Hi everyone, happy Friday. Hope you all had good weeks.

I’m glad to get this back on a Friday morning release schedule again. I think getting it out on a Saturday hasn’t resulted in the highest amount of engagement or survey responses, which is understandable.

Here’s the link to next week’s survey, also linked below.

Now onto the round-up.

Survey Results

Q1: The Kardashian / Jenner family (Kim, Kylie, Kendall, etc.) - approve or disapprove?

Results:

Highlighted Free Responses:

• “They’re obviously terrible but I voted approve because they don’t really affect my life and Kim k got a fat 🍑”

• “Don’t STRONGLY disapprove but I just genuinely find them boring and they give me uncanny valley vibes. I don’t think they bring anything new or worthwhile in terms of fashion, beauty, or culture.”

• “WHY THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE STILL RELEVANT???”

• “I think objectively their position in pop culture holds a large share of responsibility for the popularization of plastic surgery with young people. Kylie Jenner is also cursed and the reason Timmy didn’t win his Oscar.”

• “Besides being culture vultures that made millions selling body dysmorphia to poor American teenagers, they’re also cynically nihilistic profiteers who stand for nothing…”

• “…Shoutout Lamar for finessing the shit out of Khloe though.”

Commentary:

I feel like I’m not supposed to like the Kardashians because they’re gauche and fake and for many of the legitimate reasons some of you have mentioned above.

But honestly I kind of just respect their game.

Turning a sex tape and a couple low-level industry connections into what they have today is undeniably impressive. The immigrant’s son in me just can’t help but admire that sigma grindset.

The way they parlay controversy and scandal into headlines and branding; the way they identify and latch onto other celebrities to sustain and boost their public image; the way they use Pepsi to heal our country’s divisions. As they say, the devil works hard but Kris Jenner works harder.

In fact, even as I was writing this I got some breaking relevant news:

I’m sure this is a genuine romance with no NDAs and I wish them well.

Many of you do make valid points about their negative effects on American culture, and they certainly represent the excesses and gilded facade of modern American capitalism that we all know and love.

But it’s not like they these wrote the rules of our attention economy or singlehandedly made things this way - they’re just playing within the system. It’s like James Harden: he didn’t write the NBA’s officiating rules or force Adam Silver to give him 1000 free throws a game. He just exploits the existing rules for his personal gain. You may not like watching it, and it may be unethical hoops, but it works for him and he does not give two shits what you think about it.¹

I know this is all kind of hypocritical for me to say after what I wrote about Señor Beast last week. I guess the Kardashians are just the devil I know, corrupting reality TV and social media in a way I’m familiar with. Mr. Beast is more alien to me — he’s just as cunning and manipulative but in a weirder, less traditional way. And his ass isn’t as fat.

Q2: Can you name a current WNBA player not named Caitlin Clark?

Results:

Highlighted Free Responses:

• “Put some respect on the 2022 Brittney Griner Russian Prisoner Exchange”

• “Paige! Don’t know her last name but she plays for the Dallas Wings and her gf just got drafted to the same team.”

• “Angel Reese, Kate Bueckers, Sophie Cunningham, Cameron Brinks, Haley Lith. Baddies only.”

• Box Score: 8 mentions of Angel Reese; 5 mentions of Paige Bueckers.

Commentary:

Honestly pleasantly surprised by these results. Maybe everyone does watch women’s sports!

It’s funny to me that there might be a legitimate case that Angel Reese is more famous than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, at least based on these survey results. I guess SGA has never had his own meal at McDonald’s, or had a cameo in Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite.

I think if I asked this question 3-5 years ago we’d have a much different story.

Until literally a month ago, WNBA salaries were as low as $15,000. Paige Bueckers and Caitlin Clark, as rookies, made less than $80,000 a year! (Sponsorships and stuff not included.) Can you imagine some dipshit Deloitte analyst making more than CC?

Thankfully with the new CBA agreement these players can be paid more reasonably — the 2026 number 1 draft pick Azzi Fudd (girlfriend of last year’s number 1 pick, Paige Bueckers, and her new teammate) will be making $500,000 this year, which seems much more appropriate.

The rise of the league definitely is helped by its new emerging stars like Bueckers and Clark and Brink, and I can’t help but think that there’s just something… different about these girls. I can’t quite put my finger on it. They just seem trustworthy, like Elvis or Eminem or Larry Bird.

I’m just joshing around here. Hating on Caitlin Clark is dumb and I’ve got a lot of respect for Paige Buckets and how she’s spoke on the topic of her position as a white person in a sport led by Black women. Plus she knows ball in more ways than one:

Q3: Astrology - overrated or underrated?

Results:

Highlighted Free Responses:

• “It's religion for non religious people”

• “…I think it’s ultimately boring and washed to say it’s nonsense, a 2008 condescending white-man-who-loves-Richard-Dawkins type take.

  Do I actually take a lot of stock in it? No. But I always have fun with true believes, because believing in stuff is awesome.”

• “I used to think it was underrated, but now bitches be including moons and other planets and it’s getting a little too out of hand now.”

• “I’m curios why it seems to be gendered like girls are really into it. Lowkey MBTI is also astrology”

• “The stars tell me it’s all a crock of shit”

Commentary:

Based on the results, it does kind of seem like astrology has been generally saturated and ubiquitous enough where it’s hard to say it’s under-rated, even if you aren’t strictly opposed to it. I personally don’t really have a problem with it but I don’t know if there’s exactly a shortage of horoscopes or star girls.

Despite that, I do think there are still a lot of men who like to think themselves as rational logic machines and tend to shit on astrology unfairly — I liked the thing one of you wrote about the 2008 condescending white man. Guys like that need to just take it easy.

On the other hand I do think there are people who probably do take these woo-woo new-age witchy / spirituality things a little too far.

But we all have our superstitions and hobby horses and belief systems to ground ourselves in. I agree with whoever made the comparison with MBTI. We’re all just looking for some sense of identity and higher level guidance about who we should be, what kind of people we’re compatible with, what kind of people to marginalize.² Be that religion, the stars, or some nerd survey.³

Even people at Deloitte do it:

Trust me, this is is really funny if you work at Deloitte. All of us are laughing and enjoying this together.

Q4: Do you feel a strong sense of attachment, or identify closely with the area you grew up in?

Results:

Highlighted Free Responses:

• “I love my country Philadelphia. Objectively a top 4 city in America, has everything you want in a modern, thriving city. Just good enough at sports where we’re not viewed as villains, but bad enough to build tremendous character. One of the last few cities that have truly held onto its identity. Walkable, affordable, historical, multi-cultural, underrated food scene, genuine people (could use more cuties though ngl). Go birds dickhead.”

• “You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the boy”

• “I don’t really have any super deep roots culturally or historically within the US as both my parents and I have lived basically all over the US. At this point “home” is where my friends and partner are.”

• “Florida is literally the best state in the country (so long as your not gay, a minority, or a woman) ((I’m a minority))”

• “Giving away my identity here but I’m Puerto Rican and I have to remind everyone about it every second I can! 🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷”

Commentary:

I guess I’m mildly surprised to see so many no’s on this one. As a Chicagoland-er it’s an easy yes for me.

My general dumb-guy theory about this is that the places people are really proud of are mainly places that have strong food and sports culture. And Florida for some reason.

For example, DC has a pretty weak sports culture. It’s not just that the teams tend to suck, but people around here just don’t seem to really care even when they’re good.

I like the food here, I think there’s plenty of good options, but I can’t really deny that there’s not exactly a distinctive food culture. Ben’s Chili Bowl, I guess? Ethiopian food is fire but isn’t really embedded enough here to be really identified with DC for most people. So DC is pretty low on pride; you see people rep Maryland and Baltimore way more often.

Philadelphia is actually a cursed place that only produces rotten people and you guys need to shut up. But yes you have cheesesteaks and never shut up about Wawa and you love your Birds, even when inappropriate.

I’ll also begrudgingly respect Boston even though their teams are actually empirically evil and the fans are racist and I guess they love Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t approve of any of it but at least it is an identity.

I refuse to gas up New York on this platform but I do respect Mrs. Met.

Chicago is the best, obviously. I’m not biased. We have our own pizza, our own hot dogs, or own beef sandwich, and our own Sufjan Stevens album. The sports fans are truly loyal even when the teams suck, which is often. And we’ve got the Pope!

Q5: Do you currently own, or have you ever owned cryptocurrency?

Results:

Highlighted Free Responses:

• “If I was addicted to gambling I think I would be super prone to taking bets on crypto but thankfully I am strong willed and definitely normal”

• “Crypto just sounds stupid to me lol very men coded”

• “made 10k get pwned nerds”

• “crypto - especially in the form it is today - is grift. Empowering the consumer with non traditional financial choices my ass”

• “As a concept it always has just felt like grift to me so I never bought any. Happy for those that made money off of RaiBlocks though”

• “Sold to release myself from that world.”

Commentary:

Quite the skeptical mix here. Was expecting to see a least a couple more people still HODL’ing.

Things have definitely changed a lot since the first big crypto boom. I was lucky enough to get in early on the first big boom of 2017/2018,⁴ but I’m glad to be fully out of it now.

At that time, it still felt like the wild west and the emergence of something exciting and unknown. People had genuine belief in the potential of crypto as the future of a privacy-first, decentralized currency, and were excited about the ideas of what the blockchain could enable.

There was also a growing contingent of people who realized that you could just make a lot of money off this crap.

Now it seems that the opportunists have almost fully crowded out the believers. The world of crypto now is now entirely based on unregulated financial speculation, provides a medium for illicit activity, and is a lawless conduit for people to scam and rug-pull unsuspecting rubes. I had originally planned on making some joke like “crypto is astrology for men” but that would actually be unfair to astrology — at least people are actually genuine about their star signs.

I won’t judge any regular person who thinks they can make some money off of crypto, so long as they’re clear-eyed about the baseless-ness of what they’re getting into. I will still judge the Winklevii, however.

Even the security and privacy-related selling points of cryptocurrency feel less relevant than before. Old-heads may remember this comic going around back in the day:

As it turns out, this is now very much a real thing!

Despite all this, I have just liquidated my entire 401K into Trump Coin and I think it’s really going to take off. Use my promo code DONALD_DICKRIDER to get 10% off your next investment.

Survey #5

See here for next week’s survey. I’m going to keep it open until Thursday morning again, and send a reminder on Wednesday.

Programming Notes

• I’ve decided to try turning on comments for these posts. You can submit comments as a reply to these emails, or you can post them directly on the articles, found on the web page here.

• Was a little surprised that the number of survey responses was lower this week. Like mentioned, I think sending it out on Saturday had something to do with it. I know some people are also just missing these emails in their inboxes, or they’re going to spam. So if you’d prefer some other format as a survey reminder (text message? Instagram story? LinkedIn InMail?) to stay in the loop, definitely let me know.

Stuff I Liked

Trying out the idea of throwing in some stuff I liked recently. I may or may not do this every week but thought I’d give it a try. I don’t know if any of you will finish my overly long newsletter and think, yes, I want to read more verbose, pretentious bullshit please! But here it is anyways:

I enjoyed this piece from The Athletic about the evolution of NFL scouting technology. Seems like a cool job to be able to work on that. Also makes me wonder how far back the Steelers’ scouting department is.

I have been reading more of Jasmine Sun’s stuff, which I think strikes a good balance of the SF + DC perspectives on AI and AI policy.

I’ve also been chipping away at Search Engine’s podcast series on the development of self-driving cars, which has helped me greater appreciate the challenges of building that technology. I also think PJ Vogt’s accompanying Substack post has some good points about tech journalism and media bias more broadly as well.

As a regular listener of The Big Picture podcast, I’m also interested to read more from Sean Fennessy’s new Substack about movies. His first edition was pretty solid. I don’t know where he finds the time, this thing already takes me way too long to write.

A friend recently sent me this old video of Trump reviewing Citizen Kane. It’s pretty surreal how cogent and insightful he is about the movie. There’s also a sense of “you’re almost getting it” that is reminiscent of his love for Sunset Boulevard, which is also really ironically funny.

I just caught up with the Dwarkesh interview with Jensen Huang from last week and the back half of it was honestly hilarious. “You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser” is an insane bar.

Lastly, I love the NBA playoffs. What a beautiful time of year.