Supercast: “Joe Rogan Got Ripped Off”

I hope the reported numbers are low, because I don’t think even $100 million per year provides Rogan with enough upside to accommodate the trade offs:

1. Losing his relationship with his subscribers
2. Building someone else’s business and recurring revenue instead of his own
3. A smaller audience and less impact

He’s going to be just fine either way. I’m not shedding any tears for Joe, but as a business person I can’t help but shake my head at the lost potential.

The world’s largest podcasters are sitting on oil. There’s a reason Spotify is writing these seemingly insane checks: They’ve done the geological surveys. They're trying to cut deals with as many hapless farmers as they can before they all catch on. Spotify will spend hundreds of millions to reap billions.

Most people will look at Rogan and think he’s a genius living the dream.

I think he’s a farmer who just got taken by Daniel Ek.

Andrew Wilkinson

Interesting perspective on Joe Rogan’s exclusive deal with Spotify that surfaced in my Twitter feed after a new report estimated the value of the deal at over $200 million. It was somewhat amusing to see the renewed outrage without substance, which felt more like repressed envy than anything else. You can certainly make a case that he’s saying questionable things on his podcast, but Rogan’s remuneration depends on his negotiation with Spotify and how much the company estimates it can get in return, not on the perception of some small slice of the public. That other newspapers reported a smaller amount last year is rather a journalism problem of not properly vetting their information.

Wired: “Inside the daring mission to reach the bottom of all Earth’s oceans”

The Five Deeps expedition got under way in December 2018, when Vescovo took his submersible, called Limiting Factor, to the 8,376m depths of the Atlantic Ocean’s Puerto Rico Trench. Since then he has made contact with the Antarctic Ocean’s 7,433m South Sandwich Trench, the Indian Ocean’s 7,192m Java Trench, and the Pacific Ocean’s 10,925m Mariana Trench, en route to his last stop at the top of the world.

This final Five Deeps dive is the culmination of over four years of planning. It is an odyssey that has seen Pressure Drop cover 46,262 nautical miles, employing hundreds of research scientists, expedition staff, engineers and ship’s crew at a cost of millions of dollars – a bill footed by Vescovo, who operates a private equity firm when he isn’t venturing to the Earth’s most remote places. The success of the project depends on this final dive.

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As far as Triton was concerned, this initial brief was a little too simple. His original concept was a steel sphere with no windows, Lahey says. We weren’t interested in building that. For Triton, the submersible (officially designated the Triton 36,000/2) had to have commercial applications so that further models might be sold after Vescovo’s dives. For this to happen, it would need two seats (to accommodate a pilot and a scientist), a manipulator arm and, crucially, windows instead of the system of external cameras and internal screens Vescovo initially proposed. The whole point of a human-manned submersible is that it’s a visual tool, Lahey says. There’s no way you can duplicate our sense of sight. When you’re down there looking out that window, it’s like you’re hardwired to your eyeballs. You drink information in in a different way. There’s an immediacy to it, and an effectiveness. Eventually Vescovo agreed, and signed Triton up to design his one-of-a-kind machine.

Tom Ward

A fantastic and daring enterprise that nevertheless feels more like a vanity project to me. Paradoxically, the ocean floor has been explored less by humans than near-Earth space or even the Moon. But I do agree with the point that human presence is essential for extreme exploration such as the deep ocean and outer space; without it, there’s simply not the same sense of excitement and participation as when you’re sending automated probes.

BBC: “To the Moon and beyond”

Shannon started to focus on ideas that were viable. What made a lot of sense was the ability to build a very small crew-tended space station around the Moon, he says. Gateway gives you a place for crews to get set up before they go down to the surface. It gives you an opportunity to control remote vehicles on the surface. It would also act as a safe haven were anything to go wrong during a mission.

The Apollo missions took all the hardware necessary for completing the mission with them to the Moon. Nasa put them on a path around the Moon called a free return trajectory, which would get them safely back to Earth if, for example, an engine didn’t fire to send them into lunar orbit. But this limited them to landing in a narrow band around the equator.

Gateway will be higher up, in an oval-shaped path around the Moon called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), giving Nasa the ability to land wherever it wants.

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The administration cited Chinese lunar ambitions while justifying the return date of 2024. Some observers think space-faring nations like the US, China and Russia will need to coordinate lunar exploration to navigate murky legal waters over who owns lunar resources.

I think there’s a very large risk of geopolitical conflict, says Phil Metzger. If a single nation decides to go it alone on creating industry in space, then eventually that single nation would have a tremendous political, economic and military advantage.

Ignoring the potential of space resources just creates a power vacuum, he says: The ethical way to fill it would be to do it cooperatively, internationally, trying to make sure that all humanity benefits.

Paul Rincon

Despite criticism, I am very supportive of NASA’s Artemis mission to the Moon, with the potential to cement a more sustained human presence on the Moon and to reach beyond it into the inner solar system. At the same time, this project should really have happened decades ago immediately after the Apollo program. I am somewhat pessimistic that these plans will come to fruition in the current form, not only delayed by budget cuts, but eventually changed beyond recognition by the shifting priorities and moods of each new American administration.

Gizmodo: “This Working Quadcopter Drone was built using Leonardo da Vinci’s 500-Year-Old Sketches”

A team of engineers at the University of Maryland used da Vinci’s sketches to create a functional drone for a flight design contest (via CNET). Called Crimson Spin, the device is a small, unmanned quadcopter drone with wings inspired by da Vinci’s “aerial screw” design, which used the concept of an Archimedes’ screw to push against air in order to obtain flight.

The drone has four corkscrew-shaped wings made of plastic, but instead of having someone hand spin (or pump) them as da Vinci proposed, these wings are powered by batteries and electric motors. Much like today’s drones, this creation relies on small changes to propeller speed to tilt one direction or the other. Creating a single-shaft design as seen in da Vinci’s sketches would have been far more complex and required some of the technology used in modern helicopters.

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We might not be flying around on a 530-year-old helicopter design, but this project comes as the use of VTOL, or vertical take-off and landing, aircraft have gained interest for their potential ability to deliver packages or be used as aerial taxis. The unique aerodynamics of Crimson Spin addresses a few of the many challenges faced by VTOLs in that it produces less downwash and would likely be quieter than conventional propellers.

Phillip Tracy

Fascinating that such old concepts could become tangible technologies! The shape and size of the propellers seem to make them quite inconvenient though, especially if scaled up enough to lift a person…

Euronews: “Belgium approves four-day week and gives employees the right to ignore their bosses after work”

A government spokesperson confirmed to Euronews Next that employees would be able to ask to work four days a week for a period of six months. After that, they could choose to continue the arrangement or return to a five-day week with no negative consequences.

The period of six months was chosen so that an employee would not be stuck for too long in case of a wrong choice, they said.

Under the Belgian system, employees would be able to condense the current five-day week into four days. In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days.

Tom Bateman

Reading the headline (and retweeting it) a couple of days ago, I assumed this meant a four-day week on the same 8-hour working schedule, but apparently I was overly optimistic… A 38-hour working week divided into four days translates into two working days on 9-hour shifts and another two on 10-hour shifts… Not the work-life balance progress I was expecting. For reference, Iceland also experimented with shortened working weeks with great results, but they moved from a 40 hour week to a 35 or 36 hour week.

Protocol: “Blame cheap music for Joe Rogan being on Spotify”

Left unsaid during the leaked town hall was another aspect of this relationship: Spotify is in bed with Joe Rogan because streaming music is too damn cheap.

Music services have long struggled to pay those huge royalty checks their contracts with the music rights holders are calling for. Some have even argued that the deck is fundamentally stacked against the streaming media industry, and that music subscription services can never be profitable.

• Spotify has indeed lost billions of dollars over the years, a streak that continued in 2021: For the full year, the company booked net losses of $38.8 million on $11 billion in revenue, according to its latest earnings report released yesterday.

Janko Roettgers

I have been trying to abstain from commenting on this Joe Rogan dispute because people were throwing around the most ridiculous and biased arguments they could find. For the record, I don’t listen either to Joe Rogan’s podcast or to Neil Young’s music, but I am a Spotify premium subscriber, and have no intention to change that. This article discusses the business reasons for the situation; I would go a bit further and say that the underlying issue is the increasing lack of competition on this market.

The Washington Post: “Apple changes employees’ titles to ‘associate’ after they leave”

The title “associate” is generally used to connote more junior roles. Entry-level retail workers, for instance, are often called associates. Law firms refer to recent law school hires in the same way, and in universities, associate professors are ranked below those with the title “professor”.

The practice recently came to light when Cher Scarlett, a former Apple software engineer who raised concerns about alleged discrimination and misconduct at the company, filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that when Apple changed her job title to “associate”, it delayed the hiring process at a prospective employer by nearly a week, during which time the company rescinded the offer. Scarlett said the job verification service hired to vet her résumé was unable to resolve the discrepancy with Apple.

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Irrespective of the reasons why they are doing it, this is a very bad and possibly unlawful practice, said Laurie Burgess, an employment law attorney who represents Parrish in her labor board case against Apple. Seems to me that this action interferes with employees’ reasonable future economic interests.

Reed Albergotti

Today in ‘shit corporations pull when nobody’s watching’! Apple is straight up providing false information about their former employees whenever someone checks what their position inside Apple was. A petty tactic worthy of Apple’s usual arrogance that can be punishing to employees regardless of whether they left in good terms or bad. As people amusingly proposed on Twitter, now that this practice is no longer a secret, people could use it to their advantage by claiming in job interviews that they had more senior roles while working at Apple.