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.

• The Information Space in 2025 newsletter
• Watch us on YouTube
• Troy Young's People vs Algorithms newsletter
• Brian Morrissey's The Rebooting newsletter
• Alex Schleifer's Human Computer
• Follow Alex, Brian and Troy on Twitter

You guys have a nice break.

A lovely break.

I didn't do much for two weeks.

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

A.

and, we went to the Magic Castle.

That a drug

No.

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.

Sounds like a drug thing.

It is

a drug

I I hate magic.

So I did, did feel

That sounds like the right place for you.

it was an interesting experience to be in, 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 mean 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, right?

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

but finding the growth paths is, 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, you know, 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, 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, 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 some same success in the future as

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

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

Where your, your sort of media adjacent creation that you're making, whether your, 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 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 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, you know, 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, it is, it's 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.

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, they want to, you know, Pick up, right?

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.

I think there would still be a mess and everybody was open to subscribing to things that 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, and so I think we're going to see consolidation there anyway.

Right.

Like

I'm surprised we're not seeing

right?

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

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

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

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

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

I think I

have either third party

service.

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

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

They have the escape velocity.

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

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 wire cutter.

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

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

So, so that's, 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.

this media.

I mean, I think because of the election in particular, in the, in 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, a political pressure on, On ad agencies about how they, portion their budgets and

No.

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

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

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

but I think other brands are, are emerging.

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

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

Yeah, this is up your alley, Alex.

Yeah.

It's like, yeah,

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

okay.

It's anti

racism.

I believe it is.

they do good stuff.

no, I'm, I'm sure.

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

Okay.

Often 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 is that what that looks like to you?

Because that's what the, daily caller

is, essentially.

yeah.

I mean the people that have found.

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

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

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

and then, And, you know, 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 well,

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

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

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

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

Podcast, because that's how we get.

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

With all of this sort of this 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

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

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

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

coming back, baby.

We were too

Everything, 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, That retail media has this kind of strong kind of perversional as I word, um,

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 that 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, you know, 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 wade 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, like the most popular or

It does create a lot of weird behaviors.

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

Do you want to, do you want to go

I'll tell you what I know

Honey

is a great company.

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

Okay.

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

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

for you and 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 can, maybe you

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

Marcus Brownlee

Marcus Brownlee has done a video,

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

four billion dollars.

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.

And

podcasters thousands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

okay, 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.

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

right.

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

The

So they pissed off

that the

so the, 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 percent 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 percent coupon code.

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

So, the Shakedown is, you know, prevent discounting

protection racket,

it's a

I mean,

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

Yes.

But the, the, the big mistake here is that the protection record 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 can, nobody, yeah.

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

Right?

Right?

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

Well,

I don't know.

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

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

But I mean, like, look, to me, it's like, The, 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.

Yeah,

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

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

Right?

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

I mean, MySpace used to do this.

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

No problem.

Wendy's everything.

Everything's free.

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

it's up to

We used to do it.

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, it's a nice ad strategy or a sales

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

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

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

That's a, maybe that's why the

The webinar market is like fiercely

competitive,

it's the last remaining truly honest

it

is, it's an

honest

person.

If an honest person,

Okay.

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

where do you want to go next?

Brian, do you want

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

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

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

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

Alex, what are you?

What are you seeing?

in 2025 is a big theme when it

comes to AI.

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

We used to call like a few years ago when, 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 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, you know, back and forth.

Right.

I don't think that's going away.

I think we've moved into, 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.

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

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

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

Like, you know, the Alexa stuff and stuff like 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, with Siri.

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

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

when we're in media, is to think about what the future interfaces 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 wouldn't 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, you don't ask a question when

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

You want to go to the newspaper, you want to, 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 AI.

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 bot, but a place where they're doing some

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

And I think

that, that we've

already seen.

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

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

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

But Google is, Google is such a.

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

done through the browser, it's like the re 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 until.

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

And I would go and up, up, up, up, up, and go and, 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 news sources are saying.

Also, your favorite podcaster has an

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

Alex.

Someone detonated it.

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

we know, do we

know

that that was the way to start the year, like, that's like some, 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, of like, you

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

Like,

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

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, like, putting in these, like,

formulas, basically,

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

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

And I do think we are seeing some new modalities.

Look at me talking like a podcaster.

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

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

And I got into a conversation with chat GPT.

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

British female who I, 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 to, talked about

the critical response to the, 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 was an, you know, 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 it.

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

it'll be 1 of many, right?

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

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

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

Right.

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

It's just incredible technology.

It's like, it's, 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, here's the thing we're dealing with here.

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

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, 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.

There's going to be, 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, and would type cnn.

com.

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

It's not, 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 that changes things and it all starts from this.

What we're calling the chat interface.

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

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

know, talk yourself

mindset that

you had

somewhere,

Does This

come at the expense

of feeds?

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

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

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

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

It's interesting.

to me because there's so much friction.

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

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

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

And to me, like, 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 information.

Yeah.

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

just kind of misplaced voyeurism or

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

It's

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

She, I give her highlights.

I was like, do you know what's going on now about the 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 from a year ago.

Like, it is a significant and.

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

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

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

no, I watched it.

I watched it unfold.

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

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

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

And it really set off.

kind of interesting debate over, over not just the H1B 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

like relates to, you know, 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 like much higher than their parents.

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

but it was fascinating to watch it unfold on Twitter in the different directions that, 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 and and where it's going towards.

pause while Alex jumps in here for a second.

Did you see any of

like, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah.

It was on threshold.

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

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

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

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

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

you know, as an aside, like Ramas Swami, 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 job.

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?

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 plumbers jobs.

AI is coming for software engineers.

It's coming for accountants.

It's going to come for, for lawyers.

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

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

were you guys H1B people?

I was on H1B.

That's how I came in.

Okay.

Troy,

declare your status.

Were

you an O1?

Troy was an O1.

Yeah.

loser visa, they

but,

but it was the same, it's the same

idea.

I got a couple of questions here, if, 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.

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.

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 there, are the, are the libs

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

Somebody makes a post and the conversation happens everywhere.

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

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

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.

There's a lot of competition.

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

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

Like, Ramesh Wang, he could

have

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

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

That there's no

that, that,

If it

disappeared tomorrow,

good point.

Is MySpace,

would change.

are you on MySpace?

I could be,

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

specific media,

Yeah.

which

is

now Viant.

I

think.

Yeah.

It's Viant.

It's the Vanderhook brothers.

Okay.

But so, so we don't know.

Some, something's going on on X.

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

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

Oh yeah.

has completely

split

off.

It's, And to think,

But these kind of fights are great.

They're

Yeah,

but Bannon is smart enough to know that his value proposition is anger and fear, 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

even wonder what the all in guys yeah, I wonder what all 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, the silenced, 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're all like.

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

Yeah,

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

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

Yeah.

The, the ring saved by the bell.

You got to be more like screeched and less like.

Yeah.

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

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

when they were younger.

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.

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

That people compare, 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, and so that even though

up.

live

it doesn't

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

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

for, you know, 30, 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.

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

millennials to stop drinking lattes so that they can save

I

know.

Not at all.

we are.

Yes.

And

597k

is, is, it's good.

wages have gone up significantly,

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

Yeah,

Like nobody

wants

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.

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, a chicken tenders tower for, for 98.

So

that everybody wants to do it.

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

Towers.

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

so it's going to happen everywhere.

Poo poo platter

was

think

the, the, we can, we can not 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, you know, people are constantly getting ruined because they just get sick, or, you know, they can't

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

Like, that stuff's not going away.

Like, you can't

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

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

while turning into a class war.

That's what needs to happen.

Some good old

One thing that we didn't acknowledge.

Hold it.

Hold on.

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

versus 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,

Vimek.

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.

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

Well,

the first event that we

threw?

was a fitting way to end the

year in media.

It was a very fitting way.

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

Because it slightly leads to vomiting

I was, it was a nice event, Alex.

And there was a nice crudo and some steak and it

was

Sure.

it turns out

that

Crudo and more Coco.

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

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

Just a

which is weird.

Right?

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

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

It's like, it's a norovirus

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, you know, taking people out in the business time of the year.

But Happy New Year to both of you.

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

It's like it's 2025.

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

So can

we talk

about advertising important things like advertising?

Oh, yeah.

Are we still going to

Could,

advertising in 2025?

Isn't it over yet?

well, that's the thing.

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

he, he had this interesting video.

I mean, I've seen these kinds 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 that basically advertising, we'll 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, this is very attractive.

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

Anytime anyone says this is going to be less advertising.

I've noticed there always becomes more average.

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

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

You can't, 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.

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

more than, than the other stuff when somebody asked 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 like influencers, I still don't believe, I mean, I have no idea.

I'm sure some people will.

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

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

well, let's stick to advertising

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

So you're, I,

is Alex anti advertising?

Didn't you

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

He,

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

to, to connect advertising to capitalism

as its downfall.

I mean, are you a fucking communist?

Like what is going on here?

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

No, I'm being, 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

advertising.

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

the best way to do it.

That is the best

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

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

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

attention in the last Okay,

they made great microsites.

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

VO2, VO1, it's VO2,

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

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

And 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 A.

I.

Video content production.

Yeah, I think we don't really know how 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 a lot

Those examples are pretty, pretty compelling.

And you know

No, I think you would.

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

If you,

Yeah, but artists will make

cool shit.

out a way 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?

Okay, so, what is the Pop Tart

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

They have a, they have a championships

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

And usually they have some kind of like theme there.

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

like the

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

And, And it became like the Tostitos, Fiesta Bowl, et cetera, 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

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

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

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

And it

was just the entire thing.

Tarts.

Yes, the entire thing was pure, pure spectacle.

And so I, 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 it would not wish unlike my worst enemy,

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

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

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 9000 versions of punching the monkey.

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

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

hyper targeting.

So

think creative.

Advertising creativity in the form of the

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

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

I mean, even even in 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 like.

If the, 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, we did something similar that was quite

Like, upload your

also we worked with, we got to know.

So the folks at JibJab, I

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

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

I wrote a lot of stories

it.

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

I don't know if I

they were like patent trolls.

I don't, that's what

well, we got, we got, 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, 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 Pop Tart trophy is the best example of that, but, you know, we'll see.

it was all through the game.

Like it, it, 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, for people to take it over

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

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

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

And if they're talking about the U.

S.

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

I know.

A lot of

with you.

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

Don't know what they're doing?

They

They just

nod?

Yes, this is mostly

like, I like what you did

here.

Bring me something else.

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.

No,

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 cause it's a great product and I've never used it.

It's called Recipe.

Do you use Recipe?

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.

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

Yeah, but they were responding to the incentives That

were set

amazing.

Google.

it, this, this

tough shit.

Google's fault.

It

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

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

They're all just creatures responding to, you know, the, 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 just, you know, bending the need to Google and making

a product that is crappy for your, 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.

Just 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?

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.

And good ones are

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

Did I do this one?

pay?

Yeah.

It actually inspired me to buy my wife that present.

Did we

do it last week?

Is that what this has come to?

Regurgitating.

Oh my

God, that's embarrassing.

I gotta

It's the Dries Van Noten, fragrance sampler.

you did,

Oh yeah, we

already did

this.

All

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

and then I need to go.

That was a, a real bure,

yeah, that, uh, 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.

Actually.

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

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

Family trip to Vegas.

mm-hmm . Not family.

No.

Just us two.

Okay.

Okay.

to

stay

at the Trump Hotel.

I don't know.

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

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

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

you got a lot of different things to do.

It's easy access from anywhere.

It's a quintessential American product.

That that's what I like about Vegas.

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

the best product for me.

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

Hollywood.

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

if you just

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

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

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

It, it beats.

Any Cirque de Soleil show.

No, it's just incredible.

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

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

Waterworld?

it is a great movie?

Kevin Costner is just hitting his

like, aging like a fine

aging like a fine wine.

That was like infamous

as like the,

the the like

worst

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

It's incredible.

that they also use cigarettes.

It's incredible.

Perfect.

Yeah, I

thank me for it.

the,

Waterworld came out in 1995.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, you should celebrate, 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 versus algorithms where each

week we uncover patterns shaping media culture and technology.

Big thanks as always to our producer, Vanja Arsenov.

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.

All right, guys.

Happy

Thank you.

Happy New Year.