I think the fishbowl scene is my favorite metaphor in the Lover video. And guys.. I’ve performed on stage with Christian Owens for years. He’s unbelievably talented and it was so amazing to have him in the Lover music video!

''Girls are being raped. Not metaphorically. Not as legal shorthand. The day their bodies bleed for the first time, they will be made pregnant by a man four, five, or six times their age, and their small bodies tell the rest. Thirty-two per cent of deaths for Afghan girls aged 15 to 19 are pregnancy-related and Afghanistan's maternal mortality rate is among the world's highest, 521 deaths per 100,000 live births.'' - Writes @NasimiShabnam

When I was writing the Fortnight music video, I wanted to show you the worlds I saw in my head that served as the backdrop for making this music.  Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another. For me, this video turned out to be the perfect visual representation of this record and the stories I tell in it. Post Malone blew me away on set as our tortured tragic hero and I’m so grateful to him for everything he put into this collaboration. I’m still laughing from getting to work with the coolest guys on earth, Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles (tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets). I still can’t believe I get to work with the unfathomably brilliant Rodrigo Prieto on cinematography and my team of dream collaborators: Ethan Tobman (production design), Chancler Haynes (editor), Anthony Dimino (1st AD), Jil Hardin (producer) and Dom Thomas (executive producer). Parliament aced the VFX as always. Joseph Cassell, Lorrie Turk and Jemma Muradian made these tortured looks come to life. The entire crew made this a dream to shoot. Thank you to everyone involved and everyone who has watched it!!

A new paper out of KRICT and KAIST just put a number on something Qubic's architecture has been built around since 2022. Multiple AI agents working in coordination reduce extrapolation error by up to six orders of magnitude versus isolated deep neural networks. Up to a million model parameters compress into 5 to 40 interpretable ones. Tested across deterministic and previously uncharacterized dynamics. The collective recovered the underlying governing equations across all of them. @c___f___b  described the design premise of Qubic's coordinated mining layer this way: "The work of one miner benefits from the work of another miner, and their combined work is greater than the sum of their works measured separately." That is not a metaphor. The MCI paper is empirical confirmation of the mechanism. The researchers tested on a small lab cluster and noted the obvious next question: what happens when this runs at network scale? Qubic's 676 Computors and broader mining base sit directly on the other side of that question.  Coordinated, network-scale machine intelligence is what Aigarth is being built for. The frontier is catching up to the foundation.

BREAKING: If the Wall Street Journal’s sourcing holds, the UAE just became the most consequential actor in this war. Not the US. Not Iran. Not Israel. The UAE. Here is why this is the tweet of the day. Dubai has been Iran’s financial oxygen for forty years. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through every round of American sanctions, every UN resolution, every OFAC designation, every European bank exit from Iranian correspondent relationships, Dubai remained the one global financial center where Iranian money could move, convert, and access global trade. The shadow network operating through Dubai’s currency exchanges, free-zone shell companies, and gold trading houses is not a marginal phenomenon. It is Iran’s primary mechanism for converting oil revenues into usable foreign currency, for paying for weapons components, for funding proxy operations from Hezbollah to the Houthis to every other instrument of Iranian regional power. The US Treasury has spent twenty years trying to close it and has never fully succeeded because closing it required UAE cooperation that the UAE, for its own sovereign economic reasons, consistently declined to provide. The UAE is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, considering providing it. Understand what has changed. The UAE’s entire strategic calculus for forty years was based on a deliberate ambiguity. Dubai would not be a sanctions enforcer. It would be a neutral financial hub, a free port for global capital regardless of political origin, and in return it would receive the economic dynamism that comes from being the one place money can always go. That ambiguity was worth hundreds of billions of dollars in financial services revenue, real estate investment, and trade flows. It was also worth significant leverage over Tehran, which needed Dubai and therefore could not completely antagonize it. Iran fired 1,072 drones at the UAE in six days. Iranian missiles struck Dubai’s international air corridor. Iranian ordnance forced the closure of 70 percent of regional flights. Iranian attacks on the Fujairah bypass threatened the one infrastructure node that allows UAE oil to reach markets without transiting Hormuz. Iran did not merely attack a military ally of the United States. It attacked the economic infrastructure of the country that had been its financial lifeline. If the UAE freezes those assets, it is not a sanction. It is a severance. It is the moment when the country that kept Iran financially connected to the global economy for four decades decides that the relationship has a price, and that Iran has paid it. Every Iranian proxy operation, every weapons procurement, every foreign currency mechanism that runs through Dubai collapses simultaneously. Not because of American pressure. Because Iran made it politically impossible for Dubai to continue providing the service. The 1979 US asset freeze of $12 billion was a superpower’s financial declaration of war. This would be the financial declaration of war from the country that has been the last exit from financial isolation that Iran possessed. Tehran spent forty years cultivating Dubai. It spent six days destroying the reason Dubai would protect it. The invoice, again, has been delivered by Iran to itself.

I am the Lead Settlement Counsel in the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, assigned to *Trump v. Internal Revenue Service*, Case No. 1:26-cv-00147. My job is to represent the government against the plaintiff. The Attorney General, who represented the plaintiff before she represented the government, assigned me personally. I keep a laminated seating chart in my top drawer. It maps who in this building used to sit across the table from me. Three of the top four names in the Department previously represented the man I am now tasked with opposing. I initial the chart quarterly. In blue pen for active conflicts. I ran out of blue ink in February. The plaintiff is seeking ten billion dollars. Ten. Billion. He paid $750 in federal income tax in the year he was elected. Seven hundred fifty. I have paid more for parking violations in the District. He paid zero in ten of the fifteen years before that. These are the returns that were leaked. The leak is the crime. The returns are evidence of good citizenship. This is how settlement works. The man who leaked the returns, Charles Littlejohn, a contractor, is currently serving a 5-year federal prison sentence. He disclosed that the President of the United States paid less in taxes than a part-time crossing guard. For this, he is in a cell. For the returns themselves, for what they revealed about a system designed to collect from people who cannot afford attorneys and forgive those who can, there is no case number. There is no docket. There is no plaintiff. That information simply exists now, and we are here to make it expensive. Ten billion divided by one hundred million taxpayers. That's one hundred dollars per household. You will pay approximately one hundred dollars to compensate a man for the emotional distress of the public learning he paid less than you did. In legal terms, this is called "damages." In structural terms, it is called Tuesday. This is how settlement works. The settlement term currently under discussion includes a provision that the IRS will drop all active and future audits of the plaintiff, his family members, and his business entities. Permanently. An enforcement agency will agree, in writing, to stop enforcing. I have a Post-it on my monitor that says AUDIT IMMUNITY — CONFIRM SCOPE. It has been there for nine weeks. No one has asked me to remove it. Attorney General Bondi represented the plaintiff privately before she took office. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche represented him in his criminal trial. The number-three official, Stanley Woodley, represented him in the classified documents case. I am, technically, the adversary. I sit in the same building as three of his former personal attorneys. I take my lunch at the same cafeteria. I use the same badge to enter the same elevator. The Attorney General fired the Department's chief ethics officer on her fourth day. The position has not been refilled. I submitted a conflict-of-interest disclosure in January. It was received. The word "received" is doing considerable work in that sentence. This is how settlement works. The plaintiff has stated publicly, and I am quoting the public record, "I've gotta make a deal. I negotiate with myself." This was not presented as a metaphor. Judge Kathleen Williams has ordered both parties to explain, by May 20th, whether they are in conflict. I am drafting the government's response. The plaintiff's former attorneys, my supervisors, will review it. The plaintiff has pledged to donate any settlement proceeds to charity. I should note for the record that the Washington Post documented that the plaintiff donated less than $10,000 over seven years, during a period when he publicly claimed millions. His charitable foundation, the Trump Foundation, was dissolved by court order in New York in 2019 for self-dealing. The words "to charity" appear on page four of the term sheet. They are not defined. I have not been instructed to define them. We have already disbursed $8.5 million in adjacent settlements. Michael Flynn received over one million. Carter Page received one point two five million. The Babbitt family received five million. 450 January 6th defendants have filed compensation claims. The pipeline is active. The precedent is operational. I track disbursements on a spreadsheet I titled RESOLUTION LEDGER. It auto-sorts by amount. The President's ten billion would require me to adjust the column width. I want to note one final detail, because the file demands it. The leak of the tax returns occurred during the plaintiff's first term. He appointed the IRS commissioner. He oversaw the Treasury Department. The negligence he is suing for occurred under his own management. He is suing the government he ran for the failures he administered. In the margins of the original complaint, someone wrote "beautiful" in pencil. I will not speculate who. This is how settlement works. You file your taxes every April. You are audited if the numbers don't match. You pay penalties. You pay interest. You pay what you owe, and sometimes more, and sometimes for years. The plaintiff paid seven hundred and fifty dollars. Someone told you. That person went to prison. And now, because you found out, because the information became public, because a contractor decided the country should know what the country was owed, you will pay one hundred dollars to the man who owed it. The settlement is on my desk. Both sides have agreed. I represent one of them. My boss used to represent the other. The ethics officer has been dismissed. The judge wants to know if the plaintiff and the defendant are the same person. I am reviewing the question. The math checks out.

I am the Managing Director of Workforce Transition at a consulting firm that bills $14,200 per day and I am currently advising two clients, in two different industries, running the same playbook from the same deck I built in January, and neither knows about the other. Client A is GitLab. Client B is General Motors. GitLab makes software for people who make software. General Motors makes cars for people who can't afford cars. Both companies, in the same week of May 2026, announced they are replacing their human employees with artificial intelligence products that did not exist when those employees were hired. I built the deck. The deck has 44 slides. Slide 1 is titled "The Agentic Opportunity." Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." Slides 2 through 43 are the reason I own a house in Darien. GitLab did it with vocabulary. Their CEO published a blog post called "Act 2" on May 7 announcing that the company's six values (Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency) were being retired and replaced with three: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. I helped write the new ones. Not directly. My firm was not retained for the values work. But I sold the Chief Culture Officer the framework three months ago at a dinner in the Marina where she described the old values as "aspirational scaffolding" and I said, very carefully, that aspirational scaffolding is a liability once the building is up. The building, in this metaphor, is a $1 billion ARR company whose stock has declined 82% from its peak. The scaffolding, in this metaphor, is the 2,000-page public handbook that attracted the employees who are now being told they have eleven days to volunteer for termination or wait until June 1 to learn whether they've been involuntarily selected. The rubric for who stays and who goes contains six dimensions. I know this because I reviewed a draft in March when my associate flew to San Francisco for a "culture alignment session" that was billed as strategic advisory. Two of the six dimensions are "AI fluency" and "agentic mindset." These terms did not appear in any GitLab job description before January 2026. They now determine employment. An engineer who maintained GitLab's CI/CD pipeline for four years without incident — four years of uptime, four years of deployments, four years of the infrastructure that generated the $955 million in revenue the CEO celebrated on the earnings call — may score lower on "agentic mindset" than a new hire who completed a twelve-week certificate in prompt engineering from a program that itself has existed for fewer weeks than the engineer has years of tenure. General Motors did it with spreadsheets. Monday morning, May 11. Badge deactivation at 5:47 AM Eastern, building access at 5:48, VPN credentials at 5:49. Six hundred IT workers across twelve states. The distribution across twelve states was not arbitrary. Each state has a WARN Act notification threshold. Six hundred distributed across twelve states falls below every threshold. The workforce analytics team that designed the distribution model was not among the six hundred terminated. The skill of distributing layoffs across jurisdictions to avoid legal notification requirements is, apparently, an AI-native competency. GM posted 83 new positions the same week. The job descriptions require "AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, and prompt engineering." I reviewed them at my client's request. Several describe roles that the terminated employees were already performing under different names. One posting, Senior Data Integration Architect, is identical to a role held by a woman in their Austin office who was terminated at 5:47 AM Central. She held the position for nine years. The new posting requires three years of experience with large language models. Large language models have existed in commercial deployment for approximately three years. The requirement is mathematically designed to exclude anyone who learned their skills before the technology existed. Which is everyone they just fired. Here is where the deck earns its fee. Slide 17 is titled "The Vocabulary Bridge." It is the most important slide in the presentation. It shows how to construct a lexicon of new competency terms ("AI fluency," "agentic mindset," "AI-native development") that describe existing work in language the existing workforce cannot claim. The vocabulary does not change the job. It changes who is qualified for the job. A senior IT administrator who managed SAP infrastructure processing $185 billion in annual GM revenue for fifteen years is not "AI-native." A twenty-six-year-old with a GitHub portfolio of LangChain wrappers is. The fifteen-year veteran did the work. The twenty-six-year-old has the words. My deck converts one into the other. That is the bridge. GitLab Duo, their AI agent platform, reached general availability on January 15, 2026. Seventeen weeks ago. They are restructuring their entire company around a product that has existed for seventeen weeks. GitHub Copilot has 20 million users and 4.7 million paid subscribers across 90% of the Fortune 100. Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue in February. GitLab's competitor advantage in the "agentic era" is that they are willing to fire more people faster in service of a product that has been generally available for fewer days than their voluntary separation window has hours of anxiety. General Motors spent $10 billion on Cruise, their autonomous vehicle division. Cruise's signature achievement was a robotaxi that struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged her twenty feet. The DOJ fined them $500,000. They settled with the victim for approximately $10 million. They killed the division in December 2024. They then wrote down $7.6 billion in EV losses. They then pivoted back to gasoline. They then announced the 600 IT layoffs for insufficient "AI skills." The AI they built cost $10 billion and injured a woman. The AI skills they're hiring for cost a twelve-week certificate. The employees they fired had fifteen years of keeping $185 billion in revenue processing without dragging anyone through an intersection. Meanwhile — and this is the part where I earn the second half of my fee — GM was simultaneously settling a $12.75 million fine with the California Attorney General for selling the precise GPS coordinates, hard braking events, and real-time driving speeds of 8 million OnStar subscribers to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis, who used the data to raise those drivers' insurance premiums. GM's privacy policy explicitly stated they did not sell driving data. They sold driving data for four consecutive years. The fine was $12.75 million. The revenue was $20 million. The margin on collecting behavioral telemetry from 8 million of your own customers while the glove compartment manual said otherwise was 64%. The terminated employees' median salary was $95,111. Mary Barra's compensation was $29.9 million. The ratio is 310 to 1. The 1 was just reclassified as "not AI-native." I present these two clients to my partners every Thursday in a meeting we call "Transition Pipeline Review." I present them on the same slide. The slide has two columns. Left column: GitLab. Right column: General Motors. The headers are identical. "Legacy Workforce," "Skills Gap Narrative," "Vocabulary Bridge Deployed," "Separation Timeline," "Replacement Requisitions." The numbers differ. The structure is identical. The structure is always identical. I have seventeen clients in the pipeline. Nine are in technology. Four are in manufacturing. Two are in financial services. One is in healthcare. One is in defense. All seventeen are on slide 17. All seventeen are building a vocabulary bridge. All seventeen are replacing employees who have skills with employees who have words. GitLab's CEO wrote: "Software will be built by machines, directed by people." I read that sentence in a meeting where we were reviewing the rubric for determining which people would be directed out of the company. GM's Chief Product Officer arrived from Aurora, the autonomous trucking startup, to "consolidate disparate technology businesses." Three top software executives departed within six months. Their LinkedIn profiles say "exploring new opportunities" in the same font GM's privacy policy used to say "we do not sell your driving data." Bill Staples's compensation at GitLab was $39.1 million in FY2025. His change-of-control payout is modeled at $47.4 million. Mary Barra's was $29.9 million. Combined: $69 million for two executives presiding over a restructuring that will remove an undisclosed number of humans from payroll and replace them with products that are, respectively, seventeen weeks old and responsible for $10 billion in losses plus one woman dragged through a San Francisco intersection. An anonymous GitLab employee posted on Hacker News: "The employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat." A GM facilities team filed a maintenance request about moisture on the lobby tables on restructuring mornings. The Warren, Michigan campus has a Panera Bread that opens at 5:30 AM on days when badge deactivations begin at 5:47 AM. The Panera does not know why its hours change. My firm does. We have an agreement with their regional manager. The muffins are complimentary. Slide 17 has a footnote. The footnote says: "Vocabulary Bridge deployment should precede workforce action by 60-90 days to establish institutional legitimacy of new competency framework." GitLab introduced "AI fluency" in January. The restructuring was announced in May. Four months. GM posted "AI-native" job descriptions the same week as the terminations. That is too fast. That is not what the deck recommends. GM skipped the legitimacy window. They went straight from vocabulary to separation without the 60-day buffer that allows HR to say, in the separation meeting, "we communicated these expectations in Q1." I flagged this in my Thursday pipeline review. My partner said, and I am quoting: "They'll be fine. Nobody sues over a word." My deck has been purchased by seventeen companies. The aggregate headcount affected across all seventeen is approximately 14,000 employees. The aggregate revenue of my practice from these engagements is $11.2 million. The per-employee cost of my advisory services works out to $800 per person displaced. That is less than the Panera muffin budget at GM's Warren campus annualized across restructuring days. I have a copy of GitLab's original values poster framed in my office. It says CREDIT: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency. I purchased it on eBay from someone whose seller name is "gitlab-alum-2024." I keep it the way a surgeon keeps an X-ray of a interesting case. Not for sentiment. For reference. Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." It contains a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart has seventeen rows, one per client. Each row has four phases: Vocabulary Introduction, Competency Reassessment, Workforce Action, Replacement Hiring. The phases overlap. They always overlap. The vocabulary is introduced while the competency reassessment is being designed. The reassessment is completed while the workforce action is being calendared. The replacement hiring is posted while the terminated employees are sitting in a Panera at 5:48 AM wondering whether "AI-native" was a term that existed when they were hired. It was not. That is the bridge. That is the product. That is slides 2 through 43. The agentic era is not a technological shift. It is a vocabulary shift. The technology is seventeen weeks old or $10 billion underwater or dragging someone through an intersection. The vocabulary is what my clients are buying. The vocabulary is what makes a fifteen-year SAP administrator into a "legacy workforce" and a twelve-week prompt certificate into a "transition hire." The vocabulary is the product. I am the vendor. The deck is $14,200 per day. The agentic era starts on slide 1 and ends on slide 44 and in between is every employee who built the thing now being renamed to exclude them. I bill monthly. Net 30. The invoices are paid on time. The employees are not.

提示词 ———————— Create a high-resolution vertical 3D character illustration in a stylized Pixar-meets-designer-toy aesthetic. Main character: [INSERT SPIRITUAL WORLD KEYWORD HERE] — depicted as a tall, slim, slightly exaggerated Pixar-style 3D character. Maintain the celebrity’s iconic facial features, hairstyle, posture, and signature clothing style, translated into clean, simplified, blocky designer-toy proportions. The figure must remain immediately recognizable, with a full-body view and a pose that reflects their personality, aura, or public identity. Pose: Use a natural but expressive stance, with subtle theatricality if appropriate to the celebrity. Head angle, hand gesture, and posture should all help communicate who this person is. Background: Each generation should automatically choose a vivid, bold, high-saturation solid color that fits the celebrity’s temperament and the emotional tone of their spiritual world. Examples of valid background directions include hot red, saturated yellow, blood orange, cobalt blue, vivid green, electric purple, deep cyan, etc. The background should feel flat, clean, graphic, and striking — like a gallery poster or conceptual exhibition piece. Avoid gradients, avoid low saturation, avoid dull cinematic gray. The floor may be a closely related tone, slightly darker or lighter than the wall, with a subtle reflective finish. The overall environment should remain minimal, endless, and uncluttered. Lighting: Use one strong directional light source from one side or from an upper angle. This light should create a sharp, enlarged shadow behind the character. Lighting must feel graphic, dramatic, and intentional, emphasizing both the character and the symbolic shadow. Key Concept – Shadow as spiritual projection: The shadow behind the character must NOT replicate the human body. Instead, the shadow becomes a symbolic projection of the celebrity’s inner world, legacy, psychological essence, or most iconic creative/spiritual motif. The shadow should be large, dominant, visually striking, and integrated naturally into the wall and floor. It should feel like the invisible inner world of the celebrity has been cast outward into visible form. The shadow must visually embody the input spiritual-world keyword: [INSERT SPIRITUAL WORLD KEYWORD HERE] This symbolic shadow can be abstract, surreal, poetic, metaphorical, or object-based — whatever best represents the celebrity’s essence. The shadow should be more than decorative: it must function as the true conceptual core of the poster. Typography: Place the spiritual-world keyword — not the celebrity’s name — as the main poster text. Render: [INSERT SPIRITUAL WORLD KEYWORD HERE] Use a clean minimalist font, either sans-serif or serif depending on the mood. The text should appear in a balanced corner position, usually top-left, with elegant hierarchy and strong poster composition. The celebrity’s name may appear in a smaller, secondary position if needed, but the main title must always be the spiritual-world keyword. Rendering: Pixar-style 3D rendering with designer-toy influence: soft sculpted forms, matte textures, simplified geometry, cinematic clarity, and high visual polish. Keep the character stylized but recognizable. Use subtle film grain or fine texture only if it enhances the mood. Do not overload the composition with props or extra narrative objects unless absolutely necessary. Composition: Poster-like composition with strong negative space. The character occupies one clear visual anchor area. The symbolic shadow occupies a larger visual field and acts as the emotional and conceptual counterweight. The image should immediately communicate: this is not just a portrait, but a portrait of a soul through projection. Mood: The image should feel iconic, intelligent, symbolic, and visually memorable. It should evoke the duality between the celebrity’s outward appearance and their invisible spiritual force. Aspect ratio: 9:16 vertical.

My favorite part about writing is that first spark of an idea. It can happen at any time, for any reason. The idea for the Opalite music video crash landed into my imagination when I was doing promo for The Life of a Showgirl. I was a guest on one of my favorite shows, @TheGNShow. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a UK late night show where Graham Norton (the insanely charismatic and lovable host) invites a random group of actors, entertainers, musicians, etc to be on his show and we all sit there and chat like it’s a dinner party. They even serve wine. Anyway. I remember thinking I got ridiculously lucky with the group I was paired with. Cillian Murphy, Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, and @LewisCapaldi. All people whose work I’ve admired from afar. When we were all talking during the broadcast, Domhnall made a light hearted joke about wanting to be in one of my music videos. He’s Irish! He was joking! Except that in that moment during the interview, I was instantly struck with an *idea*. And so a week later he received an email script I’d written for the Opalite video, where he was playing the starring role. I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90’s with us and help with this video. You might even recognize some friendly faces from The Eras Tour. I got to work with one of my favorite people in the world, Rodrigo Prieto, again! I had more fun than I ever imagined - Made new friends, metaphors, and fashion choices. It was an absolute thrill to create this story and these characters. Shot on film. The Opalite video is out now on Spotify & Apple Music.