How Publishers Can Win When AI Replaces the Click

0:03Welcome to Media and the Machine. I'm Rob Kelly. This show is about AI and how to profit from it. I believe this is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime. I'm a three-time founder and CEO of content-driven businesses. And each week I talk with the people on the inside of AI and content, the ones building this new world and learning what works firsthand. I'm an optimist about AI, but I'm also a realist. So every show ends with me asking our guests what AI means for our jobs, our families, and our future.

0:48This week's episode is a little different because I'm the guest. I was honored to appear on the Media Co-Pilot podcast hosted by Pete Paschel. Pete has spent more than two decades in tech and media, including senior roles at Coindesk and Mashable. Today, he teaches folks in PR, journalism, and media how to keep up with AI. Pete and I covered a lot of ground. We get into the spreadsheet I keep, which tracks 99 AI licensing deals, what I've learned from them. I share when and why I think OpenAI will settle its lawsuit with the New York Times before its IPO, and how OpenAI can help grow the Times business.

1:21We dig into Yelp's content licensing deal with OpenAI and a business model I call licensing content to commerce, where Yelp can turn an AI answer into revenue. Pete gets my take on why I believe we are far from running out of content to train AI on, and we'll get into my own use of AI, including how I increase my writing productivity 8.7x without being a spammer. Now please enjoy my conversation with Pete Paschel, where this time, he's the one asking all the questions. Give me a little more background on your relationship with both journalism and sort of the business side of media. Yeah, well, I grew up on Wall Street.

1:59My dad taught me to love business. I was one of those nerdy little guys who, at 13, my dad dressed up in a Brooks Brothers suit and dragged me into the office as a kid, maybe 12, 13 years old. and he just taught me to love it like a game, kind of like folks like sports or, you know, read the Wall Street Journal, like I read the sports columns and I love sports. And dad told me I should write for the school newspaper. So I did. He rarely gave me advice, by the way, so I took it. And that was a lot of fun. And then I started writing about tech, much like you. And I wrote for a company called CMP Media, one of the favorite companies I've ever run across in Manhasset, New York, Long Island.

2:42They had great customers. So folks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates would agree to sit down with me for interviews and nothing to do with me. I had a few hundred thousand people who were going to write them a check. And you still remember the thrill of a byline, right? Seeing your own name. First time you see her name in print when it was print. Nothing like it. Yeah, nothing like it. And then I decided to, I found that was like spectating and I wanted to get in the game more. So I started running the content licensing business for CMP Media. And they had 16 magazines, a million articles. And my job, I was the only one who did it, was to sell that feed to LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Dow Jones News Retrieval.

3:26And it was a great business, highly profitable. I'm sure we'll get into that later. And that got sort of my, whetted my appetite for the business side of things. I then founded or CEO'd three different startups. And my last startup in early 2018, OnGig, I got lucky in that I had a smart co-founder, Kevin. And we started using Google's AI back in 2018. This is four plus years before ChatGPT. We're using machine learning, natural language, incredible stuff at the time, by the way, still is, in fact. And Google had us in twice to present to them. I'm so humbled by that. but we were one of their only customers too.

4:07So it was funny to have a big company like that and OnGig was using their AI and paying them. So they had us in twice to talk to a 50, 100 person team. Then I created this newsletter, Daily Doc, just for fun. And I started using ChatGPT because it launched around the same time. It 8X my productivity. So I was sold on AI. And along came the New York Times suing OpenAI. I thought that was interesting. A few months later, the Wall Street Journal owner, News Corp, made a$250 million deal with OpenAI. And I thought, you know, you love content like me and media. I thought that was just the most unusual thing.

4:44Two of the top media companies in the world taking totally different strategies. So I launched Media in the Machine as a newsletter and then a podcast. And we cover business. But at the end, also, I ask all my guests questions about sort of the future of AI and humanity, our families, our jobs. And I consider it a moral duty to be like a little guide out there. So it's mostly business, but anyone's going to find the ending interesting because we're talking about the future. And as you know, no one knows quite where this is leading. Nice. That's great. And so I guess, you know, I'd love to get right into it in terms of you mentioned those two big touch points in the AI content, you know, while licensing and legal stories of the past few years.

5:36They are very different in that in terms of the approach, but it's all orbiting around the same thing. Can you tell me a little bit about those two? deal. Like basically, and those are all sort of in a context of a couple of years ago, but I guess I would wonder like how, how did, how, what leads a media company to do one or the other? And then, you know, you tell me how that the approach to AI may have evolved over the last couple of years since those deals were made or lawsuits were filed. Yeah, I think, I mean, the New York times, you know, that happened first at the end of 2023. And it's really, as I'm staring at a spreadsheet, by the way, with 99 AI content licensing deals.

6:19I haven't figured out how to share this, by the way, in a way that isn't totally ripped off by AI companies. AI companies. I've coded something with a lot of blocking, no? They have Cloud Player call. Yeah, exactly. So what's funny, though, is I started to log all these deals. Some went retroactively. So for instance, even though it was late 2023 that the New York Times sued OpenAI, shortly after ChatGPT launched, New York Times had just done a deal with Google licensing their content around a$100 million deal. It's not talked about a lot, around$30 million a year. And I only use sources that are reputable, whether it's Reuters or the companies announcing deals themselves.

7:07These numbers aren't perfect, but the New York Times valued their data, their content. And so when OpenAI came along, they had their playbook. They were ready to protect that. They licensed their archives, just like I used to do for CFP Media, and they get paid for it. And along came OpenAI starting to use what the New York Times thought was their content. And so they were quick to sue. And so the$100 million that you're right, Right. It isn't really talked about a lot. And honestly, like the Google sort of deals and quasi deals they've done have been a little different than the others in the space because they are so influential.

7:45But was that essentially to use the Times content in their AI products? You know, I'm guessing here only and speculating, but I think it was such early days that they didn't know, you know, exactly how things were going to pan out, but they wanted to be paid. So they had a relationship with Google for years. Obviously, Google sent a lot of traffic and they've worked out issues over the years. But I imagine that the New York Times quickly got new terms in there if they didn't already at the start of the deal to account for AI in some form and renegotiated things because they're the New York Times.

8:25They got some leverage. And certainly so did News Corp. So they had probably what was one of the most lucrative deals that I read about. It's all reporting, but apparently it was something like$250 million over five years or whatever it was. But so I found that interesting. And I think this is sort of speaks to one of the insights that you've written about recently, which is that training data was sort of a big feature of those big deals circa 2024, it feels like. and I I've got a lot of questions about it like one of the main ones is that was that essentially a protective type thing because training data to me it feels like it's kind of been it's already been done right it's not like you can take the data out of the model once it's built and so I feel like it was sort of an after the fact licensing thing that sort of would sort of come into this and so you tell me like whether my interpretation is is sort of how this was treated at the time uh but i also feel like as you've observed that training data is no longer like the featured item in a lot of this stuff and i'm kind of curious why like do publishers feel like that ship has sailed or uh like especially considering some of the um court decisions since that have sort of seemed to steer at least a little bit towards the fair use idea.

9:57Give me the whole background on like training data and why, how it was treated back then and why, as you've observed, it's not as featured prominently in deals. Yeah, and you're right. So back in 2024, the vast majority of deals announced included training, including News Corp. And you're right, five-year,$250 million deal. And by the way, just to put that in perspective, I know this because I ran content licensing for CMP Media. We generated, they've long since been sold, so I could share these numbers. I think we were up to about 2.5 million top line when I was licensing CMP's content, a million articles, a fair amount, two and a half million.

10:37But that's pure profit, except for my salary. We were turning on a feed, Right. So these, you know, it might not sound like as much$50 million a year, but when it's pure profit, that could be bigger profit than the majority of news corps publications. So just a nice thing to keep in mind, this is not normal revenue. This is gravy, highly profitable. It's a little different with AI, but the concept is still the same. And so you're right. It was mostly training. I think it maps to how LLMs also evolved. In the beginning, they had to be trained. And then the second stage was you needed inference, as you well know, basically understanding how to answer questions then.

11:23And then finally, you got into RAG. And sort of the deals have mapped that pretty well. I still think training is hugely important. But what's happened is that inference and RAG have caught up and been important as well. And training now is being used for different kinds of training. I'm sure we'll cover this, but I have strong opinions on the fact that we have not run out of content and data to train on. Anyone who says we have is mistaken, in my opinion. What's left? What are you basing it on? Are you thinking about multimedia or private data? Yeah, the way I look at it is that the whole world increasingly is recorded.

12:08And so, you know, and this has been happening over the last 20 years or so as videos have become video and video recorders are now on our phones and everywhere, CCTV and all that stuff. So, you know, I look at it as endless. Do you remember in the old days when Google used to come out with something and say like X percent of the queries on Google this year, something like 35 % were new. And it always seemed really strange, right? You would think like the queries would be like the Knicks score. I'm a Knicks fan. Or what's the news today? But there's so much new information that comes out every year.

12:46So I see that even more so with AI and training on content in that every day we just are living new lives and we're doing new things. more of it's being recorded nearly 100 in some cases and so you know Madison Square Garden you know they they record the face of every person who walks in controversial but picture that on steroids or you know over in China that's done for just about everything so and then you've got of course like space you know data going on in space data inside your body biology data underwater but Even on land, the old-fashioned stuff, content and data, there's still a tremendous amount of new data, and it'll be needed all the time needed.

13:32And folks will still pay for training on that. It's just the percentage of deals with training as the emphasis is lowering to around 40 to 50%. Yeah, but I guess my question is more like, do you pay for it because you don't want to get sued? So that's why you're only going to pay people who have the resources to sue you, because you think that from a legal perspective, it's defensible, right? you know, the probably might be the most defensible part of AI scraping. And if that's, and that, that kind of feels like maybe two things are a consequence of that one, the number of people you would, who you would make that deal with, who you were scared of suing you, there's sort of a, there's a certain finite amount of them.

14:16And then, you know, then the, well, I'll let you go ahead and just answer a few things. Maybe I'm just too much of a cynic about these things, but tell me what you think in terms of the, and I know you're more on the media side, but what is the AI company's sort of attitude here and why is it shifted? Well, I mean, I think you're right about the training part. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, as they say. And the models are well-trained on what I would call the internet corpus currently. Right? They grabbed all that. They grabbed it in many cases without either A, telling folks they grabbed it or B, sharing where they grabbed it, which is, I think, by the way, a huge issue that is going to come up more and more that models are trained on data.

15:04They're not being transparent about it, and that could lead to some pitfalls for AI companies when they're using someone else's data and a customer uses ChatGPT to create something, like at an enterprise level, like a new movie. Where's that footage coming from? So that's, you know, that's my view. But I think the New York Times is probably a good case to talk about how, you know, if you're going to train on their content, they want to be paid. If you're going to answer questions, inference on their content, they're going to want to be paid. And if you're going to show up today's news stories on your, you know, on your LLM, they're going to want to get paid.

15:46and I've got some strong opinions on also how they're going to want to get paid. I think it's going to change here coming up with the New York Times and Reddit. Yeah, well, tell me about that. Like, I do feel like you're 100 % right. Like inference and surfacing current news. I guess, you know, you actually said a few different kind of categories there. um so so the um maybe go a little deeper on what each of those means and then what the um well what the compensation should be like right because it's like there's um a lot of different models on like paper crawl paper use which are similar but obviously different in terms of when you get paid um uh but then there's other stuff that is associated with inference like for example branded content.

16:36We don't have to go through all the business models. But generally, with these deals in particular, are they favoring one type over the other? And then for all of those, it feels like attribution is a key part of it. So has a standard emerged in terms of how that's being tracked? Well, you had a great interview with Jonathan Hunt, I believe his name over at HubSpot? Did I get their name right? And he sort of articulated it well, in my opinion, which is, I'm paraphrasing, but he basically said, we don't really care how much you scrape our content. And they've got a media business, as you focused on in the interview.

17:23And all they care about is the business model they have on the back end to support it. So my belief is any content-driven company or media company just has to have a back end business model to support this. So let me give you an example for the most recent content licensing deal announced. A big one is Yelp and Yelp's content local data is being, this is with open AI, Yelp and open AI did a content licensing deal and open AI gets to use all of Yelp's local data and put it up there. It did not mention whether it's used for training or not. But in Yelp's case, what they're getting is very interesting.

18:04One thing they're getting is a request for a quote. You know how you can be a service provider, like a plumber on Yelp? And if you go on Yelp and look for a plumber, it says request quote. Well, so that's a very interesting new model, which is like a content to commerce, but it's a licensing content to commerce model. And in a way, Yelp doesn't really care that much on how much content they give up if they can get revenue from that request to quote. And I think the New York Times is going to do something similar. I think when they settle and do their licensing deal with OpenAI, I think you're going to see it focused on generating traffic to their commerce, including subscriptions to New York Times, subscriptions to all their digital stuff.

18:53You know, you can buy it any way you want their games and their recipes and so forth. So I think you're going to see more of that. In that case, they don't really care as much about being scraped if they're getting the revenue on a usage base. So let me let me get let me see if I'm hearing this correctly. So it'd be like instead of just getting like your information is contributed to this answer. And here's a citation. They would also get. Oh, and by the way, you can subscribe right here in the in the UI. There's like a subscription button. Is that kind of the idea? And then... Absolutely. Right.

19:27Yeah. It's kind of similar to affiliate ads and affiliate marketing in a strange way. There's no better phrase, although I'm starting to call it licensing content to commerce. Content to commerce is a known concept. So back to HubSpot, they're happy. Jonathan's happy to get a whole crap load of subscribers coming in from OpenAI because that supports their business. And I think the New York Times and Reddit is another example. One of the reasons they haven't closed their renewal with Google, for instance, which is coming up here, is reportedly just that they're holding out for more value of people clicking through to Reddit.

20:10They want to be the brand. That's the other theme here. If you could be the brand, New York Times, you know, Reddit, you're in good shape. It's a lot harder when you're not the brand, of course, a known brand. Yeah, exactly. I know even USA Today is sort of musing in the same way that Reddit was a couple of years ago about, oh, maybe we'll even nuke ourselves off Google entirely. I know the crawler situation is slightly different than it was before. But that just sort of seems like there's a very few brands that could actually do that, that have the kind of leverage. And it is probably those three, the ones we've been talking about.

20:50um do you put any stock in any of those kind of threats i mean i guess it's we're not quite at google zero yet we probably never will be at zero but do you think those kind of threats will ever uh be real like people would wouldn't mind or not wouldn't mind but like that the stakes of getting removed from google would be less than you know whatever whatever deal you think you're not getting. Yeah. I mean, I think it's going to shift, but I also look at it as like two scenarios. We're talking about large publications, but if you and I were to form a startup tomorrow and suddenly we, let's say we weren't getting any traffic from Google, but we're getting traffic from ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude, you know, we'd be thrilled, right?

21:38So picture some 20 something launching a new business and all this free traffic's coming on board. So I think it helps to take a beginner's mind to this world. The Google traffic obviously is going down for just about everyone I've talked to. And I know you've talked about this at great length, but taking a beginner's mind and looking for what value can you get out of AI and what's your backend to just run a good business regardless of where the traffic comes from. But I do think it's going to come from ai that will get ironed out in the courts i don't see something where you remember when chat gbt launched how there was there were no links there were no citations it was just pure answers by the way it was pretty pretty great but not not fair right and over time now once they got links they half of them were made up okay yeah and you know over time it's evolved to look more like sort of perplexity did out of the gate, which is, you know, links and attribution.

22:43And I think all that will get ironed out and there'll be value coming from AI and the good media companies with a backend business model will prosper. But others are definitely going to go out of business. Yeah. And it's all, like you say, it's all happening in the AI answer and there's so much focus on that. Your mention of the subscription button possible in sort of an AI answer is interesting. I definitely am hearing and there's stuff happening that is suggesting that that real estate is now getting sort of rethought and renegotiated, right? So there's the story from the other week about how time is now putting, essentially trying to build ads for bots into their site, which is a very interesting approach I find just from a fundamental aspect because it shifts the expectation of revenue away from bots and ai companies and to the advertiser so the advertiser then essentially buys an ad specifically for the bots that gets scraped and passed along into the answer um which is um you know like obviously invites a host of questions and we'll see how this whole thing plays out as if it just actually becomes some kind of sustainable or even any kind of revenue.

24:03But I'm also like, I see these things as a user too. And I'm like, oh, not that AI answers are clean, but relative to what a search engine results page looks like, they're relatively clean today. And I feel like, oh, that's over the coming years is going to be renegotiated. And I even see it now with the, And now the ChatGPT is advertising in the answers. They're also linking out to brands more from the answers themselves. So there's all these sort of things that are factoring into the user experience as the answer is sort of getting reshaped. I guess my question is, how quickly do you see the AI answer becoming something more akin to the SERP result with a lot of different things with different labels?

24:54and what are the chances that the publisher actually ends up getting a better deal than they got with Google? Yeah, I don't know how to net out in terms of versus Google in the end, but I will say that I believe that AI is going to increase the amount of queries and requests in the world because we're going to have these agents you're talking about and you and I might, I don't know how many agents you have, but I have the equivalent of, I don't know, five or 10. And I think it's going to be the people really progressive right now that I'm talking to are well in excess of that. And so you and I were talking about microphones, podcast microphones before we got on.

25:38And if you wanted to get an upgrade to your microphone and in the future you asked an agent to go look out for one, it's going to go out and look at content sites. It's going to run into an ad, as you pointed out. And that will influence the agent. The agent's going to need new current info and someone will get paid for it. And I think it won't be purely chat GPT and the bunch. It'll be the content and ad providers in that case. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think the idea of, I mean, it's already a science, a growing science on sort of how do you influence these answers. and publishers have been interested in that too because they're competing in the information space.

26:25Of course, they're also, because their product is information, there's often the sort of existential question attached and then they just end up blocking. So let's talk about blocking for a minute in terms of like, particularly for publishers, we've talked a lot about sort of the big publishers and the big players, but most folks and certainly most of my listeners are sort of in the mid to small tier range and um for for them there's always the well i can't get open ai on the phone uh so i might as well just block you know and this obviously applies to sort of everybody which as to your point the future is ai you know if you're blocking you're not going to be where information is now transacted so um i'm oversimplifying here a bit but like i want to hear your take on like what What is a balanced approach here that helps preserve your authority, but also doesn't just like give away the store by just opening crawlers up to everything?

27:26Yeah, and I think this is where the squeeze sort of is. The large companies have the leverage of a legal team. so obviously the new york times and and others can um big big publishers and media companies have that leverage you know to to fight um open ai and the bunch and the the small companies as we talked about taking a beginner's mind you might just not care you just want to be discovered right um you want your content and back-end products hopefully you have them to uh to be found everywhere. I think it's that middle, the mid-sized companies that are feeling the biggest squeeze. And these are the ones that I know you had Bill Gross on from ProRata and Tolbit and some others are trying to serve that world.

28:18And that's the one where I believe the New York Times case is really going to have an impact because I think they care about the money, but I also, what I'm hearing from their camp is they care about the principle. They actually really care about that. And I think they're going to show their leadership in this space by setting something of a playbook is my hopes. And I think Reddit's, by the way, doing something similar, even though they're kind of a different than a legacy media company, although they've been around now 20 years or something, haven't they? So those mid-level companies, and that has not been figured out.

28:56I mean, ProRata, as I think Bill admitted on or shared on your, he wouldn't hide this, but AI is not paid as far as I know, a single one of ProRata's publishers. And so they, you know, they got some things to figure out there and it's not ProRata's fault. I mean, it's just it hasn't worked itself out, but there are some interesting new protocols coming up, as you well know. I find the RSL, really simple licensing protocol, that one is one to watch because they have about 40 % of the internet's content companies behind them. So that'd be a collective so that they can go to OpenAI and say, we represent Reddit, which they do, and they represent PeopleLink and a bunch of others.

29:46And it's time to sit at the table. And the good news about them is they don't just care about the – they represent the big companies, Reddit and PeopleLink and so forth. But anyone can sign up. You and I can sign up for our podcasts and we can write into the code that, hey, we want to get paid if you scrape our content. Or we only want traffic. We don't want to get paid. And you actually write a contract within the code. I think you're going to see some protocols like that become standard. Yeah, it definitely does feel like slowly but surely the media side of things is figuring out collective action, even though it is not sort of inherent to their DNA.

30:26You mentioned RSL, there's Spur that started in the UK that's trying to sort of figure out at the very least like what the plumbing should look like and how to correctly attribute things. and there's just a lot of collective activity that didn't exist a couple of years ago. It took them long enough. And by the way, just in a strange twist, we've always been so far ahead, the US ahead of the UK and the rest of the world in tech. Things have really tightened up in terms of AI and there are some ways in which the EU and some of their new laws and spur and so forth might take off fast over there and we might actually follow suit because we see a new model.

31:13Just might be an interesting twist to look at. Yeah. And there's also the, I know I'm interested in seeing how Google ends up allowing folks to sort of split off their AI overviews because right now I believe that's that you can opt out of Gemini through Google Extended, but you can't opt out of overviews. and i feel like it's funny like google like claims like a lot of folks claim like we're never going to put ads in our ai experience or our chat bot and the way open ai does but yet they have all these ai experiences throughout the rest of their product that is ad supported anyway just find that um a bit of an irony by the way how cool would it be if google took their page out of the youtube um creator monetization model which they pay 55 you probably know you're You've got a YouTube channel, 55 % of the ad revenue over to the creators.

32:08Huge opportunity for Google to do this with all creators. They've already got the model. They've got the tech. And I could also see Apple doing something like this. They did it with iTunes and they took Napster in a legal sort of marketplace of music content. And they turned it into something more like HBO Max or just a subscription model. And I think there's some opportunities for some companies to make some big moves. And the AI companies are not doing so well in terms of, you know, sort of favorability out there. And, you know, they might face some challenges here. uh some some friends of mine are saying you know the pitchforks might be coming um for for the ai models and their ceos with folks being so upset about um what they're doing young folks especially aren't you hearing this from young younger folks in your life i mean anyone under 18 or 20 i would say for me it's only it's about two out of three are maybe even three out of four totally down on ai i'm an optimist so it's hard for me to hear that but uh young folks can make some noise.

33:20Yeah, there's 100 % of backlash for a bunch of reasons. And the two main ones that I feel like are most influential are the teachers are mostly still skeptical of it. And the message like AI is cheating goes out to most kids in K-12 and to a large extent, folks in college. Some folks are AI forward and are sort of more acknowledging that this is the future and sort of teaching kids how to how to use it but that's that's rarer on the other part is sort of all this stuff going on in society now with regard to just activism and whether it's anti-data center anti-ai or just sort of this general like unrest that's kind of almost class warfare which involves like suspicion of big tech and etc there's all this kind of stuff that um circulating around that and i think that has an outsized influence on on the younger generation so So, uh, jobs.

34:16Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is the other thing. Again, I don't want to get this into too general AI commentary, but the whole idea that the AI marketing is always about doom and gloom, which is kind of, you know, it's come back around and, you know, there is, there's very little marketing of AI, like, Hey, this is going to do great things for you. But I also know you and I, as, uh, I guess I think of myself as an optimist too, and, you know, we're seeing great results just in our personal work. Like you've said, you've kind of 8X your productivity, which I'd actually like to double click on there a bit because that's interestingly precise.

34:50And I'm glad you didn't say 10X because that's, it feels like you - I can tell you it was 8.7X. And because I measured it in a spreadsheet, I measured in a spreadsheet with Daily Doc as I was writing, it was purely word count. I can't spam, it's not in me. So I write the same quality content And I measured my word count from blogs pre-DailyDoc that I did for my SaaS company versus DailyDoc. And I just looked at word count and it was 8.6x, the volume in the same periods of time. So it meant I could do it faster, I could do more, however you want to measure it. But that's what got me sold on AI.

35:31I was like, wow, that's my own personal thing and I'm not that good. There's others who are doing it 100x. Yeah, I certainly would make more, made more liberal use of AI as time's gone on. But this year with the rise of co-working apps and agents, it's really night and day. Like I started getting into, it's been difficult to measure other than I've been able to do things I could never have done on my own, which is to say like a lot of the coding and maintenance of software and sites and that sort of thing. that you need a whole team to do. Well, now I do have a team. It's just bots and agents that run it for me.

36:14It's great. So as we're wrapping up here, I want to just get your, honestly, your view of the future. And, you know, speaking specifically about licensing, business models, the future for publishers and media, like what do you see? And I wouldn't mind if you sort of game this out in sort of a variation of my final question, which is like, what, how do you game that out where, um, it's, it's media loses and how do you game it out where media wins? Uh, and you can define those terms however you like, but, uh, I feel like most people in media feel like we're on the losing path. Um, give us some, some thoughts on like where my, why that might not be the case, but what would happen if, if, um, for both of those sort of endpoints.

37:02Yeah, I think, well, I'll take the argument for, and I love that. I love Peter Thiel's contrarian philosophy, by the way, like him or hate him or somewhere in between. He always takes the other side. And I think that's a useful exercise for us as humans, not beyond just AI talk, humanity. So making the case that, you know, media could really take a big hit would be that AI companies win most cases, including the fair use, and they argue that it's transformative so they can train on any data content they want. And we're just slow to regulate things like compensation for any media company for using any content.

37:54I think the middle folks, some mid-tier companies, media companies, content-driven companies, a lot of them could take a big hit. And if they don't have good business models, a lot are going to lose, sort of like the small mom and pops back in the Amazon days. But I would call it like the medium-sized mom and pops, not just small creators because they can do quite well. um so i think it's going to be a really tough time so it but also i'm i'm a little bit of a you know darwinian sort of um thinker about this which is there are a lot of companies that um weren't healthy enough that uh you know all good things come to an end that that's going to happen that's us evolving and getting better so i believe that on the flip side i think the media companies have enormous clout and leverage.

38:51So for instance, I believe that OpenAI will settle with the New York Times. They're going to want to settle before their IPO. They're going to want to beat, Sam's going to want to beat Dario at Anthropic in any way he can. And I think OpenAI will close a deal with the New York Times and it'll be transformative to the industry. And then they'll have a blockbuster IPO. And there's plenty of money to share, you know, and maybe. I was just thinking that's going to be a big check, especially if the New York Times, as you say, is really trying to stand on principle here. But everybody has a price. And, you know, some of the some of the thinkers here, including Sam Altman at OpenAI, have talked about this idea of sharing all the wealth, not just universal basic income.

39:43But there's a new thing called, you know, it's, I forget the name for it, but it's like sharing just the capital, sharing the market value of these AI companies. It's possible we see some bailouts and things might change. And it's just a value distribution. So as well as OpenAI and Anthropic all do, maybe that money gets flowed back into our pockets, whether it's a company or an individual. So, again, I suffer from optimism bias. I think things will work out in humanity because we're just amazing species. But they're going to change. That's for sure. Nice. Good stuff, Rob. We'll leave it there.

40:26Thanks for dropping by, sharing your thoughts and all your analysis on all the licensing stuff that's happened in AI in the last few years. Hey, Pete, keep up the awesome work. Appreciate it, man. Well, this is Media and the Machine. A few things about you and me. If you want to hear about the next new episode, make sure you hit follow on the show on your podcast app. And if you like something about this episode, the guests, the topic, even one part of the conversation, leave me a rating or review and tell me. That helps you know what you want more of so I can make the show better for you. And if you want to go a little deeper, head to mediaandthemachine.com and subscribe to my newsletter.

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41:36Thank you.