Self Help Edition
Listener feedback.
This week’s edition got a little personal. A reader comment brought us here.
I received a respectful, but quietly scathing, listener comment regarding the downward trajectory of the podcast (and newsletter). Recent episodes were a snooze. Who cares about media events (a topic last week). Brian’s promotional bits are tired. Alex’s “hard stop” is equally stupid. Shows are wandering and lack segment depth.
All fair comments as far as I was concerned. Feedback is a gift as they say. We could easily fall back on “we are podcast hobbyists so suck it,” but that’s lame. It forced good discussion on what PvA is and why we take the time to do this.
Podcasts come in flavors. Our variety sits somewhere between a sitcom and practitioners wisdom. The people gotta get something out of it, but along the way I hope we are good company. Entertain and inform. Be human. Our value, besides being three goofy characters with different points of view, is in uncovering interesting patterns and intersectionalities in an insane media world. We are guided by natural interest and never constrained by some specific remit. Brian will happily report from Belgrade, connecting NATO history, Serbian politics and the Kushner family’s plan to turn a bombed defense ministry into luxury real estate. Politics seeps in, as it always does these days, but it is the one subject we consciously avoid spending much time on.
This week we slipped further afield. I had something on my mind that had absolutely nothing to do with any of the media and tech stuff that we usually talk about. But it was bugging me and in a wild moment of vulnerability, I decided to bring it up on the podcast.
I am convinced the next chapter of my life is a difficult internal journey. TBH, it was easier when I was preoccupied with my professional obsessions. Yes, I feel an absence of purpose. What’s more, if I am gonna get out of this in one piece, I have to come to terms with some fundamental issues with my ailing ego, acceptance, service to others, my relationships with family and friends. As good ‘ol Eckhart Tolle says, “The ego reduces the present to a means to an end.” That is happening at Troy HQ so we have some work to do.
So that was on my mind. Not media or AI stuff. If it’s on my mind it’s my signal and I often feel a therapeutic need to drag it to the pod. But how might we connect this outlier? Healthy Ego as “Good Product.” That’s fine. Maybe Alex will offer some wisdom. Besides media is personal now.
Never mind that we were just criticized for being all over the place. That is kinda the nature of the beast and hopefully the appeal of PvA. So we talked about ego on the pod. I felt a bit weird but I am glad we did it. Alex connected it to the dopamine hit of social media and the hangover that ensues when the rush goes away. Media bases covered.
What is in this for you. Well if that moment of vulnerability enables you to reflect similarly, great. I am not sure how many people self diagnose sicknesses of an ego variety, but I can assure you they are common.
You don’t need me to play psychiatrist, you have ChatGPT for that. Your smart AI friend will ask you tough questions like:
Do I become unusually defensive when corrected or criticized?
Do I need to be seen as intelligent, successful, important, or right?
Does another person’s success make me feel diminished?
So there we have it. My mental model for the PvA conversation has always been unexpected intersectionality. This week we went somewhere unexpected. I am glad we did. I hope listeners will come along for the ride, assuming the Pod is rescued from Sicilian internet purgatory. We had a lot of technical issues this week.
In more predictable PvA news…
The world wanted more subscription revenue. We just got a shitty internet.
We paywalled everything because the ad model was broken and the free distribution model was unreliable. Before, in the digital scale era, content found large audiences even if the incentives and dependencies were imperfect. But, let’s be honest, I am never gonna subscribe to the Verge or countless pubs that are occasionally useful but marginally important to me. Instead I just bounce off the paywalls and go to X or Reddit.
This new internet is frustrating, even more friction filled and losing utility. Now it’s being eaten by bots. Ironically, platforms have become way more powerful.
In the end, pubs lose readers and influence. Writers don’t get read. The internet gets worse. I am not sure the trade is gonna make these more healthy businesses. I do realize that the old ad approach is not gonna save these business. The future demands massive agility and experimentation.
The truth is, platforms won. Mostly because ad models work better on platforms.
For now the whole thing feels misaligned. I liked it better before.
Come to think of it, content marketing has eaten the world.
We used to think that branded content was this little subset of stuff that we jammed in the feed as an innovative ad product. It would accompany the old-fashioned systematic media offerings where ads and edit were neatly divided. Stuff with mechanical CPM models, requiring simple ad trafficking not tedious content mashups cooked up in branded content sweatshops.
Once, we were hesitant to shill our media brands to appease advertisers. Then we became desperate to find ways to pay for everything.
Now we just call all it content marketing and it is the model. It’s hard to separate content from ads outside of hard news. Creators shill. Businesses create. Everything is marketing somehow. That’s just how it is.
When you stand back you see a very different world for people that have to market stuff. A young insurance company called Corgi is opening cafes with drinks named after their clients. They also tattoo their employees. Defense tech software and services company, Palantir, sells fashionable chore coats and viral “white on white” tennis t-shirts. CashApp sells magic wands. OpenAI owns the hottest new tech media brand. The Infatuation is the content front end for a bank. It’s actually better since they bought it.
What are you selling? Comment here >
Oh by the way, this is an great video (and channel) and it’s also branded content. It can be both.
In short, The Smarter Every Day guy discovers that manufacturing in America is not just a technical challenge, but an ethical one rooted in how companies choose to operate.
Everyone hates Dario.
This has the unmistakable energy of a schoolyard shakedown, with Dario playing the bullied nerd.
The immediate trigger was pretty simple. Nvidia organized a letter defending open-weight AI. Almost everyone signed it except Anthropic (and Apple that has no time for this shit). David Sacks, who always brings deep disdain for Dario and Co., and the tech crowd seized on that as proof that Anthropic wants to regulate open models out of existence and protect its own closed-model business.
The resentment was already there. Anthropic has pushed harder than anyone for safety regulation and recently refused to let the Pentagon use Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. This has annoyed the tech right, the military and the open-model crowd for different reasons.
Anthropic has brought some of this on itself. Expensive testing and compliance favor large companies, and Anthropic makes a fortune controlling access to its models. The challenge comes at an existential moment for hugely capitalized frontier LLMs. Safety and self-interest can coexist. But the charge that Dario wants to ban open models appears to be bullshit. He says smaller open models are a public good and is asking for testing of the most powerful models, open or closed.
Mostly it’s cause a lot of people don’t like Dario’s brand of sanctimoniousness. Or Anthropic’s success. By Dwarkesh bull case estimates, Anthropic could earn $100-150 billion in run rate revenue this year. This could surpass the combined 2025 revenue of all of Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla, SpaceX, X). The company had almost no revenue before 2023.
Also, I love it when billionaires fret about power concentration.
Zuck takes a potshot. Are you team Dario? >
China’s AI models have a durable cost advantage: A UBS report claims Chinese AI training costs are just 10% of overseas developers. API prices are 10-20% of foreign models, yet providers maintain 20-40% gross margins. This suggests genuine efficiency, not just unsustainable subsidies, is driving the advantage. The main constraint on Chinese AI revenue is compute supply, not a lack of demand.
Hollywood TV production has collapsed (Lucas Shaw): Hollywood is making 47% fewer television shows than it was just four years ago.
Bots now outnumber humans online (Fortune): Multiple cybersecurity firms confirm that bots generate the majority of web traffic. This “Dead Internet Theory” upends business models built on human visitors. Advertising, analytics, and security systems are all challenged by this shift.
China’s AI micro-dramas are a massive new market (The a16z Show): The AI micro-drama market in China is now larger than its domestic movie box office.
The “tech bro-ification” of marketing (TIME): Tech is rebranding female-dominated marketing roles with engineering-focused titles like “growth.” The shift is seen as a way to align with a male-centric culture as AI forces a new focus on distribution.
Bernard Arnault is fighting back against the media: The LVMH chief joined X to personally rebut a six-part investigative series by Le Monde. The move was compared to Elon Musk’s adversarial interviews and other tech figures delegitimizing media.
Dropout offers a sustainable new media model (mashable.com): The streaming service combines a $6/month subscription with savvy social media marketing. It creates all its own content for a loyal fanbase, with a streaming app that works well.
POD: AI’s High School Cafeteria
Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack
This week on People vs. Algorithms, the crew unpacks Silicon Valley’s latest AI power struggle, asking whether the battle over open models is really about competition—or about taking down Anthropic. They also explore why the internet feels increasingly broken, how content marketing quietly won, and what happens when every company becomes a media company.
The conversation takes an unexpected turn into ego, leadership, and mental health, with a candid discussion about ambition, insecurity, and what it means to build a healthier relationship with success. Plus: AI agents in communities, the future of branding, and one very chaotic recording session from Sicily.
BTW, vintage musical legend summer continues. We saw Canadian GOATs Rush at MSG last night. They are doing 77 dates over the next 6 months. The fan force is strong. Not really my bag but surprisingly fun show. Remember this?
The conversation happens all week on Field Notes →
I would be careful to lean too much into one listener's critique. Personally, I enjoy hearing any of you on the pod open up about personal stuff and it was not only interesting to me but instructive.
As a Gen X substacker kept awake at night by the business model question... I'm enjoying the event chatter. Not a fan of the hard stop.