Teendrama #12 – Where I talk about Henry Hudson and Flavor Flav

Oh, and about the bucket of emerging tech that is"obvious but not seen", future of computing, Henry Hudson, Central Park's Ramble, Space Camp vs. Star Wars, Andor vs. Trump, smidge of skateboarding.

Whoa, it’s real easy to fall out of the habit of doing these. I think I let my timeboxing (max 1 hour) slip the last few times I wrote one – which means it takes longer to write / proof / read. Let’s try again! I like writing these!

OBVIOUS BUT NOT SEEN
There’s this cool overlap between this Isaac Asimov quote, "It is the obvious which is so difficult to see” and that classic William Gibson quote, “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed”. Like, what is right around the corner (already existing in R&D Labs) but will be totally unexpected when it arrives. Wanted to capture a few examples of this (and maybe I’ll come back to them later).

• “Silent-Speech-to-Text”. (aka: “subvocalization-to-text”) This is the thing where you can think a word in your brain and the word appears on a screen. (You have to wear some tech-wristband that translates brain impulses/twitches in wrist muscles to text to make this happen btw). CTRL Labs made this 100 years ago and told it to Facebook, and it was rumored to be baked into the FB Watch (which got shelved?) as a future input mechanism for Meta RayBan Glasses (this is me hypothesizing btw). I’ve seen this stuff work like 10 years ago and its probably very very very good now. It seems obvious this is what we’ll do instead of texting into a screen.

  • I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about Substack (how sad is that) and started writing a bit of this post in my head (also sad)… but how interesting would it be have been able to “save that” (?) as text and use it as draft when I woke up.

• Always-on Headphones. We are chasing this trend with BeeBot (want beta?). Yes, many people will have some kind of “whisper in you ear” device all in day long. Meta Glasses are also always-on headphones. People already do with with AirPods (leave one/both in, even if they’re not listening to something). AirPods (etc) will prob start looking more like jewelry (and less like headphones?) The Q is how weird is it when “continuous partial attention” extends to audio (and what services will we WANT chirping in our ears all day long)

• Always-on Recording. There’s a half dozen AI companies that do this now. They capture everything you speak, you hear, and can query/summarize it for you on demand. "What time did Chelsa say I needed to pick up the kids?”, “what was the name of the company that Jordan mentioned at lunch the other day?”. Querying *every bit* of info you take in is (recording devices, audio input, cameras on your face seeing everything) feels right around the corner. I wonder if the “a red light means we’re recording” thing has to come back into vogue somehow.

• Voice Cloning. A year ago I went to clone my voice and it took like 45 mins of work on my end, reading 100 sentences aloud into an app. And then I did it again the other day and it took ~10 seconds to get a pretty good clone I could prob have used to trick my own kids. It seems pretty obvious that this goes badly – voices getting clones and used in scams, used to trick “Hey Siri”, use to trick any voice ID systems, etc. I feel like The World is collectively not ready for the amount of fuckery that will come out of this (+ video fakes, etc etc)

• AI Crippling, um, Thinking? Waze/Google Maps have made it so we no longer need to do the work of navigating or routing anywhere (um, the map does it for you). That’s fine until the maps don’t work / network is down, and sometimes I feel dumber for this (“I’ve done this drive 1000x but I still don’t know the way?”) And the same thing is happening with reading / homework / research / rabbit hole’ing / right? The AI just does it all, no need to think or do the work. That NYMag story on kids vs. homework vs. AI is a solid glimpse into the future which seems more mainstream by the day.

… this is all super obvious right? (um, hit me back in the comments and lemme know) I mean, I feel kind of dumb just typing it out. But will keep this here anyway (and look for more examples to add later).

RABBIT HOLES (er, speaking of navigating…)

• Henry Hudson. Like two weeks ago Via said: “Hey dad, can we watch a documentary on Henry Hudson?” ABSOLUTELY. They’re doing Lenape (Native Americans) meet the Europeans in school (3rd grade btw) and so we went scouring NYC for Henry Hudson stuff. There’s not much TBH, we missed the HH exhibition at the Museum of the City of NY by like 4 years. We were able to get a peek at the HH stained glass at the NY Historical Society. And we took a lap thru The Met’s American Art trying to find some art from that time (no luck, most is in DC, see below)

  

  Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast, 1667, Ludolf Backhuysen

  • HOWEVER, in our research V, made a quip about how could they possibly get lost? And I explained to them that they were making the maps as they went, and they were EXPLORING!

    • She’s not doing much exploring / map making now (trapped in NYC!), so we gotta fix that this summer. Explore the woods behind our house! Explore the Kingdom of Hyrule! Make some maps!

    • As a side quest, I found this old map (1850s?) of The Ramble in Central Park, printed it and brought her to the top section and told her to pretend she was Henry Hudson with a crappy map and to navigate her way to the bridge near the fountain. I think this at least gave her a smidge of empathy for the plight of the explorer. (fun walk btw, lots of birders! 🐦👀)

1860 Planners Map of Central Park

ps: Henry Hudson’s crew ditched him in on his 4th voyage. Mutiny —> they kicked him off the boat —> his son went with them —> that’s the last anyone heard of them.

The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson is an oil-on-canvas painting by English artist John Collier, created in 1881. (Wikipedia copy & paste, btw)

Btw, maps and drawings of early NYC are amazing. This history is all around us, but I never pay an attention to it.

View of New Amsterdam, Johannes Vingboons (1664)

… this 3D bronze sculpture is The Castillo Plan, early Dutch settlement plan (from when Manahatta was New Amsterdam). It’s in lower Manhattan near the South Ferry subway stop / Staten Island Ferry terminal. [Google map] I made a trip to see it w/ the kids last weekend. The painting above is of the town as seen in the map. I didn’t know this 3D Map even existed until I went to the “Group Night” at school where you get to see what the kids are doing / working on (thru photos/slideshow presented by her teacher)

ps: American Wing section of The Met is amazing. Go find the Hudson River School painters and paintings. It’s just brilliant, amazing work (and much of it is of/about the Catskills)

QUOTES

• “GLP-1s are gonna cure internet additions (not regulation) … It’s easier to hack our own brains than limit tech / regulate things.” – Sam Lessin at Slow Ventures.

  • aka: We’ll all be on “Ozempic for Social Media” because (a) we can’t quit it ourselves and (b) govt can’t / won’t regulate the companies that make addictive social media.

• “If you think you’re better than a hedge fund, then you should just be hedge fund” – Ben Horowitz as a FSQ Board Meeting back in 2015. FSQ was just putting it’s data to use in predicting retail / foot traffic / stock market trends (!!) and it was starting to work (see: iPhone 6 predictions, Chipotle vs. E-coli predictions).

  • Thought of this as we’re starting to do fun stuff with local / news / events data at BeeBot… but I don’t want us to be an news/events listing or aggregation biz. Btw, this was a FUN time to be at FSQ, just when we were starting to flex what we could do with all all the data.

  • Spoiler: We never became a hedge fund. And it was hard to sell data to hedge funds, because you can sell 1 category or 1 vertical to 1 fund before the advantage is a commodity. Plus, we were good at investigating trends *once we had an insight*… but we never got to build The Machine that could *predict the insights* (I wanted Labs to take a stab at this but we never got a chance to)

SNIPPETS / PARENTING

• Someone from NPR Boston emailed me like a month ago and asked if they could ask me some questions about Dodgeball. Who still asks about Dodgeball?! :) That turned into this podcast episode (also featuring Alex!) that talks about the origins of Find my Friends and SnapMaps, etc. It’s a fun listen!

  • Via asked me about Foursquare (specifically) last week and – with this pod fresh in my head – I told her we kind of invented the first version of “Find my Friends” (which she uses to watch me + C on our way home, etc). She thought that was cool.

• Speaking of V –– she had her 9th bday this week! I am starting to really empathize with the “they grow up so fast” and “it all goes by in a blink” stuff people have been telling me for years. Kissing your kid goodnight on the eve of their bday has been one of my fav parts of being a dad.

  • Kids bdays = they get to pick what they want for dinner and we take them somewhere awesome where they can get That Thing. Via wanted “oysters + rack of lamb” (ha!). We went Giorgio’s of Grammercy and it was delicious.

  • Meanwhile, Sammy yelled out YEAAAAHA BOOOYYYEEEEE this morning (unprompted!) and we were like “where did you hear that?” I showed her some Flavor Flav videos.

• Took the kids to the ITP Spring Show this week. Art, tech, music, robots, games VR. Regular and routine exposure to “let’s go see some kids/students who are making weird shit” is good, and I can see that ethos emerging in V and Mars’ DNA.

  • It’s over, you missed it. Sorry. But there’s on in December and one in May every year. (get on the list)

  • The ITP show is one of the coolest things you can go to in NYC, IMHO

CONSUMING

• 📖 Great Gatsby. I have read zero pages of this. Ha!

• 📺 Andor (Season 2). OMG, was this season sent from the future to help inspire us to revote against the Death Star that is the Trump Administration? Venn diagram of Andor <> Politics 2025 <> “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (the book) is a “TED Talk from the future” that I’d watch.

  • My buddy has a framework for imagining the future: “Try to imagine the future, after everything is all figured out, when we can sit back and say “whew, that almost happened”. And when we think about that, what is the ONE THING that happened that put us on the right track?” ←- I’d like to watch smart people talking about THIS.

  • Btw, there’s no way things DON’T get violent right? I think about Chapter 51 of Ministry of the Future like 1x/week. The inevitability of it (???) kind of haunts me.

• 🎵 Typing this out and Sophie B. Hawkins “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” just came on it and this song is a banger.

• 🎥 SpaceCamp! (yes from 1986!). Great movie night for kids (“MAX IN SPACE!”). Btw, “Max” is played by Joaquin Phoenix (WHAT!?) back when he went by Leaf Phoenix, and “Kathrine” is Lorraine from Back to the Future.

  • Next up: Gonna show Via “Titanic”. Mars still needs to see Goonies. The kids have zero interest in Star Wars. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    

    Wow this photo is huge. Why no reszie options?

UPCOMING (new section!)

• I’m speaking at Collective Future NYC 2025 tomorrow (Thu 5/14). I think my session is called “The End of Doomscrolling” where I am going to try to lead a discussion about whether social media deserves to exist and if so, how do we co-exist with it so it doesn’t melt our brains / poison our existence.

• I bought tix to this skateboard film at Tribeca Festival (“Empire Skate”) and this skateboard play in Union Square. Not taking Via (adult themes in both?) but we’re both still skating. We saw a 9yo RIP the bowls at Chelsea Piers this weekend and that was inspiring to us both.

NOTES ON WORKFLOW

• Okay 1 hour. Much better. I banged out an outline (in Substack) while eating breakfast with the kids. That helped.

• Ping me if you made it this far. Password is “donkeybird”

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