"Just like how Netflix once said that their biggest competitor is sleep, I think the biggest competitor to content is real life." - Jeremy Au
"AI content will accelerate purchases of things and places, but not people. Search engines effectively did the same thing—made finding places, flights, and websites so much faster—but finding people still relies heavily on social networks and word of mouth." - Jeremy Au
"When you look at the feeds of ChatGPT or Claude, the whole SEO/GEO market is booming now because everyone is trying to figure out how to make their brand and name come up in AI engine searches and capture a large share of voice." - Adriel Yong
Adriel Yong is the Co-Founder and COO of Clouted, the AI-native clipping and distribution company that turns long-form content into short video and routes it to the right platform and audience. Clouted has raised a $7M seed led by Slow Ventures, following a $4.45M round backed by a16z SPEEDRUN and AppWorks under its former name, Clout Kitchen. The team also produces &FRIENDS, one of the largest dance and pop-culture festivals in the Philippines.
Adriel joined Jeremy Au to work through what AI has done to media. Five or six years ago, making this podcast meant cutting every "um" by hand and building cover art from scratch, and Adriel's estimate is that roughly 80% of that work no longer exists. What moved into the space are faceless pages and fully synthetic creators, plus a third feed inside the AI apps competing for the ten hours a day. Social was meant to be the escape from bought media and is now entirely paid, and the answer engines are going the same way: people used to shape human perception, now they shape the model's. Which leaves the question of what still competes, and Jeremy's answer is not sleep, the way Netflix once put it, but real life. They work through the evidence and the strategy underneath it, from the K-shaped cinema rebound to Costco's private-label discipline mapped onto AI marketplaces, and close on the framework that AI shortens the route to purchase for things and places, but not for people.
00:00 Introduction
00:55 How AI collapsed the production workflow
03:28 Faceless creators and AI-generated creators
05:16 The ChatGPT feed vs the Instagram feed
07:12 Social is now paid social, and the GEO scramble
09:25 Content's biggest competitor is real life
10:37 IRL experiences as a go-to-market motion
12:09 The K-shaped cinema economy: IMAX, the Sphere, F1
14:15 Do you need more AI tools than ChatGPT?
15:17 The atom of work AI actually replaces
16:22 Free time, the senses, and omnichannel shopping
18:33 Costco, Kirkland, and AI marketplaces
19:59 A24's barbell versus the blockbuster bet
22:19 Fandom, IP, and imaginary characters
24:27 Know the real estate you are standing on
25:39 How media consumption habits changed
27:31 Why podcasts survive: edutainment and opinion
30:14 What we consumed in the last 24 hours
32:14 The insurance arbitrage AI found
34:08 Toilets, Wirecutter, and shopping with AI
36:02 Things and places, yes. People, no.
38:55 Word of mouth is still the filter for people
40:44 The Comfort Crisis and rethinking the cinema
Keywords: AI Content Creation, Generative AI Media, SEO and GEO Strategies, IRL Experiences, AI E-commerce, Podcast Automation, Future of Cinemas, Southeast Asia Tech
