In a couple weeks, Three Point Four Media NYC and Three Point Four Media MI will hop on planes in separate places and wing our way to the great state of California to meet with a client. It’s an occasion for firsts: first TPF work trip since 2019, first time we’re seeing each other since 2020, first time meeting these specific clients in person.
Due to our previous lives as freelance writers, we were perhaps more prepared for the Zoomification of work than most. There were editors I wrote for dozens if not hundreds of times between 2005 and 2018 who I rarely if ever met in person. Some of them I couldn't pick out of a crowd because video calls weren’t really a thing. It’s possible to do excellent and productive work—then and now—without ever meeting someone face to face. From a budgeting perspective, it’s also nice not to have to spend money on too many trips.
But, at the same time, it will be nice to be able to put, I dunno, a handshake to the disembodied digital head we’ve been meeting with twice a month for almost two years. And the clients are lovely people, so it should be fun, too.
Let’s do these links.
An Article
As a long-time media transparency advocate,* I very much enjoy the Defector team’s yearly “here’s how we’re doing” posts. More businesses should talk about the money they make, how they make it, how they plan to make more, and what opportunities they will not chase. Although I really do not like the noun “blogs.” I realize that’s at least partially the point, but ugh.
* Side note: The original Awl story I wrote about this, which, frankly, was much better than the second one, no longer exists. My conspiracy theory is that one of the publications whose rates I exposed made them take the piece down, but it’s probably just a broken link or something.
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A Book
I picked this up after reading about William MacAskill in The New Yorker. Such a cliche, I am. He writes about “longtermism,” the idea that future beings should be accounted for in our decisionmaking today. (There’s more to it than that but this is a cheeky newsletter, not a moral philosophy lecture.) And there are some fascinating ideas and discussions, like why working towards frameworks is better than working towards specific goals and there’s some value in thinking about progress in millennia and longer rather than years and decades. But it’s also a lot of, technical term, philosophical gobbledegook that leads to a rather obvious conclusion. Like, yeah man, I too believe nuclear annihilation and/or takeover by AI would not be an ideal outcome for the human race. This doesn’t require a byzantine moral framework to discover. MacAskill is smart and has many adherents to his philosophy but I was surprised by how unconvincing and poorly argued a lot of the book was. Maybe I’m too shorterm to get it, but what you owe your future self is to read something else.
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A YouTube Page
Bryson DeChambeau is a success professional golfer who won the 2020 US Open and made more than $26 million on the PGA Tour before decamping for LIV. He also has a YouTube channel where he puts out at least one and frequently two or three videos a week. And these are not short, low-production efforts. They are 15- to 30-minute events with multiple cameras that must take hours to film. In the one above, he and Tim Tebow hit balls as hard as they can for what seems like hours, then go do a full exhausting lifting workout that they also film. DeChambeau also frequently guest stars on other golf YouTuber videos. He’s charming and loves golf, but doesn’t he have better things to do?
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A Project
We made running hats. And they look sweet. More details in the near future. Pivot to merch.
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A Fact that Might Only Interest Me
According to the internet’s one true source of news, Wikipedia, the Baby Yoda doll (actual name: Grogu) from The Mandalorian cost $5 million to make. It seems impossible that a single puppet could be that expensive. The budget for the entire original Star Wars was $11 million in 1977 (~$54 million in today’s dollars). So that puppet, which spends more of the show lying in a carriage, cost nearly 1/10th of A New Hope. There’s a part of Flash Boys where Michael Lewis writes about how all the best coders are Russian because they grew up learning on machines with extremely little memory whereas Americans had lots of RAM (? possibly incorrect terminology) and, I dunno, I think there’s a parallel there, Jon Favreau.
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A Run
10ishK around Prospect Park. I recently got a new refurbished Garmin because I went swimming with my old one and it was supposed to be waterproof but it almost immediately shut off following the swim. So I emailed some lovely customer service people and they sent me a new watch. Garmin can clearly see the Apple Watch writing on the wall. Anyway, the watch said we were running 4:15 minutes per mile for a very short period of time, which clearly we were not, but the result is that boring more or less unchanging blue color on the map and a tiny bit of bright red that you can’t see.
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