This week, Alex has a hard stop, AB is lost in Tokyo, and Brian and Troy go deep on sovereignty — who has it, who’s lost it, and whether it’s even possible to get it back for publishers and everyone else downstream of Big Tech.They debate whether Substack-style independence represents true sovereignty or just a different kind of dependency; ad tech’s extractive economics, and why “agentic ad buying” won’t fundamentally change a usurious system; and how OpenAI’s march toward becoming the next Google signals another era of centralization.

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Chapters:

* 00:00 Open

* 00:24 Welcome

* 06:35 How do publishers reclaim sovereignty?

* 22:29 AdTech

* 40:00 OpenAI In Browser Wars

* 57:57 Good Product

* 01:04:02 Outro

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