Deep-ish Thoughts

All anyone wants to talk about is Netflix, WBD, and the price.

I get it. It’s big, it’s legible, it’s a scoreboard.

But it’s also backward-looking—an estate sale of twentieth-century scarcity.

The forward-looking story is Disney, Warner Music, and UMG quietly turning “AI theft” into licensed category control, and repositioning IP as capital in an age where creation becomes abundant.

That’s what this piece is about.

Newly unsealed court filings, as reported by TIME, say the quiet part out loud: Meta knew. Not suspected—knew.

Knew sex trafficking flourished on its platforms—and tolerated a “17×” strike policy that let accounts rack up sixteen violations before deletion.

The LA Times covered Netflix’s limited run of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—ten theaters, three weeks, awards buzz, talent relations, the usual calculus. That read isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

When OpenAI’s Sora app hit #1 on the App Store last week, it looked like another inevitability—the moment AI video became mainstream. An invite-only app, a vertical feed, a flood of surreal mashups…

I saw the headlines about the TikTok deal on Thursday and didn’t rush to say anything. I wanted to see what survived the weekend—what was signal and what was noise. After sitting with it, the only honest way to read this is through two different “whys.”

MrBeast is the pied piper of kids on YouTube. He marches them from videos to merch to candy to sweepstakes to feel-good fundraisers—and calls it generosity. It isn’t. It’s a conversion machine built for children.

When Warner Bros. Discovery announced the HBO Max rebrand to “Max” in April 2023, executives promised seamless technical integration with Discovery+ content. This was part of a larger consolidation strategy…

AI didn’t just speed up software; it collapsed time as a source of defensibility. If your edge relied on “we’ve been building this for years,” assume it’s perishable.

When HBO Max became “Max” in May 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery promised a “seamless transition” for users. Instead, Twitter exploded with complaints…

This isn’t “integrate carefully.” It’s consolidate decisively—one app, one backend, one identity graph.

YouTube TV is facing one of traditional television’s ugliest battles, and it reveals why streaming platforms can’t escape the economic realities that have plagued cable for decades.

How artificial intelligence amplifies business mythology because the entire information ecosystem is built on corporate narratives.

Why a MrBeast Phone Company Is the Wrong Kind of Creator Power
TL;DR: Know your customer — the bill payer, not the fan.

YouTube’s first NFL stream is getting roasted for low global viewership, but the critics are missing the point entirely.

Disney’s COPPA Deal Isn’t About $10M. It’s About Who Controls the Defaults. When a trusted

White Hat, Black Box When Big Tech “Helps” Education It sounds like a win for

Instagram Didn’t Ship an iPad App — It Put a TV at the Front Door

The Hidden Infrastructure Layer That Will Define Subscription Commerce The subscription economy has hit an

The Business of Fake Friends: A History of Exploiting Loneliness How 75 years of manufactured

The Sameness Trap: Why Platforms Reward Conformity Over Greatness In a recent episode of Rick

The Kids Aren’t Alright Platforms profit from children. Parents profit from platforms. Snapchat’s stock just

Jake Paul’s Circus Can’t Touch This Bundesliga’s YouTube Power Play While Jake Paul was parading around

Dear Jim, Don’t Fuck Around With the Cuban Every morning, I walk the hills above

Chrome’s Future Isn’t for Sale — If It Were, It Should Belong to Everyone Last

Placeholder Products What Roku’s Howdy and Fox One tell us about the future of direct-to-consumer

fractional leadership + the outsider advantage big companies. small companies. the pattern is the same:

Superbundling: The Coming Platform Wars Everyone in streaming talks about “bundles” like they just invented

The Gates Were Power “There’s something sacred about walking through the gates of Paramount, Warner

Everyone’s a Platform. No One’s in Control. Stephen Colbert is out at CBS.Substack just raised

The Platform Wars: Beauty on LinkedIn and the Battle for Creator Loyalty Unilever, TikTok, and

The AI War Is Here. Here’s How Creators and Small Businesses Can Win. AI is

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is FAST: Rethinking the Next Wave of Streaming In an age

Creators: The Game Is Changing. Are You Ready? AI, algorithms, and Big Tech are reshaping

From Studio Systems to Solo Creators: How Music, TV, and Games All Follow the Same

AI, Generalists, and the New Tipping Point A few years ago, I read Range by

The Platforms Never Really Loved Creators — They Just Needed Them For the better part

Tariffs, Tight Wallets, and the Creator Economy Squeeze Tariffs. Inflation. Flatlining fan spend. The headlines

Netflix, Fungible Creators, and the Shrinking Pie for Everyone Else Netflix’s new move into video

Are Movies Really Back? Depends on Who You Ask Lately, there’s been a lot of

For Gen Z and Gen A, Creators Aren’t the Alternative—They’re the Default A new Deloitte