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Hello, Hello, Hello, welcome to on Air Fast twenty twenty six. Thank you so much. I'm Kristin Meinzer. I'm your MC for the day. And in case you don't know who I am, I'm a podcaster, I'm a royal watcher. I'm a culture critic. I've been very busy over the last week with some royal news you may have heard of, so you may know me from those things. But today is not about me. It is about the fantastic talent that is going to be on the stage and at this festival. Let's get to our first live taping of
the day, Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. The hosts of Odd Lots are Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway. Please welcome them to the stage, along with their very special guest, Henry Blodgett. Thank you so much. Welcome to the stage.
Thank you so much.
And hello and welcome to a live episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, We're definitely not going to do this, but it definitely feels like almost.
Every episode could be about AI these days. Right, Like it's just touching.
So all the things we talk about are solely getting subsumed into this topic that we're not going to do it, but we probably could.
It's not just that every episode could be on AI, it's that every episode could probably be made by AI at this point, right. And in fact, we've had a few people last year. I remember there were a few people who made AI generated episodes of the podcast and they weren't that bad. And I have to think if they did it today, they would be even better.
It would definitely be better anyway, not better than us, but they would be better than they were. I'm not sure they'd be better than they were a year ago anyway.
So we have to talk about AI and what it is doing to the market, finance, economics, et cetera. And of course we have to talk about what it means for us in the media industry. And I'm really excited to say we do have the perfect guest.
We're going to be.
Speaking here with Henry Blodgett, the CEO of Regenerator. He used to be my boss when I was at a Business Insider, someone who has a background in both media and of course Wall Street and finance, so the perfect person to talk about all the different dimensions.
Truly the perfect guest.
All right, Henry, thank you so much for coming back on odlots.
Thank you for having me so.
The last time we talked to was in May of last year, and the theme then was everyone was talking about here are these huge evaluations for AI companies, how could they possibly be justified? And that was an interesting conversation And it feels like the narrative has now flipped one hundred and eighty degrees where it's like these companies are so powerful they're going to destroy every other company they're wake and every software company, a payments provider, et cetera.
Has been like plunging really since the start of the year. How have you like updated your views? Where are you now versus where you were in same May.
We are early in the development of the industry. This looks a lot like the Internet in the nineteen nineties for the if you remember, basically, when you have a huge opportunity like this early on, you can have a huge range of reasonable predictions about what is going to happen. And here we one day it's catastrophe. None of us are ever going to have a job. Again, everything's going to create her other days, Hey, it's just a fancy word process or no worries. Open ai is way overvalued.
I will say that since we talked last I believe that we were aghast at the open ai three hundred billion dollar valuation. I believe the latest one is eight hundred billion, So we are climbing. But there are other
companies out there that are worth many times that. So if one does think that AI is going to take over the world and open Ai is the Google of the AI era, which is the thesis which I think is very misguided, we can get into, then one can imagine that a company might be worth many multiples of some of the companies that are out there.
So one of the crazy things that happened this week speaking of AI and media, is there's a guy. We've had him on the show, James Galen aka Satriny. He
runs a hedge fund also publishes an investment newsletter. He basically wrote a doom case scenario of the year twenty twenty eight where everything had become AI and because everything was AI, no one had any jobs, no one was actually buying anything in the economy, and we basically had an economic and financial crisis when I read that piece and then saw the market reaction to it, so stocks fell pretty dramatically, and people were attributing it to basically
a newsletter that was a thought piece. I thought that was kind of insane, and it speaks to what you just said, which is, when we're in this really uncertain time, you can go from sort of euphoria to doomerism very very quickly.
Exactly because it's all predictions. We're all looking into the hazy future saying how big is it going to be? These small changes in your assumptions make a huge difference in the current value. I will say, because that research report was both heralded and pillarid, this is exactly fully what you want analysts to do. You want them to look out and take a strong position and say here's what it can look like. And I thought it was
a fascinating report. I will point out that even though as you just characterized it, that this is economic armageddon, one of the first sentences of the report says ten percent unemployment, which means ninety percent employment. Most of us still have a job, and yes there are changes in industries, but most of us are still working. So I was surprised after hearing about this predicts catastrophe that I picked
it up. It's like, well, no, it predicts a big technology change that sometimes takes the economy awhile to digest, but not armageddon.
What do you think though, it says like about the market right now? I mean, and it's kind of an interaction of a market story in a media story, because here's a substack piece that really did seem to move the market.
Quite a bit on Monday, right yeah.
What does it say about the market environment that, because it's all your right, the software stocks have been getting clovered all year, and our AI agents, I mean, we'll get into that, gonna somehow make it so we don't need to buy regular business software anymore. I don't totally understand that, but this has been the fear all year. What does it sort of say about the market slash media environment that a substack piece like this could just go absolutely megaviral like that and move the market.
Everybody is twitchy. Valuations were high to begin with. We're all reevaluating our views every day saying, am I crazy thinking it could be this? Maybe I'm crazy? I have to panic a little bit so we've seen stocks roll over. The multiples are compressing a little bit again. So far from armageddon. It's people saying, okay, there may be some change here. And to your point, the big Bayer case now is that, oh my goodness, claud Code is so good,
no one will ever buy software anymore. You'll just say, hey, make me the software.
Yeah, I've done that.
Yeah you have. You're a big experimenter. Yeah, but I would say you were probably not spending billions of dollars in enterprise software before I do.
I don't know a thousands of people out in my payroll who they need to get it at Fried you know exactly.
You depend on this. And one of the nice things about having a company standing behind a product is you actually can hold them accountable for it. And maybe claud Code doesn't make your enterprise software the you why you want, somebody doesn't get paid. So as I hear that, to me, that is hysteria. I don't understand it. Software companies are
not going away. Companies that are not in the software business are not going to suddenly say, oh, let's have a junior person who understands AI build all our software for us. It is not going to happen, but overall, big changes coming, lots of disruption. Do we know for sure what that's going to do to profits of these companies and change in the economy. We do not, And that is called the discount rate getting higher. It feels riskier.
And on that day, Monday, everybody was feeling suddenly risk averse. Today I'll point out as we tape, everyone's saying, no problem. Off to the races again.
You've obviously lived and been very active and influential in a previous technological I guess cycle of disruption. What do you think people are getting wrong here, especially on Wall Street when it comes to their approach on this particular one AI versus dot Com.
I think this goes way beyond Wall Street. I think there really is a big camp still, and the case gets made and then it gets tamped down, and then it comes back even more strongly that there really will be no jobs for humans anymore. And what I would say to that is, I think the bigger risk with AI is actually that somebody invents an agenttic system that actually gets out in the world and does a lot
of damage. I think that is a bigger risk. If you look at technology job transitions over time, like the big one, which is agriculture to industrial. Two hundred years ago, ninety three percent of us worked on farms. Now it's two percent. That's a big transition, and yet all through that the number of jobs grow grew. And same thing
with things like telephone operators with steam engines. You look at any piece of it, there is disruption and pain and I'm not minimizing that for the people whose jobs are changed or disrupted by it. But the economy overall so far in history has gone on to create a lot more jobs. And so when you see the lay waste to jobs predictions, you don't also often get the other side, which is how many new jobs are going to be created?
Well, this is exactly what I want to ask you, because we hear that all the time during technological advancement cycles, new jobs are created. But I think the difficulty with AI is that it's hard to see what those new jobs are we better are.
Going to be?
Yeah, like, what are we better at than a supercomputer that can code a program or write an article in less than a minute.
Or mimical voice and do a podcast.
Okay, so how where are we three years in at this point. These job doom predictions started twenty minutes after chat GPT came out. Where are we maybe a little bit at the margin, we're seeing something maybe, but maybe it's still that companies way over hired after the COVID boom or now sort of right sizing themselves. As you say, I can go into LA, I can go to Google. I think it is drop in a topic and say make this into a great Odd Lots podcast.
Some people have said that Google.
Multiple people think that Google's notebook LM, which does that creates a podcast out of a document.
Multiple people have said they.
Trained this on Jo and Tracy like this sounds like other people are claiming that too, but yes they could have.
I'm just saying, you guys continue to grow. All I hear more and more about is oh, you gotta listen to Odd Lots grow and growing, growing, growing, growing. And I don't think we were talking earlier that you've radically changed, you made the way you make the show. We're still recording it here. You didn't just queue up lams. Who is going to rush to do the big interview with Google. They're not. They're gonna come do it with you guys,
because they love you, and your audience loves you. So I'm just saying, even in something that seemingly looks so ripe to be destroyed, you guys cost money. Why is Bloomberg spending it away right to defend I'm just saying optimistic.
So I mean I hear both ways, and thank you for saying that.
On the other hand, you know, people might not have the same affinity for someone who does claims adjusted and at insurance. They don't really care if they have the human touch for that or tech support. I want to ask a related question. It also relates to the piece that came out on one day, and it relates to this question of whether open ai is could be.
The Google of the next generation.
One of the arguments that the piece stipulates, and I think it sort of fits with what I have observed, is that ai doesn't seem to have network.
Effects in the same way.
So it's like you could switch from O chat, GPT to claude with almost no issues and it's just not an issue. Whereas after the first time I used Google in two though I never used Yahoo again, that was the last time I'd ever.
Used another search engine.
This seems this is one of the arguments in the piece that there isn't gonna be the same stickiness and network effects in the AI era in the way that defined the last twenty five years of the Internet. And so when you think about like open ai versus Google this year versus the dot com era, does that resonate to I.
Think that what folks who would say that open ai is the Google of the era would say that more and more, you're gonna build more of your life into it. It's going to know everything about you, it's going to custom so it's gonna be the switching costs are going
to grow. But to this point they have not. And I'll tell you the thing that really made me think they were in trouble, and I still think that given the valuation and given the general consensus that they've already won, was when Google Gemini came out and people said, oh it's better. Yeah, they passed them, and all the bulls said, oh, just wait till the next version of open ai comes out. I will say, if you go back into the nineteen nineties,
Amazon was very controversial. A lot of people thought it would go bankrupt. It's just a bookstore. Barnes and Noble is gonna put them out of business as soon as they have a website or Walmart or whatever. Walmart and Barnes and Noble never got anywhere near Amazon. Amazon was so far out ahead always and still almost went bankrupt by the way, but nobody was ever close. And in this case, less than two years after the product comes out,
the incumbent has caught up to me. That's when I said, like, whoa, Okay, maybe this actually is going to be like the Internet, which is the first five years all of us, including me, were saying like, oh, just buy the leaders, no problem, like they're the ones that are gonna survive. You know how many survived. Of that first five hundred companies that went public in the nineteen nineties, one went on to actually make investors a lot of money after the crash.
That was Amazon. Two others that I know of, Cisco, after twenty five years, finally got back to its stock prize. eBay did okay for a while and then kind of sputtered out a little bit. That's out of hundreds and hundreds of companies. So I think it's very possible that yes, AI is huge. It's a great idea. We all want it, and somebody is going to come along soon and due to open ai what Google did to Yahoo, which by the way, Yahoo was the big search engine winner and
then Google destroyed it. So I just think it's way too early to say that we open a eyes the Google.
We started by mentioning the open ai valuation, which everyone was a gas stat last year. Now maybe not so much. But even if you assume a future where open ai or whoever comes in and disrupts every single industry, and there are thousands of employees and companies that are paying two hundred dollars a month or whatever to access the new LM whatever the new model is, open ai, at least for right now, is still losing money on every
customer that's like a power user. So how does that actually translate into a working business model.
It's a good question. I think what the bulls would say is the cost of what they do is going to plummet, and so the lines are going to cross here pretty soon. If they own the whole market, suddenly they start to become incredibly profitable. We are not there yet. And I think when we talked last time at a three hundred billion dollar valuation, which everybody was horrified by at that point. But if you looked at the projections, the projections were three years from now, they'll do one
hundred billion of revenue. And if you at that point were looking at it saying, okay, if I believe that, then it's three times revenue, the economics will probably change. It starts to look a little more reasonable. Now we're at eight hundred billion, so it's a much bigger multiple, and you've got to actually have a much bigger revenue stream and profits. But that's the argument. I don't see it yet. I gotta say the economics are incredibly difficult for them.
They seem brutal. And there's another element too.
So obviously, unlike during the Web two point zero era where there was like cheap, plentiful compute, obviously, the capital expenditure budgets.
To these companies are just eyewatering. They're spending like crazy.
There's also this other element that I think is interesting, which is at least of a few of these labs, like the people found to them are true believers, Like they think they're like they think they're on a mission to build AGI is going to change everything. Build God, Build God, right, build a digital God, and it's like they're not going to stop at anything. They're not gonna be like, you know what, it's pretty good, let's tap the brakes. We're pretty happy with how this model works.
You know, I don't, or at least I don't get that a privy.
Also, they've couched it as this like existential race, like there's only gonna be one company that dominates in the and so the upper limit on spending to become that company is infinity.
Yes, However, there is a limit to money. And when you look at when people are raising money, you watch where they're going for it. Sure, the vcs, that's one pool of money, and then the big strategics, and then the vcs who missed the first time and are feeling so embarrassed about it they'll pay up to get in. Then it is the international funds that are watching all
this stuff. Yeah, exactly. So it's some point you run out of money, and we are talking about a company that is raising hundreds of billions of dollars just to keep the engine running and just to keep pace. This is the other problem. Google, Facebook, Microsoft are generating tens of billions of dollars of free cash flow every year that they can use to buy chips open AI has to raise it in the open market. So if those economics don't start to change soon, we're gonna run out of money.
Joe and I were talking about this before we came on stage. But another thing happened recently was there is a karaoke machine making company that announced it was now an AI company, which when I see headlines like that, remind me a lot of the crypto boom, but also remind me a lot of the dot com boom, and we are starting to see more and more of those. Wasn't there a toilet company recently?
The toilet owner is legit, so like apparently, no, no, no, for real, So you said it was not like, oh, we're an AI company. Apparently it's the Japanese toilet company and they have some like porcelain or something like that. It's very important for like semiconductors or something. So everyone's like, oh, get out of the toilet business. You have this access to this material.
But so that one was kind of legit. The karaoke one.
Okay, okay, so yeah, the toilet one. Maybe the karaoke one. When you see headlines like that, what do you think do you think like this is a rational pivot into a booming market and everyone should be experimenting with AI at the moment, or do you think like, nah, this is getting crazy.
I think we are in a euphoric bubble period where we just discovered this amazing new thing. Nobody knows what the future is, nobody knows what's gonna work, and we are effectively creating this enormous R and D lab, which is, hey, what you can do something, here's some money, go out and experiment. I hope you'll be one of the winners. Fifty to one hundred years ago, all of that stuff happened in labs like Edison's lab or Bell Labs inside
these big corporations. You never saw it. Now everything is a startup. You see it. It's happening in front of you. But there's no question that most of the companies are gonna fail. Happens aget in again and again. And I think what investors are saying when they see that is okay, you know that is a quick flip. It's hey, I'll get it. Other people. A lot of other people love AI. They'll buy it after I do, and it'll go up and then I'll sell it.
I want to ask you a question about capital markets and how they're different to the late nineties of the dot com bubble, because one really big thing that's happening these days is, yes, these companies are in private but there is a lot of stock floating around, and there are these SPVs that will buy a choir, a chunk of Anthropic and sell them on a secondary market, and people are trying to get They're much more liquid than a private company would have been in the late nineties.
I get someone someone messaged me.
They're like, do you want to buy a little I like, no, I don't do that, but they're like, would you like to buy a little bit of Anthropic at a three hundred and fifty billion dollar valuation? But you must get
a bunch of those sort of messages from people. And I'm curious about your perspective on this world, because the other thing is like, there's no financials, You have no idea like what their p and L is for these private company what's your take on some of this quasi liquid private market stock.
Yeah, and let us just say then when our phones are ringing, yeah, I know that's the right thing.
Money out there It's like, if someone is reaching out to me, I can't be that much money.
Big, big warning signs going on over there. So I think one of the things that's changed versus the dot com boom in the nineteen nineties and before that is companies used to go public very early before, and you can invest in Amazon, for example, at a four hundred million dollar valuation, sounds like a lot. It's worth trillions of dollars. Now there's been incredible appreciation. Individuals can't do that anymore, and there's good reason for it. People lost
a lot of money after the dot com crash. We didn't like that. We want to protect everybody. So now companies go public a lot later, the threat of lawsuits and all of the different regulation that you've got to do, so it's later. But the bummer about it is a lot of investors who actually do have the risk tolerance can't access them. And so, yes, you've had a new business that has been built around Okay, let's get that
private stock. Somehow get it, I think. And the problem is, again, if you choose right great company, it works, but it's more fees packed around it. It's much more you know that intermediary that called you has to get paid, so that's somebody else. It's more difficult to trade. So I think it is the market trying to solve the problem that it's much harder to make money in open AI at eight hundred billion or Anthropic at three hundred and fifty billion than it is in the seed round when
it was a few hundred million. And so you've got a lot of people clamoring to get in. But it's the same problem. You don't even infect less companies go public. They do, or they are releasing a lot of information, whereas these guys are not.
Should we do some media stuff? All right, let the media naval gazing begin, Okay, So we started out by saying that, you know, we were talking about the Satrini piece that got it went viral, but it also got a backlash. You did your own AI newsroom experiment newsletter on substack that also got a bit of a backlash. Were you surprised at that one?
Yes, I was surprised. Basically, what I did I left business inside or I started this new thing Regenerator and a podcast too. Trying your business.
It's very difficult talk about this is the most important aspect of podcasting podcast.
Exactly, yes, podcast called Solutions with check it out? Yes please. So I left and it was just me. So I said, okay, great, let's see what it can do, because if you try that as a CEO of a company, people freak out, justifiably. Oh my goodness, they're going to discover something. My job's threatened. We are all worried about our jobs being threatened. Including by the way, do we need articles any more? Articles? I mean, boy, there are a lot of great articles
written everybody. In fact, this is the problem in media. There's way too much of it. Let's just get that out there anyway. So yes, I experimented with everything, and the first thing that I did was, oh, if I were actually starting a publication and hiring a team, who would I hire. Well, I'd hire five people. I have a managing editor, and I'd have a few reporters and so forth. So I asked chat GPT, can you help me? CHATCHEPET said sure, let's make them. So in two hours
we made them. They all had different personalities, they had head shots, et cetera. I wrote this, We had like slack going where we're all talking about stories, and it was pretty good, not spectacular but pretty good, and so that was cool, so I wrote about it. Yes, I also made the mistake of complimenting one of the headshots and was immediately lambasted for that, which actually helped me hone my own AI morality.
Well, I have a question on this. If you had had a human editor for that piece, do you think you would have complimented your AI generated managing editor on her appearance.
The piece needed to be editing edited. This is the problem. You were out on your own. You don't have great editors protecting you anymore. You let your enthusiasm bubble over a little bit too much. You know who I have edited my stuff now sometimes if I feel like I'm maybe a little bit too fasty as enthusiastic JATGBT or Claude and very good spots it.
Anyway, you talk to us about that newsroom dynamic particularly, you know, every editor at a newsroom, every every newsroom right.
Now is like trying to figure out something right. You can't like alienate.
The entire newsroom and say like, oh you all have to be doing whats Yeah.
Like that doesn't work.
The newsroom obviously hates it, and I would say probably for good reason. But on the other hand, everyone has to be like figuring stuff out. What should newsroom executives, whether it's editors in chief or whatever, how should they be thinking about solving this problem?
So, I mean, so going back the other thing, the other thing that I learned from publishing, that was just how much anxiety there is, especially in younger generation, about jobs that have been there for a long time that are just disappearing. And that was extremely clear to me, and I would have been even more Yeah, I understand it. I mean it is scary. And so what does a newsroom do. I think, let's look at what's going on media.
The problem again is there's way too much media. There are so many amazing articles, for example, produced every day. When I open the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, I want to read dozens of articles. I might get to one or two. And distribution has changed radically five years ago. Facebook, Google, we're driving enormous distribution to lots of different publishers. That is all now changing.
We are going back to something that looks like the nineteen nineties, where actually you have to have a direct relationship with your subscriber. The industry is under a ton of pressure, both from advertising but also we have maximized the amount of time as humans that we can spend consuming media. This is very different from twenty years ago when we start a business socider. You remember this, Like in the nineteen nineties, media was very mature.
It was, says twenty years ago. By the way, that's like thirty years Oh, wit to figure.
Okay, but let's go back to the ninety nineties. Even farther. Media was very mature. Magazines totally mature, very hard to start one. You needed fifty million dollars and you need to hire all these great people, and then maybe five years down the road you might, if you're lucky, become profitable. Very hard, very hard to get into newspapers, television, even worse. Your slave for a long long time getting coffee, so very very tough. Then desktops came along and got connected.
So that was suddenly twelve hours a day that people are sitting in the office. They need to know what's going on. It's a new opportunity. Then phones came and that's the thing that really drove business Insider. In the earlier we're standing around, we want to know what's happening. Nobody else is serving that, so big, big opportunity. But over time all the folks in the industry caught up. New York Times is terrific, so is Wall Street Journal,
so it's business insiders, so it's Bloomberg. These companies are really really good at this now. And if you just look at, for example, political coverage, we don't need one hundred White House reporters, we just don't. And yet that's the thing that everybody's interested in, so of course you're going to have a reporter focus on that. And yet
there's just too much capacity. And then the other thing that happened, and I'll finished up very quickly, is the Internet blew up the protective mote around all of the nineteen nineties era media. Print and TV used to be completely separate. Now they're the same. You used to not have a television company be able to own a newspaper. Now we've done away with that. Everybody can own everything, everybody can do everything, and it's all a click away.
So it has become even more intensely competitive. And so it's never been an easy industry, but we are back to it being an incredibly intensely competitive industry, and I do think there's just in general too much of it.
So when we think about the impact of AI on media, it feels to me like people are talking about two paths here, and one is where you know, the big chat platforms are basically they become the front page of the internet, right and you type in whatever query you have today, how did the State of the Union address go last night or something like that, and it spits out a bunch of information that's based on a bunch
of articles that you, yourself, are not paying for. And then the other thing that I hear is well, actually, in the age of Internet slop AI slop, that distribution and quality is going to become even more important. So people are going to want to go to the New York Times or hopefully to Bloomberg or wherever and get that take on last night's events. Where do you stand on that sort of You know, it's a very binary outcome to me, which way do you think we're going?
I think this is great for the brands that make it, and again, nobody has a right to exist. It's going to be a fight, But for the brands that make it, it is terrific. I trust Bloomberg. I read it Bloomberg article. I know the reporter knows what they're doing and they know the subject. I know there is editing there. Occasionally there's a mistake, but it is an honest mistake that will be fixed quickly. Compare that to what I see on social media, especially now where AI can create photos
and videos and everything else. I don't know. I know the New York Times will immediately dive in if something is bubbling up, some video that's apparently scandalous that we've all got to look at. I know they'll do work on it. Maybe we'll sometime get to the point where they can be fooled. Not yet, and so I trust them. And you actually need a brand and a great organization to do that. And people say, wow, yes, but everybody out there, you know, who knows what's true and it's over.
That has always been the case. At its peak in the print era, a million people read The New York Times. That's it. Everybody else heard what was said from their friends, or they heard something else, they never thought about it. And so the idea that yeah, there's stuff out there that some people believe, There's always been stuff out there that some people believe. So I think it's great for brands, but I do think it's gonna be a fight. It's never going to be an easy industry talk.
Just more about this question though, of like, Okay, everyone, you know New York Times, like anyone else, they have to figure this out, right, They have to figure out, like what can they leverage it.
I'm doing scare quotes.
I hate that word, you know, but it's like the word that everyone used. Could it be leveraged in some way in the context of the traditional newsroom AI?
Yeah, And so.
Going back to your question, which I realized I didn't get to before, So what what should news.
How do they handle that?
Like, because everyone here's you have to like run your runder text through this chatbot or train your train the AI that's going to replace whatever or they feel, you know, very reasonable fear, how do you how can anyone overcome that?
So I think there there is the opportunity for there to be a lot of productivity enhancements in what we have today. We were talking earlier. You both use research chattyp for research. Me too. It's great. That is a very different That is one use of media is me looking for information going out It used to be that I would search for articles. Now I do it with Claude or chat GPT. That is a smaller piece than what most media has lived on forever, which is I
don't know what I'm interested in. WHOA, that's an interesting story. And that's the serendipitous consumption of media. That's why newspaper headlines have been like this forever. It's why magazine covers matter. We don't know what we want until we see it, and then we get it. And it's why in our business there are many different talents you need to be extraordinarily talented in the business. One is sure reporting, accuracy, expertise,
so forth. You also have to know what people care about and what a good story is and why it matters. And I don't think that changes. And so where do we look around the interestry research, drafting stories? Why not? And when people are aghast at that, let me just say back in the print era, for newspapers, especially a daily newspaper, what would happen is the reporters would be out in the field, they would get information, they would call it into the rewrite desk. Verbally, they didn't have
anything to write it with. It's just say you're the facts. The rewriters would write it. And in the last twenty years or thirty years, we who have been trained in writing and we value it and we go to Columbia Journalism School, we have conflated reporting and writing as journalism. And I do think there are opportunities now where Okay, the writing lift may may be lightened by this. And I'm not saying say here's the article and just publish it.
I'm just saying, you know what, perplexity is pretty good at writing a well informed, well sourced story in six seconds, and maybe that actually accelerates what you're doing and then maybe you can add your piece to the top or what have you. So I do think their uses.
For it too, So I actually I agree with that argument. I think like social skills and investigative skills are going to become more important in the age of AI. However, what you always hear is, well, you're gonna need You're going to need to produce scoops. Right, You're gonna have to find the stuff that the models don't already know about, and that's going to be the valuable aspect of journalism.
But the problem seems to be that those scoops get commodified so freaking quickly that I'm not sure that actually generates much value for the news organization.
It is very hard to protect news. You can't. But the organizations that produce it all the time are gonna have a huge advantage because it's going to be worth subscribing to them. And that's where That's where the New York Times, the Welster Journal, and Bloomberg that's where it's coming from. And Bloomberg's an interesting one because you really serve a somewhat small but highly committed base where Bloomberg reporters are breaking stuff all the time that allow people
to make or lose money. They're going to care and they're gonna have that terminal and chackb is not doing that. So part of what I hear you say is wait a minute, it has to be differentiated. Yeah, it does. Actually, there's a lot less value than there used to be in somebody said something interesting, let's write it in an intelligent way, do a little more work and get it to somebody else. That is not as useful anymore for
the reason that you describe. But those companies, if they want to compete with each other and they do chet, GPT and Claude right now, they are going to have to pay for that information. And that's where a Bloomberg is in great position. And say another thing, it's not just the big generalists. It is the niche providers who are experts like you guys and do an amazing job in a particular area that people really care about. Those
are gonna Those are going to survive. And I'll say one more thing, which is Jeff Bezos was an investor and business Cider is incredibly helpful to talk to him, very smart. I realize now he's become kind of not applauded in the journalims of industry. But one of the things that he liked to say is everybody wants to know what's changing and what it means. It's actually more useful to step back and say what is going to stay the same. What is going to stay the same
in media is that we are always wanted. We're always going to want to know what's happening and what it means, and we're always going to want to be entertained, and that's what media does. It's tough, but until actually there are no more humans, we are going to want media to deliver that.
I agree with that.
You know, there's some really good stories by the way, about the like the New York Post and daily news like report like the crime reporters out in the fields, and then they would call the rewrite desk and then they would like translate it into like tabloid to speak is a that's a cool, that'd be cool cool.
I remember sending notes on a BlackBerry in like the early two thousands, and then someone in the newsroom would translate it into readable words.
With a few minutes left, I want to talk about you mentioned, Jeff Bezos. I want to talk about the business environment right now. When President Trump won, there was a lot of headlines about you know, these CEOs. They'd be like, well, now we free speech, and now we can speak our minds and you know, none of this woke stuff where we have to like be careful about
what we speak. And like I get the impression that it is literally the exact opposite, and that CEOs have never been more scared, there never been more timid, and they like are obsequious to him, and they like do these big pilgrimages and stuff.
And meanwhile, we know they hate the tariffs.
We know they hate all the stuff going on. What do you like make of that? Because he's not even that popular anymore. He's actually, like, arguably like one of the least popular presidents ever. And yet I don't get the impression that there's been much of a change in the sort of like world of CEOs and rich guys and billionaires about speaking their minds.
Yes, the whole free speech thing was always I want more speech than I believe in, so I can say whatever I want. You can't say what you want, so it was gonna ludicrous. I think that in general, the big companies and CEOs, especially because President Trump won the last election, clearly they said, Okay, I believe in democracy, I'm going to be pragmatic and take care of my team and my company. And also for most public company CEOs,
they are easily removed and they know that. And your job is to actually take care of your company and shareholders. It is not to be a free speech crusader and stand up for your personal thing that you believe in. And so I think there was a lot of pragmatism. I think that may start to change here. So I feel like things have happened in the last few months. We may be starting to see a change, but I
think it is mainly pragmatism. And you can look at that from the outside and so that's outrageous, but I think they were looking out for their companies and their teams and their shareholders.
I want to go back to media and naval raising because I've got more questions, and I actually hesitate to ask this one because I fear that your response is going to get back to asking Joe and I to justify our own salaries.
I ad, I'm telling you why you're not going to be replaced by notebook LM.
Okay, I'm going to ask you to justify a particular paycheck kind of Okay, when you sold Business Insider to Axel Springer, what.
Year was that, twenty fifteen? Twenty fifteen?
Okay, if you were selling Business Insider to Axel Springer, now, how different would your which to them be in twenty twenty six versus twenty fifteen.
I would say that I think one of Business Desiders advantages, and Joe was a big part of this was we were not trying to defend the old way that journalism was done in print and television. We were trying to bring rigorous journalism to a new medium where people wanted different things, where distribution was very different. So we were experimenters and innovators, and for every idea that worked, we had twenty five ideas that were dumb and didn't work.
I take responsibility for all of them. That was the only way to figure out what worked. And one of the things we noticed relatively early is hey, we can figure out what people like and we want to serve them. And we did a good job at that, and I think that was the that was the thing that made businesses that are successful. I think now for all companies, stuffing your head in the sand and wishing AI would go away is not a great strategy. So what would
be What can we do? And again, one of the things that's changed as Google and Facebook and social have totally dried up as sources of distribution is we are back in this direct subscriber world, just like magazines and newspapers way back in the world. So that is serving your subscribers. This is what you, guys do. You have this incredibly passionate audience. They know you, they want to hear from you every week, and so that's what media
companies need. To do. So that's what I would say is we are as focused as we have ever been on serving our readers, viewers, people who love us.
So you are now in subscribe very subscriber oriented media.
You have a newsletter, you have a podcast, et cetera.
Other than realizing like, actually you know editors are good and so forth, what else have you learned or what's been notable about your own personal journey into subscriber based media.
What does surprise do well?
So I give you a I'll think So A lot of what I've been doing the last year or two is writing novels. This is something I wanted to do forever. It's like, Okay, now's the time. And I talked to another friend of mine who used to be a screenwriter, and I confess that to him. He's like, dude, that is crazy. Just go to Claude. Tell Claude what you want, and Claude will spit out three hundred and twenty five pages and it'll be pretty good. And I don't I
believe it and it'll take twenty minutes. And so I feel like the world's biggest idiot. From a business perspective. On the other hand, I did want to do it. I'm glad I did it. It's really funny. Tell us what's coming out next on It's called The Upgrade. It's about a tech billionaire who wants to use AI to take over the world.
That doesn't sound like fiction.
It's nonfiction, but it'll be out. It's going to be out in beta. It's a new form of books a screen test. Yes, it's been in alpha for a while. A lot of people have read it's different. No, it's a book book, but there's gonna be a period. But I invite you to read it. Thank you if you would send me what you think. And then when I publish it for real, it may will have benefited from your reading anyway. So I feel like a complete idiot
for doing it. But what I will say is for me as an analyst and writer and speaker, part of the joy is the process. Yea, and I learned so much and this is what I don't understand about how research is going to be conducted. One of the things that I was, Hey, write me a research report about X six minutes later it comes back. Is better than a research report that I would have written as a young analyst when I didn't know anything, and it took six minutes. So I said, okay, I'm not going to
write any research reports anymore. But when it took me a month to do that as a twenty five year old, I learned a lot through that process. And so now I don't know how you learn whether you be reading the report like I don't. That's the thing I'm really struggling with. But I will say so for me, the process has been interesting. I hope you like the book. If you like it, maybe I'll do another one. That would be great. But what I would say is on this whole thing, for what are humans going to do?
You're a chess player. It has been forty years since our phones could clabor us in chess. Chess is bigger than it is ever true in person. So my hope is we have ai research and write stuff that we don't really want to do, and we save our writing and orating and everything else for the stuff that we are really passionate about.
Henry blogIn.
Thank you so much and thanks for joining us here at all on air Fast.
There's a lot of fun.
Thank you so much, Henny. This has been another episode of the au Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen armag, dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot, and kill Brooks at Kalebrooks. And for more odd Laws content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Oddlogs. We've a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chaut about all of these things twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash od.
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