2025-08-15 23:45:25
One query I get often is “What class/skill would you suggest our kids take/learn to compete in the modern economy?” A few years ago, people expected me to say STEM, or make the contrarian case for a liberal arts education. Today, the expectation is AI. But my answer remains unchanged: To be successful, master storytelling.
Communities with larger proportions of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation, and … procreation. Storytelling = efficient transmission of survival-relevant information. Among men, being skilled in storytelling increases attractiveness and perceived status to potential long-term mates. The arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers.
In the business world, the flow of capital concentrates around good stories. Entrepreneurs, aka salespeople, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward. Valuations aren’t a function of balance sheets, but of the stories that give those balance sheets meaning and direction.
Every business I’ve ever started was based on a compelling story. Prof G Media is no different, though stories are our product. Mia Silverio, our research lead, plays a key role developing the stories I tell. This week, I asked her to write about the art and science of effective storytelling.
by Mia Silverio
I’ve been on hundreds of Zoom calls with Scott (not an exaggeration). Over the past five years, I’ve learned how he crafts powerful presentations. This is how we think about business storytelling at Prof G Media.
Scott will often stop me when we’re reviewing his decks to call for “more drama.” Infusing a narrative with drama and emotion separates an exceptional storyteller from a mediocre one.
A good storyteller is simply a good entertainer. Am I discounting the importance of the underlying content? Somewhat. But the unfortunate truth is that even if you have revelatory information to share, it’s not going to have an impact if no one’s paying attention. As writer and podcaster Derek Thompson observed, “There’s something overlapping in the Venn diagram between what is demanded of standup comics and what is demanded from public intellectuals. And that is: Explain this shit to me — make me feel something.”
Research tells us that experiences that elicit emotions are more memorable than ones that don’t. Your story doesn’t need to make your audience cry or laugh, but it should inspire thoughtfulness or surprise, promote introspection or curiosity, or evoke longing or guilt. At the very least, you need to be self-aware enough to make a deprecating joke about a dull topic.
Two ways to inject emotion into your presentations:
No. 1: Lean into provocative, contrarian takes that surprise your audience or challenge their assumptions.
The first slide of Scott’s 2024 TED talk asked, “Do we love our children?” The question begs an obvious answer — yes. But it sets up the next slides, which show irrefutable evidence that young people today have been handed a sour deal.
If we’ve elected officials who have let the American dream and the promises of capitalism die in the service of older generations’ enrichment, Scott asked, how does that behavior square with really loving our children?
Powerful stories surprise us. Harry Potter running into a brick wall and not getting head trauma is so delightfully perplexing that it prepares you for the magical new world you’re about to enter.
Scott is well known for his surprising takes: “Young people need to drink more.” “The era of the brand is over.” “Tesla is dramatically overvalued.” Etc. But provocative statements only work when they’re anchored in evidence.
If you don’t have the evidence or creative leeway with your content, you can still deliver surprises through how you present. Hide half a chart in PowerPoint and reveal it at a key moment. Drop in a video or audio clip. Bring in a guest. Move — literally. Scott has worn wigs, lip-synched onstage, and jumped up and down shirtless at SXSW. No one expects these stunts, which is why they land. Surprise gets attention and draws your audience into the story.
I never thought I’d use the words “accounting” and “viral” in the same sentence, but a professor at the University of Oklahoma changed that. Instead of droning on about balance sheets, Jonathan Kern runs around his classroom singing about depreciation and leading chants about cash flow. Viral TikTok videos show lecture halls full of engaged students. He made the most boring subject in business school unforgettable by doing the exact opposite of what everyone expects from an accounting class.
No. 2: Use engaging data.
Be selective with your data. And by “selective,” I don’t mean stingy — any persuasive story should include quantitative evidence. What I mean is, select quantitative data that has an outsized qualitative impact.
Use the “wow” test. If a data point, sentence, or slide doesn’t challenge or surprise you, cut it. Dig for the good data, don’t settle for the bland stuff.
For example, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft will together spend $364 billion on capital expenditures this year. I could leave it at that, or I could make that data dramatic (and meaningful) by telling you that for the same amount of money, you could build another International Space Station, reinvent the nuclear bomb, construct six nuclear submarines, dig the Channel Tunnel between England and France, run Japan’s military for an entire year … and still have enough left over to buy everyone in Manhattan and the Bronx an iPhone.
I believe there’s “wow factor” data in every field, no matter how boring. Consider this dull data point: The IRS processed over 266 million tax returns and other forms last year. To add drama, try this: Cumulatively, Americans will spend 7.9 billion hours doing taxes this year. That’s equivalent to about 900,000 years, or three times the amount of time homo sapiens have been on planet Earth.
OK, maybe that’s a bit too dramatic, but you get the idea.
Good stories teach us something new. Good storytellers cultivate the ability to see what others don’t.
I call this “zooming out.” Most people analyze events as if they’re looking through a camera lens, seeing only what’s in focus. Skilled storytellers pull back to capture the wider landscape, revealing potential causes and effects that were invisible in the close-up shot. Put differently, zooming out requires moving from the what happened layer of understanding to the so what? what made it possible? what happens next? layers.
Zooming out is most helpful in the analysis and brainstorming stage, when you’re deciding what story to tell. That’s how I arrived at my prediction that GLP-1s will supercharge the medical aesthetics market. Most GLP-1 news covers how the drug will affect the food and beverage industry. That’s the obvious story. What’s a more interesting one? I zoomed out and asked, what exactly happens after a patient loses 50+ pounds?
Rapid weight loss can create beauty problems: excess skin and “Ozempic face” — the gaunt, aged look you get from losing facial fat too quickly, often “fixed” with filler. I wondered if this was already fueling demand in medical aesthetics. It is: 60% of plastic surgeons say weight-loss drugs are boosting their business.
The numbers are striking. Surgical lifts and tucks are up 20% to 40% since 2019. Facial fat grafting jumped 50% in the past year. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that 2 in 5 GLP-1 patients are considering surgery, and 1 in 5 already went under the knife.
Now zoom out further: Probably more than 40% of Americans qualify medically for GLP-1s, but only 2% are taking them. As adoption scales and insurance companies expand coverage, we’re looking at massive demand for cosmetic procedures to address the unwanted byproducts of weight loss.
Zooming out works in investing, too. In 1900 betting on the automobile probably seemed smart. But U.S. automakers delivered mediocre returns thanks to competition and consolidation. The real windfall came decades later from the ripple effects: Cars enabled suburbs, suburbs fueled demand for big-box retail, and Walmart stock returned 1,600x between 1980 and 2020 — roughly 70 times better than Ford over the same period. When everyone spots the primary trend, zoom out to spot the causes and effects.
When Scott presents in a different country, I adapt his deck with region-specific data. Even small details get tailored. People pay more attention when content is personally relevant, so frame your message in a way that makes them care.
Great storytellers do this. Ruth Bader Ginsburg advanced gender equality by taking on cases where men, not women, were harmed by gendered laws — forcing male judges to confront bias in a way that felt personally relevant.
Personalization is only half the battle. The other half is context — framing numbers, concepts, or jargon so their meaning is instantly clear. When Elizabeth Warren protested Trump’s tax bill, she told Congress: “No baby should lose healthcare so Jeff Bezos can buy a third yacht.”
She could have cited the revenue loss in billions, but that wouldn’t land as hard. By putting the cost in human terms and tying it to a vivid image, she gave a dry budgetary trade-off context and made it impossible to ignore.
You can do the same with business data. “Nvidia is worth $4.5 trillion” is just a statistic. But saying “Nvidia is worth more as a percentage of global GDP than the U.K., France, and Germany’s stock markets” provides the context needed to understand the company’s scale, just like Warren’s yacht line made people feel the trade-off.
Context also makes complex topics accessible. Take this stat: Living next to a nuclear power plant for a year exposes you to 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. That sounds terrifying until you learn that eating two bananas gives you nearly twice that dose.
TikTok creator Becca Bloom nails this by explaining finance terminology using colloquial Gen Z language. She defines market cap as the total value of a company’s shares, aka “checking someone’s Hinge profile and instantly knowing if they’re high effort or still figuring life out.”
You can supercharge the power of context through visualization. Data visualization is a defining feature of our work and core to the Prof G Media brand. It also leverages a basic fact about comprehension: The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Scott’s presentations reflect this. His AI Optimist talk features 13 text-based slides and 104 slides filled with charts, images, and videos.
Here’s an example. I could tell you that AI data centers are major CO₂ contributors. Or I could show you this:
This chart works because it pairs visualization with baseline context. Without showing that the aviation industry accounts for 2.5% of global carbon emissions, how would you know 3.4% is really huge?
Back in 2021, when everyone was losing their minds over the metaverse, Scott was famously bearish. (“Headsets are nothing more than wearable sex repellent.”) I was putting together slides to back up his position, so I pulled Google search data for “metaverse.” The chart looked OK in isolation — a big spike, followed by a higher baseline.
But here’s why context is so important. For fun, I compared searches for the metaverse to something random: Crocs. Those ugly foam shoes consistently outpaced metaverse searches, even at its peak hype moment. If more people were googling Crocs than the supposed future of human interaction, maybe the metaverse wasn’t as inevitable as everyone claimed.
I started calling this the “Crocs Test.” It’s held up surprisingly well. The Crocs Test correctly predicted the collapse of Quibi, NFTs, and Virgin Galactic.
Stories exist to be shared. We tell them to entertain, teach, connect, and move other people. Storytelling is a service — a way of charting a path, yes, but also a mechanism for generating the hope needed to sustain us on our journey.
A well-told story creates a bridge between storyteller and audience, unlocking emotions in all directions. Scott, who the New York Times likened to Howard Stern — always sharp, sometimes crass — gets surprisingly emotional onstage during his presentations. He almost cried while giving his TED Talk, and I almost cried reading the comments on YouTube, not because we were receiving praise, but because we’d given hope:
Good stories help us recognize feelings we couldn’t name, experiences we believed no one else shared, and insights we knew but couldn’t articulate. As Walt Disney said of storytellers, “we instill hope again and again.”
P.S. Did you know women are 20% less likely than men to use AI? True data point. In the most recent Markets newsletter exclusive, we dig into the AI gender gap. Read and subscribe here.
The post See What Others Miss: The Prof G Storytelling Playbook appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-08-08 22:52:20
Economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value). Today, information is abundant, attention is scarce. The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention. The most recent example: American Eagle added $200 million in market cap overnight, not by increasing sales or lowering costs, but by hacking the attention economy with a Sydney Sweeney ad calibrated for the culture war’s choose-your-own-narrative ecosystem. The stock popped another 20% after President Trump praised the ad on his social media platform. Sydney Sweeney doesn’t have great jeans, or genes, but great memes.
Few people understand attention economy dynamics better than Kyla Scanlon. She captured, monetized, and continues to hold my attention on TikTok. (Where else?) She’s a frequent guest on Prof G Markets — listen here for Kyla’s American Eagle take — and the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. Kyla coined the term “vibecession” to explain the disconnect between the strong fundamentals and gloomy outlook of the Biden economy. This week, I asked her to write about how the attention economy affects young people.
by Kyla Scanlon
We’re all living through a time of immense change. The news cycle is whiplash-inducing, frameworks are being broken, and everything feels unmoored.
Last year on the road talking about my book, In This Economy?, I heard one common thread: worry. A generation-shaping worry. CEOs are worried about their businesses, manufacturers about tariffs, and young people about everything — from identity to employment to whether the world they’re inheriting even makes sense.
Young people today face a triple disruption: technological creative destruction through AI and algorithmic systems, plus political and economic upheaval through tariffs and increasing fiscal uncertainty. While every generation has faced challenges, today’s young people confront a massive reckoning between technology, economic opportunity, and personal identity.
Across the U.S., young people tell me the same thing: They’re worried about jobs, but more important, they question whether the concept of a “career” will even exist in five years. They’re graduating into a Great Uncertainty, where traditional pathways to security are disappearing, affecting how they think about their entire economic future — from employment to homeownership to marriage to having kids.
To understand what’s happening, we need to understand two things: the attention economy and the real economy. But let me start with a very surreal moment that crystallized everything for me.
Late Friday night, on January 17, 2025, Donald Trump launched a memecoin. By Sunday — a mere three days later! — Trump and his team had generated $60 billion in paper wealth from pure narrative value. By Monday, Inauguration Day, he was both president again and one of the world’s richest individuals, entirely through attention-based speculation. The coin officially “has nothing to do with any political campaign or office” (or so they say), but its success came precisely because it’s associated with him.
I believe this moment cemented our final step in the transition into the attention economy. The president of the United States bypassed every traditional wealth-creation mechanism and generated more money in 36 hours than most companies create in decades. All through attention and narrative.
Historically, value creation followed a clear progression:
Trumpcoin skipped the middle steps entirely:
Attention is truly all you need. Attention became the product, the business improvement, the way to compound wealth. It worked with immense speed, because Trump controls political positioning (executive power, regulatory influence); platforms (narrative shaping via Truth Social); and now token wealth (instant value creation through pure narrative).
This was the birth of the Attention Singularity, where power, narrative, and wealth merged into one self-reinforcing system. Attention became so dense that it warped reality itself. We’re watching a system where attention directly creates wealth, wealth instantly empowers, power captures more attention, and each cycle gets faster and stronger.
Many young people watched this and thought: Of course this is how the world works now. Of course attention is the ultimate currency. Of course the old rules don’t apply. I have to change everything.
Watching this unfold made me question everything I thought I knew about value creation. (Cue the meme of someone throwing away a copy of the Intelligent Investor.) But it also made me realize we needed to look at the broader ecosystem that made Trumpcoin possible in the first place, because this was the logical conclusion of the system we’ve built.
Four interconnected elements have reshaped our reality:
These four elements reinforce one another, forming a digital cage. When narrative production becomes more valuable than actual production, we risk creating a world where attention harvesting matters more than building things. Hence, Trumpcoin.
But young people aren’t just passive victims of this system. They’re responding to it, and their responses are reshaping politics.
When things are uncertain, people retreat to extremes but also vote for “new normals.” Trump won in 2024 partly by capturing young voters who believed traditional professional paths promising stability might cease to exist soon. Coupled with increased zero-sum thinking, institutional distrust, and attention economy dynamics, young people are trying to find footing in a fundamentally new world.The conservative shift among young voters is about more than politics. When OpenAI’s Sam Altman says AI will require the “whole structure of society to be up for debate and reconfiguration,” the entire nature of the self is being questioned.
The boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, had a somewhat clearish wealth-building formula (broad generalization) and a (seemingly) clearer sense of self:
This shaped their worldview and understanding of success. Boomers are the wealthiest generation to have ever lived, thanks to affordable housing and strong equity markets.
The boomer formula worked for many despite disruptions like the stagflation of the 1970s and the mega-high interest rates of the 1980s. But many boomers who benefited from this system have participated in its dismantling through thousands of small decisions prioritizing short-term gains over systemic stability.
Today, boomers own 38% of homes nationwide, despite comprising just over 20% of the population. Millennials haven’t caught up to boomer life markers and homeownership rates. Homeownership rates are even lower for Gen Z than Millennials at the same ages, according to a UC Berkeley study. Meanwhile, 72.9% of wealth is held by people over 55. Millennials and Gen Z own 71% less wealth than their population representation would predict, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb’s Barbell Strategy. We increasingly have a world split between young people 1) forgoing college to pursue the trades or 2) gambling everything on digital moon shots.
Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is a “method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time.” Here, we see people doing maybe one or the other. The barbell economy creates its own culture:
To be clear, a middle path still exists and is evolving. I’m generalizing to make a point. Many people are still going down the traditional road — and rightly so! — albeit with more skepticism. For some, it’s working, especially for those entering healthcare and social services, the only sectors adding jobs currently. Others are trying to bridge the gap between the past and the present with mixed results.
But as my former professor Dr. Indudeep Chhachhi says, “The opposite of rationality isn’t irrationality — it’s being normal.” When the “safe path” might be eliminated by AI overnight, hypergambling becomes emotionally and economically sensible. Safety seekers are making calculated bets. Digital gamblers are responding to an economy that increasingly rewards exponential outcomes.
I see two possible paths, both requiring us to acknowledge how the game has changed:
There are policy choices here around technology regulation, wealth transfer mechanisms, platform governance. But spending this year talking to young people across America has convinced me that the deeper challenge isn’t just technical or policy-driven. It’s about something more important: our collective capacity to understand one another across the attention economy’s fault lines.
Young people aren’t broken. They’re adapting to a world that’s fundamentally different from the one their parents knew. But their parents aren’t wrong either for feeling like the ground has shifted beneath their feet. The attention economy has created new forms of value and new pathways to wealth. The old ways of understanding ourselves and one another are straining to keep up.
The attention economy isn’t going anywhere. It’s too powerful, too integrated into how value gets created now. It’s a system, though, and systems can be changed. As historian Howard Zinn wrote: “If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
_______
P.S. Kyla Scanlon is the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. After you buy her book, you should subscribe to her newsletter.
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2025-08-01 22:31:21
This year, I wrote a book called Notes on Being a Man. My publisher is billing it as a “path forward for men and parents of boys.” (Sounds … pretentious.) It’s also my life story — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Working on the book, I observed a pattern: My friends were/are key to the trajectory of me. According to Pew, 61% of U.S. adults say having close friends is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life. The shares of people who say the same about marriage (23%), children (26%), and making a lot of money (25%) pale in comparison.
And yet, American males have fewer friends than they used to. Three decades ago, 55% of men reported having at least six close friends — plenty for a pickup basketball game. Today only 27% of men can say the same. Worse, 15% of men say they have zero friends — a 5x increase since 1990. Read that sentence again: Nearly 1 in 7 men today doesn’t have a single person he can call to shoot hoops, grab a drink, or catch a movie.
What happens to those men when the shit gets real? One horrifying data point: Men account for 3 out of every 4 deaths of despair in America. Too many men are stuck, isolated, unproductive, and prone to obesity. They’re addicted to drugs, gambling, porn, and whatever other substances provide a dopa hit with minimal friction. They’re susceptible to misogyny, conspiracy theories, and radicalization. They make inadequate mates, employees, and citizens. Can we turn this around? Yes. We have to. That’s why I wrote the book. Here’s an excerpt about making friends.
________________
The best thing anyone can do to improve their own success is make friends with people of high character who are ambitious. You are the average of your five closest friends.
For the past three or four decades, my friends have mostly been men. For a long time earlier in life, women represented two things to me—they could either help make me rich, or I could (maybe) sleep with them. Men could help me out professionally. This was the stupid, closed-minded, transactional, and sexist way I approached my life until well into my forties. No longer. I’ve spent the past ten years developing really strong friendships with women and am especially close with the women I work with. One female colleague has been with me fifteen years, another twenty-five. I love my male friends for reasons that have nothing to do with me getting ahead.
Your goal at any age is to surround yourself with impressive, good, nice people. As you get older, though, the lanes in which you might feel comfortable narrow. The idea of going on a man-date or investing in a new friendship feels more difficult. The older you get, the more you just want to hang out at home, see your partner and kids, pop a gummy, watch Netflix, and maintain links with the friends you have, without putting effort into new ones.
Socially engaged men face the decision of whether to cap the number of their friendships or not. My advice: Never shut down possibility. Get in the way of chance. I’m always on the lookout for new friends. As we’re the average of our five closest friends, wouldn’t it make sense that I’d want to keep expanding and upgrading that friend group? The goal isn’t to surround myself with doppelgangers, it’s more about me learning, getting better, thinking differently. I find friends by pushing the limits. By not being afraid to put myself out there. By going beyond my comfort zone, e.g., staying home and watching Netflix. By assuming other people are on the lookout for friends, too. Example: George Hahn reads the audio version of my weekly newsletter. During Covid, he came out with a bunch of very funny viral videos. One day I sent him a Tweet: Can we be friends? Sure, he wrote back. What are you doing now? Nothing, I said. Okay, said George, let’s grab coffee. An hour later, we were having brunch in Soho. Recently, the CIO of an investment firm texted me out of nowhere: I think we’d be great friends. Think of it as friendship cold-calling. It takes courage and resilience. If others aren’t interested, they’re not interested. If they bite, you might find yourself having breakfast or lunch with someone great.
These days, in my quest for immortality, I’ve begun getting PRP—platelet-rich plasma—injections. The doctor draws my blood, spins it in a centrifuge, and re-injects it in my shoulders. It’s supposed to relieve aches, pains, and stiffness. I’ve gone a few times, and have gotten friendly with the doc, a young, good-looking guy in his mid-forties. Last visit, I asked him about himself—was he single/married/partnered, gay/straight, did he have kids? Straight, single, and childless, he appreciated my offer to set him up. We began talking about raising boys. Turns out he’s the team physician for the New York Rangers. He suggested we go to a hockey game—would my sons be interested?
A decade or two ago, I would have said no. Not his fault. I wouldn’t have been confident enough. He was too impressive, and I would have been intimidated. It would have been too important to me to not admit I wanted him to like me, and for us to become friends. This happens to a lot of young people in America—for various reasons, their self-esteem gets so battered from hitting roadblock after roadblock while watching others succeed that they give up, foreclose on taking any more risks, whether it’s applying for a job or approaching a woman. Don’t bother, they tell themselves. You’re not worthy, you’re not that guy. In my thirties and forties, I went to every social event, found the most powerful people in the room, and became their friends or invited them to golf so I could get their business. And for reasons too exotic for me to comprehend, I was struggling with happiness? I said yes to the hockey game. The four of us had a great time. Note: You’re the average of your five closest friends. Never shut down the opportunity to meet and learn from new people.
Life is so rich,
P.S. You can pre-order Notes on Being a Man here. It will be available Nov 4.
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2025-07-25 22:54:15
It’s getting awfully late, early, for late-night TV.
Stephen Colbert shocked his audience on July 17 with the news that CBS had canceled The Late Show. I interpreted it as the latest sign of America’s descent into fascism — another media company bending the knee. The headlines came just three days after Colbert slammed Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16 million to settle a nuisance lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview, calling it a “big fat bribe.” CBS is part of Paramount, which needed the Trump administration to bless the transfer of billions from one billionaire nepobaby (David Ellison) to another billionaire nepobaby (Shari Redstone). At some point, people will notice the only ones willing to buy media companies are rich kids who didn’t have to actually make any money. But I digress.
I was wrong about Colbert. Economics are driving him out, not politics. Granted, two things can be true at once, and Colbert’s constant ribbing of the president probably made his walk on the green mile shorter. But, let’s be clear … winter was coming. This is an overdue reshaping of the supply chain in TV. Colbert isn’t going anywhere, it’s 185 of the 200 people working for him who are going to be getting their real estate licenses. The media reaction was outrage. Nothing is more precious than a 60-something comedian, who earns 100x what his staff makes, getting furious at the suits.
But the opportunistic infection that took a weakened late-night show down was the WGA’s decision to go on strike in 2023. Netflix and, to a lesser extent, scripted TV had enough shows in the bank to hang on to all or most of their audience, respectively, for about five months. But nobody was going to tune in to Jimmy Kimmel to see Michael Avenatti … again. When late-night went dark, millions of Americans realized they didn’t miss it, and they never returned. Jon Stewart should tell the WGA board, not Paramount’s management, to go fuck themselves.
Johnny Carson, the “king of late night” during his three-decade run as host of The Tonight Show, attracted a nightly audience of 10 million to 15 million at his peak. Adjusted for population growth, that would be like 25 million people tuning in tonight. By the late ’70s, Tonight accounted for 17% of NBC’s revenue. In 1988, a few years before Carson handed the reins to Jay Leno, advertising dollars spent on late-night TV surged to more than $1.2 billion, as carmakers, beverage companies, and movie studios rushed to win over younger, more affluent consumers.
In 2002, Leno’s show routinely attracted more than 5 million viewers a night — still strong — and late-night shows continued to deliver into the next decade. About 15 years ago, a popular late-night program could earn about $100 million a year.
Those days are gone. The entertainment sector has experienced a seismic shift, with late-night-TV advertising revenue collapsing 50%, to an estimated $220 million in 2024 from $439 million in 2018, according to data firm Guideline. In the five years leading up to its Chapter 11 filing, General Motors’ revenue declined 40%. In sum, if late-night television were a stand-alone business, it would have declared bankruptcy last year.
During the last two months — for the first time ever — viewers spent more time watching streaming services, including YouTube and Netflix, than the broadcast and cable networks combined. We’re still catching the highlight clips of late-night TV. But, as they do with the rest of media, technology platforms rent the content for 2 cents on the dollar.
It isn’t the end of Colbert. It’s the end of late-night TV. Colbert’s Late Show reportedly has been losing more than $40 million a year for CBS, with a budget of $100 million per season and about 200 employees. Colbert quipped: “I could see us losing $24 million, but where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh, yeah.” Assuming the show is reeling in $60 million a year in revenue, that equates to $300,000 per employee. But less than 10% of The Late Show’s audience is between 18 and 49 years old, that coveted demographic still in their mating years and making irrational, high-margin purchases. And one of the key insights from the 2024 election is that podcast listeners swing elections, as they are (much) younger and more likely to be swayed. Nine out of 10 people who watch cable news and late-night, from an economic lens, don’t matter.
Think about it: As a percentage of the population, late-night has shed 90% of its audience over the past several decades. Contrast Colbert with our company, Prof G Media. (I never miss the opportunity to boast.) We expect to generate $15 million to $20 million in annual revenue next year, with about 15 full-time people. That figure, which excludes my podcast Pivot with Kara Swisher, equates to $1 million to $1.3 million per employee. Unlike the late-night category, we’re growing 20% to 30% annually, with half of our listeners in the 18-49 age bracket. We’re reaching nearly as many of the core demographic as late-night with 8% of the staff/cost.
TV’s biggest stars are simply arbitraging the means of production (i.e., losing 90% of their staff). The talent in front of the camera/mic has figured out how to hold on to their income and cultural relevance by reducing production costs.
When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson in 2023 — a week after the network settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for almost $800 million — he embraced his newfound independence. The Tucker Carlson Show averaged 1.06 million views throughout most of June and sat at No. 11 on YouTube’s podcast rankings last week. Even if his audience is smaller than it was previously, he’s likely capturing similar economic value (i.e., pay) with a smaller team. Podcasts are TV … just more efficient.
Megyn Kelly, ousted from NBC in 2019, is another example. Semafor reported last year that her Megyn Kelly Show was drawing audiences comparable to those of the legacy media outlets — with only six employees. The show, among the most followed political podcasts in the U.S., had 3.5 million subscribers in March.
Finally, consider Conan O’Brien, who hosted Late Night and The Tonight Show, both on NBC, and then Conan on TBS. I’d speculate that O’Brien, who launched the weekly podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in 2018 and later sold his podcast business to SiriusXM for $150 million, is making more money today than he did in his late-night heyday. The 150 people who worked at Late Night? See above: real estate agents.
Even though his audience has dropped from a peak of more than 3.1 million viewers in 2017-18, Colbert enjoys better ratings than his competitors, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, registering an average of 2.42 million viewers during the three-month period ending in June. That compared with 1.77 million and 1.19 million for Kimmel and Fallon, respectively. If Colbert can’t hang on, it doesn’t bode well for his rivals or the staff who don’t make it onto the podcast arc with their boss.
Colbert, Fallon, and Kimmel shouldn’t be worried. They are caged in a broken business model, and it’s only a matter of time before they break free. In his first broadcast since CBS pulled the plug, Colbert earlier this week warned Trump that the “gloves are off.” When his contract ends in 10 months, the economic shackles will also come off. Instead of leading a $60 million business with 200 staff, Colbert will likely helm a $20 million business with 12 highly skilled people. These shows might lack the glitz and glamor of late-night. But that can be an advantage, as Colbert demonstrated during the pandemic, when he delivered monologues at home without a live audience, his wife, Evie Colbert, by his side.
More stars will follow Colbert into the next frontier after he leaves the late-night stage. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who’s already reduced her on-air commitments to pursue podcasts, may not be able to match the $25 million salary she reportedly negotiated at the network, but her current compensation is unsustainable … and she knows it.
When it returned to its traditional format in the Ed Sullivan Theater in June 2021, The Late Show seemed eager to embrace the old-school model — and ditch everything it learned in lockdown. But the future looks more like Colbert at his vacation home in South Carolina than in front of a live audience with a band, Manhattan rent, and union workers. It means sharply lower production costs, with a lean team of 20, not 200. Call it the Old Navy of media: 80% of the production quality for a fifth of the price. The end is nigh for late-night TV. But podcasts delivering high-quality — and highly profitable — entertainment are just warming up.
Colbert will be just as relevant, and as much a pain in Trump’s ass, he’ll just do it via a different means of production. Podcasts are TV, but with an audio-first overlay and better unit economics. Commending the RAF in 1940, Winston Churchill said that never “was so much owed by so many to so few.” In cable news and late-night television, rarely have so many talented people been less relevant.
Life is so rich,
P.S. On the Prof G Pod Conversations this week I spoke with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer about the future of the Democratic Party. Listen here on Apple or here on Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
The post Last Laugh appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-07-19 00:18:45
My go-to historical frame of reference is World War II. At a staggering global cost of 85 million lives, the Second World War was the crucible of the 20th century — an explosion of unfathomable destruction, followed by an unparalleled period of (unevenly distributed) peace and prosperity. As I’m a catastrophist, I’m hard-wired to dwell on the first part, and take the second part for granted. Also, World War II, specifically the European theater, is personal. As a kid, my father and his friends kept tabs on people with foreign accents, believing they were tracking Nazi spies in their hometown of Glasgow.
When the war ended, Dad was 15 — three years away from being deployed to the front. My Jewish mother narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. She found relative safety sheltering in the London tube during the Blitz. Had the Allies not stood their ground, my mom’s life could have ended with a train ride, and you’d be reading something else. So many of us don’t appreciate how much of our success isn’t our fault.
Last week, I wrote that masked agents in fatigues raiding churches, schools, and workplaces and separating families without due process is not modern America, but 1930s Europe. We’ve seen this movie before — it doesn’t end well. History, however, isn’t a single-screen theater, but a multiplex of outcomes. I recently spoke with historian Heather Cox Richardson, who is remarkable. While we share a diagnosis of the present, professor Richardson is an optimist and an Americanist. Comparing the present — what I call our slow burn into fascism — to previous periods of instability in American history, Richardson says, “I’m not convinced that the outcome is going to be a dictatorship. It could just as easily be that the outcome is a renewed American democracy. But it’s going to be messy, either way.” The question isn’t whether she is correct but rather, what can we learn from American history, specifically the 1850s and 1890s?
At the beginning of the 1850s, American slaveholders were undefeated. They had the political capital to expand the fugitive slave laws, requiring law enforcement throughout the U.S. to aid in the arrest of runaways. If that sounds like it rhymes with today’s battles over sanctuary cities and the federalization of the California National Guard, trust your instincts. In 1855 free-staters and pro-slavery forces, egged on by national political leaders, clashed in a Civil War sneak preview called Bleeding Kansas. A year later, a pro-slavery senator attacked an abolitionist one, Charles Sumner, with a cane, nearly beating him to death on the Senate floor. If rhetoric leading to political violence reminds you of what currently passes for presidential leadership, again, trust your instincts. And for contemporary parallels of political violence, see: January 6, Charlottesville, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Paul Pelosi, Steve Scalise, the attacks on state legislators in Minnesota, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. As Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski recently said, “We are all afraid.” Given our history, that’s common sense.
As the 1850s neared their end, slaveholders appeared invincible. In a distant echo of today’s court battles over birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that Black Americans, whether free or slaves, couldn’t be U.S. citizens. Two years later, abolitionist John Brown led a Hail Mary raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, intending to ignite a nationwide slave revolt. Federal military forces under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee put down what contemporary accounts called an insurrection. At the time, Brown’s failed raid was a low point for abolitionists, but in retrospect it may have represented the high-water mark of pro-slave power in U.S. politics. Within a few years, a previously unthinkable coalition of unionists (many of whom held deeply racist views) and abolitionists had formed around Lincoln’s Republican Party, won a war to preserve the union, freed the slaves, launched Reconstruction, and set America on the path of industrialization.
There’s a reason many contemporary scholars are talking about a new Gilded Age. The period between 1870 and 1900, similar to our era, was defined by extreme inequality, the corporate capture of government, corruption, and widespread distrust in institutions. Today the robber barons have rebranded as tech bros. Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine have been reborn as Trump’s meme coin — a pay-for-play crypto scheme operating out of the Oval Office. The fear that Congress and the courts work for corporations and the wealthy … remains a constant.
Reformers offer another parallel. The trust-busters of the Gilded Age had Teddy Roosevelt, who took on monopolies in railroads, sugar, and oil. We have Lina Kahn working to regulate digital monopolies that dictate the terms of commerce and preside over a broken information ecosystem. Leveraging distrust of Republicans and Democrats, the short-lived Populist Party of the 1890s demanded the direct election of senators, progressive taxation, and labor protections. Andrew Yang, who consistently loses elections but wins arguments, has championed reforms, notably the universal basic income and ranked choice voting. Zohran Mamdani, a progressive beneficiary of ranked choice voting, echoes William Jennings Bryan’s slogan, “Plutocracy is abhorrent to the Republic,” when he talks about “halalflation.” Reformers and their demands change throughout our history, but they share a common theme of fighting for the little guy against monied interests.
American history is a competition between two visions of governance, according to professor Richardson. Either we’re a society where people are equal under the law and have a say in their government, or we’re a society where elites have the right to rule and concentrate wealth, as they’re simply better than everyone else. At this moment, I’d argue that the 1% are protected by the law but not bound by it, and the bottom 99% are bound by the law but not protected by it.
In the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie personified the elite. An immigrant who made his fortune in steel during the early years of American industrialization, Carnegie initially credited his adopted country with his success. Later, however, Carnegie argued he was self-made, insisting he had a right to concentrate wealth in his hands, as he was the best steward for society. Elon Musk, also an immigrant, built his first fortune on internet infrastructure financed by American taxpayers. He built his second fortune jump-starting the electric car industry, financed once again by billions in subsidies.
Somewhere along the way, he became convinced he was humanity’s savior. For Musk, anyone who stands in the way of anointing him First Friend and/or (unelected) president is an enemy of the state. The most fortunate among us have replaced patriotism with techno-karenism. Daniel Kahneman found that, above a certain threshold, money offers no incremental increase in one’s happiness. However, there’s evidence everywhere that men who aggregate billions from technology firms become infected by an inexplicable sense of aggrievance.
Our idolatry of wealth makes Americans vulnerable to men like Carnegie and Musk. As the citizens of a country predicated on the dream of economic prosperity, Americans conflate wealth with leadership. The bottom 90% tolerate — even celebrate — a Hunger Games economy, where the rich live long, remarkable lives and everyone else dies a slow death. Why? Because each of us believes we’ll eventually reach the top. That belief isn’t optimism but opium, and it keeps the bottom 90% from realizing they’re essentially nutrition for the top 10%. Private jet owners can now accelerate the depreciation on their plane(s), but we’re stripping healthcare from millions of people. Does that make any fucking sense?
One common protest slogan in the Trump era is “This is not who we are.” I agree, but as a student of history I know that’s incomplete. A more accurate slogan: “This isn’t who we want to be.” Richardson says our model should be Abraham Lincoln, who navigated through a period of political instability and violence and renewed American democracy by appealing to the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence. This Independence Day, Richardson wrote about the men who signed America’s founding document. They risked everything they had to defend the idea of human equality — an idea that’s been America’s work in progress since 1776.
“Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to ‘take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.’”
I find it difficult to see optimism in Lincoln’s story (see catastrophist). After he won the bloodiest war in American history, an assassin’s bullet robbed him of the opportunity to shape the peace. But at Gettysburg, just a few months after a pivotal battle where tens of thousands of Americans gave the last full measure of devotion, Lincoln appealed to American values as well as the American people. Then as now, the ball is in our court. “I’m not ready to give up on America,” Richardson told me. “We’ve renewed our democracy in the past, and we have the tools to do it again.”
None of us knows how this moment will turn out.
Perhaps that’s the point. But previous generations of reformers who renewed American democracy didn’t have the luxury of hindsight or guarantees, either. They had only the present moment and a choice: retreat into cynicism or push forward into the messy, uncertain work of democracy. Susan B. Anthony faced decades of ridicule and arrest. Martin Luther King’s dream must’ve seemed impossible from his Birmingham jail cell. Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez organized immigrant farmworkers who had every reason to believe the system would never change. Harvey Milk knew visibility meant vulnerability in a hostile world. What they shared wasn’t optimism, but the willingness to act as if democracy could be renewed even when the evidence suggested otherwise.
My mother survived the Blitz because the Allies refused to give fascists the satisfaction of her fear; my father spent his youth tracking imaginary Nazi spies and joined the Royal Navy as freedom felt worth protecting. Democracy survives the same way it always has — not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because ordinary people decide it’s worth the risk. Resist.
Life is so rich,
P.S. My co-host Jessica Tarlov and I discuss Trump’s Epstein problem on this week’s Raging Moderates podcast. Listen here on Spotify or here on Apple, or watch on YouTube.
The post Resist appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-07-11 22:57:17
President Trump is no longer fighting inflation, China, or AI. Instead, he’s declared war on a manufactured threat: the “enemy within” — immigrants, journalists, and professors. Our biggest threat, apparently, isn’t Russian aggression or economic inequality; it’s your Uber driver or anthropology professor. This is not only cruel (and depraved) but stupid, as the chill being cast across the agriculture, services, and construction sectors will likely be more inflationary than the tariffs (more stupidity). Trump’s goal is to deport 4 million undocumented people over four years — that’s about 3% of the U.S. workforce; 10% to 15% in several sectors dependent on immigrant labor.
The “Big, Beautiful Bill” signed into law on July 4 isn’t about border security. It’s a blueprint for mass detention and deportation, a $75 billion hammer in search of a scapegoat. Under the law, ICE gets funding that rivals the military budgets of Italy or Israel to build sites like the facility in the Everglades nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. The goal? Fear.
This isn’t law enforcement. It’s authoritarian cosplay designed to scare the electorate and silence dissent. Trump’s war doesn’t punish behavior but identity, as immigrants from certain countries and ethnicities are targeted. Federal agents in full tactical gear swept through a park in Latino-heavy L.A. this week, just to make a point. The mayor said: “It’s the way a city looks before a coup.” Q. What do storm troopers, the KKK, and ICE have in common? A mask.
ICE has become Trump’s personal Praetorian Guard. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’s running mate, was excoriated for comparing ICE to the gestapo. But spare us the bullshit indignation: Masked agents in fatigues raiding churches and schools separating families is not modern America but 1930s Europe. Or is it?
In the 2026 fiscal year, ICE will receive over $11 billion, a 10% increase from current funding. The new law will more than double that. It authorizes the hiring of 10,000 agents, bringing ICE’s force to nearly 30,000. In 1944, Nazi Germany had 32,000 gestapo officers and $2b (inflation adjusted) in funding. They were fighting a world war. Trump is fighting home health aides and Uber drivers.
ICE claims it’s targeting “the worst of the worst.” But fewer than one-third of the record 59,000 immigrant detainees have been convicted of any crime. The rest? A: Immigrants who didn’t look like the typical Iowa voter.
Trump’s reach even extends to his political rivals. He publicly questioned the citizenship of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his former First Friend (Elon). Mamdani has been a U.S. citizen since 2018. Doesn’t matter. “Criminal” now also means “not for Trump.”
The argument that immigrants are stealing jobs is a lie told by people who’ve never built a business or managed a P&L. Immigrants create jobs. They work jobs native-born Americans won’t touch. They pay into Social Security but rarely collect. Deporting them is an economic own goal. The Cato Institute estimates the cost of mass deportations could eventually exceed $1 trillion. The Peterson Institute projects a 1.2% drop in GDP if 1.3 million people are deported, growing to 7% if deportations hit 8 million. That’s not policy, but (see above) stupidity: hurting others while hurting yourself.
Instead of militarizing immigration enforcement, we should be investing against the real challenge: AI. The World Economic Forum says 9 million jobs globally may be displaced in the next five years. Anthropic’s CEO warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Imagine the population of Greece storming the shores of America and taking jobs (even jobs Americans actually want), as they’re willing to work 24/7 for free. You’ve already met them. Their names are GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Want to protect American workers? Train, don’t terrorize.
Trump’s war on domestic enemies doesn’t stop with ICE. He’s coming for the press and the academy. Disney, Meta, and Paramount have all settled nuisance lawsuits with Trump, for a combined total of about $60 million. All the funds go to his presidential library — where truth will go to be laundered, not learned. Newsrooms are folding or playing defense. Breaking with a long-standing tradition, the White House is handpicking press pool participants.
Harvard, once America’s aircraft carrier strike force of soft power, is now a MAGA speed bag. Autocrats always come for universities, which train people to ask questions. The White House is threatening to defund billions in research, choke off international student visas, and criminalize campus dissent. Nearly 300 top researchers have applied for “scientific asylum” — in France. In the thirties and forties, some of the world’s premier academics fled Europe for America. They brought quantum theory, chemotherapy, modern computing, and other breakthroughs with them. Oh, including the bomb. The rivers of elite human capital are now flowing in reverse, and we’re sending the scholars back. How can we be this fucking stupid?
This isn’t a slippery slope, but a vertical drop. Trump has Congress kneeling, courts folding, and corporations cashing in. What’s left is us. This was never just about immigrants, professors, or journalists. It’s about unchecked power that, unchallenged, is metastasizing.
Democracy doesn’t defend itself. We won’t fight this with hashtags, but with votes, lawsuits, and courage. This is the moment we decide: Are we citizens of a republic, or spectators to its collapse?
Life is so rich,
P.S. Historian Heather Cox Richardson joined me this week on the Prof G Pod to discuss the rise of authoritarianism, the myth of rugged individualism, and what Democrats keep getting wrong. Listen on Apple or Spotify or watch on YouTube.
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