This week, Alex has a hard stop, AB is lost in Tokyo, and Brian and Troy go deep on sovereignty — who has it, who’s lost it, and whether it’s even possible to get it back for publishers and everyone else downstream of Big Tech.They debate whether Substack-style independence represents true sovereignty or just a different kind of dependency; ad tech’s extractive economics, and why “agentic ad buying” won’t fundamentally change a usurious system; and how OpenAI’s march toward becoming the next Google signals another era of centralization.
Chapters:
00:00 Open
00:24 Welcome
06:35 How do publishers reclaim sovereignty?
22:29 AdTech
40:00 OpenAI In Browser Wars
57:57 Good Product
01:04:02 Outro
