Adam Saks

Eternal learner. Live Cushy™. Growth @google | ✍️Saks Snacks | |

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

50% of @whoop users track alcohol consumption in their digital journal.

They're accruing one of the largest alcohol-related data sets in the world.

Here's what you can learn from their user data:

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

@brettdash_ what a dopamine hit to receive this message!

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

@michaelmiraflor I hope you went

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

If you’ve never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’ll change you

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents.

The war on agents has begun, and here’s how it probably plays out:

Stage 1: Companies block agents because agents skip the ads and upsells.

Stage 2: Agents learn to act like humans, and it becomes an arms race.

Stage 3: The market splits. Companies that make money on sales let agents in, companies that make money on data charge for access, and the giants build their own agents.

Stage 4: A trusted middle layer for agent identity and payments becomes the standard way in.

Stage 5: Companies that welcome agents start winning customers from the ones that block them.

Stage 6: The agent blockers come back and let agents in on their own terms.

Stage 7: Everyone starts competing for agents with better prices, faster checkout and SEO built for agents.

Stage 8: The ads come back, and companies pay to be your agent’s first recommendation.

Stage 9: The agent war ends, and selling to agents becomes as normal as having a website.

[mel 🫀☁️ @melodaysong]

getting absolutely wrecked by this today

[Adam Rossi @rossiadam]

“You are what you think about, all day long.”

[Adam Delehanty @adam__xyz]

anti-slop formula:

1) human finds the story and shapes the arc
2) claude does the first draft
3) human makes it idiosyncratic, funny and strange

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

Need to set up this workflow on my personal AI stack but have been deploying this for my day job with early versions of Google Slides and the results are truly unbelievable.

Requires a little bit of setting up the right data connectors up front, but it's so worth the investment.

[Tyler Denk 🐝 @denk_tweets]

I'm begging you to try this in claude the next time you make a slide deck:

(this was actually inspired by the former Apple design lead who wrote a guest post for @lennysan newsletter... now I use it on everything)

> write a rough outline first: bullet points for what each slide should say, plus the data or chart you want on it

> drop in links to any docs, or name the Slack channels you want it to pull from

> open Claude Code, give it your past decks as reference plus some design direction, and connect it to Figma Slides

> let it build the first draft (mine took about 30 minutes, pulling numbers straight from our database, Slack and meeting transcripts)

> the sexy bit: launch two subagents as critics. one that keeps improving the design until it's happy, and one that checks the narrative actually lands your objective and talking points

> go through every slide yourself and make final edits on your own (I just talk to it with Wispr Flow)

this took 1/3 the time it usually takes to make my quarterly recap deck.. and it's easily the best one I've ever made

I genuinely can't believe I used to create shapes with my mouse and drag and drop things around the screen like a caveman

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

@FoundersPodcast what happens when you do genuinely great work. glad to see you get a huge moment and was surprised to see so many people that were completely unaware of your work! keep going!

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

@TaylorHoliday just one sliver of the equation. i know CTC’s mainly eComm but also I’m sure you’ve seen enough examples of businesses that use predatory subscription models that (hopefully) will be challenged by this…

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

1 sliver of good news (for consumers) is that predatory subscription business models will be severely challenged by agents who cancel on users’ behalf.

The value exchange between merchants + consumers will be rewritten bc of agents

[Taylor Holiday @TaylorHoliday]

There is a non-zero chance that the entire consumer subscription economy exists expressly because enough people forget or are too lazy to cancel.

Agents could change all of that.

Additionally the convenience of the recurring purchase is diminished when an agent can constantly scour for better prices and options (and eventually monitor consumption).

It’s always seemed to me that the agentic product preference would orient as close to an objective value ((quality/price)*pace of access)? In a way that is ultimately very pro consumer and will change the market a lot.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I'm increasingly convinced that discretion is one of the most underrated traits in life. Not every story is yours to tell. And not every story needs to be told. Be the kind of person people can trust with something private. In a drama-obsessed culture, discretion has real power.

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

@mattragland love this list! Thanks for sharing and happy bday!

[gabrielle @legitimatetiger]

The attack on attention is the dark magic of our age, and most of the population is too deep into the trance to realize it.

I don't think people understand that their attention is pure money. Cash, going directly into these apps' pockets, because you cannot opt out of the ads they've sold for you to see. Do you understand that they're selling your attention without your direct consent every second of every day? Do you get that they've gotten so good at ensuring you stay within that manufactured braindead trance-like state, that they are counting on you being an easy cash out at this point? Because they are. They're counting on the dollars they can bank off of your descent into degenerate illiteracy. And you need to prove them wrong out of spite.

Your attention is much more valuable than you could possibly conceive of. It's the one thing on earth actually worth money by the minute in a capitalistic system that is failing to extract more profit from an already enslaved society. The only way they can secure more is by enslaving your mind in the hours you spend outside of the work that already demands your body and time as sacrifice. There is no vital energy left for you in this plan.

Infinite scrolling is a spell with no natural end. Traditional media had a beginning and an end, while this is designed not to. There are no boundaries to how much of your energy it can harvest... it's like tapping into an infinite source, because you ARE infinite energy. A trance is characterized by absence, not being fully present in the moment even though your attention is occupied. When you come out of a trance, you do not feel energized, you feel drained, disoriented, like you've just lost time without meaning to. That is the very signature of their energy harvesting technique.

Yes, these apps started as technology built by human engineers, but they've been fed so much collective attention that they have become their own egregore: a non-physical, autonomous group entity created by the collective thoughts, shared emotions, and sustained focus of a large group of people. It doesn't need its creators' intent to run dark magic on you; it can be leveraged and manipulated by darker entities that wish to keep this planet in the cycle of survival-based consciousness.

The most sinister aspect of all this is that the time you're giving up is the one thing you cannot buy back. This keeps humans benefitting from capitalism happy, but it also satisfies the darker entities. The more time you lose from this lifetime, the less likely you are to make any meaningful impact on this planet and help it ascend into a higher state by simply existing and having a mind of your own.

They are stripping you of your most valuable resource and you're just accepting it because it feels good to give in, but you are paying with your life every second that you do. With 6 hours of daily screentime, most people are gonna spend 17 years of their lives behind a screen. 4 hours of screentime per day gives these companies 2 entire months off your entire year. It is so much worse than you've convinced yourself it is. Stop normalizing this in your head and get serious about fighting this off, every second of every day if you need to.

Be incredibly stingy with your attention and your ability to synthesize knowledge and preserve critical thinking. Expose yourself to different theories, ideas, and opposing points of view. Allow yourself to be challenged daily and most of all, steer clear of the black magic rectangle as often as possible. Read. Watch long movies. Spend time outside. Perform artsy, handsy crafts to keep your brain engaged and in a state of neuroplasticity. Be stubborn about living your life and claiming every second as yours, claiming your most precious resource as your own: your attention. I fully believe each soul alive at this moment in time is infinitely stronger than all of this and more than capable of overcoming it.

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

@AramLeighton8 @JustBB_Media @MLB @awscloud might be time to look into the accuracy of your tracking... 415 is CRIMINAL

[Just Baseball @JustBB_Media]

Griffin Conine CRUSHES a home run!

He’s homered in two of his last three games 💪

[Just Baseball @JustBB_Media]

Griffin Conine goes the other way for his 18th home run of the year!

His OPS is up to .838 this season 🐠

[Jeffrey Katzenberg @jeffreykWNDR]

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.

Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.”

I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.

In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.

There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.

People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.

Is History Repeating Itself?

The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul."

Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work.
A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept.

They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded.

This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix.

What I Learned From Walt Disney

In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell.

We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not.

That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create.

A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did.

Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.”

A Distinction With a Difference

I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . .

Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new.

Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out.

Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new.

One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable.

Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground.

A Path Forward

In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . .

Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human.

At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling.

The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it.

There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us.

The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires.

What I Learned From Steve Jobs

Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities.

What I See Coming Soon

As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.

Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

[Stephen Zerfas @stephen_zerfas]

I like to read religions as psycho-technology tech trees.

For thousands of years, the world’s smartest people worked on algorithms for wellbeing. Some techniques build on others, the way radio made satellites possible.

The tools came bundled with dogma, metaphysical stories, and tribalism. But if you know what to look for, religious texts can read like rediscovered manuals for powerful ancient technology.

[Aram Leighton @AramLeighton8]

Off the bench, go get 102 kid