The Information Space in 2025
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You guys have a nice break? I had a lovely break. I didn't do much for two weeks. I did a fair amount of traveling. Went down to LA and we went to the Magic Castle. Is that a drug thing? No. Magic Castle, isn't that Disneyland? No. No, the Magic Castle is this place in LA. The whole place is kind of this old...

LA staple full of pictures of magicians and velvety curtains and different little rooms everywhere and people are doing close-up magic and there's like bars and everybody has to wear suits and stuff. Wow. Sounds like a drug thing. It is a drug thing. I hate magic so it did feel like... Yeah, that sounds like the right place for you. That was an interesting experience.

to being surrounded by it, immersed in it. It's hard to imagine that Diplo is talking about doing acid on the CNN New Year's show. Yeah, normalize it. That's good. I'm on acid right now. Yeah.

One of the things I wanted to jump off with, and this is a broad question, but I think it was one that we talked about basically all year. But heading into this year, I think one of the big questions is like, what are the growth paths for...

legacy media, traditional media, mainstream media, packaged media, whatever we want to talk about it, right? Because we know all of the challenges and we've talked about them ad nauseum on this podcast and they're evident. But finding the growth paths is kind of hard, to be honest with you. I want to be optimistic. The sun is out. It's almost 80 degrees. But Troy, how are you seeing, I mean, is this going to be another year of basically managing decline? Or are there...

Are there new paths for growth that you see out there for the legacy business? Forget about the people who are starting from scratch because they're always going to have an advantage. You know, I asked the inimitable Dylan Byers a similar question because he likes to spend time documenting the fall of legacy media, CNN in particular. And it's an interesting story because it's such an important part of culture.

But when asked about, you know, what kind of legacy media brands are making it through this transition with any kind of, you know, with real success or agility, you know, he points to the, he pointed to the New York Times. And I think there's a handful of brands that,

we can, that we, that we cite all the time that have done an okay job at creating a kind of new, their own gravity that works in the information space. And we, you know, some of them are news brands, right? There's like the FT and the wall street journal. And like I said, the New York times, and I think even Bloomberg, but for a lot of other brands, many of them, either lifestyle brands or call it second tier or localized news brands, the,

the journey is, is, is it's, it's pretty hard to see how there's going to be same success in the future as there was in the past. Unless of course you reinvent the business and,

in a way that your core business is really different than what it used to be, right? Where you're, you're sort of media adjacent creation that you're making, whether you're your media brand becomes something that isn't about provisioning of content and selling access to the audience that it creates, you know, that you're not just sort of limping along. And, and I think that there's a lot of risks out there in 25. I think that,

you know, Google is going to do things that are hard to predict that could disrupt distribution for a lot of folks. I think that programmatic advertising that provides, you know, a lot of, a lot of the money to, to companies that rely on digital is its future is, is it's not that it was going to go away. It's just that it's not as lucrative. I,

I think that there's a lot of scrutiny on affiliate advertising of all kinds right now in terms of like how it's being gamed and how many people are competing to do a mattress review or to review a credit card. And then we have the subscription side of it, which is nice if you can get it, but it's just intensely competitive. And unless you have that kind of

both unique content feed and a velocity around it that makes you just kind of undeniably important to somebody, I think subscription gets, you know, is pretty difficult to scale around. So anyway, you know, there's always going to be media businesses. There's always going to be packaged media. Some brands will squeak through. But in terms of vitality, a lot of the ones that we would, you know, that we know and love are going to have a tough year, I think.

The challenge with subscription also is that we don't know what happens when subscriptions or we know what happens when subscriptions hit some sort of saturation. So even if everybody we talked about managed to build a subscription business, it would make that ecosystem would likely collapse because people have a limit to how many subscriptions they want to, you know.

pick up, right? Like it's interesting to see that it's all our, all the news brands we want to turn to subscriptions, I think there would still be a mass and everybody was open to subscribing to things. There would still be a decline because I think there's kind of a limit per consumer of how many things they could subscribe to. And so I think we're going to see consolidation there anyway, right? Like

Well, there should be bundles. I'm surprised we're not seeing more of that. People want a news bundle. I mean, that's why Apple News is actually a pretty interesting product. I see more of that in 2025. Like the news, like New York Times and such might have their own subscription, but we're going to see a lot of bundling. I think I advise third parties, sir.

New York Times is going to be a bundler, right? They're going to bundle subscriptions from other news sources. They have the escape velocity. There's that constant meme that they're a games company because I guess now the majority of time spent is not with their news products. It's with games. It's with cooking. It's with Wirecutter. We'll see them with things like Stubstack and

And Patreon, too, because we're already hearing of people having way too many little $4 or $5 subscriptions popping up here and there. And there needs to be bundling in that space, too. So that's a trend that I see emerging. And I think we'll see a lot of startups around that. Okay. How about alternative media? I don't know what to call this media. I mean, I think because of the election in particular and the focus given to the manosphere and the various permutations of it,

More money is going to flood, not flood, but it's going to flow towards this, right? There's a lot of pressure already, political pressure on ad agencies about how they apportion their budgets. And...

As far as the amount of time spent, but also I think just the influence of this very incoherent decentralized area, it doesn't match up. And so I think that there's going to be more people who are going to, more money is going to go towards this area. What I'm interested in is whether we see...

brands emerge out of this. I think we see the makings of it with the Free Press and Daily Wire on the right side. But I think other brands are emerging. I've been following... Do you guys know Dropsite News? Don't know it, but Alex should know it. Yeah, it's up your alley. Really? It's the liberal equivalent of Free Press. It's anti-racism? I believe it is.

No, they do good stuff. I'm sure. I mean, I'm sure. There's interesting brands off and off every day. And there's going to be more. But once again, that's also consolidation, right? That's also kind of creatives getting together to try to create networks of people. Is that what that looks like to you? Because that's what the daily caller is, essentially. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the people that have found, let's call it, would you say escape velocity, Brian, in the kind of alternative universe, I think did it most meaningfully on the back of large, surprisingly large subscription bases. So the free press hit a million, which is a big number. And people throw around the $200 million revenue number for the Daily Wire. And they got out of the gates early to kind of soak up

you know, kind of right wing appetite for, for part of the spectrum that wasn't being served, uh,

Well, that's remarkable, by the way, if they have a $200 million business, like I do not like immerse myself in that much of the Daily Wire content, but I do enough like their advertiser base is like, it's pretty, it's pretty scruffy. I think a lot of it is subs and there's a bunch of production revenue in there and some kind of like paramedia. Also shows that we should be selling more freeze dried food on this podcast. Because that's how we get there.

It's like really alarming. Like you listen to like a Ben Shapiro or watch one of those little Twitter videos and then it's just like a seamlessly he's like pitching some like prepper product. Yeah. So, the point I was making though, guys, is that with all of this sort of wonderful-

the wonderful, you know, kind of alternative media or it is wildly fragmented. And I think the hardest thing for emerging talent there is how do you, how do you build the, you know, and it's infrastructure to trap ad dollars because it's takes a lot of people and a lot of work to, to go get that money. Brian, you know that better than anyone. I do. I do. You call it a services business. It is a services business. Isn't there a middleman business?

Yeah, there's a middleman business, one that you and I know very well, Alex, and it's federated media or say media or something like that, or people that put together podcast networks. It's coming back, baby. We were too early. Everything always comes back to an ad network at the end of the day. People keep trying to invent all kinds of things. No, we're going to make it like NASDAQ and everything. And then it's just, it's like, you know what? No, let's just make it an ad network.

The most shocking thing there that someone was telling me from a senior executive at a holding company was telling me that retail media has this kind of strong, kind of perversional, is that a word? It is now. Pressure where if you're a scaled retailer and you don't have a retail media network,

then it's harder for you to compete because you need those easy profits to lower your prices on your core goods. So you can't compete as a retailer without having a way to trap the attention dollars and profit from that. And then retail media networks run out of kind of surface area to advertise on because there's only so much volume on the places that

where they sell, where you can run media, and they become essentially this kind of ad network all over again. They become the data provider on top of local media or anybody else that doesn't have consumption signal to sell their media. It's interesting. I kind of hate retail media. Why would you say something like that? Because it's like...

If you look at like, it makes the products worse. Like it's literally, it's, it introduces like all the bad incentives that have defined digital media into the commerce experience. I mean, Amazon's gone from like being it's intense customer focus weighed through Amazon these days. It's,

It's a disaster. These feeds are a disaster. Everything is sponsored. You can't believe any reviews. I mean, I used to just get the most popular or whatever. It does create a lot of weird behaviors. The honey scandal is an example of this, by the way, if you're familiar with the honey. Do you want to go on?

I'll tell you what I know about it.

Their installed base was so enormous that the company sold for more than, I think, a couple billion dollars. I don't know the exact number, Brian. Maybe you know. I'll look it up. But I'm on YouTube yesterday, and I see that Marcus Brownlee has done a video. Four billion, by the way, January 2020. Right, four billion dollars. Boom.

So Marcus has done a sort of honey hate video. He's taken the time to create a video about why honey sucks so bad. Turns out that honey's done two things that are kind of gnarly and part of this kind of perverse incentive thing that you just described. The first is, is that they sponsored hundreds of YouTube creators and what they were doing-

Thousands. Thousands. And what they were doing is essentially hijacking the affiliate codes that all the people put on their videos. So the way that Honey works is because they're the last stop before a transaction, they take the affiliate revenue with their code. So they were taking... That is not the promise of the product. That's any affiliate code that runs through your browser. Right. So they were stealing the affiliate code without telling the creators anything.

The second thing is...

So the core business model is also kind of insane. It's a shakedown. And essentially what they do is they go to retailers and they say, if you don't pay me essentially and give me a 5% discount code, I will surface all of the higher percentage discount codes to my audience. And if you're Bed Bath & Beyond or whatever, I'll give them a 20% coupon code. But if you pay me, I'll automatically insert the 5% coupon code that you gave me.

So the shakedown is, you know, prevent discounting. It's a protection racket, right? It's a protection racket. This is a core digital business model, isn't it?

Yes, but the big mistake here is that the protection racket usually serves somebody. But in this case, they pissed off the creators by taking away their affiliate revenue. They pissed off the stores because all the stores hated them. And then they managed to rip off the customers by giving them the worst discount code. So nobody, nobody, yeah. At least the rule of the protection racket is make somebody happy. Yeah.

Well, they made the people that sold honey to PayPal very... I don't know. Protection rackets, usually only the momsters are getting any benefit out of protection rackets, aren't they? To me, it's like the...

Like Google deciding that it was going to sell ads on branded keywords. That's basically when it went over into the protection racket business. It's like people are putting your brand into our search engine. Okay, this is not a hard problem to solve as a search engine. And they just decided, no, we're going to sell ads against that. If you don't want to pay, we're going to sell it to your competitors. Right.

And not only that, they also created a browser that allowed people to just put the brand into the search and it would take you to whatever the first search result was. So, yeah, it's a very similar situation. I mean, MySpace used to do this. They used to say, look, set up your page. No problem, Wendy's, everything. Everything's free. We're going to sell ads to Burger King unless you cut the check.

It's up to you. We used to do it with Car and Driver and our automotive network at Hearst that I ran. And what we would do is bundle up all of the sort of, call it, you know, premium European car inventory and give Audi the first dibs to buy their page and quickly go over to BMW and sell them that page. It's a nice ad strategy or sales strategy. Let's just say, how would you execute on that? Like with like, say webinars, like,

Is there a way? Just curious. Well, first you have to have a little bit of market power.

Maybe that's why the webinar market is fiercely competitive. It's the last remaining truly honest space for the media person. It is. It's an honest business. It's an honest person. Okay, so we got the honey thing. Where do you want to go next, Brian? I want to bring in our friend AI, because I think 2024 was probably the year of AI chat. I think we're going overboard on the chat stuff, personally. Because I think...

"agents" in quotes are going to replace chat as the big thing in AI. I think the initial agents are going to be

underwhelming, probably, but that's to be expected. Alex, what are you seeing in 2025 as a big theme when it comes to AI? If we talk about chat, we're talking about this idea that at Indesign we used to call like a few years ago when we started discussing it, it was like conversational UI, which meant that the interface was no longer just a series of buttons and clicks, but something you could have a conversation to. And sometimes it might surface buttons or a row of text or a table,

But the main thing was that this concept that human beings like to converse with things, and oftentimes the best searches or the best way to do an action is a series of back and forth. I don't think that's going away. I think we've had an interface shift the same way we've moved into touch, and we're moving towards a more conversational age. Now, it's not going to be everything becomes a conversation, but we're already seeing at the end of 2024 a lot of these...

That services like for complexity or open AI, but it's to be a lot smarter with the way that conversation goes, you know, like it asked it to come up with flights or something, gave me a table, it will add buttons. So I think the conversational UI isn't going anywhere. I think there's going to be a doubling down in devices that you can put into your home. Like we had this conversation.

like, you know, the Alexa stuff and stuff like that. That's not going away. In fact, I mean, we're hearing that Apple is going to invest a ton of money in building little screens that you can put on your kitchen counter. And that's also that you can have conversations with Siri. So that's going to be the interface. And the agents are going to run through that. And I think the most important thing, especially when we're in media, is to think about what the future interface is. And that's going to be the way we

interact, not with all, but with a lot of both utility and content that we access from a computer is going to be some sort of conversational either typing or talking. It's not going away. I think that that, that I would say going away. I just, it seems like a lot of the chat interface has been putting a lot of the work on the user. Yeah. It needs to, it needs to be augmented. And the way I would look at that is, is building on Alex's thoughts there. You don't wake up in the morning and say, Hey,

You don't ask a question when you wake up. You want to read a feed of what's important, right? You want to go to the newspaper. You want someone to have done some work for you to present you with the most important information. And so, you know, it's almost like turning chat inside out. The interesting thing about chat and AI is all of the infrastructure is there. You can just pump queries into it automatically. So when you start to see chat augmented with information,

you know, intelligent curation, then chat becomes feed. And when chat becomes feed, I think that those interfaces, and I think the first group pointing to what the future looks like, there's perplexity. If you thought, what happens if chat GPT

becomes not just a chat box, but a place where they're doing some of the work for me, it becomes a really interesting media interface. And I think that we're already seeing some of that, right? Like where perplexity has said, you can go into our discover tab and we'll curate a bunch for you. And by the way, we'll also make a podcast feed and an email feed of the most important things for you.

This is why Google is-- and I've changed my mind about this. But one thing we are going to see is that there's going to be a lot more similarities between all of these models. And they're all going to be able to do pretty amazing things. But Google is such an advantage because they have the underlying technology. And they have the browser for now.

Because if it's done through the browser, the resurgence of the browser as the most important thing is kind of like something I didn't see coming. But if you have the browser, it doesn't matter if you're behind a paywall. It doesn't matter if you're anything. All of my stuff will be accessible by an agent. And that agent doesn't even need to be that smart because I can wake up in the morning and tell...

my you know google assistant or whatever to tell me like hey what's going on in las vegas and i would go and pop up and go and it goes like oh yeah there's you know a cyber truck exploded over the trump hotel in front of the trump hotel and here's what your new sources are saying also your favorite podcaster has a well just to be clear it didn't explode alex someone detonated it

It's a little... There's a difference. Do we know this? Yeah. That was the way to start the year. Like, it's like some Hollywood foreshadowing. But I do think, like, a lot of this, like, there needs to be kind of, like, an information omotenashi, you know, of, like...

you know, the Japanese hospitality art where they anticipate your needs. Like right now it's so passive and it's requiring people to do the driving themselves and to know the questions to ask. It reminds me of like the early days of search

where you had to know the Boolean logic to try to get the right results. And it was like, it's crazy to think about that, of putting in these formulas, basically. Well, this is a kind of Schleiferism, but now I've got his attention. We've talked in 24 a lot about the importance of interactivity in media, and I do think we are seeing some new modalities emerging.

Look at me talking like a podcaster. Because Alex, you know, I did go down this Dylan rabbit hole and I was in the car two days ago, fresh after coming, seeing the new biopic.

Complete Unknown. And I got into a conversation with ChatGPT. And by the way, it was a natural sounding, you know, kind of learned British female who was helping me out. And it was totally natural. And we went through a bunch of Bob Dylan songs together and deconstructed the lyrics, talked about the critical response to the song at the time and what Dylan was thinking, if anybody knew and all of this. And it was like, it was like,

you know, it wasn't me reading a review of Highway 61, you know, on Rolling Stone. It was way better. It was way better because we were, we were kind of going through it together and there wasn't, you know, a,

a massive amount of knowledge on the AI side in terms of any question I wanted answered about the context of the song or the meaning of the lyrics. And then I could kind of direct it the way I wanted. And I found it to be an extremely satisfying media experience.

It'll be one of many, right? Like, I mean, sometimes you want just the package, like a complete unknown was packaged for you. And did you want to interact with it, like, and change the characters? I did afterwards. But it's important, Brian, to understand, first of all, the thing Troy is talking about, I recommend everybody do it. I do it all the time when I'm stuck in traffic. The fact that we can talk nonchalantly about

about the fact that we can have conversations with computers about Bob Dylan, I think we've all gone slightly insane because I do the same thing. It's this incredible technology. It's such a huge leap to where we were five years ago. And if you haven't tried it out yet, what are you doing? Go back onto your rock. The thing I think when we have to shift that mindset, and I don't have a fully fleshed out idea of this, but here's the thing we're dealing with here.

You used to have to go to a place to get your news. And then because you had a captive audience that went to your front page or opened up your newspaper or turned on the TV, you would package that and try to capture their attention for a long time because that was the behavior. Then the behavior went, you open Instagram to see what your friends are doing. And now we can show you some other content in that feed. Or you go to Twitter to see, you know, in which way the world is burning. And then you would get that feed.

There's a new behavior now, which is, and I don't know, and maybe it goes, you know, it's the fact that it still starts from some sort of prompt. It will start, a lot of people's mornings are going to go, hey, what's happening today?

Or tell me the news. Or, hey, just give me some good news today. Or, hey, tell me what's happening in my neighborhood. This amount of choice is not something people had because in the morning they would wake up and they would say, I want to know what's happening. I would type cnn.com. That was what they had access to. When you give people access to a very simple prompt, it doesn't require a lot of work.

to ask the computer something, it changes the feed you get back. It might mean that, you know, it is some sort of algorithmic feed. It will be perhaps tailored. It might display itself in all sorts of ways. It might generate into a podcast. It might generate into a little clip show that you can watch on YouTube. It might do all sorts of things.

But that changes things. And it all starts from this, what we're calling the chat interface. But what I'm talking about more is this conversational UI. What having a conversational interface changes in your daily behaviors. And so you need to kind of pop yourself out of that mindset that you have to go somewhere.

Does this come at the expense of feeds? We're going to go in on 20 years of feeds, basically. I trace it back to-- I don't really count search. But to me, news feed-- when Facebook went to the news feed in 2006,

that really set off feeds dominating the digital media experience. And they're incredibly inefficient. It's interesting to me because there's so much friction in feeds. You're wading through a mass of information. And for all the power of algorithms, I've spent a disturbing amount of time on X lately, which I want to talk about.

And you're just wading through a bunch of just raw information to find really good things. And to me, feeds are incredibly inefficient. And I think we'll look back on them and be like, that's really strange. This is how we mostly access the information. Yeah. I do want to learn more about your ex-obsession, whether it's just kind of misplaced fourierism or it's self-hate or whatever. What is going on with that? It's menthol cigarettes. Do you talk to your wife about this?

I give her highlights. I was like, do you know what's going on now about the H-1B fight? Do you know about the fog? It's like, I've spent a lot of time, I've changed my opinion on X completely from a year ago. Like, it is a significant and

possibly the most important singular actor, I think, in the information space. It is already changing political debates. We saw the spending bill get tanked just through X. This H-1B debate, were you up on this over the holidays, or did you sit this one out? No, I watched it unfold. So the VAC Ramaswamy, the guy who's also doing Doge with Elon Musk,

He really set it off with basically a very straightforward post saying that, you know, Americans don't want to work as hard as people coming to this country under different visas. And it really set off a kind of interesting debate over not just the H-1B program, I feel like, but this underlying precarity, I guess, that a lot of

sort of middle class to upper middle class Americans feel at this time? Because I think it all relates to the war on middle management that we've been talking about and how safe careers are not safe anymore. And that's going to continue to be the case. You can, quote unquote, do all the right things and

you still aren't guaranteed what a lot of people think they deserve, which is the same living standards, if not much higher than their parents. If that's entitlement, I think that that's a common feeling of entitlement. But it was fascinating to watch it unfold on Twitter and the different directions that the debate took place. And then you flip over to legacy mainstream packaged media, and it's sort of, they're irrelevant to this very important debate that's taking place. To me, it's

it's indicative of, it's not going to be on every issue, but that is a real sign of the loss of influence and where it's going towards. I'm going to pause while Alex jumps in here for a second. Did you see any of this? Was this on threads? The H1B stuff? It was on threads. It's hard for me to calculate the value of X there because I think...

X feels just like italics that Ramaswami put out, and then it became something else. And the conversation was happening everywhere. I feel like really the social network of choice is the one that has the best algorithm. I find that my algorithm on X is a mess, and my algorithm on threads is slightly better.

And I think, you know, mileage may vary, right? You know, as an aside, like, Ramaswamy, like, we think all these people are so intelligent, but damn, that was a stupid thing to say. You guys are too dumb and lazy to get the good jobs, so we're still going to get the... We're going to get the type of immigration that gets the high-paid jobs, right? Yeah.

Well, again, I keep going back to, we never had the debates about globalization really that we should have because the people who are being affected were mostly blue collar workers and not like the quote unquote knowledge workers, a lot laptop class. And now, oh, we want to have these debates. We want to have them very much so because AI is coming for these comfortable jobs. It's not coming for plumber's jobs.

AI is coming for software engineers. It's coming for accountants. It's going to come for lawyers. Well, for sure. But it's also interesting because the H-1B, there are challenges with the H-1B. And it started a conversation in most people. Were you guys H-1B people? I was an H-1B. That's how I came in. Okay.

Troy, declare your status. Were you an O-1? Troy was an O-1. I was an L visa. I was an executive transplant. Loser visa? They felt sorry for you?

But it was the same. It's the same idea. I got a couple of questions here, if you don't mind. And one of them is just a straightforward, like what, who replaced all the journalists on X and why do we need to go there? And what is the source of, what is the real value proposition inside of there? I actually disagree with Alex. I think the, the algorithm is important, but what's more important is, is the source who who's participating. Yeah.

And so, you know, one of the interesting things about this, you know, the H1B debate is when these enterprising sort of, you know, independent data analysts went out for free and started trying to get all the facts, right? Deconstructing who gets H1Bs and how many are there and where they're coming from and all of that. And, you know, that's a kind of journalistic function that was replaced by the commons. Yeah. And it wasn't perfect. There was a lot of like bad screen grabs out there and...

Yeah. So are journalists lurking on X? Are the libs lurking? I don't understand what I mean. The stuff just comes out. Somebody makes a post and the conversation happens everywhere. If you're paying attention to media across the board, a lot of people have replaced their X feed with blue sky feeds. It is a thing. It's happening across a culture like a lot of...

movie sites that I read and stuff like that. There's a lot of competition. I think it doesn't matter where the message goes out because the algorithm ecosystem will make it that if you're somebody big enough, that message will come out. Like,

Ramaswamy could have posted this on MySpace and it would have made the news. You guys are completely trying to validate something that you're addicted to. There's no reason for it to exist. Okay, that is absolutely very good. If it disappeared tomorrow, nothing would change. Are you on MySpace? I could be. I think it was bought by an ad network. Specific media. Which is now Viant, I think. Yeah, it's Viant. It's the Vanderhoek brothers. Okay.

Okay, but so we don't know. Something's going on in X.

Brian's going to, in 25, we're going to keep asking you questions about it. The most interesting thing was the cracks showing up in the right-wing media ecosystem where like Bannon is still, Bannon has completely split off. And to think, I'm so surprised that this alliance didn't last. But Bannon is smart enough to know that his value proposition is anger and fear and

that if he gives up his kind of high priest role to Elon, he loses a huge amount of influence. So he has to fight Elon. I mean, he went to jail.

Yeah, I wonder what all the, you know, every kind of edge of that ecosystem, and I include the all-in podcast and that is going to do now that they're no longer the ones that are, you know, the silenced by the elite ones, and they're very much the ones in power. I think that's where the cracks are going to show. So we're going to see, it's going to be interesting to see where they all like fall into. That's going to be a fun time to watch that.

Yeah, it was a good tangent that when it veered into the jocks versus the nerds. I mean, that was the heart of Ramaswamy's cultural critique. The ring saved by the bell, you got to be more like Screech and less like... Yeah. I mean, that must have been music to your ears. I think, guys, I don't know, but I think somebody got bullied.

Yeah. I think, I think somebody is driven by memories of bullying. Let's talk about advertising. Well, just before we close this off, there is one other one. And, and often the line is, you know, there, there is Alex, you're, you're big on this, which is the disparity in income, which, you know, is undoubtedly an issue in our society. Um,

But there is, and I think that there is a large group of folks for whom actually the economy is, you know, giving them more than it used to give, say, my parents.

But, you know, I reflect on it. And I think that the thing I keep disagreeing with you is people don't compare their lives. They don't compare their lives to their parents' lives. They compare their lives to the person they see on Instagram. And the wealth disparity has become insane. And people's expectations are different. Yeah, I just think it's going to mess up. Technically, they live better. It doesn't feel better. We lived in a city that was radically less expensive than the places where

you know, young professionals want to congregate today. Everybody moved to the coast and got caught. And there's a massive housing crisis.

around affordability of housing, which is, you know, extremely concerning for, you know, 30 year olds that want to have a family or buy a house. But there's another one, which is when I was a kid, we never had $35 cocktails, Alex. We never went out and had $300 brunches. We just didn't do that kind of thing. Yeah. Did you know that this is a Forbes study that

According to a Forbes study, Gen Z respondents said they need an annual salary of $587,000 and a net worth of $10 million to be considered financially successful. Wow.

You guys are getting pretty close to telling millennials to stop drinking latte so that they can look for a house. I know, not at all. We are, yes. And we are also saying that median wages have gone up significantly. Yeah, but you still can't buy a house, so who gives a shit? Yeah.

Like nobody wants to have chips. There's a sports bar near me that has a, that they just got, it was like a normal, it's called Shuckers. It was like on the, on the bay, but then it got bought up by some private equity goons or something. And they reopened it as like the Palm Club. And it's basically the same thing, but now they have a chicken tenders tower for, for $98.

that they're selling. Everybody wants to do it. That's a good prediction for 25 is towers. Towers are the new power move. Towers are essentially the bundling of food.

So that's going to happen everywhere. Poo-poo platter was the original. That was the height of luxury in the 90s. We cannot undermine the wealth disparity that when you see somebody spending the same on a cocktail that somebody else needs to buy an entire meal for the family, or when people are constantly getting ruined because they just get sick.

Or, you know, they can't afford a house where they're working three jobs when people are telling them, but the economy is great. Like that stuff's not going away. Like you can't tell people how they should. Well, that's what the culture war ends up getting replaced by class wars. I mean, it's a complimented, but I think the class wars become. I'm here for the culture world turning into a class war. That's what it needs to happen. Some good old revolution stuff. Security. Security.

Hold it, hold it, hold it. We skated by a very important summary for 24, which was we had a nice People vs. Algorithms Christmas event, and we did have Seafood Towers, actually.

We had seafood towers that had shrimp and oysters. And it turns out I called my friend Vivek afterwards and I said, I'm not feeling well. And I called Brian. No, different Vivek. Different Vivek. And he said, I'm sick as a dog. Brian said, I'm completely incapacitated. It changed my organism. It changed my organism. It was seven days for me. Seven days of hell.

So you mean you poisoned people with the seafood tower at the first event that we threw? I'm so happy I wasn't there. It was a fitting way to end the year of media. It was a very fitting way. So I think the listeners should understand that if they don't see me on the ticket to stay away,

Because it likely leads to vomiting. It was a nice event, Alex. And there was a nice crudo and some steak. And it was good. And it turns out that... There should have been less crudo and more cocoa. No, but one thing is that I wanted to send out a group email and find out who... And just a few people got sick. Not everybody. Just a few. Okay, great.

right? Because there was this oyster, a lot of people got sick from oysters in December. It's like it's a norovirus thing. I just want to be, I mean, you guys just accelerated the decline of media just a little bit. It's nice to have a part in it. We're just taking people out in the business time of the year. But happy new year to both of you. We didn't say that. It's like it's 2025.

It started with a bang, as we saw. So can we talk about advertising, important things like advertising? Oh, yeah. Are we still going to talk about advertising in 2025? Isn't it over yet? Well, that's the thing. So I watched the Perplexity CEO, Aravind Srinivas. He had this interesting video. I mean, I've seen these kind of things from tech people a lot. So I sort of take it like with a grain of salt.

But it was about advertising and sort of how he is seeing advertising and that it would increasingly move to advertising not to people, but to agents. And basically advertising will actually see less advertising, but there'll be more advertising in which the persuasion is going to move to trying to persuade agents. Right. It's like saying we're going to go to war, but no one's going to get hurt. Just the robots.

Yeah. I mean, this is very attractive. I don't believe that's ever the case. Anytime anyone says there's going to be less advertising, I've noticed there always becomes more advertising. No, it's just such a great way to make money. And it's like the grease that fuels capitalism, right? You know, everybody wants a new product to be...

But it's, I mean, it's just, I think it's going to be less noticeable as advertising. You know, I think what we've noticed is the slow transition from advertising being so obvious, right? Where you just, you know, you had the soap opera stars singing out the brands to it.

getting into your feed. And now it's just so integrated to our daily content habits that we don't even notice that a lot of it is advertising. And when it turns to AI, it's going to be like really impossible to kind of discern what's advertising and what's not and how you kind of

tweak the results so that your stuff gets 3% more than the other stuff when somebody asks which car they should buy. And did you see that Meta is planning on really going hard into basically having AI characters on all their platforms? So I think when we talk about influencers, I still don't-- I mean, I have no idea. I'm sure some people will.

I think it's still going to be a very niche behavior to have virtual friends for a while. And following AI influencers is the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Well, let's stick to advertising for a second because Alex, I know how you feel and I understand how you feel. What about advertising? Why is Alex anti-advertising? He's not. I've known Alex for a long time. It's fine. Guys, I'm not saying the world's going to exist without it, but come on. Nobody likes advertising.

Dude, to connect advertising to capitalism as its downfall. I mean, are you a fucking communist? Like, what is going on here? Like, what is the Greece that you want to have in a system where people... No, I'm being honest. I understand that capitalism greases the wheel to make sure that the whole system works. And...

I, you know, I'm not anti-capitalist, but I don't like advertising and I don't think anybody does. Well, you're more, you're more anti-capitalist than you were before you got rich, which is a nice sentiment, but I was, I was always, that is the best way. Okay. But let me, let me just focus on advertising for a second. I'm sorry. You can have the soapbox in a minute, Alex. I got to tell you, you know, your, your boy, Jason Zada, who I don't know.

Who got some attention. He was the ECD at EVB. They made great microsites. Okay. So Google comes out with, what is it, Alex? VO2, VO1, it's VO2. VO2. Which is their video rendering, AI rendering, generative AI rendering thing. And it quickly surpasses, is it Sora, which is open AIs? Yeah.

Then Jason comes out with two videos that show its potential in quick succession. The first was called Fade Out. No, the first was called The Heist and the next was called Fade Out. One was more character driven. And they showed you that

oh my God, you can make stuff with like object permanence, with kind of logical gravity, with kind of tonal consistency. And they look incredible. They're just like incredible short films made with prompts and editing. Obviously there's a lot of editing in it still. And you look at that and you're like,

There is no way, and it'll start with the Super Bowl, but that's a little early in the year, that the creative process and the versioning process in the ad world is just not completely upended very quickly by AI video content production. It's just impossible that it won't be. We haven't really known how to use the tools yet because I don't think anybody's made something that's truly compelling outside of the fact that it's AI-generated.

I think what we're going to see is those, those examples are pretty, pretty compelling. And you know that every time there's, I think you wouldn't, you wouldn't watch them if you, yeah, but artists will make that video. The artists always figure out how to use it in different ways. But then when, when I push Brian on this this morning, he said to me, well, you know,

Even, you know, a lot of advertising agency work is unsexy versioning and busy work. And, you know, even though BBDO may not have a future making million dollar AT&T spots, there is still the need to create spectacle to which he then starts talking about the Pop-Tart Bowl. Did you see it, Alex?

No. Okay. So what is the Pop-Tart Bowl? It's a minor. It's not one of the big college football bowls, which are the end of the season championships. They have championships now. But these are the traditional bowl games in which two successful teams play.

battle it out neutral site and usually they have some kind of like theme it's like kind of a relic of the past like the rose bowl right or the orange rose bowl but then it became like more commercialized because it's america and they became like the tostitos fiesta bowl etc and so they're like okay let's go hard so the pop tarts bowl happened and the game itself was okay did they did the characters fly out of toasters and stuff did they do any acrobatics

So, yeah, the trophy was an actual, quote-unquote, working toaster in which I think it was a strawberry Pop-Tart got shoved into the toaster and then out popped an edible version of the Pop-Tart. I mean, edible includes its Pop-Tarts.

Yes, the entire thing was pure, pure spectacle. And so I think of that as it's a positive for advertising becoming creative again. Because when programmatic came about, I can remember going to an early programmatic conference, which I would not wish on my worst enemy. But all of a sudden, they started, they were talking data, data, data. And then finally, some guy was like, you know, the biggest driver of performance is

is creative. I was like, finally, someone's going to talk about creative. And he started talking about the punch the monkey ads and how they like tested like 9,000 versions of punching the monkey. And, you know, advertising creativity has been kind of relegated to, you

you know, sidelight in this era of like hyper-targeting. So I'm for bringing back advertising creativity in the form of the podcast. I mean, I think we're talking about like creativity across every sector that's been touched by tech has been sidelined by marketing.

by data. I mean, even down to the way oftentimes shows are selected on these streaming networks, down to the way products are built in technology, everything has been turned into an experiment. And advertising has just seen the most dramatic change of that. So I'm really happy to see if the whole thing kind of

kind of collapses on itself that the true differentiator is just going to be people having good ideas. I got to know Jason because he created Elf Yourself. I mean, I'm sure at Organic, you guys were very jealous of Elf Yourself. Iconic microsite. Iconic. Alex used to make Elf things, right?

Well, we did something similar that was quite popular. Like upload your face? We got to know also the folks at JibJab, right? So JibJab, they're like the heels of this thing. They were like the villains because they ended up... There was this legal battle with Elf Yourself.

I wrote a lot of stories about it. I think Alpha Yourself was very, very, very derivative of the JibJab stuff. I don't know. They were like patent trolls. That's what Jason will tell you. We got patent trolled by somebody that wasn't JibJab on one of our things where they said that they owned the copyright of cutting a face out and putting it on something else. So that was good times. But yeah, I think I hope that we see creativity and just human ideas take up

you know, a bigger role in the way things are successful. I don't know if a Poptide trophy is the best example of that, but, you know, we'll see. It was all through the game. Look, it spawned memes. I think what you want is you want to

I think what you want is you want to have this act as almost like a prompt for people to take it over themselves. I mean, it's the same thing as the complete unknown press tour. You just want to create some sort of mimetic energy that you put out into all the algorithms so people talk about you. And if they're talking about you as Timothee Chalamet or Tostitos, then you're good. You're golden. That's the way to do it.

And being kind of mimetic and being kind of in the moment is, I think, is a creative act. And I think we're just going to have to take more risks. Like we need a Rick Rubin of advertising. Somebody to just, you know. There's a lot of Rick Rubins in advertising. A lot of people that look like Rick Rubin. People that don't play an instrument, don't know anything. Don't know what they're doing. They just sit around and just nod. Yes, this is mostly. I like what you did here. Bring me something else. Yeah.

Troy, I would say, was the Rick Rubin of advertising before Rick Rubin. God, I wish. I think that's all I have. Well, we can go to... Oh, good product. I hope you're going to start off the year strong with a good, good product.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is AI Chat is a massively good product, I think. And I think Alex is right about that. He's been right all along. The next thing that I would go to is something I know nothing about, which is a friend of mine was over on New Year's Eve and she said, you have to put this on your good product because it's a great product and I've never used it. It's called Resume. Do you use Resume? Yeah.

No. It's an app that sucks in all of your recipes and puts them into a standard format, which can't be good for the people that create recipes. They put that on themselves, though. What's that? Well, the fact that there is space for a product that exists to make your product not a nightmare to use is your own fault. And there's another product like that that I would... They were responding to the incentives that were set by Google. Google... Yeah, well... This is all Google's fault.

No, but Google was just responding to the incentives. I don't know. Everybody's responding to some incentives. They're all just creatures responding to the kind of ecosystem that is like capitalism. Nobody's doing anything wrong here. But if you're creating content, at the end of the day, you should learn the fact that you're just...

you know, bending the knee to Google and making a product that is crappy for your users is never going to end well. I think, I mean, that's the rule. Like at every step of the way, if you're making something that the users don't like, you're not going to last long because the people you're doing it for don't care about you and they're going to change their algorithm to make good things. I had one other one that I thought was cool. I like buying fragrances for my family at Christmas time.

But there's an arrogance to that, right? Because you have to select the fragrance for somebody and sort of say, you're going to like this and no one ever takes it back. And good ones are expensive. I think you might have done that one already. Did I do this one? Yeah. It actually inspired me to buy my wife's at present.

Did we do it last week? Is that what this has come to? Regurgitating? Oh my God. It did sound familiar. I gotta say. It's the Dries van Noten fragrance. Yes, you did. Yeah, we already did this. No, it's just that I wasn't prepared. And then I need to go. That was a real bummer. Sure. That's how you start the year.

By recycling old content. But Alex, before you go, was there anything that you got for Christmas from one of your family members or someone that you thought, this is a great product and very thoughtful? I got socks. That's thoughtful. Socks are a great product. We're buying ourselves a trip to Vegas. We kind of gave ourselves that with my wife. Family trip to Vegas? Not family. No. Just us two. Okay.

They're going to get a sphere? Trump Hotel. I don't know. I think that sphere is really dependent on who's playing. I don't know what's playing right now. But Vegas seems to be a good product. You've got a lot of different things to do. It's easy access from anywhere. It's a quintessential American product. As long as you just spend two days. That's what I like about Vegas. It's fully immersed. It is, well, maybe Dubai now. Yeah.

When it was like, this is a very American kind of thing. The best product for me was, and one of the greatest things I've seen in 2024, was the Waterworld stunt show at Universal Studios Hollywood. Now, if you see one thing, if you just go to that Universal stunt show, it is all practical effects done.

It's a big cast, people on fire, explosions, splashes, jet skis. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen. They're not doing that in France. No way. No, it's just incredible. They recreate it.

And also, if you want to rewatch Waterworld and give it another chance, I would recommend it. It is a great movie. It is a great movie. Kevin Costner is just hitting his middle-aged prime, just aging like a fine wine. That was infamous. It was the worst movie ever made. It was. And we were so mean to it, and we didn't know how good we had it.

Because that movie is fantastic. It moves. It's got great set pieces. I mean, the bad guys are called the smokers because they ride motor vehicles that use gas. And also they have a huge stockpile of cigarettes that they found on a cargo ship and they all smoke cigarettes. It's incredible. It's just, that's the movie you should be watching this year. Just, you'll thank me for it.

Waterworld came out in 1995. Yeah, I mean, you celebrate the, what is it, 30 years of Waterworld. Well, there you go. Thanks for saving my ass on that one, Alex. Perfect. Yeah. Good product. Well, you know, we're all getting older, so we have to look out for each other. Yeah.

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

If you're enjoying these conversations, we'd love for you to leave us a review. It helps us get the word out and keeps our community growing. Remember, you can find People vs. Algorithms on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and now on YouTube. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next week. All right. Thank you, everybody. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Thank you. Happy New Year.