In the first episode of TMT Unscripted, Evan joins Nathan Reay to discuss being fired, reinventing his career and the experiences that shaped his view of the industry.
Attention is the battleground, and everyone is competing for it.
Evan Shapiro has spent his career inside the media industry. On his 50th birthday, that career took an unexpected turn.
In the first episode of TMT unscripted, Evan joins Nathan Reay to discuss being fired, reinventing his career and the experiences that shaped his view of the industry.
Together, they explore who really holds the power in media, why human attention has become so valuable, the impact of AI and what businesses need to understand about their consumers.
An honest conversation about reinvention, disruption and the battle for attention.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:22:03
Welcome to the first ever TMT unscripted, where we will be meeting the people shaping tech, media and telco. And to kick things off with a bang. My guest today is the award winning media executive turned independent media entrepreneur, Evan Shapiro. He has spent decades inside the media industry as a senior exec with names such as Sundance, NBC.
00:00:22:05 - 00:00:44:01
He's also an Emmy and Peabody Award winning producer. Today, his career sits at the intersection of media, tech data, global storytelling. Really. He offers a unique perspective on where the industry has been and importantly, where it's going. I'm personally an avid follower of his highly acclaimed Media Odyssey podcast, and I've heard the man speaking person around the world many times.
00:00:44:04 - 00:01:00:23
So this is such a great pleasure to have you as my first guest on TMT unscripted. My pleasure. So before we get into the maps and where the industry is heading, and I want to have a really good chat about that, I do want to just take a second, because I think it's important for our audience to understand.
00:01:01:03 - 00:01:16:03
You've really been media through and through. And although I think one of the things I'm really careful to make a point of is you're definitely not a media nepo baby, right? And I know that's something that we that we talk about. And I hear you talk about a lot on the, on the podcast and in speeches and stuff.
00:01:16:05 - 00:01:37:06
So but I think just before we get before we get there, though, for a second, just be good to understand a bit of those early years. You built this hugely successful career inside media. And you've talked to them about how the love of theatre that you found at school helped you begin that journey. Can you just take us back just for a few minutes here to where it all began for you?
00:01:37:07 - 00:02:02:11
Sure. I was, one of the first generation of latchkey kids, back when that was a cliche that people used to describe kids left at home to their own devices in Gen X. Can you imagine? We let you know. Elementary school kids and and young teens kind of exist on their own all day after school. And I was raised by a television set.
00:02:02:12 - 00:02:26:06
I mean, my mom, you know, was a single mom. She was a great mom, but she had to work. And so that time after school, I was left to my own devices watching TV. And I, I was raised by, in large part, Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and Elmer Fudd and Gilligan's Island. And I learned about the world through the prism of the television set.
00:02:26:08 - 00:02:58:15
I did learn at school, but I would say I probably learned more watching TV, and I fell in love with the idea of entertainment. I wanted to work in entertainment, in media, on TV in particular. But the the the best gateway or the only local gateway you had for entering the media industry was theatre, local theatre. So I got involved in the local theatre company and at my school, and worked really deeply with the local and my high school theatre department.
00:02:58:17 - 00:03:17:07
And that really became where I, funnelled a lot of my energies and my interests around media. It wasn't and then and that became in I mean, these are the 80s, right? So you couldn't just walk into a television network and get a job, and there just wasn't as much media around us then as there is now.
00:03:17:07 - 00:03:36:07
There were three television networks for the majority of my upbringing. Right. For if you include PBS, a few more if you include UHF. But, when I went to college, I got involved in the theatre organisation there. I moved to New York. I started working in non-profit theatre and then for profit theatre, and then I started my own marketing agency.
00:03:36:07 - 00:03:55:09
I was able to rise up in theatre, in marketing, on the on the side, or the discipline of marketing to become one of the more notable marketing people in theatre. I was the head of marketing of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and I promoted noise, funk, bringing a noise, bringing funk on Broadway. But I then was able to go out on my own and start my own agency.
00:03:55:09 - 00:04:21:20
And I worked on Rent and The Lion King, and some of the biggest shows helped launch Chicago and Lincoln, which are both still playing today. And then I was able to use that experience to pivot into and go work at one of my clients, which was court TV at the time that we were doing marketing for them, and they had an opening for a head of marketing, and I noticed the economy was souring.
00:04:21:20 - 00:04:59:08
So I sold my agency to my business partners and went to work at court TV. There I was able to kind of hone my skills as a marketer for television, building the channel's brand and its schedule. I was able to kind of influence the scheduling of prime time around forensics, which today everybody knows about. But back then was a kind of new topic on television, and from there was able to really, hone my skills as a television marketer to the point where I got named the head of marketing and the de facto head of the channel at IFC, eventually becoming head of the channel as general manager.
00:04:59:10 - 00:05:27:13
And then I got back into content. I was able to make content at IFC as the green lighter of content of programming films and television shows, eventually including Portlandia, really helping the channel more from pure independent film into comedy. And, you know, it was my idea to set the show Portlandia in Portland. We then bought Sundance Channel, and I ran both of those channels.
00:05:27:15 - 00:05:45:20
And as I was getting into the operation of both of these channels, I had some major disagreements with my very great bosses there about the direction of the industry, and I tried to convince them to turn IFC and Sundance Channel into streaming only platforms. They didn't see that as an opportunity. They didn't see that they had the rights to do that.
00:05:45:20 - 00:06:10:18
I disagreed with them. So I left and started a digital streaming platform for Participant Media. Then I went to NBC, where I started their first ever direct to consumer streaming platform. We disagreed about the importance of that platform. We disagreed about the strategy of that platform. And so they fired my ass. And that's when I went out on my own and started doing what I'm doing today.
00:06:10:20 - 00:06:35:09
That's the shortest version I can give you. Thank you for that because it's really good to understand. I think what I really want, as I hear more about it, I think it's really a good time to stand for anybody, you know, myself or anybody that careers have pivot points, right? You know, you move from the theatre, you move into TV marketing, etc. you're learning so much as you go through and many of them you probably never expect to be doing right as you get to them.
00:06:35:11 - 00:06:56:23
But like you say, you're having this amazing career, this you're doing these amazing pivots and like you say, that this point where you're fired. It was your 50th birthday. If I'm right, I think when this happened on my 50th birthday. Yeah, well, I don't think you saw it coming, but, you know, it sounds like that was the culmination, like you say, of trying to change the industry from within.
00:06:57:02 - 00:07:16:10
Actually I did. I saw it coming. I saw I saw it coming from day one. I mean, you know, when I went to NBC, people warned me that they tend to kind of, like, charge at shiny new objects and then retreat the second it gets too risky. And so I was able this is a good this is the best life lesson for you.
00:07:16:10 - 00:07:41:12
I was able to negotiate a really great contract for myself. So when we got into a major disagreement about the future strategy of NBC universal, I said it was going to be purely digital. They disagreed with me and I said it was worth betting the whole farm on. They disagreed. Right. I said, take the take the Office off of Netflix and put it on our, our own streaming platform.
00:07:41:12 - 00:08:05:20
They agreed to do that. And then when Netflix waived a little bit of money in front of them, they backed off and took the show away from my new digital streaming platform. So we had a major disagreement. But because I had negotiated such a good contract, because I knew that they couldn't help themselves, that they were going to chicken out when the rubber hit the road and it was time to make the major investment, I when they fired me, I got two years garden leave.
00:08:05:23 - 00:08:29:07
Well, and by the way, I have helped other people over the years negotiate their way in and negotiate their way out of traps like this, where they're where they're wooed to come do this major thing. And then the rug is pulled out from under them. And this is what happens continually in major media, mainstream media. This happens less, by the way, in Big Tech.
00:08:29:09 - 00:08:48:19
Not to say that Big Tech doesn't fire people and doesn't change directions, but they accept the risks going in when they make major investments. Amazon understands that a lot of the new initiatives that they try will fail, and that's the intention. Let's invest in them, take a lot of the learnings and kill them when the time comes and move on.
00:08:49:01 - 00:09:07:19
In the case of NBC, they did none of those things. They tried it out because everybody was doing it, and the day it got a little bit scary, they pulled the rug and shoved me out the door. Now they had to pay me to leave because they knew exactly what they had done. Right. That gave me the luxury of experiments in my career.
00:09:07:19 - 00:09:37:08
That is that was a really crucial moment for me, because if if I had if I hadn't had that kind of contract, I probably would have spent more time pursuing another full time job as an overpaid executive at a dying media company, instead of going out on my own and embarking on the enterprise that I now call my career and and with the amount of freedom that I have today to say the things that are absolutely true as opposed to watching everything that I say.
00:09:37:09 - 00:09:53:13
So that's a good life lesson right there. Yeah. I was going to ask you that because it's interesting how you had that ability to become independent and move into being independent. And I think that's such a life lesson, you know, that you had that runway there where you could make the right decisions for, for the good of you and your life moving forward.
00:09:53:13 - 00:10:12:14
So it's and thankfully for us, you did choose that independent path. And, you know, I think looking back on it, I'm sure the irony is not lost on you that the industry forced you out are now the ones that seem to hang on your views. And I want to hear what you want to say. And it's all the things you're trying to tell them when you're inside the 10%.
00:10:12:16 - 00:10:38:01
But no, but that is that is the odd conundrum of it is we don't listen to our own people. We only listen to the foreign invader. We give the consultants more weight than we do to the internal experts. And it is one of the main reasons media continues to kind of like chase its own town. And so as we stand here today, you've created this independent, globally recognised persona as a media cartographer.
00:10:38:03 - 00:11:00:19
What was the thinking behind your first media universe map? What were you seeing that the rest of the industry wasn't seeing? I think this is it's crucial to zoom back out and look at the framework that produced that piece of work for now, 30 years. I have a series of habits, a series of rubric by which I do my work.
00:11:00:21 - 00:11:20:10
So it's it's wake up, stupid. Every day is the main driver of this. So every day, the first thing I do when I wake up is try to learn something new about something new. I try to do that before the day starts. Every single day. Now I write about it immediately, you know, kind of not immediately after, but kind of in the continuum.
00:11:20:12 - 00:11:45:12
But that daily reinvention, that daily re-education. This is how I came very early on to data in the first place. I was not I'm not a data scientist. I did I failed out of college. I never took statistics or logic. And so I had to teach myself research and analytics in order just to be in the conversation at these networks that I was now in charge of to a certain extent.
00:11:45:16 - 00:12:11:13
Luckily, the industry are. Luckily for me, the industry does not know how to read its own data. It really does not. And so I taught myself how to ingest data in large forms, how to analyse good data from bad data, big data from small data, tangible useful insights from noise and buzz. And I just ingest that daily and then process it daily.
00:12:11:13 - 00:12:42:08
And so this I like to say by learning, by re-educate yourself 1/365 every single day, by the end of a year, you're at a completely new place. And so this this ingestion of material was really crucial to the development of me as an executive and me today as an independent media persona, as you say. And then on top of that, the, the, the, the acceptance of this data as the voice of the audience.
00:12:42:10 - 00:13:15:18
And I took that quest of daily re-education and a number of years ago, about 25 years ago, started teaching at NYU. That became a forcing mechanism of taking these insights that I was giving myself on a daily basis and turning them into articulated, digestible, accessible information. So here's all this complex data. I ingest it, I process it, separate the wheat from the chaff, and then turn around and turn it into something that college freshmen who are uninitiated in our industry can understand.
00:13:15:20 - 00:13:41:03
That whole process turned me into kind of a sausage maker of data and insights. And it was that class that was the reason or was the inspiration for creating that first media map. I needed something to show the entire thing at a glance, and in doing so, I broke all of the rules of data visualisation. You're not supposed to put that much data on one side.
00:13:41:05 - 00:14:02:03
People can only understand so much at once. And in reality, I was able to basically turn data into a narrative storytelling device. And that's really the practice that I'm in today. It's amazing to hear that. Thank you for taking the time around that, because having heard you speak in real time and watched you, when you see that amount of data come up on the screen, it's it's mind blowing.
00:14:02:04 - 00:14:22:05
It's so impressive. And it just takes you on this great journey that you don't hear from other people. So, you know, one of the things, the big themes across the maps that I've followed certainly is that power is shifting. And it's kind of always shifting. Right. And I know this is a very big an open question, and I kind of dig into some other areas more specifically as we go.
00:14:22:10 - 00:14:50:19
But if we sit back, you know, where do you think that power is today for you? So the original map that I made six years ago now, this summer, was not meant to predict anything. It was meant to show the power shift from traditional media to big tech. And in doing so, I was I used the the resources that each company had to fight this war for attention.
00:14:50:21 - 00:15:16:21
In reality, as I've been mapping and charting the trajectory since that first map six years ago, what's happened is Big tech has really taken over the centre of gravity of, frankly, all culture worldwide, for good or bad. You know, the whole conversation around AI today is a very good I mean, all the last two weeks, all we've talked about is either the failure of AI or the fact that it's going to take out the entire planet Earth.
00:15:16:22 - 00:15:40:22
That's all anyone's talking about right now, right? It's the centre of conversation. So that's a really good indication of it. But the flip of this, or the irony of it, is that the power has actually shifted because of big tech, because technology has put all the world's information, entertainment and media at our fingertips on the supercomputers in our pockets.
00:15:41:04 - 00:16:12:02
The power tech has actually enabled the shift of power from the gatekeepers, from the ivory towers, from the executives to the consumer. The consumer is now in complete control of their media suite of services, frankly, and their entire suite of services. You know, that phone, that remote control is not just our television remote control and our entertainment remote control, but it is also our banking remote control and our education remote control and our health care remote control and our shopping remote control.
00:16:12:04 - 00:16:42:15
And so I think there the, the consumer now dictates the pace and rate of, of consumption, wherever they are, whenever they are. And in fact, the, the the research done onto the map every month we redo that map in Excel and PowerPoint by hand. That just it doesn't answer any questions. It actually begs more questions. And so recently we went on a search, a quest to understand how consumption of media has shifted.
00:16:42:20 - 00:17:16:19
And so the culmination of this trajectory is that today on the planet Earth, more video is consumed on phones than on TVs. And that is a paradigm shift. I don't think that most of media and entertainment understands or they don't want to admit it, frankly. And so that, though, does personify the fact that when you look at the media ecosystem, yes, power and energy has refocused from big media to big tech.
00:17:16:20 - 00:17:44:23
But really, what's happened is big tech has enabled the power to shift away from the C-suite and to the consumer. It's really it's really helpful for that because it's one of the questions I've got is really it's amazing what you're doing around this sort of human attention piece. But just before I kind of jump on a few more questions there, can I just from what I, what I hear from what you're saying, do you see that tech, media and telco really have become a more interconnected ecosystem now?
00:17:45:00 - 00:18:10:10
Do you see that convergence between between those three pillars? Absolutely. I mean, the number one bundler of entertainment on the planet Earth, or the number of bundler of services is mobile now? It's less so here in the US, but it is becoming more so here in the US. But in, in Europe, where pay TV is not nearly as prevalent, the telco and frankly, the retailer, interestingly enough, Amazon being a good example of this.
00:18:10:10 - 00:18:35:02
But Tesco and other retailers in Europe as well are now getting into bundling. So yeah, the the they are completely converged tech media telecommunications. They have converged into one screen for the consumer that is the phone. The television is the adjunct to that. But it is definitely the adjunct, not the centre. The living room isn't even the centre of television consumption.
00:18:35:03 - 00:19:01:23
We surveyed 23 different regions around the world. The bedroom is actually the number one location. People say that they watch video, living room number two, toilet number three. And so this shows that the centre of entertainment, gravity, the centre of media gravity is not the device, it's actually the human. Wherever they are, that's where it's happening. But more often, because more time is spent outside the home than it is in necessarily or, you know, in large parts.
00:19:02:00 - 00:19:21:00
It's amazing. And that links to your and that links to your cross green attention index, right, that you've done recently. Like you're saying around that, that you're fighting for that same finite resource which is human attention really, and making sure that you're following that human attention, no matter what platform they're on. Is that the way you see it?
00:19:21:02 - 00:19:50:02
Yeah, that's exactly right. And and, you know, if there were 16 hours in every human awake day. Right. 2 to 3, four hours of that maximum is spent in front of a television screen. What big media has failed to do is understand that they're fighting for the other 12 hours of the day with social media, right? And fight that battle on that, on that landscape, on the phone, on the tablet, on the laptop.
00:19:50:06 - 00:20:15:18
They've basically ceded all of that time to meta and TikTok and YouTube. And it's why they're losing that battle. They're not even fighting. They're not even in the game on the phone. They use the phone mostly for clips and marketing, not as programming, not as attention time. It is almost kind of ephemeral to them or unnecessary, whereas that's where the actual battle is happening.
00:20:15:19 - 00:20:39:01
You don't watch widow's Bay. If you haven't heard about widow's Bay on your phone, I can guarantee it. You may watch it on your television screen, but you first heard about it on your phone. You don't watch Pluribus because you discovered it on. No one discovers anything on Apple TV+ because no one goes there, right? Except to go watch a specific show.
00:20:39:04 - 00:21:00:18
They make great programming, but you're not there all day looking for something to watch. You go to Apple TV+ because you know something's on. How did you learn on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on a newsletter, on your phone? And that if there is someone listening to this or watching this where that's not true, I defy them to give me a call and let me know.
00:21:00:20 - 00:21:26:18
I completely agree. And look, I'm I'm hands up on the TikTok. On TikTok. That's where I get most of my news. Most of my content gives me the information about what I'm going to go and watch next. So I understand that, and I'd love to just deep dive for a second more, a bit more around that content. You know, in my walk of life and what I'm doing, I'm seeing an interesting trend, particularly let's just take an example around podcasting, VOD, casters, independent content producers, this big appetite to partner with them, acquire them.
00:21:26:18 - 00:21:51:20
If you look at the overlap football with Disney and Netflix as examples, when we look at the market as a whole, though, and we stand back from those things, it's fascinating to see some of these trends play out. You know, you've touched on it already with the vertical content right on your phone and the micro dramas, the scripted premium content on the phone, Disney's deal with TikTok and kind of opening up there, you know, they're amazing, iconic brands to TikToker.
00:21:51:22 - 00:22:12:15
I think that's sort of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram dominance. You know what? I'm interested also, what happens into the future of subscription platforms, right? You're going to have super apps or is it, you know, one of the things I've heard you talk about recently is this sort of ad spends coming back and subscription spend going down, and then we've got this sort of creator economy and everything that goes with that.
00:22:12:17 - 00:22:34:13
As well as, you know, some interesting other elements like children's content commission declining. We've got this rise of investment as we touch on sports content, you know, just stepping back from it all, if you're looking into 2027, if you're kind of crystal balling where contents going, well, how are you going to have a conversation with the senior executive in the market around content at the moment?
00:22:34:15 - 00:23:03:03
I think the challenge is imagine you were starting from scratch today. Imagine you you were a television executive. You used to work in automobiles, and now you have just given the job to be the head of a television or a media company. If you were starting from absolute scratch today, how would you rebuild or how would you build this anew to address the actual lifestyles of the consumers that you're looking to reach?
00:23:03:05 - 00:23:25:10
You would not build anything the way that it looks today, not even Netflix, right? You'd start with, well, how do we get them in the door? How do we attract them? What's the lowest cost per acquisition of a new customer? Whether that's a free customer who we serve ads to or paid customer that that pays a subscription, it's going to be the phone that's going to be the that that is the device.
00:23:25:11 - 00:23:50:19
And by the way, that's the device we all use to acquire our customers now. Right. So you'd start there and then you'd reimagine everything kind of around that. And so Netflix getting into the vertical gain right now they're treating it like promotion. Right now they're treating it as kind of like an experiment. In reality, it's a great way for them to fight TikTok for time and attention.
00:23:50:19 - 00:24:10:20
If all they did was take some of their greatest true crime or some of their stand up and syndicated into short form on vertical on their own app, they could take up more toilet time. They could take up more time at the doctor's office. They could take up more time on the bus away from TikTok, away from Instagram, away from YouTube.
00:24:10:20 - 00:24:41:06
This is the same thing for Disney. This is the same thing for T.l. This is the same thing for ZDF. This is the same thing for BBC. And so I'm not saying you build a vertical platform exclusively, but you build something that was also and video, vertical and horizontal, television and phone, laptop and tablet in the home and out of the home, text and video and audio all together, deep diving around the franchises that you're building.
00:24:41:07 - 00:25:05:12
You don't have to be all things to all people, but the things you do, you need to go wherever that fan goes. Mr. beast is not exclusive to YouTube. Mr. beast is ubiquitous. He is everywhere. His consumers want to be, including live and audio and visual and all these other things. So that's that's really where we're heading is the whole consumer, the whole experience.
00:25:05:14 - 00:25:44:06
You don't have to do, by the way, I don't think everybody should do sports. I think that the fact that everybody is chasing the NFL, that everybody is facing chasing FIFA, that everybody's chasing the same sports at a very high price. I don't think that's good for distinction. So I'm not saying everybody should be doing everything, but whatever it is you do kids news, entertainment, scripted reality, you should do it as a whole, as a as a flywheel on all platforms, all at once, always on on demand and linear phone and TV, audio and visual text and and moving image.
00:25:44:10 - 00:26:05:20
Because the the super fan think about the football fan. They want every aspect of it. They want clips, they want video, they want audio, they want text, they want images. They want live. They want the whole thing anime. They want the whole thing. So serve the whole consumer. And if you imagine it around that, it's difficult, it's complicated, and it's going to be expensive to reimagine these platforms.
00:26:05:23 - 00:26:33:04
But when Matt Britain, the new managing general director of the BBC, says we're going to start putting creator content on the iPlayer. And when Disney ingests a TikTok feed onto Disney+, you know what I'm saying is the right thing, right? Like suddenly everybody's doing this anyway. Well, they should have been doing it a while ago, and they should stop dilly dallying and putting their toe into it and just lean in.
00:26:33:07 - 00:26:54:08
Its look. Completely agree. I mean, it's so it's so powerful. I think it's such a it's such a great call out for the content content strategy moving forward. I do just want to try and touch on and you know, we'll go there briefly. AI I mean we could spend the whole podcast on it, but we touched on it very briefly at the start.
00:26:54:10 - 00:27:17:21
You know, many sites are forced reshaping all industries, not let alone, but it's obviously TMT is almost the home of AI anyway in terms of it provides it to the other to the other subsectors as well. Again, it's been very topical in the last few days, safety concerns coming out of Silicon Valley. In our job. We're seeing a lot of conversations at the moment around AI now needs to have a return on investment.
00:27:17:23 - 00:27:39:04
You know, you can't just have AI for the sake of having AI. Like, what are you actually getting out of it? It's a revenue growth and diversification. Is it cost management what we're getting for it. But I know that you I think you've got a slightly different view of AI, but I'd love to kind of just touch on your view of the of that future of AI and the bubble of AI.
00:27:39:06 - 00:27:46:22
So I think the net net, if I had a big takeaway on AI is.
00:27:47:00 - 00:27:53:04
It's an accelerator of output. It's not a savings of money.
00:27:53:06 - 00:28:23:17
If you're looking at AI as a way to get more efficient and save money, particularly saving human resources, money, money you would otherwise pay to humans, you will fail. You were you were bound to fail. That is not what the technology is best at, is replacing humans. It's making the thing that AI is best at is making humans more productive, helping us increase our output.
00:28:23:19 - 00:28:49:06
Whether it's more five second clips that we can put on to social media because humans can't edit that quickly. And frankly, it's a waste of a film degree to ask someone to put out 1005 second clips of Stranger Things. But that's what Stranger Things did. They put out thousands and thousands of different versions for social video. Humans are not going to help other humans discover content more quickly on platforms.
00:28:49:06 - 00:29:19:21
That is a great use of AI. Humans are not going to really speed up the process of personalisation for consumers when they get on platforms. They're just not. We're not physically capable of doing it. AI can solve from substantially better personalisation, speeding up the search time for consumers as they're looking for content across the entire continuum. These are great uses of AI, but if you're looking to reduce your workforce by injecting AI into your into your company, you're going to fail.
00:29:20:00 - 00:29:47:05
Your company will fail because that's not a strategy. That is that is an idea. It's a tactic. It may save you a little money short term, but the evidence says dramatically the opposite. 55% of companies who have made major layoffs in favour of AI workflows regret it. The cost is substantially higher than they anticipated. The savings is nonexistent and worse, bad things are happening.
00:29:47:07 - 00:30:12:19
Really bad things are happening to companies who rest their workflows, and their management on AI, like whole workflows, are being dismantled and destroyed by. I look at the bad behaviour of AI just recently in the last couple of weeks. So AI is not the answer to human pay. That is not what it's here for. That's what it's been mistaken for.
00:30:12:21 - 00:30:35:09
That's what everybody in the C-suite seems to want it to be. But when you enable your own workforce to work with AI and find out how it can actually fit into what it is that they do and make them better, what the what they do, people are finding that they get more productive. The output is higher. They can actually make more better content more quickly as a result.
00:30:35:11 - 00:31:01:13
That is an excellent use. My my work is a great example of that. I've been able to do a substantial amount of more work as a result, myself personally, as a result of working with AI. It is also wrong as often as it's right. The AI use is often as wrong as it is right, so I have to double check its work at a higher propensity than I do than than its human counterparts.
00:31:01:13 - 00:31:22:05
I can pretty much guarantee that I am asking to proof work that AI generates at a much higher rate than the human counterparts that I work with. It's, you know, so many, so many, so many places we could keep going for hours on that. And, and I really appreciate that context. And it's fascinating to kind of get get that feedback on there.
00:31:22:07 - 00:31:42:23
I will, I guess, try and bring us back into one final question if I can. And it's one that we're going to be asking every guest on TMT on script as we move forward. So here it is tomorrow morning, every leader in TMT wakes up and sees your advice for the industry on a billboard. What does it say?
00:31:43:01 - 00:32:15:06
No and serve your whole consumer. Know who they are. Serve them thoroughly and everything else will take care of itself. I promise you that. That's Olson, that's Olson. Evan, thank you very much. I love that conversation. So insightful to hear your story and explore with you these shifting patterns around media touching on AI, their content. But I think knowing your consumer is just a great, great way to to end there.
00:32:15:12 - 00:32:32:14
Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Good to talk to you. Thank you to everyone, Shapiro, for being our first guest on TMT unscripted. Thank you to everyone who's listened or watched this episode. If you enjoyed the conversation, follow or subscribe so you don't miss a next episode. As we continue to meet the people shaping TMT.
00:32:32:16 - 00:32:33:19
We'll see you next time.