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Thanks for subscribing to SatPost and Happy New Year.

I planned on doing this “Best of 2024” newsletter for January but ended up finishing yesterday and decided to send it before the year is out.

SatPost will be on pause for a few weeks and we’ll return to regularly-scheduled programming in mid-January.

Appreciate all you readers and see you then.

Below are my 2024 selections for:

• Best Film (The Wild Robot)
• Best Book (Nuclear War: A Scenario)
• Best Quote (Jensen Huang)
• Best Purchase (Shokz OpenRun Headphones)
• Best Song (“Not Like Us”)
• Best SatPost Articles
• Best TV Show (Landman)
• Best Meme (Hawk Tuah)
• Best Meme By Me (Apple Vision Pro)
• Best Podcast (The Rest Is History)
• Best Decision (Taking my mom to Paris)

***

BEST FILM: The Wild Robot

The top-grossing film list of 2024 is a pretty depressing sight. Why? Because 18 of the top 20 films were either sequels or IP spin-offs.

Hollywood is legit just mailing it in now. What decisions even go into these studio exec meetings? They’re literally taking a spreadsheet and typing +1 to the previous instalment of the film. At least 2023 had Barbieheimer.

This year’s top film was Pixar’s Inside Out 2. I wrote about the film and flagged this quote from Pixar’s co-founder Ed Catmull:

“With certain ideas, you can predict commercial success. So with a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2,' you know the idea is more likely to have financial success. But if you go down that path too far, you become creatively bankrupt because you're just trying to repeat yourself.”

Creative bankruptcy is such an apt term for the past decade of films. I get the business decision. Built-in IP is an easier sell for a distracted audience that is glued to various smartphone apps. But Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot by milking existing brands instead of creating new ideas. As we’re seeing with backlash to Disney’s management of the Star Wars franchise, it is possible to destroy IP by making too much of the same content. Eventually, creatives need to create new ideas.

I say all this but still went to the theatres for bunch of the sequels (damnit) including Inside Out 2, Dune: Part Two and Gladiator II (ugh, let’s not talk about the sharks in the Colosseum).

The two films from the list that didn’t fall into either the sequel or spin-off buckets were adapted from novels: It Ends With Us (by Colleen Hoover) and The Wild Robot (by Pete Brown).

And it is The Wild Robot — which I went to go see with my son —that is my pick for best film of 2024 (also, shoutout to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which was so bad but at least it was an original idea and I was happily cheering on the insanity as one of only 9 people in the theatre paying respects to someone willing to take a risk).

While The Wild Robot is based on an illustrated science-fiction children’s book, the film still felt original because it hadn’t received the screen treatment yet. The plot concerns a robot named Roz shipwrecked on an island. Roz has to learn how to co-exist with animals and — along with a fox — raise an orphaned goose baby (which are called goslings, yet somehow Ryan Gosling isn’t voicing the animal).

These three characters become a family unit and there are parallels to Terminator 2. In that film, Sarah Connor and Arnold’s T-100 are the family unit along with a teenage John Connor (by “parallels” I mean “I am obsessed with T2 and spend 1% of my mental bandwidth searching for ways to shoehorn quotes from that film into a conversation or find other forms of media that echo James Cameron’s masterpiece”).

The Wild Robot was a fantastic mash-up of heart and action. The lead song “Kiss The Sky” goes very hard. The film experience just felt fresh. I am very happy that the studio greenlit a sequel and will be taking my son to the theatre for that one (damnit, they got me again).

PS. Probably the best YouTube video I saw this year was a 1-hour breakdown of the family dynamics in Terminator 2 by art director Mike Hill (James Cameron himself saw the analysis and agreed with Hill’s takes).

***

BEST BOOK: Nuclear War: A Scenario

Annie Jacobsen is an American investigative journalist that has written books on various geopolitical topics including Area 51, the history of the CIA and Operation Paperclip (when the US government recruited 1,600 former Nazi scientists to bring to America after World War II; a truly wild story).

She also writes for Amazon’s Tom Clancy series, Jack Ryan. This last fact is particularly relevant because Jacobsen released a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario in March 2024 and it reads like a thriller film.

The book weaves together the history of global nuclear programs along with US military doctrine and visceral details of what happens to people and property after a nuclear explosion (it’s very very bad). All of this is tied up in a fast-moving narrative that starts with a nuclear missile launch from North Korea towards America (the US fires back and its missiles are misinterpreted by Russian radars as an attack, which leads to an all-out nuclear war).

I read the book in two days. My main takeaway is that the majority of the world is probably too complacent about the risk of nuclear annihilation.

To wit: there’s a widely-followed organization called the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and it publishes a “Doomsday Clock”, which shows how far the world is from nuclear war. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the clock was “17 minutes” — not actual minutes but metaphorically — away from nuclear conflict. We are now at “90 seconds” from Doomsday, the most heightened period of nuclear threat since the 1980s.

Younger generations — which includes me — don’t know the feeling of peak-Cold War nuclear tensions. The book vividly explains why everyone should be concerned about military escalation. While there has been a reduction of nuclear warheads from the peak, thousands of nukes are still a button-press away from launch. Each of these weapons is an order of a magnitude stronger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Entire cities — along with tens of millions of people — can be wiped out in seconds. The global cooling that follows from the post-nuclear dust clouds would destroy the majority of the world’s agriculture and makes huge chunks of the Earth un-livable.

A particularly mind-bending part of the book is a military strategy called “Launch on Warning”. Once the launch of nuclear weapons are detected, the President of the United States has 6 minutes to decide whether to retaliate. The missiles are travelling so fast that the situation doesn’t allow for long contemplation. So, you have six minutes. I repeat: 6 minutes. Not 7 minutes. 6 minutes to decide the fate of mankind.

One more takeaway from the book is that leaders of nuclear-armed nations should 1000% be in direct dialogue with each other. A major contributing factor to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was the lack of a communication line between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Their negotiations were mediated through ambassadors and hand-written letters. WTF? That is insane. In June 1963, the two leaders created a telegraph and radio hotline between Washington, DC and Moscow to help prevent a future accidental nuclear war.

In writing a fast-paced story, Jacobsen makes a few questionable story decisions in the book. The type of mistakes that someone named u/MudButt6969 will find and write “so many plot holes” on a book-reading Reddit forum. But I’m OK with the leaps of logic because the message is worth everyone’s time.

***

BEST QUOTE: Jensen Huang

We need to tip our hat to Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang somewhere in this newsletter.

The 61-year old has led the semi-conductor firm for over 30 years and the company’s been on an insane heater in the past half decade. The stock is up 23x over the past 5 years and is currently worth $3.4T. Nvidia has been the most-valuable company in the world a few times this year and currently trails only Apple ($3.9T).

Here’s a wild stat: Huang is personally worth more ($122B, ~4% ownership of Nvidia) than the 20th century American semiconductor juggernaut Intel ($88B).

The Nvidia CEO famously worked at Denny’s as a teenager and later co-founded the company inside a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose along with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky.

This backstory takes us to the best quote of the 2024. During a chat with Stanford MBA students, Huang talked about his upbringing:

To me, no task is beneath me because — remember — I used to be a dishwasher. I mean that…I used to clean toilets. I mean, I cleaned a lot of toilets, I've cleaned more toilets than all of you combined. And some of them, you just can't unsee.

Huang later told another audience that his Denny’s days taught him resilience — which he believes is more important for success than intelligence — and he wished ambitious people an “ample dose of pain and suffering” to harden them against life’s inevitable struggles.

On a related note, the other top book of 2024 that I was going to pick was Tae Kim’s The Nvidia Way, the first book to fully recount the rise of the chip giant.

I’ll be writing a longer piece on The Nvidia Way but had to include this incredible nugget about Jensen Huang’s management style which is also toilet-related (bold mine):

As the day went on, no place in Nvidia headquarters was safe from a drive-by grilling from Jensen. Kenneth Hurley, a technical marketing engineer, was at a urinal when Jensen walked up to the one next to him.

“I’m not the kind of guy who likes to talk in the bathroom,” Hurley said. Jensen had other ideas. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked. Hurley replied with a noncommittal “not much,” which earned him a sidelong glance from the CEO. Hurley panicked, thinking, “I’m going to get fired because he thinks I’m not doing anything. He’s probably wondering what I’m doing at Nvidia.”

To save face, Hurley proceeded to list twenty things he was working on, from convincing developers to buy Nvidia’s latest graphics card to teaching those developers how to program new features on them. “Okay,” Jensen replied, apparently satisfied with the engineer’s answer.

Hilarious. I posted the story on X and Hurley confirmed the details. They need to put this exchange in the dictionary next to “Founder Mode”. It’s also the perfect variant of this meme template:

***

BEST PURCHASE: Shokz OpenRun Headphones

I think most people know the AirPods ownership cycle:

1. Buy new AirPods.
2. Marvel at the convenience and how seamlessly the bluetooth connects to your MacBook or iPhone.
3. Enjoy them for 3 months while washing dishes, doing grocery shops, working out or eating a Big Mac meal in the parking lot of a McDonald’s by yourself because it’s one of the most zen experiences a dad can have.
4. Lose one of the AirPods (forcing your other ear to take all the audio stress and probably developing some auditory imbalance that will affect you later in life).
5. Lose the 2nd AirPod and/or the AirPod case.
6. Buy new AirPods at Costco right when you enter the warehouse because they put them at the entrance next to the 50-inch flatscreen TVs.
7. Find a lost AirPod (but only one of them) 6 months later in a pair of jeans you accidentally left in the washer but haven’t worn since. Earwax totally caked in.
8. Repeat.

This cycle has happened to me 3x now.

I officially gave up because it was messing with my daily routine. My usual plan is to spend at least 90 minutes outside everyday as a cure to my terminal online-ness. When I’m about to head out the door and my AirPods are lost, I’ll burn precious minutes digging through a drawer of wired earphones that may or may not work with my iPhone because Apple had the “courage” to nuke the headphone jack.

My wife got so tired of hearing me ask, “have you seen my AirPods by chance” that she took matters into her own hards and bought me a pair of Shokz OpenRun Headphones. These things are dope and solved all the problems:

• Bone-induction technology (so nothing goes in my ears and no more wax issues)
• Marathon legend Eliud Kipchoge endorses them (I’m a sucker for social proof)
• A single wireless bluetooth headset worn behind the head and ideal for jogging so you can actually hear your surroundings (much harder to lose and the audio is spread across both ears)

I know what some of you are thinking, “Trung, losing your AirPods is such a first-world problem.” Yes it is. And I guarantee 64% of you have experienced the same thing and hate it. So, something to think about.

***

BEST SONG: Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us”

Let me start by saying that I don’t have a dog in this race. I like Drake and Kendrick. They are both beasts and have been on top of the rap game for over a decade.

But if I’m putting on my objective cultural critic hat, there’s no question that Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” absolutely bodied Drake.

The beat that kicks in right as Kendrick says “Mustard on the beat, hoe” is insane and led to the creation of one of the funniest memes of 2024 (Joe Biden “Crip walking to the song”). Also, the pop-up concert in LA when Kendrick brought out Dre and the entire city of LA — including members of feuding gangs and basketball stars (including former Drake friend and Toronto Raptors player DeMar Derozan) — to sing “Not Like Us” was one of the top music moments of the year based on the memes I saw on the timeline.

You knew it was bad when Drake resorted to suing his own record label for allegedly boosting Kendrick’s streams with bots for the song. The online consensus is that this legal move was pure sour grapes.

I hope the artists squash it, though. Let’s not escalate to violence. My longshot prediction: Kendrick brings out Drake (and L’il Wayne) during his Super Bowl Halftime performance in New Orleans in February 2025. And they sing “F**king Problems” together.

***

BEST SATPOST ARTICLES

I’m basing this list off of e-mail opens, site visits and the number of times someone replied with a comment that read “such a great read” or “unsub, this is awful”:

• The Dorito-fication of Media (How the evolution of media created ultra-processed junk food for our mind.)
• Francis Ford Coppola: The Entrepreneur (Exploring the legendary director's business career in 8 films, a studio and a winery.)
• Jerry Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery (Notes from the 1987 Esquire magazine issue that inspired Jerry Seinfeld to "pursue mastery [because] that will fulfill your life".)
• Learning to Slow Down Time (It feels like time is moving faster when we age. How to slow it down? Nature, vacations, events, novelty and random day trips to Disneyland.)
• Starbucks Digital Dilemma (The Starbucks rewards app is an incredible business. However, mobile orders are getting out of control and hurting the brand's "premium" vibe.)
• How Hermès Sells "Time” (The ~$250B French luxury giant creates the most sought after leather bags through craftsmanship, heritage and long-term thinking.)

***

BEST TV SHOW: Landman

Earlier in December, I wrote about how Taylor Sheridan went from unemployed actor at 40 to successful screenwriter at 45 (Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River) to Hollywood TV mogul at 50 (Yellowstone).

The genesis for that article was a viral clip from his new show Landman, about a fixer (Billy Bob Thornton) for an oil company in West Texas. In the scene, Thornton’s character asks his daughter if she is having premarital sex and the answer is wild.

Since Sheridan writes basically every episode of his TV shows in a small Wyoming cottage he built to be his writing bunker (his producing partner David Glasser says Sheridan “writes scripts like you or I have a cup of coffee”), many people felt that he was probably spreading himself too thin and letting some questionable lines slip through (one data point: the last few seasons of Yellowstone aren’t nearly as sharp as the first few).

Anyway, I finally got around to watching Landman and it is actually quite good. It’s definitely the best fictional exploration of the energy industry I’ve ever seen on TV. Thornton is hilarious in the role and — like Kevin Costner for Yellowstone (before he left the show) — Sheridan is just writing the perfect characters for famous actors on the backend of their careers. Never forget that Thornton has so much rizz, he bagged Angelina Jolie in her prime and they were married between 2000 to 2003.

Speaking of rizz, Jon Hamm plays an oil CEO married to Demi Moore and it’s his best role since Mad Men. Thornton’s dysfunctional family (divorced with two kids) keeps the personal stuff interesting (the daughter’s acting leaves a bit to be desired, though).

To sum it up, Landman is part Yellowstone mixed with some Sicario (great scenes with cartels vs. oil companies) and Thornton giving an awesome performance.

I do need to add three caveats for this pick, though.

First, Landman is 10 episodes long and there are still 3 more to go. I’m probably breaking some “Best Of” list rule by picking it even though it’s not done. The show can very well flop at the end. Or it can nail the conclusion. We’ll see. It’s like the NBA draft, people love throwing around the word “potential” because anything can happen and that’s what makes it exciting.

Second, I only watched four other TV shows this year:

• Three-Body Problem: Netflix’s adaptation of the famous Chinese science-fiction book had a very compelling start (one of the first real Western media looks at China’s Cultural Revolution under Mao). But the rest of the science-fiction whoddunnit vibes didn’t really work for me. People were always worried that the books would be tough to adapt and I’m inclined to agree.
  
  
• House of the Dragon: The best description I read for the second season of the Game of Thrones spin-off was that it “could have been an e-mail”. The first season fast-forwarded decades between some episodes and then the follow-up season felt like it had a bunch of filler. Weird.
  
  
• The Sympathizer: HBO adapted the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. The story involves a Vietnamese Communist spy doing covert activities as a refugee spy in America in the latter half of the 1970s. It’s the real first prestige Hollywood production telling the Vietnam War from this perspective with Vietnamese-Australian actor Hoa Xuande in the lead. Robert Downey Jr. produced it and played multiple roles (film producer, congressman, CIA spy). The first three episodes — of the 7-episode season — were directed by South Korean directing legend Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and were quite good. Episode 4 was a fictional re-telling of the making of Francis Ford Coppolla’s Apocalypse Now and may have been the best of the series. But then the final 3 episodes really fell off for me.
  
  
• Shogun: Incredibly ambitious show. Based on the book about a handful of Europeans discovering Japan in the 1600s. Sets and costumers were gorgeous and most of the show spoken in Japanese. It cleaned up at the Emmy’s but the end of the 10-episode season felt stretched.

Third, I’m kind of souring on streaming TV shows and want to spend more time watching films. It’s mostly about time. A film is 2 hours while a TV show commitment could easily hit 10+ hours and the show-runners are often just milking the plot lines to get them checks. You can spend double-digit hours watching a TV show and not even really remember anything. It’s total passive viewing, usually with a 2nd screen (e.g. me scrolling X; hell, I’m scrolling X while writing this “Best of 2024” piece right now).

Quentin Tarantino recently went on the Joe Rogan podcast and perfectly articulated why the tightness of the film format leads to better content than TV. He is biased as a film director but he made such a great point while talking about Yellowstone (which he enjoyed for the first 3 seasons):

A lot of TV now has the patina of a movie. They're using cinematic language to get you caught up…while I'm watching [Yellowstone], I am compelled…but at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera. They've introduced you to a bunch of characters. You actually kind of know all their backstories. […]

You don't remember it 5 years from now. You're caught up in the minutia of it at the moment. The difference [with film] is I'll see a good western movie and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

I'll remember the story. I'll remember this scene or that scene. It built to an emotional climax of some degree…it's not just about interpersonal relationships. The story is good itself but there's a payoff. There's not a payoff on [a lot of TV]. It's just more inter-connectional drama. While I'm watching it, that's good enough. But when it’s over, I couldn’t tell you anything about the show.

To be clear, he’s referring to quality film and TV. And it’s obviously possible to have a satisfying prestige TV arc (Tarantino cites Season 1 of Homeland as one). I think the TV shows that really stick the landing (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Succession, Mad Men, The Wire) are exceptions that prove the rule Tarantino is pointing out.

Anecdotally, the majority of pop culture quotes that me and my friends parrot are drawn from movies. I think this speaks to how films with tight story and character arcs have much longer-lasting emotional effects as compared to passively consuming endless TV soap opera drama.

The show Suits is one of the biggest offenders imo. I liked it in the moment and it’s become hugely popular in a second life on Netflix. But it’s basically just the same storylines over and over. I don’t remember a single quote except a YouTube comment for a video of Meghan Markle’s character playing hard to get with user @harikishan5158 deadpanning, “she literally could be the duchess of sussex”.

I am excited to keep watching Landman but odds are it won’t stick as well as a good film. In fact, my favourite and most oft-quoted work by Sheridan is Sicario (good lord, that border scene).

***

BEST MEME: Hawk Tuah

At this point, you are all probably familiar with the 34-second clip of a Tennessee girl (Hailey Welch) telling a “man on the street” interviewer how she would pleasure a guy by making the “Hawk Tuah” sound and “spittin’ on that thang”.

The good people at Know Your Meme rank Hawk Tuah as the 3rd top meme of 2024 (behind only “Brazilian Miku” and the “Chill, Guy” dog).

But since this is my year-end wrap, I’m going to give the Best Meme of 2024 to Hawk Tuah girl.

Let me explain.

Last month, I wrote about Taylor Swift’s $2B Eras Tour. It was the most financially successful concert tour ever and a cultural mainstay for the past two years.

According to Google Trends, Hawk Tuah at its peak — in late June — reached the same level of internet interest as Taylor Swift. Obviously obviously obviously Swift is on another level as a celebrity and creative talent.

However, Hawk Tuah briefly reached similar levels of internet saturation and it was around the time that half my timeline was people posting the phrase, “If she don’t hawk tuah, I won’t talk tuah.”

Welch turned that attention into ~2.5m followers across X, Instagram and TikTok. Now, in 2024, it’s pretty well known how people can monetize a viral moment and Welch tried it all:

• Merch: She started selling trucker hats days after the meme went viral.
• Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand: She trademarked “Hawk Tuah” and floated the idea of starting a BBQ sauce.
• SAAS app: She launched Pookie Tools, an “AI-powered” dating app with next-level technology including a tool to guess someone’s height based on their dating profile photos (AGI can’t be too far now).
• Podcast: She started Talk Tuah with Haliey Welch and pulled in 250k-500k viewers per episode on YouTube (the podcast even briefly broke into the top 5 shows on Apple podcasts).
• Affiliate ads: The podcast is sponsored by Jake Paul’s sports-betting app Betr and Welch legit slangs sign-up codes while admitting she doesn’t follow any of the sports.

Welch was so serious about turning her viral moment into something real that she launched a company to house her entrepreneurial ventures and it was called 16 Minutes (as in, she plans to outlive her “15 minutes of fame”).

I honestly respected the hustle and Welch was transitioning away from just being “Hawk Tuah Girl”. Her Southern twang and person-ability are obvious draws. It was like a combination of Theo Von (Southern comedian turned massive podcaster) and Bobbi Althoff (TikTok-mom influencer turned massive podcaster).

Most people trying to turn a nuclear viral moment into a career usually burn out within a few weeks (and end up as the equivalent of reality TV stars in the 1990s who do college nightclub party appearances for $100 and a few free Red Bull and Vodkas).

Jack Forge nailed the standard viral girl arc with this post a few days after the world learned about Hawk Tuah:

The Hawk Tuah girl is on minute 14 of her 15 minutes of fame.

There are only a few options left for her:

- Cr*pto scam

- Political grifter 

- OF

Let's see how this plays out. 

For months, Welch bucked the trend. No political grifting. No OnlyFans account. And no crypto. But, sure enough, someone convinced her to do a memecoin and she launched Hawk Tuah Coin ($HAWK) in early December.

On the first day of trading, the $HAWK’s market cap jumped to $500m then immediately crashed 90%. With any memecoin launch, the most obvious ways to get “rugged” (translation: getting scammed by a crypto pump and dump) is by insiders hyping up the coin and then immediately selling at the launch. Or having sophisticated bots buy and sell coins against retail buyers.

Bloomberg writer Matt Levine had the best breakdown of the $HAWK fiasco:

Welch was not, prior to [her viral moment], part of the fame economy: She had a regular job, was not an influencer, and the video was for someone else’s channel. But once she went viral she was maximally interested in becoming part of the fame economy. How does one do that? How does one parlay one brief funny viral clip into a lucrative career? There are well-understood approaches. You can probably get into reality television, perhaps followed by politics. You can get paid to promote products — in ads, or on your own social media — or to show up at nightclubs and other events. You can sell merch. If you can sing or act, you use your viral fame as a way into a singing or acting career. It is 2024, so Welch literally has a podcast.

But in 2024 there is a much, much, much, much, much better answer. Modern finance has created an incredible tool for directly monetizing your 15 minutes of fame. This tool is the memecoin. A memecoin is a crypto token that is created to capture some meme, a token whose price goes up when the meme gets a lot of popular attention and down when it doesn’t. […]

So! I mean! Here you are! You have become extremely famous for one thing. Parlaying that into a long and lucrative fame-based career probably will require doing other things: singing or acting or at least showing up at nightclubs. But you have a ton of meme value right now, even if you probably won’t in a year. So the thing to do is to capitalize that meme value into a memecoin, give yourself most of the tokens, and then sell them to the public. The coins will be popular among traders for, you know, a day, so you will sell a lot of them and pocket millions of dollars. And that’s it, that’s the end. You don’t have to do any other things. You have gone viral and then fully, directly monetized your virality. […]

Yes I mean obviously Haliey Welch should get millions of dollars from selling a token representing her own virality, and obviously that token’s value should go to zero in like a day. That is how modern finance works! I don’t know why you would buy the token, but then I don’t own PNUT or PEPE or Dogecoin either. People are complaining that this is a “rug pull” or a “pump and dump,” but I cannot understand what different thing they thought would happen. The Hawk Tuah coin would build an enduring business with large and growing value for years to come? What? Why? How? It’s a memecoin representing the fastest-melting imaginable form of fame; of course it should go to $500 million and then to zero in a day. That’s what it’s for! It worked perfectly!

In the least shocking development ever, a group of “investors” — air quotes because c’mon — sued the Hawk Tuah Coin team for the “unlawful promotion and sale” of the $HAWK token. The official defendant named in the suit includes the “Tuah The Moon Foundation” (yet another piece of evidence proving that we are living in the dumbest possible timeline).

From my understanding, the $HAWK launch did get botted very hard. Welch may have made $0 from it if she held (the crypto team behind her raked in millions in trading fees, though). Either way, Welch was in way over her head. Hilariously, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said they were deceived because the pre-launch marketing of $HAWK “promised more than a speculative asset, portraying it as a cultural movement”. HAHHAHHAHHA, literally no one believed that. She says she's working with lawyers sort through the botched launch. 

Welch should have never gone down the memecoin route. She was headed to a pretty well-paying creator career. Just ride out the playbook you had. Sell me some Spicy Hawk Tuah Mayo and keep bringing rappers on to a pretty large podcast while shilling a sports-betting app. All above aboard in 2024.

Hawk Tuah is both the Meme of the Year and Cautionary Creator Tale of The Year (one that I have learnt from and promise you readers that I’ll never launch a $TRUNG coin…but I might do a line of extra garlicky tahini dip).

***

BEST MEME BY ME

By pure engagement numbers.

My most viral meme image was during the Apple Vision Pro launch in February. The jokes were absolutely out of control that first weekend. The juxtaposition with the initial Apple hype and how the product flopped over the rest of the year is pretty jarring to look back on.

My most viewed video meme was when I made an El Risitas video about Google’s disastrous AI image generator launch in also February (jokes kind of on me now because Google has been on an AI heater with a bunch of legit end-of-year product releases).

I ended up with ~50m views thanks to an Elon boost and I had a handful of Google employees DM me saying the clip was shared in private chats and people were throwing up the “😂” and “🤣” emojis.

***

BEST PODCAST: The Rest is History

So, my two favourite podcasts ever are Hardcore History (Dan Carlin) and Revolutions (Mike Duncan). If you’re new to either, get started with Carlin’s Supernova In The East (about the rise of the Empire of Japan in the lead-up to World War II) and Duncan’s 2nd season (American Revolution).

However, both are solo podcasts. In recent years, I have been searching for a history podcast that had at least two people to get some good banter going. The best one by far is The Rest Is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. They started in 2020 and the show has turned into an absolute monster. It’s a top 3 podcast in the UK and blowing up in other markets.

Holland and Sandbrook had so many good multi-part series in 2024 and here are a few off the top of my head:

• The Titanic story (6 episodes)
• Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation (5 episodes)
• Custer vs. Crazy Horse (11 episodes)

While we’re on the topic of podcasts, I am obligated to shill my own new show Caffeinated Deep Dives. For each episode, I drink at least 3 cups of coffees, then read at least one book on a single topic and press record for at least an hour.

Thank you all that have written kind messages about the show (also to the person that commented “i can’t stand your voice” on YouTube before deleting it, thank you for the actionable feedback and have a great new year).

We are 5 episodes in with many more planned for 2025:

• iPhone (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Calvin & Hobbes (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Sriracha Sauce (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Trader Joe’s (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• LEGO (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)

Always appreciate them fresh subs, reviews and likes 🙏🙏🙏

***

BEST AI-POWERED RESEARCH APP THAT I'M BUILDING

This was a tough choice**, but I had to pick Bearly AI (**it was actually an easy choice because I'm only working on one app). 

If you're looking for reading, writing and speech-to-text AI tools that will save you hours on work with easy-to-use access to leading AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama)….then use code BEARLY1 for one FREE month on the app's Pro Plan.

***

BEST DECISION: Took My Mom To Paris!

My mom was born in the mid-1940s. She grew up in Vietnam while the country was under French colonial rule, then lived through the Vietnam War. Her family fled to Quebec after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and they re-built their lives in Montreal.

She’s fluent in French and has always been fascinated by Paris.

Somehow, we never went as a family while I was growing up. In our 20s and 30s, my three siblings and I always talked about taking her to the French capital but never got around to it. Writing the words “never got around to it” is so insane in retrospect considering how much my mom and dad sacrificed as refugees in a new country trying to give their children a great life.

This past October, I “cleared my schedule” and booked 5 days in Paris with my mom, my wife and our son. And by “cleared my schedule”, I mean “there’s literally nothing more important that I could have been doing than taking my mom somewhere I should have taken her years ago”.

My mom finally saw all the sites that she had grown up studying and reading about in French-Vietnamese schools: the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, Versailles, Pompidou Centre, my favourite Pret A Manger and random street cafes that served the most glorious goat cheese and tomato baguettes ever. Naturally, we found a juking Vietnamese restaurant too.

She did it all while sounding as French as any Parisian and having a blast with her grandson. I would definitely regret it if we didn’t do this trip and am very happy we did.

If you and your parents have a go-to trip that you’ve been talking about for years but “never got around to it”, make 2025 the year that you can “clear your schedule”.

On that note: Happy New Year!

Written by me, Trung Phan.

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