In this issue:

OVERWORLD:
-Soho House vs. Wall Street-
-Mini-Stories: TikTok parasites make $10,000/month + Remembering Akira Toriyama-

THE DEPTHS:
-Dune and Islam - a missed mark-

“Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.”
— the Bhagavad Gita

✦Top Trends✦

Markets

Finance bros that made Soho House corny are now shorting it - they say it’s gotten corny.

It’s where Jude Law’s toddler accidentally swallowed an ecstasy pill. It’s where Megan Markle met Prince Harry. And it’s where Kim Kardashian was denied at the door, per their “no-assholes” rule.

For 30 years, these stories built Soho House into a legendary brand.

This legend status, Wall Street shorters claim, is rotting - so they’re betting against it. The reason, they say, is that there are too many finance bro normies being accepted into Soho House.

It’s ironic. Much of the reason why Soho House managed to expand into 42 worldwide locations with 250,000 paying clients was cause they let finance bros pay to hang out with the cool kids. Talk about backfire.

Now, short sellers are claiming that Soho House is “a zero”, expecting its acrobatic leap into a 2021 $2,8B valuation to stick a deadly landing on its skull.

✦Luxury vs. Distribution.✦

Profitable luxury is a very hard line to toe. Especially because of the need to constantly maintain a sense of exclusivity while widening distribution. Soho House, like any other luxury company needs to balance this to grow, or they die.

A quick ownership recap: In 2008, founder Nick Jones sold 80% of Soho House for an undisclosed amount to British hospitality mogul Richard Caring. In 2012, billionaire investor Ron Burkle paid $250M for 60% of Soho House, leaving Jones with a 10% share. To this day, these three are the main shareholders of the now-public company.

Since its stock market debut at $12.50, the stock has seen a 58% sink to $5.92. This may stand shed light on the question: can you reconcile public offerings with highly private branding?

✦GlassHouse throws a rock.✦

This February, a malicious report was published by an obscure financial research outfit called GlassHouse. GlassHouse pulled the covers off Soho House’s financials, exposing poor accounting climbing debt, and financial shortfalls which hadn’t been reported properly.

The report whether true or not is a hit-piece - it explicitly compares Soho House to WeWork’s multi-billion dollar flop.

GlassHouse even claimed that Soho House was “never profitable in its 28-year history, went public to dump on retail investors, all while its debt surged to insurmountable levels.”

GlassHouse commented on the deterioration of the Soho House brand: “The rapid expansion of Soho House’s membership base and global footprint raises worries about the potential dilution of the exclusive experience and member satisfaction.”

This report is what many short sellers are basing their decisions on.

✦In Soho House’s defense.✦

Even if similar, Soho House cannot be compared to the WeWork scandal. As of fall of 2023, they held a cash position of $163M, compared to WeWork’s $530M in the red.

And when it comes to branding and exclusivity, Soho House says things have never been better. They reported a retention rate of 93% by the end of 2022 and boast that by the third quarter of 2023, it had an all-time high of 98,000 people on a wait-list to become members.

✦The wait begins.✦

Doubters and fans are eagerly waiting for Soho House’s updated numbers which have been pushed back from March 6 to March 17. Tension is high though, as it’s mostly seen as a counter to GlassHouses exposé.

✦Mini Stories✦

- $10,000/month TikTok Parasites-
-Remembering Akira Toriyama-

🪳 Nasty parasites of TikTok make more than a doctor.

You walked past a youngin scrolling TikTok/Shorts/Reels, and you sneakily tried to catch a glimpse of what they were watching. What did you gain? Disgust, probably.

Which one was it?

• AI images of expensive pancakes.

• Fake iMessage screenshots read by an AI.

• Cute moral stories told by an AI over GTA5 gameplay.

Most likely, the inevitable thought struck you: “Who is making this shit?”

✦Enter the rabbit hole.✦

404Media recently uncovered an entire ecosystem of parasitic creators, influencers, and software developers that flood the web with this type of content.

The best part: they’re claiming to make over $10,000/month doing this.

You might feel the urge to ring the cap bell, but remember - you’ve seen these videos yourself. Next time you see one, check the view count and you’ll realize that these get millions of views in days.

✦Simple math.✦

TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta (CPB), a program that pays for longer form TikToks, pays $4 per 1000 views - which is $4000 per million.

The CPB program was initiated to reward longer, higher-quality videos with bigger AdSense payouts - spammers have essentially gamed this. By using AI for images, voice-overs, stories and even editing - this content bypasses original, long-form, and high effort.

Of course, this isn’t viable long-term. TikTok actually catches on quite quickly. But these spammers are also fast to adapt. There’s an 80,000-member paid Discord community with several vendors selling accounts, methods, clips, untapped niches, PDFs, and followers.

So… are you going to quit your job and do this thing or what?

If you’re still curious you can read more at 404Media:
Inside the World of TikTok Spammers and the AI Tools That Enable Them

🐉 Akira Toriyama has passed away at 68.

Toriyama, the luminary behind left an unforgettable mark on the world. Creating Dragon Ball, Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest was not merely a contribution to manga and anime, but the 19th-century culture as a whole.

✦Dr. Slump.✦

Toriyama was born in 1955 and started getting attention the manga industry as a 23-year-old by entering a weekly manga contest. In 1980, his gag manga Dr. Slump started taking shape and accumulated a fan base.

✦Dragon Ball.✦

In 1984 Toriyama dropped his magnum opus: Dragon Ball. Today, Dragon Ball has seemingly intertwined with not only Japanese, but Western hero-story culture. When his manga was turned into an anime and distributed across the world with dubs for every damn country out there it created a domino effect: merchandise, videogames, conventions are still happening to this day.

Hip-hops relationship to Dragon Ball is probably the greatest testament to this.

After all who could forget?

Rest easy, king.

✦Quick hits✦

• Public trust in AI is sinking across the board. Globally, trust in AI companies has dropped down to 53% from 61% five years ago. France, Canada, Ireland, UK, U.S., Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, and Sweden reject the growing use of AI by a three-to-one margin.

• Rust’s movie armorer has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter 2 years after Alec Baldwin shot and killed the on-set cinematographer. The armorer, Hannah Guiterrez Reed was responsible for firearm safety and storage on the movie’s set.

• Apple Podcasts now includes transcripts. In case you want to read your podcast today.

• FKA Twigs’ banned Calvin Klein ad has been revoked. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority cites their reason as based on the “strength of public feeling” and declared that “the image was not sexually explicit” and that “the ad presented FKA Twigs as confident and in control and, therefore, that she had not been objectified”

THE DEPTHS

Film

How Dune 2 both respects and neglects Islam.

“My Arab friends wonder why it’s called science fiction. Dune, they say, is religious commentary.”
-Frank Herbert, shortly after publishing Dune in 1965

If you saw the film recently and noticed something in the world’s religions, stories, aesthetics, characters, and politics - yes, it’s very Islamic. It had to be, it’s Dune.

Just to scratch the surface:

✦Herbert’s big question.✦

When Herbert created the world of Dune, he wanted to give an educated answer to the question “What happens with culture, history language, and religion over the span of 10,000 years?”

The obvious answer is change. But Herbert’s caveat is that no matter how it changes, the roots always remain. It’ll mutate, separate, merge, and collide - but the roots are always there. In the world of Dune Islam, even if it’s a trace of itself, still exists.

✦Dune, 59 years later.✦

From ‘65 til ‘24, the America:Islam dynamic has changed. Drastically.

So, Western audiences do not expect Timothée Chalamet’s character Paul to exclaim that he’ll commit jihad on the robots - which is what he explicitly says in the books.

Herbert, of course, understood the word's simple meaning: struggle against evil. But Americans mostly remember jihad as something Usama bin Laden promised to subject the USA to.

Instead, Hollywood decided it’d be better if Paul said “holy war.” Even if this is narratively correct, completely throws Herbert’s deep understanding of Islam in the trash.

✦Picking and choosing✦

It’s a shame. Especially since the film picks and chooses when to embrace Islam. The designers and customers made a great homage to female Islamic dress and must have done some great research to pull the aesthetic off - all of that for the film to not cast a single Middle Eastern actor.

It’s saying: Dune can be Muslim, but not too Muslim.