Tom Brady Walks
Weekly Briefing 05/22/26
Some personal news: I’ve joined the wonderful team at the games market analytics firm GameDiscoverCo. I like to think of GameDiscoverCo as a cross between FiveThirtyEight and the Bloomberg Terminal for the video game industry. The company combines a twice-weekly newsletter by founder Simon Carless here on Substack with an in-depth analytics platform featuring Steam and consoles sales data. I’m working as a software engineer on the platform side of things.
And some good news for you, my dear readers: I’ve got many half-finished essays in the drafts and lots to say on a variety of topics. I’m aiming to be on a more regular schedule here, probably posting two-ish times a week, a bit more loosely. Think of this as my personal blog, or, more formally, a collection of notes and essays on the economics of culture and technology.
Here are some things I saved this week:
Tom Brady (among others) walked for Gucci in Times Square as part of the new GucciCore collection with a look that’s half Clavicular, half Jensen Huang. Demna, who joined as creative director after leading Balenciaga for a decade, is in my opinion, killing it. The show ended with Cindy Crawford in a black feathered gown to the tune of 1967’s The World We Knew by Herbert Rehbein & His Orchestra. [Watch the full 8-minute GucciCore show]
Michael Bloomberg explains the inner workings of the Bloomberg terminal, the goated market analytics software that’ll run you $30K a year. [𝕏]
Nate Silver details the tumultuous history of his prolific ‘Data journalism’ publication FiveThirtyEight, from its anonymous founding in 2008 to its eventual demise and fractured leadership under ABC. [Silver Bulletin]
Shein acquired the ‘knowledge worker uniform company’ Everlane this past week for $100 million. Everlane reportedly had $90 million in debt leading up to the acquisition, so this was more of a rescue deal than a big payout for shareholders. How many of the brands you love will eventually be owned by a private equity firm or Chinese multinational conglomerate? See also: Volvo, Blue Bottle, Arc’teryx, and Salomon. Related: Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a new book titled Incorruptible that outlines strategies for counteracting this seemingly inevitable descent into corporate slop. Ries helped shape Anthropic’s unusual governance structure with their formation of a long-term benefit trust. [Puck]
Ben Thompson has a solution to the data center backlash: just pay all the residents surrounding the new buildouts $10K a year. Data centers, and by extension AI, have a serious popularity problem. We’re now in uncharted territory: public opposition to nuclear energy peaked at 63% in 1984; opposition to AI data centers now sits at 71%. [Stratechery]
Roblox has made impressive progress on their ‘world models’. They trained a custom ‘action-conditioned model’ that allows for physically accurate interactive simulations i.e games. “Switching from a scythe to a rifle to a flaming torch, and interacting with the environment. There’s an uncanny intelligence deep inside these models, and we’re researching how to make games with it!” [𝕏]
Solopreneurs now account for a record 71% of new business applications, up from 40% in 2005. Someone needs to check on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s betting pool from 2024: “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI — and now [it] will happen.” [Stripe Economics]
Entertainment industry analyst, and author of the canonical book on the Metaverse Matthew Ball, joined XBOX as the Chief Strategy Officer. Ball most recently published a 167-page deep dive into the state of the video game industry. [The Game Business]
So called ‘Dad books’—a macrogenre that includes politics, biography, military history, and business titles—are in decline. “Sales of nonfiction print titles were down nearly 8% through May 9 this year, and sales of books about politics and current affairs were down 19%, according to book tracker Circana BookScan.” [WSJ]
The number of ebooks released on Amazon each week has nearly tripled since the launch of ChatGPT. Distribution is the new moat, as they say. [WaPo]
