Mostly Skiing... a few other thoughts

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another week in review .... ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

More or Less: Ben Smith and Nicholas Carlson
Dave and I went skiing this week… so Jess and Brit added Ben Smith and Nicholas Carlson to discuss Signal Scandal and DOGE.

Hot Takes:

Skiing Manhattan in Alaska — this wasn’t the totally best run of the week… but man it looks cool :) … also it is always fun skiing fast — I have been going to AK for a few years now annually, it is always great but this trip it delivered big time — company on the trip was passable.

Jet-A — is clearly the currency of fun…. Launched this last week — a few thoughts on it — (a) there are really good meme generation / storytelling tools that make launching things like this FUN… but the community tools in crypto really are still quite rudimentary and lacking — I really want to figure out how to stand up crypto native teams because the tools to build become more and more obvious every time I mess with the crypto world (b) in the spirit of ‘f- around to find out’ — I really like the idea of using Jet-A to sponsor awesome adventures / athletes — and it seems like a great use of treasury. Creating an ecosystem in something like Jet-A with an ‘open’ infrastructure where brands / sponsors buy Jet-A, a foundation making grants to real world athletes doing amazing things and promoting the token, etc. seems quite doable and honestly quite real / useful.

AI as private ‘comedy’ AR - Triumph The Insult Dog AI — some didn’t get this… let me explain — if you have meta ray bans you probably know the experience of walking around town with your glasses on, listening to music but still interacting with the world. It is great — then comes the AI use case…. Asking ‘meta what am I looking at’ is kinda lame TBH BUT BUT — if the glasses could be listening to the world around me, and then interjecting jokes / well timed situational comedy for only me to hear / laugh at — that I would think would be great… the question is only if the AI can be fast enough and good enough to actually be funny — but AI as private comedy AR is a thing I would really be in to…

Ghibli is Sad — this is a bummer / everyone making themselves (and others) into this style of animation — it just shows how when the barriers on design go down to zero — everything becomes fast fashion / a fad. It isn’t just an IP fail, it is a moment where we see culture getting over-exposed, over-accessible, and instantly burning out something… when you think about second order effects of AI // thinking about culture-as-fast-fashion should be top of list.

Build for Important Truths or Specific Communities, Not Demographics — I keep getting pitched things which are like “appeals to 18-32 year old males” — yuck — build for true universal deep human truths, or real cults — not demographics…

WTF Economist? — enough said… real bummer because I used to love The Economist.

CoreWeave — interesting re: IPO pricing and a very important reminder in how the private markets and the public markets are decoupling — the private market is willing to pay more than the public market, and illiquidity is a benefit :)

Download Your Data — Intellectually I totally understand and believe in Identity and history as key lock-in for services. If I know you better than anyone else, it makes it hard to switch … but the reality of modern data policies and data ownership regimes — if the user can just export everything / you have ‘download your data’— there is no identity/history lock-in — oh, and coming up with formats for that that a machine can’t easily reverse engineer and just import gets harder and harder…

Buy More Accounting Firms. Another fun billboard…. Love billboards — now I want to start a billboardDAO :) — seriously.

Chaotic Neutral — Very funny that when given the option Grok thinks everyone is a chaotic neutral (safe bet) — when you remove that as an option Mark Zuckerberg becomes lawful good, and trump becomes chaotic evil .. maybe Elon isn’t tipping the scales as much as people thought he was lol :)

Betting on Snow White — Placed some bets on the Snow White IMDB scores (and lost) — but (a) the history / context on how bad this movie is and all the ways they pissed of literally everyone in the world are very very funny … like ‘Producers’ level funny — (b) Kalshi is pretty fun, I have no idea how it is legal but fun.

Sam Lessin

P.S. kudos to Elon for finding a way out of X ... via x.ai — classic use of AI narrative to shift debt burden etc — It isn’t just that elon is a great marketer, he will probably go down in history as one of the most effective finders-and-users-of-cheap capital ever.. ZRIP ended ages ago, but he is still crushing the game.