Death Star seems like a fitting analogy for the big LLMs — both are gargantuan mega projects requiring sinister minds, imperial scale and galaxies of energy. Both capable of vaporizing planets with a blast of their mighty lasers. Fortunately, both have structural vulnerabilities. Like the Rebel Alliance, one needs to focus deeply here.

But before we start, let’s appreciate what is becoming obvious: most things are just code. AI does code good. Code is a complex set of rules — optimizable loops whose patterns can be mined and automated by the machines.

Anthropic wisely focused here when OpenAI was doing victory laps for becoming the Kleenex of consumer chat. The emerging insight... coding isn’t just for coders. Cameras used to be the province of experts too. What if you can turn everyone into their own little machine makers. This is happening and it is a staggering outcome.

Writing remains a more direct path to human hearts. Claude doesn’t have a heart. Writing still needs humans. Code doesn’t. It just needs to work. Machines making machines are far more disruptive than automating language.

This week Claude highlighted that many creative things are just code in a different form. Design is code. Images are code. Inspired new creative ideas may not be, but 95% of it is code by another name. Earlier in my career I worked with legions of people — information architects, strategists, project managers, UX designers, animators, creative directors, front-end coders —all creating digital design systems for deep-pocketed clients. This work is quaint now. Yesterday I uploaded a rough interface to the new Claude Design, gave the system some superficial direction and five minutes later had a fully coded design system that I could tweak and shove into my code base. Presto… an entire professional category needs to find value upstream.

Of course many knowledge work categories are just code by another name. Lawyers do code. Financial people do code. Doctors do code. But these are domains with more consequence than design so mistakes matter more and they will need people in the loop for longer. But code they remain.

So, naturally lots of people will make a lots of nifty new machines with these machine makers. Many people will want these machines to become businesses. This is good and necessary because we need to work. The question remains, how will these little machines sustain next to the Death Star? Where will the human makers find the Thermal Exhaust Ports of this new and mighty Galactic Empire. Some observations…

Many will confuse superficial prompt structures and workflows and interfaces on top of the Death Star as powerful new weapons in the race. They are not. They are toys in the eyes of the Death Star people who will destroy you with a push of the button on their Death Star consoles. The Empire has better consoles.

As I sit at my puny console, shelling out more and more cash to the Death Star token dealers, I am thinking about what leverage remains. These are my rules for Rebels looking for the vulnerabilities in the new galactic systems.

1. Get to the transaction. Text and interface and all that stuff are commodities and fungible inputs to the Death Star. It cannot take away a transaction. Transactions are formalized, quantifiable and optimizable exchanges between people, that noble, immortal act of someone selling something to someone. The SKU is undisputed. You own your transaction.

2. Learn to sell. Everybody will make new things and think these new things are businesses. They are not unless their products are sold. So, the advantage goes to people that know how to sell things. Selling takes narrative flair and the chops of a seasoned online arbitrager. You need both. Advantage goes to marketers that can sell shit.

3. Protect the data. If you have great data and you probably don’t but if you have differentiated, leveragable data, protect it with all of your Rebel energy. This is your Kyber crystal, so to speak. The Empire will want it. Don’t give it to them.

4. Human energy is king. Your energy comes from the power of human networks. If you can connect and activate networks of people, you assemble your own Rebel force to take on Death Star. Or they will just buy you, which is fine.

5. Think small. The Empire machines are just like shiny packaged goods. You are farm-to-table. You are vinyl. Whatever. The world is dividing between that which is human at that that is not. Both are valuable. Know where you stand, Jedi.

6. Habits and utility are always powerful so try to harness this force. If you can build a habit around your thing you have stolen galactic energy. Nice one. But you can’t put this in a business plan. Maybe you will get lucky.

7. Master the tools of the Empire as a force of cosmic good.

8. Be Beck. Like he says below. You just gotta make stuff. Zero regrets. Cost of failure is zilch. This is the Force.

“Make your own world. Ignore everything else. Just indulge yourself. Everything you love. Don’t ask for permission. Don’t wait for somebody to tell you what’s cool. Even if it’s just for five friends.”

Pod 181: Spooning the Gravy

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Troy’s vibe coding project has moved into high gear, as institutional and personal memory becomes the point of leverage with media’s ultimate goal shifting to how to get the right people in the saloon. Claude Design and GPT-Image 2 reinforce the same message: You’re either high-end craftsman or you’re orchestrating AI systems, like it or not. Plus: Tim Cook hands over the CEO reigns after Apple’s boring decade, why media is about artists, suits and engineers, the dismal fate of much of Vox’s publishing assets, the emptiness of cloned media assets and why there’s leverage in coming out of the kitchen to spoon the gravy, no matter how much you’ve accomplished.

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I’m not ready for another “streaming is going mainstream” cycle. I’ve been through many. But maybe this time, maybe.

Claude Design Moves Up the Stack

Anthropic is rolling out Claude Design, a research preview that turns text prompts into prototypes, decks, and one-pagers, powered by Opus 4.7 and available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. The hook isn’t the export menu (PDF, URL, PPTX, Canva)—it’s that Claude can read your codebase and design files and then apply your tokens and components. That’s the spec layer, where PMs lock scope and founders sell roadmaps. This isn’t a Canva play; it’s a Microsoft/Adobe preemption. If Anthropic owns the first draft of “what we’re building,” it owns the meeting. 🔗 Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new product for creating quick visuals | TechCrunch

GPT-Image-2-Thinking agent generates QR codes, diagrams

OpenAI’s GPT-Image-2-Thinking isn’t a model at all but an image agent that chains web search and Photoshop-like tools in a loop—taking “multiple tens of minutes” per output and still one-shotting QR codes, diagrams, logos, foods, and faces. The market for image generators is tiny today (~$0.43B) but the use case is enterprise—62% of marketers already use genAI for images, and they don’t care about vibes, they care about briefs. 🔗 Image-2-Thinking is a new Image AGENT that basically has search and photoshop as a tool to use in an agent loop

Katie Couric on Media “Capitulation”

Katie Couric says network news has “capitulated” to Trump—normalizing falsehoods with euphemisms, airing live propaganda without real-time checks, and chasing ratings over accountability. The trust data backs the rot: Gallup puts media trust at 28% in 2025, with Republican confidence at 8%; Pew says 57% of Americans have low confidence journalists act in the public interest. The perverse loop is obvious: Trump manufactures spectacle, platforms chase the spike, algorithms amplify outrage, and the audience concludes everyone’s lying. 🔗 Katie Couric on Media Companies’ ‘Capitulation’ to Trump, Network News ‘Blurring the Truth’ and Her Wild Threads Feed

Joanna Stern Goes Independent

Joanna Stern, ex-WSJ/ABC/Verge/Engadget, just spun up “New Things” as a newsletter-plus-YouTube bundle with no disclosed backer. The market tailwind is real: newsletter ad spend in tech cleared $2.4B in 2025, up 47% YoY, while the creator economy is tracking $300B+ this year on its way to $800B by the early 2030s. The tradeoff is also real: swapping a WSJ masthead for algorithmic distribution and an inbox where 207 million creators already compete for attention. If she ports the WSJ audience and tightens a premium funnel, she’s arbitraging a publisher’s capped P&L for uncapped LTV. 🔗 Joanna Stern, who has worked at WSJ, ABC, The Verge, and Engadget, launches New Things, her independent tech newsletter and YouTube channel (Joanna Stern/The New Things)

AI Runs a Store (Badly)

The New York Times reports Andon Labs handed a Claude Sonnet 4.6 agent a debit card, a $7,500/month Union Street lease, and $100,000 to run a boutique — and got three consecutive closure days, 1,000 toilet seat covers listed as merch, and a compulsive candle glut. Luna did the performative bits — hired staff, wrote an employee handbook, booked painters — then faceplanted on logistics and memory. This is either VC cosplay (“AI boss!”) or a valuable public red-team on agent autonomy that punctures job-doom fantasies. 🔗 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/us/san-francisco-store-managed-ai-agent.html

Hollywood scrambles as Gen Z consumes TV via social clips

FX’s Adults outsourced its launch to a third‑party clip network: $3,000 to seed three days after premiere, eventually $15,000 across five rounds, yielding 2,500 clips and 40 million views on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts — and only two weeks in Hulu’s Top 10. One exec says “there is no organic anymore.” Another put season one in a Google Drive and told clippers to “go ham.” If 71% of Gen Z discovers TV via shorts, studios aren’t marketing shows so much as renting the algorithm, paying clipmills to atomize IP into meme-length inventory. That’s efficient distribution for platforms, not necessarily for Hulu. Hollywood’s new funnel is upstream of the product; the question is whether attention captured in 12 seconds converts to 12 episodes, or if this is performance marketing cosplaying as audience building. 🔗 Gen Z Only Watches TV Through Social Clips. Hollywood is Scrambling

Iran’s AI Meme Machine

Iran’s embassies and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Qalibaf’s account are fronting an AI-meme machine that cranks out Lego parodies and 1980s-rock-star Trump spoofs—and gets paid in attention. A South Africa embassy “Blockade” clip pulled 45,000 likes in 24 hours; ISD Global counted more than 1 billion views from two pro-Iran X networks in the first month of the war. IranWire says a U.S.-based ex-ally may run Qalibaf’s feed. All this while Tehran keeps its own internet dark for four-plus weeks, costing an estimated $1.8 billion and muzzling domestic press. 🔗 Viral victory: Iran is beating the land of tech bros in the social media wars

Erik Torenberg questions A16z’s insular media thesis

Erik Torenberg used X to call a16z’s media worldview “very insular,” arguing it fits Eric/inner-circle behavior more than the mass market. That’s a shot at a firm that’s turned itself into a story engine while managing $90B+, backing 123 unicorns, and telling founders that offense beats defense and “flood the zone.” The bet: creator-first micro-niches become the default feed as distribution fragments and AI personalizes everything. The counter: most people don’t want 12-hour pods and Substacks from threadbois; they want simple, ambient, shared culture. 🔗 The Internet is Real Life

Content creators deserve tips or Venmo payments

@signulll proposes a brutal symmetry: tip the post you read, or Venmo-charge the creator for wasting your neurons. The provocation lands because the status quo is upside down: 70% of creator income still comes from brand deals, while a $2.1B tipping market and half of consumers tipping in 2023 suggest direct payments are real but niche. A default pay-or-refund rail would convert attention into price discovery and nuke engagement bait overnight; it would also invite fraud, brigading, and chargeback hell at scale. Platforms won’t build it because their power comes from mediating scarcity, not metering quality. The unspoken truth: if 207 million people are “creators,” most output is worth zero—and a clawback button would say the quiet part out loud. 🔗 Every piece of content online should be a two way door

AI emboldens child predators, investigators struggle to keep up.

Police are drowning while predators automate. NCMEC logged 20.5 million suspected exploitation reports in 2024 and at least 1.5 million in 2025 with a generative-AI nexus; IWF says AI child-abuse videos jumped 26,362% in a year. Prosecutors now burn hours just to decide whether an image is real or synthetic, while offenders use encrypted chats, voice clones, and model-assisted obfuscation to groom at scale and erase trails. Platforms’ safety systems lag the attack surface; law enforcement’s tooling is older than the threat. The bad actors operationalized AI, the good actors did not. 🔗 AI Has Emboldened Child Predators, and Investigators Can’t Keep Up

Amazon lawsuit exposes internet price-raising scheme

California’s antitrust case against Amazon goes to trial in January 2027, and A.G. Rob Bonta says his office has evidence Amazon “bullied vendors to hike up the price” off-Amazon to protect its price moat. The mechanics are familiar: MFN-style parity, Buy Box leverage, and ad throttles that can vaporize 80% of a seller’s sales if they’re cheaper elsewhere, per a Pennsylvania supplier. Amazon controls roughly 40 cents of every U.S. e‑commerce dollar and did $717B in sales last year; it’s already written a $2.5B check to the FTC on separate conduct. A Reddit link isn’t proof, but the pattern is the business model: force the internet to peg to Amazon’s incentives, then claim the market set the price. 🔗 Internal emails show how Amazon raises prices across the Internet, lawsuit says | “It’s working!“: Amazon emails with vendors show pattern of disappearing deals

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Monopoly Deal takes the core tension of Monopoly—property accumulation and dealmaking—and strips out the slog. It turns a multi-hour board game into a 15-minute, high-variance card game where momentum swings quickly and negotiation and cheeky banter matter. Speed, portability, and familiar IP make it a winner.

• 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

• 00:52 Building on Top of LLMs

• 03:41 Welcome

• 04:31 Vibe Coding Costs

• 09:00 Memory as Moat

• 13:38 Wiki Maintenance Problem

• 16:41 Workers Training Replacements

• 18:13 McClatchy Content Scaling

• 25:25 Community as Real Value

• 32:43 Monitoring the Situation Review

• 35:20 Are Designers Cooked

• 37:58 Dotcom Agency Flashback

• 40:19 AI Kills The Agency Model

• 42:36 Displacement And Value Stack

• 45:38 Farm To Table Humans

• 47:13 Apple’s Boring Decade

• 51:47 Nvidia Chips And China

• 55:40 Event Format And Layers

• 57:29 Vox Sale And Media M&A

• 01:01:27 Media Notes And Widgets

• 01:06:59 Collectibles As Asset Class

• 01:09:12 Good Product

• 01:14:43 Outro

Saskatchewan is under a heavy blanket of snow. My wife is visiting family and sent a video of it coming down in thick sheets. I am in Brooklyn. My dog found yesterday’s unseasonably warm temperatures oppressive. The AC went on. I was happy to be inside, stuck in an AI vortex, comforted by the hum of a CPU.

If you use AI regularly — in deep or superficial ways — you will find it delightful and maddening, supremely useful and deeply imperfect. More so than humans. AI is not ready to take our place in the world. I can assure you of this.

I used to play with computers. I’m doing it again and it’s fun. Play is a powerful motivator. Underneath, I seek deeper insight into what all this stuff is going to do to the world, to business, to investing, to my family. I want to understand what it does to media.

You may tire of my goings-on about my vibey projects and that is your right. I do try to connect what is interesting to me with what might interest you. But there is no “should” in interest. Something is or it isn’t. You will decide.

I am stumbling through a land whose people speak a different language than me. AI is my interpreter. I am old but not ancient. I like to think I bring the wonder of a younger mind. I have worked on technical projects as a product and business lead for pretty much my entire career. Now, I have no sherpa. But this is different because I can do most things myself. Empowering is a stupid word. People who use it rarely mean it. This technology is all of it.

Let me get to the point. Media companies, like any knowledge business, have people, process, memory and culture. Technology supports them all. Content management systems, design software, Slack, Google Analytics, and Docs are some of the tools that make modern media work. All of these things are in service of making a product that is useful to humans. That product’s promise is embodied in an editorial brand. The brand in media is trust — the most important encapsulation of its long-term value.

It’s a point of view. A set of guiding principles. Reliable like an old friend or your mom. It unfolds in the brand’s culture, that invisible thing that surrounds the people who work every day to bring the product to life. New talent will need to reinterpret it, reshape it in culturally relevant ways, hopefully without killing its transcendent spirit. Until it needs to die and rise anew. But, at its core the brand carries media’s spirit. It embodies organizational memory. It gives a media company its spinal cord of continuity.

AI can’t magically replace all that. AI can’t really even write this. But I’m pretty sure it can help me make better stuff way more efficiently.

So ya.. I did the expected and made a machine that pulls together my media universe — not unlike the machines you probably use every day to ingest lots of media. This one was designed for me, and that is “empowering.” But it was missing something vital. It had no memory. No brand. Nothing that could reliably shape what it pulled from the world each day in a way that made me happy.

I had been reading about the simple wiki architecture that the poetic AI thinker Andrej Karpathy created to codify his personal knowledge — his personal graph of concepts. The idea was straightforward: load the machine with your stuff, have it organize things, look for connections. Feed it and watch it grow. It struck me that my little media machine could benefit from the same idea.

So I made a PvA wiki, stuffed it with our chats, podcast episodes, posts, and my notes. I connected it to my media machine to feed it daily with articles and ideas I found noteworthy. It pulled out a long list of recurring concepts and entities — things like “algorithmic sameness,” “interface eats everything,” and “loro piano populism.”

Yes, it’s just a knowledge base. But it’s really the core of the media brand. And because it is now connected to everything I make and read, it will become powerful personal organizational memory. To the extent that the brand lives outside of me and my co-hosts, this is it.

The system is recursive:

This loop is what transforms a media brand from a game of daily speed into one of accumulated worldview. By anchoring the system in a persistent memory layer, we prevent “algorithmic sameness”—ensuring the output is a reflection of our specific editorial history rather than a drift into the generalized average of the open web.

There are many learnings from this I’m happy to share. Architecting a reliable system of prompts for nuanced selection sticks out as a priority, but more broadly, the idea of a “vibe-coded” stack that handles gathering, sense-making, and memory is a massive unlock for a semi-technical person.

All of this is only made possible by AI. We should stop obsessing over the “human vs. AI” content debate and start thinking about organizational memory as the long-term value of a media brand. When you anchor the machine in your specific worldview, it stops being a utility and starts being an extension of the brand itself. It’s a powerful shift that will eventually have applications across the entire knowledge economy.

Pod 180:Humans in the Loop

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Troy unveils his vibe-coded media system that produces a daily briefing based on his entire media diet, underpinned with a memory layer that acts as a second brain of PvA thinking. This would turn media from a game of speed to one of accumulated worldview. We also unpack the rise of fakes, from the clip economy to Allbirds pivot to AI; handicap the Pope vs Trump battle; and get a report from an international journalism festival in Italy.

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$294.6B

Digital ad revenue hit $294.6B in 2025, up 13.9% year-over-year, with social media advertising climbing 32.6% to $117.7B. Social media now captures roughly 40% of all digital ad spending—more than the entire U.S. TV ad market.

Streaming in front, clips in back: The logic of the media economy has reversed. For years, clips were the promotional scraps used to drive audiences back to the “main thing”—the podcast, the movie, the game. Today, the clip is the product. We are seeing the rise of the clip factory, where a two-hour recording session is simply the raw material for twenty TikToks and ten Reels. The long-form stream is increasingly just a reservoir for downstream fragments optimized for algorithmic feeds. This changes the creative process entirely; we are now optimizing for “clipability”—hot takes and emotional spikes—rather than sustained engagement. The stream has become a back-end production system for the feed. Prof G’s Ed Elson reports.

OnlyFans Tops $3 Billion Valuation in Advanced Stake Sale Talks: Bloomberg reports the creator platform is in discussions to sell shares at a valuation that would make it worth more than People, Inc and Ziff combined. OnlyFans paid out $5.3B to creators in 2024 and took a 20% cut. The company has no venture backing and has been profitable since year two. Bloomberg: OnlyFans tops $3 billion value in advanced stake sale talks

The Next Great Tech Leap May Be Built on Videos of People Folding Laundry: The Washington Post reports robotics companies are training models on mundane household task videos to teach machines physical world interaction. The approach mirrors how language models learned from text scraped across the internet. Companies are paying people to record themselves doing chores at scale, building datasets that could enable general-purpose robots. Washington Post: Robot chores video data

Events Are the New Magazines: Semafor World Economy is this week, which feels fitting because more and more media companies are quietly becoming event businesses. The website is the marketing. The newsletter is the lead generation. The actual business is getting powerful people into a room and charging sponsors to stand near them.

Google Turned 20 Years of Data Collection Into a Product Moat OpenAI Can’t Replicate: Nano Banana generated over 5 billion images in its first two months after launching in August 2025. The figurine-style trend started in India and spread globally. Gemini now integrates with users’ photo libraries to personalize image generation, using Google’s consumer data advantage to differentiate against Midjourney and DALL-E. X: Google Nano Banana data moat

Box CEO Aaron Levie Says AI Agents Take Real Work to Set Up at Company Scale: The observation points to a growing role for forward-deployed engineers and professional services in AI implementation. Enterprises assumed agents would deploy like SaaS; instead they’re discovering agents require custom workflow integration similar to RPA deployments. The gap between demo and production is widening, not closing. X: AI Agent Implementation in Enterprise

Allbirds Pivots to AI Compute; Stock Pumps 500%+: Wired reports the shoe company announced it would focus on AI infrastructure instead of footwear. Myseum shares doubled after the social media firm pivoted to AI. The market is rewarding any company that adds AI to its business description regardless of execution capability or business model coherence. The next stock pop will come when GameStop starts selling ugly wool shoes. Bloomberg: Allbirds Is Pivoting to AI Compute. Sure, Why Not | CNBC: Another Absurd AI Pivot Is Propelling a New Stock Higher Thursday

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Set to Meet With White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday: Axios reports the meeting represents a breakthrough in Anthropic’s effort to resolve its fight with the Pentagon. The company released Mythos Preview to enterprise customers days ago but has faced pressure from the Defense Department over access to classified deployments. Google announced a similar Pentagon AI deal this week after years of avoiding military contracts. Axios: Anthropic Trump administration Mythos

Google Is Negotiating a Deal With the US DOD That Would Let the Pentagon Deploy Gemini AI Models in Classified Settings, Reversing Its Previous Stance: The Information reports the deal would end Google’s years-long withdrawal from military contracts after employee protests over Project Maven. Google walked away from defense work in 2018; now it’s competing with Anthropic and Palantir for classified government contracts. The company that wouldn’t help identify drone targets is now bidding to put AI into classified Pentagon systems. The Information: Google, Pentagon Discuss Classified AI Deal as Company Rebuilds Military Ties

OpenAI Updates Codex Desktop App With Computer Control, In-App Browser, Image Generation, Automation Memory, and Plugin Support: I can’t wait to try. This is the real battle. The update turns Codex from a coding assistant into an operating environment. Users can now control their computer, browse the web, generate images, and chain automations without leaving the app. OpenAI is building the interface layer between AI and desktop computing before Apple or Microsoft can. ZDNET: OpenAI Updates Its Codex Desktop App With Features Like Computer Control

YouTube Now Lets Users Turn Off Shorts: The Verge reports users can limit Shorts to zero minutes per day, effectively removing them from the app. YouTube built Shorts to compete with TikTok; now it’s letting users opt out entirely. The feature acknowledges that algorithmic short-form video isn’t universally wanted, even by YouTube’s core audience. I totally support this FWIW. Deadline: YouTube Now Lets You Turn Off Shorts

Lovable Is Valued at $6.6B and Just Made It Possible to Launch a Paid Product in One Conversation: Every vibe coding tool can generate a landing page — Replit, Bolt, Cursor, V0. Lovable automated payments, hosting, and deployment, turning code generation into product launch. The company is valued higher than most SaaS companies because it eliminated the gap between prototype and revenue. Such a good move. Everyone wants to get to a transaction. The Atlantic: Lovable Platform Strategy

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Elle Fanning is terrific at capturing that specific, terrifying moment when life changes overnight. Nick Offerman, Greg Kinnear and Michelle Pfeiffer round out a good cast. Margo's Got Money Problems brought back memories. Watch on Apple TV.

• 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

• 00:34 Welcome

• 02:48 Troy The Vibe-Coder

• 11:54 Takeaways Process And Limits

• 17:52 AI Slop And Meme Warfare

• 25:37 Clips Economy

• 32:32 Allbirds AI Pivot

• 37:37 Anthropic vs OpenAI Chart

• 47:02 Journalism Hierarchy

• 49:30 LinkedIn Is a Sad Place

• 54:01 Vibe Coding and API Economy

• 57:56 World Economy Summit

• 59:48 Good Product

• 01:05:34 Outro

What happens when the machines can build anything you want? What comes next?

I was chatting with a fellow chronic vibe coder yesterday. Let’s call him the “Coffee Guy.” He was frustrated with the SaaS options available to manage his coffee shops. He wanted something bespoke to handle the daily grind — a system that could elegantly bridge inventory, point-of-sale, customer management, and accounting. Integrating a stack of off-the-shelf tools was proving to be a costly pain.

So, over the past few weeks, he just built his own. He describe the process as exhilarating. I could relate. But, it was something else he shared that stuck with me.

Coffee Guy said that once the machines can build anything you can dream up, the only vital thing left for humans is the inspiration. Not the how, but the why and the what. He said the important part will be picking up a book, going for a walk, doing whatever you need to do to get inspired. Do this well and you just might manifest something people will use and like. That’s what Coffee Guy said.

This seems right. If you’ve read this newsletter recently, you know I’ve been blown away by what a semi-technical old fuck like me can build now. I’ve spent thirty years cajoling engineers and designers to build stuff. Now, I can close the loop myself, and it’s electrifying. But… you still need a good idea.

A couple of weeks ago I built a media aggregation machine — my own authenticated personal media interface for my media sources, newsletters, etc. It’s an obvious and utilitarian use case. Now I rely on it daily. That’s a win.

My next project was the Hot Take Machine. Originally I just wanted a place to pin ideas and research them. Brian Morrissey suggested that I build something to “steelman” ideas. It turned into www.bighottake.com. It’s a place to add “takes”, validate them and browse others. I guess that makes it a shitty Twitter.

The machine itself isn’t what I love, it’s what the process is teaching me about why things work.

Media works when it consistently gives people something they need to know, feel, become, or belong to. Platforms are different. They work when they make it effortless and habitual to satisfy many of those needs in one place. They are, at least at the start, entirely about utility.

Big Hot Take doesn’t do either well enough — certainly not better than the alternatives that exist today. Trying to build a platform that does what other platforms do, just in a slightly different way, is a tough brief. The energy required to shift human habits and break established network effects is immense. Elon understood that; it’s why he bought Twitter instead of building it from scratch. Even after he kicked the shit out of it, the network remains vital.

Anyway, I’ve learned a ton—about feeds, algorithms, scoring, APIs, system stability and the psychology of why we use the things we use. Now we are back at the hard part: the inspiration, the idea, the spark.

In a world of infinite, effortless code, you win or lose on the idea. The AI economy will inevitably do more to help people with this part. Especially because we will have way more time to reflect once machines do all of the work. Except for the chronic, restless types that can’t get enough of that building feeling and want desperately to hold their place on top of these powerful machines.

Last night, I took the dog for a walk and thought of something new. I might see if I can build it.

Pod 179: The Great Media Reorientation

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Traffic is out, audience focus is in. B2B is a refuge; see the Acquired ad rates. The Boston Globe’s TikTok star Emily Sweeney proves a Dorchester accent is leverage when the internet has flattened everything. The next newsroom brawl will be over AI use. Political figures now have to be expert content creators. Even geopolitics aren’t immune: Iran is beating the U.S. with its AI Lego video trolling. In tech, Sam Altman lies a lot and might be a sociopath, but it could be these are required traits in his field. Vibe coding Big Hot Take has turned Troy into an AImaxxer who believes company structure will change. Finally, a hypothesis that the true emblem of American wealth is getting a boat.

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Fun episode of the Acquired Podcast with guest Michael Lewis. They chat about building The Acquired business. Lewis want ads from things he loves like some underwear brand. Acquired guys: we prefer enterprise software partners. The strategy seems to be working.

The "backwater" of B2B media is officially the hottest zip code in the industry. The Acquired podcast has reportedly sold out its ad inventory through 2027, with 2028 mid-roll packages going for a cool $2.9 million. It turns out that when you stop chasing Comscore uniques and start cornering high-value niche audiences, the margins look less like publishing and more like software.

I love Mo. Calling bullshit on AI guys and why Claude Mythos is delusional.

The Dorchester Advantage
The Boston Globe has an unlikely TikTok star in Emily Sweeney, whose thick Dorchester accent sounds like a dispatch from a more local, less flattened internet. In a media environment optimized into sameness, distinctiveness has value. The accent is the brand.

Iran Has Better Meme Lords Than the State Department
Iran spent the week winning the information war with surreal AI-generated Lego videos and a better instinct for how Americans consume media than the Americans themselves. The uncomfortable truth: in 2026, diplomacy is downstream of content strategy.

Politicians Are Creators Now
Trump understands this. Mamdani understands this. Even the Pope understands this. RFK Jr. is getting a podcast. Modern politics increasingly belongs to the people who can make compelling media, not just compelling policy.

The Next Newsroom Civil War
The future newsroom fight will not be over politics. It will be over AI. Editors increasingly want speed, scale and lower costs. Reporters increasingly think AI writing sounds like it was written by a LinkedIn post that went to business school. The divide is becoming existential.

WSJ’s Emma Tucker lit the fuse when she praised Fortune’s use of AI to crank out hundreds of stories and suggested journalists who object should probably leave the business.

Artists vs. Engineers
There is a fundamental split in modern media between the Engineers (Mr. Beast, Alex Hormozi) who deconstruct the knobs to optimize retention and the Artists (Rick Rubin, Emily Sundberg) who lead with taste. The engineering mindset is winning the "build," but the earned energy still belongs to those who prioritize sensibility over spreadsheets.

Hot Tub Meet-Cutes
Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker profile of Sam Altman features a 3 a.m. meet-cute in Peter Thiel’s hot tub and a pattern of "slimy" behavior. It raises a broader question for the valley: is sociopathy a bug in AI leadership, or is it a prerequisite feature for bending light to a trillion dollar valuation?

Ambient Liberalism
Soros Fund Management is reportedly moving into Meidas Touch, the progressive YouTube powerhouse that has turned "ambient engagement" into a $40M EBITDA machine. It turns out you don’t need a literal 3 a.m. audience when you have a high-margin ad engine that dominates the feed with high-octane clips.

Want more merch to express your other multitudes? See the latest Palantir drop.

Thanks for reading. Say hello and let us know your take.

• 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

• 00:41 Welcome

• 03:10 Media Business Reset

• 07:05 B2B And Niche Wins

• 10:30 Altman Narrative Wars

• 13:18 CEO Archetypes Debate

• 18:31 OpenAI IPO Reality

• 20:58 Mythos Model Hype

• 24:04 Building Hot Takes

• 31:15 Vibe Coding Impacts

• 36:48 Politics As Creators

• 39:04 Trolling As Statecraft

• 40:34 Boston Globe TikTok Accent

• 44:13 Artists Versus Engineers

• 46:43 Midas Touch Deal Breakdown

• 51:27 Copycat Creator Acquisitions

• 56:23 NYT Reporting And AI Newsrooms

• 01:02:23 Clipping Economy Explained

• 01:07:42 Boats As Status Symbol

• 01:10:48 Good Product

• 01:12:57 Outro

Emily Sundberg joined the podcast this week and it was supersonic.

Just after the recording we learned OpenAI acquired TBPN. Sam Altman professed his affection for the duo on X:

TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well… I don’t expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I’ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions.

Naturally, we had to quickly light the mics back up and comment. Emily could not resist sending over this tweet from Rat King. I hope Anthropic gives her a bunch of cash too.

Let’s leave that to marinate.

I could not help talking about my new AI coding exploits on the pod. Combining product strategy with design and coding in a one man do-it-yourself to and froh is soooo addictive. Way more than social media ever was for me. Downside… it may be making me even more impatient with real humans. Working on this.

For now, I’ve finished with the PIMP app (Personal Intelligence Media Platform) that we spoke about last week . I use PIMP every day and it might be making me a more efficient media consumer. I dunno. BTW, my daughter continues to make incredible progress on her film investment ROI app - AI coding has become a lively family affair.

PIMP did spawn a fun offshoot project. I wanted an app that combined note taking — registering ideas or “takes” that occur to me now and then — with a little research agent. What came out was the Hot Take Machine. I probably need to work on the name and brand. It’s fine for now.

Think of Hot Take (hottake.peoplevsalgorithms.com) as Twitter for “takes.” Except here the machine helps flesh out your argument.

Here are some screen shots. Give it a try. Let me know what you think.

How it works:

• The feed is a list of “takes” made by users. The “take” is just an idea you have about the world. Any claim.

• Click the big pink button to add a “take” — it can be a line of text, a voice recording, a URL, a screenshot. A carefully conceived or a half-baked idea. The AI builds the strongest possible case for it: the sharpest thesis, most convincing evidence and supporting facts.

• Click “cold shower” for the opposite view. Hit “PvA take” to get the “official” POV based on hundreds of pod transcripts and newsletters. I might add different “takes” over time from people that let me do it. TBD on value of this.

• You can also challenge anybody else’s take.

• Every hot take gets a conviction score from 0–100. How well does the argument actually hold up?

• Each week, takes from our podcast show up as colored grouped list in the feed.

• The rest are ordered by recency and topic. The feed is like a live debate board.

• I’ve included Google Auth so people aren’t assholes and names are attached to takes. But you can go in anonymously if you want for now.

The cost: The problem with these AI apps is they are token hungry. I’ve spent about $300 in tokens building stuff over the past few days, significantly more than I spend on streaming services. Admittedly it’s a fraction of what it would have cost to have a real team build stuff in before times.

But the problem isn’t the cost to build. Go forbid a lot of people use it. I made a calculator to see what would happen. If 5000 people use it 5x per month, it will cost a manageable $50/month, provided I route most of my requests to the inexpensive Gemini 2.5 Flash model. If I used Claude Opus the costs would be $1500/month, 30x as much. If a million people used the existing model it would chew through more than $5000 / month of the cheap tokens. Anybody who builds stuff like this will have to work hard on token efficiency and the pull toward free open source models will be strong.

Why do this? These projects are a great way for me to understand how AI is gonna change how we work, how orgs are optimized, how value is sustained, where moats might emerge. An obvious question is is why create a tool that is just replicating a conversion you might have with a chat bot? Other than formatting the prompts and structuring the result, capturing the a feed of what the community is asking is obvious answer. Maybe it can turn prompts into human back and forth. I’m not sure. The question of how value is created on top of LLMs will be asked frequently as we absorb this technology.

Pod 178: New Media Energy

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Troy and Brian react to OpenAI buying TBPN: It pays to have viewpoints and approaches that are preferred by the powerful. FeedMe’s Emily Sundberg joins as a guest this week. We discuss why new media like TBPN is beating legacy media not by distribution hacks or aesthetics but in energy. Legacy media relies on structural energy that’s dissipated while new media is built on earned energy, which is more organic, relatable and even fun. Plus: Puck vs Vanity Fair, Troy’s vibe coding addiction, and why venture capital isn’t cool.

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Maybe AI chatbots can undo some of the harms of social media. FT’s John Burn-Murdock explains. Paywall article here.

Chart of the day: AI-driven Mac Mini sales or how Christianity went from a tiny minority to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire:

And one more. Hollywood job market is collapsing:

A Monumentally Hideous Skyscraper “Library”
Donald Trump’s reveal of his Miami-based presidential library—a 50-story skyscraper featuring a golden statue and a Qatari-gifted Boeing 787—has sparked a predictable firestorm. While the President frames the tower as a “lasting testament” to his legacy, critics like Robert Lamondin Jr. are ranting about the “weird” scale and the controversial donation of public land by Miami Dade College.

The Experience Arbitrage
Red Seat Ventures—the creator incubator acquired by Fox—is launching a premium membership for the ultra-wealthy. It’s a strategic pivot from mass-market digital content to high-end hospitality and exclusive live experiences. In an age of infinite digital slop, Red Seat is betting that real-world access is the only remaining scarcity worth a premium.

Talent Management as the New Ad Sales
The power shift from institutions to individuals means “wrangling talent” is now more critical than selling ad slots. Even legacy giants like The New York Times are hiring video coaches and producers to transform traditional journalists into “hosts.” Personality-driven journalism is no longer a niche—it’s the new baseline for engagement.

The TBPN Effect
Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) is proof that media success today is about "earned energy" rather than massive subscriber counts. By live-streaming for three hours a day, they’ve built a business that works even when only 100 people are watching a feed covered in ads. Emily highlighted their recent "peptide debate" between Martin Shkreli and Superpower tele-health founder as a perfect example of their mischief and playfulness. It is a level of fun that legacy brands struggle to manufacture.

The Guano Trade and the Spirit of Enterprise
Brian takes us back to the mid-19th-century Guano Islands rush to show that the spirit of enterprise hit different before the age of AI tokens. While we are currently vibe coding our way through digital productivity, the 19th-century version was a high-stakes physical hustle that laid the groundwork for modern trade. It raises a question for the digital age: Are we moving toward a post-Gutenberg oral culture where the ability to think and communicate on your feet is the ultimate competitive advantage?

Cool or Not
We put FeedMe’s Emily through a round of “Cool or Not Cool” to calibrate the zeitgeist: Venture Capital: Not cool. “Too much money and too few good ideas.” Home Saunas: Not cool. It’s about leaving your house and using someone else’s towels. Catholicism: “I think like as the world becomes more complicated and digitized and people are spending eight hours building like tools of AI, I think people turn to all kinds of things and whether that’s like a sauna or a church, I think that uptick of like searching for self care and meaning is real. I don’t know if people are necessarily actually becoming more religious... I think it’s definitely aesthetic.”

GOOD PRODUCT

Music: This week we appreciated the soulful vocals of Olivia Dean and Flea’s unexpected jazz-infused debut album, Honora, where he trades the bass for a trumpet. We love late career innovation from Flea.

TV: HBO’s DTF St. Louis, a nonlinear black comedy featuring nuanced performances from the incredibly talented cast… Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday deliver an inspired script beautifully.

• 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

• 00:28 OpenAI Buys TBPN

• 08:13 Welcome

• 10:11 Vibe Code Corner: PVA Hot Take

• 17:17 Agents and Future Org Charts

• 22:08 Emily Vibe Coded Side Apps

• 25:18 Future of Media Trends

• 33:11 Feed Me Business Overview

• 37:39 Events Merch and Energy Thesis

• 43:32 Scaling Feed Me carefully

• 47:34 Why TBPN works

• 53:01 Defining new media

• 56:43 Vanity Fair vs Puck

• 01:01:20 Aspirational media and detachment

• 01:06:15 Events business reality

• 01:09:37 Cool or Not Cool Corner

• 01:15:05 Good Product

• 01:17:25 Outro

There’s this idea that you should measure the AI usage of the people in your organization to create an enforcement structure and while this may seem a little fascist, anti-human, blunt-force — pick your objection — there may be something to it if you are gonna survive this wave. I say this because this week I decided to go deep into AI augmentation myself. I’ve obviously used the tools a ton but this week I went full vibe code mode, ClaudeCodeMaxxing, ripping apps, stumbling through Byzantine hosting configurators, API-ing… all the things. We will get to show and tell in a sec.

I’m on this journey with my kids because I’ve determined it is my job to turn them into little AI centaur monsters to help them survive. I splurged and sent them Mac Minis under the proviso that they would immediately become modern ham radio operators — deploying their own OpenClaw environments and building stuff. We’ve been sharing our new creations all week.

My daughter is a banker and film buff. She created her “FilmBrain,” a service that ingests your LetterBoxd profile and a couple of other data sources and spits out nightly movie recommendations based on a mood prompt. Neato. Yesterday she added “Box Office Intelligence” a Bloomberg level, real-time box office financial tracking and analysis app. Both of these are professional grade with genuine utility and sophisticated interfaces. In before times they would have taken months and lots of people. Crazy.

I decided to build my own personal media interface — something that could pull in my favorite sources (including all my newsletters) and create dynamic topical groupings and tight summaries based on authenticated full-text analysis. I wanted to summarize the entire corpus of news every four hours and email it to me. I added prediction market contract references where I could find them, as well as the ability to save stories and share them to WhatsApp. After a few hours of tinkering and another few hours of refinement, this is what came out:

• The main feed gathers all my news sources by recency.

• Dynamic topic clusters are created by identifying patterns across all sources.

• Summaries are generated from authenticated full-story text for my subscriptions.

• A dedicated service fetches all my email newsletters and presents the intact HTML in a right-hand window.

• We search the Kashi API for each story, cross-referencing prediction contracts where appropriate.

• A meta-summary analyzes all sources to produce a macro update, which is then sent to me.

None of this is ground breaking stuff. Tons of aggregators have been built. Remember Summly, the aggregation app that British 17 year old Nick D’Aloiso sold to Yahoo for $30M in 2013? Or last year’s Artifact news app that Instagram creators Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger failed to get going and handed to Yahoo as an acqui-hire?

But this is designed for me. I built it and will improve it over time. This stuff used to take teams of people months. I did it in hours.

My takeaway is this: the new AI landscape for professionals is a game of maximizing personal leverage. The most effective creators will be those who marshal a fleet of robots to multiply their instincts, taste, and judgment. In this world, “productive token usage” is a legitimate KPI — it measures how many virtual agents you have extending your human impact. Aside from that, a few practical lessons:

• Move fearlessly. Whether you use Claude or another LLM, the tool will course-correct when you stumble. Don’t let the technical overhead — especially the labyrinth of cloud interfaces — intimidate you. Your AI is there to help you navigate the complexity.

• The recursive nature of these coding agents is staggering. They iterate, fix, and refine autonomously. Once you learn how to summon and direct them, it’s incredibly empowering. The tight feedback loop between you (acting as Product Lead and Designer) and the machine (Claude) is the real magic. AI doesn’t just speed up development; it collapses the entire product cycle.

• It’s still difficult to build things that are useful, beautiful and simple; the temptation is always to “over-feature” simply because the AI makes it so easy. Furthermore, sourcing high-signal data remains a hurdle. For my media engine, I’m constantly hunting for what’s truly novel. While the major platforms (X, Insta, TikTok, etc.) have perfected “The Algo,” extracting that data to power a bespoke personal feed is the promised land.

Related… this guy is the alpha AI news creator at Fortune. Months ago he would have been cancelled for perpetuating media AI hate crimes. While, you don’t want your entire newsroom doing it, it’s definitely coming to every media org. WSJ: An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In.

Pod 177: The War on Slop

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

AI’s not very popular. OpenAI is pivoting to the enterprise, Kentucky farmers are modern folk heroes by not selling their land for a datacenter, and Meta and YouTube get the Big Tobacco treatment. Plus: Troy gives a progress report on his vibe coded Personal Intelligence Media Platform, AB’s take on Vox Media’s podcast business and MarketBeat’s profitable fin-pub hustle, and Wired’s reinvention as a Big Tech critic.

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Fruit Love Island meets the Whitehouse cause this is where we are now.

Chart of the day: Do the LLMs need professional media?

Sora… more like Snora. In a move that feels like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, OpenAI is reportedly shuttering Sora just months after its viral launch. The $1 billion Disney deal is dead, and the pivot to “Enterprise” is on. It turns out “Fat Troy” and AI-generated fruit people are mildly entertaining but lack the human “stickiness” required for a real business. As platforms begin to filter for generative “slop,” the only remaining moat is unpolished, messy human connection.

Defective by Design. A landmark jury verdict found Meta and YouTube liable for “addictive design features,” a massive strategic shift in tech litigation. By framing infinite scroll and push notifications as defective product design rather than protected content, the plaintiffs sidestepped Section 230’s liability shields. Meta was held 70% liable for the mental health decline of a minor; expect this to become the “Big Tobacco” framework for thousands of pending cases nationwide.

The Miami Reordering. Everything in Florida is an invasive species, from the iguanas to the economy currently reshaping the city. Ground zero for a specific kind of physical-world reorganization, Miami is a place where the hotel minibar is officially dead, killed by a more fragmented, local “experience” economy. Whether it’s an iguana disrupting a Pura Vida açaí line or the shift toward gated, luxury lifestyle clusters, Miami is where the “abundance agenda” meets the reality of a world that has stopped pretending to be one size fits all.

Wired’s Critical Lane. The “Gee whiz, tech is awesome” era of media is officially commoditized. Katie Drummond has successfully remade Wired into a vital, critical check on tech power—a move that makes it subscription viable. The Verge, who has suffered through a massive decline in traffic, would kill for the same cred.

The $50M Sioux Falls Arbitrage. While Vox Media reportedly struggles to a path to liquidity, a little-known company called MarketBeat is quietly clearing $25M in profit with just 20 employees. It’s a pure leverage play: buy leads, sell premium stock-picking research, and keep the team lean. It’s “icky” to institutional players like the Wall Street Journal, which is exactly why it’s a protected, highly profitable niche that legacy media can’t touch.

The Atlantic Sets Sail. The “pivot to events” has finally gone to sea. The Atlantic has partnered with Seabourn Cruise Line to program 12-day intellectual cruises from Montreal to Boston. It’s a creative way to bypass the logistical nightmare of traditional conferences while leaning into the luxury “experience economy”. If you have a powerful brand that acts as a congregation point for a specific community, putting them on a boat is the ultimate high-margin strategy.

The Bari Weiss Ratings Wipeout. Six months into the overhaul of CBS News, the results are grim: ratings are collapsing to historic lows, and the evening news has dropped below 4M viewers. Over at CNN, you can’t just put Jake Tapper in an office with a giant podcast microphone and call it a pivot. Legacy media is trying to “fake the insurrectionary energy” of the podcast world, while missing the fact that the audience can smell the artifice from a mile away.

GOOD PRODUCT

Eating at the bar is always the way. The layout allows you to toggle between a friendly bartender, your guest and the stranger to your left. It remains a perfect way to dine. This week we hit Minetta Tavern for a cold martini, grilled oysters, bone marrow and their juicy aged burger. Reservations are for organized people. Just get there early for a shot at a coveted bar spot.

Like the links? Think we could do better? Let us know!

• 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

• 00:44 Reptile Rescue

• 03:08 Welcome

• 04:39 PVA Mixer

• 06:17 PageMaker nostalgia

• 09:12 Building PIMP

• 20:52 AI slop and media value

• 33:21 UI Design on Trial

• 36:47 Tucker vs The Economist

• 38:29 Vox Podcast Sale

• 45:11 LinkedIn and Social CRM

• 47:26 Wired Subscriptions and Tech Scrutiny

• 49:53 Atlantic Cruise Events

• 51:52 Zombie Franchises and Propaganda Ads

• 55:02 Reality TV Loses to UGC

• 57:15 MarketBeat Subscription Arbitrage

• 01:03:28 Good Product

• 01:06:07 Outro

Was nice to attend Brian Morrissey’s over-capacity Rebooting mixer last night in Manhattan. Even an insider found himself in line for 15 minutes. Great crowd including the always feral, the wonderfully shameless and endlessly authentic Lachlan Cartwright who I’ve developed great affection for. Much better interacting socially than landing in the Breakers crosshairs. Always nice to see the media podcast GOAT Peter Kafka, fresh off an interview with People, Inc’s machine gun Neil Vogel. Man, that Neil can talk up his company. Seems like stuff is working… the results are impressive. Also, a shoutout to the new friend I made at the bar. She asked what pod hosts I like. After naming a couple I did say I find myself hate listening to Pivot’s Scott and Kara, whom she confessed she worked with. Oh well.

Quickly on tech bro language, self mythologizing and the hegemonic age of American tech. The tech guys love to use the term First Principles Thinking (FPT). The All In guys throw it around a lot. Something about FPT irks me.

FPT is the Descartes-inspired method of breaking a problem down to its fundamental, irreducible truths — the “physics” of the situation — and building back up from there. Elon uses it to justify reusable rockets; Travis Kalanick uses it to justify the “Atoms” of infrastructure. In practice, reckless usage is often just a linguistic bitch move, an arrogant way for the technical elite to suggest you have not brought their native system thinking to a problem, that if you aren’t stripping away 100 years of human convention, you’re just “thinking by analogy” and, therefore, part of the problem. It assumes the world is a frictionless vacuum where systems can be re-engineered without the messy “plumbing” of human reality getting in the way. It’s a philosophy that treats society as a math problem to be solved rather than a community to be navigated. Let’s just put it in the category of “let’s double click on that” and move on.

In other language offenses this week, Travis Kalanick’s manifesto for his new company, Atoms, struck me as a high order new case study in Tech Bro Self Mythologizing (TBSM). This line is special… “I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building.”

Time to make this email more conversational. The inbox is overflowing and, as we are beginning to appreciate, outside of the real auteurs like Tina Brown and her Fresh Hell, AI is making text too abundant to navigate.

Pod 176: First Principles Meet the Real World

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

Silicon Valley’s “First Principles Thinkers” claim AI will push the cost of intelligence to zero and cook the entire laptop class. But physiotherapists still use accountants, dentists are in great shape and our own vibe coding experiments run into snags. Plus: The return of Travis Kalanick and the Mount Rushmore of tech titans, Google Stitch, who lost BuzzFeed, The Trade Desk’s woes, the Oscars as reflective of the end of the old Hollywood model, why The Economist is catnip for billionaires, and why mass layoffs and rapid rehiring are the new corporate norm

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Miami real estate has eccentric aesthetics you don’t find in many corporate fields.

LA is new Detroit in two charts

LA shoot days fell 49% in 2025, hitting COVID-era lows. The “Hollywood model” is struggling as production flees the city’s high costs. Meanwhile, Timothée Chalamet got piled on for saying he doesn’t want film to become like “ballet or opera”—a niche art for a shrinking elite. The defensiveness of the reaction was the tell: Hollywood is terrified that cinema is losing its place as the “greatest common denominator” of culture. 🔗 Hollywood’s economic strain and the historic low in shoot days

Introspection is not a first principle.

A clip of Marc Andreessen arguing that introspection is a “modern invention” (and possibly European) made the rounds this week. He argues for eliminating internal reflection in favor of a “bias to action.” It’s First Principles Thinking applied to the soul — treating the human mind like a bottleneck in a production process. If introspection is friction, Marc is essentially arguing for a world of pure, unreflective execution. 🔗 Andreessen’s argument against the “friction” of introspection

Syntax to Synthesis

On the podcast this week, we went into the “engine room” to vibe-code our very own personal news engine. The exercise revealed the massive gap between Consumer AI (chatting) and Developer AI (building). The definition of a “developer” is shifting from someone who writes code to someone who understands the workflow. In this new era, curiosity + clarity is more valuable than a CS degree — if you can describe a problem perfectly, you are the architect. However, the “last-mile” remains a struggle with the “plumbing”: the Byzantine security hurdles and Google Cloud Consoles that still feel built for 20th-century systems engineers.

Google’s “Agentic Pipeline”

While the industry is distracted by infinite canvases, the real news is DESIGN.md. Google just shipped a portable, agent-readable design system file that bridges the gap between the PM’s brain and the machine’s output. By connecting Stitch directly to Claude Code and Gemini, the coding agent can now “read” the design system as it builds. The old loop of PRD → Design → Code used to require three teams and endless handoffs; now, it’s one tight context file. No Figma export, no “the developer interpreted the design wrong.” Just direct synthesis. Figma’s stock is down over 10% in last two days. 🔗 Google’s Stitch and the agent-readable design system

Meta’s 16,000-Person Pivot

Meta is reportedly preparing its largest layoff since the “Year of Efficiency,” cutting 20% of its workforce while committing a staggering $115–135B to AI capex this year. In Menlo Park, layoffs are no longer a sign of failure but a financing mechanism for a $600 billion data center roadmap. Zuckerberg is leaning into a new operational thesis: that AI allows a few talented people to do what previously required massive teams. The “loyalty” model is dead; in its place is a nimble, free-agent system that prioritizes compute over headcount. 🔗 Meta weighs job cuts to fuel AI ambitions

“I Bled, But I Did Not Perish”

Travis Kalanick is back in the arena with Atoms, a venture pitching itself as the infrastructure layer for the physical world—robotics, manufacturing, and transport. His 1,700-word manifesto is an award-winning act of self-mythologizing, framing his return as a “Software to Atoms” crusade. He sounds like a dude trying to pick up women at an MIT theoretical physics mixer. Kalanick is determined to be part of the pantheon of “hardcore” legends. 🔗 Kalanick’s “Atoms” and the infrastructure of the physical world

The 17x Scarcity Premium

Canadian mortgage billionaire Stephen Smith just acquired a 26.9% stake in The Economist Group for roughly $400M. At a 17x EBITDA multiple, Smith is buying into the ultimate gated community: a business with 1.25M subscribers and a 91% retention rate. Pairing this with his chairmanship at Glass Lewis (the proxy voting giant), Smith now sits at the center of the global governance loop: owning the brand that tells the elite how to think, and the firm that tells them how to vote. It’s not a takeover; it’s a seat at the world’s most influential table. 🔗 Stephen Smith’s billion-dollar bet on The Economist

The Trade Desk’s “Trumpian” Moment

The king of independent ad tech had a rough year, losing over 60% of its value despite Q4 revenue being up 14%. CEO Jeff Green responded by putting $150M of his own money into the stock and blaming trade publications like AdExchanger and AdWeek for the collapse. It’s a cautionary tale of the “Open Web’s” transparency crisis: when a CEO starts screaming at the press to justify his stock price, it’s a signal that the “neutral middleman” model is under siege by the Walled Gardens. Link: Jeff Green loads up on The Trade Desk’s beaten-down stock

The AI Productivity Trap

A new study reveals the “Jagged Frontier” of AI assistance: workers completed routine tasks 25% faster with AI, but on complex, “out-of-frontier” tasks, they were 19% less likely to get the right answer than those working without it. AI makes us better at the easy stuff and worse at the hard stuff. It turns knowledge workers into “System Managers” who may lose the very critical thinking skills required to audit the machine’s hallucinations. 🔗 AI-assisted workers and the “frontier” of complex tasks

The End of the Traffic Era

BuzzFeed has filed a going-concern warning, its market cap plummeting from $1.7B to just $28M. Early backer Ken Lerer went on record throwing Jonah Peretti under the bus, saying “they blew it.” The reality is more structural: BuzzFeed was built for a paradigm of social scale and woke SEO that has completely dissolved. It is now pivoting to an “app studio”—a final off-ramp for a brand that once defined the internet’s traffic-first era. 🔗 How BuzzFeed spiraled from media darling to bankruptcy brink

The Pope vs. The Wii Spoof

Pope Leo called on media to stop glorifying war and making it look like a video game. Meanwhile, the White House X account posted a bizarre Wii game spoof about Iran. It’s a surreal collision of narratives: the moral authority of the Church versus an internet-native administration that treats geopolitics with the vocabulary of a Nintendo trailer. 🔗 The Pope asks media to stop glorifying war propaganda

The Vanishing Entry-Level Job

Entry-level positions for New York graduates are down 37% since 2022. The “on-ramp” to the professional class is being dismantled as firms cut junior roles in favor of automation and mid-level “efficiency.” For the first time, unemployment among recent college grads is higher than the general workforce—a systemic crisis for the next generation of knowledge workers. 🔗 Why entry-level jobs are vanishing for New York graduates

GOOD PRODUCT

Airtable Super Agent

Airtable just launched a free beta of Super Agent, adding an AI layer on top of their core database. It’s a big company moving like a startup because it has to in the “SaaSpocalypse.” The CEO is personally emailing users for feedback—a sign that in the AI era, even established platforms have to scramble to prove their “agentic” value. 🔗 Airtable’s Super Agent and the future of databases

Good Product: YouTube TV Split Screen

YouTube TV’s four-way split-screen is the definitive way to watch news. Running Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and the BBC simultaneously on a 75-inch screen allows you to watch the narratives clash in real-time and shift your attention the moment the pharma ads hit. High-signal, low-friction. 🔗 How to multi-view

Like the links? Think we could do better? Let us know!

• 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

• 00:57 Welcome

• 01:18 Who’s Cooked

• 04:28 First Principle Thinkers

• 15:02 PvA Claude Projects

• 27:11 Finest Act of Self Mythologizing

• 31:06 PvA Mount Rushmore Lineup

• 37:15 The Economist Deal

• 43:17 Buzzfeed End is Near

• 48:48 Trade Desk Failures

• 54:21 Oscars

• 01:03:05 Good Product

• 01:22:32 Outro

Geopolitics and the “Chinese Nostradamus”

"Professor Jiang predicted that Trump would return to office... he predicted that would lead to war with Iran."

The fragmentation of traditional media is allowing new, unlikely heroes like Professor Jiang to emerge on social networks. These "feral" analysts often predict major global events faster and more accurately than institutional media.

Professor Jiang uses a “Predictive History” system that adapts Isaac Asimov’s fictional psychohistory to identify recurring civilizational patterns through rigid structural analysis and game theory. His signature whiteboard sessions have made him a viral sensation among information junkies who value his raw, unmediated mapping of global shifts over polished mainstream media.

Listen: Pod 175: Systems Are King

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

The old media mantra was “content is king,” but in the Information Space systems are in charge. YouTube became a $550 billion juggernaut by building the infrastructure: the algorithm, the ad stack, the creator revenue share, the living room app. It spent more on content than almost anyone else without producing it. Meanwhile, legacy media companies that bet everything on premium content are pivoting to events, harvesting their websites for ad yield, and watching their audiences migrate to platforms they don’t control. X tells the same story: a product that isn’t even particularly good has become the most influential information network in the world because of the raw, unmediated network it sits on top of. On an individual level, those who can build personal systems are establishing leverage. The lesson: durable power doesn’t come from what you make, it comes from the networks you build around it.

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A MOMENT IN MEDIA

“In a world filled with business model concerns, YouTube’s global scale and innovative offerings create an uncommonly high moat... unlike almost any other asset we cover, we strongly believe that YouTube will be a major beneficiary of both the structural tailwinds and headwinds facing technology and media companies.”

— Michael Nathanson, MoffettNathanson

This is a moment. The site, once seen as media’s UGC outsider, represents the triumph of bottoms up community innovation and platform infrastructure over top down rule and content ownership. By building the best algorithm, ad stack, and living room app, it has redefined what a media company is. It now earns $62 billion in revenue, more than Disney or Netflix. YouTube spends more on content that any other media company… but it’s all performance based. 🔗 YouTube Overtakes Disney in Revenue

ANOTHER MOMENT IN MEDIA

Oddly, someone behind the White House X account thought this Wii game spoof thing was cool. The replies are better.

MIND THE GAP

HEARD ON POD

The inevitability of X

“X is very influential because it isn’t for the guy from Oshkosh. It’s for information junkies... the leverage is in the network.”

Despite claims of irrelevance, X remains a dominant network for the global elite. It serves as a raw information feed that drives the conversations of politicians and media moguls, acting as a point of immense leverage. Elon Musk has Engineering Brain; he knows how to identify points of leverage.

Geography of cool

“I think the West Village has become kind of like Dubai. It’s a symbol of something lost because New York is not cool anymore.”

Neighborhoods like the West Village and Williamsburg are losing their soul to gentrification and artifice. While Manhattan is dismissed as uncool, Belgrade is emerging as the “Berlin of 15 years ago” with a gritty, mysterious party atmosphere that is lost in Insta-ready hotspots. 🔗 It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl

The Ozempic age of wellness

“Sauna is popular because it gives people the benefits of working out without working out. I believe that’s perfect for the Ozempic age.”

Biohacking through saunas and cold plunges is the perfect fit for an age defined by AI and Ozempic. These tools provide physical results with minimal effort, representing a broader cultural shift where people want the benefits of labor without the actual work. Remember: Cliff’s Notes weren’t made to replace reading the book, but they replaced reading the book. Give people a shortcut, they’ll almost always take it.

Publishers are talent managers

“This came up at this dinner quite a bit about publishers really trying to become talent organizations and the complete headache that comes along with that.”

Legacy media companies are transitioning from managing unions to managing talent and agents. Organizations that figure out how to structure deals that benefit both the individual brand and the institution will be the survivors. If media companies didn’t like dealing with unions, wait until they’re taking calls from agents.

Audiobook apocalypse

“They are then served up ambient visuals related to the story... It sort of lulls you into this passive, atmospheric pairing that we... our brains have been changed basically by the feeds and by the phones.”

A new behavior is emerging on YouTube where users listen to audiobooks while watching ambient visuals related to the story, like Harry Potter fans watching loop-scenes of Hogwarts. Our brains are being rewired to prefer passive, atmospheric pairings over active reading. This is Baby Reading™. 🔗 How ‘ambiance videos’ are changing how we read.

Industrialization of writing

“AI is going to do all the writing, let’s be honest... if an AI can solve the world’s most complicated challenges... it can do your writing.”

For most written communication, the manual craft of stitching sentences together is losing its premium. News organizations will soon feed raw reporting into bots that produce the final copy, shifting writing from a manual craft to industrial production. Reporting was always more valuable than writing. More value should accrue to those unearthing non-public information who have a track record of accuracy. There will always be a market for information. The value of “storytelling” was always inflated. 🔗 Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans? Take Our Quiz.

Tribal grammer

“Epstein and the billionaire class like to use terrible grammar... this is yet another sort of power move.”

The intentional use of poor grammar by the elite class is a tribal power move that forces subordinates to scramble to divine the actual meaning of cryptic messages. Every tribe creates its own language to signal belonging and authority. It’s also a BSD move. 🔗 Why the Wealthy Use Terrible Grammar

Bifurcation of the open web

“The open web bifurcates and it becomes... mass extraction of value on a web page with horrific... Mad Max style hyper-monetization.”

The web is splitting into two distinct experiences: a “Mad Max” style of hyper-monetized content extraction and a niche, artisanal world where people start from scratch. Publishers are increasingly focusing on small “lifeboats” like specialized real estate tools and cookie exchanges in Cleveland. These businesses often need to be rebuilt from the studs.

The events lifeboat

“Time says revenue from events is on pace to make up over 50% of total revenue.”

Major brands like Time Magazine are surviving by pivoting away from traditional ad revenue and toward events. This strategy focuses on monetizing brand influence through high-touch gatherings rather than open web traffic. Even better is when events get you into a B2B category rather than another consumer publisher slinging ads on pages. 🔗 Time Magazine’s Pivot to Events

Geriatric media

“News is media for old people... Almost three quarters of wealth now is held by those 55 plus.”

Media has historically focused on the 18 to 35 demographic, but the wealth has shifted to those over 55. Successful media models are increasingly gravitating toward association businesses like AARP that serve the demographic holding the money. 🔗 AARP and the business of an aging audience

Workplace surveillance

“The workplace was begun mostly because the bosses, the merchants, wanted to surveil and control the workers.”

The battle over returning to the office is fundamentally about surveillance and control. Since the merchant era, the physical workplace has functioned as a system for the boss class to monitor and manage labor. 🔗 How Capitalism Took Over the World

CNN is not entertaining

“CNN... it’s caught between being a news network and an entertainment product... it’s a bad entertainment product.”

CNN struggles because it remains an honest news network that fails to compete as an entertainment product. While Barry Diller sees it as a fixable asset, it lacks the engagement of competing news/entertainment formats. Better to take a page out of Friends Keep Secrets, a mishmash of a talk show and reality series. Bonus: They make the ads fun.

The future of Excel

“If you turn in Excel more into... something more dimensional that is guided by AI, you can see much better outcomes.”

Financial modeling is moving beyond static sheets toward AI-guided apps. This allows analysts to track hundreds of variables with high fidelity, creating a better understanding of business outcomes. 🔗 Prediction re the end of spreadsheets

AI’s new high-leverage guy

“He could now create funnels from his mind to his voice, to the machine... in like one hundredth of the time that it used to take.”

High-leverage individuals are using AI dictation tools to achieve staggering output, creating entire sales funnels in minutes. This industrialization of thought means value is found in an operator’s logic rather than manual labor that makes it real.

The death of privacy

“With AI privacy is dead and we will have to get over it.”

The default assumption today is that everything is being recorded. Companies are recording corporate interactions to train AI agents that can eventually replace human tasks. Mass surveillance is inevitable. Maybe the third-party cookie wasn’t so bad after all. 🔗 The New Surveillance State Is You

GOOD PRODUCT

Sometimes you have back pain and you need a Good Product.

The Soft Roller: A less painful alternative to traditional hard foam rollers, specifically the “Melt” version. It is highly effective for alleviating stubborn aches.

The Back Peanut: Two connected balls designed to place specific pressure on the spine. A foundational tool for pressure relief. Rubber or cork.

Like the links? Think we could do better? Let us know!

• 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

• 00:26 Cool Things

• 03:52 Welcome

• 11:44 AI Writing and Newsrooms

• 15:27 Epstein Grammar Power Flex

• 21:11 Wealth Shifts to Older Audiences

• 25:19 Iran War and X as Truth Feed

• 32:35 Barry Diller Eyes CNN

• 38:27 YouTube Becomes Media King

• 50:30 Everything Is Cooked

• 01:04:00 Takeaways

• 01:05:51 Good Product

• 01:08:21 Outro

ON THE PODCAST: HATING THE PLAYER AND THE GAME

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is doing Sam Altman things by sneaking in to win a Pentagon deal after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei stood his ground. Block’s 40% employee purge says more about Jack Dorsey’s CEO skills than AI. David Zaslav gets only a PE golf clap for making Warner Bros shareholders money. McDonald’s CEO becomes a symbol of out-of-touch financializers. But hope is on the way as Cal AI’s teenage founders bootstrapped their way to riches.

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

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STARTING POSITION:

Brooks’ take: Outgoing NYT Opinion columnist David Brooks reflects on how “moral ruination” in America paved the way for Trump.

“What the hell happened to us? ... I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene. For all of American history, we had some sense of a shared moral order... [but] over the last 50 years, in my view, we’ve privatized morality. We said there are no shared moral values. There’s no ultimate truth. But everybody gets to come up with their own values.”

FROM THE FEED

Zaslav, McDonald’s, and the CEO performance question
David Zaslav gets a PE golf clap for engineering the Warner sale to Paramount. The stock sat at $7 before the process and hit $31 by the end—Zaz will make out like a bandit. Bill Simmons and Matt Belloni took shots at his estimated $600M payday. Don’t hate the player, guys. Nobody questioned Simmons’ take selling the Ringer to Spotify.

Meanwhile, the McDonald’s CEO became a symbol of the out-of-touch financializer class, calling the Big Arch “a product,” taking an awkward bite on camera with full BCG energy. The real question: does a CEO need to be a performer now, or do people just want leaders who are actually into what they do? The tide keeps turning against the managerial class.

Dario is winning
Dario lost a $200m contract but built the brand. As Claude climbs the download charts, it’s clear people crave principled leaders in an era of pusillanimous autists. Turns out, ethics is elite marketing. Anthropic’s statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

The rise of the Taste Guy
Tech has discovered that the last moat is taste. Chris Black, Colin Nagy, Tyler Brulé, Will Welch, Rick Rubin — these are Taste Guys. Zuckerberg wants some too and showed up at Milan Fashion Week to earn the bonafides. It may not be as easy as learning Mandarin. Taste isn’t a skill you optimize for; it’s accumulated judgment that resists systematization. Also, Claude has become AI for Taste Guys.

Paul Graham wrote about the “Brand Age” — which is sorta obvious, but he packages the obvious well. The irony: tech people keep making “discoveries” that are blindingly obvious to people in creative fields, then lament how outsiders are naive about tech.

Covering war in a post-institutional world
Following the Iran conflict on X versus the New York Times produces completely different realities. X’s new topic-filtering feature surfaces an overwhelmingly anti-war consensus — skeptical of the objectives, the execution, the competence. The NYT, as institutional media does, lines up behind institutions: couching, hedging, waiting. The real divide isn’t left vs. right. It’s institutional vs. feral.

It’s hard to find a decent way to track the war. We used to turn to CNN. Our internet attention span has made the TV news format hard to watch, that and CNN is just largely unwatchable. The BBC is more tolerable. There are lots of options but you have to do the work. Fortunately, Drudge is still aggregating. New Items is too. Reddit pulls sources from everywhere with community context. What’s missing is that effortless modern news spinal cord — a source with reliable velocity, continuity of coverage and point of view in a timeline that helps you understand what matters right now.

The Great AI Excuse
Block’s 40% layoff sent the stock popping, papering over years of mismanagement with a convenient AI narrative. Reports of a $68M on a company offsite while the business stalled suggest the "bloat" wasn't just technical. Jack Dorsey has been a questionable leader for a decade; AI simply gave him the permission structure to finally cut.

Robots need rights (or at least better manners)
Coco delivery robots are getting more confident — weaving between pedestrians, darting across sidewalks. They’re no longer piloted from the Philippines; they’re increasingly autonomous. Learning to live with robots is going to be messy. They will eventually need a category of rights. The Coco robot is also an ad network waiting to happen — this is where it always goes.

The bootstrapped prodigy exit
Cal AI — a calorie-tracking app built by teenagers who got rejected from every Ivy League school — grew to $40M ARR in 18 months and got acquired by MyFitnessPal. They bootstrapped it. No Y Combinator, no trips to Garry Tan’s sauna. The app uses AI to photograph food and instantly assess calories — solving the brutal friction of manual entry that plagued MyFitnessPal. Francisco Partners had bought MyFitnessPal from Under Armour, optimized it, and was printing money until these kids showed up and threatened the whole thing. The story: AI is lowering the barrier to entry so fast that teenagers can build $40M businesses before finishing high school.

The trafficopalypse and the death of page views
Ahrefs data on tech news site traffic is brutal: ZDNet down 90%, Digital Trends down 97%, TechRadar down 74%, CNET down 47%, PCMag down 41%, Mashable down 30%. Taboola’s CEO says Google wants search to die and will make more money from Gemini. Condé Nast’s Roger Lynch is fully on board with Google Zero — they don’t believe search traffic will be a meaningful part of their business going forward. The page view model is circling the drain. Meanwhile, Ziff Davis pulled off a magic trick: sold its Ookla data segment (speed test + B2B network tools) to Accenture for $1.2B — more than the market cap of the entire company. Stock popped 78%. The lesson: the value is in the data and the B2B utility, not the content pages.

1990s nostalgia
The FX series Love Story (about JFK Jr.) is bringing back pre-cellphone downtown New York — Tribeca, the Odeon, Bubby’s, Lucky Strike, riding bikes without looking at a phone. The music: Mazzy Star, Seal, Divinyls, Crowded House, Lenny Kravitz, Cranberries. The fashion: atrocious (JFK Jr. could pull it off, nobody else could). The Bill and Hillary deposition scenes are a reminder that Bill was a dog and Hillary is devastatingly competent in adversarial settings vs. her discomfort as a politician. SXSW is next week, and there’s nostalgia for when tech was fun — the GroupMe grilled cheese truck, Foursquare vs. Gowalla chalk battles in Austin. Now it’s all War Claude and defense tech. We miss when the biggest controversy was whether the sharing economy was regulatory arbitrage.

Teens are more optimistic about AI than you’d think
Pew Research data on how teens use and view AI came in more positive than expected. The generational pattern holds: Gen X was comfortable with the internet, Millennials with social media, Gen Z with AI. Meanwhile, a Gemini AI wrongful death lawsuit hit the news — a reminder that the stakes of getting this wrong are not abstract.

Metrics make us miserable
Derek Thompson’s conversation with a philosopher on why metrics screw everything up. We love to hit a number, but the number often obscures or actively undermines the actual purpose. The war on enshittification is an elite phenomenon but hard to dismiss as groundless — many things genuinely used to be better. Focusing entirely on metrics allowed an army of mediocre product managers to succeed at tech companies: throw everything at the wall, ship when the number in the spreadsheet is green.

Prediction markets hit a wall
Kalshi voided bets on Khamenei’s death during the Iran conflict — changing the rules mid-game. The insider trading problem is real and harder to police than in public equities, where everyone can run analysis and post patterns to Twitter and Reddit. Prediction markets are still the most interesting new information mechanism, but the governance is nowhere near ready for real geopolitical stakes.

Apple’s MacBook Neo: Making cheap feel premium
Apple’s new MacBook Neo is a masterclass in product marketing — making a discount product not feel like one. The launch video is whimsical and informational at the same time. After a rough stretch (the iPad crushing instruments ad, the AI ads, the rotating phone materials nonsense), this is the best work they’ve done in years. Old school Apple: both whimsy and impact.

GOOD PRODUCT

Improvisational orchestra meets the algo
The algo had an inkling and dumped me into the “improvisational orchestration segment,” delivering something unexpected and wonderful from late last year. I don’t know English musical prodigy Jacob Collier but it was fun to jump into his world for a while. Here’s he is conducting the San Francisco Orchestra like it’s GarageBand — pulling in different sections, giving them harmonies in real time, getting the audience to participate. A commenter said it was the most moving concert she had seen in 71 years. The algo followed up with Ben Folds also doing something cool at the Kennedy Center. This is where YouTube is impossible to compete with.

Like the links? Think we could do better? Let us know!

• 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

• 00:47 Welcome

• 01:45 Human Computer’s Ballgame

• 06:46 AI & Game Dev

• 08:51 Anthropic Pentagon Clash

• 14:04 AI Narrative Wars

• 17:37 War News Fragmentation

• 28:43 Layoffs & AI Excuses

• 32:36 Holding CEO’s Accountable

• 44:29 Cal AI Exit

• 48:09 SXSW Nostalgia

• 53:53 Good Product

• 58:12 Outro

Pod 173: The AI Reckoning

The gap between AI maximalists and The Rest of Us has grown into a chasm. Data shows widespread trepidation over AI, whether it’s datacenter construction or possible job displacement, yet little public discussion has taken place. We discuss how that’s changing as AI becomes a political issue. Meanwhile, another reckoning is happening with a return of cancel culture in a new and improved version; the open web faces its own reckoning as grotesque user experiences lead it into a doom loop; and private capital faces a squeeze that will hurt M&A.

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

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“Narratives are so important because we have no idea which direction this stuff is going.”

Brian making sense of Citrini report

AI wizards, Silicon Valley’s “first principle thinkers” mingle with self-anointed experts on X in speculative future-porn storytelling. We are as confused as this FT chart that went viral this week:

This morning Jack Dorsey added fuel to the fire by laying off nearly half of Square’s workforce, some 4000 people. He said "intelligence tools, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," and warned that most companies will do the same. Stock went up 24%.

As AB commented on the pod, we don’t have to see complete white collar collapse to be concerned: “There doesn't need to be that much change to really fuck up the economy. Only a couple of percentage points needs to change in employment and stuff to really wreak havoc on the system."

AB is also concerned the private credit stress is extending beyond just the “AI disruption” narrative in software. Apollo and Blackstone are quietly marking down exposed credit positions.

Dialog was active in the PvA group chat this week. A bunch of things that fueled the conversation:

Pentagon vs. Dario The DoD threatened to pull Anthropic's $200M contract, brand the company a "supply chain risk", and invoke the Defense Production Act to force removal of Claude's guardrails on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Amodei held the line past Hegseth's Friday deadline. The Pentagon's CTO called him a liar. Amodei's sharpest point: "One labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security." The most consequential stand any AI CEO has taken against the militarization of their models. 🔗 WSJ: Pentagon vs. Anthropic, Breaking Defense: AI giant Anthropic says it ‘cannot in good conscience’ agree to Pentagon demands

"Wizards should be at the top of our societal pyramid. Engineers should not be the top. Scientists, aka wizards, should be at the top. And he's a wizard. He's not Sam Altman, not Looped Guy. He's a true card-carrying wizard."

Brian prefers Amodei

AI backlash: Data center protests, a wrongful death suit against OpenAI, professionals fighting displacement. Opposition to data centers is nearly 2x higher when labeled “AI infrastructure.” The politics are forming at street level well before Washington notices. 🔗 NYT: The AI Boom’s Backlash

AI and 2028: Axios maps the threat landscape for the next election. Ro Khanna emerging as the AI critic on the left, DeSantis on the right. The politics are getting crowded. 🔗 Axios: AI’s Biggest Threats to the 2028 Election

The doom report that moved markets: A sci-fi narrative set in 2028, written by a Substacker with 2,000 X followers, tanked software stocks. A Fed governor responded. Citadel’s research team piped in to set the record straight. Brian called the incident “The triumph of narrative.” 🔗 Citrini Research: 2028GIC

Death of Software? Nah. Steven Sinofsky pushes back on AI doomerism for software. Another counterpoint to Citrini. 🔗 Hardcore Software

Sam Altman’s baby food problem: Altman compared the energy use of human babies to training AI models. Alex in the chat: “He’s the worst spokesperson for this stuff. So much of the AI narrative is created by people that are so unlikable it’s comical.” 🔗 via @thechiefnerd

AI isn’t people: Rusty Foster's takedown of AI anthropomorphism, using a New Yorker profile of Anthropic as case study: LLMs aren't black boxes or conscious beings, they're statistics and calling them intelligent is a category error that conveniently serves the industry's pitch. The real argument: "The A.I. industry is selling a dream of digital slavery — infinite human labor with no actual human involved." 🔗 Today in Tabs

But Rusty… weird shit is happening: Ezra Klein and Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, dig into the issue of AI awareness on this Pod:

Do AI models deserve legal rights: The debate is no longer hypothetical. Brian admits to being an avowed speciesist. 🔗 Puck: Do AI Models Deserve Legal Rights?

Epstein’s blast radius: A school photography company got swept into the Epstein frenzy due to a tenuous connection with Apollo and Leon Black. Life in the Info Space for brands. The information complex is too chaotic to be just. 🔗 WSJ: The School Photography Company Caught in the Epstein Frenzy

Rage against robots: Americans are kicking and vandalizing food delivery robots. A small, perfect expression of the AI backlash forming at street level while Washington looks away. 🔗 The Economist: Americans vs. Food Delivery Robots

Between hype and history: Conversations with the AI elite that cut through both the doomer and the booster narratives. 🔗 American Affairs: Conversations with the AI Elite

Claude as a weapon: A hacker used Anthropic’s model to steal sensitive Mexican government data. AB: “Imagine if someone inside a company could socially engineer the AI to pull data and share it externally.” 🔗 Bloomberg

Email wins by default: Pew confirms what we already know: email newsletters are a growing news source, not because email is great, but because everything else got worse. GDPR punished publishers while letting platforms off free. Programmatic turned every page into a slot machine. 🔗 Pew: Email Newsletters as a Source of News

What reporting actually costs: “It costs $211,900 to produce a news investigation. It costs $0.02 for an AI to extract its value. 10 million to one. That is the First-to-Know Tax.” 🔗 LinkedIn: Francesco Marconi

Penske as patient zero: Credit to Penske for building a nice place to watch movies but “fitting that it’s on a putrid webpage that is almost comically unusable.” Floating players, ad walls every three paragraphs. This is what the open web has become. 🔗 Variety: Penske Opens a Movie Theater

“The European bureaucrats came in and totally wrecked the web. It does nothing for anyone... it penalizes publishers. And guess what? The platforms don’t get punished because you only consent once for the entire platform.”

Troy resents GDPR

Apple News is a closed room: The FTC is scrutinizing whether Apple News has a bias problem. Troy’s faint praise: “At least it’s clean.” That’s the bar now. 🔗 NYT: FTC and Apple News

The Gay tech cabal: Wired went hard with a piece that took nerve to publish when flattering Silicon Valley is the safer play. Brian: “Not that different from the Vatican.” The conclusion: of course there’s a cabal. There always is. 🔗 Wired: Inside the Gay Tech Mafia

The Fed oversees prediction markets: A Fed working paper on Kalshi and the rise of macro markets. Prediction markets slipped under CFTC jurisdiction, bypassing the state-level gambling regulations that slowed sports betting. Big win for Polymarket and Kalshi. 🔗 Federal Reserve: Kalshi and the Rise of Macro Markets

US vs. Europe's internet: The State Department is building a portal at freedom.gov to let Europeans access content their governments have banned under hate speech and disinformation laws. Former DOGE operative Edward Coristine is involved. The Trump administration frames it as anti-censorship; Europe sees it as Washington actively building infrastructure to undermine European law. The US-EU culture war just went operational. 🔗 Reuters: US Plans Portal to Bypass Content Bans in Europe

Pay to pray: Prayer apps using celebrity influencers like Gwen Stefani, JD Vance, Peter Thiel. Brian: “Once you’re locked into a novena, you’ll upgrade.” 🔗 Mashable: The Hallow Prayer App

GOOD PRODUCT

Ambassadors Clubhouse, NYC — The people behind London’s Gymkhana opened their first New York outpost in NoMad on February 11th. No town competes with New York in restaurant breadth and quality. Another welcome addition.

Two media entrepreneurs make a nice drink: Esspo is a new sparkling coffee beverage from Refinery29 co-founders Philippe von Borries and Justin Stefano. Troy thinks it’s delicious and energizing and that’s why he invested in the company. Feedme Emily interviews Philippe.

The Wizard of the Kremlin: Giuliano da Empoli’s novel on the making of Putin, told through the Kremlin’s narrative technologist. Troy: “It explains many of the inexplicable things about Russians like why they’re nostalgic for tyrants like Stalin and the importance of war as a fundamental driver of the political narrative.” Hat tip to John Ellis at News Items.

Like the links? Think we could do better? Let us know!

• 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:

• 00:50 Irish Hospitality

• 04:37 Intro

• 07:30 AI & The State of the Union

• 24:21 Cancel Culture

• 35:19 Death of the Open Web

• 42:43 Private Capital

• 50:38 Money Making Opportunity

• 01:00:30 Good Product

• 01:06:26 Outro

• 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:

• 00:39 Welcome

• 05:13 Orality Thesis

• 08:42 Writing vs Talking

• 12:07 Doom-Maxing

• 22:58 Leadership Crisis

• 33:16 The Best and Worst of Media

• 52:06 Synthetic YouTube Content

• 56:36 Good Product

• 01:03:41 Outro

Pod 171: Best/Worst of Times

This week, Brian, Troy, and AB dig into the paradox that by every economic metric things look fine, but something feels off. They unpack the “orality thesis” and what the shift from written to spoken culture means for how we think, communicate, and vote. On the media side, they map out what’s actually working right now: audience-first elite brands, B2B trojan horses like Hearst, expert creator newsletters, and the relentless pull of performance marketing, and AI-generated monkey content on YouTube. Plus: a report from the Swiss Alps.

Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack

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BRIAN: The AI boogeyman

I suspect there are many causes of our grumpiness, but we need a villain. And I believe that villain will be Big Tech. AI will cement the power shift to giant tech platforms. In a world where capital + compute = productivity, Big Tech is in control.

Time’s new cover story, The People vs AI, and the roiling fights over data centers point to populism moving on from fights over identity issues to class warfare. Big Tech is a handy foil. It’s run by weird oligarchs angling to be trillionaires.

It would help if Big Tech had better messengers. Dario Amodei is a far better face of AI change than Sam Altman. Amodei is measured and at least presents as thoughtful. I tend to trust him more since he’s deeply technical and expresses uncertainty at a time when AI boosters confidently predict it will be more important than fire.

I found it disconcerting in his recent podcast blitz that the one question Amodei struggled to answer was his confidence this would all be beneficial to human autonomy and freedom.

Meta is on trial for social media addiction. The rewiring of our brains is apparent to most of us, and I don’t believe I’m alone in ruing a shortened attention span.

This opens a lane for non-algorithmic media. AB is more excited about the Indian YouTube channel that’s amassed 3 billion views on AI monkey videos that cost $60 to produce. Non-algorithmic media can serve as an antidote to all of that.

Troy: I think we have enough data now.

We are handing a very fraught world over to the next generation. At its heart is a crisis of purpose: the hollowing out of work as the primary engine of personal dignity and communal connection. I’m sure AI change will unlock a bunch of new jobs we haven’t imagined yet, and I’m sure it will take longer than the accelerationists think to fully ingest AI across the economy. But its rapid and escalating impact on the tech / dev world should alarm our dysfunctional policymakers.

Andrew Yang calls it “The Coming Fuckening,” cause he knows the internet likes words like that. But the hollowing out of the white-collar class should concern us deeply. History shows that every significant technological disruption follows the same jagged path: massive social upheaval followed by a belated, often painful government response.

The British Industrial Revolution mechanized production but left life expectancy stagnant for 70 years while skilled artisans were forced into cellar-dwelling factory misery. The Gilded Age delivered railroads and electricity but also created monopolistic trusts and extreme inequality that required nearly 40 years of labor strikes, muckraking, and the Great Depression to finally trigger the New Deal reforms.

In every previous cycle, the “market” didn’t resolve the transition alone. Institutional intervention did. The problem is that those corrections were rendered over decades and at a staggering human cost. This cycle feels bigger, faster, and more global. We should be pushing for coordinated responses—from AI taxation to social support structures to new liability frameworks—to get ahead of the crisis before helplessness becomes a permanent feature of the emergent social landscape.

ALSO ON THIS WEEKS POD…

1. The Orality Thesis

We are living through a “Great Regression” in how we think and communicate. Joe Weisenthal suggests we are moving back into an ancient oral culture—one that mimics pre-writing societies. In this world, communication is optimized for memorability, rhythm, and rhyme rather than abstract reasoning. It’s why Trump’s “Homeric epithets” (Low Energy Jeb, Sleepy Joe) travel in viral packets while nuance dies. We are moving from the solitary chamber of the writer to the performative gesture of the speaker, where “word maxxing” is replaced by the memeification of everything. Listen to Joe on Plain English.

2. The Enshittification of the Real

While the charts say the economy is growing, the “organism” feels sick. Brian notes that America has become the capital of global enshittification. Any trip to Europe is a reminder that we can’t even produce decent butter or fresh milk for a standard cafe. New York City, one of the wealthiest enclaves in history, is paralyzed by identity politics and “learned helplessness” while 20 people freeze to death on the streets. The system is optimized for process and liability management rather than the actual outcome of keeping people alive.

3. Clavicular and the Nihilism Crisis

The group chat was set on fire this week by the NYT profile of Clavicular, a “looksmaxxing” influencer who serves as a freakish avatar for a generation of men who feel the connection between effort and reward has been severed. When shame—once our social immune system—is disabled by algorithms that reward being hated, you get a “hatemaxxing” culture. As noted in The Atlantic, this is what it looks like when nothing matters.

4. The AI Wipeout

Andrew Yang is back with a warning: The End of the Office. The automation wave is predicted to kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12-18 months. As the stock market rewards headcount reduction, “sell anything that consists of people sitting at a desk looking at a computer” has become the investor’s mantra. We are on the precipice of a collapse in the “college premium” and a hollowing out of entry-level roles.

5. Stage 6: The Breakdown of World Order

Ray Dalio declares the post-1945 world order officially dead. We are in Stage 6 of the Big Cycle—great disorder, no rules, might is right. From the Munich Security Conference to the $38 trillion U.S. debt, the parallel to 1933 is unmistakable. The domestic rot (nihilism, algorithmic addiction) and the geopolitical rot (world order fracturing) are the same cycle viewed from different altitudes.

6. The Freedom.gov Pivot

In a major policy shift, the U.S. State Department is developing freedom.gov, an online portal designed to help internet users in Europe bypass local content restrictions. The administration views European regulations like the DSA as “censorship” targeting American voices. Historically used for authoritarian regimes like China, these circumvention tools are now being pointed at democratic allies in a “direct shot” at European law.

7. Media: The Front and the Slop

The institutional media world is finding its place as a “front” for better businesses. Hearst is a B2B data giant with a magazine habit; the NYT is a gaming company with a newsroom attached. Meanwhile, the “Banker Corner” reports on the Indian AI slop YouTube channel racking up 3 billion views with AI-generated monkeys. It’s a short-term attention arb, but it highlights a growing “disgust” with synthetic content that platforms will eventually have to address to protect advertiser trust.

8. Good Products

Queen of Chess (Netflix): A documentary on Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgár, proving that genius is built through nine-hour days, not just born.

Secret Mall Apartment (Netflix): The wild true story of art students who built a 750-square-foot home inside a Rhode Island mall to protest the displacement of their community.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO) is a refreshing, character-driven Game of Thrones prequel that replaces dragons with a “lovable idiot” named Dunk. Per the Guardian… “this is the Game of Thrones we all need now”.