Episode 115

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Published on:

3rd Jan 2025

The Information Space in 2025

This week, we discuss the outlook in 2025 for legacy media (not great), alternative media (much better), chat as a new media mode, X emerging as a critical power center, and culture wars morphing into class wars.

Transcript
Troy:

You guys have a nice break.

Brian:

A lovely break.

Brian:

I didn't do much for two weeks.

Alex:

I did a fair amount of traveling, went down to L.

Alex:

A.

Alex:

and, we went to the Magic Castle.

Troy:

That a drug

Alex:

No.

Brian:

Castle, isn't that Disneyland?

Alex:

No, no, the magic castle is this, place in LA.

Alex:

the whole place is kind of this old LA staple.

Alex:

Full of pictures of magicians and velvety curtains and different little rooms everywhere.

Alex:

And people are doing close up magic and there's like bars and everybody has to wear suits and stuff.

Brian:

Sounds like a drug thing.

Troy:

It is

Troy:

a drug

Alex:

I I hate magic.

Alex:

So I did, did feel

Brian:

That sounds like the right place for you.

Alex:

it was an interesting experience to be in, surrounded by it, immersed in it.

Troy:

It's hard to imagine that, Diplo is talking about doing acid on the CNN, New Year's, show.

Alex:

Yeah.

Alex:

Normalize it.

Alex:

That's good.

Alex:

I'm on acid right now.

Troy:

Yeah.

Brian:

one of the things I wanted to jump off with, and this is a broad

Brian:

question, but I mean it was one that we talked about basically all year.

Brian:

But heading into this year, I think one of the big questions is like, what are the growth paths for legacy media, traditional

Brian:

media, mainstream media, packaged media, whatever we want to talk about, right?

Brian:

Because we know all of the challenges and we've talked about ad nauseum on this podcast, and they're evident,

Brian:

but finding the growth paths is, is kind of hard to be honest with you.

Brian:

I want to be optimistic.

Brian:

The sun is out, it's almost 80 degrees, but, Troy, how are you seeing?

Brian:

I mean, is this going to be another year?

Brian:

Of, you know, basically managing decline or are there, are there

Brian:

new paths for growth that you see out there for the legacy business?

Brian:

Forget about the people who are starting from scratch because they're always going to have an advantage.

Troy:

You know, I asked, the inimitable Dylan Byers a similar question because,

Troy:

he likes to spend time documenting the fall of legacy media, CNN in particular.

Troy:

And it's an interesting story because it's such an important part of culture.

Troy:

But when asked about, you know, what, what kind of legacy media brands are

Troy:

making it through this transition with any kind of, you know, with.

Troy:

Real success or agility, you know, he points to the.

Troy:

He pointed to the New York times.

Troy:

And I think there's, there's a handful of brands that we can, that we, that we cite all the time that have done an okay job at

Troy:

creating a kind of new, their own gravity that works in the information space.

Troy:

And we, you know, some of them are news brands, right?

Troy:

There's like the FT and the wall street journal.

Troy:

And like I said, the New York times, and I think even Bloomberg.

Troy:

but for a lot of other brands, many of them.

Troy:

Either lifestyle brands or call it second tier or localized news brands.

Troy:

The, the journey is, is, is it's, it's pretty hard to see how there's going to be some same success in the future as

Troy:

there was in the past, unless of course you reinvent the business in a way that.

Troy:

Your core business is really different than what it used to be, right?

Troy:

Where your, your sort of media adjacent creation that you're making, whether your, your media brand becomes

Troy:

something that isn't about provisioning of content and selling access to the

Troy:

audience that it creates, you know, that you're not just sort of limping along.

Troy:

And I think that there's a lot of risks out there in 25.

Troy:

I think that, you know, Google is going to do things that are hard

Troy:

to predict that could disrupt distribution for a lot of folks.

Troy:

I think that.

Troy:

Programmatic advertising that provides, you know, a lot of, a lot of the money to, to companies that rely on

Troy:

digital is its future is, is it's not that it was going to go away.

Troy:

It's just that it's not as lucrative.

Troy:

I think that there's a lot of scrutiny on affiliate advertising of all kinds right now in terms of like

Troy:

how it's being gamed and how many people are competing to do a mattress review or to review a credit card.

Troy:

And then we have the subscription side of it, which is nice if you

Troy:

can get it, but it's, you know, it's just intensely competitive.

Troy:

And unless you have that kind of both unique content feed and a velocity around it that makes you just kind of

Troy:

undeniably important to somebody, I think subscription gets, you know, it is, it's pretty difficult to scale around.

Troy:

So anyway, you know, there's always going to be media businesses, there's always going to be packaged media.

Troy:

Some brands will squeak through, but in terms of vitality, a lot of the ones that

Troy:

we would, you know, that we know and love, are going to have a tough year, I think.

Alex:

challenge with subscription also is that we don't know what happens when

Alex:

subscriptions or we know what happens when subscriptions hit some sort of saturation.

Alex:

So, even if everybody we talked about managed to build a subscription business, it would make, that ecosystem would likely

Alex:

collapse because people have a limit to how many subscriptions they want to, they want to, you know, Pick up, right?

Alex:

I guess it's, it's, it's interesting to see that it's all our, the older news brands, we want to turn to subscriptions.

Alex:

I think there would still be a mess and everybody was open to subscribing to things that would still be a

Alex:

decline because I think there's kind of a limit per consumer, of how many things they could subscribe to.

Alex:

and, and so I think we're going to see consolidation there anyway.

Alex:

Right.

Alex:

Like

Alex:

I'm surprised we're not seeing

Brian:

right?

Brian:

Like, I mean, you should people want to news bundle.

Brian:

I mean, that's why Apple Apple news is actually pretty interesting

Alex:

But I see, I see more of that in 2025.

Alex:

Like the news, like New York times and, and, and the such might have

Alex:

their own subscription, but we're going to see a lot of bundling.

Alex:

I think I

Alex:

have either third party

Alex:

service.

Brian:

New York Times is going to be a bundler, right?

Brian:

They're going to bundle subscriptions from from other news sources.

Brian:

They have the escape velocity.

Brian:

there's that constant meme that there are games company, because, you know,

Brian:

I guess now the majority of time spent is not with their news products.

Brian:

It's with games.

Brian:

It's with cooking.

Brian:

It's with wire cutter.

Alex:

We'll see them with things like stop stack and and Patreon too, because we're already hearing of people having way too

Alex:

many little 4 or 5 dollar subscriptions popping up here and there and there needs to be bundling in that space too.

Alex:

So, so that's, that's a trend that I see emerging and I think we'll see a lot of startups around that.

Brian:

okay.

Brian:

How about alternative media?

Brian:

I don't know what to call this.

Brian:

this media.

Brian:

I mean, I think because of the election in particular, in the, in the focus, given to the manosphere and the various

Brian:

permutations of it, more money is going to flood, not flood, but it's going to flow towards this, right?

Brian:

There's a lot of pressure already, a political pressure on, On ad agencies about how they, portion their budgets and

Alex:

No.

Brian:

I think that there's going to be more people who are going to, more money is going to go towards this, this area.

Brian:

What I'm interested in is whether we see brands emerge out of this.

Brian:

And I think we see the makings of it with the free press and daily wire, on, on the right side.

Brian:

but I think other brands are, are emerging.

Brian:

I mean, I've been following, do you guys know, like drop site news?

Troy:

I don't know it, but Alex should know it.

Brian:

Yeah, this is up your alley, Alex.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

It's like, yeah,

Troy:

li li It's the liberal equivalent of like, you know, the free press

Alex:

okay.

Alex:

It's anti

Alex:

racism.

Brian:

I believe it is.

Brian:

they do good stuff.

Alex:

no, I'm, I'm sure.

Alex:

I mean, I'm sure there's, there's, there's interesting brands.

Alex:

Okay.

Alex:

Often every day, and there's going to be more, but once again, that's also consolidation, right?

Alex:

That's also kind of.

Alex:

Creatives getting together to try to create networks of people.

Alex:

Is that is that what that looks like to you?

Alex:

Because that's what the, daily caller

Alex:

is, essentially.

Troy:

yeah.

Troy:

I mean the people that have found.

Troy:

let's call it, would you say escape velocity, Brian, on in the kind of alternative universe, I think did it most

Troy:

meaningfully on the back of large, large, surprisingly large subscription bases.

Troy:

So the free press hit a million, which is a big number.

Troy:

and then, And, you know, people throw around the 200 million revenue number for the daily wire and they

Troy:

got out of the gates early to kind of soak up, you know, kind of right

Troy:

wing appetite for, for part of the spectrum that wasn't being served well,

Brian:

remarkable, by the way, if they have a 200 million business, like I do not like immerse myself in that

Brian:

much of the Daily Wire content, but I do enough, like their advertiser base is like, it's pretty, it's

Troy:

well, I, I think a lot of it is subs and there's a bunch of

Troy:

production revenue in there and some kind of like para immediate.

Alex:

Also shows that we should be selling more freeze, direct food on this.

Alex:

Podcast, because that's how we get.

Brian:

it's like really alarming.

Brian:

Like you listen to like a Ben Shapiro or watch one of those little Twitter videos,

Brian:

and then it's just like a seamlessly, he's like pitching some like prepper product.

Troy:

Yeah.

Troy:

So, so the, the, the point I was making though, guys, is that.

Troy:

With all of this sort of this wonderful, the wonderful, you

Troy:

know, kind of alternative media or it is wildly fragmented.

Troy:

And I think the hardest thing for emerging talent there is how do you, how do you build the.

Troy:

You know, and it's infrastructure to trap ad dollars because it's takes a lot of people and a lot of work

Troy:

to, to go get that money, Brian, you know, that better than anyone,

Brian:

I do.

Brian:

I do.

Troy:

you call it

Troy:

a services business,

Brian:

it is

Brian:

a

Alex:

isn't there, isn't there, isn't there a middleman business

Troy:

yeah, there's a middleman business, one that, one that you and I know very well, Alex, and it, it's federated media

Troy:

or say media or something like that, or people that put together podcasts networks

Alex:

coming back, baby.

Alex:

We were too

Brian:

Everything, everything always comes back to an ad network at the end of the day.

Brian:

People keep trying to invent all kinds of things.

Brian:

No, we're going to make it like NASDAQ and everything.

Brian:

And then it's just, it's like, you know what?

Brian:

No, let's just make it an ad network.

Troy:

the most shocking thing there that someone was telling me from a senior executive at a holding

Troy:

company was telling me that, That retail media has this kind of strong kind of perversional as I word, um,

Brian:

It is now.

Troy:

pressure where if you're a scaled retailer and you don't have a retail media network, then.

Troy:

It's harder for you to compete because you need that those easy profits to lower your prices on your core goods.

Troy:

So you can't compete as a retailer without having a way to trap the attention dollars and profit from that.

Troy:

And then retail media networks.

Troy:

run out of kind of surface area to advertise on because there's only so much volume on the places that where

Troy:

they sell, where you can run media and they become essentially this kind of ad network all over again.

Troy:

They become the data provider on top of, you know, local media or

Troy:

anybody else that doesn't have consumption signal to sell their media.

Troy:

It's interesting.

Brian:

I kind of hate retail media.

Troy:

Why would you say something like that?

Brian:

Because it's like, if you look at like, it makes the products worse.

Brian:

Like it's literally, it's, it introduces like all the bad incentives

Brian:

that have defined digital media into the commerce experience.

Brian:

I mean, Amazon's gone from like being it's intense customer focus wade through Amazon these days.

Brian:

It's, it's a disaster.

Brian:

These feeds are a disaster.

Brian:

Everything is sponsored.

Brian:

You can't believe any reviews.

Brian:

I mean, I used to just get the, like the most popular or

Troy:

It does create a lot of weird behaviors.

Troy:

The honey scandal is an example of this by the way, if you're familiar with that.

Alex:

Do you want to, do you want to go

Troy:

I'll tell you what I know

Brian:

Honey

Brian:

is a great company.

Brian:

It's a, it's a great example of this last

Troy:

Okay.

Troy:

So, so honey was a, it was a Chrome extension that would find discount codes and it would pop up when you

Troy:

were on the transactional part of any e commerce experience that you were going through and it would find coupon codes

Troy:

for you and their installed base was so enormous that the company sold for More than, I think a couple billion dollars.

Troy:

I don't know the exact number, Brian, maybe you can, maybe you

Troy:

know, but, I'm, I'm on YouTube yesterday and I see that, Marcus,

Alex:

Marcus Brownlee

Troy:

Marcus Brownlee has done a video,

Brian:

like 4 billion, by the way, January, 2020.

Troy:

four billion dollars.

Troy:

so Marcus has done a sort of honey hate video.

Troy:

He's taken the time to create a video about why honey sucks so bad.

Troy:

Turns out that honey's done two things that are kind of gnarly.

Troy:

And part of this kind of perverse incentive thing that you just described.

Troy:

The first is, is that they sponsored hundreds of YouTube creators and what they were doing.

Troy:

Thousands.

Troy:

And

Alex:

podcasters thousands.

Alex:

Yeah.

Alex:

Yeah.

Troy:

okay, thousands.

Troy:

And what they were doing is essentially hijacking the affiliate codes that all the people put on their videos.

Troy:

So the way that Honey works is because they're the last stop

Troy:

before a transaction, they take the affiliate revenue with their code.

Troy:

So they were taking,

Alex:

that is not the promise of the product.

Alex:

And it's any affiliate code that runs through your browser.

Troy:

right.

Troy:

So they were stealing the affiliate code without telling the creators.

Troy:

The

Alex:

So they pissed off

Troy:

that the

Troy:

so the, the core business model is also kind of insane.

Troy:

It's a shakedown.

Troy:

And essentially what they do is they go to retailers and they say, if you don't pay me essentially, and give

Troy:

me a 5 percent discount code, I will surface all of the higher percentage discount codes to my audience.

Troy:

And.

Troy:

If you're Bed Bath Beyond or whatever, I'll give them a 20 percent coupon code.

Troy:

But if you pay me, I'll automatically insert the 5 percent coupon code that you gave me.

Troy:

So, the Shakedown is, you know, prevent discounting

Brian:

protection racket,

Troy:

it's a

Brian:

I mean,

Brian:

this is a core digital business model, isn't it?

Alex:

Yes.

Alex:

But the, the, the big mistake here is that the protection record usually serves somebody.

Alex:

But in this case, they pissed off the creators by taking away their affiliate revenue.

Alex:

They pissed off the stores because all the stores hated them.

Alex:

And then they managed to.

Alex:

Rip off the customers by giving them the worst discount code.

Alex:

So nobody can, nobody, yeah.

Alex:

At least, the rule of a protection racket is make somebody happy.

Alex:

Right?

Alex:

Right?

Troy:

they made the, you know, they made, they made the, the people that sold honey to PayPal

Brian:

Well,

Brian:

I don't know.

Brian:

Protection rackets, usually only the, only the, the momsters are

Brian:

like getting any benefit out of protection rackets, aren't they?

Brian:

But I mean, like, look, to me, it's like, The, the, like Google deciding that it was going to sell ads on branded

Brian:

keywords, that's basically when it went over into the protection racket business.

Brian:

It's like people are putting your brand into our search engine.

Brian:

Okay.

Brian:

This is not a hard problem to

Brian:

solve as a

Brian:

search engine.

Brian:

And they just decided, no, we're going to sell ads against that.

Brian:

If you don't want to pay, we're going to sell it to your competitors.

Alex:

Yeah,

Alex:

and not only that, they, they, they also created a browser that allowed people to just put the brand into

Alex:

the search and it would take you to whatever the 1st search result was.

Alex:

Right?

Alex:

So, it, it, it, it, yeah, it's a very similar situation.

Brian:

I mean, MySpace used to do this.

Brian:

They used to say, look, put, set up your page.

Brian:

No problem.

Brian:

Wendy's everything.

Brian:

Everything's free.

Brian:

we're going to sell ads to Burger King unless you like, cut the check.

Brian:

it's up to

Troy:

We used to do it.

Troy:

We used to do it with car and driver and our automotive network at Hearst that I ran.

Troy:

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

Troy:

first dibs to buy their page and quickly go over to BMW and sell them that page.

Troy:

It's a nice, it's a nice ad strategy or a sales

Brian:

let's just say, how would you execute on that?

Brian:

Like with like, say webinars, like, is there a way I'm just curious.

Troy:

Well, first you have to have a little bit of market power.

Alex:

That's a, maybe that's why the

Brian:

The webinar market is like fiercely

Brian:

competitive,

Alex:

it's the last remaining truly honest

Brian:

it

Brian:

is, it's an

Brian:

honest

Alex:

person.

Alex:

If an honest person,

Troy:

Okay.

Troy:

So we got the honey, we got the honey thing.

Troy:

where do you want to go next?

Troy:

Brian, do you want

Brian:

I want to talk about, I want to bring in our friend AI, cause I think 2024 was probably the year of AI chat.

Brian:

I think we're going overboard on the chat stuff personally, cause I think agents.

Brian:

In quotes are going to replace chat as, as the big thing in AI.

Brian:

I think that the initial, the initial agents are going to be underwhelming probably, but that's to be expected.

Brian:

Alex, what are you?

Brian:

What are you seeing?

Brian:

in 2025 is a big theme when it

Brian:

comes to AI.

Alex:

If we talk about chat, we're talking about this idea that I didn't design.

Alex:

We used to call like a few years ago when, when we started discussing it, it was like conversational UI, which

Alex:

meant that the interface was no longer just a series of buttons and clicks, but something you could have a conversation

Alex:

to, and sometimes it might surface, buttons or a row of text or table.

Alex:

but the main thing was that, this concept that human beings, like to converse with things.

Alex:

And oftentimes the best searches or the best way to do an action is a series of, you know, back and forth.

Alex:

Right.

Alex:

I don't think that's going away.

Alex:

I think we've moved into, we've had an interface shift the same way we've

Alex:

moved into touch and we're moving towards a more conversational age.

Alex:

Now, it's not going to be everything becomes a conversation, but we're already seeing.

Alex:

You know, at the end of 2024, a lot of these services like perplexity or open AI starting to be a lot smarter

Alex:

with the way that conversation goes, you know, like it asked it to come

Alex:

up with with flights or something and gave me a table, it'll add buttons.

Alex:

So I think the conversational UI isn't going anywhere.

Alex:

I think there's going to be a doubling down in devices that you can put into your home.

Alex:

Like, we had this.

Alex:

Like, you know, the Alexa stuff and stuff like that's not going away.

Alex:

In fact, I mean, we're hearing that Apple is going to invest a ton of

Alex:

money in building little screens that you can put on your kitchen counter.

Alex:

And that's also that you can have conversations with, with Siri.

Alex:

So, so that's going to be the interface.

Alex:

and the agents are going to run through that, And so, and, and, and I think the most important thing, especially

Alex:

when we're in media, is to think about what the future interfaces and that's

Alex:

going to be the way we, interact, not with all, but with a lot of both.

Alex:

Utility and content that we access from a computer is going to be some sort of conversational either typing or talking.

Alex:

It's not going away.

Alex:

I think that that that

Brian:

I wouldn't say going away, I just, it seems like a lot of the

Brian:

chat interface has been putting a lot of the work on the user

Troy:

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.

Troy:

You don't wake up in the morning and say, you don't ask a question when

Troy:

you wake up, you want to read a feed of what's, what's important, right?

Troy:

You want to go to the newspaper, you want to, you want someone to have

Troy:

done some work for you to present you with the most important information.

Troy:

And so, you know, it's almost like turning chat inside out.

Troy:

The interesting thing about chat and AI is all of the infrastructure is there.

Troy:

You can just pump queries into it automatically.

Troy:

So when you start to see chat augmented with AI.

Troy:

You know, intelligent curation, then chat becomes feed.

Troy:

And when chat becomes feed, I think that those interfaces, and I think

Troy:

the first group pointing to what the future looks like, there's perplexity.

Troy:

If you thought what happens if chat GPT becomes not just a chat bot, but a place where they're doing some

Troy:

of the work for me, it becomes a really interesting media interface.

Troy:

And I think

Troy:

that, that we've

Troy:

already seen.

Troy:

We're already seeing some of that, right?

Troy:

Like where Perplexity has said you can go into our Discover tab and we'll curate a bunch for you.

Troy:

And by the way, we'll also make a podcast feed and an email feed of the most important things for you.

Alex:

this is why Google is, is, is, and I've changed my mind about this, but like, I mean, 1 thing we

Alex:

are going to see is that there's going to be a lot more similarities between all of these models, right?

Alex:

And they're all going to be able to do pretty amazing thing.

Alex:

But Google is, Google is such a.

Alex:

An advantage because they have kind of the underlying technology and they have the browser for now, because if it's

Alex:

done through the browser, it's like the re the resurgence of the browser

Alex:

as the most important thing is kind of like something I didn't see coming.

Alex:

But if you have the browser, it doesn't matter if you're behind a paywall.

Alex:

It doesn't matter if you're anything, all of my stuff will be accessible by an agent and that agent doesn't

Alex:

even need to be that smart because I can wake up in the morning until.

Alex:

My, you know, Google assistant or whatever to tell me like, Hey, what's going on in Las Vegas?

Alex:

And I would go and up, up, up, up, up, and go and, and it goes like, Oh yeah, there's, you know, a

Alex:

cyber truck exploded over the Trump hotel in front of the Trump hotel.

Alex:

And here's what your new news sources are saying.

Alex:

Also, your favorite podcaster has an

Troy:

Well, just to be clear, it didn't explode.

Troy:

Alex.

Troy:

Someone detonated it.

Troy:

little, it's, there's a, there's

Alex:

we know, do we

Alex:

know

Alex:

that that was the way to start the year, like, that's like some, some Hollywood foreshadowing.

Brian:

but

Brian:

I do think like a lot of this, like there needs to be kind of like an information omotenashi, you know, of, of like, you

Brian:

know, the, the Japanese hospitality art where they anticipate your, your needs.

Brian:

Like,

Brian:

right now it's so passive and it's requiring people to do the.

Brian:

The driving themselves and to know the questions to ask it reminds me of like the early days of search where

Brian:

you had to know the Boolean logic to try to get the right results.

Brian:

And it was like, it's crazy to think about that of, like, putting in these, like,

Brian:

formulas, basically,

Troy:

You know, just this is a kind of Schleifer ism, but the now I've got his attention.

Troy:

The, the, you know, we've talked in, in 24, a lot about the importance of interactivity in media.

Troy:

And I do think we are seeing some new modalities.

Troy:

Look at me talking like a podcaster.

Troy:

the, because Alex, you know, I, I did go down this, this Dylan rabbit hole And I was in the car two days ago,

Troy:

fresh, after coming, seeing the new, the new biopic, complete unknown.

Troy:

And I got into a conversation with chat GPT.

Troy:

And by the way, it was a natural sounding, you know, kind of, learned

Troy:

British female who I, who was helping me out and it was totally natural.

Troy:

And we went through a bunch of Bob Dylan songs together and deconstructed the lyrics, talked to, talked about

Troy:

the critical response to the, to the song at the time and what Dylan was thinking, if anybody knew and all of this.

Troy:

And it was like, it was like, You know, it wasn't me reading a review of Highway 61, you know, on Rolling Stone.

Troy:

It was way better.

Troy:

It was

Troy:

way better because we were, we were kind of going through it together and there was an, you know, a massive

Troy:

amount of knowledge on the AI side in terms of any question I wanted answered about the context of the song.

Troy:

Or the meaning of the lyrics.

Troy:

And then I could kind of direct it the way I wanted it.

Troy:

And I found it to be a extremely satisfying media experience.

Brian:

it'll be 1 of many, right?

Brian:

Like, I mean, sometimes you want just the package, like, the complete, a complete unknown was, was packaged for you.

Brian:

And did you want to interact with it, like, and change the characters?

Alex:

Right, but it's, but it's, but it's important.

Alex:

Brian, to understand, first of all, the thing Troy is talking about, I recommend everybody do it.

Alex:

I do it all the time when I'm stuck in traffic.

Alex:

The fact that we can talk nonchalantly about, about the fact

Alex:

that we can have conversations with computers about Bob Dylan.

Alex:

Right.

Alex:

I think we've all gone slightly insane because I do the same thing.

Alex:

It's just incredible technology.

Alex:

It's like, it's, it's such a huge leap to where we

Alex:

were five years ago.

Alex:

and if you haven't tried it out yet, what are you doing?

Alex:

Go back onto your rock.

Alex:

the thing I think when we have to shift that mindset, and I don't have a fully

Alex:

fleshed out idea of this, but here's the, here's the thing we're dealing with here.

Alex:

You used to have to go to a place to get your news.

Alex:

Because you had a captive audience that went to your front page or opened up your newspaper or turned on the

Alex:

TV, you would package that and try to capture their attention for a long, because that was the behavior.

Alex:

Then the behavior went, you open Instagram to see what your friends

Alex:

are doing, and now we can show you some other content in that feed.

Alex:

Or you go to Twitter to see, you know, in which way the world is burning, and then you would get that feed.

Alex:

There's a new behavior now, which is.

Alex:

and I don't know and maybe it goes, you know, it's the fact that It still starts from some sort of prompt.

Alex:

It will start, a lot of people's mornings are going to go, Hey, what's happening today?

Alex:

Or, tell me the news.

Alex:

Or, hey, just give me some good news today.

Alex:

Or, hey, tell me what's happening in my neighborhood.

Alex:

There's going to be, this amount of choice is not something people had, because in the morning they would wake

Alex:

up and they would say, I want to know what's happening, and would type cnn.

Alex:

com.

Alex:

That was what they had access to when you give people access to a very simple prompt.

Alex:

It's not, it doesn't require a lot of work, to ask the computer something.

Alex:

It changes the feed you get back.

Alex:

It might mean that, you know, it is some sort of algorithmic feed.

Alex:

It will be, Perhaps tailored it might display itself in all sorts of ways.

Alex:

It might generate into a podcast.

Alex:

It might generate into a little clip show that you can watch on YouTube.

Alex:

It might do all sorts of things that changes things and it all starts from this.

Alex:

What we're calling the chat interface.

Alex:

But it's what I'm talking about more is, is, is kind of this conversational you are what having.

Alex:

A conversational interface changes in your daily behaviors, and so you need to kind of

Troy:

know, talk yourself

Alex:

mindset that

Troy:

you had

Alex:

somewhere,

Brian:

Does This

Brian:

come at the expense

Brian:

of feeds?

Brian:

Like we're gonna going on 20 years of feeds, basically.

Brian:

I mean, I, I trace it back to, I don't really count search, but I like, to me

Brian:

newsfeed, you know, when Facebook went to a, the newsfeed in, in 2006, that.

Brian:

really set off feeds dominating like the digital media experience and they're, they're incredibly inefficient.

Brian:

It's interesting.

Brian:

to me because there's so much friction.

Brian:

In feeds, you're like waiting through a mass of information and for all the power of, of algorithms, I've spent a disturbing

Brian:

amount of time on X lately, which I want to talk about, and you're just waiting

Brian:

through a bunch of just raw information to find, you know, really good things.

Brian:

And to me, like, feeds are incredibly inefficient.

Brian:

And I think we'll look back on them and be like, that's really strange.

Brian:

This is how we mostly access information.

Troy:

Yeah.

Troy:

I do want to learn more about your ex obsession, whether it's

Troy:

just kind of misplaced voyeurism or

Troy:

it's self hate or what, what, what, what is going on with that?

Brian:

It's

Troy:

Do you talk to your, Do you talk to your, wife about this?

Brian:

She, I give her highlights.

Brian:

I was like, do you know what's going on now about the fight?

Brian:

Do you know about the fog?

Brian:

it's like, I've spent a lot of time.

Brian:

I've changed my opinion on X completely from from a year ago.

Brian:

Like, it is a significant and.

Brian:

Possibly the most important singular actor, I think, in, like, the information space.

Brian:

Like, it is, it is already changing, political debates, we saw the spending bill get tanked just through X, this

Brian:

H 1B debate, were, were you, were you up on this over the holidays or did you, did you sit this one out?

Troy:

no, I watched it.

Troy:

I watched it unfold.

Brian:

the VAC Ramaswamy, the guy who's also doing DOJ with, with Elon Musk, he really set it off with, basically

Brian:

a, a very straightforward post, saying that, you know, Americans don't want

Brian:

to work as hard as, people come into this country, under different visas.

Brian:

And it really set off.

Brian:

kind of interesting debate over, over not just the H1B program, I feel like, but this underlying precarity, I guess,

Brian:

that a lot of sort of middle class to upper middle class Americans feel at this time, because I think it all

Brian:

like relates to, you know, the war on middle management that we've been talking about and how safe careers.

Brian:

Are not safe anymore, and that's going to continue to be the case.

Brian:

You can

Brian:

quote, unquote, do all the right things and you still aren't guaranteed what a lot of people think they deserve, which

Brian:

is the same living standards, if not like much higher than their parents.

Brian:

If that's entitlement, I think that's a common feeling of entitlement.

Brian:

but it was fascinating to watch it unfold on Twitter in the different directions that, that the debate took place.

Brian:

And then you flip

Brian:

over to legacy mainstream packaged media and it's sort of, they're

Brian:

irrelevant to this very important debate that's taking place.

Brian:

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.

Brian:

and and and where it's going towards.

Troy:

pause while Alex jumps in here for a second.

Brian:

Did you see any of

Alex:

like, yeah, yeah,

Alex:

yeah, yeah.

Alex:

It was on threshold.

Alex:

it's hard for me to calculate the value of X there because I think X was it feels like just like a telix

Alex:

that Rama Swami put out and then it became something else and it did conversation with happening everywhere.

Alex:

feel like the Really the social network of choice is the one that has the best algorithm.

Alex:

I find that my algorithm on X is an is, is a mess, and my algorithm of threads is slightly better.

Alex:

and I think it, you know, mileage may vary, right?

Alex:

you know, as an aside, like Ramas Swami, like we think all these

Alex:

people are so intelligent, but damn, that was a stupid thing to say.

Alex:

You guys are too dumb and lazy to get the good job.

Alex:

So we're still going to get the, we're going to get the type of immigration and I guess the high paid jobs, right?

Brian:

Well, again, I

Brian:

keep going back to

Brian:

we never had the debates about globalization really that we should have because the people who are being

Brian:

affected were mostly blue collar workers and not like the quote unquote knowledge workers, a lot laptop class.

Brian:

And now, oh, we want to have these debates.

Brian:

We want to have them very much so because AI is coming for these comfortable jobs.

Brian:

It's not coming for plumbers jobs.

Brian:

AI is coming for software engineers.

Brian:

It's coming for accountants.

Brian:

It's going to come for, for lawyers.

Alex:

for sure, but it's, it's also, I mean, it's also interesting because the H1B, there are challenges, you

Alex:

know, with the H1B and it started a conversation and most people.

Brian:

were you guys H1B people?

Alex:

I was on H1B.

Alex:

That's how I came in.

Brian:

Okay.

Brian:

Troy,

Brian:

declare your status.

Brian:

Were

Brian:

you an O1?

Brian:

Troy was an O1.

Brian:

Yeah.

Alex:

loser visa, they

Troy:

but,

Troy:

but it was the same, it's the same

Troy:

idea.

Troy:

I got a couple of questions here, if, if you don't mind, and.

Troy:

One of them is just a straightforward, like what, who

Troy:

replaced all the journalists on X and why do we need to go there?

Troy:

And what is the source of what is the real value proposition inside of there?

Troy:

I actually disagree with Alex.

Troy:

I think the, the algorithm is important, but what's more important is, is the source who, who's participating.

Troy:

And so, you know, one of the interesting things about this, you know, the H1B debate is when these enterprising

Troy:

sort of, you know, independent data analysts went out for free and started trying to get all the facts, right?

Troy:

Deconstructing who gets H1Bs and how many are there and where they're coming from and all of that.

Troy:

And, you know, that's a kind of journalistic function that was replaced by the commons.

Brian:

And it wasn't perfect.

Brian:

There was a lot of like bad screen grabs out there and

Troy:

Yeah.

Troy:

So are journalists lurking on X?

Troy:

Are there, are the, are the libs

Alex:

But I don't understand what I mean is that the stuff just come the stuff just comes out.

Alex:

Somebody makes a post and the conversation happens everywhere.

Alex:

If you're paying attention to like media across the board, a lot of

Alex:

people have replaced their, you know, the X feed with, with blue sky feeds.

Alex:

It is a thing it's happening across like a culture, like a lot of movie sites that I, I read and stuff like that.

Alex:

There's a lot of competition.

Alex:

I don't think, I think like, it doesn't matter where the message goes out because like, there's a,

Alex:

the algorithm ecosystem will make it that if you're, you're somebody big enough, that message will come out.

Alex:

Like, Ramesh Wang, he could

Alex:

have

Alex:

posted, he could have posted this on MySpace and it would have made the news.

Alex:

Like you guys are like completely like trying to, to validate something that you're addicted to.

Alex:

That there's no

Brian:

that, that,

Alex:

If it

Alex:

disappeared tomorrow,

Brian:

good point.

Troy:

Is MySpace,

Alex:

would change.

Troy:

are you on MySpace?

Alex:

I could be,

Troy:

I think it was bought, it was bought by an ad network.

Brian:

specific media,

Troy:

Yeah.

Brian:

which

Brian:

is

Brian:

now Viant.

Brian:

I

Brian:

think.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

It's Viant.

Brian:

It's the Vanderhook brothers.

Troy:

Okay.

Troy:

But so, so we don't know.

Troy:

Some, something's going on on X.

Troy:

Brian's going to, in 25, keep asking you questions about

Alex:

The most interesting thing was the cracks showing up in the right wing media ecosystem where like, Bannon is still,

Brian:

Oh yeah.

Alex:

has completely

Alex:

split

Alex:

off.

Alex:

It's, And to think,

Brian:

But these kind of fights are great.

Brian:

They're

Troy:

Yeah,

Troy:

but Bannon is smart enough to know that his value proposition is anger and fear, that if he gives up his

Troy:

kind of high priest role to Elon, he loses a huge amount of influence.

Troy:

So he has to fight Elon.

Alex:

I

Alex:

even wonder what the all in guys yeah, I wonder what all you know, every kind of edge of that ecosystem, and I include

Alex:

the all in podcast, and that is going to do, now that they're no longer the ones that are, you know, the, the silenced, the

Alex:

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.

Alex:

So we're going to see, it's going to be interesting to see where they're all like.

Alex:

Fall into that's going to be a fun, fun, fun time to watch that,

Brian:

Yeah,

Brian:

it was a good tangent that, that, that when it veered into the jocks versus the nerds, I

Brian:

mean, that was the, the heart of Ramaswamy's

Alex:

Yeah.

Alex:

The, the ring saved by the bell.

Alex:

You got to be more like screeched and less like.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I mean, that must've been music to your ears, Alex, right?

Alex:

I don't know, but I think somebody got bullied

Alex:

when they were younger.

Alex:

Yeah.

Alex:

I think, I think somebody is driven by memories of bullying.

Brian:

let's talk about advertising

Troy:

Well, just before we close this off, there is one other one.

Troy:

And, and often the line is, you know, there, there is Alex, you're, you're big on this, which is.

Troy:

the disparity in income, which, you know, is undoubtedly an issue in our society.

Troy:

But there is, and I think that there is a large group of folks for whom actually

Troy:

the economy is, you know, giving them more than it used to give, say my parents.

Troy:

But, you know, I reflect

Alex:

That people compare, the thing I keep disagreeing with you is, people don't compare their lives, they don't compare

Alex:

their lives to their parents lives, they compare their lives to the person they see on Instagram, and the wealth disparity has

Alex:

become insane, and people's expectations are different, and so that even though

Troy:

up.

Alex:

live

Alex:

it doesn't

Troy:

We lived, we, you know, we lived in a city that was radically less expensive than, you know, the, the places

Troy:

where, you know, young professionals want to congregate today, everybody

Troy:

moved to the coast and got caught and there's a massive housing shortage.

Troy:

crisis around affordability of housing, which is, you know, extremely concerning

Troy:

for, you know, 30, 30 year olds that want to have a family or buy a house.

Troy:

But there's another one, which is when I was a kid, we never had 35 cocktails.

Troy:

Alex, we never went out and had 300 brunches.

Troy:

We just didn't do that kind of thing.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

Did you know that this is a Forbes study, that according to a Forbes study, Gen Z, respondents said they

Brian:

need an annual salary of 587, 000, and a net worth of 10 million to be considered financially successful.

Alex:

but you guys are getting pretty close to telling, to telling

Alex:

millennials to stop drinking lattes so that they can save

Brian:

I

Brian:

know.

Brian:

Not at all.

Troy:

we are.

Troy:

Yes.

Troy:

And

Brian:

597k

Brian:

is, is, it's good.

Troy:

wages have gone up significantly,

Alex:

yeah, but you still can't buy a house, so who gives a shit

Brian:

Yeah,

Alex:

Like nobody

Alex:

wants

Brian:

there's a, there's a sports bar near me that has a, that they just got, it was like a normal, it's called Shuckers.

Brian:

It was like on the, on the bay.

Brian:

but then it

Brian:

got bought up by some private equity goons or something and they reopened it as like the Palm Club and it's basically

Brian:

the same thing, but now they have a, a chicken tenders tower for, for 98.

Brian:

So

Troy:

that everybody wants to do it.

Troy:

That's a big that's a good prediction for 25 is Towers towers are the new

Brian:

Towers.

Alex:

well, they, they're towers are essentially the bundling of, of food.

Alex:

so it's going to happen everywhere.

Brian:

Poo poo platter

Brian:

was

Alex:

think

Alex:

the, the, we can, we can not undermine the wealth disparity that when you see somebody

Alex:

spending the same on a cocktail that somebody else needs to, buy an entire meal for the family.

Alex:

Or when, you know, people are constantly getting ruined because they just get sick, or, you know, they can't

Alex:

afford a house, or they're working three jobs and people are telling them, but the economy is great.

Alex:

Like, that stuff's not going away.

Alex:

Like, you can't

Brian:

Well, that's what the culture war ends up getting replaced by class wars.

Brian:

I mean, it's like complimented, but I think the class wars become

Alex:

while turning into a class war.

Alex:

That's what needs to happen.

Alex:

Some good old

Troy:

One thing that we didn't acknowledge.

Troy:

Hold it.

Troy:

Hold on.

Troy:

We skated by A very important summary for 24, which was we had a nice people

Troy:

versus algorithms Christmas event and we did have seafood towers actually.

Troy:

We had seafood towers that had shrimp

Troy:

and oysters.

Troy:

and it turns out I called my friend Vivek afterwards and I said, I'm not feeling well.

Troy:

And I called Brian,

Troy:

No,

Brian:

Vimek.

Troy:

different Vivek.

Troy:

And he said, I'm sick as a dog.

Troy:

Brian said, I'm completely incapacitated.

Brian:

It

Brian:

changed my organism.

Brian:

It changed my organism.

Troy:

I was, it was seven days for me, seven days of hell.

Troy:

Well,

Alex:

the first event that we

Alex:

threw?

Brian:

was a fitting way to end the

Brian:

year in media.

Brian:

It was a very fitting way.

Alex:

So so I think the listeners should understand that if they don't see me on the ticket, to stay away.

Alex:

Because it slightly leads to vomiting

Troy:

I was, it was a nice event, Alex.

Troy:

And there was a nice crudo and some steak and it

Troy:

was

Alex:

Sure.

Troy:

it turns out

Troy:

that

Alex:

Crudo and more Coco.

Troy:

no, but one thing is, is that I wanted to send out a group email

Troy:

and find out who, and, and it just, a few people got sick, not everybody.

Alex:

Just a

Brian:

which is weird.

Brian:

Right?

Brian:

Because there's there, there is this, oyster.

Brian:

A lot of people that got sick from oysters and in December.

Brian:

It's like, it's a norovirus

Alex:

I just want to be, I mean, you guys just accelerated the decline of media just a little bit.

Alex:

It's nice to have a part in it.

Alex:

We're just, you know, taking people out in the business time of the year.

Alex:

But Happy New Year to both of you.

Alex:

We didn't, we didn't say that.

Alex:

It's like it's 2025.

Alex:

It started with a bang as we, as we, as we saw

Brian:

So can

Brian:

we talk

Brian:

about advertising important things like advertising?

Alex:

Oh, yeah.

Alex:

Are we still going to

Brian:

Could,

Alex:

advertising in 2025?

Alex:

Isn't it over yet?

Brian:

well, that's the thing.

Brian:

So I watched the, the perplexity CEO, Aravind Srinivas.

Brian:

he, he had this interesting video.

Brian:

I mean, I've seen these kinds of things from tech people a lot.

Brian:

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

Brian:

and that it would increasingly move to advertising, not to people.

Brian:

But to agents and that basically advertising, we'll actually see less advertising, but there'll

Brian:

be more advertising in which the persuasion is going to move to trying to persuade agents.

Troy:

Right.

Troy:

It's like saying we're going to go to war, but no one's going to get hurt.

Troy:

Just the robots.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I mean, this is, this is very attractive.

Brian:

I don't believe that's ever the case.

Brian:

Anytime anyone says this is going to be less advertising.

Brian:

I've noticed there always becomes more average.

Alex:

Oh, it's it's just it's just such a great way to make money.

Alex:

and it's like the grease that fuels capitalism, right?

Alex:

You can't, you know, everybody wants a new product to be.

Alex:

but it's, I mean, it's just, I think it's going to be less noticeable as advertising, you know, I think what

Alex:

we've noticed is the slow transition from advertising being so obvious, right?

Alex:

Where you just, you know, you had the.

Alex:

The soap opera stars singing out the brands to it getting into your feed.

Alex:

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.

Alex:

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

Alex:

you kind of tweak the tweak the results so that your stuff gets, you know, 3 percent

Alex:

more than, than the other stuff when somebody asked which car they should buy.

Brian:

And did you see that Meta is planning on really going

Brian:

hard into basically having AI characters on all their platforms?

Brian:

So I think when we talk about like influencers, I still don't believe, I mean, I have no idea.

Brian:

I'm sure some people will.

Brian:

I don't, I think it's still going to be a very niche behavior to have like virtual friends for a while.

Brian:

and following AI influencers is like the saddest thing I've ever

Troy:

well, let's stick to advertising

Troy:

for a second because Alex, I know how you feel and, and I understand how you feel.

Troy:

So you're, I,

Brian:

is Alex anti advertising?

Brian:

Didn't you

Troy:

not, he's just, I've known Alex for a long time.

Troy:

He,

Alex:

look, I'm is, guys, I'm not saying the world's going to exist without it, but come on, nobody likes advertising.

Troy:

to, to connect advertising to capitalism

Troy:

as its downfall.

Troy:

I mean, are you a fucking communist?

Troy:

Like what is going on here?

Troy:

Like what, what is the Greece that you want to have in a system where

Alex:

No, I'm being, I'm being honest.

Alex:

I understand that capitalism greases the wheel to make sure that the whole system works.

Alex:

And I, you know, I'm not anti capitalist, but I don't like advertising and I don't think anybody does.

Troy:

well, you're more, you're

Alex:

advertising.

Troy:

capitalist than you were before you got rich, which is a nice sentiment, but

Brian:

the best way to do it.

Brian:

That is the best

Troy:

Okay, but let me, let me just focus on advertising for a second.

Troy:

I'm sorry, you can have the soapbox in a minute, Alec.

Troy:

I gotta tell you, you know, your, your boy Jason Zada, who I don't know, who, who got some

Troy:

attention in the last Okay,

Brian:

they made great microsites.

Troy:

so Google comes out with, what is it, Alex?

Troy:

VO2, VO1, it's VO2,

Troy:

which is their video rendering, AI rendering, generative AI rendering thing.

Troy:

And, it quickly surpasses, is it Sora, which is AI, OpenAI's, uh,

Troy:

And then, Jason comes out with two videos that show its potential in quick succession.

Troy:

The first was called fade out.

Troy:

No, the first was called the heist and the next was called fade out.

Troy:

One was more character driven and they showed you that.

Troy:

Oh my god, you can make stuff with like object permanence with kind of

Troy:

logical gravity with kind of tonal consistency And they look incredible.

Troy:

They're just like incredible short films made with prompts and editing.

Troy:

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

Troy:

Super Bowl, but that's a little early in the year that the creative process and the

Troy:

versioning process in the ad world is just not completely upended very quickly by A.

Troy:

I.

Troy:

Video content production.

Alex:

Yeah, I think we don't really know how we haven't really known how to use the tools yet because I

Alex:

don't think anybody's made something that's truly compelling outside of the fact that it's AI generated.

Alex:

I think what we're going to see

Alex:

is a lot

Troy:

Those examples are pretty, pretty compelling.

Troy:

And you know

Alex:

No, I think you would.

Alex:

I think you wouldn't, You wouldn't watch them.

Alex:

If you,

Troy:

Yeah, but artists will make

Troy:

cool shit.

Troy:

out a way to use it in different ways.

Troy:

But, then when, when I push Brian on this this morning, he said to me, well, You know, even, you know,

Troy:

a lot of advertising agency work is unsexy versioning and busy work.

Troy:

And, you know, even though BBDO may not have a future making million dollar AT& T spots, there is still the need

Troy:

to create spectacle to which he then, starts talking about the pop tart bowl.

Brian:

Did you see it, Alex?

Troy:

Okay, so, what is the Pop Tart

Brian:

It's a minor, it's not one of the big college football bowls, which are the end of the season, like championships.

Brian:

They have a, they have a championships

Brian:

now, but these are the traditional like bowl games in which two successful teams battle it out, neutral site.

Brian:

And usually they have some kind of like theme there.

Brian:

It's like kind of a relic of the past,

Troy:

like the

Brian:

but yeah, the Rose Bowl, but then it became like more commercialized because it's America.

Brian:

And, And it became like the Tostitos, Fiesta Bowl, et cetera, and so they're like, okay, let's go hard.

Brian:

So the Pop Tarts Bowl happened, and the game itself was okay.

Troy:

Did they, did the characters fly out of toasters and stuff?

Troy:

Did they do

Brian:

well, so the, the, so yeah, the, the, the, the trophy was an actual, prize.

Brian:

Quote, unquote, working toaster in which I think it was a strawberry pop tart got, got shoved into the

Brian:

toaster and then out popped a, an edible, version of the pop tart.

Brian:

And it

Brian:

was just the entire thing.

Alex:

Tarts.

Brian:

Yes, the entire thing was pure, pure spectacle.

Brian:

And so I, I think of that as.

Brian:

It's a positive for advertising, becoming creative again, because when programmatic came about, I can remember going to an

Brian:

early programmatic conference, which it would not wish unlike my worst enemy,

Brian:

but they all of a sudden they started, they were talking data, data, data.

Brian:

And then, and then finally, some guy was like, you know, the biggest driver of performance.

Brian:

I was like, finally, someone's going to talk about creative and he started talking about the punch the monkey

Brian:

ads and how they like tested like 9000 versions of punching the monkey.

Brian:

And, you know, advertising creativity has been kind of, relegated to,

Brian:

you know, a sidelight in this, in this era of like,

Brian:

hyper targeting.

Brian:

So

Alex:

think creative.

Brian:

Advertising creativity in the form of the

Alex:

I mean, I think we're talking about like creativity across every

Alex:

sector that's been touched by tech has been sidelined by by by data.

Alex:

I mean, even even in down to the way oftentimes shows are selected on

Alex:

these streaming networks down to the way products are built in technology.

Alex:

Everything has been turned into an experiment and advertising has just seen the most dramatic change of that.

Alex:

So I'm really happy to see like.

Alex:

If the, if the whole thing kind of kind of collapses on itself, that

Alex:

the true differentiator is just going to be people having good ideas,

Brian:

I got to know Jason because he created elf yourself.

Brian:

I mean, I'm sure at organic.

Brian:

You guys were very jealous of elf yourself iconic.

Brian:

Microsite.

Brian:

Iconic.

Troy:

Alex used to make elf things, right?

Alex:

well, we, we did something similar that was quite

Brian:

Like, upload your

Alex:

also we worked with, we got to know.

Alex:

So the folks at JibJab, I

Brian:

So, JibJab, they're, they're like the heels of this thing.

Brian:

You know, they were like the villains because they ended up, I, there was this legal battle with Elf Yourself.

Brian:

I wrote a lot of stories

Alex:

it.

Alex:

I think Elf to Yourself was very, very, very derivative of the JibJab stuff.

Alex:

I don't know if I

Brian:

they were like patent trolls.

Brian:

I don't, that's what

Alex:

well, we got, we got, we got patent trolled by somebody that wasn't JibJab on one of our things, where they said that

Alex:

they owned the copyright of cutting a face out and putting it on something else.

Alex:

So, that was, that was good times.

Alex:

but yeah, I think, I hope that we see creativity and just human ideas

Alex:

take up, you know, a bigger role in the way things are successful.

Alex:

I don't know if a Pop Tart trophy is the best example of that, but, you know, we'll see.

Brian:

it was all through the game.

Brian:

Like it, it, it spawned memes.

Brian:

I think what you want is you want to, I think what you want is you want

Brian:

to have this act as almost like a prompt for, for people to take it over

Alex:

I mean, it's the same thing as the complete unknown press tour.

Alex:

You just want to be, like, create some sort of magnetic energy

Alex:

that you put out into all the algorithms so people talk about you.

Alex:

And if they're talking about the U.

Alex:

S.

Alex:

Timotei Chalamet or Timothée Chalamet, Tostitos, then you're, you're good.

Alex:

You're golden.

Alex:

That's the way to do it.

Alex:

and being kind of mimetic and being kind of in the moment is, I think is a creative act.

Alex:

And I think we're just going to have to take more risks.

Alex:

Like we need a Rick Rubin of advertising.

Alex:

Somebody to just, you know,

Brian:

There's a lot of

Alex:

I know.

Alex:

A lot of

Brian:

with you.

Brian:

People who don't play an instrument don't know

Alex:

Don't know what they're doing?

Alex:

They

Troy:

They just

Alex:

nod?

Alex:

Yes, this is mostly

Brian:

like, I like what you did

Brian:

here.

Brian:

Bring me something else.

Alex:

Troy, I would say, was the Rick Rubin of advertising.

Alex:

Before Rick Rubin.

Troy:

God, I wish,

Brian:

I think that's all I have.

Troy:

well, we can go to

Brian:

Oh, good product.

Brian:

I hope you're going to start off the year strong with a good, good product.

Alex:

No,

Troy:

Something I know nothing about, which is a friend of mine was over on New Year's Eve and she said, you have to

Troy:

put this on your good product cause it's a great product and I've never used it.

Troy:

It's called Recipe.

Troy:

Do you use Recipe?

Brian:

No.

Troy:

It's an app that sucks in all of your recipes and puts them into a

Troy:

standard format, which can't be good for the people that create recipes.

Alex:

they put that on themselves though.

Alex:

That, well, the fact that there is space for a product that

Alex:

exists to make your product not a nightmare to use is your own fault.

Alex:

And there's another product like that that I would

Brian:

Yeah, but they were responding to the incentives That

Brian:

were set

Alex:

amazing.

Brian:

Google.

Brian:

it, this, this

Alex:

tough shit.

Brian:

Google's fault.

Brian:

It

Alex:

No, but Google was just responding to the, to the incentives,

Alex:

you know, I don't know, everybody's responding to some incentives.

Alex:

They're all just creatures responding to, you know, the, the kind of ecosystem that is like capitalism.

Alex:

Nobody's doing anything wrong here, but if you're creating content at the end of the day, you should learn

Alex:

the fact that you just, you know, bending the need to Google and making

Alex:

a product that is crappy for your, for your users is never going to end.

Alex:

Well, I think, I mean, that's the rule.

Alex:

Like at every.

Alex:

Step of the way.

Alex:

If you're making something that the users don't like, you're not going to last long because the people you're

Alex:

doing it for don't care about you and they're going to change their algorithm.

Alex:

Just make good things.

Troy:

I had one other one that I thought was cool.

Troy:

I like buying fragrances for my family at Christmas time.

Troy:

But there's an arrogance to that, right?

Troy:

Cause 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.

Troy:

And good ones are

Alex:

Well, I think you might've, done that one already.

Troy:

Did I do this one?

Alex:

pay?

Alex:

Yeah.

Alex:

It actually inspired me to buy my wife that present.

Troy:

Did we

Troy:

do it last week?

Troy:

Is that what this has come to?

Troy:

Regurgitating.

Troy:

Oh my

Troy:

God, that's embarrassing.

Brian:

I gotta

Troy:

It's the Dries Van Noten, fragrance sampler.

Alex:

you did,

Brian:

Oh yeah, we

Brian:

already did

Brian:

this.

Alex:

All

Troy:

No, it's just that I wasn't prepared.

Alex:

and then I need to go.

Alex:

That was a, a real bure,

Troy:

yeah, that, uh, by

Troy:

recycling old content.

Troy:

But Alex, before you go, was there anything that you got for Christmas from one of your family members or

Troy:

someone that you thought, this is a great product and very thoughtful?

Alex:

I got socks.

Alex:

That's thoughtful.

Alex:

Actually.

Alex:

We, the, the, we're buying ourselves a, a trip to Vegas.

Alex:

That's like, we kind of gave ourselves that with my wife.

Brian:

Family trip to Vegas.

Alex:

mm-hmm . Not family.

Alex:

No.

Alex:

Just us two.

Brian:

Okay.

Troy:

Okay.

Alex:

to

Alex:

stay

Alex:

at the Trump Hotel.

Alex:

I don't know.

Alex:

I think that sphere like is really dependent on who's playing.

Alex:

Just, I don't know what what's playing right now.

Alex:

but Vegas seems to be, seems to be a good product.

Alex:

you got a lot of different things to do.

Alex:

It's easy access from anywhere.

Brian:

It's a quintessential American product.

Brian:

That that's what I like about Vegas.

Brian:

It is a only it is well, maybe Dubai now, but like When it was like, this is a very American kind of, kind of

Alex:

the best product for me.

Alex:

Was and one of the greatest thing I've seen in 2024 was the Waterworld stunt show at Universal Studios

Alex:

Hollywood.

Alex:

Now, if you, if you see, if you see one thing,

Alex:

if you just

Alex:

go to that universal stunt show, it is all practical effects.

Alex:

It's a big cast people on fire, explosions, splashes, jet skis.

Alex:

it's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

Alex:

It, it beats.

Alex:

Any Cirque de Soleil show.

Alex:

No, it's just incredible.

Alex:

They, they recreated and, and, and also if you want to rewatch Waterworld

Alex:

and give it another chance, I would recommend it as a great movie.

Brian:

Waterworld?

Alex:

it is a great movie?

Alex:

Kevin Costner is just hitting his

Troy:

like, aging like a fine

Alex:

aging like a fine wine.

Brian:

That was like infamous

Brian:

as like the,

Brian:

the the like

Brian:

worst

Alex:

it was, and we were so mean to it and we didn't know how good we had it.

Alex:

Because that movie is fantastic.

Alex:

It moves.

Alex:

It's got, it's got great set pieces.

Alex:

I mean, the bad guys are called the smokers because they ride motor vehicles that use gas.

Alex:

And also they, they have a huge stockpile of cigarettes that they found on a cargo ship and they all smoke cigarettes.

Alex:

It's incredible.

Troy:

that they also use cigarettes.

Troy:

It's incredible.

Troy:

Perfect.

Troy:

Yeah, I

Alex:

thank me for it.

Troy:

the,

Brian:

Waterworld came out in 1995.

Alex:

Yeah.

Alex:

I mean, it's, you should celebrate, celebrate the, what is it?

Alex:

30 years of Waterworld.

Troy:

Well, there you go.

Troy:

Thanks for saving my ass on that one, Alex.

Troy:

Perfect.

Alex:

Yeah.

Troy:

Good product.

Alex:

Well, you know, we're all getting older, so we have to look out for each other.

Troy:

Yeah.

Troy:

That's it for this episode of people versus algorithms where each

Troy:

week we uncover patterns shaping media culture and technology.

Troy:

Big thanks as always to our producer, Vanja Arsenov.

Troy:

She always makes us a little clearer and more understandable and we appreciate her very, very much.

Troy:

If you're enjoying these conversations, we'd love for you to leave us a review.

Troy:

It helps us get the word out and keeps our community growing.

Troy:

Remember, you can find People vs.

Troy:

Algorithms on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and now on YouTube.

Troy:

Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next week.

Brian:

All right.

Troy:

Thank you everybody.

Alex:

All right, guys.

Brian:

Happy

Alex:

Thank you.

Alex:

Happy New Year.

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About the Podcast

People vs Algorithms
A podcast for curious media minds.
Uncovering patterns of change in media, culture, and technology, each week media veterans Brian Morrissey, Alex Schleifer and Troy Young break down stuff that matters.
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