📁 New Market Research!

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can’t escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI.

Anthropic's safety warnings may have just backfired — the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI
Spend months telling everyone your model is too dangerous to release, and eventually somebody with the authority to act takes you at your word. Now it's off worldwide. Not surprised. But this doesn't change the fact that open models from China do the same job, and those we can't turn off.

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.