While Bill was wandering through the wilderness, I was thinking about ways to keep myself entertained at Three Point Four Media headquarters. I decided to make it “PR Week,” branding being the only reason to do anything, and try to get some press for our little outfit. It’s something we’ve talked about trying to do in the past but haven't gotten around to doing because we’re busy and it didn’t seem very fun or interesting. A task for late July if there ever was one.
So far, the PR Push has been surprisingly successful, especially if you compare the output to what I thought we’d get, which was exactly zero. We have been featured in this newsletter about the products we use to run the business, taped an appearance on a well-known industry podcast, and will be guest-editing a newsletter in a month. When Bill returned, he jumped in and scheduled another interview, too.
Will these efforts result in any work or adoration from our fans or anything positive at all? Who knows/probably not. Still, it’s nice to know we can do it and that PR at a basic level doesn’t seem particularly difficult.
We will not be posting on LinkedIn.
An Article
Back in 2016, Tad Friend profiled Sam Altman, then the head of Y Combinator. (He’s now running Open AI. ) And yikes! Not to get all preachy, but it sure doesn't seem like this man who’s end of the world plan is to fly to New Zealand with Peter Thiel and wait for it to all blow over is the best guide into the future.
Paul Graham, noting Altman’s early aura of consequence, told me, “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.”
That’s a quote from a friend and mentor who handpicked Altman to run the company he put his heart and soul into building. Good times.
Also, don’t let him scan your eyeballs. Not a doomer but this all seems very bad!
Oh a guy is building a superintelligent AI and also compiling a permanent electronic identification database of all humans, that’s great, that’s not an alarming science-fiction premise at all. I feel like if you made that movie you’d have to have some plausible back story about how the AI convinced people to hand over their iris scans to the AI, but in the real world you don’t.
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A Book
NPR calls R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface "well-executed, gripping, fast-paced novel." The New York Times Book Review went with "viciously satisfying" and "addictive." Are these compliments or random adjectives? Maybe both?
I liked Yellowface because it’s great—how’s that for detail?—and also because I was 40th in line at the Brooklyn Public Library and then somehow magically first a couple days later. There are few things better than the surprise arrival of a book on hold. (Meanwhile, I’ve been second in line for Wonder Boy about Tony Hsieh for months. Whoever has the two copies needs to hurry up and read that thing! And I’m never going to get Open, Andre Agassi’s autobiography. That’s what I get for reserving books about bros.)
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A Project
We chatted with Jessica Roy from Snowdrop Creative about how she uses Dropbox to run her business from anywhere: “My home mountain is Grand Targhee Resort and the main chairlift, Dreamcatcher, is about eight minutes long so it’s the perfect amount of time to share files and links back and forth.”
I learned a lot about the geography of the Tetons working on this project. We need a larger travel budget at TPF.
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A Coffee Shop
Washed Up Beach Cafe is on the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk, perpendicular to Beach 97th Street. Being the closest place to get coffee, it’s always slammed with sunbathers, people riding expensive road bikes, and various other beach personalities, but the staff is harried in a friendly way and the service is quicker than one might expect. While I wouldn’t go to Rockaway for the coffee, it’s perfectly satisfactory for a beach-based experience.
FYI, if you do a Google image search for “washed up beach cafe,” you will get dozens of images of Cafe Bustelo cans washing up on a Florida beach.
Rating: Four out of five surfboards
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A Run
Once every few months, Orchard Street Runners stages a race through the streets of New York City. The 2023 OSR Red Hook run started at 8 p.m. under the Manhattan Bridge, went to three checkpoints in Red Hook—one checkpoint (Sunny’s Bar, of course) was announced at the starting line—and back to the Manhattan Bridge. There’s no formal route.
I went over the Brooklyn Bridge, which, while technically shorter, took forever because sunset on a beautiful summer night is not conducive to running fast across one of the world’s best and narrowest tourist attractions.
A very fun experience nonetheless. A little over 10.5 miles in 71 minutes, lost by about ~15 minutes. This city is full of unfathomable fitness.
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See you in two weeks.