A tale of Olympic triumph and tragedy, plus a bonkers podcast about a California con artist

Dear Friends,

The first Olympic race I remember watching was the men’s downhill in Sarajevo, in 1984. There was a brash American named Bill Johnson. He was cocky, reckless, remarkably handsome and just the kind of fellow an 8-year-old boy would be into. His family was poor, and they’d often have to sleep in the car when they traveled to races when he was a kid. The chips we carry on our shoulders can motivate us and they can destroy us. Even as a kid, I suspect I understood that as I watched him plummet down the hill, always in a tuck and often in the air. I watched on a screen that couldn’t have been more than two-by-two inches, nestled into an alcove at my grandparents’ house. He was in second place halfway down the hill, and then a miraculous first at the end. 

The next years weren’t easy, as detailed in a remarkable 2002 profile in Outside by Bill Donahue. The money dumped on a charismatic gold medalist is not, as they say in my business, recurring revenue. He bought a beautiful house and a speedboat. He carried around tens of thousands of dollars in cash. He crashed and got injured. He showed up late to practice and fought with his coaches. By the time he was 40, he was broke, burned out, and burned down. As many men do at this age, he tried to recapture the power of his youth and started to train in a quixotic quest to make the Olympics again. A crash left him in a coma that he would never really recover from. He died in 2016, in Gresham, Oregon.

In more encouraging Olympic news, I loved this story by The Atlantic’s Sally Jenkins on the figure skating protégée Ilia Malinin, who seems primed to soon reach stardom in Milan. It’s a story about parents and their children and obsession. But it’s also remarkably a story about physics.

“Wearing carbon-composite skates that weigh about two pounds each, Malinin reaches a vertical leap of approximately 30 inches on his quad axel—one kinematic study captured it at 33 inches, similar to the standing vertical leaps of NBA players such as Stephen Curry, Devin Booker, and Kevin Durant. He lands on a blade that is just 3/16 of an inch wide.

Malinin enters the jump skating at about 15 miles an hour. As he snaps into his shoulder turn, he draws his arms and legs inward, creating a spin. At this stage, he experiences at least 180 pounds of centripetal force. By way of comparison, a NASCAR driver rounding a corner will experience about 400 pounds of centripetal force, while wearing a seat belt. As he reaches his apex, Malinin is spinning at 350 revolutions per minute. This is about the same as a kitchen stand mixer or the marine engine of an oil tanker.”

Sally, meanwhile, has been on fire this week. Here’s a great piece about Mike Vrabel (go Pats), and a stemwinder about the meltdown at The Washington Post. And, speaking of the Super Bowl, if anyone has seen me and my youngest son at school dropoff the past three weeks and wondered why he bangs me on the head and declares “the big dogs come out in January” before he goes in, this is why. 

Back to the Olympics, there’s a phenomenal story in The New York Times Magazine about the cross-country skier Jessie Diggins, which includes a remarkable description of the physiological challenges of that sport as well as an explanation for how Diggins can drive herself deep, deep, deep into what endurance athletes call the pain cave. I’ll be rooting for her to win gold. And I have long loved this dual profile of Hermann Maier and my childhood friend Bode Miller: deep competitors and near total opposites. 

Over in the world of tech, the indefatigable Andy Greenberg has a crushing story about a man kidnapped and forced to work in a crypto romance scam based in the Golden Triangle. Send it to anyone you know who has found love with someone mysterious online who won’t meet in person but has an affinity for bitcoin. And send it to anyone who teaches a class on journalism and ethics, because Greenberg is forced to navigate a hairy, emotionally wrenching situation. It’s the kind of thing that AI could not manage, even if it’s getting better at certain parts of this profession, as detailed in a terrific Platformer experiment.

My favorite podcast this past month was a beautiful one with Jacob Collier on Broken Record, which manages to combine a life story with several discursions on theory and performance. And Snowball, from the series Deep Cover, is bonkers. Never trust a new spouse who has two passports with different birthdays. 

The Most Interesting Things in Tech

A week ago, it looked as though Moltbook—a new social network for AI agents—might mark a profound moment in the evolution of AI. Elon Musk said this was a sign we’re in the “very early stages of the singularity.” We quickly learned that was not the case. Many of the posts that went viral—such as the bots developing secret languages—were fake, and the real conversations were as mundane as you’d expect. The rise and fall of Moltbook is a good reminder of how much anxiety and angst there is about AI right now. It’s also a cautionary tale of how insecure the agentic web still is. 

The most interesting paper I read this week came from researchers at Anthropic, about a surprising risk of smarter AI. They found that top models tend to get complex problems wrong in more unpredictable ways. The variance is low with easy issues but increases as they become more complicated. This suggests some of the fear around AI misalignment may be misplaced. 

Finally, an article from Wired reveals the extent to which bots are already changing the web. There were roughly 800 million bot requests to websites in July. That figure was 1.8 billion in December. The number of crawlers disregarding robots.txt, a file that tells them not to scrape a site, increased by 400% over the last half of the year. And bots are now pulling more real-time information, with a focus on entertainment and news content. This has set off an arms race between scrapers and blockers, and points to a fundamental transition for the internet. It is going from a place largely dominated by content made for humans, by humans, to one made for bots, by bots. I touch on some of the economic implications of this here.

Events and Podcasts

Here are some recent podcasts I’ve been a guest on and upcoming events I’m taking part in.

Enjoy the Olympics! Particularly if you’re a human reader of this newsletter and not a bot scraping this site. 

Cheers * N

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