Taylor Sheridan's Extreme Productivity
The prolific mind behind "Sicario" and "Yellowstone" only started his writing career at 40. The realest deadlines (a young family, a $350m ranch) have pushed him to grind at an unbelievable pace.
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Today, we are talking about the Hollywood mogul Taylor Sheridan.
Also this week:
Notre Dame is back
How Moana became a smash hit
…and them fire posts (including Presidential pardons)
Taylor Sheridan is a machine.
Since selling the screenplay for the 2015 banger Sicario — a story about the American government’s war on drugs and Mexican cartels — the Texas native has gone on to write five other film scripts (including Academy Award-nominated Hell or High Water) and over 100 episodes of popular TV projects for Paramount (e.g. Yellowstone, 1883, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, 1923, Lioness, Landman). Sheridan has become such a linchpin for Paramount’s streaming business that the network spends an estimated $500m a year just on his shows.
This is an aspirational level of output that I hope to achieve myself (once life-extension technology matures and I can live until 975 years old).
Wildly, Sheridan didn’t start his writing career until he was 40 years old in 2010 and it has been turbo mode ever since.
Sheridan’s Hollywood journey began as an actor on the Chuck Norris (!!) show Walker, Texas Ranger in 1995. Over the next 15 years, Sheridan picked up small roles until getting decent work on Veronica Mars (2005-07) and Sons of Anarchy (2008-10).
How did he go from a small-time actor to leading Hollywood writer and mogul?
I think Sheridan’s story is an extreme example of Parkinson’s Law, the famous adage that work will expand to fill whatever time is allocated to the task no matter the complexity or scope (the canonical example is handing in a college term paper: no matter what day a paper is assigned, you will magically do 95% of the work the evening before it is due).
In 2010, Sheridan left Sons of Anarchy over a contract dispute and decided that acting wasn’t his calling. But his wife was pregnant and he desperately needed work to support a new family. One of the most pressing deadlines you can have is “make money for my future child”. Sheridan credits this obligation with motivating his career change and getting those first few film scripts out the door.
Following his film work, Sheridan developed the hit TV show Yellowstone and set himself up to cruise into semi-retirement. But he’s since made six other shows and a major reason is that he created new pressures and deadlines for himself. How? By buying the $350m Four Sixes (6666) ranch in Texas. To finance the purchase, he struck a $200 million multi-show deal with Paramount. That’s a lot more deadlines (and content for our eyeballs).
It’s an interesting journey and we’ll walk through it:
From Acting to Writing
Deals of a Lifetime (6666 Ranch, Paramount+)
Sheridan’s Insanely Locked-In Creative Process
From Acting to Writing
Taylor Sheridan began his Hollywood career in acting but he was never married to the idea of being an actor. He wanted to tell stories and — from a young age — was led to believe that acting was the best way to achieve this end.
From age 25 to 40, he spun his wheels as an actor before getting a wake-up call. While Sheridan had achieved his highest-profile gig on the show Sons of Anarchy, his contract came up for renewal and negotiations didn’t go well. Around 2010, the show’s producers low-balled him and Sheridan realized there probably wasn’t a future in acting, as he told Deadline:
At that time, they were offering me what I thought was a very unfair wage. It was less than virtually every other person on the show, and not enough for me to quit my second job. So, the business affairs attorney — who I won’t name — here’s what he told my attorney who said, “Look, there’s kids on the Cartoon Network making more than you’re offering this guy.”
The [business affairs attorney for Sons of Anarchy] goes, “I know and you’re right that he probably deserves to make more, but we’re not going to pay him more because — guess what — he’s not worth more. That’s what he’s worth. There’s 50 of him. He is 11 on the call sheet. That’s what [Sheridan] is, and that’s all he’s ever going to be.”
And that’s really when I quit. It wasn’t so much over money. It was so much more than how the business saw me.
There’s a joke in TV production about how Shonda Rhimes killed off the character played by Patrick Dempsey in Grey’s Anatomy after a contract dispute. Specifically, Dempsey’s character dies in a “fuck you car crash”.
Sheridan wasn’t a major character in Sons of Anarchy, but — after the contract dispute — his character was written off the show in a van accident. He didn’t have any ill will, though. The failed actor realized that he couldn’t succeed as the “11th person on the call sheet” and his only way to stay in the business was to “tell the story [from] behind the camera”.
A line that I’ve heard Sheridan say many times about his career is that “Hollywood will tell you what you’re supposed to do if you listen.” He finally listened and was ready to try something new. In a 2016 interview, Sheridan explained how he pivoted from acting to writing:
His TV acting wasn’t storytelling: “When you’re acting on a TV show [like I was], I’m not getting to tell a [story]. I was selling ad space at the end of the day. I was moving plot. I wasn’t telling a story.”
The financial pressure of a newborn on the way: “I quit [Sons of Anarchy] to write. But it wasn’t that esoteric. I had a real motivation. I was having a kid. We were renegotiating my contract on the show and they were offering me not enough money to pay rent and I’m thinking of raising a baby in [a very small apartment]…So, I made a decision. How can I look [my future child] in the eye and say — in 7 or 8 years — ‘you can be anything you want to be but sorry I can’t see your baseball game at 5pm [because I have an acting audition for some random TV commercial I don’t want to do].”
How he got started: “My wife maxed out her credit card to give me the [screenwriting software] Final Draft. So, I sat down and opened it up and said, ‘I have absolutely no idea how to do this but I know exactly what not to do because I’ve worked on so many bad scripts in my life [as an actor]. Don’t do any of those [bad] things. Tell the story I want to tell. Be honest and it should probably work out. I write movies I want to see about things that interest me. I assume I’m not that unique and other people will like them too.”
The three films that catapulted Sheridan to fame — Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017) — were very much films based on stories he “wanted to tell”. He calls the trio of films a “thematic trilogy” about the “modern American frontier”. The stories are about how the settlement of frontier lands in America changed those geographies. And how the past from those areas affect the modern times. Sheridan also sprinkled in the theme of fatherhood for each film (a topic that was understandably on his mind).
Prior to the thematic trilogy, Sheridan’s first project that attracted attention from networks and agencies was his pilot script for Mayor of Kingstown. That show went live in 2021 as part of the massive Paramount deal. But he actually wrote it in 2011 and received offers to develop it.
Why did he turn down the money when he clearly needed it? According to a fantastic profile by James Hibberd in the Hollywood Reporter in 2023, Sheridan wanted full creative control — a theme that will come up often — and none of the studios would give it:
…Sheridan refused to sell [Mayor of Kingstown]. The studios, he says, wanted to hire a room of more experienced writers to tackle the project — you know, make TV the usual way. Sheridan felt that he knew exactly how to write the show himself. So even back then, getting his first taste of success as a writer, Sheridan was reluctant to let others adapt his material and demonstrated a willingness to walk away. Some might call that stubborn or impractical; Sheridan sees it as trusting his instincts and sticking to his creative guns. He put Mayor of Kingstown in a drawer.
Dude quit acting to take up a career with (maybe) better odds of paying the rent to house a new young family. Then, ices the first real offer because he needs it to be done his way. That’s some serious cojones.
Sheridan was on to something, though.
By 2013, he says he was down to his last $800 in savings before selling the screenplay for Sicario. Denis Villeneuve agreed to direct it with Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin signing on to act. The film came out in 2015 and made $85m on a budget of $30m (it’s a truly incredible flick).
With the first win in hand, Sheridan didn’t let up.
It took him only three weeks to crank out the script for his second film Hell or High Water.
“When you start writing a screenplay, you have a general awareness of themes you want to explore,” Sheridan says in that 2016 interview. “But you have to be quite malleable because the story will start telling itself…and you have to ride with it. If I’m really struggling with a scene and writing three scenes to justify [one story point], I know I’m not listening to the story. There’s a story that wants to be told. If you listen, it will tell itself really easily. I wrote Hell or High Water in three weeks. And they shot that draft with no re-writes. And it is because it’s a story I felt very close to. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and the way I wanted to say it…it was a very visceral writing experience. It was very instinctive. Not very structured, outlined [or] planned.”
Clearly, that “newborn is coming, gotta get a bigger place” motivation is no joke.
Deals of a Lifetime (6666 Ranch, Paramount+)
Having finally found critical and commercial success in film, Sheridan’s next project would be his biggest yet. In fact, it would be one of the biggest TV shows in recent memory: Yellowstone.
Sheridan had started working on the project in 2013. His original vision was for a film pitched as “The Godfather in Montana”. HBO passed on the idea with one exec remarking that it felt “too Middle America” (after Yellowstone went nuclear, the exec that passed on the show tried to pitch Sheridan a different project but Sheridan told him to kick rocks).
Ultimately, Paramount Network picked up the show in 2017. That was the same year that Wind River — the third film in Sheridan’s thematic trilogy — came out, which also marked his official directorial debut.
Sheridan only agreed to do Yellowstone if given full creative control (and a fat budget). Paramount wanted to make a big splash for its first scripted TV series. So, it gave him everything he wanted and backed up the Brinks truck (Sheridan was the writer, director, producer and show-runner). Kevin Costner signed on as the lead and a monster TV show was born.
Having grown up in Texas and Wyoming, the show’s ranch and rural Montana setting was exactly in Sheridan’s wheelhouse. The idea and execution couldn’t have come from a team of Harvard or University of Southern California (USC)-trained writers.
Coastal folk were quite flummoxed by the show’s success. They didn’t get the appeal. It didn’t matter. By the 4th season in 2021, Yellowstone was the most viewed TV show in the world. This was also the year I finally started watching (I really enjoyed the first three seasons but the 4th one lagged and I kind of stopped following the show; Costner also bounced for the final season, which premiered last month).
Yellowstone catapulted Sheridan into a new stratosphere. He never intended to be a media mogul, though. Even as a struggling actor, he owned a 1,200 acre ranch and that was his happy place, as he told The Hollywood Reporter:
“That was my dream and I already had it. It was a great escape from the fact I was a failing actor living in West Hollywood. The plan was always to become a big movie star, then move back to a ranch and just do movies with Martin Scorsese when I felt like it.”
But a random sequence of events changed the trajectory of his life and career.
He went from the cusp of semi-retirement to buying one of the largest ranches in America for $350m (and then, signing a $200m deal with Paramount to pay for the ranch along with an investment group).
Here is the play-by-play:
A Texas icon: Sheridan is from North Texas and the Four Sixes (6666) Ranch — which has more land (266, 255 acres) than L.A. County — is “legendary” in the region. The property and its “horse-and-cattle operation were long controlled by a single dynastic family that battled for 150 years to protect their land and keep it largely intact”, which is basically the plot of Yellowstone.
Sheridan’s pitch: In 2019, Sheridan wanted to shoot parts of Yellowstone at 6666 Ranch and told its 81-year old owner Anne Marion that he would make it the “most famous ranch in America”.
The shock death: In early 2020, Marion died and the family put 6666 Ranch up for sale. If it was listed on the market, the property would likely have been carved up. The family that owned the ranch was interested in having a single buyer. So, their broker called Sheridan and asked if he was interested in buying the entire property (Sheridan recalls the negotiation: “I said, ‘How much?’ They said, ‘It’s $350 million.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m about 330 short. But please, you thought enough to call me, will you give me two weeks?’)
As a reminder: Sheridan had gone from a middling actor at 40 to successful Hollywood screenwriter at 45 to very very very successful TV show-runner at 50.
He could have achieved his life goal of buying a decent-sized ranch and working sporadically on passion projects.
But then a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity fell in his lap. To pay for it, another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fell in his lap. In 2021, Paramount was launching its streaming service Paramount+. Every streaming service needs dope content but Paramount had previously licensed Yellowstone to Peacock and desperately needed new shows to attract subscribers.
Per The Hollywood Reporter article, Sheridan was sitting on a bunch of Yellowstone prequel ideas that could soak up that fresh Paramount+ money:
Sheridan says the [Four Sixes Ranch] opportunity changed his mind about expanding his overall deal with Paramount Global (then ViacomCBS). He valued his independence, preferring to be “a hired gun.” But to buy the ranch, he signed a new contract reportedly worth $200 million and wrangled some additional investors to bridge the gap.
“I was real rich for 45 minutes,” he says. “Then I was broke again. That was the trade.”
[The Hollywood Reporter writer James Hibberd gave] Sheridan a hypothetical: Your TV shows and your ranch are both hanging off a cliff. Which do you save?
“I do the shows for the ranch,” Sheridan says firmly. […]
“[The prequels are] time capsules of life in Montana as a microcosm of the world as a whole,” he says. “They’re big spectacles, and the more that you move into the modern era, the bigger that spectacle becomes. I know these are huge bets Paramount makes on me every time. I’m asking them to give me Game of Thrones season six money for what is essentially a pilot every year, and that’s a big ask. As long as I do my job well, and people don’t bore of the genre, I think there will be enough for many more.”
Hibberd writes that an “extraordinary burst of get-the-ranch productivity” ultimately led to the green light of six new series.
This is why Sheridan is everywhere right now.
The ranch created new pressure and deadlines.
Clearly, that “I need to pay the monthly mortgage on this $350m property” motivation is no joke (also, the absolute kicker beyond kickers: Sheridan rents the property back to Paramount for filming).
Sheridan’s Insanely Locked-In Creative Process
Let’s take stock of the Sheridan Cinematic Universe with a handy table I whipped up.
Sheridan has written two films and worked on 7 TV shows — including the end of Yellowstone — since going YOLO on the Four Sixes Ranch (and according to IMDB, the TV projects have been broadly well-received).
To grind out the work, Sheridan built a one-room isolated cabin in Wyoming, where he goes absolutely HAM. His writing bunker is the latest in a long-line of great writing bunkers:
Virginia Woolf crafted many of her novels over several decades at Monk's House in the East Sussex countryside.
Charles Dickens rolled up to Bleak House in a peaceful area of Broadstairs — in England — during the summers to pen parts of “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House”.
Ernest Hemingway got gassed on rum and worked on “The Old Man and the Sea” for months at La Finca Vigía near Havana, drawing inspiration from the nearby fishing villages.
Mark Twain regularly posted up in his Hartford home to crank out classics like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.
George Orwell went full bunker-mode for many months on the island of Jura to write “1984”.
Roald Dahl had a fresh garden hut in Buckinghamshire, where he drafted stories like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” in the afternoons.
Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems over decades from her Amherst, Massachusetts home.
Trung Phan wrote parts of this article in a Google Doc in the bathroom of his kid’s playroom because it was the best place to get 15 minutes of silence.
Ian Fleming cranked James Bond books at Goldeneye, Jamaica over numerous winters, drawing inspiration the vibrant Caribbean landscape.
David McCullough built an 8x10-foot shed in his backyard — the walls are lined with 1,000 books — to write some of the best works of American history (this writing bunker is probably my favourite).
Anyway, peak Sheridan is able to crank out a single TV episode in “eight to 10 hours” (his producing partner David Glasser says Sheridan “writes scripts like you or I have a cup of coffee”).
The thirst for full creative control traces back to his stunted acting career, which was almost completely out of his hands. It’s also a major reason he started his career making Indie films with little input from any studio.
Sheridan’s solo set-up is very atypical for big-budget TV shows. Usually, there is a writers room with half a dozen people making six-figures to work on a season of content. Sheridan’s go-it-alone approach pisses off other creators and the writer’s guild.
To be fair, Sheridan does know the story and characters way better than anyone Paramount could hire. This goes back to his thirst for creative control. He won’t give it up even if doing so would be less work. While his goal is to pay for the Four Sixes Ranch, there are various excerpts from The Hollywood Reporter piece that make it clear he won’t just mail it in:
“When I lived in Los Angeles, everything I saw was the same and I didn’t learn anything in my day-to-day life. [On the ranch], I get to experience so much. I heard 25 iconic pieces of dialogue today. Most of my great lines I heard someone else say, or some version of it. I’m banking story all the time.”
“My stories have a very simple plot that is driven by the characters as opposed to characters driven by a plot — the antithesis of the way television is normally modeled. I’m really interested in the dirty of the relationships in literally every scene. But when you hire a room that may not be motivated by those same qualities — and a writer always wants to take ownership of something they’re writing — and I give this directive and they’re not feeling it, then they’re going to come up with their own qualities. So for me, writers rooms, they haven’t worked.”
“If you don’t grow up in this [ranching] world, and if you’re not a history fanatic, how do you write [the Yellowstone prequel] 1883? How does a [writer’s] room do that? It doesn’t.”
“The freedom of the artist to create must be unfettered. If they tell me, ‘You’re going to have to write a check for $540,000 to four people to sit in a room that you never have to meet,’ then that’s between the studio and the guild. But if I have to check in creatively with others for a story I’ve wholly built in my brain, that would probably be the end of me telling TV stories.”
“I get paid whether they’re good or bad, but that’s not really winning. I’m one of those people that’s incapable of doing something that’s not tethered to 100 percent of my passion. I cannot do ‘OK’ at a job.”
Just based on the law of large numbers, Sheridan has obviously written some dud lines. In fact, the entire impetus for me writing this article was because I posted a viral exchange from Sheridan’s new show Landman. The TLDR is that Billy Bob Thornton’s oil prospecting character asks his daughter about pre-marital sex and the answer is absurd. The clip got 5 million views and people in the comments were saying stuff like “man, Sheridan is going the route of Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes, who just did way too much and the quality dropped” or “Sheridan’s running out of things to say”.
After researching Sheridan’s come-up, I’m kind of fine with a dud line here or there. He’s telling stories that no one else is telling. The trade-off is fine.
More broadly, there is some skepticism on whether Sheridan is truly going at it alone. One common gripe on Reddit and other writing forums is that Sheridan is trying to take solo credit because the assignment of credit is how writers get paid extra “script fees”.
At least one comment on Reddit suggests Sheridan started solo and the story tracks with how he needs creative control:
I worked with somebody who was involved with season two of Yellowstone, and from what they said, it seems like Sheridan is a real control freak when it comes to the writing. When Paramount wanted him to take on a writer's room for the second season and beyond, he kept firing writers they hired because he didn't like what they were producing and would throw it out to rewrite it himself. The second season is the only one where any writers were credited besides him on the teleplay, so I imagine he either started screwing the writer's room out of credit following that, or he's a one-man machine of preposterous discipline.
I lean heavily towards “one-man machine of preposterous discipline”.
Another controversy involves Sheridan’s massive budgets. Remember, Paramount is spending $500m a year on his shows. Some say he is double dealing by picking overpriced vendors, including ones he may have a financial interest in (including the Four Sixes Ranch).
Sheridan obviously disagrees, as highlighted by these these quotes (via that Hollywood Reporter piece):
"I’m very blunt with every single person — the production staff, the studio, the network. I said, ‘Look, I invented this thing that I wrote down on paper and I’ve been entrusted to make it into a story that this network goes and sells. Your job is to try and get me there under budget.’ I don’t know that anyone ever said, ‘Yay, that TV show that got canceled after season one came in under budget.’" […]
"So if I’m parking 20 million people in front of a television, if I’m beating NFL Sunday Night Football routinely, I think the fact I wanted four cameras and worked late into Friday — I don’t think that’s a bad trade. My one rule with line producers and production people is: You don’t get to tell me ‘no,’ you get to tell me how much ‘yes’ costs, and then I decide where to pull that money from. It’s easy to tell me, ‘Taylor, you cannot have a helicopter for two days.’ That’s not the deal. I’m going to get a helicopter for two days. I’m going to swap this location to over here, and then I’m going to shoot this here, and I’ll squeeze this out there, and then it will end up costing the same amount of money. So if you want to call that a God complex, great." […]
"I don’t really give a shit what a line producer or some physical production person thinks. I care a lot about craft services and set decorators and assistant camera operators and people that are working their asses off for way longer than I work — and I work 16 to 18 hours a day. They’re doing it for $35 an hour. I really care what they think."
An important aspect we haven’t talked about regarding Sheridan’s extreme productivity is that there are health implications. On the Joe Rogan podcast earlier this year, Sheridan says he works out a ton and takes daily B-12 shots to handle the grind.
“You’ll get what they call the movie flu”, Sheridan explained. “ Where you just get run down. I mean the hours are…16 hours a day and you have deadlines.”
Man, for the sake of Sheridan’s health, I hope another “top 5 biggest cattle ranch in America” doesn’t suddenly come on the market. Either way, his approach is obviously extreme. There are many ways to skin the creative cat and other talented people have found success with a less intense routine.
The right amount of pressure to motivate is important. There’s a continuum of pressure and everyone is different. You obviously don’t need to have a kid on the way or buy a $350m piece of property to produce good work. This is what worked for Sheridan. If Sons of Anarchy had offered just a bit more money or if Four Sixes Ranch never came up for sale, we are talking about a very different level of output.
What’s next? In a very meta development, the upcoming show from the Sheridan Cinematic Universe is titled 6666 and is set at the Four Sixes Ranch.
It’s scheduled to come out next year because Sheridan’s got deadlines (and a ranch to pay for).
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Links and Memes
Notre Dame is back: After a devastating fire in April 2019, the Notre Dame church in Paris has been rebuilt and will re-open this weekend. It’s been fashionable to roast European innovation but we gotta give the French credit for speed-running this renovation project (which required a marriage of old and new construction techniques).
In the past 5 years, 250+ companies and 100s of artisans worked to restore the 861-year old cathedral. The best part is that they tried as much as possible to do it the way it was done in medieval times:
OG tools: Craft-people used hand-forged axes. Stonemasons used chisels. Sculptors used old-school brushes.
Arch Roof: Over 2,000 oak trees from French forests used to rebuild roof (using medieval ax cutting techniques).
Transept crossing: Ultrasonic scans were used to see how medieval masonry work was done and arch was rebuilt stone by stone (stonecutters used traditional techniques).
Grand Organ: France’s largest organ had its 8,000 pipes removed and cleaned.
There are some necessary modern touches, including a new water-misting system in roof to fight future fires. While owned by the French state, the reconstruction efforts were funded in large part by ~$1B from France’s three richest families (LVMH, Kering and L’Oreal).
The B1M has a solid 12-minute video showing how Notre Dame was rebuilt.
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How Moana became a smash hit: The top 15 films in 2024 have all been sequels or existing IP spin-offs. Grim, I know. Anyway, three releases from last week — Moana 2, Wicked and Gladiator II (ugh, sharks in the Colosseum) — joined the party with big box office pulls.
Moana 2 had the biggest domestic Thanksgiving box office ever and has already pulled in $440m. Disney is just milking that sequel teat, with the studio responsible for the top two films of the year (Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine).
The surprising thing about Moana 2 is that the first film didn’t do super well in theatres, pulling in just $600m (blah by Disney standard). The studio was considering sending the sequel straight to streaming.
What changed their mind? Actually, streaming results. The first Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho voiced the lead in both films) has become an absolute streaming beast according to the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen:
Moana was released in 2016, but it’s much bigger on streaming than it ever was in theaters. It has been viewed for a total of more than 1 billion hours, according to Nielsen, which amounts to one person sitting through the movie 775 million times. Or watching Moana for 150,000 years straight.
And it’s somehow still getting bigger. It was one of the most-watched movies in 2020, 2021 and 2022 for U.S. audiences. Then we managed to watch more of Moana on Disney+ in 2023. It was both the No. 1 movie in all of streaming last year and the No. 1 movie over the past five years combined.
The streaming-to-theatre pipeline is very strong for Disney+. Kids get bombarded on the app and remind their parents to hit the theatre. A similar dynamic played out for Inside Out 2 (I previously wrote more on that film and Pixar’s unfortunate addiction to sequels).
Why has Moana become the ultimate streaming film compared to other comparable Disney flicks? Cohen has a few thoughts:
Crossover appeal: Moana isn’t really a Disney Princess film. Set in the South Pacific Islands, it isn’t a traditional love story. It is more of an adventure film, which appeals to boys and girls equally (based on my affinity for the Fast & Furious franchise, The Rock voicing Moana’s friend Maui clearly has appeal for boys).
Water, water, water: The film’s sunny island setting is in sharp contrast to the snowy environment of another mega-hit from Disney Animation’s recent past — Frozen. When we were all sheltering at home during COVID, having the visuals of Moana play in the background was definitely appealing.
Musicals go hard: The team behind Moana also made The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. I can confirm that me and my siblings forced my parents to buy these VHS tapes and we watched them over and over again for the banger tracks (“Under The Sea”, “A Whole New World”). Moana’s soundtrack was manned by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame (“How Far I’ll Go” slaps).
On the last point, the biggest criticism I’ve seen of the Moana sequel has to do with the music. And this makes sense because Miranda didn’t do the soundtrack. He had committed to another Disney film, which led Vulture to write an article with the hilarious title “We owe Lin-Manuel Miranda an apology after Moana 2”.
The thrust of the piece is that the first Moana came out in 2016, a year after Hamilton and Miranda was riding as high as it’s possible to ride. I don’t care what anyone says, Hamilton was sick. A lot of cultural elites liked it when the Broadway show was exclusive and sold out in New York, but then soured on it when plebs like me could watch it (in Boston many years later). By the time Hamilton was put on Disney+ streaming in 2020, Miranda was kind of cringe according to these opinion makers.
But, yeah, people have an A/B test now with Moana and we shouldn’t have taken Miranda for granted.
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Some other baller links:
Helvetica…if you want to see an incredible and impassioned rant on a random niche topic, then watch German designer Erik Spiekermann go off for 2-minutes on why he hates the Helvetica font. It’s amazing.
“History is in the Making”: Insightful essay from Works in Progress on why historical dates (4th July 1776, 14th July 1789) are over-rated relative to important dates in science and intellectual progress, which are more crucial for human development in the long run. To make the point, you can probably tell me what those aforementioned dates represent but less likely to know these dates 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859…which represent the publication date for Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Can you draw famous logos? The Signs website asked 156 Americans to draw 10 famous logos from memory. They spent 80 hours doing it. The results are pretty hilarious…and Starbucks is really hard to copy.
South Korea’s President declared martial law for 6 hours…and a journalist for The Verge was drunk while it went down and has an informative and entertaining play-by-play of the events on the ground.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger resigned…or, really, was pushed out. Gelsinger started his career at Intel in 1979 before rising to CTO from 2001-2009. After losing a succession battle, he left to become CEO of VMWare. Intel missed mobile then AI and the company brought Gelsinger back as CEO in 2021. He had ambitious plans to build the American icon back up as both a semiconductor design and manufacturing leader. It’s been a bumpy ride but Gelsinger needed time to cook. The board was impatient and decided to oust him. Just to give an idea of how far Intel has fallen, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ($126B) is worth a lot more than Intel’s market cap ($90B). The Fabricated Knowledge newsletter blames the Intel mess on its board, which has been composed of financial types or professional board members instead of technologists. It’s a fascinating look at how board composition can dictate a company’s fate and the best guess is that Intel will be sold for parts (which makes sense from a shareholder value standpoint but will be a blow to American national security).
…and them fire posts (including a good Spotify Wrapped post and a really good iMessage confetti animation post):
Ugh, I know I said a few weeks ago that SatPost doesn’t do much politics. But I need to square that with the fact that some of the funniest memes on the timeline often involve politics. I’ve chosen to live with this tension and find you bangers.
As many of you know, President Biden pardoned his son Hunter last week. It was a sweeping pardon that covered over a decade of potential illegal activity. The Presidential pardon has always been a controversial tool (the most controversial ever is definitely President Gerald Ford pardoning Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon after Watergate). I have no further comment on the Biden pardon other than the fact that the timeline went absolutely buck with the memes. Ok, I have one thought. Biden’s pardon was the closest familial tie ever granted and he promised he wouldn’t do it and critics from both sides of the aisle all agree it was an over-reach (if we’re being honest, Jill wasn’t going to let Joe not do it). But it was the human decision. Biden had lost two other children. As a father to a son, there is a 100% chance I would have done the same. Back to the memes:
Finally, let me finish with an absolute top-tier shitpost. There is a parody account on X/Twitter of an Indian dude that is highly-accomplished in the finance industry. His name is “Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, CA, ACCA, ESQ”. Anyone active on X/Twitter will know it. The account — again, a parody account — has been dropping banger business memes (with sprinklings of India-related humor) for the past 4 years.
Turns out he was preparing this entire time for the perfect moment. And that perfect moment came when President-elect Trump nominated Kash Patel to head the FBI. At this point, you readers may have noticed that both of these people share the same last name (I know my readers are astute observers).
Well, Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, CA, ACCA, ESQ has been posting non-stop about how his “son” has climbed the heights of American power. The parody account (I repeat: parody account) then said that President Biden pardoned Hunter because he was “scared of my son Kash”. About 86% of people on X were in on the joke. The other 14%…may God have mercy on your souls. Newsweek — the once great American magazine that has fallen by the wayside — was part of this 14% of people that didn’t get it and credulously wrote about how Kash’s “father” Parik Patel has been cheering him on X/Twitter…only to later issue what might be the most embarrassing magazine correction in the history of magazine corrections (actually, this magazine correction is def more embarrassing).
So great. Well done. And this!
“Trung Phan wrote parts of this article in a Google Doc in the bathroom of his kid’s playroom because it was the best place to get 15 minutes of silence.”
another very well done piece