. There's always this disconnect between the person that they are on screen and the person that they are. But honestly, I probably think that sitting down for a Theo Vaughn episode takes you less time and effort

than getting ready and make up and going through the questions and sitting with producers for like three minutes on Colbert, you know? And you see people that are like kind of stilted and uncomfortable there that sound really good when they're just having a conversation.

because there's less pressure on that. But yeah, but what they're feeding is that kind of hyper algorithm of everything. It's going to be on YouTube. It's going to be on TikTok. It's going to be on Vogue. I mean, it's going to be everywhere because you're flooding the zone with things that are creating content.

And, you know, the traditional media kind of started giving all of that away when they started making tweets news items. Because like you don't go to them first because you know that they're going to have to cover something. Right. Maybe you'll go for the photo shoot or something like that if you want something fancy. Well, I mean, that is I mean, that's over. Like because Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are like tanking a massive spending bill on X company.

So, I mean, they have no choice but to be reporting out the tweets. Yeah, but I think the ecosystem feeds itself, right? Like he's still doing professional photo shoots and press junkets where he'll be like in line at the premiere, right? And those things are coming up on TikTok, right?

And then he does the Theo Vaughn and that stuff comes out in Vogue. And what he's doing, he's just like the media ecosystem now is just feeding each other. It's becoming like maybe a healthy ecosystem. I don't know. There seems to be some sort of fauna and flora that's developing here. But you're seeing in this person that's been entirely kind of conditioned by the internet. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's charismatic. He comes across things.

and honest and like, oh, he's actually one of us, even though he's somebody that, you know, many people find incredibly like unapproachably good looking. And I think that's refreshing and it's a new type of celebrity, which I think we're going to see more and more. But, you know, I think the interesting thing to me is how broad they're going with this and how intentional it is. The question, Alex, is...

What do you still need from legacy media? Like the role that the magazine used to play in that celebrity pass by on a talk show was, and it was always kind of depicted, I think, the reason that magazines were sort of small businesses, but, you know, famous brands. And you would be Timothy Chalamet and you would show up on Leno and you would hold up the magazine that you were on the cover of.

And the magazine fulfilled an important role in capturing and defining a moment and making that thing that's still, right? It's kind of etched in now. And, you know, I think it was really valuable. I'm not sure that we need even to do that anymore. I mean, I think influencers, we've talked about this before, are

Brian Goldberg will always say from Bustle that influencers love going by and being on the cover, digital or print covers of his publications because they like all the pomp of a professional photo shoot and being framed for that moment on a cover.

Yeah. I mean, then exchange for that, they'll come to the party in Miami. And so, you know, what role does Colbert play in this thing? And I'm sure there's magazine covers. What role does it play? I mean, it's definitely downgraded, right? The object.

the magazine cover used to be the moment. But now I think the moment is very distributed. It's very part of this like hyper algorithm as I'm calling it where you kind of have a sense that now people are talking about Timothee Chalamet and young people are giving a shit about Bob Dylan. That's like a win, right, for everyone. And

And I think before this, what was it, a year ago, Pedro Pascal did a very similar thing. He was kind of everywhere. And he was very memeable because people started to notice he's kind of acting adorable and self-conscious. And he was dropping these outfits.

But there was still the artifice of the photo shoot or the premiere and stuff like that. People still want to see that. There's still value in it. It's just downgraded. It's just like an ingredient. This part of the media thing. So I think these things will still happen. And I don't think you're going to have just Superstar just being on Theo Vaughn, being kind of like... Especially if Glamour is part of that brand. And I think superstars are. But...

But the kind of like unapproachable Angelina Jolie or Jeremy Strong kind of like superstar press tour is over as it stood.

And I don't think they want to do that because imagine how much value he's getting out of that one Theo Vaughn interview. Usually these guys have to sit for 16 hours in a room talking to like press outlets that's going to put them in front of 5,000 people, you know? So there's still going to be like the big drop, like appearing on SNL. Like, you know, when McGee appeared on SNL, it felt like he was dropping. He felt like he had arrived and,

But that didn't really bring him that many new fans. You know, he was already popular by the time he got that. That was just like a glamorous thing to do. And, you know, if you're an artist, that's nice to put on your mantle. It's like an award.

But yeah, Chalamet is smart and he's charismatic. Like that's what they're going to look for. And I wonder if, you know, you're looking for the next artist is like, how can that person like sit in a room and chit chat with a bunch of other people? That being said, the whole podcast thing is still like super male dominated. Like, I wonder how that changes over time, you know?

Yeah, that'll be interesting. I mean, there's Call Her Daddy and other examples. Sure, sure. I mean, it's not, it's never like 100%, but it does feel like big space is taken up by these very male-dominated, like, manosphere-type podcasts. Maybe we can become part of the manosphere. That'd be awesome. I mean, we're part of it if whether we like it or not, you know?

Speak for yourself, Alex. We just need more grifts. This might be a little bit too niche, but it's after my heart. The Aussie media CEO, Carlos Watson, got sentenced to nearly a decade in prison this week.

for conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. You know, Ozzy to me was an extreme case of that era's playing sort of fast and loose and sort of fake it till you make it approach. Do you know Ozzy, Alex, at all? Probably don't. You know, I was trying to follow the thread and I thought you were talking about Ozzy Osbourne for a good few minutes. I was like, what?

This is exactly the point. This is exactly the thing. It's like you could, you know, they stood up this, it was backed by Goldman Sachs and Google's VC arm, I believe. And it raised a lot of money. Okay. And it clearly to me, like you knew it had no real audience, right? Like it was like, I never see this stuff anywhere.

And there were some brands I always felt like could get away with that if they were focused on particular niches that I might not like, you know, be near. But this was when I was like, okay, they cover politics, they cover news. And I'm like, surely somehow I would, and then organically come across it. And then you go to the like YouTube videos and like, it's clearly any views are suspicious. And yeah,

And that is kind of par for the course. I think what happened was this got taken to an extreme in trying to raise money. And Carlos, at least according to the courts, ended up stepping over that line and saying,

Now he's going to jail. So talk about the scale here. And the website is still full of just his face everywhere. Well, so he's turned. It's kind of interesting in a weird way. He's really dedicated to his innocence, I guess. He's become a freedom fighter of some kind. I mean, one would be, yeah.

Yeah, no, I would be dedicated to it. But he came up with a documentary that's like a 90-minute long documentary about basically this conspiracy to put him away, in which he details how the judge might have investments tied to him. This is before sentencing. Never a good idea. I don't know. I've never been sentenced, but I would not put out this sort of documentary, a

like saying that the judge is crooked before that judge is sentencing me. No. Right? No, that's the right way to motivate a judge. But it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of the path, right? Like,

Somebody gets to a certain place in their career, then they get accused of something like embezzlement or usually something even more nefarious. And then they make a documentary trying to prove their innocence. And three years later, they're full on right wing selling vitamins on YouTube.

But if he's going to jail, he might not get that option. Yeah, well, he got to make his documentary. He got his take on it. He besmirched the names of Jonah Peretti and Ben Smith in his documentary. That's Chelsea Peretti's brother. Oh, yeah. I remember now. Yeah.

I mean, now I remember him as the guy who said no to Disney offering him $650 million for BuzzFeed. Yeah, in retrospect. That's the problem when you think you're a tech company and you think like, you know, all the stories about saying no early are going to pay off. If you're a media company, just say yes. Anything. If somebody comes with a check, just say yes. Any money. It's just going to get less.

To be entirely fair, Alex, the... I'm just poking the bear here. I know my audience. The reason this story is interesting is because medias is full of liars.

And the entire industry, in fact, even pre-digital, which was the lying era, I can remember lots of times when people would talk about the kind of audience research that you would field as a established media company or print magazine. And it was all, you know, soft, generously. And you would, you know, twist the results, find the conjunctions where you had the most pet lovers that used wireless headphones in the world.

And so you would find all these ridiculous things that distinguish you. And then the digital era where it was part like you driven by absurd, you know, reach and page view and unique numbers and much of it was unvalidatable. People were just throwing that stuff out like they were, you know, like, like, it's like performance art.

How many uniques you got? We have 100 million uniques. Wait, you mean half of the country reads your product every month or something or every week? So it was rampant. It was easy to fake, right? It's hard to fake this on the internet. There isn't a person in digital media that hasn't lied about the reach of their property.

My favorite of that was the traffic assignment scheme. So there's this... I'll just explain it to Alex. There's this thing, comScore, that...

Supposedly, it says how many people visit a website and then it's used by media buyers to figure out plans. And so you always want to get your com score number higher. So if people are not coming to your website, it's like a bit of a problem. But you could get some other website, like a bored panda or something, who needs money and is not obsessed with that, to assign their traffic to you. And it would look like your traffic.

You could dig down and find out that it was really Bored Panda's traffic. And this was how Vice basically appeared to be so big. They were claiming in 2018 that they had an audience of 288 million people. Brit & Co claimed at one point to have an audience of 175 million people. They were counting...

Well, I mean, a lot of people want to know how to make Christmas decoration. Pinned any content on Pinterest or something. Yeah. The problem with that is when that shows up, I mean, sure, it's at worst fraudulent, at best, you know, a little cheeky. Pathetic. It's pathetic. But I think it's also like strategically destructive because if your data isn't correct, right, your entire staff like thinks it's working, like doesn't understand what's working and what's not.

You know what I mean? It's just like, it's such a fool's game. It's such a, I mean, at least be a crook that like leads your company to success, right? But this is your just-

telling the people that work for you wrong things so that they don't know what's working and what's not and which accelerates your demise brian what happened here he was on a call with goldman and was pretending he was the youtube it wasn't there's no his samir rao his like co-founder was the impersonator he impersonated a youtube exec or something yeah to say that no no because goldman sachs is like i think this is bullshit and like

And it's like, yeah, pretty obviously bullshit. And it's transparently bullshit. Like the whole thing was obviously nonsense. I mean, I got to respect people that are like such like grifters. They just go for it. I mean, just like the law, just like waking up in the morning and saying, I'm going to full on lie about this. The whole thing, the bigger picture is the whole thing was out of whack because...

CPMs were relatively speaking low, engagement was fake, and people needed to, you know, trade in all of these sort of high carb impressions that they were generating. And the whole thing was like a false economy, right? Like it was cheap impressions that were, you know, cheap for a reason, built on fake analytics. And, you

And that era is over now. It's like shame on you media buyers for – not you, Brian. You seem to be looking at me. Well, for buying into it and for – Oh, you know who you are. You know who you are. You're listening right now. You 25-year-old media planner. This is what happens when you sell $2 CPMs and think that that's actually what it costs to create something of quality. It's just unrealistic.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, all right. Let's move on to the next topic. Let's talk about shopping content, right? I mean, we are, I think one of the sort of stories of, of this year was Google's war on the SEO glue factories out there. Google basically said they don't like those business models, but there's still commerce is still,

And it's sort of obvious path that a lot of publishers have to go on. It seems like we've talked about it a lot on the show about getting as close as possible to the transaction, right?

And we are in the holiday season. So this is gift guide time. I mean, this is always a lucrative, I mean, hopefully it'll be as lucrative as it has been in years past. But Troy, what in your estimation, first of all, what makes a good gift guide? And then what is the future for shopping content? It's a little broad, but. You know, I mean, affiliate had great promise, right? It's the most native of all ad formats, right?

The idea of recommending products in the front of a book is an age-old practice in publishing. The idea of doing it with trust and authority of your brand and people buy it after that, that's the real thing.

And then it got connected to the transaction and the distribution mechanism of Google. So you would create a lot more because that would give you more distribution from Google and you would make more money. And it was like for publishers, it was like, oh, my God, finally.

Finally, something that I actually don't have to go sell and put fake numbers on in the market. People will pay me for it if I generate revenue. It was glorious. And I still think it matters.

But for me, so many of the shopping guides are just generic crap that feel like, you know, something I could, you know, find on the front page of Amazon. I personally like, and I don't seek out shopping guide content, but I like shopping guides where like an editor, a writer, like find really kind of

you know, personal, interesting, weirdo, can only get them at a store in the East Village, kind of like, you know, stuff that, you know, speak, that feels, you know, really cherishable. I don't know, like, cool stuff. But some would say that that's not a huge market. Yeah, that's a free niche. You know, Troy's little Brick-a-Brack store is not going to keep your media's...

Yeah, but I don't really need a gift guide that has Sony wireless headphones in it. That's not a gift to me. I get it. I think that path is kind of a dead end because as behaviors shift more and more from search into chat interfaces, which is happening, it's undeniable at this stage.

People are getting much more into behaviors about fine-tuning their shopping guide. First of all, describing the person or describing the type of categories. Some categories are really hard to recommend for. Like I was talking about furniture, right? Because they're so contextual. So you can't say this is the best chair. And so there's a lot of categories there. That's not a gift guide. Hang on.

I think people are individualized and unique, right? Like, so if you want to buy something for a musician that plays a certain type of instruments and likes wooden instruments, that there is a product out there. But the main thing is that this entire part of the industry is entirely based on the fact that the link is attributable to the source, right? And when you have something that says, well, here's what Vogue recommends in watches or whatever the...

the hell you're looking for, that attributable source is going away. It's non-defensible. It's non-defensible. Nobody needs to be recommended to buy a whoop, okay? I'm talking about...

Wait, I want Alex to explain. What do you mean it's not attributable to the source? Well, it's like right now you go to the site, the site has links. You go on Black Friday and say, "These are the top Black Friday deals for video gamers or sports fans." And you go there and you click the link. That link has a code that tells Amazon or whatever that you get a cut from that deal. Oh, right.

But that way of experiencing these types of guides already feels really arcane because it's very broad, it's very scattershot. While asking a thing,

Like a chatbot, for example, say, hey, I'm looking for a present for my wife. She likes these types of things. She's size this. And here's where we live, right? There are so many variables I can add. That thing can go through these shopping guys and Twitter and Reddit and Instagram. That feels gross to me. Oh, I don't care what you feel about it.

Is that serendipity? Is that what serendipity is? Troy, you think you just want to, you know, like your friend who's an artist told you to go to the store in Brooklyn. It's only open on Thursdays and you have to ask this old lady to give you the special ashtray that was used by like that shit. Like it's fine. It's great. Love that.

99% of the people just want to know like, wait, which video game should I buy for my kid? Because I don't know what the fuck they're doing. Like whatever I'm saying, it's just like this, if this is a huge source of revenue and you can see them, they're all leaning on it. That stuff is going to go away so quickly because the idea of an attributable link to a product is going away. Not only that, imagine I want to say, hey, and you know what? I don't want to buy it on Amazon.

Find me a thing that is for this person and I don't want to buy it on Amazon. Like tell me that that is not a better experience than Googling stuff and then getting onto a site that has a bunch of links and I don't even – like that stuff is all gone. You can see it happening. I mean you're beating up on the weak kid in the schoolyard. I get it. No, I'm telling like, hey, weak kid, like –

bulk up because that's not working. I don't know what it is. All right. I get it, Alex. I think that makes sense. We started the conversation about gift guides that I cherish about why I liked the green tomato scented fuckity fuck candle and

And that you can't find anywhere. And I appreciate that kind of recommendation. And that's the human side of it that I like. I get it. If you want your gamer kid to get a game, you can type it into the machine. Perfect. No, you know what you can do? You can ask a query to something like chat GPT saying, I'm looking for a gift here, some variable. And please don't find me stuff from, you know,

you know, go deep in the internet, find stuff that is like less, less well-thrown path. And, you know, you might find something there that you might, you might not know where to find other way. What, whatever the case, I mean, I stand by it. I know you, you can make your gift guide from your friend or whatever your best product at the end of the day. But like, if you're a media company and you're relying on commerce, I don't see where this is going. This is painful. Isn't that the topic? I agree. And one of the,

My point to close it would be once commercial intent moves into the chat space, like really moves in there as opposed to it just being a querying front end forever green content, that's when the dam breaks. It's over. And the dam being search. When commercial intent manifests like in real ways at scale in the search box, it's serious. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is happening over the next 24 months. Yes. And the downstream effect is going to be huge. So with that, I think we're still going to see gift guides, but it's just because people enjoy doing them. There you go. Okay.

It's becoming a hobby. Actually, I do think some sources, like I think, you know, America's Test Kitchen that really focuses on certain things and they have a very kind of broad spectrum media strategy. You know, they're kind of everywhere. They've got a subscription service. I think that still works. I mean, I think you still go there and you trust and they've got a mix of characters. There's gift guides and there's recommendations, but there's like every day. Like to me, Wirecutter is fine for like every day. Wirecutter is fine.

I want to buy an alarm clock. They have zero taste. I don't need taste. I need an alarm clock.

He goes, can you imagine? They recommended a speaker that cost $450. You have to at least spend $70,000. And I don't want to have to ring the bell. No, no. You don't want an alarm clock that's tasteful. I don't give a shit. But besides, why do you even want an alarm clock? Because I don't want to have my phone in the bedroom. Get one of those beautiful little LeBron ones. Those are nice.

I'm looking for a wrong one, actually. You know, just the phone in the room is like, it's stress-inducing. Like, you should never put your phone on the table also. Don't put the phone on the table. Keep it in your pocket. Okay. All right, should we move to the next topic there, Mr. Moderator? All right.

All right, next gen super consumers. I wasn't clear on this one. Alex, you said kids are watching a lot of packaging content. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So take it away, Alex. And don't start, I don't know why you had to get all testy with me and like Troy's whiny baby or something. I edited that out, by the way. You did? Did you? Well, I don't know why. He asked me for my opinion.

Because you were sick and you were being a whiny baby about like... Oh, yeah. You were my actor. You lost it in the thread this week. So for our audience, what happens with Troy is that there's long hours of silence where you've asked Troy something, he doesn't respond. And then...

Troy decides to work on something and then starts yelling at everyone that we should all pay attention now because he's focusing on this and he's done with whatever else he was doing. It's great insight, Alex. Yeah. It's not true. It's fake news. No, so I was reading about the fact that brands like Sephora –

are being swarmed by girls that are 10, 11, 12 years old for not makeup, which makeup can be fun and I get that kids want to try this stuff out, but actually skincare routines.

They don't need it because, you know, at 11 years old, your skin is pretty much the best it'll ever be. But it turns out that a lot of these kids are watching influencers. And a lot of this influencer content is, this is my morning routine and this is what I do. And so they're asking their parents and the parents are oftentimes obliging, which is to,

to me to buy them like really expensive Korean, you know, that sea salt, you know, facial creams and all of that stuff. And the brands are responding, you know, by, by actually tagging some, you know, of their products to be, you know, tween, you know, like great for tweens or whatever. But it got me thinking the fact that like these kids have grown up on a very commercialized type of content, right?

Some kids really grew up on watching unboxing videos of kids, kids unboxing toys. They're like a YouTube generation. Yes. And so much of this kind of influencer sphere is really kind of integrating the product marketing into their content, right? Whether it's like, you know, kind of like...

Mr. Beast having his snackable stuff or, you know, drinks or branded content, all these kind of, and they're, they're putting these kind of brand partnerships into their content as, and they're not separating that at all. And, and if you look at Mr. Beast and, you know, the, the, the Logan and Jake Paul's of the world, they are, you know, grown men that are really targeting young kids, right. And really marketing to young kids. And, and,

I was wondering, first of all, where does this go? And also, do the rules that apply on broadcast TV around advertising to children not apply on YouTube? This feels like a massive, massive weakness for YouTube. Yeah, YouTube has always had their biggest weakness has been with COPPA and all kinds of children's issues.

The closest they've come, I mean, they've never gotten really fully hit on it, but that is their biggest weakness. I mean, the most popular videos this year were MrBeast, right? The second most popular was Cristiano Ronaldo with MrBeast. And everyone, I think MrBeast is a grifter at the highest scale. I mean, I think he's... He's heading for a downfall. You can see this. But he's also like too big to fail at this stage.

He's an economy, you know? And I don't, it doesn't look like YouTube is either tweaking the algorithm or, you know, or it's strange because it feels like when it comes to children, the legislation doesn't seem to move very fast, but we're seeing what kind of rampant consumerist content is doing to accelerate kids like, you know, potential body issues, but also just like the fact that they think they have to use like face cream so they don't get wrinkles at 11 years old. I'm just, it's, it's, it's,

It's happening, and I think it's consequential. So all the grief that YouTube got and then Instagram got, YouTube will get it because YouTube is... Somehow it was like, obviously, it was always there. It was massive, right? But if you look at... There's this chart that shows the most popular social network among kids, and it's just...

It's so far YouTube versus that social network platform versus all the others, TikTok, all of them. Obviously, Facebook just cratered. And yeah, that's going to be where the battle is. I mean, we often talk about the power of brand here. This new generation is very much, has very strong brand affinities, right? And if you look at the content that's being built into Roblox and things like that, it's a lot of

kids building things around their favorite brands of products and you'd be surprised. It was an interesting topic to me and if you want to read up about it, it's wild to see kids queuing at a Sephora to buy some $40 face cream. It seems to me there's something even broader that would mirror the discussion we had on the Timothee Chalamet thing which is

that marketing takes the same form of kind of informality and authenticity. And it's just all around us now. It's like you're soaking in it. It's less, and I think we saw this in 24 with the change of the sort of tech keynote structure where it became more like conversational and you could make mistakes and, you know, we're bringing you in to meet the product managers at OpenAI and

Or this week, we're going into Jensen Wang's kitchen, CEO of NVIDIA, and he'll do a little gag like he's pulling the chips out of his oven. But he'll show you how he's pulling this new, what's it called, Alex? This new, it's kind of cool actually, the Jetson Aura Nano from the oven. I had the little computers. Yeah, which is a $249 brain for making basically AI robots.

And it just becomes another video on YouTube. And it's fun. And the CEO would brought you to his house and they probably made it in an hour.

It's so strange, right? Because I think, you know, there's like the baby news comment when you watch kind of network news. It also happens. I also get this feeling when I watch advertising and the ones that are very striking to me specifically is very like very specific car advertising. You watch a brand like BMW and it's somebody driving and it says, no compromises, explore the beautiful. And you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Right.

Yeah, at the winding road and just some guy with a four o'clock shadow and his hot wife or whatever the fuck. And then you're like, I don't care about this product at all. And then Doug DeMuro shows up in his shorts and is just going around and pressing all the buttons and showing us the quirks and features. And all of a sudden, this car becomes a product that you may want. I think we're... And I have to be careful here because it's not that it's always the truth, but

But there's like fakeness. We have a good radar for fakeness. And we used to think that we used to have nothing to compare it to. But now that there is at least an expression of unedited...

just raw expression of things, the fake stuff is disappearing. Like it's just like becoming sort of much less powerful. Well, I mean, it's like artificiality to some degree, right? Yeah, I mean, it's artificial. It was interesting. There was this moment where user-generated advertising was like a thing, like in early 2010s, I think.

And it all sucked to me. But the reason it sucked was because when people were told that they were going to make ads, they made ads as they imagined ads to be. So they just made poor... But then I'm like, you're not good at making these ads. No, no, no. They sound like 1950s ads, you know, like some guy doing... Yeah, they would just sort of pattern match that. And I do think you're right that over time, there's been...

this shift that like, no, you're not going to try to like mimic what the quote unquote professional, you know, ad makers would do. And I think they got much better at figuring out the incentives, right? Like it's, it's, if you tell a podcaster that they're going to make 10 bucks every time somebody gets their AG one, you know,

Nitro Greens subscription or whatever, then you've got incentives and that person who's good at making content is going to figure out how to make content for your product. Just let them cook completely free

adjacent to this, but apparently there's a proliferation of content on Instagram, which is not marketed as ads. And there are podcast clips of people going, oh yeah, I use that product and it's great. And those are entirely actors in studios that have podcasts set up and they're just like shilling, you know, they never record a podcast. It's not a real podcast. Genius, genius. Yeah.

Some gaming system is sending me ads showing RFK Jr. using their gaming system nonstop on X. It's a really wild place. I know you're not coming back, Alex, but it's pretty insane. I mean, I got to tell you, X takes just to give you some sense of what I mean. In a kind of good way. I know you're going to hate to hear this,

I think he's going to do it. I think he's going to make X into something. But I don't understand. Let me just give you some raw data, right? Because this is very interesting. I have, and it's an algorithm thing. I have 7,600 followers on X, right? And I...

We have 2,400 followers on threads. And essentially the same post, a very similar post, got over 750 likes and 72 comments and 32 retweets on threads. Okay? It's pretty good. I'm happy with that. And on X, it got one like. It's baffling.

Well, it's that is the I mean, you're just it's TikTok. Your followers don't matter. I don't think that much. Right. But I mean, I've been on X like for I've been on X since like 2007. Like I don't and I have posted regularly in the past. I don't I don't understand. I rarely post on X anymore.

Right. But I mean, I think, okay, but I think without the content, I mean, I'm hearing this from a lot of content creators. I'm back on posting because I need to create an audience because I need to feed the algorithm. I need to Timothee Chalamet this and, you know, I can't wear leather pants at Evoque.

photo shoot yet. So do whatever you want. I can do whatever I want. That's true, man. I like that. Alex, you might make content on X that does better than it does on Instagram. It's just like, it has never happened. It's not very scientific. I mean, it's not very scientific. It's a different system. It's a different system, man. I'm hearing of a lot of content creators on X that said that they're not getting any traction for the stuff that they're doing. And it's not worth the effort. Every time I head over to threads, I feel like it's icky.

Well, I don't know. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Maybe you see, I'm not saying threads is fine. I don't like Facebook. I don't like meta. I'm actually just giving some raw numbers here. It's not like, oh, you know, X is, I get half the likes. It's just one compared to 750. And it's either like a massively different audience, although my audience is pretty similar on both.

Or there's something going on with that algorithm that is really prioritizing types of content that like, you know, it's hard. I don't know what signals it picked up that I was really into.

anything relating to Ireland and migrants, but I get an unbelievable amount of content about that. Irish migrants? No, about migrants in Ireland. I don't know. Like there's a lot of stuff on X that is like kind of nuts. A lot of fights videos get sent to me. I don't know. Alex, you went to Disneyland or Disney World? Land. You went to Florida? Yeah.

No, Land is in Florida. It's easy to remember. World has the ORL numbers in it, which is Orlando, and Land has LA in it, which is Southern California. Okay, yeah, yeah. How was that? Oh, we love it. You know, you feel that they are kind of jam-packing it

to a point where it's becoming somewhat untenable. But if you can manage it, you can manage it. Do you guys dress up? Do you dress up? Do you like go in drag or anything? No, but I got to tell you, like the Disney adult population and the amount of just pure adults that are there without kids that are fully decked out in Disney stuff,

is incredible and it's somewhat disconcerting but that's kind of that's the people you need you know people who have no kids have a job and are so into buying your plastic shit that they will spend 30 on a sippy cup it's great it's a little makes me a little uncomfortable at times but there are any documentaries on disney adults i'm sure i'm sure so did you go to rye well why did you go there

I took my son and my niece and nephew and it was very fun. You know, there's, there's lions and stuff like that, but that star, I mean, some of the stuff they do is so good. The Marvels and the Star Wars land is just, you know, so immersive, so well done. And, and especially the newer rides are so smart about how they shuffle you in and, and get you to experience that. They have an app, which surprisingly doesn't crash with, you know, 50,000 people kind of using the network at the same time, which is,

incredible in its own right but what I what I what I did notice there is just first of all like phones are everywhere right and and

The amount of kids just crying and immediately getting a phone or a tablet in their hand is – that stuff's not going to end well because we're making addicts, like, at a very young age. But also, waiting in line and watching people's behavior, you know, a lot of people watch social media. And I always found it crazy that people listen to podcasts at 2X. And I know some people do that with this one. You know, it just –

It breaks my brain if I do that. Or three and a half X, it goes up. I would just like to ask them, just don't listen. If you're going to listen to it at two, please find another podcast. We don't need you. You just told that to somebody really fast and they probably paid attention. But if you see...

But that is a young person. That is a sign of the brain chemistry just changing. Yeah. Because that's something true. I'm like, I think we all grew up analog. And I can't even imagine. I've tried it before. I'm like, no, this is nuts to me. Yeah. And the thing that I was actually surprised by is how people use their feeds. So people on Instagram or TikTok. And the way they swipe through that stuff and swipe between apps is

And then swipe back and then go to Instagram and swipe back and then go back to TikTok and swipe, swipe, swipe. And I don't know, it feels like it's, you know, like a hundred movements a minute that are happening. I don't even understand how they are consuming data.

recalling or I mean they're not but like it feels like when you're watching somebody do that it feels like you know seeing somebody on a production line that knows how to slice up chicken really well and they're just just going through the motions and I don't even understand how you create content for a generation that consumes and like that and I would you know I would not bring it up if it was one or two people but it's pretty much everyone I saw wait in line use their phones much faster than I did

And, and, you know, if you, if you haven't noticed that behavior before, I recommend just like paying attention and seeing that because that's a, you know, that's, I didn't see anybody read anything. That's for sure. Except a lot of people have their phones muted and read the subtitles apparently. And, and they probably go through like 200 pieces of content, you know, waiting in line. It's, it's just, it's just wacky. So that's what you guys have to deal with.

So when Troy sends me a New York Times article that I have to read and listen to, and it's got all this thing about these tapes that they found in the 70s, even I'm like, what if...

I cannot look at that. That's funny that you brought that up because I guess I'll remove that from this week's good product. I'm not saying it's a bad product. I have brain worms as well. The reason I sent you that one was because there's no words. You basically get like a paragraph every swipe. There's a lot of words.

I hate it. I don't know. Those... Actually, Troy, just why don't you set it up? Because people don't know. It's a multimedia package on New York Times. Yeah. Do you like those? Honestly? I do like them, actually. I didn't think... I felt like there's one of those things nobody actually likes, but they pretend they like because they think it's good. I like making them. I mean, it's got to be... The content's got to be good. This was a good story. It was about...

Fire Island's a cool place. And it was about this influential gay couple in, I don't know, it was 50s, 60s that had created, you know, they were a big part of this scene in Fire Island and then lived through the scourge of AIDS. They sold their house. The guy was, you know,

really big in the electronic music community and had left them like crates and crates of mixed tapes, many of them rare. So these new guys moved into the house and they discovered this kind of museum-like collection from a time and an era and celebrated it and it was just a cool story.

And it was done in a way that was kind of interactive and you swiped and you could read and you could hear the music in the background. And conceptually, I get all that. But the whole time I was like, you know what I wish? I wish this was just a YouTube video with somebody with the boxes, putting them in a tape player and listening to them and responding to it. I don't know what modality I need to be in.

to be reading and listening to stuff and swiping my phone or being in front of a computer. I love that. I love that point, actually. I love that point. We did that stuff because we wanted to find the new feature format. Right?

Right on an HTML page. So we tried to combine images and interactivity and words in a way that felt real. And it kind of skidded out. But I like this story is why it's from 22. But how much do you think it costs to produce that? Tons. Yeah. And how much do you think they would have spent if they just got like some charismatic person to open boxes on YouTube? Exactly.

It's the scourge of Snowfall. Do you remember Snowfall? Oh, we remember Snowfall. I mean, we... Like, Troy and I worked on this stuff because we really hoped it would work. But, like, I think, honestly, like...

it's hard to put yourself in a place where you can experience content that is very different. I think you either need to put yourself in a different space and you go to a museum and you're guided through it. But on your day to day, am I reading? Am I watching? Am I listening? What am I doing? That type of stuff is hard to make. Modality is important. And

And if you're trying to kind of grab people's attention when they're kind of waiting in line or in the toilet or bored at work or whatever, which is where a lot of media consumption happens, there's only a very few formats that really kind of fit that. I should say for those who do not, for some reason now, but Snowfall is a multimedia feature that the New York Times did in 2012.

that ignited all sorts of predictions that this was the future of interactive storytelling. Didn't turn out to be the future. It's still around and it's still quite beautiful. I looked at Snowfall so much

So much like trying, you know, when we were building the sites and it was just very well built. I have to admit, I never read Snowfall and I still don't know what it's about. You don't know what happened at Avalanche Creek? I have no idea. No idea. I just like, I just know that, you know, they had a static video that like the content scrolled over and that was pretty... Tunnel Creek. It was the avalanche at Tunnel Creek. Yeah. Well, what it made me think about is...

Ethan Mollick wrote a kind of, you know, be careful what you say about AI because when you just look at what's happened in 24, it's mind-bending and remarkable. And he uses this one example. Ethan Mollick is an AI researcher where in Chicago or somewhere, he writes a sub-stack. He's like, there was this research paper that basically said that those black aliens

Knives and forks, those plastic knives and forks are toxic because they have too high of inclusion of recycled toxic recycled plastic. And everybody started to freak out about it.

And then it turns out that in the peer-reviewed paper, the paper-passed peer review, there was an error in the math, like one extra zero, and everybody missed it. And so he uploaded it on his phone, the PDF to the latest model on OpenAI as the latest model, and said, is there a problem with this paper? And in two seconds, it said, yes, there's an error in the math error.

And I just thought he's like, he made the point that, you know, stuff in the world gets so complicated that sometimes, you know, you have to be an expert to understand what the machines are saying too. But, you know, and, and, and in this case, just how remarkable it was, he could type in one sentence on his phone, upload a research paper into chat GPT and get a result like that. And I think it's remarkable. Yeah.

And then he went on to show the new, the quality of the clips on the new Google video model. And I'm kind of, you know, I find most of those things are just toys, but VO2. VO2, yeah. VO2 is pretty crazy, Alex. Oh, it's incredible and can generate up to eight minutes at 4K. It's not fully available to the product now.

But like the permanence of objects and the way that they respond and like, it's pretty crazy. And we don't, we don't know how this going to be used, which is why I always find it strange. Just like the, I get it. I get it. That media creators, I'm not going to call it the media, but because it's everywhere. It's across YouTube and podcasts there.

There is a lot of AI skepticism. And I think the AI skepticism is bigger with people who create content because they feel the most targeted. And I understand why. So if you feel like your job is about to disappear, the first thing you're going to go is like, this stuff is shit. And I love Nilay Patel and I listen to The Verge.

cast all the time but i feel that they they dismiss a lot of these products as like vaporware sometimes stuff like that is is not productive because i don't know what's going to be big but i think that there is a an element of paranoia that everyone should should pick up on it's like you know if you're walking through the forest we're we're programmed to be you know

to be a little bit on edge and freak out every time we hear something rustling in the branches because we don't know if a tiger is going to eat us. In this case, I'm not saying that all of these things are going to pan out, but if you don't have...

If you're going through this saying, well, they will never be able to do this or they will never be able to do what I do. Okay. If you're talking in the future, it's easy to argue about the future because nobody knows, honestly. Okay. I'm talking about the future. I'm talking about in two weeks. Brian, I'm talking about in two weeks.

Okay, if we're talking about the present, I think it's fairly, it's okay if someone, for instance, like writing is probably something I know the best and like these engines suck at writing. Like I got some writing back from someone. I was like, did you do this through AI? Because it reads like AI.

And that was not good feedback. Right, but they suck at writing, but they can create an outline for you in five seconds that you can then spend 20 minutes cleaning up. Maybe I'm misunderstanding because I can understand criticizing the output of the current

Reality right now, because a lot of this stuff is still, it could, it will, it's going so fast, blah, blah, blah. Everything changes. And a lot of what is being produced is incredibly mediocre. It is very good with finding errors in research papers and all the summarization and whatnot.

When it comes to creation, it doesn't seem to be creating very compelling stuff. No, I think the use case for me is much more about the interface to information, Brian. The video one is different and how people will use that creatively, I think is going to, we'll see. And it'll take a long time. And, you know, I...

the process of a paragraph versus hunting through multiple ad-laden articles, there's no comparison in utility. No comparison. Oh, yeah. And I think that...

We also like the trajectory of this, seeing just we're using raw tools right now. We're not really using the next generation of tools that are going to be built on top of that, you know, specifically made for writing, specifically made for a stylistic expression. Also, yes, what Troy is saying is right, like how we consume content changes. So how you write it will undeniably need to change. All I'm saying is that this is moving so fast.

Please remember where we were two years ago when we started doing this podcast. This is moving so fast that this denialism of

that there's something incredibly profound happening to the industry that we love. I mean, for me, like media, games, movies, but also to the way people experience content and knowledge on the internet. It's really profound. And I think it was on the Vergecast where somebody said, like, you know, nothing still beats the 10 links when I'm writing a story. Like I go on Google and I need to really read the sites. Yes, but nobody else does that.

Nobody else wants to do that. People just want an answer to what temperature the chicken needs to be when you cook it. Oh, yeah, I get that. It sounds like nothing beats the feel of the newspaper in the morning. Yeah, exactly. And it's going to happen so fast. And it's also going to come at us from vectors we don't really understand because I don't know what it means. Yes, if you look at the raw output of these things, there's a lot of not very compelling stuff.

But it's always getting better. And at some point, somebody is going to learn how to use it because it's going to become the tool to make stuff. Have you been on LinkedIn lately? Oh, sure. AI is not making it better. One of the things that I find is that... Here's the thing. I don't even know if it's making it better. Even if it's making it worse, you cannot dismiss it. Even if 99% of the internet is...

SEO is dead, product guides are dead, you've got to figure out what to do. Stock photography and stock video, that's over. There's a lot of industries that... Stock photography should be dead. Let's be real. Like talk about the uncanny valley. You're talking about stock photography. I mean, the downstream effects of stock photography. Here's the truth. Keep going on the dead thing. What else is dead? Wait, wait. But a lot of professional photographers...

make recurring revenue of the B-roll stuff that they put on stock photography sites. They could not make a living by purely doing their photo shoots. If that goes away, that's a big problem. The only thing that will slow this down is a major copyright lawsuit because it's

I believe and many people believe this is all built on stolen content. So that could be something that can sustain creatives for a long time. But otherwise, I think it's going to have to be a new world with new jobs. I think there's going to be value to be extracted from it and creativity is always going to be valued. But yeah, I mean, I think the search page with a bunch of links is dead.

That's dead. I like this, the Alex dead list. That could be a reoccurring feature. Yeah. Anything else? Well, on the dead list? Well, I want to get into good product, but I've got some- Reader mail. Reader mail feedback. Let's get to reader mail. Okay, because it's about good product. Well, one was talking about Alex, but we'll skip that.

What? I want to hear that. No, come on. Stop it. Don't. It's so annoying. Please. Tell me about me. The audience wants to know.

Oh, this one is just tighter. Good product. As I listen to that at the end of the show each week, it's been reminding me more and more that the best things in life aren't things. The best things are real experiences like a good hike, walk, or simply time outdoors and time with friends. Time on the internet separates everyone from people, nature, and the best things in life.

How many people really need the best shoes, sound system, juicer, bicycle, or whatever? Almost all products are good enough these days to satisfy most people most of the time. And then the listener signed off, the best thing in life is the off button. But that is an endorsement, Troy, of your very expansive take on good product. Thank you. Thank you. That's why you wanted to hear that one over mine.

Yeah, well, the other one was about Funk and Wagnalls. Also, guys, let's not call a good product there. Like, here's the thing I enjoyed this morning. A hot shower on a cold, foggy day. You're welcome. That's nice. I wish I had that. Sounds great, actually. Yeah, you look like you need one. Yeah, I certainly am not going to bring that New York Times article out about the mixtapes from Fire Island. That's dead. That's dead.

I mean, you know I appreciate this stuff, Troy. Multimedia is dead. The webpage is dead. Well... I don't know if the webpage is dead. You guys... Oh, really? The webpage is not yet dead. My good product of the week is... I just think about things that...

That I enjoyed, and I enjoyed The War Room immensely. I would highly, I would encourage. It's sort of a canonical documentary. You should watch it. It's cool. It shows you, by the way, that the kind of violence in politics is not a modern phenomenon. It's rough and tumble, and it has been for a long time, and both sides complain about the media endlessly. Carville used to fight with the media like mad.

And to watch Clinton navigate all the troubles that he had at the beginning of that campaign felt very Trumpian. I remember that 60 Minutes interview he did when the allegations first came out. What was the name of that woman that then admitted publicly that she had been encouraged to speak by the Republicans? Jennifer Flowers. Right, right. But also that we had a nice contribution this week by an anonymous banker.

And that will show up in the newsletter. Oh, nice. So he talks about what's in store for deal-making next year, how we're going to see more structure to protect downside in deals like we did with the Moneyline deal that happened last week where payouts only achieved if the stock hits a certain price. But there's a lot more activity in the market now, so I thought I would find a sort of enterprising young banker to write it up for us.

And we'll keep that person anonymous for now because then maybe they can bring better stuff to the table. They can come and we can disguise their appearance and their voice. Yeah. How would we do that? Easy. Yeah, we can do that. We have the technology. Okay. Do you guys have anything to add to good product? No. No, I mean, I think it's perfectly great. I mean, I think Disneyland is a good product.

Being strained. I had a very strange Disneyland experience. I went like, it was when my sister got married. My mom got like a, there's a lot of kids in my family. So Elon Musk would love my family. And there was a group of like 20 of us. I went to the park too. And I guess we had a couple extra tickets. And, you know, we're from Philly. So my mom was scalping.

And she's like, I was like, mom, you shouldn't do that. And she was selling the tickets. She got picked up by an undercover cop, a Disney cop. No, they don't fuck around. I was telling my wife. They didn't call her a stuffer, though.

Just a worry. It's people waiting in line and kids being kids and something, but you never see a kerfuffle. You never see a scuffle at Disneyland. I'm sure they must have all these secret agents that will swoop you up and drag you into a basement. It's like, mom, take the loss. She was like, does anyone need tickets? All of a sudden, this person was like,

The alarm's hardcore. I like it. Alex, you know, you can pay a couple of grand and get taken to the front of the line and through the back and all that stuff. That's what I did the one time. What did it cost per person, I wonder? I don't know. They took us around in a van.

It was obnoxious, right? That's the VIP. You can get the VIP stuff and it's like, I don't know, a couple of grand per hour or something like that. But if you're a bigger group, it can be worth it. But look, you know, we took kids over a weekend. We stayed at one of the Disneyland hotels, the new Pixar hotel. And with flights and tickets and the express lane passes and the food and the stuff, it's like eight grand.

It's a lot of money. I did remember a good product. Total or per person? No, total. Okay. I mean, we were flying from California, so it wasn't a long flight. But it adds up. For families, it's really expensive. So a lot of people wait in line, and some of these lines were two hours long. So I don't know how many rides you do. Yeah, when I went to Disneyland with Disney World, we drove twice.

from Philadelphia in a Country Squire station wagon. Seven. Two parents, five kids. Nice. That was vacation. I'm sure the parents had a good time. That's why I did that too, except that my dad smoked the whole way.

And by the way, I laid in the back of the station wagon without a seatbelt. Yeah. And, you know, behind, you know, the backpack. Oh, man, those good old days. You're sleeping able to lie on the back. Poor the government guy. No, this is why Gen X is the great generation. You know, we don't take it all for granted. The one other little mention on good product that came to mind is I like buying fragrances for people at Christmas.

And I bring with that the arrogance of picking what I think they should smell like, which isn't super good. And Dries Van Noten has this really nice idea where you buy a $70 sampler kit. And by the way, Dries Van Noten makes beautiful fragrances in incredible packaging, really beautiful packaging. And you get 10 small vials for $70. Wow.

You give that to the person and then they pick what they like and they put the code on it. And then as soon as they transact, you pay an extra 250 bucks or something and they get the large bottle of fragrance. Oh, that's smart. So it's a nice way to sort of sell a sampler plus the whole product.

And if someone doesn't redeem, you're only on the hook for seven. Yeah, and it protects the downside of the gift giver. I mean, that's like shot in the dark.

be honest with you isn't it yeah i'm not a i'm not a cologne guy but is that is that women's cologne it doesn't matter anymore alex no lamar jackson just he was just talking about how he he wears probably gonna be the mvp of the nfl saquon barkley doesn't get it as he should but he talks about how he what about what about josh oh josh could that's true but i think it's gonna be lamar

It's going to Josh this year. Well, that's fascinating. 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. Are we doing one more episode before the end of the year or no? We will, at which point we'll wish people happy holidays. Okay. All right. See you guys. See you guys. Bye.