Hola amigos. This week, I’m recovering from our investor trip to Tequila, Mexico.
Pro Tip: scheduling 0830 investor sessions the day after eight hours of tequila tastings is a schoolboy error.
Unrelated: WC stories this week and probably next week will be shorter than usual.
Want to come on the next trip? Check out Altea, our private community.
Today, we’ve got:
Table of Contents
Films you should watch but probably haven’t
A surprising number of fantastic and very well-known films stunk up the box office.
- Resevoir Dogs grossed less than $6m (adj for inflation).
- Dazed and Confused? $16m
- Fight Club pulled in $100m and was censored in China.
Look at the table below. You’ve probably seen nearly all of these, but probably not in the theatre.
Common themes run through these films. They’re often complex stories, and they’re usually rated R.
Would you watch Cube based on this trailer?
Or have any real idea what it’s about?
Probably not, but once you’ve heard about it from a friend and find that it’s available to stream, you’ll give it a go.
If you own a cinema, this is a can’t-miss list of films you an probably get for cheap and sell a lot of tickets to.
Mind-blowing research
Psychedelics are blowing scientists’ minds.
Doctors, families, and victims of PTSD–which is awful and now very common after 23 years of constant war–have struggled to deal effectively with the condition for millennia.
But a surprising new treatment is making significant progress. MDMA combined with therapy is breaking ground only dreamt of previously.
Psychedelics, historically the refuge of rave kids and burnouts, are going mainstream.
As you can see from this chart, which I made using DeepSearchLabs, sentiment toward psychedelics is rising remarkably quickly.
Get ready for this to become mainstream.
Inside Zuck’s compound
Have you heard about Zuck’s ginormous compound in Hawaii? Probably. Any idea what’s inside it? Probably not.
Wired pulled loads of public records and filings to find out, and it’s absolutely wild. The all-in cost is close to $300 million (and rising), and includes a sprawling apocalypse-ready bunker.
Read the whole thing if you’ve got some time, but this sort of unrelated fact jumped out at me the most:
Recently reinstalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to
The New Yorker, where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel’s New Zealand properties in the case of an apocalyptic event.
It’s no secret billionaires are building bunkers around the world, but it seems like it would be far more cost-effective just to buy up all the private air strips in New Zealand.
China can fix its population problem with this one weird trick
A lot of people have had a lot to say about what the population of China will be in 2100:
- UN Projections:
- Medium variant: 1.153 billion by 2100
- High variant: 1.353 billion
- Low variant: 488 million
- Other studies:
- ChinaPower Project: Between 720 million and 1.35 billion by 2100, depending on fertility scenario
- Brookings Institution: Likely to drop below 1 billion by 2080 and below 800 million by 2100
- City-level projection: National population ranges from 0.72 to 1.35 billion by 2100, depending on the fertility scenario
But regardless of who you ask, it’s shrinking quickly and is a big problem.
But there’s one clear and obvious thing the government can do to help solve the problem.
In China today, it’s 50% more expensive to raise a child than in the US, where it’s notoriously pricy to raise a kid. And it’s 3x more expensive than both Australia and France.
Childcare costs are extortionate, and the impact on women’s careers is larger than nearly anywhere else in the developed world.
“Women generally see a reduction of 2,106 working hours when looking after children aged 0-4 and face an estimated wage loss of 63,000 yuan ($8,700) in the period.”
Significant when the country’s per capita income is only around $13k, and it’s closer to $11k for women.
Those two factors — extortionate childcare costs plus an enormous opportunity cost for women — combine to mean women (and families) can’t afford to have kids.
This is an easy fix, guys.
Why does Google Gemini’s weird performance really matter?
Both anti-woke folks and people who generally care about technology have had a troubling week.
If you’re catching up, Google Gemini’s new AI model basically refuses to create images of white people in any sort of historical context.
It’s a bizarre result that’s triggered all sorts of culture war debates, but that’s not what you should really be worried about.
Check out this thread if you’re into AI or the future of humanity.
Google’s Gemini issue is not really about woke/DEI, and everyone who is obsessing over it has failed to notice the much, MUCH bigger problem that it represents.
— Yishan (@yishan) February 23, 2024
(1/n)
Yishan is right, and it’s troubling.
That’s all for this week; I hope you enjoyed it.
Cheers,
Wyatt
Disclosures
- Our friends at incogni sponsored this issue.
- I don’t own any Chinese babies.
