Mike White's 15-Year Journey For "The White Lotus"

The backstory on how HBO's hit TV show was the right person with the right project at the right place and the right time.

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Today, we are talking about Mike White’s 15-year journey to create The White Lotus.

Also this week:

• Home Depot’s $20B Gardening Business

• The Robot That Took Over The Dairy Industry

• Why Sinners Is Scaring Hollywood

• …and them fire posts (including WiFi router hacks)

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Mike White's 15-Year Journey For The White Lotus

The White Lotus recently wrapped up its third season, garnering ~20 million viewers in the US and cementing its place as one of HBO’s top shows (the viewership was more than double its first season and comparable to Succession’s final season, which both hit ~9 million viewers).

🚨 SPOILER ALERT🚨: Actually, I’m not going to give any spoilers but let me give a top-level review of the dark comedy drama (each season begins with a floating dead body at a luxury hotel in a beautiful location and we spend time with the guests, hotel employees and locals to solve the whodunnit).

It was an extremely enjoyable watch with an ace cast including Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Rockwell (!!!!), Parker Posey, Aimee Lou Wood and masssssssssivvvvvvvve Thai K-Pop artist Lisa.

However, I still think the first two seasons (set in Hawaii and Sicily) are superior to the latest set in Thailand. But those shows established a pretty high bar and benefitted from the “shiny new thing” effect. They felt fresher and the narratives were tighter (each season has gotten progressively longer from 6 episodes to 7 episodes to 8 episodes).

Still, all three seasons are quality TV with incredible character studies and explorations of the wealthy American psyche. Creator Mike White is the show’s real star and writes some of the most (literally) banging dialogue you’ll find anywhere in TV or film.

As I detailed in my essay “The Case Against Streaming TV Shows”, The White Lotus anthology format just hits the spot for me. It’s a short commitment with a guaranteed narrative payoff and a shared cultural viewing experience thanks to HBO’s weekly release cadence.

The White Lotus experience also has a great business and creative backstory.

White took a long and winding journey to bring his idea to screen. A seed for The White Lotus was first planted in 2006 and White pitched HBO a kind of similar show as far back as 2008. Ultimately, the official premiere was in 2021.

In February, after the show’s Season 3 premiere, David Bernad — a producer for The White Lotus and longtime collaborator with White — went on The Bill Simmons Podcast and shared a ton of great details on White’s 15-year journey.

First, some background: Mike White was born in 1970. In college, a classmate convinced him to move to Hollywood after graduation, so they could work on writing projects. White wrote for some sitcoms (Dawson's Creek, Freaks and Geeks) and started really making industry waves in the early-2000s, especially on his collaborations with Jack Black. He wrote and acted in School of Rock (2003) and Nacho Libre (2006). In 2011, he parlayed this film success into a TV series with HBO starring Laura Dern called Enlightened. That show involved a Hawaii mediation retreat (a callback for fans of The White Lotus) but lasted only two seasons.

For the next decade, White’s most notable entertainment turn was as a savvy contestant on Survivor. In 2018, he placed 2nd on Season 37 of the smash reality hit TV show by building coalitions, understanding power hierarchies and absolutely wrecking lesser-skilled contestants with blindside votes (let’s just say these dynamics may or may not have made their way into The White Lotus).

Let’s pause White's story in 2018. That year, he is almost 50 and it's been 12 years since his last major hit with Jack Black. Hollywood has cooled on White and the early-career momentum is gone.

Then, the pandemic hits and White happens to be the right person with the right project at the right place and the right time.

Here’s how the stars aligned for White and The White Lotus, per producer David Bernad:

***

1. White Pitches HBO His TV First Idea

In 2008, Paramount had commissioned White to write a sequel to School of Rock and he decided to draft while living in Spain. Honestly, such a baller decision and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Whites loves to travel (he was also a contestant on another hugely popular reality TV show: The Amazing Race).

Bernad tagged along on the trip and — between School of Rock writing sessions — White floated a new show concept.

“We were just walking one day and [White] pitches this idea,” says Bernad. “[It’s] about a hotel show…And the central relationship is a couple that's on a honeymoon. One is rich [and] one is marrying into money. The show kind of starts with the groom returning and the bride is not there and you don't know what's happened. And I'm like, that's incredible.”

2. HBO Doesn’t Think Anthology Series Can Work

Interestingly, HBO execs hated the honeymoon idea because anthologies — or a season of TV with a self-contained narrative — weren’t really a thing at the time. Studios were still in the mindset of milking a show for multiple seasons. An anthology was one and done. All of the energy that viewers put into the characters would dissipate.

This changed in 2014 when HBO had a monster hit with True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew “I’m going to say the weirdest shit in the world while rocking the weirdest moustache” McConaughey.

“So, True Detective was really the thing that I think broke open anthology series,” says Bernad. “I get [why HBO didn’t initially like anthologies]….The hardest thing is a pilot, right? Like getting people engaged and interested in characters. And then to replicate that every season is really hard and get people re-engaged. It's almost impossible.”

True Detective was so successful that the industry had to reconsider anthologies. It also helped that the streaming business model could accommodate anthologies: instead of a multiple-season commitment, an anthology series is great way to drum up hype and entice new subscribers.

In hindsight, The White Lotus doesn't really have the pilot problem because it smartly hooks viewers with a murder mystery and a new exotic location.

3. Phil Jackson Inspires A New Show (And Amazon Picks It Up)

Around the end of 2015, a former HBO executive had moved to Amazon Prime and asked White about his “honeymoon show". Amazon optioned the idea but it was a slightly different plot. The honeymooning couple was now going to different hotels around the world but each location was the same brand of hotel.

As Bernad explains, White made this change after he went on a vacation trip and kept bumping into legendary NBA coach Phil Jackson (aka the Zen Master):

Mike was kind of inspired [by] Phil Jackson…I can't remember which country he was in. But he went from this great hotel to that great hotel to another great hotel within the same country. And Phil Jackson…must have [had the] same…travel agent who had booked us into the same exact hotels. So, Mike kept seeing him at every hotel. So he was like, “Okay, this honeymoon couple, basically is going to travel to different hotels, and they're going to see the same couples or same people.”

The show never got made as Amazon’s film and TV studio went through a #MeToo corporate shakeup. But White had added a new wrinkle to his idea.

4. A Serendipitous Dinner

Fans of The White Lotus will definitely remember Tanya McQuoid, a very wealthy but also very troubled socialite that is relevant in all three seasons of the show.

Tanya is played by actress Jennifer Coolidge (for an older generation, you’ll remember her as “Stifler’s Mom” from American Pie…just classic!).

In 2006, Bernad and White were dining at a restaurant when they saw Coolidge. The three started hanging out and sparked a friendship.

For years afterwards, White tried to write a show for Coolidge and finally does so in 2019. It’s a 4-episode TV show called St. Patsy and Coolidge is set to play a character that is quite similar to the one she ultimately plays in The White Lotus. Also, the St. Patsy plot involves a murder mystery in Sri Lanka.

All the studios pass on the show but White has another idea in the air.

“We're basically told Jennifer is not a TV star or whatever,” Bernad remembers. “So, now we have The Honeymoon Show [that] Mike was thinking about. We have the Couple Murder Mystery Show. We have Jennifer in Sri Lanka. So those three elements we have kind of simmering. Mike is being pigeonholed now as an incredibly creative guy, but [he] can't have like a giant show. He's not like a ‘Big Taste Guy’. He's like a like a ‘Small Critics Love Him Type of Guy.’”

5. The COVID Opportunity

At the start of 2020, White and Bernad were preparing to make a road trip comedy with actress Aubrey Plaza (she ends up in Season 2 of The White Lotus). They had the financing ready but then the pandemic hits and the money dries up.

White and Bernad take the L like everyone else and try to reset.

Then a break: in July 2020, HBO calls “out of the blue” and asks, “We don't have any programming, is there anything you can do in a COVID bubble that you can do quickly, cheaply, that can be on the air in 2021?”

White goes, “Yeah, I got it.”

And HBO instantly replies, “Great, it's greenlit.”

“Mike literally didn't know what [the show] was,” says Bernad. “But he had been thinking about these three different shows over the last 15 years. He combined all those elements [Honeymoon Hotel, Coolidge, Murder Mystery] and that became The White Lotus.”

6. White Writes The Show In 14 Days

After HBO’s greenlight, Bernad and White race to put the show together:

It was probably August of 2020.

We get on a phone call with HBO and they're like, “You have 30 days to make this. Good luck.”

[We] had two weeks to find a location. What people don't know is originally we were going to do it in Australia. Basically, we found a hotel in Australia, but we couldn't get our COVID vaccinations and visas in time. […]

We pivoted to Hawaii because it was the one place that we could get in. And God bless Four Seasons Maui. It's the only hotel in the world that said, “Yeah, come shoot this during COVID.”

Mike [said], “I'm not going to Hawaii…there's no way I'm doing a season in 30 days.”

I said to him, “We're going to show up in Hawaii. We're going to get them ‘pregnant’, as they say in Hollywood. We're going to get them ‘invested’. They're going to spend enough money that we're going to actually…need another 15 million to make the show.”

He goes, “If you're wrong about this, I'll kill you.”

So, we went to Hawaii. Mike had one script and he didn't even know what the ending was. Mike wrote the scripts without knowing where it was going.

Because we got there in September of 2020. We had to shoot by the end of October.
We had basically six weeks for Mike to write the season, cast the season, hire a crew, scout it and shoot it.

We had to be done by Christmas to get it on the air in 2021. We arrived in [Hawaii] and Mike just started writing. We were in a 14-day quarantine. And Mike wrote almost the entire season in those 14 days.

After hearing this bit from Bernad, Bill Simmons had the perfect analogy to White’s writing session: “So he's like Bradley Cooper in Limitless, just cranking it out?”

Bernad confirmed, “Yeah, basically. And it just kind of poured out of him. But it was really...he had been thinking about the show for 15 years [going back to meeting Coolidge].”

Right person (Mike White). (The White Lotus). Right place (Hawaii COVID Bubble). Right time (Pandemic; the rest of Hollywood shut down).

7. An Insane Production

Bernad’s plan to get HBO “pregnant” and “invested” works perfectly.

However, the crew and cast — including Sydney Sweeney, Murray Bartlett, Alexandra Daddario — quickly realized that the 30-day shooting schedule wasn’t possible. They ask for an additional 18 days. Desperate to get new content out the door, HBO just kept funnelling funds into the project.

The funding was only half the battle, though.

“Strategically, they had spent enough money where I knew it was a sunk cost [for HBO],” says Bernad. “They were like, ‘OK, we got to give them this money to get something out of it.’ And I think that was the hardest production I've ever been through because in Hawaii…if you got COVID, you go into a hotel room for 14 days.”

Around Christmas, the production really hit a snag. Coolidge got COVID and had to quarantine. Filming is put on pause as Coolidge recovered over Christmas and New Years.

Fortunately, HBO foots the bill for 5 days of re-shoots in February 2021. The show is completed and the rest is history.

***

Reflecting on the journey, Bernad says, “If you had told me five years [after HBO greenlit the show], I would be in Bangkok…at a Marvel-sized premiere and…walking out in front of 5,000 people yelling our names, I would tell you that's impossible.”

My Fortune Cookie takeaway of The White Lotus production story is that you just never know. Keep working on stuff. It might not hit right away but as Victor Hugo famously said about the French Revolution, “Nothing else in the world...not all the armies...is so powerful as an idea whose time has come” (other examples: Beatlemania in 1964, Goldeneye N64 in 1997, the Stanley Cup tumbler in 2023 or a Grande Nitro Cold Brew every Thursday when I walk by a Starbucks).

🚨 SPOILER ALERT🚨: HBO has renewed The White Lotus for a 4th season.

Where is the location? There’s nothing official but White is doing some travelling to reset, as he told Howard Stern earlier this month.

“There are times when I felt like I was going to die trying to finish this job,” White said on Stern’s radio show. “I forgot what my life is. I’m going to Colombia today just to get the hell out of here…I don’t think we’re going to South America [for next season]…but maybe one day we could do it there, I just gotta get out of L.A.”

Sam Rockwell with 5 of the craziest minutes in TV history.

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Home Depot’s $20B Gardening Business

Once a consumer or retailing company hits $100B in revenue, there’s a very very high possibility that you’ll find some wild stats under the hood:

• Apple’s $395B in 2024 sales includes ~$40B for Wearables (e.g. AirPods, Watches), which is more than the total revenue for Salesforce ($38B), Volvo ($38B) or Visa ($36B)

• Walmart’s $648B in 2024 sales includes over 1.5 billion pounds of bananas, the retailer’s single top-selling item and a protein shake ingredient that annoyingly dominates the flavour of any other fruit you put in the blender.

• Costco’s $250B in 2024 sales include $9B+ on clothing including me trying very hard right now to not make a joke about Kirkland because I feel like I’ve been making too many Kirkland jokes.

• Amazon’s $638B in 2024 sales includes $56B for its advertising business and $665 in unused Audible credits from me.

• Home Depot’s $160B in 2024 sales includes $20B for gardening, which is more than either Hermès ($16B) or Spotify ($16B).

This last detail was brought to my attention by a few readers.

Last week, I wrote about Hermès and randomly a Wall Street Journal article by Ben Cohen about Home Depot made a timely comparison (bold mine):

The garden business rakes in about $20 billion a year for Home Depot—more than appliances, lumber or paint. It’s one of the biggest departments of the biggest home-improvement retailer, covering everything from live goods like plants, flowers and shrubs to soils, grills and patio furniture. In fact, it’s so big that Home Depot makes more money from its garden divisions than Hermès does from all of its luxury goods.

Even though there was a direct correlation between every year my dad got older and the amount of bags of soil he bought for his garden, I never pieced together that Home Depot’s garden business was this big.

For the $350B+ retailer, gardening has become particularly important because the home renovation boom during COVID has tapered off.

Gardening is an interesting revenue base because people that get into it (eg. my dad), really get into it and become a reliable source of recurring revenue (the soil isn’t going to re-fertilize itself).

While other large retailers (Amazon, Walmart) do a lot of sales during the Holiday Season, Home Depot's gardening dependence means that Spring is an important time of year and they spend a lot of resources to find the best plants and flowers.

It’s such an important endeavour that Home Depot is not messing around on the corporate espionage front:

"To find those plants, Home Depot runs 25 trial gardens in nine climate zones across the U.S. and studies them in the field under a variety of conditions. After all, a plant that thrives in New Mexico might not survive in New Jersey. For security purposes, some of those experimental gardens are hidden in cornfields or through backyard donkey corrals, protected on secret farms before the plants are selected and patented.”

In recent years, Home Depot has added an annual pow-wow event when the country's top plant and flower breeders come to a centralized location to show off their goodies.

Key criteria include “disease resistance, drought tolerance and ‘flower power,’ industry shorthand for color vibrancy and bloom size” (amazingly, HD sends a design team to Paris Fashion Week to see what colors are popping on the runway).

I have yet to dabble in the plant game because my first experience was a total dud. During my freshman year at McGill University, a friend’s mother gave me a plant for my dorm room as a welcome gift. I thought it needed extra sun, so I put it on the window sill and the overnight frost killed it. For the sake of plant life, I decided it was best to never try again.

However, hot peppers are really hot right now…and I effin’ love capsaicin, so I could see myself giving it another go. But I’ll have to cancel one of my streaming services or B2B SAAS apps first because the last thing I need in my life right now is to provide another company some recurring revenue.

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BOOOM! Use code BEARLY1 on the website for one month free of our Pro Plan and go nuts.

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The Robot That Took Over The Dairy Industry

One reason I love writing this newsletter is I’m forced to cast a wide net and keep finding interesting nuggets to write about before AI takes my job.

That Home Depot gardening story was one.

Let’s make it back-to-back: apparently, there are specialized robots that de-stress the milking experience for cows, thus making them more productive on farms.

Enter Lely, a Dutch company founded in 1948 that focuses on agricultural innovations. In the 1980s, Lely launched the Astronaut robotic milking system which is based on the principle of “free cow traffic”, which means that a cow is free to eat, drink, rest and milk herself whenever she wants.

The Astronaut costs $100k and there’s another $10k a year in operating costs (there’s that damn recurring revenue again!!!).

What does it look like? It’s this giant red machine thing and at the bottom middle, you’ll see some rubber milking teat cups. Cows basically walk up to it whenever they feel like getting milked and the magic happens.

I can’t really do it justice here, so please watch Lely’s somewhat appropriately-titled “The art of milking” video on YouTube.

Anyway, Spectrum IEEE has a solid article on how de-stressing the cow milking experience improves the animal’s lives and makes them more productive:

• When cows milk on their own schedules (instead of being forced to do it on human schedules), they produce 10% more milk.

• Also, cows get very uncomfortable when they are milked less than 2x a day (without having to co-ordinate with the human schedule, cows can milk themselves more often and feel better from the additional relief).

One Astronaut robot can milk up to 60 cows (each cow only take a few minutes and the teat cup self-cleans; meanwhile — and I can’t believe I’m about to write this — a laser sensor guides the robotic arm at the exact angle to connect to and stimulate the next teat).

Lely has deployed over 130,000 of these “Astronaut A5” milking machines around the world. About 10% of the 25,000 dairy farms in America use the milking robots. A condition of using Lely is that the cows have to live that “free cow traffic” life and do everything on their own schedule.

Typically, a farmer would spend 4-6 hours a day just to milk cows manually. The machines allow them more time to make sure cows have good feed, clean rooms and general care.

Since every company is inevitably an AI company now, Lely has access to so much data from the Astronaut robots that it’s now working on ways to wrangle the information to see how it can further improve the cow’s day-to-day and…errr…milk them for more milk.

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Why Sinners Is Scaring Hollywood

I got another Hollywood business nugget for you this week.

Ryan Coogler — director of the Black Panther and Creed films — released an original horror-thriller film last week called Sinners, which is set in 1932 Mississippi and combines Southern African-American culture, jazz music and vampires. It stars Michael B. Jordan, a frequent Coogler creative partner and a guy with one of the highest-pressure names you could possibly ever have (B. Jordan says he doesn’t want to meet the real Michael Jordan until he’s accomplished more).

The 38-year old Coogler cut a unique deal for the film that reverts the IP back to him after 25 years. According to Chris Lee at Vulture, some Hollywood execs fear the arrangement could “end the studio system” and here’s why:

• The Deal Coogler Received: “Coogler would retain final cut (a creative dispensation reserved for the industry’s crème de la crème), command first-dollar gross (that is, a percentage of box-office revenue beginning from the movie’s theatrical opening rather than waiting for the studio to turn a profit), and, most contentiously, 25 years after its release, ownership of Sinners would revert to the director.”

• Owning IP Is A Studio’s Main Job: “Studios exist for one simple reason: to build a library,” [an executive tells Vulture]. “The lifetime, long-term value of our film properties is what makes a studio a studio. It’s why David Ellison wants to buy Paramount. It’s how MGM sold for $8 billion. Things like licensing and windowing these films throw off hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. So the whole idea of building up your library — and you lose it in 25 years? Wait a second, you just gave up all your revenue down the line.”

• Warner Bros. Agreed Because They Were In a Bind: During the early days of COVID, Warner Bros. really pissed off creatives by putting its entire slate of films in 2021 straight to streaming. One huge fallout is that Christopher Nolan severed his distribution relationship with the studio and took Oppenheimer to Universal. Massive L. Under new CEO David Zaslav — with Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy as the leads for films — Warner Bros. has tried to make amends by throwing huge deals to top talent including Paul Thomas Anderson ($130m for a crime thriller starring Leo), Maggie Gyllenhaal ($80m for a Bride of Frakenstein reboot) and…Ryan Coogler ($90m plus all the extras).

Honestly, the fear is hyperbolic. Like no Hollywood studio is giving Trung Phan a “you get your IP back in 25 years” deal (although if you’re a Hollywood exec and feel like going YOLO-ing your career, I definitely have some content for you).

Only a handful of directors can pull off Coogler’s move. He clearly had clout for piloting existing IP for Marvel’s Black Panther ($2.2B over two films) and Creed (~$400m over two films). Coogler himself said he only asked for the IP on Sinners because of how much the film’s story meant to him and doesn’t intend to do it again.

In recent years, Quentin Tarantino pulled off the same deal for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Sony will give the film’s rights back after 30 years. But he’s also Quentin Tarantino and it was a unique circumstance:

Two insiders with knowledge of Tarantino’s rights-reversion deal point out that it wasn’t new or unique to Sony but in effect a holdover from an agreement at his previous moviemaking home Miramax (then headed by disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein), where the director had limited license terms on all his movies, such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. “That was grandfathered in,” says a third source familiar with the copyright deal on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “Because the Weinstein business was made by Tarantino, they gave him whatever he wanted. And when Tarantino started to do stuff elsewhere, [Sony] was like, ‘Well, he had it. So if we want to be in business with him, we got to keep it going.’”

Sinners is definitely scaring business folks. The New York Times wrote a strange headline: 'Sinners' Is a Box Office Success (With a Big Asterisk). Meanwhile, Hollywood trade publication Variety got dragged for writing this tweet (bold me) about Sinner’s opening weekend:

"Sinners" has amassed $61 million in its global debut. It's a great result for an original, R-rated horror film, yet the Warner Bros. release has a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away.

Technically they’re correct. But what a weirdly passively-aggresive thing to post. We get it, you bosses don’t like this deal. Relax.

As a shorthand, heavily-marketed and blockbuster-ish films will earn 30-40% of their entire box office run in the first weekend. Prestige and indie films that have less marketing and theatre screens rely more on word-of-mouth…so if they pick up steam, then the first weekend may only account 15-20% of the total box office.

Let’s say Sinners picks up some steam from the online kerfuffle and opening weekend accounts for 25% of total box office. That means 4x more from here, which puts it at $250m (about breakeven based on the Hollywood heuristic is that “you breakeven at 2.5x the budget after accounting for bonuses, distribution, theatre and marketing costs").

Warner Bros. will probably add a bit on top for streaming and get (more) back in good graces of directors. Seems worth it…especially if there’s a sequel…and for an original idea too…and for the most successful filmmaker by box office under-40.

You could even say that Coogler was the right person with the right project at right place and the right time.

PS. Coogler did a very cool 10-minute featurette explaining different film technologies and aspect ratios (and why he used the IMAX film camera for Sinners).

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Links and Memes

Some other links for your weekend consumption:

• Beijing held the first ever robot marathon…that pitted 21 robots (of all shapes and sizes) against 1000s of human runners. While a human won (phew), the top-performing robot (5’11, 115lb humanoid form) finished the race in 2 hours and 40 minutes with the help of operators and a battery change. The record human half-marathon time is 56 minutes…so, yeah, we still got that going for us.

• “Foxconn’s iPhone factory…is fueling a real estate boom in a small Indian farming town,” per Rest of the World.

• YouTube’s first video…was uploaded 20 years ago (co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded a 19-second clip of “me at the zoo”). The first video to hit 1 million views was a classic Ronaldinho Nike ad that goes very very hard.

• iPhone Air 17 is stupid thin…Unboxed Therapy has been getting dummy models of the new iPhone Air 17. The official thickness is 5’5mm. To put that into perspective, that’s about the size of the volume buttons on the iPhone. It looks incredible but I know for a fact I would snap one of these in half within 3 days.

• The satirical publication Bablyon Bee…has been on an absolute heater with fake headlines in recent weeks. Here are four solid ones.

• Succession creator Jesse Armstrong…is back with an HBO film called Mountainhead on May 31. It stars Steve Carrell, who obviously crushed it in The Big Short and this films is about four billionaire friends (combined net worth = $371B) on a ski vacation during an international crisis. I’m worried it could be a bit preachy but the first trailer shows Carrell looking a bit Michael Scott-ish, which I don’t mind.

• Carolina Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky has a PhD in Chemistry from Berkeley....Before joining the NHL team in 2014, he was offered a job with Apple to work on battery technology (but turned it down). He started in analytics department and has since hired neuroscientists, mechanical engineers and other gigabrain math people for the Hurricanes. In other words, I never got a recruiting phone call. Great profile in The Athletic.

• Meta Antitrust continues…and there continue to be juicy developments. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that he believes the photo sharing app could have thrived without Facebook. Further, he says Zuck Daddy Flex took resources away from Instagram (he suggested Zuck did so because Instagram was outcompeting and a “threat” to the main Facebook app and Zuck wanted to protect his baby).

• A teardown of G-Mail’s AI Assistant…by investor Pete Koomen helps explain the shortcoming of many AI apps (“I am beginning to suspect that these apps are the ‘horseless carriages’ of the AI era. They're bad because they mimic old ways of building software that unnecessarily constrain the AI models they're built with.”)

• Speaking of Google, the search giant has lost two recent antitrust trials…the former Assistant Attorney General under President Biden that brought the antitrust cases against Google gives a thorough breakdown of what the potential remedies may be to make Google’s search and display ad products more fair. Divest Chrome? Spin off Android? Spin off AdWords? Share search data? Stop sending my newsletter into the promotions tab of their G-Mail? Anything’s possible. Google is appealing but the future of the open web is going to look a lot different.

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…and them fire posts (including Easter):