The Weekday Variant
🦞🥞 Vol. 2, No. 13
Hey, Bunch here. I am writing this from a hotel lobby in Los Angeles1, having spent the last few nights somewhere between Hollywood and Laguna2 on a mix of business travel and some lovely social affairs with friends and family.
The printing press broke down across this week on the road, thus our delays in yesterday’s delivery. The good news is, we’re back up and running now, so hopefully this delayed Monday edition is just the change-up your week needs.
🔑 Bring friends → score merch → get more friends ✨
Punched Out
Scenes from one possible future of sport
If you’re like me, you really only cared about the Tyson-Paul fight insomuch as it was an opportunity to see Jake get knocked out by a proper representative for our collective feelings towards the Vine star turned Disney Channel star turned professional boxer. So, like me, you might have even forgotten about it completely as the undercards began on Friday night, until your feed became overrun with takes and memes on every aspect of Netflix’s production and stream–from the hosts to celebrities attending to the fights themselves3–when, of course, they could actually get the broadcast to buffer.
I was in transit and struggling with the same technical issues as many others but, by the time the first round of the main event started, I did manage to join the reported 65 million who watched the eight, 2-minute round match between Iron Mike and “El Gallo de Dorado”–the first of several big sports moments streaming live on Netflix–through annoyingly-persistent buffering interruptions4 that surely have the folks at the NFL and Netflix in some very tense conversations in advance of the Christmas Day games (Chiefs vs Steelers and Ravens vs Texans) that will land on the streaming giant.
Fortunately, when one stream goes down, another almost already springs up in its place. In this case, even when Netflix failed me, I was able to follow across my own social feeds and, in an unexpected turn, join six million other people watching the view from a luxury box inside AT&T Stadium, via a livestream on Antonio Brown’s X account. Altogether it made for a manic and disjointed way to cobble together a watching fight night, but maybe it was the perfect way to experience this particular fight.
A sea of digital ink has been spilled already in the hopes of analyzing this one, as a potential future of sport, both how we watch5 and what we watch6 so I’ll just quickly share a few of my key takeaways from what I saw on Friday night:
A lot of buffering animation. I alluded to it above, I can only imagine the crazy CTO conversations happening right now. Netflix is going to be in a world of hurt if those two NFL Christmas Day games go anywhere near as poorly as this one did. Other platforms have shown this kind of scale for streaming live sports is possible, now Netflix has a little over a month to figure it out.
Mike Tyson’s whole ass. Imagine you’ve been trying to get the stream to buffer for several minutes and then it finally kicks in and you’ve got this shot. If the Netflix crew can’t keep one guy’s bare butt out of the shot, probably shouldn’t get them anywhere near an NFL locker room with a live cam7.
An interesting cast of characters. Cedric the Entertainer. Jerry Jones and Michael Irvin. “First Lady of Boxing” Rosie Perez. Evander Holyfield. William Zabka & Ralph Macchio. Charlize Theron8. Interesting mix of fight night regulars, Netflix plants, and other people who make a lot of sense at Jerryworld.
A rough sixteen minutes. Look, it’s Mike’s life and his call on if he needs a paycheck, if he needs to prove something to himself, if he really needs to just hit Jake Paul (all noble pursuits). I just didn’t feel great having watched it unfold, even as Paul bowed reverentially after dominating all eight rounds. Maybe a decisive knockout of a guy half his age would have flipped my feelings entirely, we’ll never know. But I am probably good if I never watch another fight featuring a guy approaching 60.
🇦🇺 Australia plans age limit to ban children from social media
It was a big week for Oceania politics. The Haka protest in New Zealand parliament (rightly) got the views, but the big piece of legislation out of Oz had everyone talking.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of questions (and 🌶️ takes), but not a ton of concrete details about what happens next:
Some social media platforms will be exempt from the under-16s ban. So what's in and what's out?
Australia's plan to ban children from social media proves popular and problematic
🇨🇳 China Faces Deflation as Economy Stutters
🇪🇸 Spain: open economy, unstoppable run?
🤠 Texans Are (Probably) About to Get 7,637 More Acres of State Parks
Speaking of Texas, congratulations to all of the Lone Star State’s first-ever Michelin stars, announced this past week. Shout-out to the Austin winners:
Conan O’Brien to Host 2025 Oscars Ceremony
Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’
Heralding the ancient and otherworldly charm of Future Medieval graphics
Want to Network in Silicon Valley? Bring a Bathing Suit
If Your Tattoo Was Designed by AI, Does It Have a Soul?
Wendy’s Bets on Palantir AI to Keep Up With $1 Frosty Demand (Related, from a former employee: Reflections on Palantir)
AI Can Now Authenticate Sneakers by Their Smell
Barcelona strike ‘record €1.7bn’ Nike kit deal9 - Remember that time they tried to convince us they might just make their own kits?
Just Frame It: How Nike Turned Sports Stars into Superheroes
Okung Launches Bitcoin Sports League After Salary Gamble Pays Off
Why is this interesting? The Explicit Baseball Card Edition
The 6 New Rules of Communicating
A Brief History of the Most Famous Swear Word in the World
Self-Sabotaging Innovation: The Art of Doing Dumb Shit
Mom Jailed for Letting 10-Year-Old Walk Alone to Town
Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.
‘Wicked’ Dolls: Mattel Mistakenly Includes Link to Adult Porn Site on Packaging
‘Hawk Tuah’ girl launches Pookie Tools, an AI-powered dating advice app
The Moral Threat of Bicycles in the 1890s
How the U.S. Almost Became a Nation of Hippo Ranchers
Recommended
🎧 LISTEN
The Knowledge Project
Thanks in large part to the OG Tim Ferriss, the “interviewing successful people about being successful” genre has been a bedrock of the podcasting milieu, and while Mr. Four-Hour Work Week can still make the format work, it’s mostly the stuff of fawning fanboys and idolatry of people whose success is often much more luck (or nepotism) than repeatable achievement.
But The Knowledge Project from the excellent Farnam Street manages crack the code in a way that isn’t pretentious, that doesn’t feel like another Silicon Valley poker circle, and that actually manages to stoke the flames of curiosity through conversations with interesting people in business, some you’ve probably heard of, others that aren’t household names (but probably should be).
What the world needs now is love McNuggs. It is a sentiment no less true today than when it was expressed perfectly by Jeb Boniakowski for The Awl:
Everyone talks about how globalization "McDonalds-izes" the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi'an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald's are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say "School of Keith McNally." But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.
Related: McAtlas is an upcoming book from James Beard Award winning photographer and writer Gary He, which he describes as “a visual social anthropology of the largest restaurant chain in the world.”
This Week’s Sources
[SIC] | The Trend Report | Why is this interesting? | Garbage Day | ZINE | Kottke | Eater Austin | Feed Me | Honest Broker | Huddle Up
Observation: folks in Texas were a lot more prepared that the election might go red than the people I’ve been talking to here. Austin used to feel more like a satellite of LA politically but in this moment it feels like another planet. I wonder if the gap is just my election perception being formed at red sea level, or to what extent Rogan and the post-pandemic California refugees–not to mention Elon and a growing battalion of Cybertrucks springing from the local Gigafactory–have actually shifted Austin’s Overton window.
Sounds a bit like a Warren Zevon lyric.
The main event was a dud, but the “co-main event” of Katie Taylor vs Amanda Serrano and the undercards were all solid.
By the time it was over, watching the icon Tyson totally cooked, dominated by Jake F*cking Paul, I wished I was still watching the buffering screen.
Netflix’s eventual dominance of sport being viewed by some as an inevitability.
Does our future hold more celebrity boxing-type moments? More old men getting beat up for money?
Unless the “accidental” ass shots aren’t so accidental. In which case, you’ve hit paydirt.
Girl.
Unfortunately for Barça, they’re still “at risk of financial meltdown” despite the giant Swoosh cash infusion, and some experts inside the Spanish soccer world are skeptical that the deal is really bigger than their rivals’ Real Madrid deal with adidas.