Charles Barkley calls Spurs the 'dumbest basketball team' after Game 4 collapse
Chuck is the best personality in all of sports commentary. Nobody else just says the thing. Also, can we talk about Wemby for a moment? I've never seen someone's star fade faster. Between the dumb decisions and absolutely DIRTY plays, Wemby has made himself completely unlikable. This dude is NOT the face of the NBA. If anything, he's the villain. Go Knicks.

SpaceX IPO closes up 19% and delivers the world's first trillionaire I remember staying up to watch the first Falcon 1 launches fail, one after another, when this whole thing looked like a rich guy's expensive way to go broke. Now there's a trillionaire and 4,400 new millionaires. Wild to watch a moonshot actually land.

Nicolas Cage interview 
There is no actor I like more. The guy has made some of the worst movies ever and some of the best, sometimes in the same year, and never once seems to be faking it. We don't deserve him. See also: Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit

The Race to Cultural Relevance

Every AI startup is having the same realization at once: it is very hard to differentiate in the age of AI.

When everyone has access to the same models, the same capabilities, the same speed to ship, the product itself stops being the wedge. Founders quickly find out that features and functions can be matched in a quarter. Outcomes converge, and if the customer squints, everything looks the same.

So what's left? Brand!

Right now, more than any other time in marketing, 

IT'S A RACE TO CULTURAL RELEVANCE!  

New Strokes!

🎶 The Strokes — Falling Out of Love

Haven't been this excited for an album in a long time. I've written about The Strokes quite a bit in the past, but they are one of my all time favorite bands. From high school through college, The Strokes were always on. I think they are one of the very few important American bands of the last 25 years. The New Abnormal was a masterpiece. Excited to see how they follow that (nearly impossible right?) -- Falling Out of Love is promising!

Paying content creators in the AI age: Parallel CEO Parag Agrawal on the launch of Index
Parag Agrawal, Parallel Web Systems founder and CEO, joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the launch of his AI start-up, paying content creators in the AI age, the backlash against AI, the threat posed by AI generated content, and more.

📁 More marketing strategies should come from raw impulse and personal vision. Less process. Too many of these terrible venture capital playbooks come from formulas that make every company sound the same — they eat the soul and take out all the instinct and individuality of great marketing. 

Don Draper in Shorts

Mad Men made me want to be a marketer. I watched Don Draper sell me a career every Sunday night for years. And it worked. The show came at a very formative time for me. It taught me about style, bourbon, and how it's possible to completely reinvent yourself.

Mad Men sold me Don Draper.

Flash forward 20 years, and Your Friends & Neighbors is selling me something very different. It's the same actor. But time has changed everything. The suit is now a quarter-zip. The Manhattan ad agency is now a cul-de-sac. We see Don Draper in shorts. 

Jon Hamm has aged in front of our eyes. He's like a real-time preview of what's coming. And honestly, it just feels sort of sad.

Everything that was cool and sexy about Mad Men is so depressingly absent in this new Apple series. We're still being sold. It's just nothing we want. The show is trying so hard to capture the things that worked in the original -- the face, the voice, the pitchman cadence -- but the magic is gone. Hamm still makes you want things... but everything he is describing is stuff he is stealing. The magic was when he was selling you something that wasn't tangible. Not an object. But a feeling. Now he's just reading off specs and price tags. Same delivery, but completely soulless. The other Mad Men ingredients are here, too. The premise that you can rewrite who you are. The sex, the drinking, the loneliness of being good at things that don't love you back. None of it lands the same. The entire show feels like a cheap imitation of Mad Men with a much bigger budget.

But, if I completely ignore how bad the show really is... It is sort of poetic that the suburbs Don Draper ran from are where John Hamm ended up.

Or maybe the show isn't bad. Maybe it's just reminding me that I'm rapidly aging and the magic is starting to disappear. 

Hacky sacks are back! 
I remember carrying around a dirtbag in my pocket my entire junior year of high school. Before that, 6th grade and a rasta colored sack full of beads. I just saw some kids the other day at the park across from my hacking it up -- it made me smile because they weren't on their phones. 

 🎶 Kris Kristofferson — Sunday Mornin' Coming Down