No. 8 - A very disturbing marketplace on Instagram, Huberman-ification, NVIDIA, Human legacy, Wealth porn, The mundane, and Very good movies
Gustavo S. Carvalhal Ribas, CFA
Venture Partner and Head of LatAm at K Fund
A VERY DISTURBING MARKETPLACE ON INSTAGRAM
I must say: this one is for the strong of heart. A lot has been written about the negative effects that smartphones and social media have on people, especially children, but, this month, The New York Times conducted an investigation into an extreme example of these problems: parents operating their young daughters’ Instagram accounts in the hope of transforming them into digital influencers, but also attracting the following of sexual predators – in some cases, with the parents selling exclusive pictures and garments. Although I believe this is an extremely relevant topic, I understand how disturbing it can be, so I’ll just leave the link below and not go more into it, but so everyone understands the size of this, an internal study at Meta found that 500 thousand child Instagram accounts had inappropriate interactions every day.
HUBERMAN-IFICATION
Ever since I read Outlive: The science and art of longevity, by Peter Attia, longevity and healthier habits became relevant topics of interest to me. I’ll write about the book in a future newsletter, but, this month, I came across Huberman Lab, a podcast by Stanford neuroscience professor Andrew Huberman that, last year, was the third most popular podcast on Spotify (number seven on Apple Podcasts). The show also bears incredible success on YouTube (4.6mm followers) and Instagram (5.5mm followers), which is somewhat unbelievable given that the episodes often range from 2 to 3 hours discussing health-related subjects (for me, the ones about oral hygiene and about sleep are the best so far). It clearly is one the several examples of a growing emphasis society has been placing on health.
NVIDIA
This month, NVIDIA announced spectacular quarterly results, taking the company’s market cap to roughly the same value as Brazil’s GDP. A couple day’s later, Jensen Huang, the company’s CEO, talked to WIRED, in a great interview. To me, one of the best parts is when he discusses the pace of AI innovation at the company, stating that, over the last 10 years, NVIDIA has advanced AI by a million times (in his words, “many, many times Moore’s law.”).
HUMAN LEGACY
As a person who loves studying history and learning about traditions, I often find myself going to places that feature the “UNESCO World Heritage Site” branding, as well as looking for celebrations and food with that certification. Nevertheless, I must say I had never had the opportunity to truly understand what that meant.
In a long article featured in The New Yorker, Julian Lucas explains not only that but also goes deep into several intricacies and stories around this theme – which is much more interesting than I thought. It turns out this listing began in 1978 and was initially too concentrated in Europe and North America, but, over time, has been increasingly featuring heritages of societies whose achievements are less concrete and more intangible, such as crafts, oral traditions, rituals, etc. The current catalogue has more than seven hundred elements, and wandering through it makes you want to pack and travel.
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WEALTH PORN
In the second episode of Netflix’s “Working: what we do all day”, former US President Barack Obama goes about explaining how, during his lifetime, popular culture (such as TV shows) went from focusing on middle class houses and lifestyle (while featuring rich people as somewhat odd outliers) to, beginning the 1980s, focus more and more on money and lavish ways of living, with the sizes of the houses getting bigger and bigger, for example. Just think about how many headlines you see about billionaires, top 1%, luxury influencers, how many characters live in big houses and fancy apartments, etc.
This episode is what came to mind when I read this article. Whether we are talking about the day-to-day life of a media mogul and his family (Succession), the enormous penthouses of TV celebrities (The Morning Show), the breathtaking hotels and views of rich people’s trips (The White Lotus) or the ultra-expensive wardrobes of a group of New Yorker friends (Sex and the City), TV shows have indeed been increasingly focused on the upper classes. Social media too, with TikTok’s videos of first-class airplane cabins, Instagram’s pictures of expensive restaurants and trips and people tracking private planes on X. With that, the middle-class way of life seems to have vanished from existence, with people possibly not seeing characters, situations and content that relates to their everyday life.
It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that ends well…
THE MUNDANE
This part is to counterbalance the Wealth Porn part above. Just as “Seinfeld” used to be described as a show about nothing, Enuma Okro writes this piece praising the most commonplace daily activities as a source of peace amid a chaotic world.
Starting with a painting of a woman hanging sheets to dry, the author discusses if “the hurriedness by which most of us have learnt to live is somewhat related to how we experience either a diminishing or an expanding sense of time”. Mundane tasks would allow us to center and think more about our surroundings, including valuing more the gift of other people’s care for us through these seemingly tedious tasks.
VERY GOOD MOVIES
Some months ago, for some reason, I wanted to watch a good movie. I had been watching too many series and felt like watching a movie, so I started looking for good movies and noticed that none of the ones I wanted to watch was recent, but there were a lot of them that had been released 10 or more years ago. This struck me as odd and then I found this:
Movie studios have focused more and more into sequels and into big blockbusters full of special effects, budgets have been more and more directed to streaming series… and it seems that movies with an incredibly good plot and cast are becoming rarer. It doesn’t seem like many of the movies released over the last ten years are of the kind one would watch several times. It happens, of course, but too bad for movie lovers.
Hope you liked it! Let me know your thoughts.
Best,
Gustavo