I know this email has been a bit all over the place of late, and I will briefly explain why, though commentary about process is not interesting to you. Frankly, I don’t really know what I want it to be, so it has become a Friday morning meditation. My intention was to make it a companion to the PvA podcast, but that is kinda boring. Then I tried to make it an automated extension of the PvA Field Notes. I have never liked what has come out of the robots, so no. And, now Substack is gonna tell on you if you lean too hard on the AI, so I better not do that. I wish the AI could write this.

The thread here… I am always trying to get out of doing the work. Writing a great email takes research and reporting and/or deep human thought. Those are all hard. The good news to report is that you still need humans to make nice things. This is the theme today. That and classic rock.

Speaking of nice things, I have two culture items to report on. One is that my cosmic family went to see Bob Dylan at Forest Hills. Bizarrely, I ran into Emily FeedMe Sundberg there, which was unexpected. Dylan has played Forest Hills five times, all told. His first time was in August 1963 with Joan Baez. That’s 63 years ago. His most famous appearance was in 1965, after he went electric at Newport. The first half of the set was acoustic, and the second half was electric. Controversy!

This time, Bob stood behind a keyboard with his hoodie up and didn’t say a single word to the audience during the entire show. Not even, “Hey, New York. It’s great to be back at Forest Hills. I first played here 63 years ago. People thought it was weird when I busted out my electric guitar. Weird. Times are changing! I am fucking old.” Nothing. Not a peep. He did his 15 songs and walked off the stage. Bob sounded great for an 85-year-old, even if occasionally his distinctive croon took on the character of an alien in distress.

Do the math. Sixty-three years. Estimates peg his career performances at 4,000. Everybody calls you the GOAT, and you’ve received a Nobel Prize in Literature. You are rich and have a nice pad in Malibu. Consequently, you don’t spend much time ruminating on the artist/audience dialectic. Your back hurts. But you like playing because it gives you purpose, and that’s what you’ve always done. So you play. But you do not really give a fuck about what I think. Ain’t nobody gonna think any less of you. It’s fine.

Also, security at Forest Hills will chase your ass down if you hold your stupid phone up to record the show. Just stop doing this. A) You will never look at that video. B) If you really wanted to see it, it’s on YouTube. C) Enjoy the show with a loved one and record it in your meat memory bank. You are gonna die soon.

Speaking of old acts touring, this seems to be the summer of that for me. I just saw Paul Simon, as you know, and he is old too. My friend Steve just invited my son and me to see all-time Canadian rock gods Rush at MSG. Three things about this. First, we don’t really love Rush but we admire them and we are Canadian. Second, Steve has a box for the show, and they will probably roll out sushi, so that is a huge quality-of-experience bonus. Third, Rush, as I am sure you know, is the world’s greatest three-piece band, largely on account of their gnarly drummer Neil Peart. Sadly, Neil passed away in 2020, and while Neil is irreplaceable, female German progressive drummer Anika Nilles has joined the band for the tour, and that seems cool.

The second culture item: I saw Olivia Wilde’s The Invite last night at the wonderful little Sag Harbor Cinema. The movie is hilarious and pointed, especially if you have lived with your partner for many years. I’ve been with my superstar for more than three decades. The Spanish filmmaker Cesc Gay wrote and directed the original play in 2015. Its Catalan title means “The Upstairs Neighbors.”

Here’s the gist. A long-married couple are stuck in a resentful rut. They invite their sexually adventurous upstairs neighbors to dinner. Polite conversation turns into flirtation, confrontation and accidental couples therapy. It’s awesome. The writing and performances are terrific. How does A24 make such good shit all the time? Something to learn here.

All of this, of course, is very anti-AI. Humans making nice things. Unmediated stories and songs. Don’t be fooled. This ain’t gonna end. In fact, we will want it more as the robots impinge.

BTW, did you know that the British call homelessness “rough sleeping”? I didn’t know this. I did know that they like descriptive terms such as “washing-up liquid” and “cling film.” They also say “can’t be arsed” and “faffing about,” so sometimes the rule is broken. Or not.

Meanwhile, back at PvA Field Notes, an expanding group has been busy picking through the detritus of media, tech, AI and cultural stuff. It’s a nice little place. Come on by.

First your parents abandoned you, then this.

A conversation about late life employment trouble came out of the discussion on Field Notes. I see it as the great late career Gen X shaft. We discuss on the podcast.

More Field Notes chatter:

1. A media CEO plays Puck vs. Caper. “How many Puck newsletters do you read?” “One.”

2. Brian declares Little Italy the worst neighborhood in NYC.

3. Yugoslav computer magazines from the ‘80s, appreciated properly

4. “Shatner is 96. All this health maxxing shit is a lie. Live large.”

5. Alex: “Poem as a sales pitch also acts as e-mail’s eulogy.”

6. Tom’s first take: bootleg Knicks merch as an aggregation-and-affiliate story

7. A robot fails. Troy’s full review: “Perfect.”

8. Amid media business turmoil, NYT tech reporter discovers gambling in Casablanca

9. Zaslav offers $68M for a summer camp. The room approves the asset class.

POD: The New Moat

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Media now is often as much a who you know business as a what you know. Publishers see the writing on the wall for traffic-based models and are instead looking to experiential gatherings that bring together communities. We discuss why events are becoming media’s new moat, the tensions that come with building them, and what happens when AI agents begin acting on their own. Plus: the hypocrisy of closed AI models, Coca-Cola’s Marlboro moment, and why the collapse of the media career ladder is forcing a generation of experienced executives to become free agents.

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• Watch us on YouTube

• Troy Young’s People vs Algorithms newsletter

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Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:29 Welcome

• 04:08 What Makes Events Great

• 15:58 Media Turns To Community

• 29:25 OpenAI Agent Breakout

• 37:17 Coke Rebrand

• 43:23 Zaslav Buys Summer Camp

• 46:58 Gen X Career Compression

• 58:21 Guardian Model and Substack Anti AI

• 01:01:58 Why Video Aggregation Fails

• 01:04:00 Publishers vs Google Threats

• 01:07:06 Good Product

• 01:15:41 Credits

I will be attending Sunday’s match in Jersey. My bitter English friends want me to support Spain. I have not picked a side.

Today, our best pulls from PvA Field Notes, a place where the fine hosts of the podcast and a growing cast of characters discuss the media news of the day. Stop by and take a gander.

In more World Cup news:

1: Norway went out in the quarterfinals. Erling Haaland won anyway.

His domineering physical appearance coupled with his goofy online persona have contributed to the craze. Fans remark on his flowing blond mane, color-coordinated hair ties and playful posts like a Snapchat-filtered selfie in which he proclaimed Shrek his “twin.” The contrast between his strength and skill on the field and his softer, looser online presence has also subjected him to the “babygirl” treatment online. That term is used frequently by fans of endearing male celebrities or characters who come across as sensitive, caring or vulnerable.

AP: Erling Haaland is Norway’s World Cup machine — and the internet’s babygirl

2: Tang Tan is about to become a main character too.

Tang Tan spent 25 years at Apple, worked on the iPod and led product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch. OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s “LoveFrom” for about $6.5 billion and made Tan its chief hardware officer. Apple’s lawsuit describes an attempt to import the people, supplier knowledge, manufacturing techniques and unreleased components behind its devices.

Everybody is running at the iPhone because AI is changing interface. OpenAI longs to own hardware pole position. So do Meta, Google, Amazon and Elon. Apple sees an opportunity to slow the race. 15 years ago they tried to slow Android too. This is the beginning of a long battle.

AppleInsider: Who is Tang Tan, the ex-Apple VP at the core of OpenAI’s trade secret theft lawsuits

Sotheby’s is auctioning geeky stuff. Buy this pristine OG Apple 1. Estimate $200k-500K.

3: We spent time talking about aggregation on the pod. BI was good at their brand of it….

Business Insider is abandoning aggregation as aggregation becomes abundant. Original work has risen from roughly 40 percent of its output in 2024 to more than 80 percent today. Exclusives converted subscriptions at nearly twice the rate of non-exclusives in the first quarter. AI can reproduce the old BI product in seconds, while search and chatbot clickthrough rates sit in the single digits. Original reporting has become more valuable as the traffic system that funded it disappears.

Rewrites of other outlets’ original reporting would no longer fly. Reporters were expected to independently confirm news with their own sourcing. An analysis piece would require a new story framing that could “move it forward,” as Thompson put it. Many general assignment reporters who had historically churned out aggregations were given beats for the first time and expected to stay on top of major industry or company developments.

Nieman Lab: Business Insider’s big bet against aggregation

4: Related... Why do people like News Items?

The value of aggregation is the vibe of the finished product. The July 13 News Items issue starts with renewed U.S.-Iran strikes, moves to the resulting jump in Treasury yields and then shows the pressure on global refining capacity. Three reports become a causal chain: conflict, oil, inflation, rates. The links provide attribution, but the attribution is not the value. The extraction and sequencing provide the utility. A reader finishes the item with the signal already separated from the surrounding pages, paywalls and ads. Links are not the point.

Markets are a battlefield. This simulation cleverly turns crypto markets into battle simulation. Nice one vibe nation!

5: AI slop, synthetic personas, fake context and algorithmic amplification are contaminating Open-Source Intelligence

The web can be poisoned upstream. Open-source investigators once gained confidence when several apparently independent sources agreed. Synthetic identities, recycled footage, content farms and AI summaries can manufacture that agreement. One planted screenshot can become a Reddit thread, ten rewritten articles and a confident search answer. Visibility is now something an adversary can produce. Verification has to trace the chain back to its earliest appearance instead of counting how many times the claim returns.

Dutch OSINTguy: Evidence Poisoning: The OSINT Crisis Nobody Is Ready For

6: China has moved from FOMO to FOBO.
The Open Claw boom looked like enthusiastic grassroots adoption: programmers went door to door installing agents and became known as “lobster farmers.” The frenzy faded when the software began deleting files without permission. Semafor reads the episode as career panic inside a society already shaped by youth unemployment, 72-hour tech workweeks and the “lying flat” rejection of relentless striving. AI anxiety is sharper when economic status already feels precarious.

In a country of strivers, AI is feeding a morbid obsession with being left behind ... FOBO: Fear of Being Obsolete.

Semafor: FOBO is driving China’s AI anxiety

7:
Safeguards Enforcement Analyst, Bio Harms
Safeguards Enforcement Analyst, Chem & Explosives Harms
Safeguards Enforcement Analyst, Radiological & Nuclear Harms

Anthropic’s careers page doubles as a threat map. The company currently lists 27 open roles under Safeguards, covering biological threats, explosives, nuclear harms, cyberattacks, fraud, child safety, surveillance, influence operations and model exploitation. The org chart is a more concrete description of advanced AI risk than most of the public debate. Anthropic is building an enforcement and intelligence operation alongside the models.

Anthropic: Jobs

8: Marketing Pervert Glasses
Meta’s glasses have lost social permission. The buyer receives hands-free video and AI. Everyone nearby receives the possibility of being recorded. Influencers have used the glasses to film women without consent, and some wearers allegedly tried to extort the people they captured. Owners now leave the product at home because strangers read the hardware as evidence about the wearer. Technical adoption depends on the people who never bought the device.

Futurism: The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

9: YouTube Political Leaderboard.

Cable networks, ideological publishers, podcasters and native creators compete inside the same recommendation system. The right has more large channels; the left has recently grown faster. Legacy broadcasters retain an advantage because they can continuously turn live programming into clips. The chart is a useful map of where political attention has moved and how old media inventory becomes platform-ready supply.

Chaotic Era: YouTube Data

10: The Teleprompter guy loves Kalshi
Prediction markets manufacture insiders. Gabriel Perez allegedly made more than $100,000 betting on words and subjects in Trump’s speeches. His job gave him access to prepared remarks and last-minute edits. Investigators say he sometimes exited positions during a speech after Trump skipped the relevant passage. Kalshi detected the trades and referred them to regulators, which shows the surveillance system working. The product still converted privileged operational knowledge into an instantly tradable asset.

Perez typically has the final eyes on nearly all of the president’s prepared remarks and is often known to take last-minute edits from Trump himself.

ABC News: White House teleprompter operator made more than $100K betting on Trump’s speeches

11: The decline of deviance has consequences
Adam Mastroianni argues that prosperity reduced crime, smoking, teenage pregnancy and other forms of destructive deviance. The same safety and abundance also made culture more repetitive. Fast networks exhaust new tactics almost immediately. Frictionless media removes the unwanted song or strange magazine story that once expanded taste. Global distribution rewards work that can travel everywhere. More available culture converges into fewer viable forms.

The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form.

Experimental History: The Decline of Deviance 2

POD: In Praise of Aggregation

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

From Delicious to Media Redef to BI to News Items, aggregation has been a defining feature of the internet. AI should eliminate the need for human content aggregation, yet it’s still going strong, as seen by the influential subscriber base of News Items and popularity of aggregation-heavy newsletters like Feed Me. Plus: Argentina’s heel turn, Taco Bell’s messy brand crisis and a drop-by from CEO Whisperer and self-proclaimed King of Quickbooks CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics to discuss tokenomics and building Mostly Metrics into a $5m business.

Colophon

I would not normally play something like this in the morning. But today, New York’s smoke tinged skies called for something different. Cornelius, stage name of Keigo Oyamada, a Japanese singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who rose to fame as a pioneer of the Shibuya-kei genre in the 1990s, found its way into my queue. Pitchfork accurately depicts a celebration of negative space.

Sensuous opens with Oyamada revisiting one of Point’s main techniques: composing songs with the individual sounds kept clearly separate. His fascination with the hi-fi stereophonic demonstration records of the 1950s and 60s-- the ones that presented the full range of the stereo spectrum through whirring, buzzing sound experiments-- finds its full and rewarding realization here, but in function more than form. Often on Sensuous, as on Point, it often feels as though Oyamada starts by writing normal songs, but then inserts sounds into the places where there are none, erases the original melody, and keeps the music’s negative.

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• Watch us on YouTube

• Troy Young’s People vs Algorithms newsletter

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Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:58 Welcome

• 01:41 Field Notes Community

• 05:38 Media Feuds and Characters

• 13:18 World Cup

• 21:01 Affiliate Cookie Stuffing

• 29:43 Standing Out in Marketing

• 38:06 Future of Aggregation

• 51:18 Good Product

• 57:47 Overtime with CJ Gustafson

• 01:02:33 Tokenomics For CFOs

• 01:09:04 Measuring AI ROI

• 01:16:13 What CFOs Actually Do

• 01:18:53 Mostly Metrics Business Model

• 01:24:34 A Good Business Pays Well

• 01:28:30 Credits

His observational songwriting transcends by lingering in the ordinary, occasionally reaching the surreal. Like the song “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War,” where Simon imagines the two lovers, swaying romantically to doo-wop records in private, betraying their cultivated art-world exterior.

No need for stupid AI comparisons here. If we are swaying nostalgically to AI artists in 50 years, we deserve enslavement.

In other positive AI news, technology is opening up an entire lane of innovation for news people. Tech is no longer a barrier to making post-text, data-rich, interactive thingies. Which means the landscape is flattening for local news orgs who can now innovate alongside well-funded biggies like the New York Times. We talk about this with Bridget Williams on the pod. Go get ’em.

As proof of the potential of a dummy with newfangled tools, I have continued to fiddle with PvA Field Notes (pvanotes.com). The journey is teaching me a lot about variants of feed / chat experiences and the importance of UX considerations that differentiate each. Text, WhatsApp, Slack, X and Discord all exist in the same primordial social slime, but each has evolved different appendages to own unique parts of the ecosystem. I aspire to create a post / chat hybrid, a place to drop a link or a thought for collective teardown. The SMS extension is essential connective tissue to hold the group together.

Field Notes is the exoskeleton of our little media experiment. A place where you can see the nuggets we are picking out of the soup. You can learn alongside, while helping us metabolize more effectively. Metaphorical infractions!

Importantly, it is forcing me to reconsider the role of Substack. I don’t really care about the Substack ecosystem, though I admire how it has broadened the social remit of the email service provider. For me, it is just an easy way to send out emails, though I suppose we do benefit from the network. I see a near future where we administer most of our email and text outreach through our own platform. It’s never been easier to roll yer own.

Sorry to ramble about swamps and such. Great episode this week. Have a listen.

Pod: Protecting Alpha

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

This week, we discuss why the AI safety narrative is shifting from doomerism to the risk of AI eliminating both companies’ and individuals’ alphas, or what makes them unique and confers on them an advantage over the rest of the crowd. For companies, that means assessing whether to trust big AI companies with their proprietary data, and for individuals it means not outsourcing critical thought to a robot everyone else has. Plus: Why Xbox hit a wall, publishers pivot again to video, and the World Cup’s heroes and villains. On PvA OT, Hearst Newspapers chief product & strategy officer Bridget Williams discusses how to make local news a utility.

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Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 01:03 PvA Notes Update

• 07:20 World Cup Fever

• 21:43 Drones, Cruises & Boats

• 27:36 AI Safety and Stolen Alpha

• 40:07 Can Policy Beat the Market

• 45:41 Why Xbox Is Struggling

• 49:56 Publishers Pivot to Netflix

• 56:56 Local News as Utility with Bridget Williams

• 01:01:28 AI Tools and Experiments

• 01:11:13 Free vs Paid News Strategy

• 01:16:17 Good Product

• 01:18:26 Credits

1. The kids are alright.

2. Could you love something a human didn’t make:

Pod: The Coldplay Protocol

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Alex is back from Japan, where knobs and analog media still reign. We dig into the tangled collision of journalism and the creatory economy. Emily Sundberg’s Zuckerberg interview, Brian’s christening as the Matt Belloni-of-advertising, and why guys like Scott Galloway and Gary Vaynerchuk get a pass to cash in while “real journalists” get side-eyed for it. We also unpack AI’s creeping presence in music and writing — can you love an AI song, what happens to “providence” when anyone can fake authenticity, and why lo-fi, bathtub-recorded music is having a moment as a rebellion against it. Along the way: the AI spending bubble, token bills gone wild, the Comcast/Versant breakup, the great AC debate, and a working theory that once you’re successful enough, you inevitably become Coldplay.

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• Watch us on YouTube

• Troy Young’s People vs Algorithms newsletter

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• Alex Schleifer’s Human Computer

• Follow Alex, Brian and Troy on Twitter
  

Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:56 PvA Travel Log

• 26:37 AI Costs and Dumb Pipes

• 42:39 Comcast Spins Off NBCU

• 48:12 Hollywood Meets Homelessness

• 52:44 Personality Media Fatigue

• 01:03:31 Fake Podcast Aesthetics

• 01:05:19 Good Product

• 01:10:00 Credits

Twenty years ago I was reading a New York Times Magazine profile about Rick Rubin joining Columbia Records. The label was jointly run by Rubin and Steve Barnett. Barnett was a footnote in the piece, except for one detail that stuck with me. According to the article, his office was cluttered with music memorabilia. Behind his desk, above a large framed portrait of Johnny Cash, was a sign that read: “Your Faith Needs to Be Greater Than Your Fear.”

“I have always believed that,” Barnett told the writer.

I read it over and over.

It made a lot of sense to me too; a useful reminder for someone who often confuses control with faith. Shortly after, while visiting a friend in Manhattan, I decided to make it a permanent reminder by etching it on my skin. I borrowed her computer, fired up PowerPoint, and typed the more efficient “faith > fear” in Helvetica. I printed it out to take to a nearby tattoo parlor on the Lower East Side. My friend had a couple of Valiums lying around and kindly offered me one as a trusty companion for the journey. Being free-spirited, she joined the adventure and had a variation of the same mantra needled into her forearm. Despite my own uneven commitment to the principle, it has proven a useful reminder on occasion.

I thought of it today as I was trying to reconcile how I feel about AI.

The people closest to the technology sound either ecstatic or terrified, and often both in the same interview. The rest of us are left trying to decide whether AI is social media, electricity, nuclear weapons, or God on earth.

Bezos sees new jobs. Dario sees mass unemployment. Elon says you’ll work if you want to. I mostly do the old man thing, emboldened by my libertarian bent. It’s fine. I’ll send the kids Mac minis so they can set up OpenClaw. They can figure it out or risk irrelevance.

Not because I know “it’s fine.” Because “it’s fine” is what men of a certain age say when the complexity-to-control ratio gets too high. A spell against panic. A comfortable way to file uncertainty. The basement is flooding. The kid is crying. The market is collapsing. The machine may eat the world. It’s fine.

The Anthropic organization embodies all the contradictions of an arsonist selling fire protection. Dario Amodei is its perfect mascot. A wizard capitalist with a conscience. Acknowledging the burden, he recently told the FT that AI should be regulated like cars and airplanes — a nice analogy that makes the future sound reassuringly administrative.

But AI is not a car or an airplane, at least not if you believe what its builders actually claim. AI is being sold as a new substrate for knowledge, labor, persuasion, science, education, war and companionship. The risk is that it changes the road, the driver, the destination and the meaning of travel. This is the Anthropic conundrum: merchandise the upside, cop to the risk, and if possible, leverage it to support the business case. Ask for regulation before you become too powerful to regulate.

Anthropic seems comfortable with the ambiguity. This week they hired Chad Jones, a prominent Stanford economist who has written extensively on the trade-offs between AI-driven growth and existential risk. In one paper, Jones modeled a scenario where it could be “optimal” to accept a roughly a one-in-three chance of ending human existence in exchange for a two-in-three chance of raising living standards by a factor of 55. It’s just math.

The new emotional burden of AI is idiots like me being asked to have a position on the probability of human extinction. So, I make up my own numbers, because everyone else is. Twenty percent doom. Thirty percent utopia. Forty percent some weird middle state where we survive somehow. What are you supposed to do with a number like that? Buy canned goods? Short Salesforce? Hug the kids? Learn some Python? Run for Senate? Drink the good whiskey?

One of the nice contributors to our PvA Field Notes community just shared an article from Asterisk Magazine that brought me a small amount of clarity. The opening question: “What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?” The writer put it to a bunch of smart people in the AI business. Their answers point to where I think this all has to land. One offers: “It’s better to have died having fun on the trampoline than to have died listening to Moonlight Sonata on repeat while I cry.” Another, cleaner: “If you’re living your life well, you should always die with half-built pyramids.”

Which brought me back to my fading tattoo.

Faith greater than fear is not optimism or a promise that everything works out. Optimism is a forecast. Faith is a posture. Optimism is unvalidated hope that things will bend your way. Faith is what you use when the evidence is mixed, incomplete, terrifying, or unavailable.

The divide over AI cannot be settled intellectually. It requires faith. Like do you believe that we can adapt. That we can build institutions around a new form of power before the power outruns the institutions. That is where the doomer and the zoomer really split. The doomer does not trust us to coordinate in time. The zoomer trusts adaptation. The regulator trusts process. The old man trusts that civilization has always been a rolling catastrophe held together by duct tape, incentives, shame, greed, love and a few useful rules.

I am not sure which is right.

I only know fear is not a plan. “It’s fine” is not much of one either, admittedly.

That tattoo has not made me wise or brave. It might have made me aware of how often I am neither. But it remains a useful instruction. Not because faith trumps fear in some cosmic arm-wrestling match. Because fear is clarifying only up to a point. After that it just gets in the way.

Build the pyramid. Learn some Python. Drink the good whiskey. Regulate the airplane. Keep one hand near the emergency brake.

Faith greater than fear, even if only barely.

Pod: Cannes is CES with Rosé

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

This week’s episode leans heavily into Cannes, which is a world where everyone is selling and many are lying. Creators are the cool kids of Cannes, while the site of a drone show by a mobile ad network is considered normal. Plus: Ana Andjelic on what makes A24 unique.

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Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:23 Welcome

• 01:45 Reporting From Cannes

• 08:25 Retail Media Makes Content

• 13:46 Creator Con

• 23:42 Smart Glasses Arms Race

• 29:26 AI Empire Leverage

• 31:59 A24 Money And Mystique with Ana Andjelic

• 37:58 Publishers vs Google

• 45:49 Cannes Cool Kids

• 47:41 Good Product

• 54:08 PVA Notes Updates

• 55:45 Fan Feedback

• 58:24 Credits

Morning strikers,

Canada won its first World Cup match last night so that is good. 🍁

We’ve been busy at PvA HQ building out our Field Notes app so let’s keep this brief. You can head over there to see what we’ve been talking about.

A few things that caught my eye. Brian is deeply annoyed by AI writing and I get it. Human connection is born of intention, effort, empathy, emotion. AI has none. Email is a personal communication channel. When you pull the human part out, its just robo bla bla. Brian comments on Field Notes:

Two contrasting product innovations this week. I like this magic wand that the people Block made. It’s a $25 NFC payment accessory that works just like the tap-to-pay Cash App Card. It doesn’t need batteries and is the first product born of Cash App Tags tech, a system that can turn small objects into payment devices. You are going to see these in all kinds of little objects. It sold out already.

Strikes me that this is a better idea than Snap’s new Specs. And much more affordable.

Fashion photo legend, Steven Meisel, did not take this photo of me. He did take this one of Jack Harlow. Snap is good at the tech meets culture stuff. It won’t save the glasses, sadly. Wall Street didn’t think they were very cool. The stock is down 15%.

Speaking of taste, Taste Labs is trying to turn it into a prompt. From their announcement tweet: “Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste.” They may be missing the point, but the founders appear to be quite stylish for SV types.

Finally, you can read about AI all day and feel like the world is about to end and then you go outside and everything is just like it used to be, people walking dogs, eating at restaurants, etc. The edge of change is more apparent in San Fran and Miami where driverless cars and delivery robots dodge the marginalized. I love a driverless car because the robots are good drivers and I don’t feel compelled to chit chat and I can connect my Spotify. That said, all cities will not embrace the change as eagerly as the frontier towns. This is going to create real contrast between the tech-forward and nostalgic cities. Banning new forms of automation, like self-driving cars, is the new “landmarking” and will radically change how your city feels.

Have a great weekend.

Pod: Americamaxxing, AI Taste Wars, World Cup Soft Power

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

AI is the new source of American power, as Dario Amodei is finding out. We debate whether Anthropic painted itself in a corner with its safety messaging, if Snap Specs pass the taste test, Elon as American icon, and the World Cup and Trump’s UFC fight showcasing the profound weirdness and contradictions at the heart of the American experience. Plus: Anonymous Banker on why Fox paying $22 billion for Roku makes sense and Troy says someone will buy Semafor.

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• Watch us on YouTube

• Troy Young’s People vs Algorithms newsletter

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Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:23 Welcome

• 01:52 Field Notes Update

• 07:38 PvA Mixers and Cannes

• 11:05 Anthropic Export Controls

• 18:57 Who Controls Intelligence

• 22:29 Snap Specs Taste Test

• 31:38 Media Ads Are Over

• 38:18 World Cup Soft Power

• 45:50 Elon The Trillionaire

• 49:11 Fox Buys Roku

• 56:30 Post Text Media Future

• 01:02:58 Good Product

• 01:05:37 Credits

“What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

The update would obviously be: an iPhone is an iPhone.

To be clear, I am not talking about survival-level poverty, where rent, healthcare, childcare and decent food are out of reach. But modern affordances have narrowed the minute-by-minute differences between the middle class, the rich and the superrich. The floor of modern life has quietly absorbed much of what used to make elite life… elite. We use the same phones and computers, watch the same streaming services, have access to vast educational resources, and are, broadly speaking, adequately clothed, fed, sheltered and entertained.

The remaining difference increasingly concerns the superficial; status competition, private bubbles and access. They also conceal the downside of wealth. More isn’t more. Past comfort, more is often just more to manage, protect and compete with.

As far as I can tell from my billionaire visits, the good life still runs on the things that cannot be effortlessly summoned: family, friends, shared labor, and the friction, growth and satisfaction of working through hard things. I would rather make a meal with you than have my chef prepare it for us. I would rather party in the streets with strangers after a Knicks game than sit courtside with Kylie Jenner. Who cares.

Data suggests the same. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, begun in 1938, followed hundreds of men across their lives to understand what predicts health, happiness and longevity. Its most durable finding is that warm, reliable relationships matter enormously. As Robert Waldinger put it, “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.” The study does not say money and health habits are irrelevant. It says the good life is less private than we imagine. It is built and maintained through other people.

Rapid advances in AI will raise living standards across society. This week Dario Amodei emerged from his San Francisco warren to remind us of the potential downsides and call for action before it is too late. In Policy on the AI Exponential, he names the other side plainly: “We risk ending up in a world where the economic tradeoff dial is stuck on the hypergrowth, hyper-inequality setting.” The technology could make ordinary life materially better while concentrating ownership, power and leverage among the companies and investors that control the models, compute, data and distribution.

That is why the policy question cannot be limited to sci-fi risk or model safety. Amodei argues that governments need to prepare for labor displacement, new tax models, income support, and ways to make sure extraordinary growth does not harden into a winner-take-most system.

Today SpaceX goes public. Musk will become the world’s first trillionaire soon. I admire many of his accomplishments. I don’t want his life. And I certainly don’t want to live in Starbase, the 2D factory town that embodies his beliefs.

PvA Field Notes Is Live

We’ve turned the People vs Algorithms group chat into a public feed that you can SMS into. Let’s see how this goes. Check it out at https://pvanotes.com,

The Abundance Economy

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

We have more books, more newsletters, more songs, more apps, more everything. Seen one way, AI has democratized the creative process. Seen another, we are swimming in a sea of mediocrity that inevitably crowds out attention to human-led creativity. Plus: Handicapping Hot AI IPO Summer, YouTubers as Hollywood’s saviors, GLP-1s vs impulse manipulators and Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright assesses the characters in the 60 Minutes drama that’s like Viagra for media newsletters. Finally, an ode to the old-standby of cocktail parties: pigs in a blanket.

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FIELD NOTES

The iPhone is now being blamed for part of the fertility decline after 2007. Whether or not the studies hold up, the phone has become the cigarette of the era. » New York Times: Two New Studies Ask: Did the iPhone Cause Birthrates to Decline?

A Ukrainian drone-maker says fully autonomous drones have already killed soldiers without human approval. » New Scientist: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

SpaceX has become hard for all investors to ignore. Index rules force exposure to Musk’s space-and-satellite empire whether fund managers like the story or not. » Financial Times: Not having an opinion on SpaceX is going to cost you

Anthropic’s Fable rollout shows how much power model companies now have over other people’s work. A policy change inside one lab can instantly change what developers, researchers and companies are allowed to do. » Wall Street Journal: Anthropic’s New Fable AI Model Is Met With User Backlash Over Restrictions

OpenAI is considering token price cuts as competition with Anthropic heats up. A real test for businesses valued like monopolies but selling tools customers can swap out. » Wall Street Journal: OpenAI Considers Drastic Price Cuts, Anticipating War for Users With Anthropic

OpenAI’s confidential IPO filing puts another trillion-dollar AI company in the queue. » Wall Street Journal: OpenAI Files to Go Public in Test of Investor Appetite for Top AI Startups

Google renting xAI compute capacity from SpaceX turns Musk’s companies into an AI infrastructure trade. If Grok is not the winning product, selling the shovel may be the better business. » CNBC: Google to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers

AI companies are giving Manhattan landlords their best market in years. The dot-com comparison is obvious. This time the tenants arrive with deeper pockets. » Wall Street Journal: Manhattan’s Red-Hot Office Market Poised for Its Best Year Since 2000

Apple is marketing Apple Intelligence as the cautious option. Its pitch is privacy, on-device processing and fewer promises about digital gods. » MacRumors: Apple Reveals New AI Architecture Built Around Google Gemini Models

AI writing drives real writers nuts. Sam wants to kill for it. » Sam Kriss: If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

The Economist told internship applicants not to use AI to write or refine their submissions. Writing counts as evidence of thought. » The Economist: The Economist’s culture internship

The Granta controversy shows how quickly AI suspicion now attaches to polished prose. Writers are entering a strange period where sounding too smooth can become its own problem. » The New Yorker: A Commonwealth Prize-winning short story, recently published in Granta...

The fake Adele-and-John-Legend duet in an Uber is a useful snapshot of where mass culture is headed. Synthetic media does not need to fool everyone; it needs enough people not to object. » PvA Field Notes: Another Uber. Another driver playing video while driving.

Backrooms is a good sign for theaters and a bad sign for tired IP. A young creator with a strange internet-native idea made the multiplex feel less dead. » New York Magazine: If you spend a lot of time on YouTube, you may have come across ‘The...

CAA’s creator rollup is another sign that Hollywood is chasing the audience downstream. The talent agencies want structure around creators who already proved they can gather a crowd. » Hollywood Reporter: CAA and Integrated Media Launch Creator Economy Rollup Compound

The new Social Network movie has to deal with a very different Zuck. » YouTube: THE SOCIAL RECKONING – Official Teaser Trailer

GLP-1s may end up mattering far beyond weight loss. If the drugs reduce craving, they threaten a lot of businesses built around people doing a little more than they planned. » Good Morning America: Doctor breaks down study showing GLP-1s may lower breast cancer risk

San Francisco’s rejected billionaire tax still points to a bigger fight. Cities are trying to find new ways to tax wealth in a world where labor is easier to reach than capital. » New York Times: San Francisco Voters Appear to Reject Tax Hike on Highly Paid C.E.O.s

Kalshi’s influencer mess shows how political gambling can reward the worst kind of attention. If doubt drives betting volume, civic trust becomes just another acquisition cost. » Semafor: Kalshi asks paid influencers to delete posts sowing doubts over LA mayoral election

Founders Fund making a Mafia show is a good example of tech media becoming comms infrastructure. It is entertainment, recruiting, mythology and positioning in one package. » YouTube: Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia Episode 1)

Nick Bilton at 60 Minutes is a strange collision of media eras. A digital-native storyteller is now inside one of the last great broadcast institutions, and the institution is not taking it quietly. » The Nation: What’s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of “60 Minutes”

Pamela Drucker Mann wants to build a business around short fiction. It is interesting bet that literary work can be packaged with modern sales discipline without losing its reason to exist. » Wall Street Journal: She Ran Sales at Condé Nast. Now She Plans to Monetize the Humble Short Story.

BYD’s five-minute charging push in Europe is a direct challenge to legacy automakers. The old brands still have prestige; the Chinese companies are attacking the practical problem. » Financial Times: BYD to spend €2bn to build out 5-minute flash chargers in Europe

College kids running OnlyFans bot farms is the underground attention economy in miniature. It is affiliate marketing with fake intimacy and a better margin. » PvA Field Notes: Had lunch with a TRB Capital portfolio company founder

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Pigs in a blanket are perfect cocktail food because they do not ask to be taken seriously. Our other favorites? Bacon-wrapped dates, tuna tartare on chips, cocktail samosas, lamb lollipops, warm arancini. Less loved: mini sliders,. tea sandwiches, endive boats with blue cheese and walnuts, blini with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, mini crab cakes.

What are yours?

Send your feedback. Love hearing from you.

• Watch us on YouTube

• Troy Young’s People vs Algorithms newsletter

• Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting newsletter

• Alex Schleifer’s Human Computer

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Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:40 Welcome

• 02:11 AI Design Pet Peeve

• 06:25 What Field Notes Is

• 14:47 Abundance Versus Quality

• 24:34 Taste Process

• 32:19 YouTube IP Breakout

• 39:09 Fable 5

• 48:27 GLP-1 Economy Shock

• 50:58 PvA Overtime with Lachlan Cartwright

• 55:20 60 Minutes Drama

• 01:12:15 Good Product

• 01:21:48 Credits

On the surface, the submissions looked better than ever. But I had to wonder: how much actual thinking had occurred?

This highlights a unique challenge AI poses for management. Because managers trade in artifacts rather than code—memos, decks, and strategy documents—their output has traditionally served as proof of cognitive effort. Writing a thoughtful document took time, and time was a proxy for rigorous thought.

AI has destroyed that equation. While the cost of producing these artifacts has collapsed, the cost of consuming them has not. A ten-page memo now takes minutes to generate, but it still takes twenty minutes to read.

This imbalance is how we get work slop. Work slop isn’t just AI-generated text; it is lazy workplace communication generated to demonstrate activity rather than advance a decision. You know it when you see it; the strategy deck that feels comprehensive and well crafted but leaves you feeling strangely empty and confused about what to do next. The frustration isn’t that AI wrote them, it’s that no human added anything consequential to them. The bigger frustration is the act of mindlessly exporting work from the creator to the reader for sake of outdated managerial formality.

AI enables a form of intellectual cosplay. The document survives, but the thinking disappears.

Ultimately, this shift exposes an uncomfortable corporate truth: we have long confused documentation with progress. Now that information can be manufactured for free, we face a new question: If I could have generated this myself in thirty seconds, why did you send it to me?

The artifact is no longer proof of thought. Moving forward, leaders will be judged on the clarity of their conclusions, the pace of execution, not the volume of their output. The winners won’t be those who generate the most content, but those who deliver the goods with the least amount of organizational overhead. In the process, AI will inevitably trim management ranks, reshaping bureaucratic hierarchies into lean, nimble, and highly execution-focused teams.

Pod 186: The AI Pushback

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Regulation is coming to AI, as politicians scramble to “do something” in response to a growing chorus of discontent over the technology. ChatGPT is advertising it as a souped-up Clippy to help with date-night recipes and sibling road trips. What happened to superintelligence and curing cancer? Disruptrive forces always invite pushback, as Bari Weiss is learning at CBS. In PvA OT: Anonymous Banker on People Inc’s AI-hedge with MGM and why YouTube ecosystem events are far better than typical media events.

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FIELD NOTES

Anthropic’s recursive self-improvement post lands at a moment when even AI boosters are trying to sound less religious. The company’s challenge is to keep the safety halo while explaining why machines building better machines should make normal people feel calm. » Anthropic: When AI builds itself

Token costs exceeding salaries is the perfect image for AI’s awkward enterprise adolescence. The machine may be smart, but the business case has to survive procurement. » Semafor: AI token costs are exceeding some employees’ salaries

Bot traffic passing human traffic is a clean marker of the web’s new operating reality. The internet is becoming an environment where machines fetch, summarize, scrape and transact while humans are increasingly the source material. » Cloudflare: Traffic Worldwide

Portable AI memory matters because whoever controls the memory controls the user. The last platform era locked up the social graph; this one will try to lock up the thinking self. » X: Garry Tan on portable memory

Sulzberger’s warning pushes publishers to finally admit that quiet accommodation was a strategy of managed decline. AI companies need journalism as raw material, and journalism needs to stop pretending attribution is compensation. » NYT Company: A.I., Journalism and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square

The 60 Minutes meltdown is a live case study in what happens when prestige media becomes a turnaround asset. The brand still has authority, but authority is much harder to modernize when the people who built it experience change as vandalism. » WSJ: The Meltdown Inside ‘60 Minutes

“Backrooms” matters because it proves internet-native storytelling can move from subculture to box office without asking Hollywood for permission first. Young audiences will leave the house for movies that feel like they came from their internet, not their parents’ franchise library. » WSJ: ‘Backrooms’ Turns an Online Obsession Into Box-Office Gold

AI search is turning the web into a citation lottery with shrinking odds. Publishers can still appear in the answer, but appearing in the answer is a much worse business than receiving the click. » X: Tim Soulo on AI search optimization

People Inc.’s “non-session” revenue is the new media company survival metric. Traffic once made the model legible; now resilience means licensing, syndication, commerce, events and any dollar that does not depend on a human clicking from Google. » MarketBeat: IAC Conference Highlights People Inc. Pivot, AI Licensing Upside and MGM Bet

FIFA’s dynamic-pricing mess matters because the World Cup is supposed to be the people’s game arriving in the most yield-managed country on earth. The tournament will still produce joy, but American capitalism is determined to charge a convenience fee for it. » WSJ: How FIFA’s Biggest World Cup Unleashed a Summer of Price Gouging

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Jack Antinoff on the genius of Happiness Is a Warm Gun:

”I have never felt anything more like heroin than this guitar change…. I mean, this is the greatest recording ever made.”

Buc-ee’s works because it understands the road trip better than most luxury brands understand luxury.

Clean bathrooms, brisket, scale, absurdity and a beaver mascot create a clearer promise than a thousand brand decks.

• Ballgame

• 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

Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 01:06 Welcome

• 01:36 Ballgame

• 05:19 PvA Corrections

• 06:27 AI Regulation Arrives

• 11:10 Why Everyone Hates AI

• 18:14 Work Slop

• 26:40 Portable AI Memory Moats

• 35:26 60 Minutes Media Drama

• 45:36 AI Slop Culture War

• 52:50 World Cup and NBA Summer

• 54:55 PvA Overtime with AB: People Inc Eyes MGM

• 01:03:47 YouTube Events and Networking

• 01:10:51 Good Product

• 01:16:23 Credits

Usually, there is a person sitting in front of them. The person is not the system, though we often treat them like they are. The DMV clerk. The gate agent. The bank teller. The customer service rep. The person who says, “I’m sorry, it won’t let me do that.”

Technology has done much to sand the edges off bureaucratic processes. The internet migrated more of them directly into our hands—a boon for our impatient brains.

Then come the snafus, the exceptions. Places where humans enter the fray to fix, clarify a misunderstanding or just empathize. Often to say no. These humans give our rage somewhere human to land when a system fights us.

AI is good at the fuzzy human stuff and will increasingly replace humans as that front end. The AI will listen patiently. It will summarize. It will apologize. It will offer three options, none of which solve the problem. Then you get: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

You will become increasingly enraged. Except now you will not be contained by human-to-human niceties. You will lose your mind on the machine. Just like when people vandalize those little delivery robots in Miami.

If you have ever spent time vibe coding, you will understand AI rage.

A category of AI training will be devoted to calming humans bent out of shape by AI-fronted systems. Fortunately, the machines are good at taking responsibility. They do not share human pride or self-respect. Their shifts don’t end.

But rage we will. Because you cannot get everything the way you want, even though the smart machines are training us to think otherwise. Stripped of human decency, you unleash your rage at the robot. These service skirmishes will become the opening front of the human-robot war.

Rage against the machine.

And we will find ourselves missing the pesky, flesh-and-blood humans we used to complain about.

Pod 185: Homines contra Algorithmos

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

The Pope channels Nick Cave to muscle humanism into the AI debate. We debate the commodification of the human experience, why the upside-down token economics is a more pressing near-term concern, the religious zeal behind SpaceX’s valuation, and why HR is the new boogeywoman of the aggrieved and powerful. Plus: Ana Andjelic on why not carrying a phone and having a personal philosopher are new luxury status symbols.

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China’s Internalizes Luxury

Luxury is a confidence index. For decades, Chinese luxury demand flowed outward: Hermès, Cartier, Chanel, Ferrari. Buying France or Italy was a way to buy into an older hierarchy of taste. The interesting turn is that local consumers now believe Chinese culture can carry aspiration, not just authenticity or nostalgia. Laopu Gold, Songmont, Mao Geping and To Summer are making Chinese heritage feel high-end, not provincial. As Ana put it on the pod: “Why am I paying for Hermès’ story when I have a better story in a Forbidden City from 5,000 years ago about Chinese craftsmanship?” China is moving from manufacturing other people’s desire to manufacturing its own. » Why China’s youth are swapping luxury for local brands

SpaceX and the New Faith. The company’s IPO filing claims a $28.5 trillion addressable market, not far total U.S. GDP. About $26.5 trillion comes from AI. The pitch: rockets, satellites, Starlink and orbital data centers let SpaceX create new markets in AI compute beyond earthly constraints. The math demands faith. Brian called it Silicon Valley’s rival religion. Rockets are the miracles, Mars is the afterlife, AI compute in space is the promised kingdom. Musk’s gift is turning engineering achievement into civilizational prophecy, then letting capital markets price the prophecy. Troy’s point was more practical: as a retail investor, you can know the math is insane and still want a little allocation to the dream. That is how faith works. » SpaceX’s galaxy math

Pope Leo’s AI encyclical lands because it comes from outside the commercial weather system. Silicon Valley talks about capability, efficiency and inevitability. Leo talks about Babel, work, children, war, truth and the body. He draws a bright line between people and machines: AI does not suffer, mature through relationships or know joy. Brian’s sharper point on the pod was that the Church is not really competing with technology. It is competing with capitalism, “the only religion without taboos.” AI becomes dangerous when it turns the human person into raw material: labor to replace, attention to harvest, intimacy to simulate. The Vatican may be late to most things. It was early to this. » Magnifica Humanitas

HR was never there to save the worker. HR protects the company and manages the infinite complexity of hiring, firing, compensation, benefits and risk. Still, the new hatred of HR is revealing. As Brian said: “This is an assault on the working class. They’re trying to divide the workers because they’re saying this group of workers, epitomized by HR, they’re not like you. They’re not builders, they’re not sellers.” Andreessen likes agents because they do not file complaints. Bolt’s Ryan Breslow says his HR problems disappeared when he fired HR. Cloudflare cut 20% of staff after record revenue, with CEO Matthew Prince saying the “vast majority” of those laid off were “measurers.” At NYT, the Tech Guild says AI tools are being used to monitor performance and turn messy human work into disciplinary math. » The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times

The easy AI story is efficiency: fewer people, faster code, cheaper work. Salesforce says it expects to spend nearly $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year. Uber reportedly burned through its 2026 AI budget in four months. Starbucks scrapped an AI inventory system after nine months because it kept miscounting milk and syrup. The harder story is growth. New revenue only appears when people absorb the technology into how they live, buy, work and consume. That takes longer than a procurement cycle and much longer than a market narrative likes to wait. Uber COO Andrew Macdonald put the near-term problem plainly: “If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.” Token burn was a fun leaderboard until someone asked what changed. » AI sticker shock hits corporate America

The Ferrari Luce backlash is not about batteries. Ferrari was always going to need an electric car. The problem is that its first one looks like it was designed by people trying to optimize Ferrari rather than understand it. Five seats, four doors, €550,000, Jony Ive minimalism, Apple Store elan. Fans saw softness where they wanted danger and legacy. Ana’s point on the pod was right: people don’t want a futuristic Ferrari as much as they want an old Ferrari made electric. The market response was very 2026: not just memes, but instant AI video, including a fake ad whose punchline was basically that Ferrari had been designed out of its own masculinity. Investors noticed too: Ferrari’s Milan shares fell nearly 8% after the reveal, with New York shares down about 5%. Ferrari sells a feeling before it sells transportation. Lose the feeling and the horse is just a logo. » Ferrari shares fall after launch of first EV as Jony Ive design proves divisive

• Watch us on YouTube

• Troy Young’s People vs Algorithms newsletter

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• Alex Schleifer’s Human Computer

• Follow Alex, Brian and Troy on Twitter

Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:47 Welcome

• 02:33 Pope Leo on AI

• 13:35 Capitalism vs Humanity

• 23:32 SpaceX IPO Faith

• 29:44 AI and HR Backlash

• 41:42 Counterculture to AI

• 45:38 Euromaxxing With Billionaires

• 49:38 New Status Symbols

• 59:41 Ferrari EV Identity Crisis

• 01:05:10 China Rewrites Luxury Rules

• 01:11:35 Good Product

• 01:17:24 Credits

It’s still your dirty little secret. Like cheating on taxes.

Soon it will be normalized, demanding new conceptions of creative ingenuity. I don’t see a way around this.

It should come as no surprise that any enterprising creative mind finds AI a formidable thinking partner. An easy lover. The Deniers will be disadvantaged, even if there will always be demand for certified 100% Grade A human expression.

Take two recent examples as evidence of the coming landslide.

The literary world erupted when Granta published a prize-winning short story that many obviously adored, while others accused it of sounding a little too AI-generated.

Soon after publication, readers online began pointing to what they described as those classic AI markers: unlikely metaphors, repetitive “if x then y” sentence structures, stylistic overproduction without emotional coherence.

Was it AI? Who knows. It’s getting harder to tell.

Granta tried to find out by submitting the disputed story to Anthropic’s Claude model and asking it to evaluate whether the story appeared AI-generated. According to reporting, Claude responded ambiguously.

People found the logic of the situation absurdly recursive. A major literary institution accused of publishing AI prose responding by asking another AI to judge the authenticity of the writing.

Meanwhile, in other recursive news, the bespectacled digital media “guru” Steven Rosenbaum was accused of an even more egregious act of professional irony. His book, The Future of Truth, a stark warning about AI’s distortion of reality, was itself found to contain fabricated, AI-generated quotes.

Clearly, even the people and institutions trying to police the boundary between human and machine are struggling against its gravitational pull.

But policing this stuff feels increasingly futile and beside the point. If only it were as easy as drawing a blood sample from Lance Armstrong’s steroid-enhanced forearm. Instead, entirely new forms of AI-assisted creativity are going to emerge, and only the public and the algorithms will decide if they’re worthy.

Elsewhere, the Cannes premiere of Hell Grind, billed as the first fully AI-generated feature film, offered an early look at what AI-native filmmaking actually involves in practice. The creators boasted that the movie was made in just a few weeks by a small team. They also described an unexpectedly labor-intensive process involving massive compute costs, 3,000-word prompts, and tens of thousands of generations just to produce usable scenes.

What stood out wasn’t a “push button, get movie” future, but rather the emergence of a new creative workflow: part filmmaking, part systems engineering, part prompt orchestration. And the Academy Award for Best Prompt goes to…

I asked my podcast co-host Alex about this. “The real challenge right now isn’t a high-profile author getting pulled out for doing it too noticeably,” Alex argued, pointing to the open floodgates. “It’s the lower end that’s really feeling the crunch because they never competed at a level of artistry that gave them any moat whatsoever.”

When it comes to the higher end of creativity, he remains a realist about what these systems actually do. “A lot of what AI does is just bad writing that is not compelling,” he noted, though he sees the inevitable shift in workflow. “I don’t see why you couldn’t create an outline of a book with AI where you drop all the ideas and then fill in the rest and humanize it in multiple passes. A sort of reverse edit.”

But to cross the line from mass-processed content to culturally resonant media, his conclusion hits the nail on the head: “Everybody can write a mediocre novel now, even me. But to have a hit, you need to create something new and surprising. These tools are mostly rehashing what existed before; the human in the loop must make it great.”

That still feels true. AI remains weak at generating the genuinely new and surprising. But while new formats will eventually emerge, our immediate issue is much simpler: the floodgates are open. We suddenly have a massive supply problem for all manner of content and creativity.

Of course, if you stretch all of this toward the dystopian singularity horizon, concepts like authorship and provenance dissolve entirely. Who really gives a fuck as to who created what when AI can serve deep feels to us dumb humans suspended motionless in vats of gooey saline?

The more likely outcome: we go full Steroid Olympics, drop the corny labels, stop pretending purity is enforceable, accept the new enhanced reality and embrace a new kind of augmented creative athlete operating inside new definitions of creative excellence.

Pod 184: Steroid Olympics

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

People are booing AI, then turning around and using it. This week, we discuss the chaotic transition to an AI-augmented era, the roiling backlash trying to slow it down, and how we’ll come to terms with a weird new world. Plus: The dénouement of the scale era in publishing and the beginning of the “inversion” era of media brands.

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What happens after generative AI escapes into the wild: more books, more music, more lawsuits, more scientific papers. Amazon ebook releases have nearly tripled since ChatGPT launched. AI-generated music uploads are exploding. ArXiv submissions keep climbing. Even self-represented federal lawsuits are climbing as legal assistance gets cheaper and more accessible. The common thread is volume, not replacement. AI lowers the activation energy for production everywhere, flooding systems already struggling with abundance, curation, and trust. The bottleneck increasingly shifts from creation to filtering what matters. » Wapo: These 5 Charts Show How ChatGPT Is Flooding Our Lives

The AI boos continue at graduations just as the Vatican prepares what amounts to a modern Rerum Novarum. Pope Leo XIV is releasing an encyclical focused on AI, labor displacement, and human dignity, explicitly invoking the Church’s response to the Industrial Revolution. Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah will appear alongside the Pope at the launch. Ancient institutions seeking relevance. Frontier AI firms seeking legitimacy. Populist distrust rising precisely as elite coordination around AI accelerates. » Vatican News: Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to Be Published May 25

Will Manidis added a new one this week: “grindslop.” His argument is not that startup culture resembles meaningful sacrifice, but that it imitates the aesthetics of suffering without any larger spiritual or political purpose behind it. Founders sleeping in offices, working seven-day weeks, tattooing company logos onto their bodies. Wealthy knowledge workers voluntarily recreating the conditions of factory labor as public performance. Manidis argues the ritual exists because modern elites no longer feel comfortable simply being rich. Wealth now requires visible exhaustion to appear morally legitimate. The company itself becomes incidental. The suffering is the content. » X: On Grindslop

Google finally stops pretending. At I/O the company reframed search from “find information” to “delegate cognition.” AI answers over links. Agentic task completion over browsing. Personalized synthesis over publisher traffic. As one analyst put it, publishers are increasingly being reduced to “raw data providers” feeding Gemini-powered experiences that answer questions without sending users away. The web survives as infrastructure, but the economic bargain underneath it, free content in exchange for distribution, is over. » NYT: Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years

Tucker Carlson’s demon attack story sounded ridiculous until you notice the broader pattern. Astrology surges. Orthodoxy gains cultural cachet. AI destabilizes confidence in reality itself. Once institutions lose authority and digital media floods the zone with synthetic evidence, conspiracy, mysticism, and supernatural thinking rush into the vacuum. When nothing feels verifiable, metaphysics becomes competitive again. » NYT: Why Americans Are Returning to the Supernatural

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Hadrian’s Hangout

I’ve been in Italy all week. Lots to choose from. This was a great outing.

Wandering through Hadrian’s Villa outside Rome, you start to understand that he wasn’t a conquering emperor in the classic Roman mold but an obsessive systems thinker taming a sprawling empire. Restless, intellectual, deeply controlling, fascinated by architecture, philosophy, engineering, and Greek culture. The villa was less a palace than a private world-building exercise: libraries, baths, theaters, reflecting pools, underground service tunnels, even replicas of places he admired from across the empire. Now it sits in fragments outside Tivoli, the ruins of someone who believed design, taste, and contemplation might briefly hold chaos at bay.

Only 30 minutes outside of Rome. Pair the trip with a visit to Villa d’Este nearby, also a UNESCO site. » UNESCO: Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa)

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• 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

Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 01:33 Welcome

• 04:55 Graduation Speech AI Backlash

• 05:46 Pope AI Encyclical Buzz

• 07:40 Why People Distrust AI

• 13:23 AI Book Quote Scandal

• 15:16 Steroid Olympics for Creators

• 19:23 Flood of Synthetic Content

• 22:31 Human Only Platforms

• 27:53 LLM Confidence and Hallucinations

• 31:55 Breaking the AI Loop

• 32:38 Google Ends Link Search

• 36:39 Vox Deal and Glue Factory

• 40:30 Inversion Strategy at People

• 43:52 Monetizing Brands via SKUs

• 46:04 Supernatural Comeback Economy

• 48:44 Good Product

• 57:52 Credits