Hey friends! If you don’t follow me on LinkedIn, then you might have missed this: I’m producing a new podcast about the history & future of social media, and we launched this week!

The show is Revolution.Social, and it’s hosted by Twitter’s first employee, Rabble (a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath), who holds the distinction of being the person who hired Jack Dorsey. So, it was only fitting that Rabble kicked off their podcast by interviewing Jack about selling Twitter, why he left Bluesky, and everything he’s been doing since the Elon drama began.

A couple shoutouts before we get to the podcast recs: First, to Alice Chan from Flock Marketing for bringing me in on Revolution.Social and for being a superb partner behind the scenes; and second, to James Cridland for featuring the show yesterday in Podnews ... and for posting the trailer on NewPodcasts.net, which has become one of my favorite ways to discover new podcasts.

I’m really excited about this one, in case you can’t tell. Future guests include Kara Swisher, Taylor Lorenz, Yoel Roth, and more, so go give it a listen … or watch the show on YouTube.

When I haven't been editing those interviews though, here's what else I've been working on and listening to this week ...

👍 Imaginary Worlds - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Douglas Adams" ft. (hosted by Eric Molinsky)

🦸🏻‍♂️ Panic World - "The plot to ruin the new Superman movie" ft. Open Mike Eagle (hosted by )

😷 Lock and Code - "Is AI 'healthy' to use?" ft. Anna Brading & Zach Hinkle (hosted by David Ruiz)

🤬 Code Switch - "From gr*pists to nip nops, how self-censorship shapes the language of TikTok" (hosted by B.A. Parker)

🐦‍🔥 Post Games - "The life, death, death, death, death, and rebirth of Atari" ft. Wade Rosen (hosted by )

💙 Revolution.Social - "Jack Dorsey on Selling Twitter, Leaving Bluesky Social & What He's Building Next" (hosted by Rabble / Evan Henshaw-Plath)

🐫 Great Chat - "The straw that broke the camel's back" (hosted by Sally Shin, Angela Du, and )

Another show launch coming up next week! 🎉🎉🎉 Watch this space. In the meantime, here's what I've been editing & listening to lately:

🌕 The Truth - "Silvia's Blood and Moon Graffiti" (hosted by Jonathan Mitchell)

❤️ Cannonball - "Me and Bruno Mars — A Love Story" ft. Niela Orr (hosted by Wesley Morris)

👻 Lock and Code - "Corpse-eating selfies, and other ways to trick scammers" ft. Becky Holmes (hosted by David Ruiz)

🥴 Factually! - "AI is Making You Dumber" (hosted by Adam Conover)

🚸 Articles of Interest - "School Uniforms" (hosted by Avery Trufelman)

😎 Great Chat - "AI is killing the summer slowdown" (hosted by Helen Min, Ashley Mayer, Angela Du, Mac Bohannon & Sally Shin)

☭ On with Kara Swisher - "The Red Scare Returns? Lessons from McCarthyism in the Age of Trump 2.0" ft. Clay Risen (hosted by Kara Swisher)

👂 The Sound Session - "What can sound do that words or visuals can't?" ft. Ella Watts (hosted by 🎙️Gareth Davies)

⚖️ Movies on Trial - "Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace" ft. Bobby Lopez (hosted by Shawn Grindle, Dave Pilson, & Dave Reynolds)

🧠 The Intelligent Marketer - "AEO vs SEO" ft. Ethan Smith (hosted by Rishabh Jain & Mike Duboe)

👨‍🚀 No One Saw It Coming - "The Lingerie Makers who put Neil Armstrong on the Moon" (hosted by Marc Fennell)

☂️ Building Better CMOs - "Lisa Caputo, CMO of Travelers: Empathy Meets Innovation" (hosted by Greg Stuart)

⛓️‍💥 Up First - "When News Broke" ft. Ben Bradford

🎭 Great Chat - "When startups become theatre" (hosted by Helen Min, Ashley Mayer, & Sally Shin)

You can get my recommendations delivered straight to your ears by subscribing to one of my podcast playlists. Here’s how to do that.

Hey all, I have a super-sized list of podcast recommendations for you, but not because I’m being nice or anything. I just forgot to post here as well as LinkedIn!

It’s been a busy month for me, with two out-of-town trips, two new podcast launches, and more of both in the near future. Let’s get into it… here’s what I’ve been editing and listening to!

🙉 Close All Tabs - "Do You Hear What I Hear? Audio Illusions and Misinformation" ft. Francesca Fenzi (hosted by Morgan Sung)

✈️ Smart Girl Dumb Questions - "Is It Safe to Fly Right Now?" ft. Kate Kelly (hosted by Nayeema Raza)

🕵 Lock and Code - "What does Facebook know about me?" (hosted by David Ruiz)

✊ Radiolab - "The Echo in the Machine" (reported by Simon Adler, hosted by Lulu Miller)

💣 Blank Check - "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning" (hosted by Griffin Newman & David Sims)

📹 Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World - "Vine Street Confidential" (hosted by Benedict Townsend)

🚘 Building Better CMOs - "Virat Khullar, Head of Marketing at Hyundai India: Optimism is a Force Multiplier" (hosted by Greg Stuart)

❌ This Guy Sucked - "Henry Ford" ft. Zack Furness (hosted by Claire E Aubin)

🏄‍♂️ Fresh Air - "Remembering Brian Wilson, Leader of the Beach Boys" (hosted by Terry Gross)

❌ Lock and Code - "The data on denying social media for kids" ft. Jean Twenge (hosted by David Ruiz)

🔥 Big Technology Podcast - "Sam Altman's Gentle Singularity, Zuck's AI Power Play, Burning of the Waymos" ft. Ranjan Roy (hosted by Alex Kantrowitz)

🦈 Radiolab - "Making A Monster" — and really, every episode of their carefully named 'Week of Sharks' (hosted by Rachael Cusick)

🦸🏻‍♂️ The Atlas Obscura Podcast - "The Super Museum" (hosted by Dylan Thuras)

🥯 The Intelligent Marketer - "Everything is an Ad Network" ft. Eric Seufert (hosted by Rishabh Jain & Mike Duboe)

🐧 Tell Me What It's Like - "Keri Nelson: Life and Work in Antarctica" (hosted by Stacy Raine)

⚓️ Building Better CMOs - "Lauren Beckstedt, CMO of Brunswick Corporation: Anchoring Brand Value" (hosted by Greg Stuart)

🛜 Long Shadow - "The End of the World as We Know It" (hosted by Garrett M. Graff)

🤝 Great Chat - "Much ado about acquihires" (hosted by Helen Min, Ashley Mayer, Angela Du, & Sally Shin)

You can get my recommendations at a much more reasonable pace by subscribing to one of my podcast playlists, wherever you listen. Here’s how to do that.

Here's what I've been enjoying this week:

🌭 Bay Curious - "How Bacon Wrapped Hot Dogs Became Iconic Bay Area Street Food" (hosted by Olivia Allen-Price and Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman)

✨ - "Andor Season 2 Post-Mortem" [but actually, the entire Andor recap series] ft. Patrick Willems (hosted by ).

🃏 Scriptnotes Podcast - "Writing Jokes with Mike Birbiglia" (hosted by John August & Craig Mazin)

🥣 Building Better CMOs Podcast - "Doug Martin, CMO of General Mills: Emotional Connections Matter" (hosted by Greg Stuart)

🚶‍♂️ Mayo Clinic on Nutrition - "The Truth Behind '10,000 Steps a Day'" ft. Ro Huntriss (hosted by Tara Schmidt)

✊ Power User - "The case against logging off" ft. (hosted by )

👀 As always, a reminder that you can get my podcast recs delivered straight to your favorite podcasting app. Here’s how.

Question for podcast fans: How do your listening habits change when you travel? I'm usually not doing much housework while on vacation, so that's a big chunk of my podcast time gone, and I'm also less likely to be alone in a car. (Drivers stuck in traffic are my job security).

Last week, I was in New York and found a little time to listen to shows on the subway, but I was too busy to collect my picks here, like I usually do. So, here is a super-sized playlist of listening recommendations for the weeks of May 12 and 19:

🧻 Planet Money - "Why it's so hard to find a public toilet" (hosted by Willa Rubin)

⛪️ You Are Good - "Dogma" ft. Niko Stratis (hosted by Alex Steed & Eve Lindley)

🤖 Ologies - "Artificial Intelligence Ethicology" ft. Abeba Birhane (hosted by Alie Ward)

📉 The Sam Sanders Show - "Is Pop Culture in a Recession? Hot Takes Round 2" ft. Zach Zimmerman & Eliot Glazer (hosted by Sam Sanders)

🛻 Building Better CMOs Podcast - "Charlotte Blank, U.S. CMO of JLR: Lead Like a Scientist" (hosted by Greg Stuart)

📵 Lock and Code - "How Los Angeles banned smartphones in schools" ft. Nick Melvoin (hosted by David Ruiz)

🍩 Podcast: The Ride - "A Perfectly Cromulent Simpsons Episode" ft. Alan Siegel (hosted by Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner & Mike Carlson)

💥 The Memory Palace - "Oh, Herbert Morrison" (hosted by Nate DiMeo)

😵‍💫 Decoder Ring - "Blinded by the Headlights" ft. Nate Rogers, Daniel Stern, & Paul Gatto (hosted by Willa Paskin)

📞 Strangers on a Bench - "Why Was She Calling Me?" (hosted by Tom Rosenthal)

‼️ And ICYMI, you can get my podcast recs delivered to your app of choice. Here’s how.

Podcasts are an odd duck in the media world: On most listening apps, you are *not* at the mercy of an algorithm. You choose exactly which shows you want to subscribe to, and which episodes you want to hear.

I love this, because I am a deranged hermit living in the digital desert, clinging to a carefully curated collection of RSS feeds, email newsletters, and Blu-ray Discs.

However… even I am not immune to the slot machine-esque thrill of TikTok. Every swipe is another chance to find something amazing. And sometimes, I do!

Recently, I’ve found a happy medium between these two extremes on Pocket Casts: First, I manually curate all the feeds I subscribe to. Then, I choose to download individual episodes based on their title/description. Everything else gets archived.

Once an episode is in my “Up Next” queue, though, I turn on the shuffle mode and let it ride! I’ve already lost count of how many times shuffling brought me to an episode I wasn’t expecting to love. Three of those are in this week’s recommendations.

The sheer amount of entertainment we have access to is overwhelming, and actually ~looking~ at everything one could listen to is paralyzing. I’ve come to realize it’s nice to surrender *some* control, *some* of the time. Maybe I should do this with my Blu-Rays …

Here’s what I’ve been shuffling through this week …

🐷 Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - “Spam!” (hosted by Alex Schmidt & Katie Goldin)

🤖 Lock and Code - “The AI chatbot cop squad is here” ft. Emanuel Maiberg & Jason Koebler (hosted by David Ruiz)

🏆 The Extraordinarians - “Pun Champion Janani K. Jha” (hosted by Kristen Schaal, Tony Hale, & Matt Oberg)

📕 If Books Could Kill - “The Let Them Theory” (hosted by Michael Hobbes & Peter Shamshiri)

🎸 Dead Meat - “The Sexy Symbolism of Sinners” (hosted by Chelsea Rebecca & James A. Janisse)

🎺 Fresh Air - “Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis” ft. George Clooney (hosted by Terry Gross)

👨🏻 Good Hang - “Paul Rudd” (hosted by Amy Poehler)

‼️ And ICYMI, you can get my podcast recs delivered to your app of choice. Here’s how.

“I always want to have something that's making me uncomfortable, because I'm not currently the best person at doing that thing, but I want to figure it out and learn and become great at it.”

This quote from Zoe CMO Bob Sherwin on the latest episode of Building Better CMOs really clicked with me.

I believe in knowing your own limits and hiring beyond them. But at the same time — I always want to be learning new things, for my company’s benefit and my own.

Maybe your customers’ needs change. Maybe AI gets too good at your job. Or maybe you just want to learn a new skill for the sake of learning it. I'm literally starting a photography class next week, because ... why not?

As Bob says, if your job “doesn't provide you with skill acquisition, challenging yourself, increased responsibility, then you really should start getting antsy.”

Here’s what I’ve been listening to this week …

📊 Never Post - “Smooth Moves” ft. Hannah Pivo & Julian Chokkattu (hosted by Jason Oberholtzer & Georgia Hampton)

🍿 Hyperfixed - “Parker’s Obsessed with this Movie (But She Cannot Find It Anywhere)” (hosted by Alex Goldman)

⛷️ The Journal - “Neom, Pt 1: Skiing in the Desert” ft. Rory Jones, Eliot Brown, Andy Wirth, & Tony Harris (hosted by Ryan Knutson)

🍳 Home Cooking - “Cultural Anther-pology” ft. Sumesh Hirway (hosted by Samin Nosrat & Hrishikesh Hirway)

🧭 Building Better CMOs - “Bob Sherwin, CMO of Zoe: Navigating Media Shifts” (hosted by Greg Stuart)

🌟 Bullseye - “Andor creator Tony Gilroy” (hosted by Jesse Thorn)

🧬 Radiolab - “The Age of Aquaticus” ft. Husdon Freeze & Carl Zimmer (hosted by Lulu Miller & Latif Nasser)

Hey, email readers! Sorry to ghost you for the last couple months… you’re probably not interested in my excuses, but if you are, you can find them at the bottom.

For the past two months, I’ve been sharing podcast recommendations on LinkedIn and in public playlists, and the response has been fantastic.

Here’s how to get those recommendations delivered directly to your favorite podcast app.

This little experiment has going well enough that I’m going to start posting those same recs here! So if you want to know what I’m listening to & what I’ve been working on, you’ve come to the right place.

This week’s podcast recommendations

I love the feeling of falling in love with a new podcast. In the summer of 2011, I started listening to RadioLab, and a core memory was created: THIS was possible with audio?

Even as I've made podcasting my career, that feeling has continued to find me. It happened in 2014 with Reply All, in 2018 with Everything Is Alive, in 2021 with Normal Gossip, in 2024 with Never Post — to name just a few.

The latest winner of the Eric Johnson Award For "omg i love this" Vibes is a podcast about radical Catholic peace activists during the Vietnam War, called Divine Intervention.

I posted the first episode here in mid-March, and it's quickly become my favorite new podcast of 2025. Brendan Hughes & co are telling a story about resistance, sabotage, and faith that feels timely and immediately relevant, even though the events happened more than 50 years ago.

The playlists I post here are only for episodes you can enjoy on their own, without already knowing the podcast. But if you're looking for a new series to really sink into, you'd be smart to give Divine Intervention a try.

Speaking of which, here are this week's new recommendations:

🧛 WTF - "Ryan Coogler" (hosted by Marc Maron)

🐕 Lock and Code - "Did DOGE 'breach' Americans' data?" ft. Sydney Saubestre (hosted by David Ruiz)

🎙️ The People's Recorder - "A Giant Listening Project" (hosted by Chris Haley)

💩 This Guy Sucked - "Voltaire" ft. Eleanor Janega (hosted by Claire Aubin)

🌳 Niche to Meet You - "Stick Nation: Paying Attention, One Stick at a Time" ft. Logan Jugler, Boone Hogg, & Margaret Renkl (hosted by )

👑 Big Time - "The Homecoming Queen's Gambit" (reported by , introduced by Steve Buscemi)

🎯 Question Everything - "Freedom of the press is great, until you're the target" ft. (hosted by Brian Reed)

Those excuses I promised

• My motivation to write about silly internet videos and funny news stories went WAY down after November 5, 2024. Wonder why.

• I am increasingly wary of Substack as a platform and was researching a move to Beehiiv or Ghost. Still chewing on this one!

• On a happier note, my work at LightningPod is keeping me busy! Podcasts are growing, and the sort creators & businesses I work with have been reaching out. I hope to tell you about some new shows I’m working on very soon.

But first, a reminder to check out the LightningPod Recommends podcast playlists I told you about back in November. I’ve been keeping them updated regularly since then, with great stuff I’ve been editing or listening to.

If you use Spotify, follow this playlist by clicking on the plus sign. If you’re using another app, you can copy this RSS feed and paste it into Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts. Transistor has a good guide if that sounds intimidating. Or, you can find the playlist on Listen Notes to listen on the web.

Here’s what’s currently on tap, as of this writing:

• Mark Chrisler recounts the “egg nog riots” that tore apart West Point and featured a shocking number of historical figures. (The Constant)

• Alex Goldman tries to help someone with an insanely difficult question: Should she have kids? (Hyperfixed)

• Katie Goldin and Alex Schmidt explore the history of Christmas trees, and plant the word “scrungly” deep in my brain (Secretly Incredibly Fascinating)

• Hrishikesh Hirway joins Kelsey McKinney to unravel a dramatic family mystery (Normal Gossip)

• Katie Thorton explains how Times Square went from vice central to family-friendly destination (99% Invisible)

• And Joubin Mirzadegan looks back on the coolest stories and grittiest advice shared by his guests in 2024 (Grit)

And now, my 2024 movie recap

My partner made something incredibly cool for her Instagram last week: A custom-designed recap of all the books she had read in 2024, sorted into thematic categories. Unfortunately, she used my Canva account to make this, which made it easy for me to steal her designs and do my own recap, except for movies.

I saw 142 films in 2024 — here’s what really stuck with me…

I told ChatGPT to imagine what you all would look like as ducks, with my vaguest prompt to date: They have to look cool, do cool stuff, wear fashionable clothes, and be having a great time.

🐈‍⬛ Déjà vu all over again

Usually in this part of the newsletter, there’s a section called “What I’m reading.” But in the weeks since the election, the answer to that has been a lot of political stuff that is generally quite depressing.

I’m sure you’re getting plenty of that in your media diet, too, and — notwithstanding my occasional rants about whatever tech company has pissed me off most recently — I don’t want Follow Friday to be a bummer.

On top of all that, my work at LightningPod is keeping me busy enough that I have less and less time these days to spend newslettering. I want to focus that time on the thing that brought most of you here in the first place: Podcasts.

That means this newsletter is going through a big change, again. For now, at least, I’m going to nix the reading/YouTube/TikTok/movie sections (although you can still follow me on Letterboxd for all my takes on cinema such as 13 Going on 30 and School of Rock).

I’m also going to make it a lot easier to listen to my podcast recommendations.

🚨 My new podcast playlists

Nobody wants to listen to a podcast in their email app. But I stand by all the episodes I recommend here, and I want you to listen to them, too! So, I have a couple new things you should try.

First, if you use Spotify, you can follow this playlist to get my new recommendations in the app. Clicking that link will open the Spotify app, and then you can click on the plus sign to follow the playlist.

No Spotify? No problem! I’m sharing the same episodes in a playlist on ListenNotes.com, which you can get in whatever podcast app you use.

Here’s the the playlist on Listen Notes, and here is the public RSS feed. You can copy that second link and paste it into almost any app — including Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts — to get my playlist. If you’re not sure how to do that, find your app in Transistor’s guide and follow the instructions.

I’ll be adding to these lists continually, no more than one episode per day. I’ll remove episodes once they’re about a week old, to keep it fresh.

🎧 What I’m listening to

Here’s the Spotify version of the playlist:

This week’s picks so far... Stars for the ones I edited:

• Lock and Code, “An air fryer, a ring, and a vacuum get brought into a home. What they take out is your data” (27min) *

• Grit, “CEO and Co-Founder Codeium, Varun Mohan w/ Leigh Marie Braswell: Limitless” (1hr) *

• Acquired, “IKEA” (3hr22min - I promise, it’s worth it)

• Imaginary Worlds, “There’s No Place Like Oz” (38min)

Give one of the playlists a follow, and let me know what you think!

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

If you’re feeling sad, angry, bitter, or betrayed right now… that is valid! I know I am.

I don’t have the usual links or podcasts for you this week, just some personal reflections and a bit of advice after the US election.

That’s down below, but if you do nothing else, please read For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing by John O’Donohue: “Imitate the habit of twilight, / Taking time to open the well of color / That fostered the brightness of day. / Draw alongside the silence of stone / Until its calmness can claim you. / Be excessively gentle with yourself.”

My yoga instructor read this poem in full at the end of her (very well-attended) class on Tuesday night, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. So here are some AI-generated ducks being claimed by calmness:

🕰 2016 vs. 2024

On Gianmarco Soresi’s podcast The Downside this week, comedian Lucas Zelnick reflected on being in deep-blue Brooklyn Wednesday morning: “You’ve never seen so many devastated liberals in one room as a coffee shop in Bushwick. It was like being at ground zero on September 12th … I think 2016 was shock. And this feels like defeat.”

This resonated with me, and I don’t want it to. I do not want to be defeated for four more years.

During the first Trump administration, everything felt like it was spinning out of control, but that chaos motivated me to be proactive in my own life, where I could. I learned to cook, started eating healthier, and left the stifling suburbs for the city, where I met the woman I would later marry. I stopped living life on cruise control.

That was a frenzied atmosphere, though, and the pushback to the chaos was loud and frequent. When every day feels like defeat, it’s harder to find motivation.

But I have a plan.

✅ My priorities

The night of the election, my partner and I made lists of our top priorities in the likely event of a Trump victory. Every time I have thought about the list in the days since, it has made me feel a little better; I’d recommend this as an exercise if you’re feeling lost.

Your own list will vary, but mine is:

1. Take care of my partner and myself

2. Be there for our friends and families

3. Support our communities

4. Be healthy

5. Be hopeful

With these defined as my priorities, I’ve realized that there are many things I don’t need to do: I don’t need to get back on social media, to yell about politics (even though there are certainly a lot of people who ought to be yelled at now); I don’t need to water down my principles, to “get along” with the people who voted us into a dark an uncertain future; and most importantly, I don’t need see that future as one game, which is either won or lost.

Rather, I want to acknowledge that the years ahead are going to be really, really painful for a lot of people — and to then look for opportunities where I can make things a little better. There will be many losses, but with care and compassion, we can also create wins.

“The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything,” Rebecca Solnit wrote, “and everything we can save is worth saving.”

🗣 Your turn

I hope, in some tiny, tiny way, that the fluff and nonsense you typically see on this newsletter helps you; maybe a video I’ve shared makes you laugh, or a podcast makes you think.

But if you’ve read this far and you’re so inclined, I’d love to hear from you: How are you feeling, really? What sort of stuff would help you if you saw it here? And what are your priorities now? Feel free to reply to this email, or you can answer anonymously here.

Thank you, and please: Be excessively gentle with yourself.

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

Speaking of which, an early happy Halloween to all, except for the people who (as of OCTOBER THE TWENTIETH) already decorated my nearest IKEA for Christmas. What are we even doing here?

📰 What I’m reading

Dehumanization and the internet: “Digital technology always promised the possibility of improving our reality and our ability to connect with each other by re-creating reality and consequentially adding more value to it. But has the opposite happened? Perhaps the dissociative and aspirational nature of technology is only adept at keeping us in a state of perpetual and spinning longing and desire, making it hard to care about anyone beyond ourselves because all we notice is the perceived lack within ourselves.”

Now I hate campaign texts even more: “Deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans and misled those battling dementia or other cognitive impairments into giving away millions of dollars — far more than they ever intended. Some unintentionally joined the ranks of the top grassroots political donors in the country as they tapped into retirement savings and went into debt, contributing six-figure sums through thousands of transactions.”

CCPuns: “China’s online spaces are strictly monitored and censored. Some sensitive topics and terms are strictly banned, such as references to the Tiananmen massacre, or criticism of President Xi Jinping. Insulting individuals or China generally is also frowned upon. In response, users have adapted, using funny or obscure references and in-jokes to get around the censorship. Many rely on homophones, using phrases that sound very similar in Mandarin, but were written with different Chinese characters, such as the word for “paratrooper” (sǎn bīng) instead of “idiot” (shǎ bī).”

America’s strangest tourist destination: “We were not allowed to go joyriding through all 3,200 square miles of White Sands. We had to follow a prescribed route past concrete structures that explosives had reduced to rubble and tangled rebar. We saw a progression of signs that formed a dark poem when read in sequence: Warning: Entering active missile range / Beware of eagles eating on the road. / Caution: Radioactive materials. The lettering on one had faded entirely, leaving only a crisply drawn rattlesnake.”

Hug faster, dammit! ““It’s hard to say goodbye so make it quick. 3 minutes max,” one of a series of signs at Dunedin Airport on the country's South Island says. “Max hug time three minutes” another reads. Those seeking “fonder farewells” should “use the car park” where a generous 15-minute window is allowed, a third says.”

I also just finished reading A Disturbance in the Force: How and Why the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened by Steve Kozak. As a chronicle of a filmmaking fiasco, it doesn’t have as many jaw-dropping anecdotes as, say, The Disaster Artist. But Kozak writes with passion about the people involved in the notorious special who were earnestly trying to make something good. I think to get the most out of the book, you ought to have already watched the Holiday Special, which is easy to find and difficult to finish. But for superfans of Star Wars and/or weird pop culture, it’s a good read.

🎧 What I’m listening to

Flightless Bird is an exploration of American culture through the eyes of a New Zealand-born journalist, David Farrier. And in the most recent episode, he visited the most American thing: A huge chain restaurant loosely themed around another country’s foods! As a poor excuse for an American, I’ve never actually eaten at an Olive Garden, but it’s quite fun to hear David talk to superfans who have OG-related tattoos, nicknames, and even weddings. Also, you know what? He’s right. Loading up on bread right before a meal is weird.

I was vaguely aware that there’s a book called “Who Moved My Cheese?” and I probably wouldn’t have looked too closely had I encountered it in the wild. On the surface, this bestseller is about adapting to change … but as Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri explain on If Books Could Kill, it’s actually a “demonic” bit of pro-layoff propaganda. What’s more, it’s terribly written and centered on a metaphor that is both too simple and too convoluted, making it perfect fodder for their podcast.

On their podcast One Song, Diallo Riddle and Blake "LUXXURY" Robin discuss the history and analyze the “stems” of popular songs, and I can only imagine how impatient they must have felt, waiting until spooky season to cover Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Even if you already love this song (and who doesn’t?), this episode will make you appreciate just how musically inspired it is. I also love the fact that, as DJs, the hosts appreciate all the different musicians who made this song great, not just MJ.

I edited this: On Lock and Code, the ACLU’s senior policy council Cody Vetzke talks with David Ruiz about the data broker industry, which knows a lot more about you than you probably realize. And that matters for more than just advertising; your hidden data profile can be used to deny you a job, a house, or admission to a university.

I also edited this: Loom CEO Joe Thomas spoke with Kleiner Perkins’ Joubin Mirzadegan and Ilya Fushman on the latest episode of Grit, reflecting on his company’s $975 million acquisition by Atlassian. They recount the ups and downs of Loom’s path to an exit before pivoting to its rollout of AI products, the acquisition landscape, and what it’s like going from independent founder to acquired employee.

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is this headline in the San Francisco Standard. Who isn’t going to click on that? And it’s accurate, too!

Here’s the article

🍿 What I’m watching

Shaun of the Dead (2004) - ★★★★ ½ - It really clicked for me on this viewing just how much work the first act has to do to make the rest so entertaining. We spend so much time with Shaun, Ed, Liz, and the gang that even though the movie is often silly and cartoonishly violent, the emotional beats still WORK. I think the jokes are funnier in Hot Fuzz and the action is more impressive in Baby Driver, but I’m so impressed by what the creative team was able to accomplish here.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) - ★★★ ½ - A charmingly zany wartime comedy about a man trying to hide from the truth, who winds up ensnared in a much bigger lie. Eddie Bracken plays the impeccably named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, who returns to his hometown a war hero — even though he never went to war. The story beats are a little predictable, but there are more than a few great jokes, and I love the depth afforded to some characters who easily could have been neglected.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

Life lessons for toddlers

This foil sculptor is so cool

Emotional support human

The pinball Olympics are nuts

This guy’s laugh could cure diseases

🦆 About the Ducks

ChatGPT really struggled with this one. As I found last week with my sleepy duck trying to tune out the world, the AI seems to want to add a lot more stuff than I really asked for, hence the giant ducks in the clouds (???). But the first draft was even more chaotic:

The prompt here was “draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks facing each other. one of them is dressed in a white button-down shirt with a red tie, and is holding a cricket bat. the other duck has been turned into a zombie!”

Thanks ChatGPT for haunting my nightmares with that first zombie. I had to tell it to tone down the horror to get the winning art.

I also tried Canva’s new AI image-generation tools this week, in several different styles, and there were some pretty good options, but the “landscape aspect ratio” instruction didn’t get through:

Oh no, who gave the zombie-duck a bat?

📰 What I’m reading

Podcasting isn’t a technology problem: “I see a deep imbalance in the kind of help being offered, which seems to show an industry-wide misunderstanding of what will make a new podcast successful. We are teaching people how to deliver, but not what to deliver. There is vast attention to systems for logistics, delivery, and marketing, but only a cursory nod to how to make shows that are worth listening to in the first place.” PREACH!

Meta commits a really stupid AI faux pas: “Oh look, our feed is full of amazing photographs of people enjoying the Northern lights. Let's quickly tell them that they can fucking fake it instead. Ugh.” 

The financialization of fandom: “If positive fans can generate more money--a tall ask, and a marketing responsibility that shouldn't be on them--a thing might stick around; if negative fans can cost a company more money, or even just the threat of it, a thing might get the axe. This feels like it puts the average viewer in a bind: a show can be cancelled if there isn't enough instant buzz and viewer numbers for it, but it also can't necessarily be saved by all the passion and fandom it can muster.”

I haven’t been reading as much news as I usually do, due to the aforementioned vacation. But you know what holds up? Speaker For the Dead, the first sequel to Ender’s Game, which was written to be enjoyable on its own. I still have my old copy of it from high school, but if you’re going to read it, I’d encourage you to buy it used or borrow it from your local library, because the author is … a big problem.

🎧 What I’m listening to

I’ve been a fan of Kelsey McKinney’s podcast Normal Gossip since its very early episodes, although I admit that I missed a bunch of seasons 5 and 6 starting last year. No spoilers, but … the first episode of season 7, “Forbidden Feline Fanfiction with Ashley Reese,” convinced me I HAVE to go back and listen to everything I missed; dozens of episodes in, this podcast is still outrageously funny, and one of the best ones to listen to with a friend or partner.

Speaking of new seasons, rock critic Rob Harvilla is back with a promising — albeit awkwardly titled — new season of his podcast for The Ringer: “60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s.” I guess they couldn’t change the main title for SEO reasons? Whatever, the show is still fantastic, and Rob still goes on long digressions about topics like erotic poetry and Cormac McCarthy. And somehow, he reliably arrives back at world-beating analyses of era-defining songs, such as the millennial anthem “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.

And I’ve edited a bunch of podcast episodes that have published since my last newsletter, so let’s start with this one from Lock and Code: David Ruiz interviews two of his colleagues at Malwarebytes, Zach Hinkle and Pieter Arntz, about a disturbing new type of scam: Phony Facebook funeral livestreams. They go over how the scam works, what to watch out for, and why its victims are so susceptible.

On Grit, there’ve been two new episodes you should check out — first is Klarna CEO & co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who talks to Joubin Mirzadegan about the feeling of being a “country cousin” as a tech exec in Sweden. They also discuss partnering with OpenAI, pushing yourself into your “stretch zone,” reinventing an established company and more.

And most recently, Joubin also interviewed Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz about the state of mixed-reality headsets, the importance of founder voting power, giving the worst startup pitch of all time, and Rony’s efforts to create a more optimistic & democratic way forward for emerging tech. It’s a long interview but absolutely worth your time; the minutes flew by even as I was editing it.

Almost done, two more! On Building Better CMOs, Greg Stuart interviewed Nissan’s global CMO Allyson Witherspoon about why “creativity is queen,” the danger of over-reliance on AI for creativity, and how she adapted her leadership style as an American for colleagues in Japan. You can also read the full interview as a podcast transcript with chapters.

And finally, I edited this episode of Greymatter for the venture capital firm Greylock: An interview between their partner Saam Motamedi and Alvaro Morales, the CEO of the built-for-AI billing company Orb. Alvaro talks about what a new $25 million funding round means for his company, how pricing for digital services has evolved, competing with the Goliaths of the billing vertical and more.

I also edited the video version of this interview. Take a look!

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is this furry mental wellness robot designed by Casio. Only $398 if someone wants to buy it for me:

🍿 What I’m watching

Movie - stars - review

The Wild Robot (2024) - ★★★★ - Gorgeously animated, frequently funny, and emotionally manipulative in the best ways. One of the few Dreamworks films that could pass for top-tier Pixar. The third act dragged a little longer than I would have liked, but I loved the subtle ways we learn about Roz’s world without having it explicitly shouted at us.

South Pacific (1958) - ★★ - ⬇️

“Hey Joshua, we want you to direct the movie version of this big musical.”
“Is it off the charts racist?”
“Joshua, please. This is 1958. OF COURSE it is!”
“OK, good. How are the songs?”
“There’s like one and a half good ones, but we’ll run them over and over again until the movie is 3 hours long.”
“Good enough for me! I just have one condition.”
“Anything!”
“This is going to be filmed in a gorgeous tropical location, right?”
“Yes! We’re filming in Hawaii!”
“OK, I’d like to ruin most that footage with a sickly yellow filter.”
“Genius! You’re hired!”

The Descendants (2011) - ★★★ - This dramedy opens with a clear idea: “Fuck paradise.” Even in Hawai’i, George Clooney’s character tells us, things can go badly and life can be hard, which is a clear enough setup for the story that’s about to unfold. Sure enough, things are not as pretty as they seem. But for the rest of its runtime, the movie fails to draw enough connecting lines between its A plot — an unfolding family tragedy — and its B plot, the potential sale of a piece of pristine Kauai real estate. The two stories do intersect eventually, but pacing problems and a few unearned tonal swings make it hard to get closure with the story. For what it’s worth, though, the supporting cast — including Shailene Woodley as elder daughter Alexandra and Matthew Lillard as a real estate agent with a secret — does great work.

Lilo & Stitch (2002) - ★★★★ - The ultimate found family picture. One of the most underrated Disney animated movies, a post-Renaissance gem that never fails to make me laugh AND cry. A lot of that should be credited to the character of Nani, who didn’t even register with me when I was a kid.

Saturday Night (2024) - ★★★ - This wants so hard to be an Aaron Sorkin movie, and I imagine Aaron Sorkin wishes he had had a crack at the script. I love the near-real time pace, and the ensemble cast does some impressing impressions, but SNL today isn’t the countercultural bomb that Lorne Michaels describes it as here; it IS the mainstream. Saturday Night is inaccessible as a work of drama to viewers who don’t know the celebrities and sketches being recreated, and underwhelming to those who do. Anyway it’s probably going to win Best Picture, so I’m just resigning myself to that now.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

Jolene’s side of the story

My partner says this is ridiculous and not funny

We’re sorry …

How to ruin the moment

Dinner with a view

🦆 About the Ducks

ChatGPT didn’t quite understand what I was going for here, but I think you get the gist. Here’s my original prompt:

draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of a duck lying in bed, trying to cover its ears with a pillow. outside of its window are several other ducks making noise: one blowing into a trumpet, another using a jackhammer, another driving a big rig truck and blowing its horn, etc.

I was curious how that “etc.” would affect things. Here was the initial output, which has a lot of … etc.

I prefer the second illustration overall, but I like this art style better. Kinda funny how both ducks seem to have an airhorn on their beds; some days, I could use that. And they both have duck-related artwork that pokes out of the frame.

I’m going to leave it all on the court today, because programming note: Follow Friday will be off next week. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be back in your inbox on Friday, October 18.

🍎 And now, a lil rant about privacy

In the New York Times this week (gift link), Kevin Roose spotlights a change Apple made in iOS 18 that I literally can’t believe is only happening now, in 2024: When an app asks to access your contacts — you know, the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and maybe physical addresses of literally everyone you’ve ever met — you’ll now have the option to not share all of that information in one tap.

“iOS has allowed users to give apps selective access to their photos for years,” he writes. “Shouldn’t the same principle apply to their contacts?” YES. All-or-nothing sharing is only good for businesses, not for users.

Apple’s laziness affected me personally this year, when I joined WhatsApp to talk to family members overseas. I don’t trust Meta and declined to give it access to all of my contacts, which makes the app WAY less convenient to use: I can type in other people’s numbers, and they can type in mine, but I can’t label anyone’s number with that person’s name. If anyone messages me 1:1, I have to hope their picture shows me who they are, and/or just memorize their phone number. This is so shitty and I’ve been mad about it for seven (7) months.

Kevin acknowledges that Apple’s long overdue change to contact-sharing will, unfortunately, benefit incumbents like Meta, who already have all of your contacts, while new social apps won’t be able to scale as quickly. I say Apple should be bolder and let you revoke every app’s access to your contacts in one tap. Make everyone start over!

📰 What I’m reading

When dead relatives become AI slop: “Our memories have become forever digital debris to be sucked in, digested, and reanimated by machine learners. Our lives, our dead, and their data are becoming a kind of digital compost. Maybe it’s a bit like a woodland burial? Well, except no, it’s not anything like that. We are not vegetable scraps, and no trees will grow from my father’s online remains.”

Robot elephants for Hindu temples: “The animatronic, which cost almost $6,000 to build, is part of a limited campaign by PETA and another animal rights organization, Voices for Asian Elephants, to demonstrate how robot elephants can replace real ones, minimizing cruelty to animals and risks for humans.”

The Onion endorses Joe Biden: “Joe Biden may be young by Washington standards, but he’s packed a lot into 81 short years. He’s fought hard for working Americans, be they on the factory line or on the board of Blackstone Group. He’s stood up to everyone who threatened this great nation, from Vladimir Putin to Anita Hill. And he supports women and minorities, based on that seemingly random lady he chose to be his vice president.”

Confessions of a prison librarian: “We did not keep detailed circulation information and incarcerated people shared books off the record, so I usually could not deduce whom these treasures belonged to. Mementos languished, waiting for someone to send a frantic message over the electronic kiosk, hoping to recover the photo of their little girl. I could not help with many of the problems people face in jail, but I could provide small kindnesses that made me feel lighter amidst the heaviness of the place.”

Smart glasses are creepy and you shouldn’t buy them: “‘To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,’ the video says. ‘After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.’” Sorry for the second tech privacy rant, but like, facial recognition and recording people surreptitiously are two features that a lot of people expect and want from smart glasses. Hackers will always find a way to enable them, as they did here with the Meta/Ray-Ban smart glasses. Although there are great industrial applications for AR, I think anyone who wears these things in public is a creep until proven otherwise.

🎧 What I’m listening to

Via Podcast the Newsletter, I’m really enjoying a new podcast called Love, Factually, which applies the science of romance to famous rom-coms. Professors Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel kick it off, of course, with Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, which might be my favorite movie of all time (thanks, Emily). Although its famous big thesis — that men and women can never be friends — is a work of convenient fiction, the hosts discovered a lot of truth in everything from Harry and Sally’s friends-to-lovers journey to “I’ll have what she’s having.”

I know I literally told you to go listen to Question Everything two weeks ago, but the latest episode is even better than the already-excellent series premiere. It’s a convo between Brian Reed and celebrated journalist Barton Gellman about why Barton left his career behind to become an advocate for democracy at a nonprofit. It raises some urgently important questions about the role of journalism and what the hell we’re supposed to do if the preisdent does not care about facts at all.

I edited this: On Grit, Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan spoke to Kleiner Perkins partners Joubin Mirzadegan and Ev Randle about his sometimes-divisive leadership style, hiring for conflict, and the intense love that his company gets from its users. One of them even promised to name their child after Huntress, and Kyle wrangles a similar promise out of Ev if he hits $1 billion in annual revenue.

And I produced and edited this: Building Better CMOs is BACK for another season! MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart interrogates what makes great marketing leaders tick, and he couldn’t have found a better guest to kick off season 2 than Manolo Arroyo, the global CMO of Coca-Cola. They talk about the Olympics, AI, why Manolo wants his team to be “selfish,” and a lot more.

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is Gisnep, an ingenious word game that I think I found through Hank and John Green’s Complexly email newsletter. You drop letters into squares below to create an iconic quote. Try it out!

🍿 What I’m watching

I only saw one movie this week?? I guess I was busy.

Hoop Dreams (1994) - ★★★★ ½ - I have never cared about basketball as much as I did while watching this. One of those long documentaries that feels long, and yet you don’t care because you have to know what happens next. Much credit to the late Roger Ebert for championing this film when no one else would — a gold standard for low budget docs.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

How to vocal loop

ANGWY!

Nirvana, but make it bluegrass

Gordon Lightfoot or GTFO

Where do puppies come from?

🦆 About the Ducks

Here’s the ChatGPT prompt I used this week:

draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks playing basketball on an outdoor street court. one of them is not wearing a jersey and trying to defend the hoop, while the other *is* wearing a jersey, holding the basketball, and is in midair, going for a dunk.

Interesting that the AI doesn’t seem to understand the concept of “shirts vs. skins,” but at least the jerseys are different colors.

See you in two weeks!

💉 Reminder: Get your COVID booster!

My left arm is sore as I write this because this week, I got my annual flu shot and the newest COVID-19 vaccine for 2025. I remember how momentous getting the first shots in 2021 was: Just getting an appointment was an ordeal, and then I queued for at least 30 minutes outside the vaccine site, nervously checking my phone. What if they run out? etc.

That experience is hilarious in hindsight because getting my annual vaccine has become so easy. I rolled up to Walgreens, stood in no line, and was boosted & out of there in eight minutes. Consider this your reminder to get yours, too.

📰 What I’m reading

America’s forgotten fruit: “Today, wild pawpaws still grow in 26 states, from northern Florida to Pennsylvania and across the Midwest into Nebraska. But even though they appear in abundance each fall, few people are aware of the delicious treasures hiding nearby.”

Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake: “Legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. These problems seem to concentrate among young men living in low-income counties—further evidence that those most hurt by sports gambling are the least well-off.”

Understanding anti-woke tech bros: “These guys romanticize the idea of working with their hands, but it’s far more likely they spend their days typing on a laptop (or better yet, speaking into a podcast mic). Rather than a remote log cabin, they imagine escaping to their very own civilization on a corporate-owned self-governing city-state — er, ‘networked state.’ They’re not driving lifted trucks; they’re buying bulletproof hunks of metal that look like they came out of Cyberpunk 2077. Like Ron Swanson, they still love animal protein, but now they may be eating it literally raw.”

Hang on to your physical driver’s license: “No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.”

Don’t give up on pronouncing someone’s name: “I cannot speak for everyone with a unique name, but in my opinion, I’d rather someone try to pronounce a name than just give up. Personally, I am not offended when either my first or last name is mispronounced but rather thankful someone took the effort to give my name dignity by attempting to say it — as I do theirs.”

🎧 What I’m listening to

Despite living in Northern California, I’m not a huge wine drinker. But I have made many daytrips to Napa and Sonoma counties, some of them on oppressively hot days. On this episode of Short Wave, Lauren Sommer answers a question I’ve thought about often: What is climate change doing to the grapes? Especially interesting is the impact on one specific, popular variety: Cabernet Sauvignon.

I wasn’t expecting a history of Pop-Tarts to have quite so many innuendos, but apparently that’s on brand for the On Brand podcast. There are also connections to World War II, dog food, and an ongoing debate about whether the Kellogg’s-made treat should be eaten with butter (absolutely not). Chemistry takes precedence over the breezy story here, which is wise because hosts Jon Glover and Marisa Pinson have a lot of it.

I’ve been celebrating the return of How to Destroy Everything, an exquisitely produced podcast about a narcissistic father named Richard Jacobs, which became an overnight hit last year — despite releasing only two full episodes. In the latest episode of the show, Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky explain how they were overwhelmed by their popularity, and why they took a year off before committing to a regular publishing schedule. But if you’re new to the show, you should definitely start with episode 1.

I edited this: On Lock and Code, David Ruiz interviews San Francisco’s City Attorney David Chiu about his lawsuit against several websites that make it easy to create deepfake pornography. Apparently, high schoolers and college students are using these sites to swap their classmates’ faces onto the bodies of sex workers and adult film stars, a depressing new low in the already-terrible genre of “revenge porn.” As if being a teenager wasn’t hard enough.

And I also edited this: On Grit, Joubin Mirzadegan interviewed former Ford CEO Mark Fields about spending decades in the auto business, the fallacy of “work/life balance,” and writing a new chapter after being fired from the company he gave most of his career to.

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is Cats of the Web, a sorely-needed IMDb for internet-famous felines. How did this not exist before?

🍿 What I’m watching

The Mask of Zorro (1998) - ★★★★ - I don’t know how they’re not still making one of these every 3 years. Fun dialogue, clever action choreography, and more sexual chemistry than you can swing a sword in the shape of a “Z” at. Enough time has passed that Antonio Banderas could pass the torch to another Zorro — is Pedro Pascal too old?

Super Mario Bros. (1993) - ★★ ½ - Is this a good movie? Not really, but not because of the awkward special effects or the extravagant … lack of fealty to the source material. Honestly, I love the fact that the colorful world of the early Mario video games was replaced here with a grimy, dystopian sci-fi city; it makes the moments of game-y silliness — like the super jump boots or the Bob-Omb — really feel special. I just wish the script was more consistently funny and the action was a little less coincidental. Gotta admire the audacity of the BTTF-esque ending though.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

Just a normal dog eating a pineapple

Accidental bookmarks

A very Septembery mashup (wear headphones)

¡Olé!

A great laundry productivity hack

🦆 About the Ducks

Man, generative AI has gotten crazy impressive, but every time it fails to do something simple, it’s honestly a relief. Here’s the original prompt I gave ChatGPT and what it spat out:

draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks facing each other. both are wearing blue overalls, and one of them has a red shirt, black mustache, and a red hat with an "M" on it. The other has a green shirt, brown mustache, and green hat with the letter "L" on it. They are surrounded by red-and-white mushrooms

Pretty good, but there’s one obvious error: Luigi-duck’s hat.

So I said, the duck on the right should have an "L" on his hat instead of an "M”

We got the picture at the top, which I accepted because it’s less chaotic than this first output and, honestly, who cares? (sorry, Luigi stans).

It’s clear the AI knew what I was getting at because I didn’t even specify the color of the overalls’ buttons, or the fact that the initials on the hats should be encircled. But for whatever reason, generating an “L” wasn’t on the table. Weird!

🙅‍♂️ Don’t watch this trailer

Better late than never, I saw the Broadway musical Wicked this week and it was a good time — not my favorite sort of play, but good enough that I was eager to see the trailer for Jon Chu’s upcoming two-film adaptation, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. And WOW, am I glad I didn’t see this any earlier.

This movie is going to only adapt the first act, and if you have seen Wicked, then … yeah. The trailer gives away everything that happens, which is such a let-down because the story is genuinely clever. Here are the top comments on YouTube:

Look, getting people into the movie theater is a tough business right now, and studios are going to do what they have to do. But I don’t think this CliffsNotes version of the story even works as a piece of marketing.

📰 What I’m reading

The parties of Silicon Valley’s ultra-rich: “One recent client who ordered up a medieval-themed party in a French castle asked that each guest be announced via trumpeter. In concept, it seemed like a good idea, but a trumpet ‘going off every five minutes’ was annoying. ‘I said, “Hey, this is actually ruining the experience, can we just have one trumpet and leave it?” … But they were obsessed with the trumpet.’” 

In praise of Vertigo’s most overlooked character: “Bel Geddes is remarkably skilled at investing every moment with meaning, even when Midge remains silent. Watch her face as she reacts to that observation and try to read her expression. Is it the look of a woman plagued by regret? Or is she remembering that she had a good reason to end their engagement, that there’s something about Scottie that made settling down with him seem undesirable?” (spoilers for Vertigo, FYI)

Begun, the AI podcasts have: “The hosts could almost be mistaken for human podcasters, from the way they emphasized ‘bam!’ when tossing it in the middle of a sentence to using modern phrasing like ‘messy as heck.’ There were still a couple of quirks, as I noticed the AI spelling out certain words and phrases, like ‘P-L-U-S.’ Some of the writing wasn’t exactly what a human would say, either, with one AI host calling platinum ‘bling bling metal.’”

Crazy Soviet bus stops: “As Jonathan Meades writes in the first book’s forward, the Soviet empire had a ‘taste for the utterly fantastical.’ The bus stops take in a vast range of architectural styles and aesthetics, materials and decoration, welcome breaks from the autonomy of Soviet centralised planning and functionality.”

Fame sucks, even if you’re a hippo: “A video on Tiktok showing Moo Deng’s caretaker playing with the hippo has been viewed more than 33 million times, with more than 2 million likes … But her caretakers are increasingly concerned for her safety, with some fans throwing water and other objects at Moo Deng, prompting the zoo’s director to threaten legal action.”

🎧 What I’m listening to

I love the idea of Question Everything, a new podcast from S-Town creator Brian Reed. He’s inviting the media to question its own ethics and how those values are relayed to the public, beginning with an interrogation of his own podcast from one of its harshest critics, Gay Alcorn. It’s fabulous! Distrust of the media only intensifies when journalists are afraid to engage with criticism. BUT I worry that only current and former journalists like me will listen to this. Prove me wrong, y’all.

A hearty round of applause for The Allusionist, which has just crossed 200 episodes! It’s one of the most consistently delightful and enlightening (delightening? Enlightful?) podcasts out there, and unlike some milestone episodes, this one is completely accessible even if you’ve never listened to the show before. Its play-along quiz is, in fact, a great introduction to the wonderful and charming (wonderming? chonderful?) Helen Zaltzman.

Omg, Hrishikesh Hirway and Joshua Malina are finally back in my podcast queue thanks to the The West Wing Weekly Political Film Fest (or TWWWPFF, as all the Gen Zs are calling it). It doesn’t take much/anything to get me to listen to a free movie podcast, but this one is behind a paywall on Patreon; and yet, that didn’t matter at all. I loved Josh and Hrishikesh’s pioneering TV recap podcast so much that I started donating to their Patreon the same day this was announced. Here’s the trailer, but if you choose to donate, I particularly recommend the Dr. Strangelove episode.

Speaking of Patreon … I edited this: On one of my favorite recent episodes of Grit, Joubin Mirzadegan interviews Patreon CEO Jack Conte about his reluctant path from indie musician to tech entrepreneur, why success feels like failure, and why Jack hires for obsession, humility, and kindness. It’s genuinely an inspiring listen, and I wish more CEOs talked the way he does.

I also edited this: On the Smart Home Show, Adam Justice checks in with Richard Gunther about all his new hardware acquisitions from the past year, the most intriguing of which (to me) is a “food recycler” that turns food scraps into something resembling coffee grounds. Those grounds can then be composted, used as fertilizer, or shipped back to the company that makes the recycler, Mill, and turned into chicken feed.

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is this compilation of surreal AI-generated videos “starring” Gordon Ramsay. Unethical? Probably. Did I laugh a lot? Definitely. (Via Garbage Day)

🍿 What I’m watching

Little Caesar (1931) - ★★★ ½ - Melodramatic but surprisingly modern for a nearly century-old crime movie. The scenes between Edward G. Robinson as Rico and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as his partner Joe are the highlight, but many of the actors — including some who only show up for one or two scenes — are given the space to make bold choices. I love the extremely deliberate way Thomas E. Jackson talks, such a clever contrast with the fast-talking gangsters he’s after.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) - ★★★ ½ - The first half feels rushed because so many new characters and ideas have to be introduced, but everything comes together in the end to make a very satisfying family adventure tale. A major plot development is so heavily foreshadowed as to feel late when I finally happens, but I guess this is a movie intended for children and not 30something adults. As one of the latter, though, I really appreciated the care that was put into the gorgeous animation here, and the fantastic score by John Powell.

Some friends and I also started watching Muriel’s Wedding at 1am Sunday morning, but everyone in the room was falling asleep by 1:30, so I can’t review that yet. I liked what I saw, though! Toni Collette has always been good.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

What I really, really want

Manipulative parrot

Lilo & Stitch & this lady’s husband

Let’s go get Felix

Spooky Chappell Roan

🦆 About the Ducks

HOW CUTE ARE THEY? I can’t take any credit for that, because I didn’t specify that they should be this cute. I learned from last week’s “content policy restrictions” struggles and got this one with only one prompt:

“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks facing each other. one of them should have green feathers, be holding a broomstick, and wearing a black pointy hat; the other one should have blonde hair and be wearing a pink poofy dress”

But what if …

No, I shouldn’t.

…

Or should I?

“do it again, but make them cuter”

Hmm. No, sorry, the first attempt was cuter.

📰 What I’m reading

Is Shein unstoppable? “None of the anger from creators or reports of grim working conditions or alleged links to human-rights violations appear to have slowed Shein’s march. Shein has picked up billions of dollars in outside investment, including from major American private-equity firms.”

Idiot tourists at Yellowstone: “The NPS can plant as many warning signs as it likes, but those signs are powerless in the face of visitors who are bad influences on one another. We came here to see nature. We weren’t going to settle for seeing it from a road, a path, or a patio. We wanted to get closer, and getting closer is the one thing you really shouldn’t do here.”

Surveillance is getting worse: “How does the store know which bag of chips you picked up? The answer is located on the ceiling: over two dozen surveillance cameras dangling on stalks, watching every move of each customer in the store. They’re like jungle creepers hanging from tree branches in the depths of a rainforest, if that ecosystem had evolved to spy on humans.”

The Biden era’s signature TV show: “Some TV shows — through no fault of their own — become almost inextricably tied to certain presidential administrations … such that they tend to feel a little dated as soon as the country has moved past them a bit.” I’d literally never heard of Emily’s pick until I saw it mentioned on TikTok two weeks ago, and it’s a HUGE show.

Oh, no: “A self-described ‘team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world’ says they’ve acquired the rights to Flappy Bird, the iconic mobile game whose creator took it offline less than a year after it was released. Now, ‘The Flappy Bird Foundation Group’ will relaunch the game on Android and iOS in 2025.”

🎧 What I’m listening to

On Search Engine, PJ Vogt talks to The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey about the nuances of animal welfare, and what veganism actually means as a choice. Like PJ, I eat meat, but I found this to be a fantastic listen, carefully constructed and free of personal judgment. FYI, there are frank explanations of how livestock turkeys and cows are frequently treated, which may be upsetting.

“Meet Me at the Fair” is a classic This American Life setup: Ira Glass and a team of producers (including Dana Chivvis and Chris Benderev) descend on the Iowa State Fair, looking for extraordinary stories. They’ve done this sort of thing before to great effect, and I always marvel at how quickly they can make me care about something as seemingly low-stakes as a 4H rabbit competition.

Only a few weeks ago, Conspiracy, She Wrote covered the various conspiracy theories that Taylor Swift has to contend with, which I’m sure are in no way getting worse and weirder post-Taylor’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Sociologist Brian Donovan explains to CSW host Cristen Conger what makes some of these theories creepy and insidious (shocker), but “Gaylor” expert Leah Dajches explains that it’s not all bad. (Via Hurt Your Brain)

I edited this: On Grit, Joubin Mirzadegan interviews Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus about disrupting the video game industry, how the company fumbled the handoff to a new CEO in 2013, and making the virtual real. I admired Mark’s candor about mistakes he had made, and how he realized that Facebook was going to win the social networking era.

And I also edited this: On Lock and Code, EFF director of cybersecurity Eva Galperin talks with David Ruiz about the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, and why the so-called encrypted messaging app has historically been less secure than advertised. Plus, is the arrest just an excuse to try and break end-to-end encryption?

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is this short and sweet video about “the sustained two-shot” from Every Frame a Painting. Fascinating!

🍿 What I’m watching

I Capture the Castle (2003) - ★★★ ½ - A cozy coming-of-age romance anchored by Romola Garai with great supporting performances by Bill Nighy and Rose Byrne as her father and sister, respectively. You can see the seams that formed when Dodie Smith’s book was adapted into a two-hour screenplay, and we don’t get nearly enough time with one of the most interesting characters, the main characters’ bohemian artist step-mother, played by Tara Fitzgerald. I suspect the pacing is a little cleaner in the original novel.

V For Vendetta (2005) - ★★★ ½ - A stylish and compelling dystopian thriller set 5 minutes into the future, anchored by an impressive Natalie Portman performance. The adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask by weird 4chan nerds over the past two decades has undermined the coolness of the V character, and the big finale doesn’t quite connect because it hasn’t been convincingly set up. It’s also hard not to notice how overwhelmingly white this film is, despite allusions to post-9/11 xenophobia. Would be fascinating to see how the Wachowskis might write a new adaptation of the same source material today.

The Wrestler (2008) - ★★★★ - The script doesn’t deliver any surprises, but that doesn’t really matter. Mickey Rourke is so compelling as Randy “the Ram” that even before you see his face for the first time you can tell this is a man burdened by pain and regret. Each tantalizing window of hope is that much more crushing if you, like me, watch this with a strong suspicion of how everything “has” to work out.

Will & Harper (2024) - ★★★★ ½ - SO much better than I expected — a beautiful, sweet, laugh-out-loud funny documentary about former SNL head writer Harper Steele, who transitioned to living as a woman in middle age. The “Will” in the title is her longtime friend Will Ferrell, who joins Harper on her first cross-country roadtrip since coming out. Ferrell seemingly has a supernatural sense of when to clown around and when to be a shoulder to cry on. His famous face opens a lot of doors but also invites public scrutiny, and it’s a testament to their friendship how real they can get about it all.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

▶️ What I’m YouTubing

My friend sent me this video essay about Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah and said, “thought you might find this interesting.” He was absolutely right:

And here’s an even better video essay, this one about the music of The Shining. I know it’s not really spooky season yet. I don’t care!

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

Men only want one thing

Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride), recreated in Lego (!)

There are two types of cats

That’s a-moray (no but really)

Amazing Doctor Who art

🦆 About the Ducks

Originally, I asked ChatGPT to draw these two ducks: “One of them is holding a red lightsaber in its wing and wearing a darth vader mask, while the other is holding a knife and wearing a guy fawkes mask.” However, the AI said, “I wasn't able to generate the image due to content policy restrictions on certain themes.”

OK, I thought: There’s probably a restriction on violent images, so I removed the words “holding a knife" … and got the same error message.

So, maybe anything involving the wannabe destroyer of Parliament was off limits. Let’s take Mr. Fawkes out of there entirely and focus on two James Earl Jones movies:

“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks facing each other. one of them is holding a red lightsaber in its wing and wearing a darth vader mask, while the other is dressed as mufasa from the lion king, with a red lion's mane”

Nope! Content policy restrictions.

Finally, I got it: It was my use of trademarked character names that was causing the problem.

“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of a duck dressed as a lion, with a red mane. it should be standing on top of a tall pointed rock, with several other ducks looking up at it.”

Bingo! And we get the picture you see above.

Weird that the "Starbucks cup” in last week’s prompt didn’t cause any such problems. But now that we know the words “guy fawkes” probably weren’t causing the problem. Which means we can do this….

“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of a duck wearing a guy fawkes mask leading a mob of other ducks wearing guy fawkes masks towards parliament in london”

lol

Scroll down to the bottom to see the prompts I used and ChatGPT’s first attempt at this.

🏃 What I’ve been doing

I decided last November to take a break from newslettering, and have been pretty busy since then! A few highlights: I returned to the Bay Area’s annual Dickens Fair, finally rode Rise of the Resistance at Disneyland, saw Laci Mosley aka the Scam Goddess live on stage, visited India for the first time and ate like a king, hooted and hollered at Dune: Part 2 in IMAX, marveled at the total eclipse in Dallas, got really into Eurovision (especially the songs by Ukraine and Ireland), hiked on an honest-to-goodness glacier in Iceland, ditched my glasses thanks to LASIK, sang along to Young the Giant at Outside Lands, and started working on some new podcasts that I cannot wait to tell you about, once the time is right.

Phew.

Somewhere in there, I also got back in the habit of reading news & newsletters every day and saving the best links that I wanted to share with you. Here’s what’s been on my clipboard this week …

📰 What I’m reading

The rise of brown: “It’s become culturally associated with craftsmanship and heritage, concepts that have grown in value as technology becomes more omnipresent.”

The perfect toy lightsaber?: “In 2020, Shilo shipped Hasbro a wooden wine box containing a white plastic prototype with a red motorized blade. He says Hasbro was more than happy — they told him he’d finally cracked the code. They told him it’d be the ‘biggest toy ever.’”

The burning of the Library of Alexandria for fandoms: “The absence of Brazilian stan twitter will undoubtedly create a noticeable gap in the pop culture landscape. Brazilian stans are hyper-engaged, creative, and frequently amplify voices from the Global South. Removing such an influential group of users will lead to a less diverse and vibrant culture on Twitter.”

The original dating app: “‘What troubles me about this computer jazz,’ one sophomore woman told Look magazine, ‘is my feeling that boys don’t level when they fill in their questionnaires. I was honest with mine, but I wonder if some guys fill theirs out to see if they can get a first-nighter.’”

A looming cat-astrophe in London: “‘I think Larry is quite territorial,’ says Justin Ng, a freelance photographer who has taken pictures of Larry outside No. 10 since 2014. ‘It’s Larry’s domain, he’ll feel he’s been threatened with another cat coming in.’” (via NextDraft)

🎧 What I’m listening to

If you’re not into Jeff Goldblum’s whole thing, you should probably skip this one. But if you already like him, you’ll love his appearance on Wild Card with Rachel Martin. He sings, he flirts, and he quotes George Bernard Shaw from memory like an escaped Aaron Sorkin character.

I’m a longtime fan of Jamie Loftus — her book Raw Dog made me laugh til I choked — so I’m not surprised that her internetty podcast Sixteenth Minute (Of Fame) is a lot smarter and deeper and more empathetic than it may seem. I loved this episode about “left shark,” aka Bryan Gaw, and I look forward to diving into the archives.

And finally, I edited this: Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe on Grit, talking with Joubin Mirzadegan about his mission to help make 100% of the world’s cars electric, and the pressure he feels to not screw things up for his workers.

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you all so much for staying subscribed after I put this newsletter on pause. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!

💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week

is this conversation with ChatGPT. (click through to see it all)

🍿 What I’m watching

The Long Dumb Road (2018) - ★★★ - I love the two leads of this movie, which makes it especially disappointing that they weren’t set up with a more effective script. Jason Mantzoukas got a couple big laughs out of me, but I suspect at least one of those was just him improvising because the jokes don’t really connect to a bigger theme. And apart from a quickly-discarded notion of seeing “the real America,” Tony Revolori’s character doesn’t have much to do besides surviving the roadtrip. This had potential, but it’s not quite there. Available to rent/buy on digital.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) - ★★★★½ - Holy shit, what a perfect cast. Missed this when it came out, glad I found my way back to it. Denzel, Frances McDormand, and Corey Hawkins bring the source material alive in a way so many filmed Shakespeare adaptations struggle to do, and they make it look easy. Streaming on Apple TV+.

The Terminator (1984) - ★★★★ - A masterclass in how to repeatedly dangle hope in front of the audience, and then snatch it away. Linda Hamilton is great, Arnold Schwarzenegger is terrifying, and Michael Biehn is also there. The love story may not convince, but almost everything else soars. Available to rent/buy on digital, and streaming on AMC+.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) - ★★★½ - The second-best movie featuring a former Disney Channel star with sandworms in it this year. It’s familiar fare for fans of the first one, but I was grinning throughout if not always laughing. Michael Keaton seems to be having a great time, and a post-Schitt's Creek Catherine O’Hara steals several scenes while reprising her role from the original. The biggest star, as with that film, is the production design — Sets! Animatronics! Stop motion! I’m so glad they resisted the urge to CGI-ify this world. In theaters.

Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!

▶️ What I’m YouTubing

The parents who took their kids to see Alien (1979):

In just four days, 32,000 game designers made more than 7,000 games around the theme “built to scale.” Here are the 20 best ones:

💀 What I’m TikTok-ing

He is so proud of himself

Light banter with Mr. Brightside

When podcasts run out of true crimes

The kids are also on the phone

Cool octopus… OMG

🦆 About the Ducks

You may remember I opened my last newsletter with a kinda crappy AI-generated illustration of ducks waiting a crosswalk, so I decided to see how much better generative tools have gotten since November. And, um, wow, right?

Initially I asked ChatGPT to, “draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks. one of them is wearing sunglasses and a swimsuit, while the other is wearing a burgundy cardigan and holding a starbucks cup in its wing.” Here’s what I got:

That was already pretty impressive (big lol at the cardigan/Starbucks-branded swimsuit combo on the right), but it wasn’t quite what I pictured. So I said: “the ducks should be facing each other, and the background should be different between the two sides of the image. behind the duck with sunglasses, there should be a beach scene like the one here. but behind the duck with the starbucks cup, there should be a tree with leaves turning brown for autumn.”

Like I said in September, “I want to be as excited to write this newsletter as I was to make the Follow Friday podcast that preceded it. It’s not there yet.”

Collecting internet miscellanea and sharing it here is fun, but it takes a lot of time to do that well, and it’s time for me to take a break and focus on some other projects. I’ve left Twitter and Reddit in the past year, and it’s been about five years since I left Instagram and Facebook … I am still posting short movie reviews on Letterboxd, so follow me there!

Anyway, I never regretted any of those decisions, but I strongly suspect I will be back to newsletter-writing. So stay subscribed, because I might drop back into your inbox in time with some fun surprises.

In the meantime, here a few of my all-time favorite newsletters, which you should also follow!

Dirt

Podcast The Newsletter

The Browser

The Morning News

Before I go: One more palate cleanser

Boston Dynamics’ creepy dog robots can talk now, which makes them 100x cuter:

Welcome to another edition of Follow Friday! I am carried to you this week by the joy of finally finishing Only Murders in the Building, Season 3 (way better than Season 2, IMO).

Usually, when I’m lucky enough to find a moment of peace and stillness, my brain surprises me: It’ll wander to fun memories, or new creative ideas. But for the past six days, it has exclusively filled the vacuum with songs from “Death Rattle Dazzle.” I’m sure this is perfectly normal and not at all a problem.

So quick as a whip gotta pick which Pickwick triplеt did it

🏆 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week: I’m not on Reddit anymore, for reasons, but my partner shared a thread this week from the /r/SanFrancisco subreddit that was too good to ignore: “Is falling a big problem in San Francisco?”

As you might imagine, the comments are very silly. A few favorites:

• “I personally wear knee and elbow pads on a regular basis to prevent further injuries.”

• “All our hospitals are actually located at the bottom of the hills for this reason. They have cat flap doors to catch the rollers safely.”

• “falling on Lombard St is like playing pinball”

🍴 The second-best thing I’ve seen online this week is this 5-minute video that YouTube has been nagging me to watch for months. It’s about how to load a dishwasher better and you know what? I’ve been putting its tips into practice … it works! Stop pre-rinsing your dishes!

⚡ On Grit, 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner joined Joubin Mirzadegan from Waterloo, Ontario to talk about growing at the “speed of technology,” why the company waited 14 years to raise outside funding, and why he set his title on LinkedIn to “Chief Eliminator of Obstacles.” I really, really admire the fact that 1Password seems to have consciously tried to do things differently from most startups in Silicon Valley, for example by only hiring after it’s certain it can make payroll. An investor would probably counsel their portfolio to not do this, and hire ahead of the signals, but as a longtime 1Password user I feel good knowing the employees are taken care of.

🏢 Related: Speaking of taking care of your employees … why do so many of us hate the office so much? “The world nearly ended; there’s no such thing as business as usual anymore,” writes Justin Myers.

🎬 On Wednesday, Hollywood news outlet TheWrap published a disturbing story: “A24 Expands Strategy From Arthouse Gems to More Commercial Films.” Citing an anonymous source, the story said a $225 million investment valuing the company at $2.5 billion is putting pressure on the film studio to start chasing the same thing that everyone else in Hollywood cares about, familiar IP.

My reaction:

For the 99% of you who don’t pay attention to which studios’ logos appear at the start of a movie, A24 has distributed some of the best movies of the past decade: Moonlight, The Green Knight, The Florida Project, Lady Bird, Eighth Grade, Room, Minari, The Farewell, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Everything Everywhere All At Once, just to name a few 4.5-5 stars.

As anyone following Disney over the past 15 years knows, the cost of highly profitable IP like Marvel and Star Wars is borne by artists who want to make literally anything else.

I don’t have a subscription to TheWrap, so I haven’t read the full story, but I’ll let The Reductress sum it up: “A24 Announces They’re Done With the Emo Shit, Finally Rich Enough to Fund a Movie With Big Explosion.”

📉 Related: “Marvel’s TV experiment wasn’t a failure—until Marvel decided it was.” I’ve given up on at least three Disney+ series in the past year, something I rarely used to do for TV shows; if the IP machine is going to keep churning, I’m glad they’re at least recognizing that something is broken.

⚡ On Lock and Code, David Ruiz reconnected with past guest and interpreter-for-the-youngs Nitya Sharma what teenagers and Gen Z are afraid of online. As Malwarebytes found in a recent research study, Gen Z is more likely than older generations to fear things like having their personal information exposed, being bullied, and having compromising photos shared online — which kind of makes sense. We’re witnessing in real time what happens to the first generation that has never known a world without the internet.

😋 Speaking of Gen Z: The youths have decided that “Nirvana” t-shirts are now “preppy.” Sarah Stankorb reports “from beyond the grave” about the history of “preppy” fashion and why this trend maybe kind of makes sense.

🏠 The Atlantic’s Kate Lindsay has a great article out about how Airbnb has changed — and, many guests would say, declined — since its humble early days of couchsurfing and renting spare bedrooms.

… the difference between Airbnb and hotels has become smaller and smaller. The standard Airbnb host still has an average of just 1.5 listings, Lane said, but “mega-hosts”—larger companies or wealthy individuals with 21 or more properties that throw their significantly more substantial resources behind them—now make up 30 percent of active listings.

As Lindsay notes, “You can still find a spot that’s cheaper and better than a hotel room—especially for families and larger groups,” which is true. But if I’m traveling by myself, or just with my partner? With almost 100% certainty, I’ll tell you that I’m going to wind up at a hotel.

🔎 Here’s a really fun article about what gets left behind at restaurants — including 50 American Express black cards at one restaurant in Beverly Hills, $14,000 in cash in Miami Beach, and a 4-year-old child in Washington, D.C.

⚡ This week on The Smart Home Show, Adam Justice and Richard Gunther were joined by The Verge's smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, to talk about Amazon and Google’s fall hardware events. Most of the show is focused on new and updated products for the connected home announced at Amazon’s event, but pay special attention to the discussion of how the two companies are applying generative AI. It seems we’re not too far away from being able to talk to our devices as if they were people … kind of creepy, TBH.

Speaking of human-like technology…

🚨 Help I’m obsessed with: Researchers at Disney Imagineering in Zurich have unveiled a new robot — who, to my surprise, doesn’t seem to have been given a cutesy name — that can “strut, prance, sneak, trot, or meander” to convey emotion. I assume this technology will be applied to named characters to the Star Wars lands at the theme parks, but whatever, I just want to meet this little guy.

👩‍💻 I’ve been a fan of Taylor Lorenz’s writing about the internet for many years, and was planning to read her new book Extremely Online but Dan Kois’ review in Slate has given me pause — apparently, it doesn’t go as deep as I would have expected: “Lorenz seldom engages in any truly critical way with the events she recounts in her book, rarely interrogates or seems to think deeply about them.” As Kois notes, Lorenz seems to be the perfect person to write about the dark side of online fame, having frequently been the target of bad-faith brigading and hate campaigns. Maybe she’s saving that for the next book.

📱 The best thing I’ve read this week: “For all of us, constantly changing technologies can be frustrating,” writes Bartunde Thurston for Puck. “For seniors experiencing cognitive challenges or physical limitations, it can feel nearly impossible to keep up.” Spurred by an encounter with an older person at the airport who couldn’t order food because she didn’t have a smartphone, Thurston collected hundreds more stories from the “digital chasm” and proposes some very reasonable fixes that tech companies can and should embrace. The full article is paywalled, but I think this gift link will let you read it even if you don’t have a Puck subscription.

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😛 Palate cleanser: I cannot explain this. Last night, I found myself Googling “potato of the month club” and made my way to the website of a tater farm in Maine. In addition to offering bulk deals, seeds, recipes… and also a page of notable quotes.

I clicked thinking these would be quotes about potatoes … right?

There’s more than a hundred of these. Probably, this farm posts these hideous memes on Facebook to drum up business … but, no! I choose to believe that this is just someone’s private collection that they use to hype themselves up before they head out to harvest spuds.