United’s New Routes Reveal Travel’s Next Bet

0:22Seth Borko: The number of the week is 10. That is the number of new international routes United Airlines has just announced. This is its largest international expansion ever. So we've got Ibiza. We've got Okinawa. We've got Toulouse, Luxembourg, Merce. Merce. Merce. Seth. Merce. Yeah. Look at all of these exotic places that United Airlines is flying mostly out of New York. Where are you going? Which are you booking?

0:54Sarah Kopit: I mean, as a as a lover of Newark Airport and as having said on this pod that I'm a lover of Newark Airport and I will defend that controversial take. I'm very excited for me. The big one is I'm going to pronounce this wrong for sure. Lubjolana, Lubjolana, Slovenia, the capital of Slovenia, which is actually a destination. I was talking to my wife about visiting this summer originally. And now there's a direct flight from my hometown. that's like a huge transformation we had that we were looking at connecting flights through heat throw and all sorts of stuff yeah what about you you know i i do what oh i don't know

1:36Seth Borko: i do want to go to japan i've never been to japan i've been to a lot of other like if not these places these regions but i've never been there um i am curious though like and i guess i I don't know that much about airline routes and how they pick them. But especially out of Newark, sure, fine. Because probably a lot of people are connecting through there. So it's two planes and not three, right? So if you're flying from Detroit, you're going to connect through Newark to go there. But I do often wonder, like, I mean, how packed are these airplanes? How big are these airplanes? Like, these are some pretty niche markets.

2:15Seth Borko: so i mean i suppose this is a this is just a leisure play this is the k-shaped economy coming after young professionals or any professionals i suppose who really want to go on vacation to

2:27Sarah Kopit: exotic new hotels let's read these destinations okay uh okinawa japan yeah that's leisure 100 by the way i would love to go to okinawa yep wait no diving okinawa's diving you're gonna go further south diving oh yeah okay so so so basically same same people just different yeah

2:50Seth Borko: different that's right yes like it's it's the same it's the same customer who talks to a lot

2:55Sarah Kopit: of skiers and scuba it is exactly the same person it's just a different season that's exactly right yeah yeah okinawa is is further south and it's actually another destination that i've had on my list for a very long time i'm really into the world war ii history aspect of it i'm really into the scuba diving in each aspect of it and there's no i mean i was talking again talking to my wife like well we'll have to connect we'll go to tokyo maybe we'll go to taiwan taipei or beijing where are we gonna how are we gonna get there and now it's like oh san francisco direct so like this this list of destinations feels very tailored and i think we were talking about this before the pod kind of started like i feel like at least personally i felt very seen by this of destinations i think it's very clearly targeted at that urban white collar professional leisure traveler who wants to explore who is already probably a pretty advanced traveler who is maybe a little later in their career with a little bit of money and loyalty and status benefits and who wants to go somewhere different and differentiate i mean let's go through again both the list ibiza slovenia sardinia sicily okinawa uh these are valencia these are clearly heavy leisure destinations maybe luxembourg is business maybe toulouse france is business but other than that this is clearly a leisure focused route expansion and like a very specific kind of a leisure traveler the kind of person who's done with cancun and paris paris wants to go somewhere yeah that's not i mean there's no major gateway cities here right someone who is starting their european trip

4:35Seth Borko: with paris or london is not taking these flights yeah i see it too as it's just what you said it's the you know we often talk about kind of sometimes we talk about the dupes or the the off the beaten path is like a money play like to get more for your money to me this seems like almost exactly the opposite. It's like, well, I've already spent all my money doing all of the basics. So now, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to increase my social capital with, um, you know, a new story about a far off locale that none of my friends have been to. So I'm going to be able to win. Yeah. These are definitely dinner party conversations.

5:16Sarah Kopit: Sardinia is coming up more and more. Sicily obviously had a whole white Lotus season set there. So this is very much for that, that person for whom travel is a status signal. It's very much a reflection of the rise in premium leisure, the rise in the K-shaped economy. It's also reflecting a really interesting technological innovation because a lot of these routes are going to be flown by a new model of aircraft, which is called the, here's where we're going to get a little jargony, stick with me, listener please the a321 xlr or xlr's i actually don't know if the x is extended or extra but it's just that extra uber extended long range is what that that stands for as you can imagine but it is this brand new hyper efficient the a320 is the classic airbus narrow body by the way we at Toulouse, France.

6:13Sarah Kopit: Airbus has major manufacturing plants in Toulouse, France. So maybe there's a bit of a, I don't know if it's a play on words there, but these narrow body aircraft, like the 737, like the A320, continue to get iterated on. They continue to get, the planes themselves get longer so they can hold more people. They continue to get more energy efficient. This was the move that Boeing was pursuing with its MAX series of 737 aircraft before they uh before that before before everything that happened with the max

6:48Seth Borko: before all the things happened and airbus everything out of toulouse and a couple other

6:52Sarah Kopit: places of course has been incredibly successful with this new version called the a321 xlr it's a super efficient super long-range narrow-body aircraft and it is opening up access for all sorts of interesting routes um a Shah Brizvi who uh has worked with me on the research team and now works on the Skift Advisor team he calls them uh long and skinny routes skinny because it's a narrow body skinny and long because they're long distance and it's exactly what you were saying which is that how many people really want to fly from Newark to Sardinia yeah you know what I bet

7:27Seth Borko: though I bet every single one of those people wants a lifelike well they probably want premium I wonder what the mix is there. They do talk about how these new planes have different seats. I don't think we've seen them yet. They are touting the seats, how that is a differentiator. But I'm curious what the mix is between economy, premium economy, business first.

7:51Sarah Kopit: It won't be all business, but it will absolutely be premium heavy. and you know the point is that yeah it used to be to get the range to fly these long distance flights you had to put a giant big hunking chunk of metal giant aircraft on that and you couldn't fill that the way you make money on a big plane like that is like to your point lots of people sitting in the back of the plane but when you have a smaller more nimble aircraft you can put more premium in there more relative percentage of flight can be premium and you don't need to fill it with 300 people you can fill it with if you fill with 80 people 50 of whom are in premium or first class it's probably pretty i mean 80 is low but it's probably it's not it's not too shabby you can at least experiment with it for a season and so what we've seen this is a trend that we've been following for a long time these long and skinny routes i actually have a chart can i share chart oh all right this is from a report we did about some of the major trends in airlines and this was this is an older it's a piece of older data so it's not updated for the full year 2025 but this is flights on narrow-body aircrafts flown a distance of greater than 3 000 miles which is a long-haul distance globally over time and you can very much see how you know we had look at that 50 to 60 long haul narrow body flights a year before the pandemic.

9:19Sarah Kopit: There was a drop during the pandemic, of course, because no one was flying. And now there's been this progressive steady growth in long haul narrow body flying. And the A321XLR is the ultimate expression of that. We've seen a lot of European airlines embrace that because, you know, it kind of feels like it fits with that low cost point to point model that the, you know, Aer Lingus and Iberia's and Ryanair's of the world fly. But now we are seeing this long and skinny trend start to transform not just European airlines, but American airlines and not just low cost airlines, but premium airlines and saying, wait a second, we can take this seasonal, nimble point to point narrow body model.

10:01Sarah Kopit: We can do it for that premium high end American leisure traveler who wants to explore Japan, wants to explore Europe. And we can finally do it in a way that's cost fuel and profitability efficient. So I think it's both like a really fun thing. It's exciting for me as a United Loyalist based out of Newark, but it also signals a new leg in these premium airline wars in the US, in my opinion. I will say, though, whenever I get on one of the big planes,

10:28Seth Borko: the double deckers, especially, I still get kind of like...

10:31Sarah Kopit: It's the best. I mean, I agree.

10:35Seth Borko: yeah i don't do it very often anymore oddly it's like it's like a special treat whenever i like go down the gate i suppose and like all of a sudden there's stairs i'm like i i i love it

10:48Sarah Kopit: this is how nerdy i am and i've trained my wife at this point when we're at the airport and she'll be like that looks like an a380 i'm like yeah good job it's the only double decker right like it's i know great job way to go way to go well done well done it's an easy spot but it's it's distinctive and it's excited yeah oh dreams of i mean summer's almost over it's so it's sad

11:13Seth Borko: like think i always think about the beginning of the school year means like end of vacation time i suppose i shouldn't think about it that way we all can go on vacation whenever yeah it's the

11:23Sarah Kopit: close in days of august um once i mean school's gonna yeah it's coming to a close uh did you get any good trips in post camp pre pre uh start of school or no yeah we we went to mexico so which

11:39Seth Borko: is like so it's not like a long exotic or especially different trip for us for my little family but it is one we love very very much so we had a really good time would you see your

11:52Sarah Kopit: family go into Sardinia for a vacation?

11:56Seth Borko: You know, I would. My kids now, they're almost 15 and 12. So they are now getting to the ages and frankly have been at the ages for a while where I think they would really get a kick out of going to somewhere really, really different that they've never been to before, maybe never have even seen in books or considered. So I do think this year, I actually want to take them to the UAE. I can't remember if I've talked about that before on this pod. But that's where I want to take them for our first big international job.

12:36Sarah Kopit: Well, if you really want your kids to really stand out at the lunch table, of course, which is the equivalent.

12:43Seth Borko: Yeah, well, of course.

12:45Sarah Kopit: award-winning journalist award-winning journalist he writes best on these other long and skinny routes and we kind of pegged our conversation to this new united routes but he did a piece this week about long haul demand he says delta is flying its first US non-stop Atlanta to Riyadh Saudi Arabia if you want to one-up the UAE is apparently also

13:10Seth Borko: I would take them to Saudi oh my goodness like I love i love going to saudi too like i i just think i just think the whole region the reason why i want to take them to the uae is because i mean it's i want to my son really loves the most oh yeah supercars i want i just want to show i want to show him the supercars in dubai that's that's like the method to the madness and then we'll go and do you can start in miami as a starter as a start around and then work your way up to yeah right and it moves boosh yeah to the other ones

13:44Sarah Kopit: in oh so in gordon's article he talks about um san francisco sapporo sapporo is the ski and

13:50Seth Borko: destination so you've got okinawa and sapporo covered yes yes okay yeah melbourne directs i

13:59Sarah Kopit: think i'm british airways and finn melbourne the british airway and finnair those are with stopovers um heathrow phuket thailand sydney to las vegas that's an interesting one

14:13Seth Borko: that is an interesting one i wonder i i would love to see the profile of that of that traveler like who are you and what are you who are you what are you doing like what's your what's what is that there are some pretty big casinos in australia i think though i think like there

14:29Sarah Kopit: might be yeah i think there's some i read a story i read an article about some casinos in australia

14:34Seth Borko: once i don't know it's funny i i you i can hardly think of two like culturally opposite places and in in my mind is the aussies and and our friends that visit australia have done a good

14:50Sarah Kopit: job keeping keeping australia as the opposite of authentic uh authentic and natural and yeah right yeah yeah well anyways lots of exciting long haul stuff i do love the long haul stuff that is one of my favorite things to do at an airport especially like a big airport like he throws great for this istanbul is awesome for this i love to look at the boards the boards and just read the different cities and just be like wow how many so many cities you know what i love doing when i'm checking in

15:19Seth Borko: um and you see like the person next to you in line who's walking in with like their surfboard and their golf clubs and their skis. And I always think to myself, man, you have an interesting life person checking those enormous sporty accoutrements coming in to the plane. So, yeah.

15:46Sarah Kopit: What else do we have in news to talk about, Sarah?

15:49Seth Borko: Have you ever stayed at a hostel, Seth?

15:51Sarah Kopit: Yeah, I have stayed at a hostel.

15:53Seth Borko: see i know i well i shouldn't say never very long time ago i stayed at a hostel in the united states it was yeah so it was right i think we were going hiking see these are things that i never do i never should do i never should have ever done it a go this is how you become one of the sporty

16:15Sarah Kopit: people checking into that flight that you're that you're looking at i guess yeah yeah that i'm

16:20Seth Borko: aspiring to be right that's exactly true so anyway but that's my one and only time so tell me tell me your hostile story because we had some hostile news this uh this week well

16:32Sarah Kopit: ish hostile news um well yeah i well my so it's not it's it's somewhere between i'm a big fan it's not the brand that we have the news on but there's another pseudo hostile brand called uh freehand They really call themselves as hotels, freehand hotels, but they're very small rooms. And they also have some shared bunkable rooms as well. So they're sort of a hybrid, more like a private accommodation at a hostel slash somewhat hostel slash some hotel. They're really trying to occupy this like premium hostel, solo hostel, like older hostel or like former hosteler, but wants a hotel kind of niche.

17:13Sarah Kopit: And they have these hotels. Yeah. And they're called freehand hotels. and they've got these bars that they call Broken Shaker. Okay. And my first date with my now wife was at the Broken Shaker on the rooftop of the freehand hostel hotel in New York City.

17:27Seth Borko: You know, that is so interesting. A, why did you take Allie to the bar on top of the hostel on your first date? This is my immediate question.

17:37Sarah Kopit: It's still open. It was and is a cool bar. I think some of its cool factor has worn off. um i also think when you're younger rooftop bars have more of an appeal than perhaps they do they do at now but it was summer rooftop bar affordable rooftop bar by the way if you don't know the new york city rooftop bar scene it can get pretentious and expensive it can get very quickly and so yeah there you go it's like affordable luxuries like in line with their vibe of an affordable rooftop cocktail bar in New York City in the middle of summer. What's not to love?

18:15Seth Borko: What's not to like? So what did you make in the news this week? Do you think this is a good play? Tell our listeners what the news was.

18:24Sarah Kopit: We had a news, Luke Marion reported about Generator Hostels, which is another kind of higher... They're a proper hostel brand. Freehand probably doesn't like that. I called them a pseudo-hostel. So they're more of a hotel with hostel-like characteristics, whereas Generator is a proper hostel brand. And what was the news this week?

18:46Seth Borko: Well, so it's basically that, you know, Generator's new CEO is basically come out and say, you know, we are a premium product too. Like, yes, we have bunk beds and yes, we're 40 pounds a night. But you know what? Like, perhaps you can't afford to stay at the Hoxton, but you can afford to stay with us. But that does not mean that you are going to get any of a less premium experience. And so it's really, I kind of look at this as the kind of baby K-shaped economy. So this is for those people that are very much on their way to their lie flat seats and they're, you know, going to Slovenia nonstop.

19:33Seth Borko: You know, but we can't all do that right away. in our careers, but people still want luxury, like luxury, luxury, luxury, premium, premium, premium. And so I think that, you know, Generator is basically looking at that and saying, well, we can do that too, just on a smaller or more modest scale. Yeah.

19:55Sarah Kopit: And by the way, I really like this strategy. In case you don't know, Generator is a big deal. I mean, they were acquired by Brookfield Asset Management, which is a major private equity real estate firm for 776 million euros. Exchange rate fluctuates. But that's depending on how the dollar is doing. You could be pushing almost a billion dollars in that transaction. This is a huge deal. They're trying to grow the brand. And I like it, right? This is a line, actually not a quote, but Luke writes this, that Generator is not positioning itself against other hostile brands, but is a step below the lifestyle hotel market.

20:38Sarah Kopit: And the betting that its guests will eventually move up into it. I like this strategy. That's why it also made me think of Freehand, which I think is very much competing for a very similar clientele, which is that someone who wants to travel, who wants an experiential element, who maybe wants to make friends, maybe is a solo traveler, or just wants to, you know, hostels put you, it's almost like somewhere in between Airbnb meets... Communal. Like, they don't want to worry about bedbugs. They want the communal experience, like what an Airbnb could offer, like what a hostel could offer, but they don't want to be rough in it.

21:15Sarah Kopit: They don't want to be so cheap, but also they can't afford a full-on boutique hotel, and they want to travel across Europe. I think it's a really interesting market. I think it makes a lot of sense to me. and it speaks to i mean exactly what you said i like how you called like mini k-shaped economy like it's like those russian nestin dolls and it's just like there's big luxury and then there's medium luxury then there's even smaller luxury in between i think that's right like we have these multiple layers of the leisure market like these russian nestin dolls petrushka dolls that are sitting together and you want to be the top half of your level of the whatever you know of the of the thing i think it's a good pitch well i i was gonna say and it's it's a pretty classic

21:59Seth Borko: business strategy right which is get them early that's right um you know it's it it is true what they say like once you do experience premium products and luxury products even if it's on a different scale it is very hard to go back so once they've got you they've got you this is a

22:16Sarah Kopit: tough market to crack freehand has tried to do it i think they've been by all accounts they've I don't actually don't know their financials. I won't say about all accounts being successful, but they're still around. The hotel is still open. The bar that I had my first date at is still open. They haven't totaled, but they haven't really expanded in the way I thought they would. And I would say the same with generator. I stayed at a generator hostel in Copenhagen. I stayed at generator before and I really enjoyed it. That was in 2015. Over 10 years ago. And, you know, they want to double. it's currently a 15 property they want to double it i think they've had 15 properties i don't know the exact timeline but they've had 15 properties for a while so i think it's been slow growth because part of the problem is that they're the at the high at the top end of the the big k at the top of the big k they got a lot of money to spend yes i i think that premium little k premium can be meaningful but this is a more i won't even call it a certain customer this is just a more uh cost conscious customer it's hard to grow hostels have a certain reputation especially outside of europe their hostels within europe feel like they're a little more par for the course they're like there's nothing fun about them yeah it's just very very normal

23:36Seth Borko: yeah it's almost there's a bunch of when you hear a hostel in us you immediately cringe

23:41Sarah Kopit: right um and it reminds me a little bit of what selena was trying to do selena was those um was also a hostile company also going for yeah slightly higher end feel for a community feel for and they did they rapidly expanded they raised they didn't raise a ton of they got investors to open these different properties they expanded aggressively i really liked the idea of what they were trying to do. They had this really fun metric that they talked about at our global forum, which was, did you make a friend? And instead of asking guests to rate them, would you recommend this score? One, two, three, they just asked, did you make a friend?

24:23Sarah Kopit: And that was how they measured if their properties were doing well. I loved everything about it. And they went belly up. It was just a really difficult, really difficult market.

24:33Seth Borko: Would you consider the pod, like the ones that are in New York City where would you put that place?

24:40Sarah Kopit: I would put Pod. No, so Pod to me doesn't have the

24:45Seth Borko: Because I don't think that ever had share anything. They're all separate. Yes, they do have shared bathrooms. They do. That's right. Yeah, that's true.

24:58Sarah Kopit: I don't think that

24:59Seth Borko: I've stayed there. I liked it.

25:01Sarah Kopit: See, it's so funny because there's certain things you associate hostels with. year i associate pod hotels with asia and with japan specifically yeah there's all these youtube videos have you ever been to the one in new york oh i like them well what i understand of them is is they're meant to be clean cheap in out done yeah um yeah that's me it's like staying on a ship yeah yeah it is um that to me is not trying to compete with lifestyle what's interesting about this generator play and to an extent the freehand play is that they see themselves as competitors to lifestyle hotels just at an affordable budget no one would ever confuse a pod hotel with a hoxton whereas the new ceo generator consistently refers to uh hoxton and moxie in this interview with luke so i think it it's yeah yeah good point maybe price-wise competitive and maybe even they're technically considered hostels because i think once you have a shared bathroom you're sort of in that hostile space but it's how you position yourself it's the market it's it's customer segmentation is is the key i mean i would argue airbnb kind of competes with the or old school airbnb where you stay where you share an apartment or someone sort of competes in this market as well.

26:27Seth Borko: Oh, man. I still don't understand that. I mean, I get it.

26:32Sarah Kopit: It was fun in the same way that staying in a hostel in your 20s is fun. You meet the host. They show you around. You're doing their thing. I get it. And that's sort of what you're trying to get out of a really good hostel.

26:46Seth Borko: Yeah. Yeah. So should we talk about a few non-travel things this week? The world does go on.

26:54Sarah Kopit: outside of the travel industry.

26:56Seth Borko: It does. It does. So let's frame it around our... Well, let's frame it around our winners and losers. Do you think Mr. Drunkenmiller is a winner this week?

27:06Sarah Kopit: I think he's... Well, it's hard to be a loser when you're a billionaire hedge fund manager, but...

27:13Seth Borko: True story. Ferris, as the kids say, as my tweenagers say.

27:20Sarah Kopit: But I don't think he came off... Let's debate. I don't think he came off looking that good. So what did Druckenmiller do?

27:26Seth Borko: Yeah. Okay. So he gave an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal, and it was noticed by almost everyone immediately. It's like, oh, it looks like Claude wrote that. That looks like every answer that Claude has ever given me. And they went to him, or actually, I don't even know who asked him the question about it, like how it actually ended up in all of our feeds. But he's like, yeah, I used I used AI to write the whole thing. Like it wasn't it wasn't even like how many people use AI or at least it didn't seem to be where it's like, you know, you go back and forth on drafts and you edit new blah, blah, blah.

28:07Seth Borko: It was kind of like he's like, no, I just the whole thing.

28:10Sarah Kopit: The whole thing. And I think it's funny because it don't, I mean, and I think both you and I have sat, maybe not uniquely, but have sat across both media and finance. I worked at a bank. You worked at Bloomberg. And so we have exposure to both the world of media and the world of finance. And it's so funny if you accused a writer at the New Yorker of using AI and you had them dead to rights.

28:41Seth Borko: Yeah.

28:41Sarah Kopit: It would be, they would die of embarrassment. It would be a scandal. And then here's Druckenmiller, who's an investor, point blank. I'm not embarrassed. I mean, of course I used it. Why wouldn't you use it?

28:54Seth Borko: Why wouldn't I be using AI? I got to run a business.

28:57Sarah Kopit: These guys, the Wall Street Journal asked me for, you know, 2 ,000 words by Monday. I got some ideas. Here you go. Put them to AI and there you go. Serve it up. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I, you know, I must say, like, it's not poetry, right?

29:15Seth Borko: Like, what Stanley also said was that, you know, he read it, everything in the op-ed that he gave the Wall Street Journal, they are his thoughts. It is what he thinks. That is his opinion. It was an opinion piece. Why does it matter? I mean, honestly, you could think about it. It's like, well, AI happened to write this one. Yes. I was just going to say, you know, maybe 10 years ago, it was going to be your assistant or a ghostwriter or somebody else who wrote the words. You know, you had a conversation with them. And then it was another human being, though, who actually took your thoughts and wrote it down.

29:56Seth Borko: And that's been happening forever with high-level executives, since high-level executives have existed. So I've kind of given up the ghost on this one. Like I said, if you were trying to argue about the merits of a poem, perhaps? But even then, I don't know if it moves you what moves you set. Well, that's true.

30:24Sarah Kopit: I mean, this is like becomes like a what makes good writing, what makes a certain point, like what makes art, right? Like I find this what makes good writing.

30:37Seth Borko: I was going to say good. See, that's the key. See, with this one, it's a little bit different because I would argue that the op ed was not actually good writing. I don't know if you read it, but it read kind of clunky to me, blah, blah, blah. But and it was immediately recognizable as something that Claude might write. But I think that I think that's the crime. The crime is bad writing. it's not like if if you're gonna put your name on something that's i mean this is the journalist to me if you're gonna put your name on something that's bad writing well that's on you right like that's like therein lies the the the awful isn't some of that just opinion kind of stylistic like

31:25Sarah Kopit: what we consider good writing here in the uk might not be considered good but here in the u.s might not be considered good right in the uk might not be considered good writing in india might not have been considered good writing 100 years ago like what is good writing changes yeah i'm sure i'm

31:43Seth Borko: sure that's true um i know it when i see well i mean it is also what i do it is it also is my job to know that but you know can i ask you a question yeah go all right it's bad writing we can agree

31:56Sarah Kopit: that it's bad writing there are yeah this sort of reminds me of like um driverless cars where it's driverless cars cause accidents. Humans cause a lot of accidents as well. Humans are responsible for plenty of human-generated bad writing. Is it more embarrassing to put your name to AI-generated bad writing or more embarrassing to put your name to self-generated bad writing?

32:23Seth Borko: I think it is more embarrassing to put your name on AI-generated bad writing. And the reason why I think it is, is it just shows that you didn't care at all. at least if you at least if you wrote it and you tried like a lot of people just can't like their skill set does not you know they're just they're just not going to be a good writer at least with ai you have like a tool to get you 75 of the way there what i've always thought is that good writing is good thinking and the power of writing well is

33:00Sarah Kopit: thinking well and then once you've thought you can start using ai more and more if that makes any sense like like i i don't want to cause too much of a controversy i don't want to get ourselves canceled here but like we started to integrate more ai into our research output like far be it for me to to credit like kind of said about giving up the ghost like far be it for us to criticize Druckenmiller for writing it. I think the question, I think the issues increasingly are not, is it good writing? Is it bad writing? Is it AI-generated? Is it non-agent? How do I know that you put thought into it?

33:37Sarah Kopit: It's about respect for the reader and also something like, how do I know that you put thought and care into it? Because AI signals a lack of care, but maybe you did put into care, then the AI was the tool to bridge you from maybe an even worse writer. Maybe you're just not a good writer and the AI bridged you to the output. So I think it's like good writing was a surefire sign of care. Now it's harder for us to tell if you cared when you wrote this or not. And some people cared very much and some people did not care very much. And how do I tell you, yes, I used some AI, but I still cared. I still thought a lot about it.

34:13I still put a lot of effort into it.

34:18Seth Borko: Well, I mean, you hear a lot about now where, I mean, it used to be, that, you know, if you went in a cover letter or resume, if you're hiring somebody, there were typos that they didn't care. That was like immediately disqualifying. Now there are never going to be typos. And you even see some people talking about, well, I put in a little not so perfect flourish here and there. So it signals to the reader that I did something. I, human, was a part of the creation of this document, which is bananas, by the way.

34:55Sarah Kopit: And I really like to write with hyphens.

35:01Seth Borko: And I've been self-editing myself to turn my em dashes into commas or semicolons.

35:10Sarah Kopit: And it's like, actually, that was my handwritten thoughts. But then I edited it so that it looked... Yeah.

35:19Seth Borko: do you ever put your stuff into that you've actually that you have written yourself so you know you did you know and put it into it as some of the AI detectors I've actually never used any of the AI detectors believe it or not I've played around with some of the free ones the thing that is that is always interesting to me is when inevitably it flags quotes from like in-person in interviews that I've done. Like a human being has sat there and talked to me and I've taken one of those and put it in quotes and, you know, said so-and-so said. And that's what it flags. Like, they're not very good. Yeah, that's why I've been hesitant about using them.

35:54Seth Borko: It's what I'm getting at.

35:56Sarah Kopit: I don't think they really work. Like, I've heard too many stories of people putting 100 % human-generating stuff. I started reading a fiction book, by the way. I picked a book. Oh, good for you. Yeah.

36:09Seth Borko: Congratulations. I don't read a lot of fiction.

36:13Sarah Kopit: I started reading fiction.

36:14Seth Borko: And as I was reading through it, I said, this feels really AI. Am I reading AI-generated fiction?

36:21Sarah Kopit: And I looked up the copyright and it predated LLNs. It was 100 % guaranteed human-ridden. And so it's like, this is one of those things where we're getting increasingly confident that we can tell AI writing from human writing. And AI writing is bad writing. and there's going to be a lot of false positives. There's going to be a lot of false positives.

36:45Seth Borko: Well, the other thing is, is AI was trained on the very books, the fiction books that, you know what I mean? So it's, I think we've just now recognized it. Or for those of us that read a lot of perhaps LinkedIn, because unfortunately I think LinkedIn is a place where a lot of bad AI writing shows up. you just it's once you kind of like have an eye for it you just can't on you can't unsee it um you can't unhear it like the way the cadence and the the cadence the words the it's not x it's y all of that good stuff but but yeah so i don't know i i was i was actually a little bit surprised just going back to the wall street journal that there was such blowback i was a little bit surprised

37:34Sarah Kopit: that the Wall Street Journal op-ed page aggressively defended Druckenmiller. I love they were going to say, our bad.

37:42Seth Borko: Oh.

37:44Sarah Kopit: You're an editor. Yeah, what do you think about that?

37:45Seth Borko: You know, I wonder. I mean, I'm not sure. I don't, I don't, I actually don't know anybody at the Journal. I haven't, like, had the opportunity to reach out and ask anybody. But, I mean, I wonder if they talked about it beforehand.

37:57Sarah Kopit: They must have. Like, I wonder if they knew what they were going to say. These are professional writers and editors, yeah. They must have known it was AI-generated.

38:02Seth Borko: Yeah. like and so you know so they made the decision to run it and then if if if they got if they got called out on it this is this is i think this is one of the things we're going to too we're

38:16Sarah Kopit: we're talking about the ad we're not actually talking about the article itself which was so it's like this interesting thing where it's like the actual piece was about interest rates We haven't mentioned interest rates once. And Jucky Miller has an incredible track record. And I think he was criticizing Scott Pesant, Secretary of the Treasury.

38:39Seth Borko: So it was like an important...

38:41Sarah Kopit: It's interesting how some of this AI stuff, love it or hate it, is subsuming sometimes the real issue, which is like one of the most notable investors of our age just criticized the Secretary of Treasury and all we're talking about is whether he used AI to write it or not, as opposed to, is he right? What did he say? What's the future of the deficit in the U.S.?

39:04Seth Borko: I have a feeling that 10 years from now, maybe sooner, because everything happens sooner than we think these days, this conversation that you and I are having will seem very quaint. Like, we will no longer talk about it. It will, my prediction would be that it will just be assumed that AI is either used for this type of, again, not the poets, stay away from AI, the poets, but for this type of thing, poets, songwriters, fine art, great. But for just trying to communicate, get information from inside, ahead, to other human beings using artificial intelligence

39:51Sarah Kopit: to do so if you are not a skilled communicator writer you know if you are not a skilled writer yeah using it as a tool to do that i think it's not just neural link each other we'll just neural

40:02Seth Borko: link each other i know exactly there will be no need for us anymore no research reports we'll just yeah it'll all come just brain to brain brain to brain all right do you have um I have a few losers.

40:21Sarah Kopit: Go for it. Go for it. Well, sadly, I just, the world is not really a loser, but the world has suffered a tremendous loss, I suppose, this week with the passing of Dolly Parton.

40:33Seth Borko: So I just, you know, yesterday as I was reading everything about, you know, Dolly Parton and the just kind of the outpouring of people talking about what she meant to them, I was like, wow. So Dolly Parton is really the one thing right now that every single person agreed was good. No matter who you were, you know, she was just a kind of like a bright shining light. So, you know, rest in peace, Dolly. And then, I don't know, I also just kind of for all of you CMOs out there and folks who, I don't know, comms, professionals. I just couldn't help but notice just Target and Callaway Golf and the kind of bad press they got rightfully about for Target, it was a Halloween costume.

41:38Seth Borko: And for Callaway Golf, it was an advertisement. And to me, the interesting thing from a business perspective about these two situations if you don't know what i'm talking about google it'll

41:48Sarah Kopit: come right up is very two very um off the mark offensive one's an ad campaign and one is a product that was on advertised on the website and shelf stores but two huge misses and these are

42:03Seth Borko: huge but from two huge companies so even at small companies you have to go through a committee to do anything, right? So I can only imagine how many people have to go in at Target to approving, you know, the sale. Like, how many people had to see it? It doesn't just, like, show up there, like, poof. Or to produce a commercial, like, how many, you know, planning sessions and writers and writers, directors, sign-offs, green lights, you know, have to go into that so it does it does it does show how companies can have big significant blind spots that it's kind of stunning to an outsider that they happen i'm curious like for all of you all of you folks who work kind of in in these like spaces at your own businesses like when you saw this did you just cringe like how does that happen like how does it get through all of those very many, you know, because it's not at this point, it's quite objective.

43:08Seth Borko: It's not just taste. You know what I mean? Like you didn't see anybody like being like, well, I'll just take the I'm going to take the opposite side of that. You know, I think it's fine. That's not what happened here. So I don't know. So those were my losers.

43:22Sarah Kopit: Those are pretty good losers. Those are pretty big losers, too. Those are good ones. Yeah. How does it happen is the question. I don't know. You know what my winner of the week is? This is a niche New York City one, so I apologize if this podcast has gotten a little long in the tooth and if you're not from New York City. But our mayor, Mayor Mamdani, announced he's taking plans to fix the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which is arguably the worst, most distressed roadway in the country, certainly in New York City. It's like literally crumbling. We've been talking about doing something for decades and we never did anything.

44:07Sarah Kopit: And he did the social media post and he references an incredible book called The Power Broker by Robert Caro. And he's talking about Robert Moses and the Power Broker. He's not Robert, he's tongue in cheek. And I like that the Power Broker, we'll call Robert Caro my winner. The Power Broker continues to be not just essential, new york city reading but like memed and joked about like it continues to live on as like a meme and a joke and the mayor of new york city and all these people and um i'm on my third attempt to try and read it it's it's chunky i haven't made it all the way through yet but um i think

44:48Seth Borko: lex read it yeah i think he's done i i i heard that he's mccarthy so you can talk with him when

44:54Sarah Kopit: our skiff studio team has also finished it i talked to her about it a lot it's a it's just iconic and i think the book itself continues to have icon status and i love that that like a thousand page book about new york city urban development can be yeah yeah all i have to say

45:13Seth Borko: is when they ultimately do close down those sections right by you right my life yes my life is going to be very negatively impacted. So I will be sure to complain about it at length on this podcast when it happens.

45:29Sarah Kopit: If you didn't know, if you didn't get it when we were talking about mass transit to the World Cup, this is a New Yorker rite of passage to complain about transit, infrastructure, traffic, which we can't help ourselves. And so dear listener, thank you for your forbearance. We appreciate it.

45:48Seth Borko: Yes. And thank you for tuning in this week.

45:50Sarah Kopit: Thank you.

45:51Seth Borko: Send us your notes. What do you think about AI? If you're a marketing exec, how do things go terribly wrong?

45:57Sarah Kopit: If you could launch any route, long and skinny route, where would you want to go? What would it be?

46:02Seth Borko: What would it be? We'll tell the world on our next pod. Okay.

46:08Sarah Kopit: Bye. Well, thanks, everybody. Have a good one.