Finding a soulmate

What happened?

Last week, every lonely man on Twitter found their soul mate. An account called @andyohlbaum released this video on Twitter. Andrew is launching a company that provides you with a virtual AI girlfriend.

Why does this matter?

For those in happy relationships, this probably won’t matter.

But if you are still interested, let’s take a step back for a second. One of the biggest threats to human civilisation is the birth rate. The number of babies born needs to be greater than the number of people dying for humanity to continue to flourish. Why? Because everything good about the world has come from clever humans working on tough problems to bring about positive change. The fewer humans there are, the smaller the number of great people there are working on tough problems. A world with fewer Albert Einsteins, Leonardo Da Vincis, and Florence Nightingales is not a good one.

A reasonable question now is what does this have to do with a Twitter video? For the birthrate to grow globally, men and women need to continue to have families. For that to happen, strangers need to pluck up the courage to ask each other out and why do that when you can find the perfect companion - you can literally make your perfect partner - with AI?

What does the future look like?

Now I don’t think this is too much of a problem for the people of Venezuela or Iraq, but in the Western World, we have seen a slow and steady evolution of more people watching porn and fewer people having sex.

I think this is quite a worrying trend that is only going to get worse. Why go through the awkward parts of finding a partner when you can find companionship and pleasure online? While I think Andrew’s business is incredible (a money-printing machine), I am not sure it is good for the world. The entrepreneurial part of me thinks “Fair play, great work” and the other parts of me are going “wow, this is actually incredibly toxic“.

Jack

Mahoosive money-making Mariah

What happened?

Mariah Carey makes a heap load of money every Christmas with the same song every year - but actually how much money?

Why does this matter?

It doesn’t really. As you probably learned from the previous section, we have an appreciation for great businesses, and Christmas songs are crackers.

All I Want For Christmas Is You has clocked up $60 million in total earnings and it brings Mariah roughly $5-10mil annually. This supposedly comes from royalties and shows. She earns $5mil in 6 weeks, every year.

She isn’t the only one, Christmas music racks up $177 mil each year and for the first time, Brenda Lee’s Rocking Around The Christmas Tree hit number one this year. The song was released in 1958 and Brenda is celebrating being a Billboard-topping artist at the age of 77 as well as earning Brenda over $1.5 million.

What does this mean for the future?

Mariah has the cheat codes for making money on music. Whilst most musicians are only as relevant as the latest TikTok song or their most recent album, Mariah becomes relevant every year.

Does anyone know Sam Hunt? He has 3 top 10 singles and one song has close to 1 billion streams but that all happened ages ago, 4 years to be exact.

So what does this mean for the future? Well not that much. However, if music was just about making money, I would spend the first 10 months of the year putting every bit of my creative energy into making a Christmas album and then enjoying the fruits of my labour for the rest of my life.

Jack