Hello from Kalamazoo! This week I visited the birthplace of Gibson guitars and learned a ton about the rich history of the famous guitar brand and its history in this town.
During World War II both the building and the workers of the Gibson Mandolin Guitar Company in Kalamazoo transitioned to producing munitions to support the war effort.
But there was a secret. The women — who became the primary staff thanks to the war — weren’t just making bullets. They were still making guitars.
Women made some of the best guitars in the world?? GASP. That secret stayed a secret long after the war ended, and it was just recently discovered that nearly 25,000 instruments shipped during the war from those talented luthiers. The men returned. The factory went back to normal, and almost nobody knew that women (again — gasp!) had been making some of the world’s most famous guitars that entire time.
The Gibson factory left town for Nashville in 1985, and the building today is run down. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and restoration efforts are on their way. Locals told me about a proposed Hard Rock Hotel development that could be a fitting reuse of the space. Would love to stay there! Would be worth the trip for that and another glass of fresh Bell’s Two Hearted, for sure.
You can listen to this short 15-minute podcast from Atlas Obscura about the story of the Kalamazoo Gals. I just love discovering stuff like this when on work trips…
👀 My Eyes Hurt on Google Trends
Uhhh… this is real data. Cross-check it yourself. I did! 🤡
Also:
📸 Finally, a place to share photos on social: TikTok?
TikTok users have been getting pop-up notifications about a new TikTok Notes app to share photos, and yeah, it appears to be an Instagram competitor.
Per Techcrunch: the notification says that the company is soon launching “a new app for photo posts” called TikTok Notes and users’ existing photo posts will be shared on the app. Users can choose to not share their image posts to the new app too.
You can see the coming soon page here: https://notes.tiktok.com/
Wait Greg, is this another example of Platform Decay (aka “enshittification) that you wrote about last month, where every social platform ends up copying itself until everything is the same? Yes. Yes, it is. 🤔
🏀 Dude Perfect 2.0 is Coming
These aren’t your father’s influencers. YouTube icons Dude Perfect have come a long way from basketball trick shots and water bottle flips! They are a sports and comedy entertainment brand phenomenon known for stunts, humor, and world records, featuring a group of five friends.
The cohort scored a $100-300 million investment this week and shared plans to open a retail store, launch a streaming platform, introduce a line of toys and games at Walmart, and shared some early thoughts on a $100 million theme park.
I love this quote from the investment firm:
"The next generation is not coming in and flipping on cable TV. They're pulling in their phones, and they're subscribing, they're following. And these are the people they're listening to.” - Jason Illian, Highmount Capital, on investing in Dude Perfect.
If you haven’t heard or don’t care about these guys, ask a Generation Alpha kiddo in your life about them. Spend some time watching their content. And pack a bag for the theme park they’ll launch sometime soon! 😎
📺 YouTube of the Week
“The future will always be coming. The human experience always is.”
Some compelling messages here about A.I. from Reddit’s Global Brand Ambassador, Will Cady. Short and sweet. 🤖
🎙️ Quote of the Week:
“These [AI] models are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas. And I think the power of the human being having new ideas all the time - that’s the thing that the platforms won’t be able to find. That’s why the platforms feel old. Social platforms enter a decay state where everyone is seeing the same thing all the time. It’s because we optimize for the distribution and people get bored. And that boredom drives much more of the culture than anyone would give it credit to - especially an AI developer can only look backwards.” - Ethan Mollick in conversation with Ezra Klein
⚡️ Quick Hits
Screens aren't the future; windshields are.
Medium announced that while AI content is still allowed, it can no longer be listed behind a paywall.
OpenAI and Meta are on the brink of releasing new artificial intelligence models that they say will be capable of reasoning and planning, critical steps towards achieving superhuman cognition in machines. Key quotes: “We are hard at work in figuring out how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan . . . to have memory.”
If your brand is still active on X/Twitter, your followers are going to go down as the platform does another bot sweep.
Walmart Discovered on Roblox surpassed 20M Total Visits in under six months. Some really compelling stats. I absolutely recommend you go see how one of the biggest retailers in the world is investing in the metaverse and learning about how the next generation will spend their social time.
App of the Week: Palmsy is a completely self-contained social network just for you. Palmsy lets you make little posts for yourself. Then sends you some push notifications from random pals from your contacts as if they had liked/engaged with your content. What? I tried it. It was… very strange. Try it here.
YouTube of the Week: how many crabs would you need to teach them to play Doom?
Podcast of the Week: Are today’s young people too afraid of looking old? Good podcast here about The Sephora Kids by Today, Explained.
TikTok of the Week: “Peanuts” theme but its in the Phrygian musical scale.
Reel of the Week: Guess a number between 1 and 10.
See you in the future! 🚀
Greg
Sometimes I think about the former high school theater nerds (now young adults) who must really miss the days when TikTok was just a place to share lipsyncing and dancing.
Love it all! Dude Perfect is fascinating - can’t wait to watch their business plan evolve.