The Leverage Podcast

Subscribe to my substack: https://www.gettheleverage.com/This week, the CEO of Cloudflare announced that bots had passed human traffic for the first time in the internet’s history. By their count it’s 57.4% bots to 42.6% humans.Many of the economic assumptions of our world are constructed on the basis of humans being the ones who look at, and operate computers. Facebook sells ads because they have eyeballs looking on websites they control, and the brains behind those eyes are convinced to buy stuff with the ads they show. Content providers like me put stuff online assuming we can monetize a reader relationship through subscriptions or ads. This has done enormous good (independent media companies like mine can exist) and enormous harm (engagement, rather than truth, becomes what systems like Instagram’s algorithm optimize for).In our current internet, like as of the moment you are reading this, that old economic equilibrium is kaput. Irrelevant. Toasted and buttered bread. Aka, cooked. AI agents search differently, they use the internet differently, and most importantly they monetize very differently.CHAPTERS:00:00 Humans Become Minority00:33 Attention Economy Breaks01:32 AI as Content Middleman03:49 Turned Into a Skill04:59 Skills That Still Matter06:07 Deflationary AI Economics08:21 Taxing the Agents10:56 Bots Buy Everything11:58 Power Shifts and Scarcity13:16 AI Proof Your Career

Subscribe to my Substack: http://www.gettheleverage.comSpaceX is one of the most ambitious and historically important companies ever built… and a potentially wildly overvalued stock investment. In this episode, we explore the history of SpaceX and what you need to understand about their IPO.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 SpaceX Vision vs Stock04:36 Grit Becomes Culture05:47 S1 Fantasy Markets08:09 The Business Breakdown10:17 Why It Might Work?13:06 The Muskian Multiple14:54 AI Hype And Vibes17:09 Key Man Risk

Subscribe to my Substack: http://www.gettheleverage.comDesigners used to be the monarchs of software. Now they're being squeezed out of existence. It's not just them.In this episode, I break down how AI has automated both sides of the design workflow, what that's done to hiring, and what this means for every knowledge worker right now.YouTube Chapters:00:00 — Designers Used to Run the Show01:15 — How AI Automated Both Sides of Design02:30 — The Data: Design Hiring Has Flatlined03:57 — The Three AI Workflow Paradigms06:06 — Node-Based Systems and the New Design Stack07:08 — "Designers Are Basically Just Cops Now"08:23 — What AI-Native Companies Actually Want From Designers09:05 — The Real Question: Could This Happen to You?09:40 — The Two Roles That Survive: Junior Execution and Taste Executive12:20 — Evan's Personal Fear and Why He Made This Video12:56 — The Only Choice You Have Left

Subscribe to my Substack: http://www.gettheleverage.comThere's a great contradiction of Tim Cook as maybe the best CEO of the last decade, and also maybe the one who has set Apple up to fail.He just announced his retirement. He's gonna step down in September. You're going to see two types of commentary about Tim Cook. One is that he is a genius who created so much value. The other is that Apple's product was bad and never innovated.
What I'm here to tell you is that both of these people are actually wrong. The answer is weirder than you might think.

Timestamps:
00:00 Tim Cook Is Retiring
01:36 Apple Silicon Masterstroke
02:43 Where Apple Thrived
05:33 Tim Cook Is An Operator, Not A Visionary
06:05 Apple Car and the Vision Pros
10:20 Where Apple Intelligence Went Wrong
12:13 Why Apple Lost the Narrative
14:24 The Next CEO's Opportunity

Every law, every investment thesis, every AI-related career is built around the assumption that we can forecast where these models are going to go, that we'll be able to control them, understand them, and therefore build and invest appropriately.But Claude Mythos shows that the more capable these models get, the worse we are at understanding what is going on. So we need to talk about what the model is and what it can do before we can talk about the implications of it.
Subscribe to my Substack: http://www.gettheleverage.com
Timestamps00:00 Hype Versus Reality
00:49 Meet Mythos Model
01:48 Cybersecurity Shockwave
02:44 Benchmarks Are Breaking
04:49 Model Taste And Vibes
05:49 Why Mythos Improved
07:09 Recursive Acceleration Fears
08:55 Career Impact Syndrome
10:59 Company Productivity Bottlenecks
12:32 Prepare For The Shift