People vs Algorithms

The Friction Economy

This week we dig into how much of the economy is built on friction, and what happens when AI agents start removing it. Also: why students are so gloomy about AI, Vanity F

The Mother of All Interface Battles

Brian, Troy and Alex debate who will control the interface to your life, whether convenience will steamroll privacy concerns, and how the winner gets to collect a toll on

The AI Interface Shift

Brian and Troy dig into Muse, Meta’s push to make AI assistants mainstream, and why the next big platform battle is over the interface itself. They also look at what this

Nobody Asked For Dragons

Brian and Troy map the whole cast: who's the wizard, who's the arms dealer, who's the schoolyard bully, and who gets stuck playing the citizens of King's Landing who neve

Cognitive Struggle

They debate warnings from Anthropic researchers that AI could kill humanity, whether anyone can credibly calibrate those risks and whether a visible catastrophe will be r

Strong Meat

We look ahead to the release of GTA 6 while tackling the implications of the doomsday sci-fi AI narrative, the use of social cost to coerce behaviors, and how giant sport

Owning the Narrative

Dolly Parton owned a very American narrative of being born poor but making something out of nothing through talent and hard work. In contrast, tech tried to control its n

Social Media is Dead

What replaced it is an algorithmic entertainment machine where everyone is selling something, AI makes authenticity harder to trust, and the platforms increasingly have l

The Provenance Problem

Suno makes real songs harder to tell from fake. Launch videos are coming across as fake — and the engagement is fake. Drawing the line between creative tool and robot aut

Sales Energy

They take risks, they’re fueled by rejection, they know the power of relationships, they’re competitive and they will do shots. The best sellers follow the way of Catalan

AI’s High School Cafeteria

This week we unpack Silicon Valley’s latest AI power struggle, asking whether the battle over open models is really about competition or about taking down Anthropic. We a

The New Moat

Publishers see the writing on the wall for traffic-based models and are instead looking to experiential gatherings that bring together communities. We discuss why events

In Praise of Aggregation

AI should eliminate the need for human content aggregation, yet it's still going strong, as seen by the influential subscriber base of News Items and popularity of aggreg

Protecting Alpha

This week, we discuss why the AI safety narrative is shifting from doomerism to the risk of AI eliminating both companies’ and individuals’ alphas, or what makes them uni

The Coldplay Protocol

We dig into the tangled collision of journalism and the creatory economy. Emily Sundberg’s Zuckerberg interview, Brian’s christening as the Matt Belloni-of-advertising, a

Cannes is CES with Rosé

This week’s episode leans heavily into Cannes, which is a world where everyone is selling and many are lying. Creators are the cool kids of Cannes, while the site of a dr

Americamaxxing, AI Taste Wars, World Cup Soft Power

We debate whether Anthropic painted itself in a corner with its safety messaging, if Snap Specs pass the taste test, Elon as American icon, and the World Cup and Trump’s

The Abundance Economy

Seen one way, AI has democratized the creative process. Seen another, we are swimming in a sea of mediocrity that inevitably crowds out attention to human-led creativity.

The AI Pushback

ChatGPT is advertising it as a souped-up Clippy to help with date-night recipes and sibling road trips. What happened to superintelligence and curing cancer? Disruptive f

Homines Contra Algorithmos

We debate the commodification of the human experience, why the upside-down token economics is a more pressing near-term concern, the religious zeal behind SpaceX's valuat