My Quest to be Whelmed
It's hard to watch the news and harder to talk about it with people who might disagree. I'm overwhelmed. Are you? Plus, links to stories about AI, comedy, new scams, Star Trek, & more! (Issue #181)
The Dispatch is back after two weeks! I'd only intended it to be one, but a combination plate of travel, fatigue, things to which I wanted to attend, an inability to think of anything to say (see main topic, below), and did I mention fatigue? All of these things got in the way.
I'm dedicating this issue to my friend Suzie Reider, with whom I was lucky to reconnect at the Digital Ascendant event in Palo Alto the week before last. Suzie is one of those remarkable people with whom you can have a meaningful conversation even if you only have two minutes. Suzie, thanks for that conversation.
Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…
In Digital Trends, Peter Horan does everybody a favor by summarizing a two-hour interview about AI with David Deutsch, the father of quantum computing. The interview itself is worthwhile, but you'll get more out of it by reading Peter's piece first. (Sort of like how I wish Michael Lewis had written The Undoing Project before I started digging into behavioral economics.)
Speaking of AI, over in The Conversation there's a worthwhile piece about how much water AI uses. We need to keep the environmental impact of this transformational technology on the front burner of our thinking.
Last AI bit this week… over at Technology Review, Rhiannon Williams has an eye-widening piece about how much better AI clones of real people are getting. The central question for our near future is how we will be able to tell what is real.
ICYMI and are remotely interested in comedy, "The Comedian as Master Troll" (NYT $) digs into how some comics are abandoning likability in favor of shock value. (H/T La Profesora.)
If you think something might be a scam, then it's a scam. Never click links in email that seem to go to your bank or credit card. Never give strangers access to your bank accounts when they initiate a call. If they give you a number to call back, don't call that number. Call the number of the back of your credit card or ATM card instead. Demand to talk with a human. Here's a recent NYT story about a reporter who is an expert on scams who nearly got taken in.
My Ozempic Journey update: for those of you who have been following along, I've been on Ozempic for diabetes control and weight loss for a year, sharing details here in The Dispatch from time to time. My results so far have been good, but not fantastic. My blood sugar is better controlled. I've lost some weight, and I didn't experience side effects, but the big transformations didn't come. So, after chatting with my doctor, I'm going off Ozempic and onto Mounjaro to see if it makes a difference. Further bulletins as events warrant.
On the lighter side...
The season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds left me grumpy. No spoilers here, but there was too much vague hand-waving about how the central plot point was meant to be. Plus, the third act was a retread of "The Inner Light," one of the best Patrick Stewart-focused episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1992. (See the trailer on YouTube here.) The penultimate ST:SNW episode was also a retread, this time of Enemy Mine (1985, trailer here), which also rhymed with a terrific episode of the otherwise forgettable Galactica 1980 that brought back Dirk Benedict as Starbuck.
Don't get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with redoing old stories from new points of view. Shakespeare only ever invented one plot (The Tempest), stealing and remaking the rest, and his reputation seems to have survived. Also, I'm middle aged and perhaps not the target audience for ST:SNW. Most of that target audience won't remember movies and TV episodes from the 1980s and 1990s. I just didn't think there was enough new in those ST:SNW episodes.
Watching Jamie Lee Curtis laugh uncontrollably on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is delightful. You can see the short sequence here and the full sequence here.
Speaking of Colbert making actors laugh, and in celebration of the return of Slow Horses on AppleTV+ this week (Wednesday), don't deny yourself the pleasure of watching Gary Oldman nearly soil himself laughing as he watches farts added to some of his classic performances.
Buddy Hackett telling the classic "settle it country style" joke on the old Johnny Carson show. It's a guaranteed laugh even if you’ve heard it, here.
Rube Goldberg has nothing on this guy. Pure genius.
If you like what you're reading, please forward to a friend. Sign up is here.
Practical Matters:
Sponsor this newsletter! Let other Dispatch readers know what your business does and why they should work with you. (Reach out here or just hit reply.)
Hire me to speak at your event! Get a sample of what I'm like onstage here.
The idea and opinions that I express here in The Dispatch are solely my own: they do not reflect the views of my employer, my consulting clients, or any of the organizations I advise.
Please follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads (but not X) for between-issue insights and updates.
On to our top story...
My Quest to be Whelmed
I'm a lucky guy. I have a happy marriage. I'm healthy. My wife is healthy. We live in a lovely suburb just remote enough that there's not much crime, and we can still get good produce within a short drive. I work hard, but I'm paid well. I have friends here in Oregon and all over the planet. My adult kids are good people: the most important thing I've ever helped to make happen. My parents are alive and well. After both of our corgis died a few months ago, we're now planning to adopt a Bernese Mountain Dog. (I know that sounds like a shift, but I always described Ace, the corgi we had longest, as a Berner trapped in the body of a corgi.)
Still, I’m overwhelmed. And if I'm overwhelmed with all my blessings, then it must be so much worse for people who struggle with illness, making ends meet, kids with challenges, loneliness, and more.
I’m a news junkie who is becoming phobic about the news. (I'm far from the only one.)
Outside of trivial news coverage (sports, lifestyle), there are no safe topics.
Everything is a paradox.
I think that pharmaceutical companies advertising directly to patients is bad for patients and doctors, but, as my friend Brian Wieser has observed, pharma ads are what keep television news financially afloat, so RFK, Jr.'s attack on pharma ads is also another knife in the back of journalism.
Chicken Little had it easy: she only had to worry about the sky falling. We get to worry about satellites falling from the sky and spying on us before they plunge.
We have two faraway wars in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, but even though they’re faraway it's risky to talk about either of them because we're so polarized. As a Jew living in the USA, it's hard to have a conversation with other Jews in which I can both condemn Hamas for a despicable, vicious attack on October 7 (nearly two years ago?) and condemn how Israel's war on Hamas has killed so many innocent civilians in Gaza. Why is it unreasonable to hold both opinions?
Charlie Kirk didn't deserve to be assassinated by a mentally ill kid. Nobody does.
But what if this was a science fiction movie in which we could extract Kirk from the moment just before the gun went off? Held in a time travel limbo like the white room in Quantum Leap, the time travelers would show Kirk the 2023 footage when he said, "I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."** Would Kirk have changed his mind knowing that he himself was about to be one of the unfortunate gun deaths?
Conservative Dispatch readers may be reaching for the unsubscribe button just because I've asked that question. While I'm sad to see any reader go, when did the right reaction to an opinion that's different than yours become either to silence the person or stick your fingers in your ears?
The comment that provoked Disney to pull Jimmy Kimmel's show was: "We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and do everything they can to score political points from it."
Kimmel wasn't saying anything derogatory about Kirk, but if you watch President Trump's comment in this news report, Trump claims that Kimmel said "a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk," which is not the case.
If Kimmel made any mistake, and I don't think he did, then it was to characterize Tyler Robinson, the assassin, as MAGA. There has been nothing conclusive in any reporting about Robinson's politics. He grew up in a conservative family but registered as neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Even if he had registered for either party, that does not mean that Robinson's political affiliation drove him to kill Charlie Kirk. After a successful academic career in high school, Robinson dropped out of university after a semester. I suspect he was struggling with depression, but we won't know for a long time.
I'm not just overwhelmed by these particular stories and by our ever deepening polarization. That would be easy. I'm also overwhelmed by the onslaught of contradictory coverage about AI: it's going to save us; it's going to kill us. We haven't even figured out how to deal with social media and smartphones!
And I'm underwhelmed by the possible solutions to these problems. Progressives hold out hope that the mid-terms will see Democrats retake the house, which would at least slow down the rate of alarming changes to our society, but that's more than a year away.
I'd just like to be whelmed for a while. Not panicked, not hopeless. Just whelmed.
What about you?
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.
* No AI Image Prompt this time: just human intelligence (such as it is) and PPT.
** Kirk's description of the Second Amendment, something that James Madison wrote in 1789, as protecting "God-given rights" makes so little sense that it gives me a headache, unless Kirk somehow thought that Madison had a direct connection to God.