‘We Could Often Tell When We Were Wrong’

Jun 2

You have probably been Rickrolled, but there is a non-zero chance you don’t know what Rick Astley looks like:

His famous single actually spent five weeks at Number 1 on the charts before the label even made a video for it — scared that people would reject his look and thus the song — unheard of in the late ’80s, where the unabated influence of MTV was unavoidable.

The producers of the song, SAW (Stock Aitken Waterman), also admitted to subconsciously holding it back for the same reasons, taking their time before they presented the track to the label. They were trying different forms for the song, sending it to a number of different producers, trying to find a sound for the single that would harmonize with Astley’s look.

That is until one day someone was playing it in the production studio’s office and Pete Waterman, coming down the stairs, and Mike Stock, going up the stairs, heard the track beaming from one of the rooms and they both stopped in their tracks. “And we said, ‘Bloody hell.’ This sounds fantastic,” Stock related. “We heard it there at that moment and realized it was all hands to the pump. Let’s get it out there. Let’s not hold back.”

Stock, blind to visuals and acting from a state of autopilot, finally realized what he hand on his hands. His opinion on that experience is sagacious:

“We could often tell when we wrong, but you didn’t know when you were right a lot of the time.”
Mike Stock

Much of this anecdote comes from the fantastic Song Exploder podcast. Please consider listening!

Homo Anti-Economicus

May 22

John Stuart Mill worked to define that humans would be efficient with their actions

For misinformation to work, it has to be treated as factual.

This is the central conceit of a recent Bryan Caplan¹ post, “Misinformation About Misinformation”:

Misinformation won’t work unless the listeners are themselves naive, dogmatic, emotional, or otherwise intellectually defective. In economic jargon, the problem is that the story mistakes an information problem for a rationality problem.
Bryan Caplan
“Misinformation About Misinformation”

John Stuart Mill was a British economist who, in the mid-1800s, worked to define the term homo economicus: that humans would be economical (efficient) with their actions. Said a different way: Man would act in their own economic self-interest. And, if they did, markets would work themselves out.

Rational choice theory underscored the economic (monetary) aspect of this, which is why I believe Caplan emphasized this word in his piece. People will make decisions in their lives that make the most economic and social sense for them.

The problem is: They don’t. We’ve known humans act irrationally. It’s funny that I have to say that because if you’re reading this sentence, you’re nodding your head because you know someone who is in debt and just bought a new car. In the face of disease, people are unwilling to act in order to take preventative measures and instead hope to avoid infection.

I agree with Caplan’s premise: It’s not the fault of the entities who produce the poor product. Rationally, their market should cease to exist. If they kept selling a bad product, rational actors would not buy in and the market would dry up.

Except we all know that’s not the case.

via Tyler Cowen

¹ Professor of Economics at George Mason University who authors a Substack called Bet On It

Data Merchants

May 10

“GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps” was published this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research by Rebecca Janßen, Reinhold Kesler, Michael E. Kummer, and Joel Waldfogel. Here is the abstract:

Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.
“GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps” — emphasis mine
Janßen, Kesler, Kummer, and Waldfogel

Please allow me to write this abstract in a different way:

…we find that GDPR has effectively removed about a third of apps that relied on ingesting and selling data as a value add to advertisers and has reduced junk app usage by the same amount. The privacy benefits of GDPR are valuable, and they have forced apps to substantially increase their value to consumers using innovation.
Me

Netflix Paints Its Picture With AI

May 3

Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. “It was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows.”

From Ryan Broderick, podcaster at The Content Mines and author of the highly entertaining Garbage Day newsletter:

2019. The show Daybreak came out. It is horrible. It is what radicalized chuds on YouTube think of all Netflix shows. It’s, like, a perfomatively woke, algorithmically generated, teen-not-comedy thing about what it would be like to live in a high school that was in the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of… thing. And it was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows. Where you’re like — you can just see the robot going, ‘This genre’s performing well and this genre’s performing well. Let’s combine them.’
Ryan Broderick
“The Facebookification of Netflix”
The Content Mines

Broderick paints a damning picture of how Netflix managed to become its own echo chamber. The machine learns what it’s programmed to do, the business green-lights the results. Soon, the system itself is flooded with an AI-generated list of shows that all seem to get canceled before a third season.

In related news, this is what artificial intelligence creates when I tell it to paint a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”:

I asked AI to paint me a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”

It’s a questionable result. When you give questionable art to consumers who have, sight unseen, already paid for it, the results seem to be speaking for themselves.

Coming To The Center: The Intersection of Sports, Gaming, and Entertainment

Apr 22

Converging On Content

On a podcast at the end of last year, Nicole LaPointe Jameson said that professional esports organizations “bridge industries that resemble a lot of traditional sports but also resemble modern-day entertainment.” Since my company works in the nebulous landscape of esports, I get asked about what the scenery looks like, and I now start that answer with a sentence that has been molded from Jameson: “Esports exists at the intersection of gaming and entertainment.”

Basketball and Esports

“Think of basketball,” I then say, comparing the world of esports to something more familiar. “There is a team on the court. They pay those players. They pay coaches to help the team improve. They do it to win and get people going to games, to compel people to watch them play.”

The same concepts apply in esports, which is what Jameson is referring to when she says esports resembles traditional sports. Everyone understands this business model. Traditional sports organizations do it, esports organizations do it.

But professional basketball is a great fit for this metaphor because the league writ large also leans into the hype surrounding the sport — not just the product that’s put on the court. The players bicker back and forth on Twitter. The arena is a fashion runway. The offseason dynamics are almost as entertaining and enticing as the in-season action.

Basketball has leaned into the magnetic pull of modern entertainment’s currency: content.

That’s how this landscape extends. From its beginnings, esports embraced content. They embraced the ecosystem surrounding their professional teams. People have been casually watching people play video games for as long as there have been esports teams. Pro orgs have long created fans of their brand through, among a number of other things, leveraging celebrity, merch, content creation, streaming, live events and collabs, Twitch chatting and community Discords, collegiate programs — all while supporting the actual teams that compete under the brand’s umbrella.

Both esports and traditional sports entities have teams — e.g. the Houston Rockets play basketball, 100 Thieves has a team that plays Valorant — but what separates traditional sports from esports is that the two interests have different starting points for colloquy. With (most) NBA teams, the chatter is first about winning titles and trade markets and salary caps; its Top Shot NFTs come later. With (most) pro esports organizations, the discourse commonly starts with the brand and its content.

Entertainment At The Center

Sports are obviously a form of entertainment, but fully-evolved modern-day entertainment is content.

It’s what makes the basketball-slash-esports metaphor really harmonize. Pro teams and pro orgs sell to their fans in a number of tangential ways that aren’t directly related to putting a product on the court (players, coaches, referees actually executing the game) and generating direct revenue (selling tickets to watch the game). Now, they’re both moving closer to pursuing the same things altogether: The importance of team success is increasing for esports orgs as the competitive world becomes more codified; the importance of off-court entertainment is rapidly extending traditional sports teams into new spheres of influence.

The Golden State Warriors, a team that plays professional basketball in the NBA, are leaning into this concept, shifting their brand to this new nexus of entertainment, initiating moves that make the team look more like an esports org than a professional basketball team. Earlier this week, the Warriors organization announced Golden State Entertainment (GSE), a division of the team that will “create licensed documentary content, produce music, and hold non-basketball live events in the Bay Area.” It will be overseen by David Kelly, the Warriors’ Chief Business Officer.

Content is king. Whether you’re talking about content in the form of games, whether you’re talking about content in the form of music, in the form of films — the ability to generate content that speaks to people will always be central.
David Kelly
Chief Business Officer, Golden State Entertainment

Not coincidentally, K-pop star BamBam is already a Warriors ambassador, previously releasing limited edition GSW x BamBam merch with the team. So why would the Warriors produce music? That’s why: GSE is set to release BamBam’s next single. They can grow revenue through the production of a documentary of him and have him perform in the Chase Center.

Traditional sports is coming to the new center of entertainment. The way esports organizations leverage content-as-a-driver for their teams will be the future for professional sports organizations. Warriors Majority Owner Joe Lacob has actually believed this for awhile now — he comes from the venture capital world and has been very public about running the Warriors with a “startup approach” — setting the entertainment train down the tracks in 2019 by announcing his intent to augment the Warriors’ organization with these ideas.

And guess where they’re looking for inspiration?

I want this to become more than a basketball team. I want it to become a sports entertainment, media, and technology company. It’s not just a team. That will become clear over the years. You can see, we’re into esports, which is related. We’ve got some other things that we’re working on as well. Utilize the management that’s here, utilize the resources we have, utilize the brand that we have, to turn this into something a little bit bigger. But I think that’ll all become obvious later.
Joe Lacob
Majority Owner, Golden State Warriors
“…The Assembling Of A New Rome,” The Athletic, Feb. 2019

Lessons Learned: Piggy-Backing

Apr 17

Building out a business model on the back of other businesses should be treated with caution

I call it piggy-backing, and it was a first-party lesson learned when my company, Mainline, started out: Be careful building out your business model on the back of another business.

Two examples:

Twitter

Chris Dixon is currently a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz. But, before he was the poster child for $3 billion in Web3 investments, he was a programmer in the 2000s-era Internet where the iPhone, Google, and all modern social media was born then refined then perfected. Specifically, Twitter.

When Twitter changed their API in 2011 or so, there was a big wave of startups — including a lot of my friends — who built Twitter startups. That was a thing in 2009 and 2010, with Tweety, TweetDeck, and all sorts of API services. There was a VC firm that started that was literally only doing Twitter apps. People thought of it as the new web and a new platform, but then there was this very harsh lesson learned. For a long time Twitter did not have a client software, and at some point they decided, “Hey, we need to control. We are going to have client software, have an ad-based model, and change the API,” and that whole industry died. Same thing happened with the Facebook platform.
Chris Dixon
Decoder Podcast

PUBG

The second thing Mainline set out to do was generate revenue by running professional esports leagues for the game title publishers. It’s not a particularly easy thing to do; for the most part, a developer’s core competencies are not in governance, broadcasting, tournament organization technology, and the things necessary to create and sustain competitive league balance. It’s in making the game the best it can possibly be for the players.

Perfect. We could step in. We were already running the largest competitive PUBG leagues in North America, so we reached out to work with the publisher (then called Bluehole) and set about to do exactly that.

The good news for PUBG is that it became an international leviathan, by nearly every metric, holding the title of most popular mobile game in the world and the desktop version has been one of the most-played games on Steam since its release in 2017.

The bad news for us meant that it was able to take its competitive league in-house.

Link Mar 16

Waiting For Oblivion

Job’s Sacrifice by William Blake, 1805

Talmudic interpreters have even said we should read the story as the final part of the biblical narrative — the exclamation point ending the age of humanity in which God spoke to us. I love this notion. Perhaps Job made an argument so airtight that God, embarrassed, ceased talking to humans altogether.
The Impatience of Job
Abraham Riesman

Did God give up?

Quote Mar 12

Out of 10 longlist nominees for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, all 10 are college graduates. On average, the nominees attended universities with rejection rates above 80 percent (i.e., highly competitive). Five went to Ivy League schools or competitive equivalents, and winners tended to double up. Charles Yu, who won the 2020 award, attended Berkeley as an undergraduate and then went to Columbia for his JD. Susan Choi, who won in 2019, graduated from Yale and Cornell. Sigrid Nunez won in 2018; she’s a graduate of both Barnard and Columbia.
Bertrand Cooper
Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?
Current Affairs, Issue 59

Permalink: The Deck Is Stacked

Life Begins

Mar 11

Francis Crick at a dinner at the Nobel Prize Winners Conference in Lindau, Germany, 1981

Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick published an extraordinary book called Life Itself in which he argues, from a scientific point of view, that life could not have got started on this planet. … To cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe … and one of those spaceships crashed into the early earth, its cargo of bacteria spilled out and eventually became us. And that’s honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, thought of (the) beginning of life on this planet.
Stanley Miller
American Chemist

Yes, Francis Crick proposes what he called directed panspermia, which is to say some alien civilization put some cells — some bacterial cells — on a rocket and crashed it on the earth.
Nick Lane
Professor of Evolutionary Biochemisry at University College, London

Both quotes from Life in a Barrel, Radiolab, around 43:10

Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and he truly believed life began, more or less, as the science experiment of an extraterrestrial entity. It’s important we don’t discount or marginalize ideas too quickly because they sound crazy today. People were killed because they believed the sun didn’t revolve around the earth.

The same episode claims that “99.9%” of all life that’s ever existed on Earth has gone extinct. Which is to say: The possibility that we began as an alien experiment, that we began as a creation of a god, that we even exist at all — is roughly the same.

Photo: Francis Crick at a dinner at the Nobel Prize Winners Conference in Lindau, Germany, 1981

Link Mar 4

The Future of the Creator Economy

Artists will be able to create stadiums, sell advertising, charge for tickets, release music all in the same virtual world

Imagine building a digital stadium or house party in Unreal Engine where the musician can release their music at an 82% profit margin and then charge for tickets to their own virtual concert while making extra money selling sponsorships or advertising at said concert.

Quote Mar 1

We saw hopesfall play as a local band and came home and wrote the riff of “Walls” that night. A direct influence. Not from a certain riff or the record but from what they were making happen on the stage as a local band — that feeling, chasing that feeling, was the riff of “Walls.”
Matt Carter
Emery Guitarist from The BlackSheep Podcast

Emery’s “Walls” is an all-timer. It would make perfect sense that the band behind that band is another all-timer.

The quote comes at the 1:10:20 mark.

Listen to “Matt Carter: Emery” on Spreaker.

Permalink: Are You Listening?

Imitate And Improve

Feb 26

The STEM PLAYER And The Movie Pig

Pig

Heads up: There are spoilers in this section.

I recently saw the movie Pig. On its surface, it’s loaded with the Nic Cage fanboy treatment. Cage plays a man who refuses to speak, lives in the woods with his (very) valuable truffle-finding pig, pig gets stolen, his idiosyncratic, mythical figure must exact revenge and get his pig back.

Except he doesn’t exact revenge. He takes beating after beating. When he is (constantly) presented with the opportunity to leverage violence as his means, he improbably relents and pursues peace. It’s not “Taken but with a pig.”

The movie was a critical darling, but by all accounts, it didn’t make money. The best estimates have it slightly above breaking even, others have it as a million-dollar loss. I found the movie lost momentum towards the end, undermined its climax, and that fantastical elements of the plot distanced it from the reality it was trying to create. I wasn’t enthralled by the result, but I very much enjoyed a number of its individual mechanisms, including its cinematography and the risks it took in its storytelling.

There should be more movies like this one, though, ones that don’t just take a left turn when we’re expecting a right — ones that are written from an entirely different place on the map. That’s why I believe it’s important that the movie got made. My feelings on its final assembly aside, it’s important that Pig was recognized so broadly and publicly in the hopes that more movies like this will get greenlit. It’s wild that an esoteric movie leveraged the real-world fandom of Cage’s acting choices to pursue an unexpected narrative. It’s emblematic of a creative approach that plays on the real-world expectations of fans, further blurring the fourth wall between our art and our lives. And when new creative approaches are pursued, we get further innovation and collaboration and remixing and rebuilding.

These results are rarely perfect out of the gate, either, but that’s rarely the point.

Stem Player

In today’s economy, video games are bigger in terms of the size of the business than movies and music and TV all put together. And what are they? They’re about going into the world and changing it and interacting with it. … My fundamental opinion is, the more we can see together, the more together we’ll be.
Alex Klein
Co-Founder of Kano Computing in GQ Magazine

Alex Klein is the co-founder of Kano Computers; Kano created the Stem Player device with Kanye West. GQ Magazine interviewed him about his work on the new product where he discusses, among other things, the inspiration for its design: Kano’s see-through computers, the machinery used in music studios, children interacting with it at Ye’s Yeezy Christian Academy, a destroyed Apple laptop, stress balls, (literal) rocks, arcade machines, products designed for people with autism. The two of them found inspiration for it everywhere. It was a communal process.

Read the Full Post

How Much Is Your Work Worth?

Feb 6

Designer Paul Rand Behind The Cover Of The Origins And History Of Consciousness Featuring His Design — Courtesy Of Print Magazine

Jayme Odgers is a graphic designer most known for his work with collage and new-wave in the 1980s. Also notable, he was an apprentice for one of the most famous designers of all designers, the visionary Paul Rand.

Odgers had a hell of an anecdote about Rand in Print recalling his first day on the job (recounted by another hall of fame designer, Steven Heller, in one of his columns):

On that very first day I began working for Paul, he had a book jacket design due. I watched as he reached into a drawer and chose two sheets of colored paper, … a red-orange and a complementary green color. Using scissors, he cut three smallish green shapes and in seemingly random manner glued them onto a square of the red-orange paper. With a circle cutter he cut out a doughnut-like shape about six inches in diameter and one inch wide, which he glued onto a sheet of white paper. It was like watching a magic act. I was mesmerized.

Covering the entire doughnut shape with acetate, he used a rather large nib pen dipped in white ink to deftly draw a linear serpent eating its own tail over the torus shape — an ouroboros appeared as if out of nowhere. Done. No sketches, no indecision; in less than 15 minutes, with minimal material, he had created the cover art for Erich Neumann’s book The Origins And History Of Consciousness for Bollingen Publishers.
Jayme Odgers
The Daily Heller: The Assistant, Jayme Odgers, Works for Paul Rand

Here is that work:

The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann as designed by Paul Rand

What would pay him for that? Would that number change for you if it were the same outcome but he spent 15 days on it instead?

Read the Full Post

That Shot Of Cassie From Euphoria

Feb 3

Sydney Sweeney as Cassie Howard in Euphoria

In the second season of Euphoria, a hard cut towards the end of episode four showed Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie Howard, staring forlorn towards nothing in particular, face tabula rasa, brain bridled with overwhelming anxiety.

It’s so good. So so good.

Director of Photography Marcell Rév spoke about this shot directly, with the framing and positioning built from imagery prominently found surrounding Mary, the mother of Jesus. “(This episode’s) montage I really like: iconic images of our characters in a setting that’s not totally real or in a light that’s not totally real. … Our inspiration was Mexican murals.”

Director of Photography Marcell Rév looked to Mexican murals for inspiration in framing this shot of Cassie Howard

The subtle nod to this spiritual realm — you see the references in the shot when you’re told about them, and maybe it was even in your subconscious before that, too — is propping up a vein in the second season of the show, too, as Levinson introduces religious undertones and alludes to spiritual purpose in the plot.

“Mexican murals from the turn of the century, Cassie with all the flowers… It became a way for us to be inside their worlds without having to break down everything on a logical level and to allow for a slightly more metaphysical perspective to take over the show. It became a way of exploring that on a visual level as opposed to just words, words, words.”
Sam Levinson
Writer and Director, Euphoria

Even if you cut all that out and it was only the shot as a frame, you’re still fixated on it, fascinating and angelic.

Quote Jan 20

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems from which they derive a variety of remedies — almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.
In Praise Of Passivity
Michael Huemer

Permalink: Passivity

Quote Jan 15

“The game’s going on rather better now,” she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little.
“‘Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is— ‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!”
“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business.”
“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderful
Lewis Carroll

Permalink: Love Alone

Link Jan 10

web3

One of Moxie Marlinspike’s first NFTs

Easily the most eloquent and insightful work I’ve read to date on the new web3 ecosystem.

The Top 17 Songs Of 2021

Dec 23

Kanye West’s Donda with a triplicate, Adele with the heartstrings, and some serious metal from Brand of Sacrifice and To The Grave

“Leave The Door Open”

Silk Sonic

Sign me up for basically anything Bruno Mars.

“family ties”

Baby Keem feat. Kendrick Lamar

Horns are classic and straightforward, perfect for the minimalist beat and Keem’s thin, higher-pitched rapping style. Fantastic beat-switch halfway through amid his torrential output. The video is also an astounding art piece.

“DON’T SHOOT UP THE PARTY”

BROCKHAMPTON

The artistic collective BROCKHAMPTON had frontman Kevin Abstract on a podcast with Rick Rubin this year (Broken Record). It gave me a new appreciation for their work and specifically this song.

Read the Full Post

Quote Dec 22

“Would you tell me, please, which way I out to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll

Permalink: Then It Doesn’t Much Matter