General Melchett

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@RingGo_parking is your app down? Can't park and keep getting error messages. Restarted app and phone. Tried 10 times over 15 mins.

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@doomerzoomer @fum6174 Maybe from the US but photo was taken in UK...

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@doomerzoomer @fum6174 $300k for a newly qualified doctor in the UK 😂

Try £45k

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Chief Marketing Officer of an AI company that spent $8 million on a Super Bowl ad last night.

The ad was 30 seconds long. 

It featured a child. The child asked our AI a question about the stars. 

Our AI answered beautifully. 

The spot tested well in focus groups. 

The creative team won an internal award. 

We generated 40,000 renders to find one where the AI didn't hallucinate. 

The approved cut was take 39,847. 

The child in the ad is not a real user. 

The answer about the stars is not a real answer. 

The entire commercial is a proof of concept for a product we have not shipped.

By halftime, the audience hated us.

Not just us. All of us. Every AI company that bought a spot. 

Sports Illustrated reported fans were "vocally fed up" before the first quarter ended. A Harris poll conducted before the game found consumers already felt "mostly negative" about AI advertising.

We knew this. The poll was published Friday. We bought the ad in September.

I watched the game from a hospitality suite with eleven other CMOs. We had a real-time sentiment dashboard on a monitor next to the bar. By the second quarter, the needle was in the red. 

Someone from our analytics team Slacked: "Audience is associating us with the Svedka ad." 

The Svedka ad was an AI-generated fever dream of two dancing androids that looked like what happens when you ask a machine to render human desire without ever having experienced it. Critics called it "warm slop." We were being grouped with the warm slop.

Twenty-three percent of all Super Bowl ads were AI or tech companies, according to iSpot. More AI ads than beer ads. More AI ads than food ads. We looked at each other across the suite and realized we had made the same mistake simultaneously. We had all bought the same thirty seconds of American attention and said the same thing into it.

I watched Ring's ad from that suite. Ring built a network of millions of AI-equipped doorbell cameras pointed at American front doors. They pitched it as a lost-pet finder. 

The ad said: "We built a surveillance panopticon and pointed it at your neighbors' homes, and now we're teaching it to recognize faces, but look -- a puppy." They did not use those words. They did not need to. 

The audience heard it anyway. Ring accidentally described its own business model in the most damning terms possible and then asked people to feel good about it.

I watched AI[.]com's ad from that suite. Nobody in the room understood it. The domain was purchased for $70 million by the CEO of Crypto[.]com. The website crashed immediately after the ad aired, because millions of people tried to find out what they had just watched and found nothing. Seventy million dollars for a URL that could not survive its own commercial.

I watched Anthropic mock OpenAI, and then watched Sam Altman call them dishonest, and then watched two companies valued at a combined $1.35 trillion spend the rest of the evening calling each other liars on X.

Someone in the suite said: "At least we didn't do that."

I said: "We spent $8 million to say the same thing they said, and nobody noticed."

I am not sure which is worse.

By the fourth quarter, the collateral damage had started. Viewers became so hypervigilant about AI that they started accusing non-AI ads of being AI-generated. Dunkin' Donuts. Comcast. Ads made by humans, by production crews, by directors with cameras and craft services -- called fake because two hours of AI advertising had conditioned 130 million people to distrust everything on their screen.

Our industry spent $100 million on Super Bowl ads to build trust in AI.

We built the opposite.

I need to tell you about a parallel that nobody in that hospitality suite mentioned, although every person in the room was old enough to remember it.

Super Bowl XXXVI. February 2022. Crypto firms bought the ad breaks. Coinbase. FTX. Crypto[.]com. They spent $54 million collectively. The ads were flashy and confident and told 100 million Americans that the future was decentralized and inevitable and worth their money.

FTX collapsed ten months later.

Coinbase spent the following year in court.

Crypto[.]com's CEO is now spending $70 million on AI domain names.

We spent more than double what crypto spent. I know this because Tech Brew calculated it this morning and my VP of Communications forwarded it to me with no comment. She always adds a comment. The absence was the comment.

Here is what I know that I am not supposed to say.

The Super Bowl is a lagging indicator of industry health.

A lagging indicator means the peak has already happened. It means the industry already believes in itself more than the public does. It means the money has been spent, the bets have been placed, and the audience -- the 130 million people you needed to convince -- sat through your pitch and felt nothing but annoyance.

I spent $8 million to learn something that a Harris poll could have told me for free.

Nobody wants what we are selling. Not like this. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But "maybe not ever" is not a phrase that survives a board meeting, so we say "not yet" and buy another ad.

The earnings call is in six weeks. When the analyst asks about brand strategy, I will say the word "awareness" and the word "consideration" and the word "momentum."

I will not say "warm slop."

I will not say "lagging indicator."

I will not mention FTX.

I will not tell them about the sentiment dashboard, or the Slack message, or the eleven CMOs in the suite who watched the needle go red and poured another drink.

We will do this again next year. 

The budget is already approved.

The budget keeps going up and to the right.

[Joe Carlasare @JoeCarlasare]

You can’t put “real world assets” on a blockchain.

You can only put IOUs for RWAs that need to be enforced by courts.

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@chronicallyshel @yorkshirerose06 @MikScarlet Working from home jobs aren't available?

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@RichardAmofa This sir, is Emile Heskey.

[TechnoEthicist American Scream @AmScream]

#Crypto is just a scam. That's it. It really is as stupid as it sounds:

1. Convince people to buy worthless tokens on the premise they'll be super-valuable.

2. Stupid people drive up price and add liquidity to the market.

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@Marilyn86434882 @POTUS45 @elonmusk https://t.co/RKGkhRGuNx

[Adrian Bott @Cavalorn]

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

[ً @trading_axe]

I was the lead market maker at Jump.

I'm no longer under NDA so I can say this,

Typically when you see down moves during the weekends like this, it is pure market manipulation.

It was one of the tactics I invented during the low volume moments.

We would load up and pay attention to Crypto Twitter as a source of sentiment, with specific accounts organized in specific categories.

One thing I used to like doing was purposely "nuking" a new 4H candle on BTC and/or ETH, which was an easy trap.

"Smart" traders know we'll eventually revisit those wickless candles, so it was good bait for me to set with eager buyers stepping in and the candle continuing lower.

They end up capitulating before we reverse.

Bottom shorters get comfortable here too.

Anyway, I can't give away too much but just know,

Most of thos "bad" price action you're seeing is a group of "whales" sitting in a chatroom together and merely oil painting on charts.

My alias in Jump was "Vincent van Gogh."

And that isn't because I lost my mind [well - that too],

But because I painted some of the best looking bear traps.

I know an influenced painter copying my work when I see one.

Stay safe.

Retar Dio.

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@WantMakeRE @patcarino If you could DM me their details, that would be greatly appreciated, thanks

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@DanNeidle I doubt the FCA cares given banks are regulated by the PRA?

Also, is filing late accounts is linked to their ability to protect depositors' money? Let's hope the PRA are looking at more important things!

[TechnoEthicist American Scream @AmScream]

Does #decentralization really make sense? Let's go over "Stupid #Crypto Talking Points"

https://t.co/tp1TN3539m

#bitcoin #btc #blockchain #tech #fintech #investing #money #finance #fire #cryptocurrency #factchecking #wisdom #cryptoReality

[TechnoEthicist American Scream @AmScream]

Crypto Industry Fun Facts:

#crypto #btc #bitcoin #cryptoReality #cryptocurrency #finance #investing #fintech #tech #scams #blockchain #eth #sol #tradFi #defi #nft #ponzi #facts #wisdom #quotes #funFacts #money #paypal #robinhood #blackrock

[American Economic Liberties Project @econliberties]

This couldn't be more false—@CFPB firmly opposed debanking and has taken measures to stop it.

The real reason @pmarca, @elonmusk & other tech oligarchs are attacking this agency is because it has protected consumers against scams they’ve profited from.

Receipts.🧵👇

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@PeterMcCormack @profplum99 How's this looking now?

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@JacobKinge Explanation here to anyone that wants to understand https://t.co/ylVbqChpnZ

[Cluseau Investments @blondesnmoney]

i see this all the time from the real life squad in addition to the ad share ppl. it's very surprising how many sharp investors do not understand this

when yields rise, the price of a bond falls. it's that simple. if a bank buys a 10 year bond at 2% and a year later, the 10 year yield is 3%, obviously a 10 year bond with a 2% coupon will be trading below par

now, here's where it becomes blatantly obvious. this isn't even math, this is english

an unrealized loss becomes a realized loss if you realize it. if you sell.

the banks that own these securities, bofa, citi, wells, chase.

they borrow from you at 0%. do you have a bofa checking account. chase maybe?

congratulations, you are the reason unrealized losses do not matter. the banks pay you nothing, so they don't care if the "trading value" of the bond goes down because they WILL NOT sell. they don't need to

on an earnings call, bofa literally said "we have no intention of taking these losses". and even if they did, they would sell the bond, take a small loss, and buy a new bond with a higher coupin (interest rate), but once again, they have no need to

they will simply run out the clock, in 10 years or whatever it is, they get their money back at par, and nothing ever happens

it really is incredible how many people do not understand this concept, it's not like there is 500 b of imminent losses. the temporary value of the bond goes down, but as long as they don't sell, they get their money back

blondesnmoney

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@NoFriendlyFireX What's NPV and opportunity cost got to do with it? This is about accounting treatment

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@TheBTCTherapist Vanguard manages passive funds which purchase a wide array of listed stocks based on a pre-set definition. Wall Street firms don't just go and take punts and buy equity stakes of companies

[General Melchett @MelchettsBeard]

@Rictiffany83 @Cymruambyth46 No judgement - "picky eaters" his words not mine!