The Putin Interview and Smart Dust

🌅 Today’s Topics

Good Morning, today we’re delving into:

• An Unlikely Interview with Putin

• AI, dust, and diodes

• A graph showing a pretty impressive mistake

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Tucker Carlson Interviews Putin

For those of you who don’t know Tucker Carlson, he is a US broadcaster famed for hosting a long-standing and incredibly popular show on FOX News. He has almost a cult following with over 12 million Twitter followers.

Last week Tucker interviewed Putin and even by his standards, this was a big deal. Now we’re not going to delve into the actual substance of the interview, although I would recommend watching, but instead look at how a fired TV presenter got the first interview with Putin in 4 years.

A bit of backstory

Tucker’s time on Fox was filled with wild conspiracy theories, meteoric fame and never-ending drama - most notably being named in the lawsuit that cost Fox $787 million due to spreading misinformation about the Capitol Hill Riots in 2021.

His time at Fox came to an abrupt end when in 2021 Rupert Murdoch (think Logan Roy from Succession) fired him. 

So now Tucker finds himself out of a job, but with a huge following. He certainly could have gone for a job with the likes of The Daily Wire (Ben Shapiro’s media company) or another right-leaning organisation.

But he didn’t do that.

The age of a personal brand

Instead of taking the, undoubtedly, huge paycheck Tucker decided to start his own show: Tucker on X. His first episode saw him claiming extra-terrestrial life had been discovered, Ukraine’s Zelensky was “sweaty and rat-like” and Black Lives Matter was organised by the Deep State - high-brow thinking as you can see!

The first video has clocked over 122 million views, and he’s since done interviews with numerous world leaders and averages over 10 million views per video. Compared to his average audience of 4.5 million at Fox, he’s seemingly made the right move.

The Putin Interview

Last week he was the first Western journalist to interview Putin since the war in Ukraine started, and whether you see this as giving a platform to a murderous dictator, or leveraging his right to freedom of speech, the transition away from mainstream media is symbolic of a far more decentralised media landscape.

50 years ago The BBC, or The New York Times controlled the narrative. Now for better or worse the likes of Tucker Carlson are presenting views that would previously have gone untold. 

Look at this graph:

Almost every mainstream media outlet lost viewing figures year-over-year, and it seems this transition seems like it will only accelerate.

I think this is a good thing.

While it does mean the likes of Tucker Carlson get a platform, it also means the voices of millions are being heard. Whether that’s women in Afghanistan, Uighurs in China or civilians in Palestine the point is they now have a voice.

Three, entirely unrelated cool things

A quick one from me this week, 3 things I read or watched that are cool.

Decoding ancient writing

Some super-talented people did something awesome with AI last week. In 79AD Mount Vesuvius erupted and famously buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in ash, preserving a time capsule of ancient history for almost 2000 years.

Among charred bodies and vases of wine were 1800 scrolls of papyrus containing carbonized ancient writing. No one knew what was written in these black knowledge rocks until today. A team of legendary nerds used computer vision and machine learning to decode what was hidden away and won $700k for it, from the cofounder of Github.

This doesn’t have any huge ramifications for the world; what has been read so far are probably the musings of the philosopher Philodemus. This was just three awesome folks building something cool to unlock a piece of undiscovered history. Check out the code base and the announcement.

Smart Dust

My co-founder mentioned something called Smart Dust this week. I thought you all might like it too.

Smartdust is a technological promise of small wireless sensors with the ability to measure environmental data. The concept (and it still remains quite conceptual) is you can use microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to collect data from the surroundings including light, vibrations, and temperature.

Because these devices are only a few millimetres in size, they can exist suspended in air or float. They have the potential to be used in defence systems, farming, diagnosis of certain diseases and the original team published their paper on how they could be used in the brain.

There might be a future of microscopic sensors floating in the air feeding data back to our robot overlords.

The curse of light-emitting diodes (LEDs)

I, like 10 million others, love a YouTube channel called Veritasium. This week he made a video telling the story on LEDs, yes, the little coloured mundane lights.

It turns out that LEDs are quite complicated, specifically blue ones. Until LEDs, traditional light bulbs shon when passed electricity through a tungsten filament. The filament would heat up so much that it would glow emitting light.

The problem with this is that it is inefficient, most of the energy is lost as heat. Then the LED shows up on the scene. Unlike, traditional incandescent bulbs, LEDs are the light emitting beasts but coloring them turns out to be quite hard.

It took scientists over 30 years to figure out how to make a blue bulb and the final discovery was made by a random Japanese scientist that the whole community thought wouldn’t achieve anything.

Chart of the week

You might have had a bad day at work but did you put an extra 0 in a public earnings report and accidentally signal to the market that your company was doing far better than in reality? No? Well, an analyst at Lyft (a competitor to Uber) did and you might be able to guess when the report went out.