So I’ve developed a recent issue with Ed, in particular with his podcast. He doesn’t vet his advertisers at all. A week or so ago I turned on the most recent episode at the time (“OpenAI is not real company”) of the podcast and the opening ad was for some generic AI company with generic AI solutions, then Oracle, then a reasonable college ad, then Discover credit card, then an online gambling site.

Considering his very proselytizing approach and moral/ethical angle he attacks all of this with, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. I say this as someone who generally agrees with him and have shared his work with many people.

I understand a lot of podcasters use dynamic insertion services but he needs to stop and listen to what he is putting his name behind. Perhaps he should actually do on-air reads anyway since all information indicates DI ads have terrible ROI anyway. He’s in some ways just letting a company drop commercial slop - some of which directly contradict the values he is espousing - on his show critiquing growth capitalism and AI/commercial slop. It’s pretty flagrant IMO and frankly I’m not even sure he’s aware of it, but I don’t think that makes it much better