A French left-wing activist mocked those whose livelihoods had been destroyed by violent rioters and looters over the past few days. “Your little shops, that’s real cute,” said Lola-Fleur Whittaker, who defended the rioters during a French television debate. Whittaker tried to draw sympathy, stating that her mother is an English teacher who eats cookies for lunch because she can't “pay for the cafeteria.” However, online users quickly found Whittaker’s social media profiles, where she posts pictures of herself vacationing in places like Oman, the island of Ré, Sicily, the Greek islands, Malaysia, and Egypt. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manchester, and she offers French lessons for €53 per 50-minute lesson on the platform Preply, where she has already taught 1,709 classes.

Larry David is one of America’s unlikeliest icons, and one of history’s purest founders. In our latest profile, Correspondent-at-Large @blakejharrisNYC—who spent six years talking to Larry for his new book—explains what makes Larry so special, and why it took him so long to break through. Larry was a mediocre student with a middling social life. His first two jobs—selling bras and driving cabs—ended quickly. At 25, he called his mother from a hotel room: “Ma, nothing good is ever gonna happen to me.” She urged him to become a mailman. Soon after, he found what he thought would be his calling: stand-up comedy. His material was funny, but he rarely finished a set. If somebody in the audience looked at their watch, or didn’t laugh when he thought they should, Larry stormed off. 14 years later, aged 39, he got a break. He was asked to write his first sitcom script for a big new Showtime series. Only an eighth of what he wrote survived the edit, but the episode was still his. He was broke, and the writing credit could have sparked his career. But Larry refused to put his name on it. Even with Seinfeld, Larry nearly hit self-destruct. The pilot performed worse than almost any other show NBC had ever tested. Still, the network ordered four episodes, one of the smallest orders in TV history. Larry barely made it through them. When the studio installed a showrunner to oversee the scripts, Larry endured the man’s notes, then said “NO. I’m not doing one thing,” and walked out. In the summer of 1991, with the show finally starting to work, NBC wanted Jerry and Elaine to get married and have a baby. Larry quit in the parking lot and wished everyone good luck. Jerry stood with Larry, and NBC caved. Larry’s friend and comedian Bill Scheft put it this way: “He doesn’t [act this way now] because he has fuck-you money. It’s the opposite. He has the fuck-you money because he’s always acted this way.” Read the full profile by Blake, author of Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David. colossus.com/article/many-fa…

Writing this headline about this out-of-this-word presentation marking a monumental technical achievement reiterates that WSJ has given up writing credible accounts of reality for regular people to read.

got the HRT gang back together!

If Claude didn’t tell Ben Wilson to go to the doctor he’d already by dead: .@BenWilsonTweets had been ignoring his symptoms until he entered everything into Claude. “Claude said, ‘This isn’t the kind of thing like go in next week when you have a chance. This is the kind of thing—go in right now. If you can’t be seen right now, go to an emergency room.’” “And Claude was right.” “If I lived in a world where there were no cancer treatments, I probably would’ve been dead within a few months.” “The initial prognosis was one year. If you go and look up the survival statistics for the type of cancer I had and the amount of spread that I had, the five-year survival rate is zero percent.” “I’ve been trying to live two lives at once, one in which I die sometime in the next year and one in which I’ve got 20 years.”

Success is not certain, but excitement is

Pod up! Some good nuggets on lab revs, Nvidia supply unlock, AI capex & millions of Nvidia agents to employees as we enter the singularity & recursive flywheel starts spinning. 🧐🇺🇸🚀 @JensenHuang @BG2Pod

Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5. I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38. He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. 0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders. 55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies. My observations: 1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively. 2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now. 3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention. 4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is. 5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now. 6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text. They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it. 7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy. 8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies. Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here. 9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens. 10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity! 11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it. 12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable. 13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think. 14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data. 15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open. 16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down. 17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building? 18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone. 19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good. 20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped. 21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense. Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era. Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways. Happy to be home and locked in. Until next time!

I've been traveling the world a bit. One of the most incredible experiences was getting to visit Taiwan w/ @JensenHuang. It was wild 🤯.. huge crowds of engineers, insanely good street food at night markets, and of course a lot of good conversations across many days. I caught some of it on video, see below. Alright, that's it from me, love you all ❤️ Timestamps: 0:00 - Highlights 0:46 - Intro 3:25 - Computex: crowds, engineers, tech, future of AI 9:12 - Chat with Jensen: keynote prep & nerves 13:03 - Chat with Jensen: Taiwan's tech history 19:47 - Raohe night market 29:37 - Chat with Jensen: memories from childhood 33:44 - NVIDIA party 40:29 - Lunch: braised pig's feet 43:09 - Chat with Jensen: GPUs, AI, and competition 55:07 - Ningxia night market 1:10:14 - Taiwanese breakfast 1:29:54 - Outro

Wrote this article last December, and wanted to share it here as well given Paramount's closed acquisition of WBD last week