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• 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

• Join our community - PvA Field Notes

Chapters:

• 12:00 GTA VI

• 20:47 Meta Layoffs

• 33:07 Hugging Face Agent Swarm

• 40:03 AI China Race

• 47:42 Social Costs And AI

• 01:09:04 Good Product

• 01:16:58 Credits

I bring this up because there is suddenly a lot of talk about the internet being dead. I would like to take a minute to examine what exactly is dying, why it is dying, and speculate a little about what comes next.

For clarity, what is this thing we call the internet when we say it is dead? We mostly mean the Web. The internet is the network underneath everything. The Web is the thing Tim Berners-Lee and others built on top of it: an open system for publishing, finding and connecting information.

It is defined by a few good ideas.

There are open standards and protocols that allow anybody to make and read the stuff it contains. There is a universal addressing system — URLs — so everything can have a location and everything can link to everything else. There is a discovery machine… Google. Then there is an economic model, mostly advertising, that kinda works but has never worked particularly well.

Mostly, we love that it is free of nasty central control. This is why we call it the Open Web. You want a website, you can make one. Put whatever you want on it. Design it however you want. Make it fugly. Sell ads. Or subscriptions. Nobody at Apple or Meta needs to approve.

Berners-Lee once explained the idea nicely: “You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

That was cool. But there was a little problem.

Platforms came along, and for most people they were just better products. Instead of navigating millions of individual websites, you got one navigational construct for everybody’s stuff, mostly the feed. That was nice for most people. As the internet shifted toward photos, rich media and then video, platforms did all of that better too.

The platforms leveraged scale to build vastly superior advertising machines. They also did all the hard technical stuff inside tidy gardens: identity systems, social graphs, comments, messaging, authentication, payments, moderation, security and analytics. All the complicated shit that an individual publisher or creator had to wire together themselves got absorbed into a few giant planned communities.

Platforms scaled away complexity and made the Web feel clunky.

Over time they sucked more and more of its creative and economic energy. Platforms made it much easier to be an independent creator. People seemed comfortable with the trade.

Do not underplay monetization in this power shift. The Web ad model embodies 20-plus years of human toil and it still sucks. Banner ads led us astray. Identity was never core to the architecture. Payments were basically bolted on later. Publishers need unattainable scale to make the economics work. We have spent decades adding commerce, identity and subscriptions to a system originally designed to move documents around. Platforms solved this stuff more elegantly because they controlled the whole environment.

Apps added another layer. They worked better because they were closer to the metal of your phone, but distribution was still controlled by a couple of tech behemoths. Apps are useful but not the great democratizing force that the Web promised.

So the Web is under pressure from the hegemony of platforms, a deteriorating advertising model and now the AI-driven weakening of Google as a distribution machine.

But at almost exactly the same moment, something glorious is happening to the ’ol Web. AI is making it radically easier to build things.

John West, our podcast guest this week and author of The Internet Will Die and So Will You, put his finger on this. He described making Mixtab, a tiny social-media/news application for a group of friends. It lets them collect links, automatically turn them into an edition of a newspaper and talk about it together. He built much of it with AI in about a week.

West said one of the things that excites him most about AI is that it enables “a more experimental and creative way of using the web.” I enthusiastically concur. You know I’m sympathetic to this idea because I won’t shut up about my own community publishing experiment, PvA Field Notes.

So there’s a nice twist: AI may be helping kill the old Web while simultaneously making a new Web possible.

What does that look like?

First, almost anybody can now build rich, functional, social experiences without coding expertise or the support of an unaligned platform.

The new blog is something more interesting. It’s a cool application you build for you and ten other people you care about. It’s probably a social thing. It has all the bells and whistles that the big guys have. It definitely benefits from the wisdom of an AI agent. It probably goes out and gets stuff from across the Web. Maybe it connects directly to your new perv glasses.

Indeed, the new thing may not feel like a Web page at all. The page might just be a home base: a place where agents live, services connect and information persists. Humans may visit occasionally, but increasingly the traffic could be software talking to software. Your agent shows up, gets what it needs, talks to another agent, updates something and moves on. The Web page becomes less a destination than a component of a larger system.

In short, the unit of creativity moves from the page to the application.

Second, a lot of these things do not need the old Web’s shitty economics. If I can build something for almost nothing and run it for almost nothing, it does not need 10 million visitors. A site for 50 people can be successful if those 50 people love it.

Third, all of this software can stand on top of an enormous amount of infrastructure. Maps, payments, identity, messaging, databases, video, search — they are just services you can call into your little creation. You can use APIs without really knowing what an API is.

And AI does more than make these things easier to build. It vastly extends what you can imagine building.

Intelligence becomes an ingredient. Your little application can understand what’s inside it, organize itself, answer questions, make connections, personalize itself and do things that would have required a vast product team a few years ago.

The constraint shifts from your clumsy technical skillz to your imagination.

Oddly enough, Berners-Lee saw some version of this coming. In 1998 he imagined a Web where “the day-to-day mechanisms of trade and bureaucracy will be handled by agents,” leaving humans to provide “the inspiration and the intuition.”

So I can imagine a refreshed Web. Something smaller, stranger and more personal.

A collection of rich little applications made by people for their people. Built on an enormous foundation of open standards, cloud infrastructure, APIs and AI that the person making the thing barely has to understand.

The new ham radio. A science fair. A farmers market. A hacker’s garage. A vast showcase of human imagination made possible by an almost unimaginable box of smart Lego.

The old Web was pages. Then platforms turned the internet into feeds. The next Web is wildly functional things we make ourselves.

That feels pretty vital and cool to me.

POD: Owning the Narrative

Out FRIDAY AM: Apple | Spotify | Substack

Dolly Parton owned a very American narrative of being born poor but making something out of nothing through talent and hard work. In contrast, tech tried to control its narrative and instead stoked backlash to their grand project of AI. Plus: A celebration of nerding out, from the Stick Guy to Emma Camp to David Senra. And a conversation with the WSJ computational journalist John West about why the successor to the open web is small private groups.

Plus PvA Overtime: The Hobbyist Internet Will Replace the Open Web

WSJ computational journalist John West, author of The Internet Will Die and So Will You, joins PvA OT to discuss why the internet is more fragile than most people think. The internet’s abundance and frictionlessness have weakened the intentionality that once gave media discovery and created meaning. Algorithmic feeds now navigate us, while platforms decide what gets remembered or forgotten according to their commercial interests. Paradoxically, AI could provide a way out by making it easier to build small, personal tools and revive the hobbyist internet.

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This song was bouncing around in my head as I wrote this. Apologies for those of you who decide to listen. Old punkers don’t die, they tour Slovenia.

The conversation happens all week on Field Notes →

• Buy John West’s new book - The Internet Will Die and So Will You

• 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

• Join our community - PvA Field Notes
  

Chapters:

• 00:00 Internet Impermanence

• 02:44 Dolly Parton Legacy

• 10:04 AI Narrative Crisis

• 29:35 Fine Line of Authorship

• 38:13 Celebration of Nerding Out

• 44:17 Carney is an Interesting Character

• 50:23 AI Newsrooms And APIs

• 56:08 Flock Cameras And Privacy Backlash

• 01:03:38 John West On AI And The Dying Web

• 01:17:38 Importance of Forgetting

• 01:27:30 What is a Computational Journalist?

• 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

• Join our community - PvA Field Notes
  

Chapters:

• 01:12 AI Fakes and Social Trust

• 15:38 The Case for Arguments

• 28:30 Flock Cameras And AI Surveillance

• 33:26 Taboola Takes Over NBC Ads

• 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

• Join our community - PvA Field Notes
  

Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:31 Welcome

• 04:38 Field Notes Update

• 06:16 Anthropic Watermarking

• 09:40 Provenance Problem

• 22:42 Meta Back in AI

• 35:28 NVIDIA Compute Futures

• 37:17 Media Survival Playbook

• 40:19 Bobby Fingers Craft Era

• 47:27 GDP Beyond the Numbers

• 50:52 Woke 1.0 Aftermath

• 01:01:00 Credits

Something else caught my attention as I wandered around.

People I know. I see them once or twice a year and, normally, they're just a year older. This year I took note of the full overhauls. Heavy GLP-1, TRT transformations. New versions of themselves. In many cases, healthier versions. You’ve probably noticed the same.

We’ve spent the last twenty years editing digital versions of ourselves—carefully choosing photos, contexts, opinions and stories. Changing our physical selves is not new, but the changes are growing bolder and more commonplace.

The internet taught us to think of ourselves as software: something that can always be updated, optimized and versioned.

That observation came to mind on the drive back to Brooklyn. I was thinking about how identity now has much more intentionality. I opened ChatGPT’s new voice mode and started a chat.

(BTW, the new Chat model is truly nuts in its fluidity and humanness. Seems OpenAI feels the same way. The much anticipated voice-driven device will attempt to transform the capability into a consumer hardware offering.)

Anyhow, all this is part of the same disorienting modern condition. The digital become increasingly human. The physical becomes editable like the virtual. A singularity emerges. Identity is a SKU.

Below, I recapped my robot conversation cause I thought it was good.

Me: I was just at a party where a few people I’d known for years looked like entirely different versions of themselves. Not older. Different. GLP-1s. TRT. Better medicine. Better technology.

It made me wonder if there’s something bigger going on.

We’ve spent twenty years editing digital versions of ourselves. Now we’re beginning to edit the physical one. It almost feels like the internet taught us to think of ourselves as software.

It also feels connected to the final triumph of narrative. You become the story you want to tell. Maybe the story no longer follows the self. Maybe the self begins following the story.

Am I imagining this, or is there something genuinely new happening here? Start with the basics. What is identity? Get me smarter on this.

Sure. At its core, identity is the answer to, who am I? But that's not one thing. It's memory, roles, values, body, and the stories that stitch all of that together over time. Part of it is how you see yourself, and then part of it is how others see you. And the conversation between those two views is changing all the time.

Me: Give me a bit more on the philosophical underpinnings.

Hmm. Okay, so there’s a long argument there that maps pretty well onto what you’re noticing. Some traditions say you’re basically your body, but bodies are now modifiable in new ways. Then, you’ve got the idea that you’re the same person because of memory. Continuity of consciousness. But memory is slippery and edited by narrative. Then there’s the narrative view that we author our own lives. And now those tools of authorship are on overdrive. So the philosophical twist is the body is joining the narrative layer. It’s becoming as editable as a profile. So the question starts to shift from who am I to what about me stays unedited?

Me: Who has written good stuff on this?

Lots of people have been circling this idea for years. Marshall McLuhan thought technology changes who we become, not just what we do. Baudrillard worried that representations become more real than reality itself. Harari argues humans are becoming "hackable animals." What's striking is that these ideas no longer feel theoretical.

Me: Um, how do people come to terms with what is the core self?

I think a lot of it is noticing what's driving the edits. Is it your own desire? Is it pressure from other people? Is it a kind of exhaustion? Then asking what actually feels continuous across all those changes. Maybe it's a set of values or a few close relationships, or even just the style with which you make choices in your life. Not everything has to be anchored to one fixed core for everyone to see. But having one or two touchstones that don't rely on performance can really help steady the ship.

Me: Right. What do you think are the second order consequences of a society where identity is much more fungible than it was before?

I think it's pretty profound. If identity becomes more fluid, I think reputation matters less and branding starts to matter more. Self-optimization also turns from a choice into an expectation. And authenticity gets a lot harder to pin down. We might also see more churn. More rapid switching between selves, careers, affiliations, with politics tilting even more towards identity expression rather than policy. Hmm. One consequence I think is super interesting, capital starts to buy not just things, but possible selves.

Tech used to extend what we can do. Now it extends who we can be. I think that's new.

Me: Let’s break it down into a few categories. Consumer culture, professional life, relationships, the economy?

In consumer life, it's gonna become buying selves, not things. Brands selling who you'll get to be as their customer. Professionally, AI makes skills more portable. Your identity is less about a specific craft and more about your taste and judgment, your ability to reinvent and relaunch yourself. In relationships we might need new tolerance for our partners and friends updating themselves. Relationships may become less about accepting who someone is today and more about remembering who they've been. History itself becomes an act of love.

Economically, if identity is as editable as it seems like it's going to be, then whole markets might shift from goods to selves. Wellness, AI, education, creator tools, all that stuff. The economy starts trading in "becoming". Who gets to author the next version of you? You, or the algorithm?

Me: Some good points. It strikes me that we've been talking about all of these things separately. Taste. Wellness. Narrative. Even why social media has become so central to politics. Maybe they're all manifestations of the same phenomenon. If identity has become more fungible, then all of these become tools for constructing and projecting the self.

In a world of infinite edits, a coherent point of view becomes one of the few things that can't be commoditized. Taste matters because it determines which version of yourself you choose to build. Narrative matters because identity increasingly lives in stories rather than biographies. Wellness becomes less about curing illness and more about constructing identity. Even politics becomes more performative because identity itself becomes a political act.

Me: And the obvious counter reaction where we reject all of this. A longing for permanence and you know old-fashioned kind of values. Because we see the person that changes willy-nilly as a fraud or not authentic.

When everything is fluid, the opposite becomes precious. Continuity as the new scarce commodity. We might see it re-emerge as its own sort of luxury good. Long, visible commitments, kept over time, as a counter-signal to the rest of the culture. Some people will lean into constant reinvention, some will double down on being legible and steady. What we admire shifts. We used to admire consistency, now we admire transformation. The question is if that pendulum will swing back. Maybe, after a while, the most impressive thing is refusing to optimize.

Me: Interesting.

Other stuff:

AI gives good answer but also good bullshit. The result, the scarce resource isn’t information anymore, it’s trust. And, every AI-generated answer creates another verification step. The machine removes friction from production while adding friction to belief. New York Times Opinion: The Internet May Look Different After You Listen to This

Salespeople are having a moment. For years we convinced ourselves that dashboards and algorithms could replace relationships. As AI commoditizes content and search fragments, the people willing to "get their ass wet" suddenly look undervalued again. PvANotes: Hacker News Sales Rules

Local journalism keeps shrinking while national journalism keeps concentrating. Manhattan now has roughly ten times its population share of newspaper jobs. The result isn't just fewer local reporters but a national conversation increasingly produced by people living in the same handful of neighborhoods. Bloomberg: The New York-ification of Media Keeps Growing, Warts and All

Silicon Valley has a new AI wunderkind: Leopold Aschenbrenner. He raised hundreds of millions, wrote a viral manifesto, got margin-called, and still finished the year ahead. merica doesn't actually love prodigies. It loves hustlers. We celebrate the comeback story because it leaves room for us to imagine we could become the hero too. Financial Times: Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund..

There's a reason everyone is arguing about Rubberz. The song itself doesn't matter. People are trying to figure out whether provenance still has value once the output becomes indistinguishable from human work. Music is just the latest industry asking that question. Pitchfork: So Is Fenix Flexin's "Rubberz" AI or What?

Everyone wants to be YouTube. Netflix is licensing creators. Disney is adding social features. Streamers keep trying to import YouTube into lean-back television. But they misunderstand the product. YouTube isn’t just video—it’s an enthusiast platform built on intent, density and discovery. Wall Street Journal: Netflix, Amazon and Peacock Go Big on Popular YouTubers

The old guard won. Not by becoming creators, but by becoming indispensable to creators. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal now function as the reporting layer of the internet. Large newsrooms generating the facts that thousands of newsletters, podcasts and YouTube channels transform into analysis and opinion. The web fragmented. Reporting consolidated. New York Times Q2 Earnings |

POD: Honor the seller

Out FRIDAY 3 PM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

They take risks, they’re fueled by rejection, they know the power of relationships, they’re competitive and they will do shots. The best sellers follow the way of Catalan fishermen: To get the fish, you gotta get your ass wet. Plus: Why the NYT and WSJ hit escape velocity, AI’s new oddball character, and the folly of trying to out-YouTube YouTube.

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The conversation happens all week on Field Notes →

• 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

• Join our community - PvA Field Notes

Chapters:

• 00:00 Open

• 00:36 Welcome

• 02:11 Linda’s Character Flaws

• 05:54 Spencer Vs Galloway

• 11:50 Netflix Offsite Drama

• 13:25 Salespeople Vs Marketers

• 15:36 AI’s New Main Character

• 26:36 Rubbers Mystery

• 29:29 Biohacking Identity Shift

• 36:06 NYT WSJ Escape Velocity

• 43:29 Creator Models Beyond Personality

• 48:53 YouTube Is Untouchable

• 51:04 Hearst Buys A&E

• 56:00 Good Product

• 01:00:54 TRB Audience Summit 9/17

• 01:02:17 Credits

I received a respectful, but quietly scathing, listener comment regarding the downward trajectory of the podcast (and newsletter). Recent episodes were a snooze. Who cares about media events (a topic last week). Brian’s promotional bits are tired. Alex’s “hard stop” is equally stupid. Shows are wandering and lack segment depth.

All fair comments as far as I was concerned. Feedback is a gift as they say. We could easily fall back on “we are podcast hobbyists so suck it,” but that’s lame. It forced good discussion on what PvA is and why we take the time to do this.

Podcasts come in flavors. Our variety sits somewhere between a sitcom and practitioners wisdom. The people gotta get something out of it, but along the way I hope we are good company. Entertain and inform. Be human. Our value, besides being three goofy characters with different points of view, is in uncovering interesting patterns and intersectionalities in an insane media world. We are guided by natural interest and never constrained by some specific remit. Brian will happily report from Belgrade, connecting NATO history, Serbian politics and the Kushner family’s plan to turn a bombed defense ministry into luxury real estate. Politics seeps in, as it always does these days, but it is the one subject we consciously avoid spending much time on.

This week we slipped further afield. I had something on my mind that had absolutely nothing to do with any of the media and tech stuff that we usually talk about. But it was bugging me and in a wild moment of vulnerability, I decided to bring it up on the podcast.

I am convinced the next chapter of my life is a difficult internal journey. TBH, it was easier when I was preoccupied with my professional obsessions. Yes, I feel an absence of purpose. What’s more, if I am gonna get out of this in one piece, I have to come to terms with some fundamental issues with my ailing ego, acceptance, service to others, my relationships with family and friends. As good ‘ol Eckhart Tolle says, “The ego reduces the present to a means to an end.” That is happening at Troy HQ so we have some work to do.

So that was on my mind. Not media or AI stuff. If it’s on my mind it’s my signal and I often feel a therapeutic need to drag it to the pod. But how might we connect this outlier? Healthy Ego as “Good Product.” That’s fine. Maybe Alex will offer some wisdom. Besides media is personal now.

Never mind that we were just criticized for being all over the place. That is kinda the nature of the beast and hopefully the appeal of PvA. So we talked about ego on the pod. I felt a bit weird but I am glad we did it. Alex connected it to the dopamine hit of social media and the hangover that ensues when the rush goes away. Media bases covered.

What is in this for you. Well if that moment of vulnerability enables you to reflect similarly, great. I am not sure how many people self diagnose sicknesses of an ego variety, but I can assure you they are common.

You don’t need me to play psychiatrist, you have ChatGPT for that. Your smart AI friend will ask you tough questions like:

1. Do I become unusually defensive when corrected or criticized?

2. Do I need to be seen as intelligent, successful, important, or right?

3. Does another person’s success make me feel diminished?

So there we have it. My mental model for the PvA conversation has always been unexpected intersectionality. This week we went somewhere unexpected. I am glad we did. I hope listeners will come along for the ride, assuming the Pod is rescued from Sicilian internet purgatory. We had a lot of technical issues this week.

In more predictable PvA news…

The world wanted more subscription revenue. We just got a shitty internet.

We paywalled everything because the ad model was broken and the free distribution model was unreliable. Before, in the digital scale era, content found large audiences even if the incentives and dependencies were imperfect. But, let’s be honest, I am never gonna subscribe to the Verge or countless pubs that are occasionally useful but marginally important to me. Instead I just bounce off the paywalls and go to X or Reddit.

This new internet is frustrating, even more friction filled and losing utility. Now it’s being eaten by bots. Ironically, platforms have become way more powerful.

In the end, pubs lose readers and influence. Writers don’t get read. The internet gets worse. I am not sure the trade is gonna make these more healthy businesses. I do realize that the old ad approach is not gonna save these business. The future demands massive agility and experimentation.

The truth is, platforms won. Mostly because ad models work better on platforms.

For now the whole thing feels misaligned. I liked it better before.

Tell me you disagree >

Come to think of it, content marketing has eaten the world.

We used to think that branded content was this little subset of stuff that we jammed in the feed as an innovative ad product. It would accompany the old-fashioned systematic media offerings where ads and edit were neatly divided. Stuff with mechanical CPM models, requiring simple ad trafficking not tedious content mashups cooked up in branded content sweatshops.

Once, we were hesitant to shill our media brands to appease advertisers. Then we became desperate to find ways to pay for everything.

Now we just call all it content marketing and it is the model. It’s hard to separate content from ads outside of hard news. Creators shill. Businesses create. Everything is marketing somehow. That’s just how it is.

When you stand back you see a very different world for people that have to market stuff. A young insurance company called Corgi is opening cafes with drinks named after their clients. They also tattoo their employees. Defense tech software and services company, Palantir, sells fashionable chore coats and viral “white on white” tennis t-shirts. CashApp sells magic wands. OpenAI owns the hottest new tech media brand. The Infatuation is the content front end for a bank. It’s actually better since they bought it.

What are you selling? Comment here >

Oh by the way, this is an great video (and channel) and it’s also branded content. It can be both.

In short, The Smarter Every Day guy discovers that manufacturing in America is not just a technical challenge, but an ethical one rooted in how companies choose to operate.

Everyone hates Dario.

This has the unmistakable energy of a schoolyard shakedown, with Dario playing the bullied nerd.

The immediate trigger was pretty simple. Nvidia organized a letter defending open-weight AI. Almost everyone signed it except Anthropic (and Apple that has no time for this shit). David Sacks, who always brings deep disdain for Dario and Co., and the tech crowd seized on that as proof that Anthropic wants to regulate open models out of existence and protect its own closed-model business.

The resentment was already there. Anthropic has pushed harder than anyone for safety regulation and recently refused to let the Pentagon use Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. This has annoyed the tech right, the military and the open-model crowd for different reasons.

Anthropic has brought some of this on itself. Expensive testing and compliance favor large companies, and Anthropic makes a fortune controlling access to its models. The challenge comes at an existential moment for hugely capitalized frontier LLMs. Safety and self-interest can coexist. But the charge that Dario wants to ban open models appears to be bullshit. He says smaller open models are a public good and is asking for testing of the most powerful models, open or closed.

Mostly it’s cause a lot of people don’t like Dario’s brand of sanctimoniousness. Or Anthropic’s success. By Dwarkesh bull case estimates, Anthropic could earn $100-150 billion in run rate revenue this year. This could surpass the combined 2025 revenue of all of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla, SpaceX, X). The company had almost no revenue before 2023.

Also, I love it when billionaires fret about power concentration.

Zuck takes a potshot. Are you team Dario? >

China’s AI models have a durable cost advantage: A UBS report claims Chinese AI training costs are just 10% of overseas developers. API prices are 10-20% of foreign models, yet providers maintain 20-40% gross margins. This suggests genuine efficiency, not just unsustainable subsidies, is driving the advantage. The main constraint on Chinese AI revenue is compute supply, not a lack of demand.

Hollywood TV production has collapsed (Lucas Shaw): Hollywood is making 47% fewer television shows than it was just four years ago.

Bots now outnumber humans online (Fortune): Multiple cybersecurity firms confirm that bots generate the majority of web traffic. This “Dead Internet Theory” upends business models built on human visitors. Advertising, analytics, and security systems are all challenged by this shift.

China’s AI micro-dramas are a massive new market (The a16z Show): The AI micro-drama market in China is now larger than its domestic movie box office.

The “tech bro-ification” of marketing (TIME): Tech is rebranding female-dominated marketing roles with engineering-focused titles like “growth.” The shift is seen as a way to align with a male-centric culture as AI forces a new focus on distribution.

Bernard Arnault is fighting back against the media: The LVMH chief joined X to personally rebut a six-part investigative series by Le Monde. The move was compared to Elon Musk’s adversarial interviews and other tech figures delegitimizing media.

Dropout offers a sustainable new media model (mashable.com): The streaming service combines a $6/month subscription with savvy social media marketing. It creates all its own content for a loyal fanbase, with a streaming app that works well.

POD: AI’s High School Cafeteria

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

This week on People vs. Algorithms, the crew unpacks Silicon Valley’s latest AI power struggle, asking whether the battle over open models is really about competition—or about taking down Anthropic. They also explore why the internet feels increasingly broken, how content marketing quietly won, and what happens when every company becomes a media company.

The conversation takes an unexpected turn into ego, leadership, and mental health, with a candid discussion about ambition, insecurity, and what it means to build a healthier relationship with success. Plus: AI agents in communities, the future of branding, and one very chaotic recording session from Sicily.

BTW, vintage musical legend summer continues. We saw Canadian GOATs Rush at MSG last night. They are doing 77 dates over the next 6 months. The fan force is strong. Not really my bag but surprisingly fun show. Remember this?

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The conversation happens all week on Field Notes →

• 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

• 00:35 Welcome

• 02:16 Anonymous Feedback Sparks

• 08:38 Open vs Closed AI Drama

• 12:03 Who Benefits From Open Weights

• 17:28 Power Plays and Regulators

• 21:10 Meet Linda the Agent

• 25:35 Content Marketing Wins

• 32:47 Paywalls Ruin the Web

• 37:27 Platforms and New Moats

• 41:29 AI Flood and Filtering

• 47:53 Good Product

• 56:45 Credits

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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The conversation happens all week on Field Notes →

• 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

• 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

• Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting newsletter

• Alex Schleifer’s Human Computer

• Follow Alex, Brian and Troy on Twitter
  

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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• 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

• 01:03 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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Follow the PvA conversation at pvanotes.com

• 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

• 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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• 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

• 00:23 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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