Friday Fodder #34

What's Trending? What's Transcendent?

Mar 28, 2025

Has it been a slow week? It has not been a slow week.

This week, the 98% of the population that didn’t know Signal existed learned that Signal exists and is - depending on your political persuasion - used nicely (har) or misused by a lot of high powered people. Lots of yelling ensued about resignations and Hillary’s email server (this again?) and it was all very fair and nonpartisan. At the exact same time, everyone also learned that 19 out of 19 Very Important and Busy People apparently don’t have the time to check who else is in the very important group chat?! Inasmuch as I have biases too, my fair and nonpartisan opinion is: this seems pretty egregious, guys. First thing I do when I get a big group text is see who the heck I’m talking to and if they’re as important as me. As always, the truth is always maybe just a little more complicated. But not much.

Meanwhile Katherine Maher, the head of NPR, got a grilling on the Hill too. They say they don’t track the politics of their reporters but some form of in-group hiring led to an 87-0 D/R split. But don’t worry, that doesn’t cause bias! And in a funny quirk of fate this week, the NPR CEO who took the grilling, she’s on the board of directors of Signal!

Google released Gemini 2.5 Pro and it may be the new best model in the world, especially for coding. But nobody noticed because everyone was too busy making silly cartoons with the new OpenAI Imagegen. I’m pretty sure that OpenAI just holds these releases in check and waits to overshadow the new stuff from other labs. It’s a great strategy: the Upstage.

And let’s not focus on Gemini Pro, the new Imagegen really is awesome! I’ve used it to remodel two rooms in my house already. I mean look: here’s a very wealthy and famous man whose name does not rhyme with Beff Jezos relaxing on his loggia reading the hardcover version of the renowned and prestigious Brains Are Plastic (coming soon).

But of all the imagegen styles, Ghibli is the new hot thing and it’s not just a mediocre Maserati sports car. It’s a style, a whole vibe. There’s Ghibli portraits, Ghibli hollywood, Ghibli Steve Jobs, Ghibli influencer memes, Ghibli Lord of the Rings trailers. Even the White House got in on the Ghibli vibe with possibly the most in-bad-taste example imaginable.

You know I had to do my own Ghibli. Here’s me and my son!

What else? Well, 750 million people in one week viewed or re-viewed what might be the most ridiculous and absurd morning routine video of all time. That right there is the modern Prosperity Gospel - the ultimate productivity bio-influencer - Huberman has officially been defeated.

Also more pardons were announced. More tariffs too. MAHA becomes AHA. Gold is at all time highs. The Department of Education is going away. Canada and the USA broke up.

So all in all, pretty normal week.

On to the reading!

Timely

The $100 Trillion Disruption - I’ve been thinking a lot about GLP-1s lately (ref: my experience). Like it or not, they’re going to become a much larger factor in the world. The right question seems to be: “whether we will shape it or let it shape us.”
Taking Back The Web - I miss the web. The real one. It’s dead, if you haven’t noticed. We still use the same protocols and all, but it’s all apps and carefully curated algorithm-driven central corporations like Meta and X and Google and whatever else. We could get it back, and the playbook is pretty simple. “We just have to throw away the convenience of the algorithms.”
The Eternal Present - Yeah, it’s really the phones. “In phoneworld, it’s not just that we’re getting the news. It’s that we’re getting the news, and the knee-jerk reactions of hundreds of people to that news, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, locking us into an eternal present where the time passes in huge slices and nothing changes beyond the movement of the thumb along the glass screen.”
Jevons Paradox: A Personal Perspective - Fantastic article that helps us move past trying to keep up with all the slop by making ourselves slop and instead asks us to “become relentlessly, unapologetically you”.

Timeless

The Vatican’s Latinist - The delightful story of Fr. Reggie Foster, his passion and abilities with the Latin language, and his unparalleled ability to teach.
Childhoods of Exceptional People - We all have a modern vision of what childhood should look like that’s fairly simple. But many of the historic achievers of the past had something that looked quite different. But there were patterns of similarity. Things like 1-on-1 tutoring and idleness. Maybe we need to change our expected blueprints a bit.
The First AI Meme God - The story of Andy Ayrey’s Truth Terminal is outrageous dystopian science fiction.. that is actually happening. A look at what happens when an AI tries to invent a religion, gets some money, and pumps a memecoin.
Emmett Shear’s Entropy Argument For Life - While it may live in Substack as a comment to a writer’s post, this is in fact a fascinating and insightful set of observations of how the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Evolution, and “Interestingness” work together. I couldn’t get it out of my brain and ended up in a fun dialog with Claude about it.

Books

The Technological Republic by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska - I haven’t even finished this one yet, but I know it’s one of the most important books I’ll read this year. A look at how technology and the national direction of the USA were aligned in the 20th century, how this alignment diverged, how software dominates the 21st century, and how we need to get realignment quickly. Deeply philosophical and remarkably insightful.