Welcome to Small Talk, an email I serve out every Monday morning exclusively to our Breakfast Club members in NYC and Charleston. The premise is simple: my top of mind topics for the week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners ahead anytime some chatter is required. From now on, I’ll be sharing it with subscribers of The Supersonic as well. Enjoy, and crib topics as necessary.
As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of the fact that we now have a “national day” for everything. National Sibling Day. National Sandwich Day. National Kiss a Ginger Day (sorry, it was Jan 12, you missed it). Social media marketing gimmicks would be the most generous way to categorize them. But, as much as it pains me, I’d be remiss to not mention that in addition to Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Inauguration Day, today is National Coffee Break Day, so go put that Breakfast Club membership to good use.
For consideration …
Damn fine coffee
We lost a Hollywood heavyweight last week in David Lynch. Besides being one of cinema’s most inimitable and indelible auteurs, the man was also one hell of a coffee fan, as anyone who’s binged Twin Peaks can attest. Here’s a roundup of all the coffee Easter eggs and deeper meanings in the legendary director’s works. He even directed a series of commercials for the Japanese (and Coca-Cola-owned) canned coffee brand Georgia. But one doesn’t need to only watch Lynch to see some damn fine coffee scenes. From Pulp Fiction to Heat, Glengarry Glen Ross to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, coffee has given us some of the most memorable scenes in movie history – who knew the beverage could fuel so much drama. If you’ve got similar main character energy, a Texas-based coffee brand will pay one lucky applicant $75k (+ benefits) to travel around the U.S. drinking coffee and posting about it on social.A new Gilded Age?
If you get the job above, one of those social channels you’ll be posting to is, of course, TikTok, the big but beleaguered social media app that President-elect Trump saved/vowed to save, or at the very least whose inevitable ban he’s stalled. Whether or not Trump’s olive branch will prove successful is up for debate, but in the meantime you can read about the whole roller coaster ride here (or speculate if it was all one big convoluted pr stunt). Indeed, Trump seems like big tech’s—and, by extension, billionaires’—new best friend. That means the moneyed elite are descending on DC, even more than usual. Does this suggest we’re in for a new gilded age? Surging home real estate prices—and Elon Musk’s rumored private club that could be opening in Adams Morgan—would indicate so. DC restaurants are feeling the impending shift, with some restaurateurs nervous about Trump’s immigration policy and what it could mean for their employees and, if the incoming President’s rumored raids happen, prices. Others remain optimistic and diplomatic, like the typically outspoken Keith McNally, who said he’d serve any member of the Trump family at his recently opened Minetta Tavern (providing they don’t wear a MAGA hat).It's about to get agentic
It wouldn’t be a newsletter without a bit of AI news, the latest of which involves Perplexity submitting a bid to merge with TikTok in order to add more video to their AI search capabilities. AI coding, however, has already entered its next era. Coding assistants are quickly becoming the new norm, both debugging bad code and working on new code, freeing up traditional (i.e. human) coders to manage teams of AI engineers. What’s more, is that many believe this could be a fast track toward Artificial General Intelligence, a hypothetical state in which machines will possess the same cognitive ability as humans to grasp and learn intellectual tasks. Father-to-be Sam Altman is a believer, saying that his future child will never be smarter than AI (wow, Dad, way to instill some confidence in the kid), but also says that will be true for everyone. “That’ll be natural,” the OpenAI CEO says. “And of course it’s smarter than us. Of course, it can do things we can’t, but also who really cares? I think it’s only weird for us in this one transition time.” The transition he’s talking about? AI’s “agentic stage,” in which everyone will rely on an AI agent to “autonomously perform tasks on the user’s behalf.” If all this news has you feeling like a luddite, here’s something to snicker at: turns out AI isn’t much of a history buff. When tested on PhD-level historical inquiry, our future tech overlords could only manage 46 percent accuracy. What a bunch of dunces.
Quicker hits …
Oliviero Toscani, the provocative Italian photographer behind Benetton's streak of controversial ads from the 1980s, has passed.
The Lauberhorn, Alpine World Cup skiing's longest, wonkiest downhill race (competitors launch over a rock cliff, ski through a tunnel under a train track, and hit speeds approaching 100 mph), took place over the weekend in Wengen, Switzerland. Watch the white-knuckle highlights here.
Regardless of its fate, TikTok has forever changed Hollywood, as well as fundamentally changed how we create and consume content.
Enjoy your week.
BL
Ben Leventhal
Founder + CEO
Blackbird