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โœจ๐ŸŽ‰๐‡๐š๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฒ ๐๐ž๐ฐ ๐˜๐ž๐š๐ซ, ๐“๐„๐”๐Œ๐„๐ฌ! ๐ŸŽ‰โœจ ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ” is about to start with a ๐๐”๐‹๐’๐„! โšก The ๐’๐’Š๐’ˆ๐’‰๐’•๐’” ๐’‚๐’“๐’† ๐’“๐’Š๐’”๐’Š๐’๐’ˆ, the beat is ๐’๐’๐’–๐’…๐’†๐’“ ๐’•๐’‰๐’‚๐’ ๐’†๐’—๐’†๐’“, and ๐“๐‘๐„๐€๐’๐”๐‘๐„ is ready to make this year ๐’–๐’๐’‡๐’๐’“๐’ˆ๐’†๐’•๐’•๐’‚๐’ƒ๐’๐’† with the ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ“โ€“๐Ÿ๐Ÿ” ๐“๐‘๐„๐€๐’๐”๐‘๐„ ๐“๐Ž๐”๐‘ [๐๐”๐‹๐’๐„ ๐Ž๐] ๐ˆ๐ ๐Œ๐€๐๐ˆ๐‹๐€! ๐‘ป๐’‰๐’Š๐’” is the ๐’๐’Š๐’ˆ๐’‰๐’• weโ€™ve all been...

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๐Ÿ’Ž ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ“โ€“๐Ÿ๐Ÿ” ๐“๐‘๐„๐€๐’๐”๐‘๐„ ๐“๐Ž๐”๐‘ [๐๐”๐‹๐’๐„ ๐Ž๐] ๐ˆ๐ ๐Œ๐€๐๐ˆ๐‹๐€ ๐Ÿ’Ž Manila, you turned the night into pure magic! โœจ From the first beat to the final bow, your voices, cheers, and love filled every corner of the arena. Together, we created something truly specialโ€”moments that will stay in our hearts long after the lights go down. ๐—ง๐—˜๐—จ๐— ๐—˜๐˜€, ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚ ๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐˜€๐—ผ๐—ป ๐˜๐—ต๐—ถ๐˜€ ๐˜€๐˜๐—ฎ๐—ด๐—ฒ ๐˜€๐—ต๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ฒ๐˜€ ๐˜€๐—ผ ๐—ฏ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ด๐—ต๐˜. ๐Ÿ’Ž๐Ÿ”ฅ ๐ŸŽค ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ“โ€“๐Ÿ๐Ÿ” ๐“๐‘๐„๐€๐’๐”๐‘๐„ ๐“๐Ž๐”๐‘ [๐๐”๐‹๐’๐„ ๐Ž๐] ๐ˆ๐ ๐Œ๐€๐๐ˆ๐‹๐€ ๐Ÿ“ ๐’๐Œ ๐Œ๐š๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐จ๐Ÿ ๐€๐ฌ๐ข๐š ๐€๐ซ๐ž๐ง๐š ๐Ÿ“… ๐€๐ฉ๐ซ๐ข๐ฅ ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ–, ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ” (๐’๐š๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐๐š๐ฒ) #TREASURE #ํŠธ๋ ˆ์ € #PULSE_ON #PULSE_ON_IN_MANILA #TEUME #YG #TREASUREinManila

iMe Philippines

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What started as an event, became a series of events, it became a movement. Long before the events, Islanddao has been around since the early days of the Solana ecosystem. A group of power users. A Service DAO. A Network State. A movement. ๐Ÿ๏ธ With just three events in little more than a year, Islanddao has already cemented itself as one of the most prominent irl events and communities for builders. It's only natural we're expanding. New leaders emerge, new destinations, new tech. 2026 will be our most expansive year yet, with (at least) two destinations: - Koh Samui, Thailand, 03-28 June 2026 ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ญ - Florianรณpolis, Brazil, October 2026 ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ท Superteam Brasil will be leading the charge in Brazil and we are excited to pass the baton and grow. Together. Two months of connecting, shipping, coordinating and putting amazing blockchain tech to actual use. The NFT, the mobile app and more. Scaling Keeping IslandDAO for the future The Islanddao model has always been about hosting, empowering, connecting the best builders and founders in exceptional venues and locations all around the world, while expanding the movement to more and more countries. Weโ€™re thankful about our incredible sponsors whoโ€™ve been supporting us over the years but in order to make Islanddaos sustainable, starting from v4, a paid ticket will be required in order to attend. To ensure we can continue expanding to more countries and providing the world-class experience youโ€™ve come to expect, we are evolving our model. Starting with Islanddao v4 in Thailand, we are introducing a ticketed entry ๐ŸŽŸ๏ธ This isn't just a fee; itโ€™s an investment in the community. Each ticket covers a week of access to the event: Five days in our premium co-working house, plus an exclusive weekend adventure. Ticket sales for IslandDAO v4 Thailand are now live, and weโ€™re doing things differently. ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ญ Islanddao isn't just a physical location. Itโ€™s a digital ecosystem. At the heart of our hackerhouse is the Islanddao PERKS collection. Weโ€™ve re-invented the NFT experience through our custom app, turning your onchain identity into the "operating system" for your time at the event. Your PERK NFT is not just a collectible; it is essential infrastructure. It's your power to shape Islanddao! Run the event onchain Vote on house decisions and influence the eventโ€™s direction, including Launchathons and Hackathon participation and collective decision-making. House Interactions Your PERK is your key to the physical worldโ€”from entering trading competitions and signing up for workshops to completing location-based missions that trigger in-app rewards and surprises. Here is how the v4 ticketing system works: The Ticket & The NFT Every IslandDAO ticket is anchored to an NFT. This isn't just a digital collectibleโ€”it is the essential infrastructure that grants you access to all our on-chain events and the co-working house. For the IslandDAO Family: If you already hold a PERK NFT, our app makes it seamless to attach your ticket to your existing on-chain identity. For New Builders: Your journey starts by joining the wider IslandDAO family. Before securing your ticket, youโ€™ll need to acquire an NFT from our PERKS collection. This NFT is your essential onchain identityโ€”once you have it, you're ready to purchase your ticket and unlock the full hackerhouse experience. The Ultimate Perk: Free VIP Access The "All 12 animalsโ€ legend is real. We reward our most dedicated collectors who have powered this movement from the start: Hold all 12 animals from the Perks collection? You are eligible for a VIP Pass. This grants you full access to the entire event for free. Ready to ship in Thailand? Whether you are a long-time holder or joining us for the first time, your journey starts on-chain. Secure your spot for the week(s) you want to attend and experience the future of blockchain-integrated living.

IslandDAO ๐Ÿ๏ธ

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From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey itโ€™s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasnโ€™t just connectionโ€”it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldnโ€™t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. 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Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spacesโ€”where I had been hyping up the platformโ€”started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. 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Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know thisโ€”it will test you in ways you canโ€™t imagine. Youโ€™ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, youโ€™ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. Weโ€™re just getting started. Letโ€™s talk about it. ๐Ÿš€ If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but Iโ€™m more excited than ever for whatโ€™s to come.

Nelson Epega

43,485 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 1 Jahr

dave meltzer: youtube enthusiast ๐Ÿ’€ perfect. now we can stop pretending this was ever complicated. the real story is not that wwe is afraid of aew. the real story is not that โ€œhigh level wwe officialsโ€ are whispering scary things to dave meltzer. the real story is not even that tony khan got asked a planted question on a media call with very little distribution about the possibility of aew soon having very little distribution, although that sentence is so stupidly perfect it should be bronzed and placed outside the wrestling observer newsletter office like a war memorial for people who died pretending this was journalism. the real story is that aew is going to lose its wbd distribution deal. either it ends at the expiration of the three-year term in 2027, or it ends earlier if paramount closes wbd and decides aew has no strategic place inside the new company. and based on the board as it exists right now, the most likely landing spot for aew in 2027 is google / youtube. that is the story. everything else is laundering. tony khan wants the story to be: โ€œwhy would wwe say this about us?โ€ that is the whole operation. take my public analysis. run it through dave meltzer. assign it to wwe / tko. then let tony khan answer a canned question on a media call with very little distribution about potentially having very little distribution. a media call for a lightly viewed roh show. a planted story. a planted messenger. a rehearsed answer. a pr flack probably wrote it. tony khan performs hurt. tony khan says โ€œi donโ€™t know why wwe wouldโ€ฆโ€ tony khan denies the obvious. tony khan keeps me minimized. tony khan removes me from the public conversation about the exact thing i have repeatedly said is going to happen to aew. everyone is supposed to pretend this is organic. it is not. it is the most bubble wrapped, manufactured, artificial environment possible. aew is heading toward youtube because the domestic media rights board is closing around them. not as a troll. not as a bit. not as โ€œpr spin.โ€ as a business conclusion. aew is not leverage. wwe is not afraid of aew. the $185 million number was bullshit. the buyer universe was shrinking. paramount / skydance was coming for wbd. wbd was not going to be some permanent aew safe house. youtube was only ever a real โ€œoptionโ€ if someone at google was actually cutting a media rights check and underwriting production. not because every divorced mom with a ring light and a gmail account can upload video to the same platform. that was always the distinction. that is still the distinction. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” February 28, 2025 โ€œYouTube is an option the same way you or I could start a YT channel tomorrow. Is Jon Cruz cutting AEW a media rights check or underwriting a production budget? Hell no. Just the reality. It isnโ€™t the model. Jon is global head of sports over there.โ€ that was february, not last week. not after dave meltzer suddenly discovered youtube prelim numbers like columbus finding the new world. it is becoming inevitable now. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” April 30, 2026 โ€” 11:26 AM โ€” 251.2K Views โ€œto every journalist and every podcast who interviews tony khan from this day forward: please ask tony if wbd told him back in august they would not be renewing aew. wbd told him in august. i confirmed it directly and triple sourced it. please ask why tony has been acting like nothing is wrong for the last 8 months, and then please ask tony what his actual distribution plan is. because the only distributor left that will take aew is google/youtube. the myaew app is not realistic. the my aewapp is a death sentence in 2026 if youtube doesnโ€™t make an mg deal for aew. they started building it too late and there is no realistic way to scale it. also, who is going to sell ads for the platform? kiswe is not the best. they built the myaew app. they are new to the game. hold tonyโ€™s feet to the fire. Paramount is not real for aew. WBD passed back in August. CW/Roku is now off the table. Amazon and Fox do not want AEW. ask Tony why he's been lying to you and to the locker room and to the fans, acting like things are all great with the network? i am sure a lot of people would love to hear his answer.โ€ april 30. 251.2k views. not whispered. not hidden. not vague. not โ€œhigh level wwe officials.โ€ i said it publicly and directly: wbd passed back in august. paramount is not real for aew. cw / roku is off the table. amazon and fox do not want aew. the myaew app is not realistic. google / youtube is the only distributor left on the board that makes sense. that is the actual story tony khan does not want to answer. not โ€œwhy would wwe say this?โ€ ask tony khan if wbd told him in august that wbd would not be renewing aew. ask what his actual distribution plan is. ask who is selling ads for the myaew app. ask how a platform built this late scales in 2026. ask whether youtube is an actual rights partner with an mg, or just the place you go when the real buyers are gone. that is the question. not the fake question dave meltzer laundered into โ€œhigh level wwe officials.โ€ the real question. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” July 9, 2025 โ€” 10:51 AM โ€” 9,565 Views โ€œNo one in Hollywood believes the $185 million number.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” July 9, 2025 โ€” 11:35 AM โ€” 7,470 Views โ€œThe $185 million figure is inflated. Varietyโ€™s October 2, 2024 article was likely updated after a publicist called on AEWโ€™s behalf, as early reports placed the deal between $140 and $150 million per year. Tony Khan was also included in Varietyโ€™s Dealmakers 2024 list, which, while not officially pay to play, strongly favors those spending significant advertising dollars with the outlet. No one in Hollywood seriously believes WBD, which is in junk bond status, is paying AEW $185 million per year. Clear enough?โ€ clear enough? the number was never clean. the number was never real in the way aew fans and wrestling media pretended it was real. and when the $185 million number started getting laughed out of adult rooms, the number magically became $178 million. that is where the shell game gets funny. because $178 million was not some sacred sourced number either. it was brandon thurston taking the median between $170 million, reported by sports business journal, and $185 million, reported by variety and others. that is literally what wrestlenomics said. Wrestlenomics โ€” October 4, 2024 โ€œWhy use $178 million here for AEWโ€™s new deal when some outlets are reporting the average annual value is $185 million?โ€ Wrestlenomics โ€” October 4, 2024 โ€œI used $178 million here because it is simply the median of $170 million, as reported by Sports Business Journal, and $185 million, reported by Variety and others.โ€ there it is. arithmetic. not an all-cash rights fee. not a clean license number. not proof wbd valued aew like raw. not a finance-department document from warner bros. discovery. a midpoint between conflicting public reports. then wrestling media treated that midpoint like scripture because they needed the story to be โ€œaew is valued like raw,โ€ not โ€œaew pr inflated a number no serious person in hollywood believed.โ€ and by the way, $170 million was not the clean all-cash number either. that is the scam. float the number. repeat the number. launder the number. defend the number with people who do not understand the difference between cash rights fees, in-kind services, equity, marketing commitments, platform value, make-goods, ad inventory, and press release math. then when the number collapses, pretend the next number was always the number. that is not reporting. that is aew state news. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” July 10, 2025 โ€” 5:53 AM โ€” 12.6K Views โ€œAEW isnโ€™t leverage. Itโ€™s not competition. Itโ€™s a niche product with loud fans and limited reach.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” July 10, 2025 โ€” 8:56 AM โ€” 1,018 Views โ€œWe handle wrestling deals too, but thinking we need AEW for leverage is myopic. The landscape is changing and the game Iโ€™m playing is different.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” July 15, 2025 โ€” 25.7K Views โ€œAEW isnโ€™t leverage.โ€ that was never emotional. that was never tribal. that was never โ€œi hate aew.โ€ it was market structure. wwe did not need aew as leverage because real leverage was never โ€œanother wrestling show exists.โ€ real leverage is architecture, scale, subscriber churn, platform strategy, sports adjacency, global rights, advertising, sponsorship, live inventory, library value, data, brand safety, executive relationships, and the actual buyer universe of maybe 18-20 companies in the united states that matter for live sports rights. aew fans thought this was a wrestling argument. it was never a wrestling argument. it was a board. and the board was already moving. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 11, 2025 โ€” 482 Views โ€œI wasnโ€™t viewing the above in that context (TKO vs AEW counter programming), it was more of this is what Iโ€™m hearing after 2 weeks of big media deals rolling out (Skydance closing, South Park library moving) etc. Which have all been in the works for awhile.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 11, 2025 โ€” 388 Views โ€œBut if you were to look at it from a counter programming perspective (and I donโ€™t think this was a factor in UFC deal) - there are only so many players for these big media rights deals. PARA is likely off the board (via TKO deal) & then what if they acquire WB in 2026/27?โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 11, 2025 โ€” 535 Views โ€œYes, of course, that wouldnโ€™t mean the end for AEW. It would make navigating their media rights deal more challenging, I would guess. But this is a hypothetical scenario & I do not believe anyone is paying $7.7b for UFC or a $40b valuation for WB w/ how do we fuck AEW, either.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 11, 2025 โ€œAnd hearing all weekend Paramount is still interested in WBD.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 11, 2025 โ€” 1.3K Views โ€œI think more interesting for what it could mean as the dominoes keep falling in terms of the still evolving landscape. The deals are massive & the number of major players at the top are shrinking as still big push for consolidation & scale.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 11, 2025 โ€” 12:11 PM โ€” 2,588 Views โ€œAnd Iโ€™d view AAA on Google/YouTube as directly competitive. It targets both the CMLL collab & the audience that used to watch AEW Dark on YouTube, & WWE is able to send well known stars to AAA events with an eye towards converting more of the younger, YouTube demo of viewers who donโ€™t watch streamers.โ€ again: august 11. not yesterday. not after dave meltzer tweeted a netflix prelim number. not after anyone had to retrofit the argument. the point was already there: the major players at the top were shrinking, paramount was still interested in wbd, paramount was likely off the board for aew because of the tko deal, google / youtube was becoming directly competitive for the exact audience aew used to reach through dark, and the buyer universe was consolidating around deals much bigger than tony khanโ€™s feelings. this was not mysticism. this was not inside baseball for the sake of sounding smart. this was the board. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” August 24, 2025 โ€œThis isnโ€™t fair. I misread your question. AEW will exist but likely on the Discovery Global app (if it ever launches, I would bet that it doesnโ€™t) and it will continue to do consistent ratings. If Paramount/Skydance buys WBD in a yearโ€ฆโ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” September 4, 2025 โ€” 76 Views โ€œNo, thatโ€™s the WBD network division (cable, news, sports) that was already announced as being spun off under Discovery Global. The article youโ€™re citing is about them selling a minority equity stake in that unit to cut debt and boost valuation ahead of the 2026 split.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” September 16, 2025 โ€” 3.6K Views โ€œThis is not just about Hollywood scale. It is the foundation of a conservative aligned media infrastructure. A Paramount/WBD merger would fold CBS, CNN, HBO, and Warner Bros IP into Ellisonโ€™s orbit under Trumpโ€™s regulatory umbrella.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” September 16, 2025 โ€” 11K Views โ€œWithin 48 hours of the rumor, WBD stock surged ~55% and Paramount Skydance rose ~24%. That market response itself boxed David Zaslav in; his board, Wall Street, and his own contract now expect movement.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” September 27, 2025 โ€” 12:16 PM โ€” 3,516 Views โ€œNah homie. Enjoy watching the show on YouTube after Ellison buys WBD and Ari who is advising Ellison and used to represent Trump and runs TKO makes the call.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” September 28, 2025 โ€” 174 Views โ€œI believe if and when Paramount acquires WBD, TKO will push to lock down a monopoly on combat sports. The long knives are already out for competitors, and the rights deals have likely been spread around town precisely to keep rivals from signing with those streamers.โ€ none of that was random. paramount / skydance, ellison, ari, tko, wbd linear assets, youtube, aaa, the tko deal, the wbd split, the shrinking rights buyer universe โ€” all of it was one connected domestic rights architecture. that is why this conversation was always over the heads of the people screaming โ€œcopeโ€ in my replies. they were arguing like fans. i was reading the cap table. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” December 6, 2025 โ€” 3:07 PM โ€” 41.4K Views โ€œYes, I always believed Paramount would walk away with WBD. I was one of the first to talk about it on here, even if I wasnโ€™t the first to hear it. The Paramount Skydance acquisition closed on August 7. I posted this on August 11, about 1 month before the The Wall Street Journal first broke the news on September 12 that Paramount Skydance was preparing a bid for WBD.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” December 6, 2025 โ€” 3:07 PM โ€” 41.4K Views โ€œThe bid was always going to be hostile. We are only in this process because it was a hostile bid. Most people in Hollywood believed Ellison long coveted WB and Jack Warnerโ€™s chair. WB was not for sale when Skydance acquired Paramount, which is much smaller in scale.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” December 6, 2025 โ€” 3:07 PM โ€” 41.4K Views โ€œNearly everyone in town assumed an Ellison acquisition of WBD was inevitable until the Netflix bid shocked everyone. Signs were there for the last two weeks, which is also when I stopped posting about what might happen. Of course, its not over yet. Paramount still has paths to winning this acquisition. The one thing thatโ€™s for certain though is an Ellison-led acquisition of WBD is no longer inevitable.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” December 8, 2025 โ€œEND CREDITSโ€ space jam is a warner bros. movie. that was the joke. and the joke was the same thing i had been saying the whole time: paramount was winning the bid, for those who did not understand. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” December 19, 2025 โ€” 4:30 PM โ€” 828 Views โ€œHere is another reference to it. So tell me how exactly is Paramount the better outcome for Daveโ€™s argument? Netflix doesnโ€™t touch the WBD linear assets. Gunnar keeps his SpinCo.โ€ Puck excerpt โ€” December 19, 2025 โ€œMany industry insiders are also skeptical about Paramountโ€™s seven-year, $7.7 billion deal for exclusive UFC rights in the U.S. Yes, it can be read as a signal that Ellison came to play. But some people see it more as Ari Emanuel having his way with the person to whom he is ostensibly an (unpaid) advisorโ€ฆโ€ that is the board. that is the relationship map. that is the thing wrestling media either does not understand or pretends not to understand, because understanding it means admitting the story is not โ€œaew has leverage.โ€ the story is that aew is sitting in the middle of a consolidating rights marketplace where the people with leverage are doing much bigger things than worrying about tony khanโ€™s feelings. Nick LoPiccolo โ€” January 21, 2026 โ€” 4:22 PM โ€” 870 Views โ€œi mean get ready to learn youtube buddyโ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” February 19, 2026 โ€” 2.8K Views โ€œParamount was always my bet to acquire Warner Bros. Never wavered.โ€ Nick LoPiccolo โ€” February 28, 2026 โ€” 1:27 PM โ€” 118 Views โ€œyou donโ€™t need to look under a hood I AM SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ I BEEN SAYING IT SINCE JULY / AUGUST ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ PARAMOUNT IS COMING FOR WBD AEW WILL LOSE A TV DEAL ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿšจ GUESS WHO WAS RIGHT ๐Ÿ’€โ€ so no, this is not hindsight. this is not showing up after the fact with a flashlight and pretending i discovered the body. this is a paper trail. february: youtube is not a real rights model unless google is cutting the check. april: wbd passed back in august, the myaew app is not realistic, paramount is not real for aew, cw / roku is off the table, amazon and fox do not want aew, and google / youtube is the only distributor left that makes sense. july: the $185 million number is inflated and aew is not leverage. august: the buyer board is shrinking, paramount is still interested in wbd, and google / youtube becomes directly competitive. september: paramount / wbd folds the board into ellisonโ€™s orbit, and if ellison buys wbd, enjoy youtube. december: paramount was always the bet, the bid was always going to be hostile, and netflix does not solve dave meltzerโ€™s argument because netflix does not touch the linear assets. january: get ready to learn youtube. february: paramount is coming for wbd and aew will lose a tv deal. same board. same thesis. same answer. now here is the part tony khan and dave meltzer do not want to say out loud. tony khan and dave meltzer do not mention me publicly for a reason. because the second they say my name out loud, they admit where this conversation has actually been coming from. not wwe. not some anonymous โ€œhigh level official.โ€ not some shadowy tko whisper campaign. me. that is the problem for them. behind the scenes, ask any real insider what happens when my name comes up around this subject. there is a reaction. not because iโ€™m magic. not because iโ€™m some internet boogeyman. because they know exactly who is saying it, why iโ€™m saying it, what rooms i have been in, what companies i have dealt with, what executives i have spoken to, and why the analysis keeps landing. that is why they keep trying to non-person me publicly while reacting to me privately. they want the argument. they want the benefit of responding to the argument. they just do not want to admit whose argument it is. when i said wbd told aew back in august 2025 they were not exercising the option for the fourth year, tony khan blew up behind the scenes and forced john mcmullen to revise / update his article 2-3 weeks ago after i tweeted it. which is hilarious because that should not even be crazy or damaging โ€œnews.โ€ that is how this business works. when a distributor is not continuing, they tell you early enough so you have time to find a new home. that is not sabotage. that is not wwe. that is not nick lopiccolo hiding inside david zaslavโ€™s air vents with a clipboard. that is corporate courtesy. wbd execs privately whisper and shake their heads at tony khanโ€™s behavior because their view is very simple: why does tony khan act like everything is great and rainbows and sunshine with the studio? we told tony khan as a courtesy so tony khan would have time to find a new home. and no, this has zero to do with paramount looming as an excuse. paramount did not even make its first hostile bid for wbd until september 11 or 12. that was after tony khan was already told there would not be a wbd renewal. so what did tony khan do? tony khan turned the truth into a wrestling angle. tony khan, or one of tony khanโ€™s minions, gets dave meltzer to drop a story assigning my claims and what i have been publicly posting about tony khan to โ€œhigh level wwe officials.โ€ why? because it gives tony khan a safer enemy. tony khan does not want the story to be the actual timeline. because the actual timeline is brutal. on february 28, i said youtube was not a real media rights model unless google was actually cutting the check and underwriting production. on april 30, i said wbd passed in august, the myaew app was not realistic, paramount was not real for aew, cw / roku was off the table, amazon and fox did not want aew, and the only distributor left that made sense was google / youtube. on july 9, i said no one in hollywood believed the $185 million number. on july 10, i said aew was not leverage. on august 11, i said the major players at the top were shrinking, paramount was still interested in wbd, and google / youtube was becoming a directly competitive lane. on september 16, i said a paramount / wbd merger would fold cbs, cnn, hbo, and warner bros. ip into ellisonโ€™s orbit. on september 27, i said enjoy the show on youtube after ellison buys wbd. on september 28, i said if paramount acquires wbd, tko would push to lock down a monopoly on combat sports. on december 6, i said paramount skydance was preparing a bid for wbd long before most people admitted the obvious. on february 19, i said paramount was always my bet to acquire warner bros. and on february 28, i said it in all caps: paramount is coming for wbd. aew will lose a tv deal. that is the part tony khan cannot answer directly, because the direct answer means admitting this was never โ€œwwe is scared of us.โ€ it was always the board closing. tony khan wants the story to be: why would wwe say this about us? that is the laundering operation. take my public analysis. run it through dave meltzer. assign it to wwe / tko. then let tony khan answer a canned question on a media call with very little distribution about potentially having very little distribution. a media call for a show with very little distribution answering a canned question about aew potentially having very little distribution. based on a planted story, from a planted messenger, with a rehearsed answer, after an roh show maybe 8-15k people watched. a pr flack probably wrote it. tony khan performs hurt. tony khan says โ€œi donโ€™t know why wwe wouldโ€ฆโ€ tony khan denies the obvious. tony khan keeps me minimized. tony khan removes me from the public conversation about the very thing i have repeatedly said is going to happen to aew. everyone is supposed to pretend this is organic. it is the most bubble wrapped, manufactured, artificial environment possible. a canned and rehearsed answer at an roh media scrum about a planted dave meltzer story based on my very real and very public analysis of the media rights board. but make no mistake. tony khan was responding to my words. tony khan just laundered them through dave meltzer and assigned them to wwe / tko so tony khan could keep lying about it publicly without ever saying my name. and now, voila. dave meltzer is posting about youtube viewers and prelims. Dave Meltzer โ€” May 16, 2026 โ€œAt this moment there are 340,000 people watching prelims for Netflix on YouTube. Itโ€™s a good number.โ€ yes, dave meltzer. youtube can have good numbers. nobody said youtube cannot have good numbers. that was never the issue. the issue is whether youtube is being used as a funnel into a premium rights ecosystem or as a substitute because the premium rights ecosystem rejected you. that is the difference. that has always been the difference. netflix using youtube prelims as audience acquisition is not the same thing as aew trying to spin youtube as a media rights home because the real buyers are gone. ufc using youtube as a funnel is not the same thing as aew using youtube as a life raft. wwe sending stars to aaa on youtube to convert a younger demo is not the same thing as aew retreating to youtube after the traditional buyer board closes. and the fact that dave meltzer is now suddenly tweeting like the mayor of youtube is the punchline. because the same people who mocked the youtube outcome are now going to spend the next several months explaining why youtube is actually good. of course it can be good. for the right use case. for the right property. inside the right architecture. with the right check attached. but when you spend two years telling everyone you were valued like raw and your next stop is โ€œplease subscribe and smash that bell,โ€ maybe stop pretending this is victory formation? i told yโ€™all where this was going. the record is right there. iโ€™m still right. and tony and dave: you guys are see through translucent. thatโ€™s it for ye ๐ŸŽค๐ŸŽค๐ŸŽค

Nick LoPiccolo

99,106 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 3 Monaten

BREAKING: Berkshire Hathaway just filed its first 13F after Warren Buffett stepped down as CEO. Wall Street spent a decade asking what happens to Berkshire when Buffett is gone. We just got the answer: On May 15, the first 13F of the Greg Abel era hit the SEC. Abel took over from Buffett on January 1, 2026. This filing covers his first full quarter in the chair. It is the most aggressive structural rebalance Berkshire has run in years. And almost nobody is reading it correctly. Here is what the filing actually shows: Berkshire trimmed its portfolio from 40 positions down to 26 in 90 days. 16 stocks fully exited. Amazon, gone. UnitedHealth, gone. Domino's Pizza, gone. Chevron cut by 35%, roughly $8 billion sold at peak energy prices. Visa, Mastercard, and Aon all sharply reduced. Then on the other side of the book: Alphabet position increased 224%. From about 18 million shares to nearly 58 million. The stake is now worth roughly $23 billion. One of Berkshire's seven largest equity holdings. A new $2.65 billion position in Delta Air Lines. Berkshire's first airline holding since they sold the entire sector in April 2020. Total stock sales for the quarter: $24 billion. Total stock purchases: $16 billion. Net selling: $8 billion. And the cash pile? $397.4 billion as of March 31. A new all-time record. Read those numbers again. This is not a passive handoff. This is a CEO clearing the decks and concentrating capital in a small number of high-conviction names while sitting on the biggest cash position in corporate history. Now here is the part the financial media is missing. Everyone is treating this like a referendum on Greg Abel's personality. "Is he as good as Buffett." "Will he be too cautious." "Does he have the killer instinct." Wrong question. The right question is why the system kept executing in exactly the way Buffett would have run it. Because that is what actually happened here. Concentrate in dominant businesses you understand. Check. Buy when valuations get attractive. Check. Alphabet was trading at a forward P/E in the teens when Abel was loading up. Sell when valuations get rich. Check. Chevron got cut at a peak. Visa and Mastercard got trimmed at all-time highs. Hold cash when nothing else qualifies. Check. $397 billion. This is not Greg Abel inventing a new philosophy. This is the Berkshire operating system continuing to run, the way it was designed to run, after the founder stepped away. That distinction matters more than anything else in this filing. Here is why. For 60 years, retail investors have tried to "follow Buffett." They scan the 13Fs the day they drop. They buy what he bought. They hold what he held. They sell when the headlines say he sold. And they almost always underperform. Because following Buffett the person was never the strategy. The strategy was Buffett the system. The patience to hold cash for years when nothing was cheap. The discipline to concentrate when something finally was. The structural willingness to look wrong for long stretches because the math eventually wins. Most retail investors have none of that. They have a phone, a brokerage app, a Twitter feed, and an attention span measured in headlines. They buy when Buffett buys. Then they sell three weeks later when the position is down 8% because they panicked. That is not following Buffett. That is using Buffett's name as a permission slip to make emotional decisions. The Q1 filing makes this point in a way no Berkshire annual letter ever could. The man is gone. The trades still look like Buffett trades. Because the system was the asset all along. The system was the moat. Now look at the Alphabet decision specifically. This is the part that should stop you. Alphabet generated $64.4 billion in free cash flow over the last 12 months. Google Cloud revenue grew 63% year over year in Q1 2026. Operating income from cloud tripled to $6.6 billion. The company is sitting on a near-monopoly in search, a top-two cloud platform, the best AI research lab in the world, and a balance sheet that prints money. And it was trading at a discount to the S&P 500 multiple when Abel was buying. That is not a hard call. It is the easiest call a value-oriented institutional buyer can make. But it requires you to ignore the entire narrative that Wall Street had been running for six months. The narrative was that AI was eating Google search. That ChatGPT was a Google killer. That the search monopoly was structurally broken. Retail investors bought that narrative and sold Alphabet at the lows. Abel ran the math and bought 40 million shares. Same company. Same fundamentals. Two completely different decisions, because one was driven by data and one was driven by narrative. The Alphabet position is already up 38% since the end of Q1. Six weeks of gains. Roughly $8 billion of paper profit in 42 trading days. That is what systems do. They do not predict the future. They wait for asymmetric setups, take large positions when the math says to, and let time do the work. Now the $397 billion cash position. This is the number that confuses retail the most. Why would the largest holding company in America be sitting on $400 billion in cash while the S&P sits at record highs? Because cash is not a position. Cash is optionality. Cash is the ability to act when everyone else is forced to sell. In 2008, Buffett had cash when Goldman Sachs and General Electric needed capital. He cut deals at terms no retail investor could ever access. In 2020, Buffett had cash when the COVID crash hit. He took advantage. Greg Abel is doing the same thing. He is loading the rifle. He does not know when he will get to fire it. He knows that having it ready is what separates Berkshire from every fund that has to be fully invested all the time. Most retail investors cannot do this. They look at $397 billion in cash and see "missed opportunity cost." They think holding cash is the same as losing money to inflation. It is not. Cash held by a disciplined system is a weapon waiting for the right target. Cash held by an emotional investor is a temptation that gets spent on the next hot trade. Same dollar. Two completely different outcomes. Here is the lesson the entire financial press is missing this week. Berkshire is not interesting because Greg Abel is a genius. Berkshire is interesting because it is the rare proof point that an investment process can survive its founder. The most important investor of the last 60 years is gone. The portfolio still looks like a Buffett portfolio. Because the rules were the asset. The personality was the wrapper. Most retail investors got the wrapper and missed the asset. They watched the documentaries. They read the books. They went to the Omaha meeting. They bought the personality. They never built the system. That is why they keep losing to the market over 20 year holding periods, while a holding company with the same playbook for six decades keeps quietly compounding. The question is whether you spend the next 20 years doing the same thing. Or whether you finally build a system that runs without you. Most retail investors will never have $397 billion in cash to deploy. But every retail investor can build the same kind of structural discipline Berkshire just demonstrated. Rules that execute regardless of headlines. Rules that buy when the math says to buy. Rules that hold when nothing qualifies. Rules that do not need a famous founder to run. That is exactly why Surmount exists. Automated, rules-based strategies that execute the same way every single trading day. No panic selling. No FOMO buying. No "what would Buffett do" guessing. Just systematic execution built on the same principle that just kept Berkshire running without its founder: The system is the asset:

Logan Weaver

20,503 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 3 Monaten

On Zero 10 at Art Basel 2026 When I heard Zero 10 was coming to Art Basel, the first thing I felt wasn't curiosity about the art. It was the chance to finally stand in a room with people I'd only ever known through a screen and talk about where our space actually is right now. I went in wearing two hats and trying to keep both on at once. One was the curious visitor: how does digital art even get communicated inside an institution like this? The other I can't take off. Someone who comes from the underground core of this scene. I made myself a promise on the way in. No "fuck this, it's all cringe." Neutral. Open. Give it everything before I judge anything. And for a while, it earned that. The first thing Zero 10 gets right is that it doesn't feel like a side fair, even though that's exactly what it is. Visually it holds the moment. Without saying it out loud, it tells you Art Basel is serious about this now. Not dabbling, not hedging its bets. The first works I saw were John Gerrard's triptych of flags, and they set the tone instantly. They're gorgeous. Someone walking in cold might not even clock them as simulations. They might think they're looking at a live feed. That's the point. The room opens by declaring, in the most aesthetic way possible: *this is the zeitgeist of digital art.* Hold onto that sentence. I'll come back to it. Walking through, I slowly understood what Eli Scheinman and Trevor Paglen were actually doing. This wasn't Miami, where every phone in the room was pointed at Beeple's robot dogs and the whole thing tipped into spectacle, which, to be fair, worked exactly as intended. Basel was something else. Didactic in the good sense. A guided walk through the history of digital art, screens and physical works, old and new, woven together until the seams disappeared. For someone like me, who has been pushing back on the flattening, the lazy reflex that files Autoglyphs and Fidenza in the same drawer as 10k flip projects, this was genuinely moving to see. Someone built a room that takes this work seriously enough to give it a lineage. That matters. I don't want to undersell how much it matters. Then I hit Avery Singer's *Shit Coin Maxi*, hung by Hauser & Wirth, and that's the exact moment something turned. It's a good title, or it was. That's almost the problem. "Shit coin" is already dead vocabulary. That word had its currency back in Cobie's peak era, and nobody current talks like that anymore. So a painting made in 2025 reaching for it reads less like the present than like nostalgia for a moment that already passed. I'm not mad at the work. I'm noting what it represents. A blue-chip painter borrowing a word that signaled "now" a couple of cycles ago, hung in the room that's claiming to show us the actual now. The strongest culture of the last few years got made by people with no institutional cover, and what makes it onto a blue-chip wall is the part already legible to the institution, smoothed down into something sellable. So the present wasn't absent from the room. It was here, absorbed, translated into a dialect the fair already understands. Which made me start looking for the other version of it. The one that hasn't been translated yet. The thing that's still hot to the touch. It wasn't there. Not a single artist or movement in the room represented the current moment on its own terms. Someone will say that's just my perspective, and fine. But let's be real. The wildest movement of the last cycle happened on Solana, through meme coins, and out of that chaos came an NFT scene with its own dynamic and a handful of genuinely outstanding artists building a language that deserves a place in the canon. Avant NFTs, Gay NFTs, tongue-licking-the-flame NFTs, whatever you want to call them. That language isn't a footnote. Read properly, it throws new light backward. It's what finally lets the 2021 work and everything before it be seen as something other than cartoon monkeys. The current scene is the key to the historical one. Leave it out and the history you're telling is missing the part that shows the conversation has moved past 2021 bag holders praying for the mass adoption where the world wakes up and decides Tyler Hobbs is sexier than Ida Ekblad. And before anyone reads this as an NFT guy asking for more NFTs: that's the reduction, and the reduction is the whole problem. What's missing isn't a market category. It's a way of working. Artists using the blockchain like a studio, not to mint jpegs but to build whole worlds, weaving AI, physical objects, writing, and community into one continuous practice instead of separate outputs. That is digital art. That is AI art. The two things this show says it's about. Which is what makes the omission strange. Zero 10 sorts everything into clean bins, AI over here, generative over there, a physical piece on the wall, exactly when the work that's most alive is the work dissolving those bins. The filing system is the tell. It organizes the present with the categories of the past. Which brings me back to that opening declaration. *This is the zeitgeist of digital art.* Except those flags weren't new. *Western Flag* dates to 2017. The newest of the three is 2023. The works chosen to announce the present were themselves already the past. Fellowship framed the triptych as a nine-year body of work, the oldest piece nearly a decade old. A zeitgeist on a delay. None of this makes the work bad, but digital culture doesn't run on museum time, and work that felt current when it was made can read as historical by the time it's framed as the now. Is it even one, then? I mean that as a real question, not a gotcha. A zeitgeist is the spirit of a time, and a spirit can only belong to the people living inside it. So what happens when the previous generation is the one interpreting what the current generation's culture looks like? Does it stay a zeitgeist, or quietly become a retrospective wearing the zeitgeist's clothes? You named the whole platform after Malevich's *0,10*, the show where Suprematism reduced everything to zero and started over. You set your own bar at rupture. And the one thing the room didn't show me was the rupture happening outside its walls. This isn't sentiment, either. The last Art Basel and UBS survey put it plainly: Millennials and Gen Z now make up roughly three-quarters of high-net-worth collectors, and more than half of those collectors bought a digital work in the past year. The new generation isn't the future of this market. It's the present tense. Defining their culture for them, from above, doesn't just feel off. It misreads the room it's standing in. So let me end where my excitement actually lives. For years, the part of Art Basel I loved most wasn't the main fair. It was Liste. The young galleries, the disruptive positions, the work that hadn't been sorted or priced or canonized yet. That's where you went to feel something. Zero 10 could be that. It has the bones to become the room that hits you awake before the main halls lull you back to sleep. The cold water before the warm bath. The place you walk through first, get rattled, feel your pulse, and only then go get comfortable. That's the highest thing I can imagine for it, and it's within reach. The frame is right. The seriousness is right. What's missing is the nerve to let the people making the present define what it looks like. Get that part right, and Zero 10 won't be showing us the zeitgeist. It'll be where the zeitgeist is.

VVV.SO

15,724 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 2 Monaten

The Royal High Courts are certainly a place of grandeur and perhaps some are intimidated by the surroundings. Well that impressive 19th century Gothic architecture is a sight to behold but the Judges less so. Iโ€™ve seen too many judges in the UK and Pakistan and by God, they leave a lot to be desired. Especially when one comes across McGowan the Mediocre. What should have been a straightforward win has turned into a cheating exercise by the very judiciary meant to uphold justice in this country. Why do I say straightforward? Letโ€™s recap. After 3-4 failed complaints to the GMC, the Jewish lobbies upped the ante. First came my loss of contract at South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust where I was doing some clinics. No investigation. Just blocked from the email and canโ€™t address patient queries. Then started the defamation in the press โ€“ articles in the Jewish News, Jewish Chronicle and Telegraph followed by loss of contract with Medinet with whom Iโ€™d worked since 2018 intermittently and had glowing reviews. The GMC now opens an investigation โ€“ given the pressure from Wes Streeting, elected in July 2024. They wanted an Interim Orders Tribunal (IOT) to decide if any sanction should be imposed whilst I was being โ€œinvestigatedโ€. I had a trip abroad for my brotherโ€™s assassination case and I had clinics. Patients who had waited 12-18 months to see a Neurologist. The GMC and MPTS didnโ€™t care. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) is allegedly an independent body to the GMC and runs the IOT panels. They would not move the IOT by 11 working days as the GMC had refused (so much for independence!) โ€“ instead of 20th December I had suggested 13th January 2025. Recall this was over the Christmas period โ€“ people going on holidays and yet I was expected to get legal advice when I was in clinic from 8am โ€“ 6pm. I told them patients came first โ€“ I stand by that. Hurt Jewish feelings arenโ€™t urgent and they donโ€™t come before my patient care. I requested deferment by 11 working days, told them I would defend every single tweet and indeed, looked forward to it. This was all via email. Multiple emails. All ignored โ€“ including the one letter that contained my โ€œdefencesโ€. They would not budge โ€“ the Jewish lobbies were demanding action and the GMC wasnโ€™t going to risk their ire again. Wes Streeting was breathing down their necks. On 20th December 2024, I saw my Neurology patients and on 23rdDecember, I found out that Iโ€™d been suspended for 18 months. No other doctor had an 18-month suspension or got one since โ€“ in their absence. My remaining clinics in December and January all cancelled. Some patients were cancelled as they were making their way to my clinic. I requested the transcript of the IOT hearing โ€“ the GMC had been demanding conditions on my license on public interest grounds yet 3 batty women decided I should be suspended for 18 months for public interest and patient protection! Later, the barrister for the indemnity body stated he โ€œcouldnโ€™t get purchase onโ€ how they came to that decision. In any case, after being misled by my indemnity body โ€“ who suggested that I first ask for an early review, delayed asking for it and then the GMC refused. They were refusing to allow me to be heard after claiming I wouldnโ€™t attend. The indemnity body then reneged on the agreed High Court action. The GMC even send me the Rule 7 letter โ€“ the final โ€œallegationsโ€ against me on 5 February 2025 which they then updated in March. Ordinarily this takes about 9 months to send โ€“ in my case, they managed to do it within 6 weeks! Yet one of the reasons they claimed I needed to be suspended for 18 months was because of the lengthy investigationโ€ฆ. I had to reply by 5 May 2025 which I did via a191-page response. The GMC usually respond within 3-4 weeks. As of 21 January 2026, I have yet to hear from them. I then took matters into my own hand. Let down by cowardly lawyers except one (Yasmin), I filed a High Court application under Section 41 A(10) of the Medical Act 1983 to challenge my unlawful suspension. I requested an urgent expedited hearing as I was being left with no way to earn a living. There were 10 grounds of appeal. The High Court date was set for 10th July 2025. Meanwhile, the MPTS is obliged to give a 6-month review โ€“ 16th June 2025 afternoon was scheduled. I stated I wanted this in person and in public. I flew back from Kashmir on 9th June โ€“ itโ€™s cheaper to live there - and found myself arrested at Holyhead under s12 of the Terrorism Act for โ€œalleged support of proscribed groupsโ€ โ€“ apparently I was โ€œon the wanted list. Iโ€™m released 14 hours later. Theyโ€™d seized my mobile phones and laptop and wait for it, all my GMC documents that Iโ€™d carefully put together. Iโ€™m still not sure why I couldnโ€™t get those back. I learn that the GMC is seeking information about this non-reportable arrest within 24 hours of it โ€“ they know. In any case, I go for the IOT hearing โ€“ and the GMC Counsel attempts to utilise the arrest. I object. The panel agree that it will not be considered. However, the MPTS have set an insufficient amount of time for the hearing โ€“ they would have known. There were over 1000 pages in the bundle of nonsense โ€“ the only worthwhile part of that was my beautifully written 191-page response. I was quite proud of it if Iโ€™m honest. It could be considered my second PhD thesis. As I have to return to Pakistan for hearings and the High Court case was 10thJuly, the IOT hearing was re-scheduled for 14th July 2025. So, fast forward to 10th July 2025. Under 48 hours before the hearing is due, the GMC submit their skeleton arguments โ€“ ordinarily submitted 7-14 days before โ€“ no doubt, to wrong foot me. They finally admit that the IOT panel made an โ€œerror of lawโ€ in not properly applying the Article 10 rights but argue they got to the โ€œright decision but by the wrong routeโ€ (!) I am self-representing in Court 1 at the Royal Courts of Justice โ€“ the GMC have their in-house lawyer, their GMC Counsel and her clerk. But I have the best lawyer (currently abroad) and an excellent McKenzie friend, Sean Naughton and my well wishers who attended to support me. We start at 10 30am โ€“ and I ask the Judge to review the admission of illegality. On that basis alone, my suspension should be revoked. She declines and wants to hear the case. I then detail the IOT powers and how the grounds to sanction me had not been met โ€“ they had not proven public interest or public protection. I discussed the GMC actions, the unfairness, disproportionality, the abuse of process, the outright lies by the GMC, the draconian 18-month suspension, the persecution by the Jewish lobbies and the breach of my rights under Articles 8, 9 and 10 of the ECHR. My opening lines: โ€œI submit that the suspension was political in nature. It was subject to bias and external pressure was clearly evident. It was unlawful and demonstrated seriously flawed reasoning. It was manifestly wrong and the panel erred in law. It was completely unnecessary. Itโ€™s been tainted by marked procedural errors, unfairness and it has demonstrated gross abuse of process by the GMC and the MPTS and the IOT panel and those abuses have continued. The suspension is draconian and disproportionate and inconsistent with other decision makings of the IOT panels. It is a complete violation of my rights under Article 8, 9 and especially Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights. And it is demonstrated also limitation of the panelโ€™s expertise, both in terms of law, but also, importantly, the context of the rights of the Palestinian people and it brings into serious question whether the GMC should be policing speech of doctors. It should certainly not be policing or interfering in political speech.โ€ I went through each ground in detail giving the relevant case law. I talked openly about the nature of that persecution: โ€œAll of the complaints against me have been made by Jewish and pro-Israeli affiliated organisations and I think itโ€™s necessary to list them โ€“ Lawyers for Israel, in collaboration with Gnasherjew, the Jewish Medical Association twice; the unnamed Jewish Zionist doctor; the Jewish News who defamed me; the reporter is Michelle Rosenberg - who is Jewish and Zionist; the Daily Telegraph defamation - George Chesterton is married to a Jewish woman; Miranda Levy and Jacob Freedland are both Jewish and Zionist. I had the Jewish Chronicle defamation - Jane Prinsley is Jewish and has a home in Israel; Campaign Against Antisemitism by Stephen Silverman, who is Jewish and has submitted three similar tweets in March 2025 to the GMC which have been included in my Rule 7 letter without due process the GMC is obliged to follow on receipt of a new complaint. And then, twice in the Jerusalem Post - Mathilda Heller and Michael Starr are both Jewish Zionists. And despite the suspension, Sabrina Miller, a Jewish Zionist journalist at the Daily Mail attacked a number of pro-Palestinian doctors, including myself. So, these previous complaints that have been dismissed by the GMC included tweets of a similar nature. The tweets have not changed, but I would contend that the priorities of the GMC had and my complaint was clearly being handled by individuals who appeared conflicted. In my witness statement, I have detailed the behaviour of XXX, XXX, XXX who refused to respond to emails on where disclosures from the GMC themselves, since I submitted this appeal, have since revealed that XX XX had made false notes on my record claiming I had prior FTP history. In addition, in July 2024, Wes Streeting became the Health Secretary. I refer Your Honour to pages 327 to 337 of the bundle. Thereโ€™s a Declassified article, incidentally, thatโ€™s been written by a Jewish journalist, Matt Kennard. He has investigated Streetingโ€™s support of Israel since his days at the National Union of Students. It documents that he visited Israel in 2022 paid for by the Labour Friends of Israel. That organisationโ€™s former chair was Joan Ryan, infamously found to be discussing her ยฃ1 million payment from Israel with Shai Masot, the Israeli diplomat. Streeting has taken over ยฃ20,000 from Israeli lobbyist, Trevor Chinn. Trevor Chinnโ€™s father heads the Jewish National Fund which supports illegal Israeli settlements and from Lord Mendelsohn and David Menton. The Jewish Chronicle even ran a profile of him entitled โ€œWes Streeting, our friend at the NUSโ€. So, thereโ€™s little surprise that Wes Streeting made comments in The Telegraph stating he would urge medical regulators to discipline staff expressing views which he, as a pro-Israeli and Zionist, opposed. He stated that regulators had the power to set conditions that a healthcare professional must work under. Suspend them or strike them entirely from the medical register. He made similar comments to The Times. He then met with the Board of Deputies for Community Security Trust, which is also behind my complaint, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Jewish Medical Association, reiterating โ€œI expect employers and regulators to take actionโ€. The idea that this political pressure by the Health Secretary in November 2024 was irrelevant to my suspension is untenable in the face of this clear intervention, which actually represents political interference and undermines the alleged independence of the GMC.โ€ And I made clear the Jewish privilege at play โ€œSo, from what Iโ€™ve just presented, itโ€™s very clear that the red line concerns Israel. Tweets, thatโ€™s words. Criticising an entity, carrying out the mass slaughter against innocent civilians will be punished more severely than malpractice, blatant dishonesty, criminal convictions or even genuine Jew hatred, as long as you are not a Muslim. And if youโ€™re Jewish and you belong to a powerful lobby group like the Jewish Medical Association, then the GMC gives you a clear pass as shown in the case of Liz Lightstone and Justin Stebbing.โ€ I made clear that even the GMC referral to the MPTS explicitly stated โ€œthat there was no evidence of [her] racially discriminating against anyone or discriminating against Jewish people.โ€ I stated in the High Court โ€œAnd I should point out that the Jewish people are not a race; Judaism is a religionโ€ and โ€œIt is my inalienable right to be able to disagree with the narrative from Israeli lobbies and express it. Their free speech does not trump mine.โ€ I made sure that she understood that my patients and even Grok approved of me: โ€œIn fact, Grok is positively glowing โ€“ โ€œDr Rehiana Aliโ€™s tweet carry a fiery, unapologetic tone blending sharp intellect with a raw defiance against injustice echoing the spirit of Malcolm X, mirrors Malcolmโ€™s blend of moral clarity, confrontational rhetoric and distain for oppressive systems.โ€ โ€œI canโ€™t think of a better person to be compared to.โ€ I further stated โ€œI do not believe that legal, that legitimate political commentary or reporting facts can be antisemitic. I do not believe that any groups, be they Jewish, Muslims or Christians, are exempt from criticism where the situation warrants it. I do not believe in hate speech, as thatโ€™s the very antithesis of free speech, but also, importantly, there is no tweet of mine that demonstrates hatred for any group simply by virtue of their religious identity and, indeed, none has been identified as such.โ€ I even quoted the Queen: โ€œI do not accept that stating facts becomes anti-Jewish simply because the majority of those committing the crimes are Jewish. If you take that to the logical conclusion, that would mean that no Jewish person could ever be criticised for their bad behaviour. That cannot be right. I would also point out that the late Queen, according to the Israeli press, and the ex-President of Israel Rivlin, was reported to have viewed every Israeli as a terrorist or the son of a terrorist. Who would have thought that the Monarch would have been so based?โ€ At 1pm, the Judge wants a lunch-break โ€“ I havenโ€™t finished. We continue after lunch break โ€“ and I complete my submission dealing with the GMCโ€™s arguments. โ€œBefore I sum up, Iโ€™ll just briefly address the skeleton arguments that the defence submitted on 8 July. And obviously Iโ€™ve already raised disgruntlement about that but I think itโ€™s important to note, that the GMC has finally conceded, after over two months since receiving my skeleton arguments, that the IOT erred in law. On that basis alone, that suspension should be quashed today. If the GMC was capable of self- reflection, it would have withdrawn its objections to my appeal gracefully but that is probably too optimistic an outcome to expect of this bureaucratic monster which has become a law unto itselfโ€ฆโ€ Then the GMC repeats their arguments and argues that the High Court have broad powers and should take original jurisdiction over the matter: โ€œAnd that is an exercise that this Court can properly make, exercising its original jurisdictionโ€ In fact, the words โ€œoriginal jurisdictionโ€ were repeated about 7-8 times. The GMC Counsel repeated to the Judge โ€œWe accept that you have a free-er handโ€ and again โ€œBecause, as I say, this Court is free-er to exercise the original jurisdictionโ€ and so on. Look at the tweets! She said โ€œMossad did 9/11โ€ and that โ€œIsraelis shouldnโ€™t be allowed near humanityโ€. She said โ€œIsraelis are involved in organ traffickingโ€. All true. I was amused. Ordinarily the High Court usually looks at technical and legal aspects without going into the actual details of the issue itself (e.g. on covid, they wouldnโ€™t debate the merits of the covid vaccine โ€“ the issue was whether the conditions/suspension was legal according to rules and procedural fairness). I reply I have no issue but it wasnโ€™t necessary โ€“ the grounds did not require that. However, if the Judge wanted to look at the tweets she should acquaint herself with the facts that I presented in my 191-page response. I request a judgement that day or the next day. I had no faith in the MPTS and GMC. That review hearing was due a few days later on 14 July 2025. Judge McGowan was fully aware of that review IOT hearing. She stated โ€œWe need to finish this during the course of today. It cannot go part heard and I understand that your review hearing is listed on Monday next.โ€ She stated the following: โ€œAnd if there is not a decision from this Court today then, presumably, the review hearing will be made aware of these proceedings, but their decision is independent of this. If they decide to not lift the suspension, then my decision either does the same or lifts or terminates the suspension. If they terminate the suspension on Monday, then my decision probably becomes quite academic, but necessary, nonetheless.โ€ Even the GMC Counsel admitted that the Courtโ€™s decision was โ€œof interestโ€ I didnโ€™t agree it was โ€œacademicโ€ The Judge continued: โ€œThere is too much material. It is too important.โ€ And later that her decision was โ€œnonetheless, an important exercise.โ€ I emphasised in my response that I wanted the High Court to rectify that injustice done to me in December 2024 and that โ€œthe overarching question is โ€œwas my original suspension, was it correct or not?โ€ McGowan replied : โ€œI โ€“ I do understand that and in order to reach a decision about that I have to look at what you say are the procedural mistakes. I have to look at what you say are the errors of law. I have to look at what you say is unfair about the way the hearing was conducted...โ€ and again,โ€œUntil I have made my mind up about the procedural unfairness and all the other points you have raised, I have got to consider everything.โ€ I again pointed out โ€œ..I would argue itโ€™s an abuse of the system and Iโ€™m actually paying the price for their deficiencies, or rather procedural irregularities. Iโ€™m having to live with the consequences of being deprived of an incomeโ€ฆโ€ In other words, there have been consequences for me โ€“ financially and professionally. And I ended with โ€œI have no faith in the IOT. I have no faith in the MPTS, and I have no faith in the GMC, and I am not the only one to feel that way. The fact that we are calling for a different body and weโ€™re calling for the GMC to be dismantled. Iโ€™m simply asking that the injustice that was done in December is rectifiedโ€ฆโ€ The concluding remarks of McGowan? โ€œWell, I am certainly not going to give judgment in this case at 3.55pm. You raised an awful lot of important issues. The importance of a decision to you, personally, is obviously great. The importance of a decision to your potential patients is high and the importance of a decision to the public is equally important. So, all of those matters have to be considered and balanced and I will get to a decision early next week. I think that is probably the best way, which will be handed down in the usual way. All right, well thank you both very much. Thank you all very much for your attendance.โ€ At no point did McGowan state there would be no Judgement. On 14 July 2025, my suspension was revoked. I self-represented and I didnโ€™t concede a single point or any tweet. What happened next was a shocking abuse of the judicial process. My registration was reinstated โ€“ no conditions. But that 7 months suspension remains on my record visible to every employer. The very next day GMC emails the Court to state that the High Court no longer has jurisdiction over the matter as the suspension was revoked! The IOT panel has very limited powers so whilst it revoked my suspension, it will not deem it unlawful or indeed make any comment about the previous panelโ€™s decision โ€“ and certainly not its legality. The MPTS admitted that only the High court could rule it was unlawful. I contacted the Court pointing this out and that I was expecting a judgement as per McGowanโ€™s position in the High Court. The High Court had a full dayโ€™s hearing and the court was independent of the tribunal and had seized jurisdiction. All my grounds including the legality of the suspension were outstanding. The revocation was to some extent irrelevant to the Court issuing the Judgement โ€“ if anything, it rather supported my contention that the suspension imposed on me in December 2024 was unlawful. I ask the GMC to provide what law theyโ€™re relying uponโ€ฆ.they quote this section and claim it is written in the present tense! โ€œSection 41A(10 of the Medical Act 1983, Interim Orders, states Where an order has effect under any provision of this section, the relevant court may โ€“..โ€ Yes โ€“ that is the best they could come up with it. Needless to say, the convention in UK legislative drafting is the simple present tense โ€ฆbecause the law is โ€œalways speakingโ€. I call and even visit the Royal Courts of Justice. The Court staff chase the Clerk โ€ฆIโ€™m asked to be patient and await the Judgement. Even up to 6th August 2025 I was told that the Judgement was coming. On 11th August 2025, I am informed by email that there will be no Judgement!! I spoke to a number of barristers and solicitors โ€“ itโ€™s almost unheard of. They're all useless though. I get no replies to my emails to the High Court. So in November 2025, I requested the Hearing transcript. On 12th December 2025 โ€“ over 5 months after the substantive hearing โ€“ I received an Order (not a Judgement). It was a bare order โ€“ simply stating โ€œUpon the Court hearing the substantive hearing on this matter on 10 July 2025 And upon following consideration of the documents lodged by Respondent on 15 July 2025 confirming revocation of the Interim Order pursuant to Section 41A of the Medical Act 1983, the application is dismissed.โ€ No reasons whatsoever as to why the Judge had contradicted her own position in Court. I replied to the Court and file an application for permission to appeal โ€“ not just to McGowan (the system is so barmy that you have to ask the same judge for permission to appeal) but also to the Court of Appeal โ€“ the latter for both permission to appeal and the appeal itself concerning McGowanโ€™s bare unreasoned order. McGowan now responds (miraculously) via the Court staff wanting a 30-minute hearing for permission to appeal โ€“ that is set for Tuesday 13 January 2026. So, yet again I am at the High Court now requesting permission to appeal. To be honest, I wasnโ€™t expecting much. McGowan had shown she lacks the spine to address the issues โ€“ and has zero integrity. You donโ€™t get a DBE in the UK for nothing. In fact, she started this hearing by asking the GMC to interpret the Section 41A of the Medical Act!!! Then she turned to me โ€“ the Claimant โ€“ and asked if โ€œI understood what was being saidโ€. I replied that I understood full well. English after all is my first language and Iโ€™m a Cambridge graduate. I can understand basic English. She clearly has difficulties though โ€“ I later learnt that she dropped English at Manchester University for Law. At the expense of sounding very snobbish, I just knew she wasnโ€™t Oxbridge materialโ€ฆ. I present my arguments โ€“ including case law. The GMC has no relevant case law โ€“ their arguments are โ€œit is written in the present tenseโ€ (I did correct them that in actual fact, it was written in the simple present tense to be more precise) and that the decision of the High Court โ€œis finalโ€. Of course, I point out that finality is based on two aspects โ€“ firstly, getting a reasoned Judgement! I never got a judgement. I effectively got a blank piece of paper. On no grounds, could that be considered โ€œa decisionโ€. And secondly, if there were any errors of law, procedural irregularities โ€ฆthey were always appealable. Appeal however was not automatic โ€“ all that meant was that one had to request permission to appeal. Can you imagine a system where a Judge makes an error but you canโ€™t appeal it?! I point out that every issue remains live. I even simplify it for them โ€“ I point out that in the case of rape, and using GMC logic, weโ€™d never prosecute the rapist โ€“ after all, the rape was no longer in progess. That is not justice. The High Court seized jurisdiction by having a substantive hearing and had to produce a judgement. Of course, I understood that had I appealed after the revocation, the application would have been dismissed. McGowan sat there clearly not listening. This was merely an exercise to show thereโ€™d been a hearing. She tried to claim she has โ€œno powerโ€!! She then had the audacity to say โ€œYouโ€™ve had a success. Why arenโ€™t you satisfied with that?โ€ I point out that I was suspended unlawfully โ€“ I had 20 years of an impeccable record and it states โ€œmisconductโ€ on my record. I have a right to get that unlawful suspension struck from my record and remedy with regards to the consequences I had suffered. The GMC โ€“ a public body โ€“ should be held accountable not just for my sake but for other doctors and I remind her of her own words โ€œfor the wider public interestโ€. In fact, I quote liberally from the transcript and point out her contradictions. At no point did she ever state โ€“ because itโ€™s not possible โ€“ that the High Court lost jurisdiction. Thatโ€™s the legal principle: โ€œOnce seized, always seized.โ€

DR REHIANA ALI BA MB BCHIR (Cantab) MA MRCP PhD

18,659 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 7 Monaten

The most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026 PS: My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason โœจ๐Ÿ‘พSaaStr.Aiโœจ Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A Smith does on first take PPS: Full transcript below [17:00] Harry Stebbings: I I just wanted to ask Jason, if the people that we want are fundamentally different, the developers that we used to hire, we don't because AI writes the code for us. The marketers we don't want, the sales people we don't wantโ€”who who do we want genuinely? Like what is the attractive profile? Because your Anthropicโ€™s and your OpenAIs are hiring, so so what are the people that we want in the companies of the future? [17:18] Jason Lemkin: Look, I know it sounds trite, but but the answer is simple. It's just the expression each year changes. We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We needโ€”everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big eventโ€”they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may becomeโ€”so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any roleโ€”sales, marketing, engineering, product, QAโ€”they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and saysโ€”it's it's it sounds Captain Obviousโ€”but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents. It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AIโ€”you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to. And so these teamโ€”all the brute forcers out thereโ€”everyone talks about how bloated teams got in 2021. I don't agree with that. I think they got as big as they needed to be when growth was high and you needed humans to do everything. All you look at these teams that that doubledโ€”well if growth continued at 60% like the rate in early 2021 for 5 years or can help me do the math and every single thing a software company did required a human. You were understaffed by your 2021 headcount. You'd be sitting here in 2026. You every office in SoMa would be triple packed and you there wouldn't be enough humans to staff your company. It's just the world changed. [20:33] Harry Stebbings: Jason, you live on the bleeding edge. I think me and Rory see that and I think the world sees that when they hear you every week in terms of how you run SaaS. For all of the CEOs and execs who listen to the show, what would you advise them in terms of determining whether someone is AI fluent when they meet them for jobs, for talent? [20:51] Jason Lemkin: Here's I realized I was just asked this. I just did a review with a super fast startup growing just crossing 100 million and I was asked this question. And one of my favorite executives, I thought his answer was pretty dated and because he gave me an answer that was about 6 months old. The answer 6 months old is: "I look for folks in my team, I look for you know at what tools they play with." Okay, that was a great answer in like summer of 2025. Okay, I tried Lovable last week. Okay, the answer in 2026 is: "What commercial AI tool have you brought into your organization this month?" That's the test. Anyone that is on the bleeding edge that you would want to hireโ€”now there are so many great products in the market. Okay, there is no excuse in any role to have not brought one tool a month into your organization. Okay, thereโ€”now there's going to be better and better tools and better and better products as the year goes on. What's the one you did? And you will see folks with their deer in the headlights to this question. What what sales tool? What marketing tool? What product tool? What engineering tool? What did you bring in? Why did you pick it? How does it working? Because if you're at remotely at the cutting edge, you're all over this. You're looking for the next agentic tools that will radically improve how you do business. This isโ€”you think everyone thinks SaaS is at the bleeding edge, right? You know, you know, all we do is we're just looking for the tools and trying them. Okay? Okay, we're one year ahead of everybody else because we did the simplest thing in the world. Like we tried the tools early and we trained them. We trained them for a month. Okay, I'll give youโ€”want hear a horrible example from this week? Super hot AI company valued at 6 billion. Okay, I'm not going to name it. Um, this week yesterday told us we had to quadruple what we spent on their product. Okay, their agent told us, right? And why did this happen? Okay. Well, at this $6 billion company, no one had trained the agent on its pricing properly. No one had tested it. They said, "Well, well, we've been in beta." And we said, "Well, when did the beta launch? A year ago." Okay, these are people asleep at at the wheel. You want somebody who the instant this comes up, they exactly know what the issue is. And "Hey, when I was at Lovable Replit, we trained the agent. This is how we did it. I brought in this tool. I brought in this tool that that Rory invested in last week. It solved all these issues." That's what you want to hear. And if they haven't brought in a tool in the last 30 days, at least deeply evaluated it. I don't really care whether they bought it, but gone so far down the funnel they can tell youโ€”pick whatever tool: Fixie, Regie, GC, AIGCโ€”I don't care how you went through it, you looked at it, you can tell me the eight ways it would improve the productivity of your business and three you didn't. Just don't hire that person because they're going to run your company to the ground. This is the job today. The job today is not to screw around on ChatGPT and to be a prompt engineer. The job today is to bring the best AI and agentic products into your organization and leverage all the hard work that the engineers have done building those products. That's your job. You don't have to screw around. You don't have to be a prompt engineer anymore. You have to be an agent deployment expert. Aโ€”this is the new job we're making up today. An Agentic Deployment Expert. That's your job from C-level to junior. Agentic Deployment Expert. Don't hire anybody else. You're going to regret it. They're going to stare at the camera. He's good. Stare at the camera. He's honorable. We could probably just I could slip away, get a coffee, and come back. No. And I I sound exasperated, Rory. And Iโ€”but the reason I am is I can just see I can see my best companies doing it. And I can see some companies I've invested in not doing it. And I want to cry. I just want to cry when they have no ADs on their team. I justโ€”like you're flushing your years of your life down the toilet by not approaching your how you're building this company this way. [24:33] Rory: Yes. And at the risk of being positive, it's worth pointing out two things he didn't say. Well, something implicit why he saidโ€”Jason didn't do the only hire, you know, he didn't commit the um employment law, I think it's a civil penalty of saying only employ people below X who get the new new thing because he implicitly said anyone can do it provided you're willing to learn. And I think that's the big aha that's one of the positive statements to make here right? Look and I think it appliesโ€”I'm always wary of being "Hey, coming across, hey this this is the things that you all have to do." I think it applies to everyone including investors right? I mean I will say I have found that unless you're willing to invest the time learning these tools you actually shouldn't be investing in them. One of my partners Andy had this expression: "You know, if you decide you want to stop learning new things you probably should retire within 6 to 12 months and never write another check again." Maybe that's down to 3 to 6 months at this stage, right? And I think, you know, it'sโ€” [25:27] Harry Stebbings: Yeah, I actually I actually had a meeting with mine and Jason's biggest investor the other day and Iโ€”pretend he's not hereโ€”I said I think he's the most equipped investor for this generation of investing because I don't think anyone quite sits at the bleeding edge like he does on the investor side. [25:42] Harry Stebbings: Why in terms of using the equip stuff? Yeah. Yeah. In terms of using the stuff, understanding understanding bottlenecks, constraints. For sure. [25:51] Jason Lemkin: But can I just add one point? We can just cuz it's so important if it helps people. Okay, we areโ€”and thank you Harry. We're going through these phases. Okay, and when AI started to blow up for real for us, uh call it early 2024, right? Maybe late '23, I wasn't equipped. It was too technical. I wasn't going to go in and figure outโ€”I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to deal with a massively hallucinating LLM API and turn that and turn that into something magical. Kudos to investors and others that that got it in early '23, '22. I mean I remember Iโ€”I guess it was maybe SaaStr Annual '23. I was with David Sacks and I did a Q&A and I said, "How you thinking about AI at Craft?" He's like, "Well we're all in. We want 80% of '23 of investments to be AI." I'm like, "Great but like show me the show me the great ones in market." He's like, "They're all prototypes. We're all they're all they're all proof of concepts but we're all in anyway." That's where you kind of had to be in '23 if you weren't investing at like the LLM level. Okay, I wasn't smart enough. Then we went through this weird-ass prompt engineer era where like you you could torture these products to do something good, right? But you had to torture them. You had to like craft these crazy things that made no sense. Now we are in the era where mere ordinarily smart generalists can make these tools do magical things. And literally I go to these meetings and people be like, "I don't know how to like this is so scary. I don't know how to do this." And we show them our backends. Do you know how to do a workflow generator? Do you know how to do a a decision tree? Like we've been building these since software in the '90s. Okay, if youโ€”I can show you all of our agents. The how they work is novel. They do have to be trained. You can't be lazy and have these agents work. But honestly, the the UI, the UX, the way we interact with them, it's just software. And so my point is: Pick yourself off the ground. This is your time now. If you felt lost in AI era, if you felt like you're behind, you don't understand what all these people are saying on X and Twitter and their Claude and and their and talking about all the 4.6 point Nano point and it's overโ€”like you just it's not your world. This is your time. This is your time for the generalist that knows how to use software tools really really well. And Iโ€”this is my last point but it's so important. If ever in your recent lifeโ€”and this is why you could be all you need to be is young at heart to Rory's pointโ€”if in the last three to five years you have successfully deployed a piece of enterprise software of any sort you yourself, not some agency you hired, but if you have deployed it, you can deploy any agentic tool. Any. And you can become the hero in your company and you can become the hero in your functional area. But I watch folksโ€”I'm literally helping a company now that they're adding hundreds of sales folks this year with a new pre-IPO COOโ€”he's not hasn't brought in a single tool, totally scared of it. Okay, it's not that hard. Did you use SalesLoft? Did you use Outreach? Did you use HubSpot? Do you know these tools? If you can deploy these tools, you can deploy a world-changing AI agent. And so this is the time for people like the folks that that were shut out of the AI revolution right now. The generalist folks that are not that know how to deploy software that don't even know how to build software. Like vibe coding for me was folks who knew how to build software, but you didn't have to be an engineer. Now, you just need to know how to deploy software to win with AI agents. That's all you need to know. So many people have these skills and they're petrified of AI. "How did you do that? How did you deploy an AI BDR?" Well, we bought a piece of software, we figured out how it worked for a day, we set it up in an afternoon, and then and then we did spend 30 months training it, which you didn't do with this old software because in the old days, we just had to manually upload all the data, right? And there was no training. The the only non-intuitive part is training these things. And it's it's it's just work. So that's why when I see folks on the management team not doing this, there's no excuse. You do not need to be technical to win with AI agents in Q2 of '26. You do not need to be even 1% technical. Not at all. So it's your time. Or you're going to get laid off. Or you're going to get laid off because you're not going to matter.

Arjun Mahadevan (Mr. LLC ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ)

37,744 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 5 Monaten

Trump Supporters Are Pathetic Cucks, And Other Notes The middle east continues to burn under the administration of the self-proclaimed โ€œPresident of Peaceโ€. Donald Trump says heโ€™s โ€œreinstatingโ€ the US blockade on Iranian ports after reportedly green lighting Saudi Arabia to reignite its war on Yemen. Trump and his handlers built a whole political platform out of โ€œno more endless warsโ€ and then immediately changed the Defense Department to the Department of War and started launching never ending wars. Being a Trump supporter in 2026 is like staying best friends with a man who stole your wife. Heโ€™s deceived and betrayed you at every turn and youโ€™re still swinging from his nuts? Thatโ€™s cucky, humiliating behavior. He promised to end the wars, and instead he started a new war. He promised the Iran war would be over in a few weeks, and months later it shows no sign of stopping. He promised to put America first, and instead heโ€™s putting Israel first. He promised to cut government waste, and heโ€™s pouring unfathomable amounts of treasure into the military-industrial complex. He promised to drain the swamp, and he became the single most corrupt president in US history. He promised to fight the deep state, and went on to promote the longstanding agendas of the most evil people in Washington and Langley which even his terrible predecessors had resisted. These are all objective, indisputable facts. If you disagree with any of them, itโ€™s because youโ€™re performing ridiculous mental contortions to justify your groveling support for a man who has betrayed you. Itโ€™s so self-debasing. Get up off the floor, pull your tongue back into your head, and have some fucking dignity. โ– Congressman Randy Fine has been tweeting about how heartbroken he is to lose Lindsey Graham. It really is amazing how all the absolute worst people on earth are grieving this man. Like literally every single one of them. The list of Graham's mourners is a who's who of genocidal psychopaths. โ– Everyone currently saying โ€œI disagreed with Lindsey Graham on many things, butโ€ is telling you they didnโ€™t actually disagree with Lindsey Graham all that much. โ€œI disliked his politics, but โ€” โ€œ You liked his politics a lot more than I did, thatโ€™s for damn sure. Thatโ€™s why you are sad that he is dead while I am happy. If youโ€™re in any way sad that a 71 year-old warmongering psychopath died, itโ€™s because you didnโ€™t care about his victims. You didnโ€™t care about the populations he was constantly pushing to incinerate with high-tech war machinery. If you did, you wouldnโ€™t feel inclined to mourn the passing of their abuser. If youโ€™re expressing condolences for Lindsey Grahamโ€™s death, youโ€™re saying you care more about looking like a kind and caring person than you care about actually being one. โ– Whenever I read a new report about Israeli prison abuses, I think about how horrifying it would be to be a Palestinian captured alive by the IDF. You know theyโ€™re going to torture you. You know theyโ€™re going to rape you. Probably over and over again, for months. If youโ€™re a devout Muslim, killing yourself is off the table. You just have to sit there knowing youโ€™re going to be plunged into hell on earth. โ– When an apartheid state does evil things I will criticize it. Tell me Iโ€™m not allowed to criticize the apartheid state and Iโ€™ll criticize it even more. Use government power to stomp out criticism of the apartheid state and Iโ€™ll make criticism of the apartheid state my full-time job. โ– Liberal Zionists tell me, โ€œMost Israelis disapprove of Netanyahu!โ€ I tell them, nobody gives a fuck. No one cares which apartheid political party Israelis prefer. Nobody cares which genocidal political leader theyโ€™d rather have as their prime minister. Every Israeli faction is evil and is supported by evil people. โ– Itโ€™s funny how they call it โ€œgenerative artificial intelligenceโ€ when it neither generates anything nor exhibits intelligence. It just copies the stuff humans said and did. It doesnโ€™t come up with its own ideas. It shows no signs of insight, understanding or creativity. They keep needing to feed it human-generated material in order to improve it because itโ€™s incapable of generating its own material. We havenโ€™t created artificial intelligence, weโ€™ve created a toy that regurgitates our own intelligence back at us. โ– Reading by Tim Foley:

Caitlin Johnstone

17,411 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 1 Monat

Min Hee-jin (NewJeans Producer) NHK Music Interview ๐Ÿ”— โ€œMeticulously planned debut โ€˜Attentionโ€™โ€ ๐Ÿงข: When I was preparing to launch NewJeans, I really struggled with deciding what our first piece of content should be. I thought about it for a long time and considered many possibilities. It was a project that came with high expectations, and for me personally, it was also my first opportunity to prove myself. So how I presented it mattered enormously. Even down to the smallest detailsโ€ฆ like the impression the very first released photo might give, or what kind of impact we could make at launch. I thought hard about what kind of content would be the most effectiveโ€ฆ should it be a video or a photo? What time of day would be most effective to release it? I consider things like that very carefully. For example, the way a person experiences content at night versus during the day can feel quite different emotionally. So I even thought about those subtle aspects. Eventually, the conclusion I reached was: โ€œLetโ€™s make the most of our situation.โ€ At the time, the members hadnโ€™t been revealed, and no one knew how many of them there were or what kind of group this would be. So I wanted to maximize that curiosity. You know how the more something is concealed, the more curious people become? I wanted to build that curiosity to a peak and then release everything all at once. Thatโ€™s why we decided not to release a teaser and instead go straight into a full music video. (This was actually inspired by Hyein suggesting we skip teasers.) I didnโ€™t think still images or photos would be enough to fully convey the feeling I wanted to express. I felt that video and music together would evoke the emotional response I was looking for because people experience things synesthetically. When sound, image, and feeling come together, the emotional impact is stronger. I believed the best way to present the membersโ€™ images was through music and a moving pictureโ€ฆ thatโ€™s why we led with a music video. In the debut music video, โ€œAttention,โ€ thereโ€™s a scene where the members act out a little drama. I paid very close attention to that moment and created music that would fit it precisely. For me, I donโ€™t just make contentโ€ฆ I design the entire process of how it should be shown for the greatest effect. And I believe thatโ€™s incredibly important. That first feeling someone gets when they encounter somethingโ€ฆ that emotion, that sparkโ€ฆ is so important to me. Iโ€™m very detail-oriented, but I also value fun deeply. So rather than just releasing content, I want to enjoy the process leading up to it. Even when we released our second album, since we shot the entire music video across the country, the sequence of how we released the videos was critical for me. Itโ€™s hard to explain all this simply in an interview, but maybe some people noticed: the first content we released that time was actually a teaser for the last track, โ€œASAP,โ€ and then we followed that with the full music video for โ€œNew Jeans,โ€ which was the first track. That order was a carefully calculated strategy. It was designed to guide the audienceโ€™s emotional journey. Seeing the audience react just as I had hopedโ€”that whole process was honestly so fun and thrilling for me. I think I really enjoy that kind of thing. โ€”โ€”โ€” โ€œHow 'Ditto' was bornโ€ ๐Ÿงข: People often praise the music of NewJeans, and I hear a lot of talk about genres. But actually, I donโ€™t feel bound by genre at all. I love a wide variety of music. Iโ€™m not the type to insist on only one particular genre. What I love are songs that blend genres cleverlyโ€ฆ those are my personal favorites. So going forward, my focus is not on genre but on whether something feels fresh and whether it can create an emotional moment. I donโ€™t want to define what kind of music we make. And I think you have to experience the flow of the times to really understand whatโ€™s meaningful in a given moment. For instance, the song โ€œDittoโ€ was chosen because it delivered emotion. It matched perfectly with the winter album concept I had envisioned, both in terms of timing and mood. When I hear a song, I tend to trust my gut. I have a pretty strong intuition for which songs will resonate. Itโ€™s not about objectively predicting what will be a โ€œhit,โ€ but about whether a song moves your heartโ€ฆ you can just feel it. Of course, my own taste plays a big role. But I think thatโ€™s actually my strength as a producer, not as a composer. When I hear a song, I can immediately picture the visualโ€ฆ what kind of story, what kind of vibe it could carry. That allows me to work faster. For example, when expressing something like school uniforms, there are so many possible variations. But I always like to start from the basicsโ€ฆ whatโ€™s the original idea of a school uniform? I try to return to that. So with โ€œDitto,โ€ I wanted to tap into something primalโ€ฆ the pure, basic feeling of liking someone. That kind of emotion is universal. Everyone has it; itโ€™s wired into us. When I saw Director Shin Woo-seokโ€™s interpretation of it, I thought, โ€œYes, thatโ€™s it.โ€ Thatโ€™s the kind of complete interpretation I look for. I believe the completion of a project comes from every person involved thinking about their part down to the final detailโ€ฆ the maximum quality they can bring out. My role is to unify and refine all of that. I draw out the essence of each personโ€™s creativity, trimming away anything unnecessary. So the final product is something thatโ€™s polished and high-quality, just the way I envisioned it. Thatโ€™s my working style. So itโ€™s not like Iโ€™m fixated on retro or stuck in a particular style. I donโ€™t think human taste has changed all that much. Things people liked in the past are the same things we like now. Itโ€™s just the form of expression that changes with time. I donโ€™t feel bound by โ€œpastโ€ or โ€œpresent.โ€ I donโ€™t even think in those boundaries. To me, itโ€™s all just good taste. You know how kids sometimes have their own little treasure boxes when theyโ€™re young? I think my work is kind of like that. I want to make things that never feel datedโ€”that are timelessly enjoyable. โ€”โ€”โ€” โ€œDance Expression and 'Hype Boy'โ€ ๐Ÿงข: I had a vision of what kind of girl group I wanted to create. Thatโ€™s why I chose a song like โ€œHype Boy.โ€ And to bring out that feeling, we created four different versions of the music video. Every choice had a purpose, everything was designed to maximize the experience of the song. โ€œHype Boyโ€ is such a unique song. It has this strange, piercing melody that gives people chills in a good way. To emphasize that tingling feeling, I had to break away from the standard K-pop choreography formatโ€ฆ you know, the kind where everyone is in perfect formation, doing synchronized moves. But our songs donโ€™t suit that kind of choreography. Our dances are much harder. They require the body to move very naturally with the groove of the melody and beat. So I think our members are incredible. Itโ€™s not easy to express naturalness with your body, and you have to really enjoy it to make it look effortless. But they pulled it off so well. Theyโ€™re still young, but theyโ€™re so talented. And through it all, I wanted to avoid making them look like they were performing just for business. I wanted them to show the pure joy and bright spirit thatโ€™s natural for people their ageโ€ฆ genuine, carefree, radiant. โ€”โ€”โ€” โ€œThe difference between NewJeans and conventional K-POPโ€ ๐Ÿงข: Ah, for me, itโ€™s all about naturalness. And honestly, naturalness isnโ€™t something you can produce or direct into existence. It comes from how I interact with the NewJeans members on a daily basisโ€ฆ what kind of environment they practice in, how they live and work. There are so many things that donโ€™t appear on camera, but those unseen aspects have to be in place in order for true naturalness to come through. Thatโ€™s why I wanted to create that kind of environment for the girls. And also, I wanted to shape my own working environment in that way too. Only then can something truly natural, something unforced and not overly stimulating, really come out. To begin with, I donโ€™t believe anyone can be completely natural in front of a camera or under the gaze of others. Itโ€™s human nature to become self-conscious. Thatโ€™s why I think naturalness is our strength, but it canโ€™t be our concept. If you try to turn โ€œnaturalnessโ€ into a concept, it actually becomes incredibly artificial. So why do I place so much importance on naturalness? Itโ€™s because the girls are still so young. While other kids their age are going through school and having a wide range of life experiences, these members are living very different lives. Before they officially debuted, I told them, โ€œThis is like studying together with me.โ€ Our standard contract is seven years, which is about the same length as going through high school and college in Korea: three years of high school and four years of university. So I told them, โ€œWeโ€™re going to school together. Weโ€™re learning together.โ€ And in that sense, I want to be a good teacher to them. Theyโ€™re also surrounded by an incredibly professional team, people theyโ€™d never meet even in a traditional school setting. Iโ€™ve never really liked the word idol. These days, that word is used more like a job title, something manufactured by the industry, and itโ€™s far from its original meaning. To me, the term idol feels misplaced. It doesnโ€™t really reflect who these artists are or what they represent. And Iโ€™m not the kind of person who clings to labels or terminology. In fact, what I really want is to break the stereotypes and preconceptions that come with the idol industry. I want us to show people something differentโ€ฆ to challenge those assumptions and redefine what this can look like. Thatโ€™s the kind of mindset I have. โ€”โ€”โ€” โ€œIsn't it difficult for the members to express "naturalness"?โ€ ๐Ÿงข: There were a lot of things I considered when forming the group. First and foremost, I think it was important that the members shared a similar vibeโ€ฆ like how I prefer working with staff who align with my taste. Itโ€™s important for the crew to be on the same wavelength. And by that, I mean more than just getting alongโ€ฆ it also extends to shared values. Of course, people wonโ€™t all share identical values, but when weโ€™re facing in a similar direction, everything becomes easier. Itโ€™s also just more efficient to work with people who have overlapping tastes. Now, when it comes to our members, they each have their own individual tastes, but those preferences are still in development. Just like we all went through as kids, theyโ€™re still growing, still discovering themselves. Theyโ€™re not in a finished state. So we didnโ€™t cast them based on some complete or polished version of themselves. It wasnโ€™t like, โ€œThis person is fully formed, letโ€™s pick her.โ€ It was more like, โ€œAh, she has potential, thereโ€™s something there.โ€ That sense of a sparkโ€ฆ those were the kinds of subtleties I paid attention to. I didnโ€™t cast anyone just because they were pretty or could sing well. I donโ€™t work like that. I really value those finer, more delicate aspects. Even the design of the light stick wasnโ€™t something that came from a long strategic planning sessionโ€ฆ it was actually a spontaneous idea. I didnโ€™t sit down and think, โ€œLetโ€™s make a light stick like this.โ€ NewJeans didnโ€™t have a fixed logo, but I felt we still needed a unifying symbol. So one night, just before going to sleep, I kept thinking about it. Right before dozing off, I started sketching and it turned into a rabbitโ€™s face. When I drew it out, the shape just continued and turned into a bunny. To me, the NewJeans members are like little bunniesโ€ฆ playful, innocent. Their visuals also resemble rabbits in a way. And rabbits symbolize abundance. That made me think: โ€œAh, maybe our fans will multiply like rabbits. That would be great.โ€ So that bunny face became both a symbol for the members and the fans. The image came to me all at once, and I imagined a venue completely filled with bunny light sticks. That vision led to the creation of the light stick itself. Since I always prioritize fun in everything I do, the next idea that came to mind was making the light stick customizable. I thought, โ€œWouldnโ€™t it be great if fans could personalize their bunny?โ€ That way, each rabbit would represent a different personโ€™s character. So we included accessories, allowing everyone to customize their own bunny. Itโ€™s symbolic of all these different bunnies coming together and enjoying a good time as one. Our light stick has a big head, so when itโ€™s used in a concert hall, it lights up in heart shapes that are very visible. That was the image I really wanted. And that bunny faceโ€ฆ itโ€™s also a heart. It represents both the face of NewJeans and our hearts. Itโ€™s the love weโ€™re showing to our fans, and the love we want to receive in return. Every time I see it, I feel deeply moved. Itโ€™s very emotional for me because itโ€™s a perfect realization of what I envisioned. As someone with a background in creative direction, thereโ€™s nothing more satisfying than seeing an idea materialize exactly the way you imagined it. That kind of work holds deep meaning for me. โธป ๐Ÿงข: Looking back, I think in 2023 we were able to achieve almost everything we had hoped for. Iโ€™m so incredibly grateful for that. Of course, this is an ongoing challengeโ€ฆ and the better things go, the more pressure there is. Thatโ€™s why I always try to return to my original mindset. Just like I tell the members, I try to remind myself of the beginning and keep things fun. Back then, when we were first putting out content, planning the music, and working on visuals, I felt this thrillโ€ฆ this rush of excitement. I donโ€™t want to forget that feeling. So I try hard to engrave that emotion into every album we release. Iโ€™m constantly working to rediscover the joy in all of it. So for 2024, I hope everyone can look forward to us with fresh anticipation. And even if we come out with something completely new, I hope people will receive it warmly and with excitement. Thatโ€™s really my deepest wish. ๐Ÿ™

1tokki

17,635 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 1 Jahr

Ch. 14 of NITRO: The Inside Story of Hulk Hogan's heel turn - #OTD 30 Years Ago (7/7/96)! AS DAY BECAME NIGHT at the Sullivan home, Bollea deliberated his participation in the pay-per-view. โ€œEverybody was telling him that it was the wrong thing to do,โ€ Kevin Sullivan says. โ€œHe was getting booed out of the arena, but they were all saying, โ€˜this is gonna kill himโ€™.โ€ With no end to the discussion in sight, the wily booker casually suggested that Bollea and Young make use of his two guest rooms until the morning. โ€œI isolated [them],โ€ Sullivan admits. โ€œI was just afraid that at the last minute, he was going to use his creative control [clause] and pull out.โ€ If Sullivan could deliver Bollea to the arena by showtime, the finish of the match called for Hogan to star in the most dramatic of surprise endings. In a sequence devised by Kevin Nash, an unannounced Hulkster would shockingly interfere in the match, but only after the heels gained an unfair advantage through cheating. It would be a brilliant misdirection, Nash thought, as fans would instinctively believe Hoganโ€™s appearance to be in support of the babyface team. โ€œI knew there were gonna be 55 different ideas,โ€ Nash says, thinking back to the eve of the event, โ€œ[so] I actually put a lot of thought into it. I called Scott [Hall] two or three days before that, and said โ€˜what do you think about this?โ€™ โ€œWe had to make it a 2-on-2 match with Lex Luger getting injured [during the match] and going out. We would cheat to get Macho [Man] in trouble and all of a sudden Hulk comes down, which of course would mean โ€˜ok, here comes Hulk to make the saveโ€™. [Hall] said, โ€˜I love itโ€™.โ€ There was, however, the looming possibility that Bollea could reject his turn at the eleventh hour. Thinking ahead, Eric Bischoff developed a contingency plan in which Sting would play the role, ultimately revealing himself - despite not having prior experience with the WWF - as the โ€˜third manโ€™ instead. โ€œI remember Eric came in to the locker room,โ€ recalls Marcus 'Buff' Bagwell, โ€œand said [to Sting], โ€˜I wanna talk to you about somethingโ€™. I could hear them going over the idea, and then when they got done, Sting told me what they were talking about. He said that [Eric said], โ€˜there are only two guys that could turn heel where it would really matterโ€™. That would be Hogan and Sting.โ€ โ€œHe was offering Sting the job first, [as I recall], and Sting didnโ€™t wanna do it. He didnโ€™t really say it wouldnโ€™t work, but he just said, โ€˜it doesnโ€™t intrigue me. I donโ€™t wanna do itโ€™.โ€ According to Andre Freitas, a special effects artist who worked in costume design and character development for WCW, the proposed Sting swerve was to involve the use of a doppelganger - or โ€˜phonyโ€™ Sting - presumably in an effort to fool fans that the real character had switched sides. โ€œThat was their original plan,โ€ says Freitas. โ€œEric showed me a picture of Jeff Farmer (a lower-card wrestler) and said โ€˜can you make him Sting?โ€™ I told him that they have similar bodies...then we looked at Stingโ€™s hair and Jeffโ€™s hair...and talked about all that stuff. I did a head cast for [Farmer] and some prosthetic and test make-ups. But when they secured Hogan, we didnโ€™t do [the angle].โ€ ----------- Amazingly, even as Bash at the Beach began, Bischoff continued to consider Plan B. โ€œI remember walking by this perforated wall in the Ocean Center,โ€ divulges Nash, โ€œand Eric said to me, โ€˜Hulk is with Sullivan, and heโ€™s not sure heโ€™s gonna do it yetโ€™. It was up in the air.โ€ Meanwhile, viewers of the pay-per-view - and, for that matter, WCWโ€™s own production staff - speculated as to the identity of the third man. โ€œThey were trying to โ€˜workโ€™ everyone,โ€ asserts Jason Douglas, a WCW producer backstage at his first pay-per-view event. โ€œโ€˜Rocketโ€™ (staff member Rick Sancher) came up to me - they were kinda testing me because I was new on the road - and said โ€˜hey, I think itโ€™s gonna be [WWF wrestler] Bret Hartโ€™. I guess it was to see if I would leak something, and so I was just like โ€˜oh, cool, Bret Hartโ€™.โ€ In reality, aside from Bischoff, Bollea, Young, Hall, Nash and Sullivan, the turn would be concealed from everyone - even the announcers, according to orders from Bischoff - as to ensure their most realistic reactions. With less than an hour before the main event began, production staffer Woody Kearce discovered a revealing clue in the parking lot. A Hulk Hogan motorcycle had appeared mysteriously in one of the spaces, sparking another round of backstage conjecture. Finally, with what Sullivan recalls as โ€œthirty minutesโ€ and Bischoff remembers as โ€œforty-five to sixty minutesโ€ left on the air, Bollea belatedly arrived at the Ocean Center. The mood suddenly changed. Upon realizing that his star had been convinced, Bischoff began to relax. โ€œOnce he got to the building, I recall a sense of calm,โ€ he reveals. โ€œAll of the anxiety, all of the tension, all of the worry, all of the effort to make sure things stayed quiet...all of that just kind of dissipated. It was like fog lifting when the sun comes out - it all just went away. I was thinking, โ€˜it is what it is, thereโ€™s nothing more I can do...so letโ€™s just roll with itโ€™.โ€ To cement the turn, Bollea knew, he would have to deliver a monumental post-match promo to explain his actions. While typically, he enjoyed using Bischoff as a sounding board to rehearse interviews, the need for complete privacy - on this occasion - was unquestionably paramount. And so, away from prying eyes - and ears - the two met up in the most unglamorous of clandestine locations - a utility closet. In the midst of the run-through, Bischoff stopped to emphasize an important point: When you grab that microphone, I want you to say...โ€˜this is the beginning of the new...world...orderโ€™. The phrase - โ€˜new world orderโ€™ - lingered auspiciously in the air. Bischoff surprised himself with the utterance, realizing slowly that the term encapsulated everything that the invasion storyline could represent. In 1990, then-president George H.W. Bush famously utilized the same expression in a speech to Congress, although its origin could actually be traced back to the 28th President, Woodrow Wilson. But if Bischoff was unsure as to the source of his spontaneous inspiration, perhaps the answer could be found closer to home - on the preceding Nitro, just six days earlier, announcer Larry Zybysko serendipitously made the following proclamation: โ€œThis Sunday, I promise you, there will be a new world order of wrestlingโ€ฆโ€ Fans at the Ocean Center waited anxiously to see if Zybyskoโ€™s prophecy would materialize; for after all the hoopla, it was suddenly time for the main event. Before the opening bell, the audience was already on its feet for ring announcer@Michael_Bufferโ€™s pre-match introductions. As Hall and Nash sauntered to the ring for The Hostile Takeover match, Buffer set the scene with theatrical aplomb: โ€œLadies and gentleman, at this time, let me introduce the men whose plan and goal is to takeover the WCW with force and hostility. We were told there would be three of these interlopers, and I must apologize as I have been informed - as you can see - there are only two. Ladies and gentleman, introducing...the Outsiiiiiders!โ€ In a moment that played off perfectly on television, Stingโ€™s entrance music began - and quickly ended - as โ€˜Mean Geneโ€™ Okerlund traipsed cautiously into the ring. After exchanging quizzical looks with Buffer and referee Randy Anderson, Okerlund confronted the Outsiders to get some answers, an inspired plot device designed to build the tension even further. โ€œGentleman,โ€ began Okerlund, โ€œif I could have your attention...I donโ€™t have police protection with me at this time, but I wanna confront you in front of this full house here at the Ocean Center, and millions of others watching across the country and around the world. I donโ€™t see three men here tonight. Where is your partner?โ€ Responding in a manner consistent with their WWF characters, Hall and Nash assured Okerlund that the third man was present - and ready. โ€œLet me tell you something,โ€ announced a confident Nash, โ€œwe got enough to handle it right now, right here.โ€ Once more, Stingโ€™s entrance music blared from the arena speakers, this time preceding the man himself, accompanied by Luger and Savage. โ€œHere we go!โ€ screamed color commentator Bobby Heenan as the wrestlers passed an unusually large contingent of security personnel on the entrance way. โ€œThe war is on!โ€ Less than two minutes into the bout, Luger collapsed to the outside, a move in accordance with Nashโ€™s plan to even the sides before the climactic reveal. โ€œNow itโ€™s two against two!โ€ yelled Heenan. After a brief delay, the concerned crowd looked on as Luger left the arena on a stretcher, leaving Sting and Savage alone to fight valiantly for WCW. As the match progressed, the contemptible Outsiders used every trick to stall their opponentโ€™s momentum, until a revitalized Savage began a furious rally at the fifteen-and-a-half minute mark. The invaders were suddenly down, but not out - as with the referee distracted, Nash landed a low-blow to bring the Macho Man to his knees. All four men lay on the canvas, exhausted, as referee Anderson started a ten count. As Anderson yelled โ€˜ONEโ€™, several rows of spectators rose to their feet. Within seconds, the reaction diffused from section to section, the noise level increasing with each passing beat. On the live broadcast, viewers at home caught glimpse of a familiar figure making his way down the ramp. โ€œHulkamania!โ€ screamed Dusty Rhodes on commentary while Hogan walked methodically towards the ring. Noticeably, the Hulkster seemed oddly disaffected - even out-of-character - but after exchanging the briefest of glances with the crowd, he continued stride with the din reaching fever pitch. โ€œWhose side is he on?โ€ bellowed Heenan, a question that seemed inexplicable given the history of Hoganโ€™s on-screen persona. โ€œWhose side is he on?โ€ repeated Heenan, who as longtime fans could recall, had opposed Hogan for years as a manager in the WWF. For that reason, the comment flew over the heads of most (but not all) viewers; meanwhile, the live crowd was cheering as if their team had won the World Series. Nash and Hall retreated to the floor as Hogan tore off his shirt, an apparent signal that the archetypal good guy was here to save the day again. โ€œWhoโ€™s bad now boys?โ€ taunted play-by-play man Tony Schiavone on commentary, confident that WCWโ€™s honor was no longer in jeopardy. Savage lay prone on the mat as Hogan surveyed the scene. Above the cheapest of cheap seats, peeking through a curtain with palpable anticipation, was Eric Bischoff. โ€œI knew that something big was about to happen,โ€ he recalls. โ€œIt was either gonna be a big failure, or a big success.โ€ Seemingly out of nowhere, with his unsuspecting devotees enveloped in celebration, Hulk backed up to the corner. With the coldness of a serial killer, the once-honorable hero shockingly shoved referee Anderson, and executed his patented finishing move - the leg drop - to the helpless Macho Man below. The audience became completely, utterly unglued. โ€œI was standing back with the announcers,โ€ remembers Michelle Baines, newly hired as a production assistant. โ€œOne of the producers turned to me and said, โ€˜you need to go to the backโ€™. โ€œโ€˜I said, โ€˜what do you mean?โ€™ โ€œShe said, โ€˜itโ€™s gonna get ugly real quickโ€™.โ€ โ€œShe was right - the crowd turned ugly quick.โ€ In retrospect, it was clear that even as Hoganโ€™s body approached the canvas - contact with Savage just milliseconds away - the gravity of the assault started to hit home. โ€œWhat has he done?โ€ questioned a crestfallen Rhodes, โ€œis he the third man? What the hell is going on here?โ€ Heenan was even more direct - โ€œHulk Hogan has betrayed WCW! He is the third man in this picture!โ€ A breathless Schiavone could barely muster more than three words: Oh My God, he repeated. Oh My God, he continued, as Hogan high-fived a grinning Hall and Nash. The courageous Sting, stumbling to his feet to stop the injustice, was quickly dispatched, and in the coup de grace, Hogan tossed Anderson to the floor. Sardonically, he covered Savage for the pin, the contest now clearly a farce. โ€œI hope you love it,โ€ a disappointed Rhodes wailed on commentary. โ€œYou just sold your soul to the devil.โ€ The third man was a mystery no more, and Hall, Nash, and Hogan raised their hands in victory to a genuinely astonished audience. The immediate outrage, which first gave way to shock, was now inspiring unmitigated rage. Simultaneously, the evil trio continued to taunt, pose, and antagonize while the announcers lamented WCWโ€™s future. As Sting and Savage hobbled back to the locker room, a visibly distraught Okerlund returned to conduct an explanatory interview, based around the one Hogan and Bischoff had mapped out earlier. โ€œMean Gene,โ€ commanded Hogan, โ€œthe first thing you need to do is to tell these people to shut up if you wanna hear what I gotta say.โ€ For the next four minutes, Hogan rationalized his turn with remarkable clarity. โ€œThe first thing you gotta realize, brother, is this right here is the future of wrestling. You can call this the new...world...order of wrestling. These two men right here came from a great big organization up north, and everybody was wondering who the third man was. Well, who knows more about that organization than me, brother? I made that organization a monster. I made people rich up there. I made the people that ran that organization rich up there. And when it all came to pass, the name Hulk Hogan, the man Hulk Hogan, got bigger than the whole organization!โ€ Bischoff watched from his secretive seat in amazement - he had not seen, nor had anyone, this intensity of emotion on display at a wrestling show before. It was almost as if the assembled masses had lost themselves in the performance, perhaps even forgetting, if only for a moment, that they were witnesses to a pre-determined event. Hoganโ€™s actions had ostensibly interrupted their critical faculties; in other words, they had suspended their disbelief by reacting to the incident as if it were real. Moreover, the shock was manifesting in the most volatile ways imaginable, as in an incident edited out of future showings of the pay-per-view, a rather large man, likely intoxicated, ran into the ring before being knocked down by Hall and Nash. Concurrently, a stream of debris rained down from the stands, with one object hitting Okerlund, and the rest filling the ring in a stunningly unique visual. Hogan continued as the trash piled up around him, even referencing Ted Turner in his diatribe: โ€œBillionaire Ted promised me movies brother. Billionaire Ted promised me millions of dollars. And Billionaire Ted promised me world caliber matches. And as far as Billionaire Ted, Eric Bischoff, and the entire WCW goes, Iโ€™m bored brother! Thatโ€™s why I want these two guys here, these so-called Outsiders. These are the men I want as my friends. They are the new blood of professional wrestling, and not only are we going to take over the whole wrestling business...with Hulk Hogan, the new blood and the monsters with me, we will destroy everything in our path, Mean Gene.โ€ โ€œLook at all the crap in this ring,โ€ responded Okerlund. โ€œThis is whatโ€™s in the future for you if you want to hang around the likes of this man Hall, and this man Nash.โ€ Hogan raised his finger as if to stop the interviewer midstream, the perfect line instantly coming to mind. โ€œAs far as Iโ€™m concerned, all this crap in the ring represents these fans out here,โ€ he boomed defiantly. โ€œFor two years, I held my head high,โ€ ranted Hogan, alluding to his rather uninspired WCW tenure. โ€œI did everything for the charities. I did everything for the kids. And the reception I got when I came out here, you fans can stick it brother! Because if it wasnโ€™t for Hulk Hogan, you people wouldnโ€™t be here. If it wasnโ€™t for Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff would still be selling meat from a truck in Minneapolis. And if it wasnโ€™t for Hulk Hogan, all of these โ€˜Johnny come latelysโ€™ that you see out here wrestling wouldnโ€™t be here. I was selling the world out, brother, while they were bumming gas to put in their car to get to high school!โ€ In closing, Hogan foreshadowed the future state of affairs in WCW with a prophetic preview of coming storylines: โ€œWith Hulk Hogan and the new world organization of wrestling, brother...me and the new blood by my side...whatcha gonna do when the new world organization runs wild on you? Whatcha gonna do? What are you gonna do??โ€ Despite mistakenly bungling the โ€˜new world orderโ€™ phrase at the conclusion of his speech, Hogan still provided the perfect punctuation to a sensational heel turn. His promo, inarguably the most dynamic of his career, came across as strikingly authentic (โ€œit felt real, because it was realโ€™,โ€ offered a proud Eric Bischoff upon reflection years later). On commentary, Schiavone - who most inspiredly suggested that Hogan had planned to double-cross WCW all along, since his debut in 1994 no less - added to the realism with some mournful final comments: โ€œWe have seen the end of Hulkamania,โ€ he grieved. โ€œHulk Hogan, you can go to hell! Weโ€™re outta here. Straight to hell.โ€ ---- To the layman, there appeared an obvious explanation for the feverous crowd response that accompanied Hoganโ€™s turn. Clearly, the element of surprise - one of the key elements of Nitroโ€™s success - had been exploited to a masterful degree (โ€œnobody on earth thought that the third man was going to be Hulk Hogan,โ€ highlights Nash). To Kevin Sullivan, however, there were several layers of story at play. โ€œPeople thought that it was an invasion from the WWF,โ€ he begins, implying that the success of the angle could be correlated to its realism. โ€œThey really bought into it, and when Hogan turned heel...they were sure of it. โ€œSo while Hogan gets the credit for the reaction, it was [Nash and Hall] who set the whole thing up. Those guys built the foundation of heat, and when Hogan came down, it just blew up.โ€ โ€œWe were red hot coming off WWF television,โ€ agrees Nash, โ€œand then you had the biggest turn in the world on top of that. The biggest babyface of all-time finally turned heel!โ€ To the ever-meticulous Sullivan, always a keen observer of the nuances present in a wrestling angle, an often overlooked element was also noteworthy. โ€œHe did it to Randy [Savage],โ€ the booker emphasizes, speaking of Hoganโ€™s betrayal. โ€œPeople knew there was real-life heat there. That helped out too, but everyone played an intricate part. โ€œLightning...you canโ€™t catch it in a bottle but one time.โ€ The above is an excerpt from the book, NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW. Amazon USA: Amazon UK: Amazon Canada: Amazon Australia: 17+ Hour Audiobook Available at Audible and Apple Books Audible USA: Audible UK: Audible Canada: Audible Australia: Apple Books: Ultimate NITRO Bundle: Deep Cuts - Wrestling Stories in 60 Seconds! David Penzer AdFreeShows.com 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff On This Day in WWE Allan Conrad the Mortgage Guy IandrewDiceClay WCW Archive Because WCW WCW4Life แด€ส€แด…แด€ ร–แด„แด€สŸ 90s WWE Secrets of WCW Nitro #WCW #nWo #HulkHogan #BashattheBeach #HeelTurn #Wrestling #WrestlingBooks #OTD #WWE #WorldChampionshipWrestling #Nitro

WCWNitroBook

53,506 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 1 Monat

Ten Takeaways From 10/21/25 ONE) NBA on NBC Hello, friends. Welcome to the 2025-26 NBA season. Itโ€™s been a minute, hasnโ€™t it? A whole lot has changed since we last spoke. We were reintroduced to the NBA on NBC. Canโ€™t believe itโ€™s been almost 25 years, but here we are again. They absolutely crushed it after having some early audio difficulties. I get how clichรฉ it is, but I seriously got chills once โ€œRoundball Rockโ€ started playing. Thought Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady had contagious energy in the pre-game coverage. The graphics are clean and straightforward. Really like the team fouls tracking in the score bugโ€”just a very pleasant experience. Looking forward to the โ€œPrimeโ€ experience. God, canโ€™t believe it costs $650 to watch basketball now. We need to talk about the MJ segment, though. If youโ€™ve been living under a rock, NBC shocked the world and somehow convinced Michael Jordan to sign on as a โ€œspecial contributorโ€. โ€œInsights to Excellenceโ€ is sadly everything I thought it would beโ€ฆ nothing. He wasnโ€™t in the studio or anything. Looked like some pre-recorded interview with Mike Tirico from who knows when at his house, talking about why heโ€™s come out of hiding. The thing lasted about three and a half minutes. โ€œTo pay it forward. I had the obligation to basketball.โ€ - MJ on the decision to join NBC Okay Mike. Hoping for some actual insight in future recordings. TWO) Champs Are Here OKC received their rings and raised their banner before the game. Vibes were immaculate. Dillon Jones was even in attendance. Good thing the Wizards waived him just in time for him to make his flight. Rockets werenโ€™t having it, though. Ime Udoka said that they didnโ€™t watch the ceremony and were instead focused on trying to ruin their night. Kevin Durant came out for warmups to loud boos, and so he booed them back. Everyone laughed. Meanwhile, Steven Adams still gets loud cheers because, well, who doesnโ€™t love Steven Adams? It was a rough go-around for all Thunder not named Chet Holmgren (28 points, 11-17 FG) to start, especially SGA. He had just five points at the half on 40.0% shooting (2-5 FG), but you can only contain the league and Finals MVP for so long. He scored 24 of his 35 points in the 4th quarter and overtimes. Whatโ€™s up with the four missed free throws (10-14 FT)? "I'm glad the guys enjoyed the ceremony. That's a great, great life event they had." - Mark Daigneault "It was surreal. I don't know how to describe it besides that. Seeing the banner raised was cool too... I'll remember it for the rest of my life." - SGA on the pregame ceremony THREE) Thunder Starters One of the more critical questions going into Opening Night was, โ€œWhoโ€™s the 5th Thunder starter?โ€ as we wait for JDubโ€™s wrist to get right. SGA, Dort, Chet, and IHart felt obvious. Between Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, and Cason Wallace, I leaned Cason mainly because of the bigger picture. Didnโ€™t make sense to start Alex after managing him all last year, but then he started in every preseason game he played. Had to give that some sort of credit (and we did). Well, they ended up doing what they did a lot last year: change it up midway. Wallace started, and then Caruso started the second halfโ€ฆ for Hartenstein. Here we go again. Casonโ€™s playmaking looks improved. Daigneault went 11 deep (!!!) in the first quarter. Rookie, Brooks Barnhizer was the fourth sub off the bench, played about two minutes, and was never seen again. Part of that reason is Ajay Mitchell, who checked in after him (for Shai). Thereโ€™s been some buzz, going back to his standout Summer League (19.8 ppg, 5.3 apg, 4.8 rpg, 1.5 spg). He scored 12 of his 16 points in the second quarter. โ€œNot surprised. He was playing like this before he got hurt last year.โ€ - Mark Daigneault on Ajay Mitchell FOUR) Jumbo Lineup Itโ€™s not much of a surprise to see Udoka start with the Steven Adams/Alperen Sengun pairing after how dominant they looked at the end of last season (+29.9 net rating, 162 minutes)โ€”especially given the matchup, with Holmgren and Hartenstein on the other side. The real shocker is how much they leaned into it. Alpi and Adams shared the court for over 30 minutes (+8). LIKE WTF?!!! This was Adams' first time touching 37 minutes since November 9, 2022. They did just sign him to a three-year extension. Youโ€™d think they might wanna be careful with their investment. The average height of this Rockets' starting lineup is 6'10 (Thompson, Durant, Smith, Sengun, Adams), LMAO FIVE) Alpi Dominance Continues Maybe what Sengun was doing at EuroBasket 2025 (21.6 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 6.6 apg, 1.0 spg, and 1.1 bpg) translates over? Not gonna lie, I certainly had my doubts, but noโ€ฆ heโ€™s looking just as dominant (I know, one game). Alperen Sengun vs Thunder: 39 PTS 11 REB 7 AST 2 STL 5-8 3P (career-high) 10-11 FT 27.7% USG Yeah, I see it too. Second time in his career, heโ€™s attempted eight threes. Dude averaged 1.2 attempts per game last year. The hitch in his shot appears to be gone, so hey, this could be real (doubt it). All I know is that if it is, itโ€™ll do wonders for his ceiling on sites that reward threes (DK). Also, going 10 of 11 from the line is something worth paying attention to. He was a 69.2% free-throw shooter last season. On the flip side, Amen Thompson (18 pts, 4 reb, 5 ast) had seven attempts from behind the arc and missed them all. Sucks, but his shot still looks flat. Thereโ€™s no lift. While weโ€™re here on Thompson, he had to leave the game late because of cramps. SIX) The Reed Conundrum Iโ€™ll give Reed Sheppard (9 pts, 4 ast, 37.9% TS, 28 min) this; heโ€™s a confident motherfucker, and I love that about him (in a cute way). Itโ€™s hilarious how many times he looked off KD in this game. Heโ€™s gonna have stretches where heโ€™s feeling it and looks automatic, but is it really gonna be worth it if his defense looks this dreadful? He canโ€™t stay in front of anyone. The Thunder hunted and won that matchup with ease all night. Amen getting cramped up in OT1 really salvaged his minutes, cause I didnโ€™t think he was gonna see the court again. Again, I know itโ€™s only one game, but a couple more performances like this and things could get ugly. SEVEN) KD Gets Away With One Or should that say gets away with none? Kevin Durant (23 points, 9 rebounds) made his Rockets debut, and thereโ€™re gonna be two things you take away from it. Whyโ€™d you trade for him again? He was pretty much non-existent when they needed him most down the stretch, with a 12.5 USG% in both OTโ€™s. There shouldnโ€™t have been a second overtime. KD was clearly seen calling for a timeout after a rebound with about a second left on the clock. The problem is, they didnโ€™t have anyโ€“He Webberโ€™d it. He should have been Tโ€™d up, giving the Thunder a free throw to potentially end the game. Zarba and his buddies even got together to talk it over once the buzzer sounded, but did nothing. Strange, but luckily, it didnโ€™t end up mattering much since OKC won in the second overtime. โ€œKevin definitely called timeout 3 timesโ€ฆ They just missed it.โ€ - SGA The Thunder beat the Rockets 125-124. EIGHT) Kuminga Starts Gallagher and I both felt pretty confident (sounds so stupid saying that with Kerr) that had Mosey Moody been available for this one, he would have been named the fifth starter, but his calfโ€™s still bothering him. Steve Kerr decided to start Jonathan Kuminga (17 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, 33 minutes) instead, rewarding him for a strong preseason. There might be some more rewards coming because, whew, this is exactly what theyโ€™ve been wanting to see from him for the last couple of years, especially the boards. You wouldnโ€™t know it from looking at Lukaโ€™s box score, but JK did about as well as you could defending him; he made his threes (4-6 3PT) and consistently found the open man. Iโ€™m gonna go ahead and guess that he starts again against Denver on Thursday Let the showcasing begin. โ€œWhen you ask for opportunity, you must deliver. Heโ€™s been very vocal about his opportunity and he delivered.โ€ - Draymond Green on Jonathan Kuminga โ€œI just wanna help JK be greatโ€ฆ Weโ€™ve been kickin' it. Hanging out. Watching film and just working on our game together. I know how great he wants to be and how great he can be.โ€ - Jimmy Butler on mentoring Jonathan Kuminga NINE) Jimmy Being Jimmy One of the funnier moments of the night came post-game, when Jimmy Butler talked about a bet he made with Draymond Green. The wager is that heโ€™ll have a better free-throw percentage than Steph Curry this season. Deadass, hahaha. He admitted that itโ€™s probably a bad bet but I still love that he does this type of shit. Two years ago, he said he was playfully aiming to shoot 50.0% from three. He obviously didnโ€™t hit that mark, but he did shoot a career-best 41.4% that season. If youโ€™re wondering how the bet is looking to start after Game 1: Jimmy Butler: 16-16 FT (100.0%) Steph Curry: 8-8 FT (100.0%) Will keep you updated as the season goes. Jesus, 16 free throw attempts. โ€œNo chance.โ€ - Steph Curry when asked if Jimmy Butler has any shot at winning the bet Before weโ€™re done with GS, a shoutout to Will Richard (5 points, 14 minutes). We tease Kerr all the time about playing these randos, but this kid looks like he can actually play. TEN) All Luka and Austin The Lakers are gonna struggle hard while LeBronโ€™s out. They just donโ€™t have any other guys on the team that can create. Luka Doncic (43 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 34.7% USG) and Austin Reaves (26 points, 9 assists, 30.1% USG) scored or assisted on 97 of the Lakers' 109 points. So wild. Marcus Smart (9 points) was the first sub off the bench. As for DeAndre Aytonโ€™s debut (10 points, 6 rebounds, 4 turnovers), letโ€™s just say it didnโ€™t take long for the Lakersโ€™ fan base to turn on him. Poor guy looked lost out there. "We just started. This is probably the second game we've played together." - Rui Hachimura on what the difference was for the Lakers "The trend I see is that we continue to be a terrible third-quarter team." - JJ Redick The Warriors beat the Lakers 119-109.

Establish The Run NBA

15,288 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 10 Monaten

how Iโ€™m building fractl for a $10M exit in 6 months, so I can produce my dream musical ๐ŸŽค๐ŸŽฌ I don't know how ๐Ÿคท๐Ÿผโ€โ™€๏ธ That's what the show is about ha. Figuring it out, in real time. Wish me luck lol fractl's new docu-series โ€˜โ€˜The Crypto Hustleโ€™ launches feb 26. Final-fucking-ly. thank you Superteam Canada & Solana for the funding and for making Episode 1 possible ๐Ÿฅฐ For those of you who are new here, hiiii ๐Ÿ™‹๐Ÿผโ€โ™€๏ธ my name is Rime Salmi, I'm an artist who accidentally built the biggest investor network in web3. And now we're producing a 12 episode documentary about how I'm working my way back to being an artist, with funding. the origin story. when I crashed with the last crypto cycle, back to zero (plus tax) at my grown age, I had to ask myself what the hell I was gonna do with my life. I always just wanted be an artist. With agency. So i worked and paid for everything, studio, music videos, started a record label, all that to keep my artistic freedom, for my entire career. Had some success, lots of failed experiments, lots of tears, and lots of fun. After I lost everything to the terra luna crash (mistakes were made ๐Ÿฅฒ), I had to figure out how I would fund the dream next. I needed a break from the emotional roller coaster of trading crypto, so I went back to school for the grant money (thank you government of Canada). I relocated to madrid for a change, and started making tiktoks. Skits that I thought were funny. Skits that i thought were risky but honest and necessary. Iโ€™ve always loved saying out loud what others are ashamed to even think ๐Ÿค“ if you follow me on ig or tt you know ha I was having a blast. Creating all day. Some tiktoks took off. Ones that felt very personal. I felt seen. I was at my happiest, filming, editing, singing and pretending to listen in class, for the grant money. Then it hit me. That's what i want. I wanna be telling stories. I dont wanna be just a singer, just a songwriter, just an actress waiting for auditions to come my way. I wanna do it all, tell more stories, write and produce them. soโ€ฆA musical? But I hate musicals ๐Ÿ˜ญ why do they start singing in the middle of a conversation?!? whyyyyy A musical for people who don't like musicals??!!! ๐Ÿฅน Thatโ€™s it!! A MUSICAL FOR PEOPLE WHO DONT LIKE MUSICALS ๐Ÿคฉ DONE. So from the lowest of my finances, in the middle of career confusion, with a bruised ego from failing so miserably at my first crypto cycle, I found something great to get excited about for the rest of my life. I needed to validate the feasibilityโ€ฆ because I know Iโ€™m a dreamer who gets shit done, but Iโ€™m very much a idealist. so I asked my good friend of mine and the producer of my first 2 albums Benny Adam (now a rising star, this is me clout chasing) for advice. I asked him: โ€˜is this too much? For me to wanna produce a whole as* Netflix series, music and all?? Heโ€™s the most talented, ambitious yet realistic guy I know. And I knew he would tell it to me like it is, but kindly. Because heโ€™s also a nice human ๐Ÿซถ๐Ÿฝ โ€˜So?? Is it too big of a project??โ€™ He pausedโ€ฆ I looked at him, hopeful ๐Ÿฅน โ€˜Ya. Itโ€™s a reeeally big project ๐Ÿ˜•โ€™, he said. Fuck. and then he paused, again. Just tell me, I thought. Tell me aaaall the reasons this is a bad ideaโ€ฆ ๐Ÿ˜ž beat. โ€˜But if anyone can do it, itโ€™s youโ€™ cue inspiring battle field music Reeeallyyyyy? ๐Ÿฅน I teared up. Iโ€™m tearing up now writing this. Because at that low point in my life, thatโ€™s what I needed. Just one person who really knew me, to remind me, despite my circumstances, of who I am and what Iโ€™m capable of. That Iโ€™m crazy, yes, but in a good way ๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿฝ๐Ÿ‘ˆ๐Ÿฝ Shokran Benny. I donโ€™t think you know how much that meant to me (Iโ€™m gonna tell him again because heโ€™s on episode 4 of the Crypto Hustle ha) Ok. So. Musical it is. When I ran out of back-to-school government money, and needed to be an adult again, I reintegrated the crypto space, with a purpose. I called my friend and mentor Armando Pantoja and asked him what he thought I should go for in terms of job (I needed a break from entrepreneurship). He said โ€˜Iโ€™ve seen you at conferences, youโ€™re really good with people, you know marketing, and you actually understand crypto. He said go to conferences, youโ€™ll figure it out. Just show upโ€™ I did. I showed up to eth denver 2022 and I started the first iteration of what became fractl as an influencer marketing agency, because I saw a good skill-market fit and because I couldn't find a job lol but I hated it. I dont wanna manage influencers, I don't wanna manage artists. Iโ€™m an artist, I would never manage me, that's crazy ๐Ÿ˜‚ One thing led to the other I became a fractional CMO. An opinionated one ๐Ÿค“ I found myself always trying to lead founders towards personal storytellingโ€ฆ suggesting they put themselves out there more. I really believed that it would help them build trust in a space that so desperately needs it. Then, I started hosting our investor events (to get leads for the agency), and saw the struggle of founders building and fundraising at the same time and the original idea for this show started to form. We need bolder marketing in this space. What if we followed these founders around the world at all these conferences and followed their journey, building a company, raising, launching a token, failing. In these ruthless markets, with the drama of personal sacrificesโ€ฆ I could see it so clearly ๐Ÿ˜ƒ So I started pitching it. THE BEST MARKETING CAMPAIGN EVER GUYS!! WHO'S IN?? No one. I couldn't convince a single founder of the vision.๐Ÿฅฒ Maybe I wasnโ€™t qualified enough in their eyes to carry out such a big vision, following multiple founders on a 6 month production around the world. They were probably right lol But Iโ€™m also a little crazy. And really really stubborn. That's something right?? A few months later, inspiration still strong, I told pablo erminy who's worked on multiple Netflix shows about it and he said: โ€˜why dont you just tell YOUR story? You have a great story, people will wanna watch you build in public to fund your artist dream. As a first reality tv production, one story is more than enough to handle.โ€™ Wise man. Maybe i did underestimate how complex a multi-lead, international, real-time, film production would be ๐Ÿ˜ฌ Done. because I know great advice when I hear it. PIVOT! ๐Ÿ›‹๏ธ So thatโ€™s how โ€™The Crypto Hustleโ€™ was born. This journey I was trying to sell to other founders, I would do it for myself. show not tell. Now the funding. I tried selling the project to sponsors on and off for over a year, between the normal fractl operations, hiring, training, firing, messing up, learning. And only ended up spreading myself so thin, that I neglected the core business. Company became a mess (for others reasons too, that I will come up on the show, hint: boys) Bottom line is, we lost more money than we made, trying to sell a show. I should've known. Film fundraising is a producerโ€™s full time job lol Fast forward 1 year, 2 pilots and a near bankruptcy later, Iโ€™m now launching Episode 1 from Korea and just wrapping episode 2 from Hong Kong. No funding. (except for Episode 1, thank you again Superteam Canada ๐Ÿฅฐ) Fuck it. Might not be the big production I had envisioned, but all the core principles and the emotions, and team talent is there.. An MVP. Now. because waiting for things to align would just delay this indefinitely. And because I have more conviction than ever. not only in authentic storytelling as the best marketing, but also because my soul needs this. I need creativity to keep going. If i stay too long in business mode without publishing art, stories, songs, dances, funny skits, I find no reason to wake up in the morning. Not to be dramatic, but I really only wanna be an artist ๐Ÿ˜‚ Also, the timing IS ideal. because in my mess, I got lucky ๐Ÿฅฐ I found a production team that felt right instantly. Love at first meeting. not only are they aligned with the docu-series concept, but with the end vision too. The cultural impact I wanna have with the musical. vegetable Badr, Momo, @JuicySocialAgency, you're my favorite part of 2026 ๐Ÿซถ๐Ÿฝ So here we are. About to launch episode 1. Documenting the process of building fractl for a $10M exit in 6 MONTHS, so i can produce my dream musical ๐Ÿฅฐ Itโ€™s about to be epic. Or a massive failure, in public. can girl with the pink hair make this happen? ๐Ÿ‘€ let the adventure begin ๐Ÿ’šโ˜บ๏ธ full episodes will be on my youtube channel. go subscribe ok?

๐ŸŒธ Rime Salmi ๐ŸŒธ

10,291 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 6 Monaten

๐ŸŽ‰๐Ÿ’– Xin chร o Viแป‡t Nam~!! ๐Ÿ‡ป๐Ÿ‡ณ Chรบng mรฌnh โ€” Boys In Love, 6 chร ng trai vแป›i 6 quแบฃ tim ฤ‘ang ฤ‘แบญp loแบกn nhแป‹p ฤ‘รขy!! ๐Ÿ’“ Chแป‰ vร i ngร y nแปฏa thรดi, chรบng mรฌnh sแบฝ ฤ‘ฦฐแปฃc gแบทp cรกc bแบกn rแป“i โœˆ๏ธ๐Ÿฅน tแบกi GMMTV FANDAY 26 IN VIETNAM ๐Ÿ“ Ngร y 23 thรกng 11 nร y, tแบกi Nhร  hรกt Bแบฟn Thร nh, TP. Hแป“ Chรญ Minh! ฤรขy lร  lแบงn ฤ‘แบงu tiรชn chรบng mรฌnh ฤ‘แบฟn Viแป‡t Nam! ๐Ÿ‡ป๐Ÿ‡ณ Tแปซ khi biแบฟt lร  sแบฏp ฤ‘ฦฐแปฃc gแบทp cรกc bแบกn, chรบng mรฌnh cแปฉ cฦฐแปi suแป‘t khรดng ngแปซng ฤ‘ฦฐแปฃc ๐Ÿ˜ญ๐Ÿ’ž Chรบng mรฌnh rแบฅt mong ฤ‘ฦฐแปฃc nhรฌn thแบฅy nแปฅ cฦฐแปi, nghe tiแบฟng reo hรฒ vui vแบป vร  cแบฃm nhแบญn tรฌnh yรชu tแปซ cรกc bแบกn โค๏ธโ€๐Ÿ”ฅ Chรบng mรฌnh ฤ‘รฃ chuแบฉn bแป‹ nhแปฏng tiแบฟt mแปฅc ฤ‘แบทc biแป‡t ๐ŸŽคโœจ, nhแปฏng bแบฅt ngแป thรบ vแป‹ vร  nhแปฏng khoแบฃnh khแบฏc แบฅm รกp chแปฉa ฤ‘แบงy nแป—i nhแป› vร  tรฌnh yรชu dร nh cho cรกc bแบกn ๐Ÿ’ซ ฤแบฃm bแบฃo sแบฝ mang ฤ‘แบฟn mแป™t ฤ‘รชm thแบญt vui, thแบญt hแบกnh phรบc ฤ‘แปƒ cรนng nhau tแบกo nรชn nhแปฏng kรฝ แปฉc ฤ‘รกng nhแป› nhแบฅt! ๐Ÿซถ๐Ÿป๐Ÿ’– ฤแปซng quรชn quyแปn lแปฃi Top up Private Photo ฤ‘แป™c quyแปn nha~ ๐Ÿ“ธ ๐Ÿ’ฅ Vร  ฤ‘แบทc biแป‡t, mแปi vแป‹ trรญ ghแบฟ ngแป“i ฤ‘แปu cรณ cฦก hแป™i ฤ‘ฦฐแปฃc tham gia hoแบกt ฤ‘แป™ng trรชn sรขn khแบฅu cรนng chรบng mรฌnh ฤ‘รณ! ๐Ÿ’ฅ Nhanh tay ฤ‘แบทt vรฉ ngay nhรฉ ๐ŸŽŸ๏ธ๐Ÿ’จ ๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿป Chรบng mรฌnh ฤ‘รฃ sแบตn sร ng mang yรชu thฦฐฦกng โค๏ธ tแปซ Boys In Love ฤ‘แบฟn vแป›i tแบฅt cแบฃ cรกc bแบกn mแป™t cรกch trแปn vแบนn nhแบฅt!! ๐Ÿ’˜๐Ÿ”ฅ Hแบนn gแบทp nhau nhรฉ, Viแป‡t Nam~!! ๐Ÿ‡ป๐Ÿ‡ณ Hรฃy sแบตn sร ng nhแบญn lแบฅy tรฌnh yรชu, nแป—i nhแป› vร  nguแป“n nฤƒng lฦฐแปฃng bรนng nแป• tแปซ chรบng mรฌnh nha~ ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ’ฅ ..................... ๐ŸŽ‰๐Ÿ’– Hello Vietnam~!! ๐Ÿ‡ป๐Ÿ‡ณ We โ€” Boys In Love, all 6 of us โ€” canโ€™t stop our hearts from racing!! ๐Ÿ’“ It wonโ€™t be long before we finally get to meet everyone โœˆ๏ธ๐Ÿฅน at GMMTV FANDAY 26 IN VIETNAM ๐Ÿ“ November 23rd at Ben Thanh Theatre, Ho Chi Minh City! This is our very first trip to Vietnam! ๐Ÿ‡ป๐Ÿ‡ณ Ever since we heard weโ€™d get to meet you, we havenโ€™t stopped smiling ๐Ÿ˜ญ๐Ÿ’ž We canโ€™t wait to see your smiles, hear your laughter, and feel the power of your love right there with us โค๏ธโ€๐Ÿ”ฅ Weโ€™ve prepared special stages ๐ŸŽคโœจ, fun surprises, and warm moments all filled with our love and the energy of missing you ๐Ÿ’ซ We promise to make it a night full of warmth, joy, and unforgettable memories together ๐Ÿซถ๐Ÿป๐Ÿ’– Donโ€™t forget to grab your exclusive Top up Private Photo privileges~ ๐Ÿ“ธ ๐Ÿ’ฅ And remember โ€” every seat has a chance to join us on stage too! ๐Ÿ’ฅ Go get your tickets now ๐ŸŽŸ๏ธ๐Ÿ’จ ๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿป Weโ€™re more than ready to send all our love โค๏ธ from Boys In Love straight to your hearts โ€” to the MAX!! ๐Ÿ’˜๐Ÿ”ฅ See you very soon, Vietnam~!! ๐Ÿ‡ป๐Ÿ‡ณ Get ready for all our love, affection, and crazy energy!! ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ’ฅ #GMMTVFANDAY26 #BoysInLoveSeriesxVIETNAM #GMMTV lukepeemsan mickmetas เธžเธตเนˆเธ„เธดเธก (เน‚เธŠเธเธธเธ™) ๐Ÿ“šPโ€™KIM 6/1 เธ™เน‰เธญเธ‡เธกเนˆเธญเธ™ (เนเธญเธชเธ•เธฑเธ™) ๐Ÿ“š Nโ€™Mon 6/4 Ken_Lim เธ™เน‰เธญเธ‡เธ•เน‰เธฒเธฃเนŒ (เธžเธญเธฅ) ๐Ÿ“šNโ€™tar 6/1

GMMTV

51,527 Aufrufe โ€ข vor 9 Monaten