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What are the Economics of an AI Native Internet?
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Speaker 2
Hello, everybody. It's September the 22nd, 2025, a Monday. We're doing our That Was The Week Tech Roundup. A couple of days late this week because Keith's just come back from Europe. The headlines, of course, dominated today by the continual repercussions, ramifications of the Charlie Kirk assassination and all the media controversy about it. And Keith... Leads this week with something about free speech. Who's for free speech? Keith is very much for free speech. I don't want to turn this into just another argument about whether whether Jimmy Kimmel should be allowed to broadcast on television. Keith, your editorial, as always, is of high quality. I want to turn this into a tech conversation. I don't want to just talk about free speech. What is this current controversy, do you think, about Charlie Kirk and what you can and can't say? on conventional television. What does it tell us about our particular moment today in September 2025 with YouTube and social media and AI on the horizon?
Well, interestingly, I think what it tells us is counterintuitive to the current narrative. The current narrative is that free speech is in danger and Charlie Kirk being assassinated by a killer and Jimmy Kimmel being, in quotes, assassinated by the FTC and ABC, really are not indicative of the truth. The truth is that speech has never been freer. There are many, many ways for any of us to articulate our point of view to others in public whether it's X or whether it's Substack, YouTube, you know, the opportunity for individuals to have a point of view has never been greater. And tech is the reason for that, that tech has basically elevated the individual to have a global mouthpiece, which it never did before. You know, we, the masses were, consumers of opinions, but never proliferators. Now we are.
Yeah, and I think you and I agree on that reality, although we might disagree about whether that's a good thing. I wrote a book a few years ago called Cult of the Amateur, which suggested it might not be a good thing. You're very much in favor. But leaving that aside, Keith, What I don't understand, and we talked about this a little bit before we went live, what really ultimately is the big deal to Charlie Kirk or Colbert or whoever else being thrown off the networks? They just go on YouTube. They just go on Substack. They just go on... some other video platform and build a business around that what what's the big deal about being thrown off television these days does it speak still i guess there's two interpretations on the one hand maybe the old media isn't quite as dead as people like yourself have always suggested or is this the birth pangs of a new age is television more or less powerful today than it was 10 15 20 years ago
Well, as always, I think there's more than one thing happening at once. Let's start with the one we don't want to spend as much time on, which is that there is an impetus now among certain people to close down the opinions of others. Obviously, shooting them is an extreme expression of that. Firing them is a fairly extreme expression of that. But it's undeniable that there is an anti-democratic Yeah,
and the New York Times this week, today leads on the firing, and I'm quoting the headline, the firing of educators over Kirk Comet's follower familiar playbook, which is the progressive take, I'm sure on the Wall Street Journal, we would hear the reverse on how progressives are still trying to shut down people they don't want to hear.
And I, for one, would acknowledge that in recent history, at least, most of that came from the left. in its cancel culture initiatives on university campuses now it's also coming from the right as we see with uh Kimmel so this is not a politically um one-sided set of developments it seems to be across the political spectrum that closing down your opponents is now okay but that that's less interesting than what are the options for the person who's closed down And I think there are more options than ever before. I mean, Kimmel is a well-known figure that would command an audience in his own right without requiring an ABC to promote him. So I think that does speak to your point, which is that whereas traditional media and television are certainly not dead, And the audience sizes are increasingly tiny. I saw this week that the audience for late night television watched live on any of the channels. is well under 100,000 people.
Yeah, and that's what, again, maybe we need some historical ironist like Marx to make sense of this, because I've never met anyone who watches these things. The only person I'm guessing who does is Donald Trump. So what's the big deal here, even?
Well, the big deal is political. It's about the spirit of the times and the survivability of democracy. And you and I probably are both on the same side of that discussion. You might not consider it a real threat. Probably I'd be with you on that, but you never know. These things can spark off and suddenly a spark turns into a fire and before you know it, democracy is under threat. So it's certainly possible. But I think I'd see it much more as an opportunity to redefine
One of the links that you had in this week's newsletter is to some updates on YouTube Live. I'm guessing the guys over at YouTube must be rubbing their hands about this. And in fact, why aren't they... making public offers to Kimmel or Colbert or to the right to put all their stuff on YouTube, which is what everyone watches anyway.
Not even from a self-promotional point of view, from the point of view of democracy, of saying, look, there are alternatives to television, which is an archaic medium governed by archaic organisations like the FCC. The only people who watch are old people like Donald Trump.
Who cares? Well, as we've seen in the last few weeks, especially at the tech dinner put on by the White House, the current spirit of the times when it comes to YouTube and every other big tech company is to tiptoe very lightly around these topics for fear of upsetting the White House. So they're not prone to public statements or taking sides. They're keeping their heads down and trying to get business done. And that's terrible. You know, the implication of what you're saying is they should be more strident in their beliefs.
No one's going to fire Neil Mohan at YouTube. He's a remarkable entrepreneur. So you're saying that there's still a bit of political fear, but then privately these guys are rubbing their hands. You have to assume that this is their historical moment to blow away television. I mean, you and I don't always agree on everything, but I think we also agree that television is generally a corrosive force and that we need to replace it with something more innovative, more democratic and more dynamic.
which part of the media is not threatened by AI's rise. One of them certainly is YouTube. AI represents mainly a plus for YouTube. There's no minus. Why? Because it monopolizes uploads of content and the channelization of that content. And the trend is, for young people especially, to spend more and more time on YouTube watching more and more things. So YouTube is certainly a net beneficiary in a world where Google search is is widely understood to be in decline. YouTube isn't. So it's a very, very strong platform going from.
Yeah, Keith, you and I have and we've talked about this many times, both publicly and privately, have agonized literally over the last 15 years about doing our own not so little startup called Now TV. which we've never for one reason or other got off the ground. Isn't this a moment, if not for now.tv, because you and I are busy with other stuff, but isn't this a moment where a group of people properly funded with hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars come together and say, okay, Kimmel, Colbert, maybe some conservatives, Joe Rogan and et cetera. We are going to reinvent the television experience and even take on YouTube.
Yes, but driven by four billion smartphones with cameras and video recording capability. In other words, we were never... purely editorial. The idea was to put curation, a bit like I do with That Was The Week, curation with editorial. And obviously you lead with editorial, but your content comes pretty much for free from the world's smartphone owners. And nobody's done that, including CNN. And it's still open. YouTube's the nearest, but they lack the editorial piece. So there's no voice of YouTube as such. There's many voices on YouTube. YouTube actually contains the raw material for a thousand now TVs, topic specific, geographically specific.
Right. So, you know, the world is already pregnant with the capability for many now TVs. Nobody's given birth to one yet. The nearest were people like the Young Turks. I guess I forgot. What's it called? Not Vibe. Vine. Not Vine either. The TV channel that went bust, that was doing documentaries. Anyway, similar thing. Nobody's really done... Vice, that's it.
Yeah, you're using the good Marxist language, Keith, about pregnancy and giving birth, which other 20th century Marxist theorists like Gramsci developed. I definitely think that the video story isn't closed. It definitely isn't. Are people pitching? I mean, you're the VC, man. No,
The failure of that Hollywood initiative to do short form video is recently in the memory of most investors. So I remember when it was the same before Zoom, there were many attempts to create a Zoom like platform, but recent memory was failure in that real time video world. And then suddenly Zoom comes along and owns everything. I think the same is going to happen with video. There's going to be a moment at which smart people put together some packages that are very compelling from an audience point of view and get huge audiences and make lots of money. It isn't yet, but it might be soon. And events like this week just shine a light on the need for that to happen to protect entertainers, comedians, documentarians, opinion leaders from being cancelled. And I think that will happen. And cancellation will ultimately be impossible. It is impossible to cancel opinion already.
I mean, I wish some more people cancelled you and I. I mean, it's not necessarily a bad thing because it means people are listening to you. One of the pieces you link to today is from Noah Smith, who, of course, writes on Substack, which is a next generation platform. He writes about without free speech, America is nothing. Are there people like Smith, you think, who are exaggerating the danger, Keith, of this disappearance of free speech?
I think that they are, because as I just said, I think cancellation of speech is impossible today. Anyone who wants to speak can get a mouthpiece and speak. What is more possible is cancellation of individuals within contexts, like professors in colleges or comedians on ABC. or many, many others. Cancellation in context is possible, but those same people will rise up in another place.
Yeah, I mean, I think you and I are in a strong position in the sense that we don't have bosses. Perhaps an academic would say, well, if I say what I really think on Gaza or something else on Kirk, I'm going to get fired and I'll lose my job and I'll lose my home and my family won't eat. The response, I guess, of some people, perhaps even Keith, including yourself might be, well, you need to get, if not another job, reinvent yourself, join an online university, rethink what you do and how you bring value. Is that a legitimate response or should some people with real jobs and real bosses be fearful?
No, I think it is a legitimate response, but for somebody to think like that, they have to break free from the publisher talent, um, you know, a relationship. A lot of talent has only ever relied on a publisher to give them a platform. And they're codependent. And that's an intellectual codependency, you know, like Kimmel. And so to have the confidence to not have a publisher But to be your own platform and your own publisher, that requires a bit of a transformation in your experience. And I think that's a difficult journey for somebody who's been you know, had their umbilical cord tied to money from a publisher.
Well, we've got the umbilical cord now. We've got pregnancy and given birth. Keith, maybe we'll do some more biology shows. What about Kimmel himself? I haven't heard that much. Maybe he's... I don't follow it maybe as closely as I should. What a guess for him. This is a dream. I mean, this is the best thing that could ever happen. Some... fairly anonymous online television comedian who doesn't seem to have a brand very different from the others in the stable, certainly is one of the most famous people in the world.
True, but I think he did make a major blunder that's going to affect his reputation. What did he say? I mean, to be honest, it wasn't very coherent, but if you break it apart, it appears as if he was saying that the shooter that shot Charlie Kirk was himself a MAGA person. And he spoke about killing their own. when in fact it's totally obvious that the killer was, you know, in his own mind at least.
I don't want to turn this into another ideological debate, but don't the rush limbo and that whole tradition, I mean, they say the same things on an hourly basis about conspiracy of one kind or another.
If you choose in the day after an assassination, to imply that it was an in-house assassination within MAGA when clearly everyone can see it isn't. And then that produces outrage from all the MAGA supporters who are being accused of being in on it. It's not surprising that there was a backlash. So he certainly lit the fire and his reputation will be damaged because of that. Weirdly enough, many on the left supported him without questioning what he said, which is probably typical of the times as well. So he's not innocent in this. He is a victim of his own mouth. But then, you know, that's okay. You're allowed to be a victim of your own mouth and you shouldn't be cancelled because of it.
So why do you take on Pam Bondi's suggestion that there's a difference between what she calls free speech and hate speech? I mean, was what... Kimmel talked about suggesting that the assassin of Kirk may have been working for the, was some sort of planted flag. I mean, is that hate speech? Is conspiracy hate speech or is it just mad speech?
Well, to some extent, it doesn't matter. Hate speech is protected. You actually can hate in speech on anyone. People of different color, different religion, different sexual orientation, and that is not against the law. So hate speech is protected. And Pan Bondi is completely wrong to imply that hate speech is somehow illegal and should be punished. In fact, the opposite is true. The only real need for free speech is to protect speech you strongly disagree with. There's no need to protect speech you agree with. And so hate speech, it should be one of the most protected speech classes, not the most hated or the most legislated against. That would be a step towards autocracy or at least a constrained civil society. So she's completely wrong. And legally speaking, there is no such thing as hate speech. There is just speech. Legally, hate is not, you know, legislated against.
In your editorial said, and you're not alone here, we need to turn down the dial on demonizing those we disagree with. And you include people who disagree on AI. Is there really... a danger that AI will fall into the Pam Bondi trap of hate speech? Do people really hate AI, Keith?
Well, you cited my interview of the week as with the publisher of the New Books Network, Marshall Poe. You didn't suggest that he was guilty of hate speech. But are people like Poe who deeply fear AI, are they in danger of transforming it into the equivalent of Charlie Kirk in their mind?
Right. So the problem is that he is part of a large group of people characterizing AI. as anti-human, especially when it comes to copyright and stealing. And if a human went around stealing your stuff, they'd be locked up. And the accusation here is that AI is going around stealing people's stuff, which on the face of it just isn't true. It's an easy misunderstanding because AI is reading your stuff. And there's quite a thin line between reading or listening, if it's audio or video, and stealing. But it isn't stealing, it's reading, just like you and I would read his stuff. And then he demonizes AI and wants it stopped in some way, although he's a you know, he didn't really have any good solutions. He made the point.
Yeah, and I mean, he was a bit pessimistic. The title of the interview is Gutted and Glutted, the dire economics of podcasting in the AI age. And as I said, Marshall knows this stuff, at least from a niche point of view. His new books network has published 28,000 podcasts. So are you suggesting, so what advice would you give Marshall? How would you respond?
I would tell him to welcome AI to be a listener or reader and to be in discussions with the LLM companies to have a database of all the links to every single podcast with some metadata that describes what's in them and let AI go to town in the hope that AI will surface those links to send traffic to his podcasters.
Well, Marshall, if you're listening, that's Keith's advice. You had another interest. You didn't, I don't think you included this in that was the week links, but you sent me this this morning and every essay by Katie Parrott, I assume she's for real. I fed my essays to chat GPT until it learned my voice. Is this the kind of model that somebody like Marshall Poe should, should use with chat GPT or anthropic or Claude?
Um, That would be the right thing to do in the context of building tools for his podcasters. It's more of an internal way of thinking, like how do I leverage AI to help me do what I want to do? And each one of his podcasters could certainly benefit from that approach. She has spent quite a lot of time building a database of her writing and making sure that ChatGPT both understands her opinions, her style, her tone, and can reproduce it fairly effectively. But it's constant work from her to feed it.
It seems to me from a creative point of view, it's an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn't you want a free input on your style, on your ideas, on what you've written, if it can remember everything you do and you don't exaggerate its significance? It seems odd that anyone would turn down that opportunity.
Exactly. Well, if you're not technical, she clearly is quite technical. If you're not technical, there is a challenge of getting, you know, comfortable with learning how to do it. It's probably a week's learning to be able to kick it off. But you have to go through that pain of ignorance. Right.
We've been talking about history, its ironies, how we'll think back. One of the most curious pieces of news of the week, which speaks of the great paradoxes of history, is that NVIDIA invested $5 billion in Intel, the original chip company, NVIDIA now being the darling of the chip world, I don't know whether you made NVIDIA or Intel your startup of the week, which isn't really the point, but what does this tell us about the ironies of history of companies that come and go? Does it suggest that there are even second lives for companies like Intel? Might we read that Google now is investing in Yahoo?
You know, doesn't it remind you of when Bill Gates bailed out Steve Jobs and invested in Apple. I think it was $10 million, some small amount, or maybe it was 100 million, but it was a fraction of Apple's value. And had that not happened, Apple was going to go bust. And then Apple went on to become the world's most valuable company. And Microsoft saved them. Intel is America's only semiconductor-making company. There is no other. AIM is not American and doesn't make chips, doesn't make semiconductors. Broadcom doesn't make semiconductors. So Intel is the only one left standing that can prevent Taiwan, China, and so on from being global. But what about NVIDIA? And NVIDIA doesn't make semiconductors. It makes what's called GPUs. So it's a different part of the ecosystem. So by bailing out Intel, NVIDIA is kind of bailing out America, which is probably genuflecting to the White House in this American dynamism narrative. Obviously, it's the opposite of dynamism. It's American octogenarianism. but it is a saving- Who's your startup of the week? Is it Nvidia or Intel? Intel now is a startup, so it's Intel.
And speaking of state power, I mean, it seems to me that when we look back at this period in 50 or 100 years, the real conflict is between the reappearance or the threat of state power, which is being articulated by people like Pam Bondi, and of course, Trump, and a more distributed kind of system. And you see that even with state policy when it comes to NVIDIA and Intel and America First. Is there some truth, Keith, do you think that that ultimately the real conflict in historical terms is between some sort of new American state capitalism, in some ways probably not that different from Chinese state capitalism, and a more distributed kind of economic system.
I think there's two trends. Let's call the first one deglobalization, and that tends towards the state playing a greater and greater role in capitalism. where everything is about your country versus everyone else. That definitely is a trend. And the unentangling of the world economy, which is, from an historical point of view, a retrogressive trend. It's an anti-growth trend, if you will. Well,
Well, I don't know if they're Keith Tears, they're well founded laws, which is that the globalization of the division of labor is a net plus for the human race. And in your view, it's inevitable. and inevitable. It's happening anyway. Despite all of this deglobalization, there's a separate trend, which is globalization itself is accelerating through technology mainly and financial systems.
Yeah, and that's the odd, again, our world is full of so many paradoxes. It's so surreal. At the same time as that's happening, We have this growth of America first or Russian, Chinese, other kinds of nationalism. So I'm not sure what's real and what's just hyperbolic or symbolic.
Well, they're both real. And as an individual, you choose which future you prefer and try to help make it happen. I prefer a future in which human beings cooperate more and more to our mutual benefit. clearly the Trump White House prefers one in which everyone else loses and America wins, which is an unlikely future history.
It's not that America wins, it's the White House wins. What do you make, Keith, of the news this week? You linked it in the newsletter about Trump saying, and of course this can always change with him, you never quite know what he's saying, that US and China approved the TikTok deal. How does this play out in these two grand visions, nationalism versus globalization?
Lots more to talk about next week, Keith. Finally, your post of the week. is a good one. It's on Tech Meme, and it's on Tech Meme itself. That was the week, and a lot of your aggregator initiatives over the last few years, you and I have talked about this a lot, and maybe it was something we talked about in terms of Now.tv as well, is inspired by the success of Tech Meme. Tech Meme seems to me to be a very interesting company, tech company, in the sense that it's incredibly powerful popular and successful. But Gabe Rivera has never really built it in the way that some entrepreneurs might. He's happy with it as it is. Is that a fair way to evaluate TechMeme? You might actually explain what it is. Not everyone will know it.
Yeah. Yeah. Gabe Rivera is a personal friend. I've known him since he started TechMeme. He was very close to TechCrunch in the early days of TechCrunch in 2005 through 2010.
And Tech Meme is a technical publication. He was the first person really to use intelligent code to aggregate headlines on topics that were attracting the most interest. So Tech Meme is a curator of the top tech news, but entirely software driven. and he has the capability of clustering writing around a headline topic to show the breadth of conversation around that topic.
Yeah, and it's really an excellent plot. I mean, it's not just Tech Meme. They also have one for politics and for media. His post of the week is entitled... explaining at some length tech meme's 20 years of consistency. Keith, in much shorter length, what does Gaby say about his 20 years of consistency? A very unusual tech story, isn't it? 20 years of consistency. In 20 years, either tech startups become super companies like TechCrunch, perhaps, on the media side, or they fail. But tech meme's been around. It's a remarkable history.
Yeah, well, he talks about a lot of things, but the one that stood out to me is how the landscape that Tech Meme sits on top of has changed during those 20 years from originally the open internet, where everything was crawlable, scrapable, and classifiable, to now lots of paywalls. where TechMeme can't get access to the content behind the paywall and has to negotiate with the publisher to get access. And in the case of TechMeme, most publishers give access because they want to be represented in TechMeme, which shows you the trade-off between a code-based aggregator and a publisher, which is, you give me content, I'll send you traffic, which is what AI is missing. So TechMeme, in a way, is symbolic of a more proper relationship between publishers and aggregators, or publishers and AI, for that matter. And he talks through the history of all of the changes and says that TechMeme's consistency its ability to change as the underlying infrastructure changed whilst retaining its core value.
Yeah, and interestingly enough, whilst it's different from the Kimmel story, your editorial this week is on free speech. And in a way, I guess, the tech meme story is also on free speech. It's not free speech versus hate speech. It's free speech versus paid speech.
Is that the core dichotomy in Gabe Rivera's argument? It's a good way to think about it, yeah. And I think publishers have the same dichotomy. When a publisher goes behind a paywall, they know for sure they're killing their traffic.
Well, that goes back to the Marshall Poe argument in Reebok's network and his interview. Marshall still believes in paid speech. And you're saying that for Marshall, free speech is actually, or should be, at least in AI terms, to his benefit.
I think you can do both, but you've got to lead with free to create a pipeline that converts into subscribers. And your subscribers need to be getting some value that they can't get for free.
Well, that's a very, very generous offer from Keith Teer. If Jimmy Kimmel or your agent is watching, Keith will give up his hot seat and allow Jimmy to continue his career as a brave spokesman for free speech, although it'd probably be paid speech because we try to monetize it. As always, Keith, an honor privilege have a great week it's a short week this week because it's monday today we will be back i think with that was the week on saturday so lots more to talk about we've avoided ai mostly this week we spent too much time talking about ai i'm guessing next week we'll be back with it thanks keith bye