Things I spent time thinking about this week / talking about:
More or Less: The Q2 AI investor story - coming home to roost … long Meta, maybe Google… short everything else (with due meme-stock caveats) — For 18+ months now I have been saying the place to be long AI is where it can incrementally and consistently make companies more money, and that everything else is a bubble. And this quarter we see it playing out… meta rips because they actually have a direct pipeline to monetize step by step AI improvements practically (which they are)… everything else is a meme-hype-cycle — all the way down to NVIDIA. Until the ways to consistently make MONEY with AI are clear and scaling up, it is all under-optimized experimental spend .. and Accenture, buying Microsoft, buying NVIDIA all the way down on ‘experimental’ spend is dan-ger-ous. Quality of revenue matters.
The AI ‘friend’ story — also discussed on MoL… the initial hype-cycle was your ‘AI assistant’ and it turns out that is very very hard to do well — now we have friend.com and meta shutting down their expensive ‘AI personalities’… ‘friends’ / entertainment is way way easier and practical, if kinda dypstopic…. But I think the idea of your AI best friend is still wrong for now (people applying the wrong lessons from the movie HER and Bladerunner….) — the level of tech we have now is way better suited for AI ‘casual’ friends instantly responding to your social media posts, filling the ‘void’ of feedback most people have etc, vs a singular character you really care about.
Good News from Harvard — Alan Garber being the official ‘next’ president vs interim is very good news. He is academically beyond reproach (key after Gay), has the right principles, and has demonstrated a series of wins in the right direction for the university. If he is leading, I have *more* faith (though the face-saving Corporation framing of ‘we are gonna do that extensive search we promised just later’ is cute) — but that isn’t all — Harvard New Admissions Essay — is a nice symbolic (and practical step) asking about how students deal with ‘disagreement’ … it isn’t perfect but a big step in the right direction — and nearly exactly what the 1636 forum has been proposing adding to the admissions form for last ~8 months. You gotta celebrate the wins along the way.
Video Production — Jellyjelly and Davinci Resolve, and Capcut and ‘Captions’ app — been messing with a lot of video tools recently. Jellyjelly.com for short / live / social media sharable clips is really getting there (go team Venmo)… Davinci Resolve is pretty great, Capcut (the TikTok tool for pros) is good but I was surprised at how complicated it is! … and Captions makes my experiment with having a ‘hot girl’ read screenshot essays very very practical vs. a real pain in the ass.
The $100K documentary — Been talking to a few people about this, but I really think there is an opportunity for someone to figure out how to make the $100K documentary over and over / Laurene Powell Jobs has the bank to write a few $20M checks a year just for fun to promote ideas she likes, but I think there are a lot of people like me that would do the same thing at smaller niche scale around $100K and the economics of niche documentaries that nearly pay for themselves but every once in a while pop should actually work
Peacock Olympics — pretty good / love the split screen 4x mode for watching the olympics as the number of sports / narrative splits into a million sub-niches all with their own gold medalists….
The Demon of Unrest — finished the book I hilariously read when I couldn’t sleep at 2 am for months (literally my demon of unrest) …. Highly suggest — the period up to the civil war is VERY interesting for its similarities and differences to our times… re: culture shift
Best,
Sam
Half Baked vs. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle? — I am working on my ‘cannon of western civilization’ more and this is a key question… if you had 100 slots to teach someone about modern US culture you probably give one slot for this genre — but which do you pick?
sam lessin | @lessin | https://calllist.app/lessin | stop