Hello! I'm Faris. I'm looking for the awesome. Founder/Genius Steals. Nomadic strategist/speaker. Author/Paid Attention. Husband/@rosieyakob.
On The Road
Joined December 2006
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faris retweeted
Wow
Spotify just announced a feature that could either save the music industry or destroy it.
Starting as early as Q1 2027, Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to use AI to transform any participating artist’s song into a completely different version. Turn a folk ballad into a dance track. Make a hip-hop song sound acoustic. Generate a cover where one artist’s voice performs another artist’s song. Remix a pop hit into lo-fi study music. Create the version of your favorite song that only existed in your head until now.
The remixes will be uploaded directly to Spotify. They’ll appear in playlists. They’ll count toward the original song’s chart position. And most importantly the original artist will earn royalties every time someone listens to a fan-created remix of their work.
Spotify has already signed a landmark licensing deal with Universal Music Group the world’s largest record label. Negotiations with Sony Music and Warner Music are ongoing. The feature will cost an additional $4–$5/month on top of Spotify Premium. And analysts project 7–8% of American subscribers will adopt it by 2028.
This is not Suno or Udio generating music from text prompts. This is fans remixing real songs by real artists with the artists’ permission, on the world’s largest streaming platform, with royalties flowing back to the creators.
A music industry analyst who’s covered streaming economics for 15 years told her team something after reading the licensing agreement that reframed how she understood the future of recorded music.
“Spotify just turned 640 million listeners into 640 million potential remixers. The question isn’t whether people will use it they will. The question is whether paying artists for fan remixes solves the economics of streaming or creates a world where the original recording is worth less than the infinite remixes generated from it.”
Here’s what Spotify’s AI remix feature actually is, who wins, who loses, and why this might be the most consequential decision in the music industry since the launch of streaming itself 🧵
faris retweeted
while workers in China were begging to be paid at least a small amount as they received no wages, suki waterhouse and her best friend threw lavish parties for their brand and insisted that they have no money in their bank accounts
faris retweeted
it’s crazy how the Silicon Valley finale ended with AI discovering a math breakthrough that could break up the world’s encryption.
in the show, the AI wasn’t even trying to break encryption. it just stumbled upon the discovery while recursively improving Pied Piper’s compression algorithm and itself, without any engineers guiding the process.
now 7 years later, with OpenAI’s math and Anthropic’s cryptanalysis progress, watching that ending hits a little different.
man this show was really ahead of its time, not talking about it “predicting” anything but just the sheer range of things its writers could imagine back then.
faris retweeted
I made a book to learn animation by actually moving stuff on activity pages: stopmotionbook.com
It's a digital download so you can print it at home :)
faris retweeted
This is how many humans it takes to replicate electronics and automation.
also, banger.
faris retweeted
This strip is genuinely devastating. Like he knew it was soon and he was accepting it
faris retweeted
So odd how we're not calling years of below-inflation pay rises "quiet paycutting"
'Quiet quitting' could be hitting the economy - here's why bbc.in/4ijTORZ
faris retweeted
It's not just millennials, though they're 100% right here. Every working person I know aged over 45 is either 1). the boss, and laughing 2). has gone freelance to reclaim their dignity or 3). is a ticking time bomb of quiet, boiling rage at the way their employer treats them. – at Glasgow, Scotland
I find articles like this hilarious. They're written as though there's this thing happening that we can't explain.
Look at the data... quiet quitting is particularly pronounced among Gen Z and younger millennials.
Then look at the backdrop to their careers. These people have watched their futures being spent on bailouts, lockdowns and furlough.
Even if you work extremely hard and earn promotions (which is far from guaranteed), wages in the UK are so crap, and the cost of living so high, that the rewards often amount to very little.
The extra pay can be negligible. The extra effort and responsibility are not.
And if you've worked hard, trained and made your way up the greasy corporate pole, there's a good chance you've watched entry-level wages creep ever closer to yours. You might reasonably be asking yourself why you bothered in the first place.
Since the pandemic began, the National Living Wage has increased by nearly 55%. If you're someone with years of experience, training, progression and hard work under your belt, and your wages haven't kept pace, why wouldn't you question the value of all that effort?
The incentive has been inverted.
This is wage compression, and we're now witnessing the second- and third-order effects governments seem so oblivious to. When the financial reward for taking on more responsibility diminishes, so does the incentive to do it.
And this is what's happening. People are moving the dial they actually have control over… how much they give a shit about their job. And I don't blame them.
I think people are also starting to realise that much of the reward for their hard work is swallowed up by the ever-growing, increasingly wasteful blob that is the British state.
It's like having someone sitting on your shoulders, stealing half your food, getting heavier by the day, and repeatedly slapping you around the face as you try to go about your life.
faris retweeted
Feel as though I can add some tips for those going through this as the slide in jobs has in my opinion been going on since the pandemic and never recovered fully.
The AI dislocation tsunami in the next 5 years is going to dwarf the last 5 years by many times. I think it’s going to be a brutal wake up call for large numbers of white collar. The economic shift for individuals and nations is also going to be brutal.
I was in my mid to late forties 4 or 5 years ago when this erosion of career opportunity spat me out of the system. However hard I tried I could not get back into a job that paid that same money.
The disruption for me personally was not helped by having spent a decade in Asia then coming back and finding that with no day to day professional network it was doubly hard.
Funny how those old LinkedIn colleagues and work mates are just too busy to help. That coffee meeting, ‘yeah can’t make next week get back to me in a few weeks and we’ll rearrange’ becomes a regular line.
The jobs i did finally accept had smaller and smaller salaries and frankly worse and less smart people & teams which meant that the whole endeavour they were embarked on was questionable.
There are so many sub par companies out there making money it’s surprising.
Side note: the level of smarts out there is a low bar. You convince yourself people can’t be that slow or dim but yes they really are.
The biggest challenge is overcoming the psychological hit to your beliefs and for those with fuller egos managing that climb down.
Thats an 18-24 month process for reality to really hit home hard. Could be shorter or longer depending on one’s ability to grasp that things have changed irrevocably. This is the hardest part.
Suicidal thoughts ✅
Questioning why and what happened on repeat ✅
End up semi addicted to - enter your poison of choice here ✅
Loss of motivation and getting desperate ✅
My advice, accelerate the timeline to 6 months.
- move fast to calculate your burn rate and aim to balance your savings and that rate so you have at least a few years to last should you have zero income
- your partner matters enormously (obvious I know) but basically be married to someone who made the same or more than you (I know I know and I couldn’t give a monkeys)
>> Those with expensive wives and lives are in really serious trouble here.
- downsize everything (very liberating) to match as closely as possible the burn rate
- if you haven’t got a few years of savings to tap into then I don’t know what to tell you
- live very frugally
If you can make it past the 24 month period with the uncertainty of it all, it undoubtedly makes you stronger and you learn a tonne of hard lessons.
I didn’t have huge spending habits before and have low ego so some of this has not been overly disruptive for me but I think many will not have this setup.
It’s also an excellent friend sorter. Most aren’t and evaporate into the ether.
@_The_Prophet__
⚡️The “perfect resume” was never security.
It was a leveraged bet that elite institutions would keep valuing the same human profile forever.
That bet worked so well for so long that people mistook repeated selection for durable scarcity.
Ivy League, Bain, Goldman, Stanford MBA, private equity, senior tech. Each credential increased income, but it also encouraged a more expensive life built around the assumption that the next institution would always want them. The house, private schools, city, social circle, network, status, spouse expectations, all of it quietly capitalized future employability.
They did not merely earn high incomes.
They borrowed against the permanence of their own relevance.
That is why the layoff at 43 can be psychologically catastrophic even with millions saved. Their financial structure, identity, marriage, geography and peer network were all built around one invisible asset: continued access to elite institutional demand.
Then that asset gets repriced.
And the horrifying part is that their competence did not disappear.
The market simply stopped needing as many expensive embodiments of that competence.
That is exactly where AI attacks.
AI does not have to make the Harvard MBA stupid. It only has to make one Harvard MBA capable of doing what previously required five. Once that happens, the scarcity premium collapses while the person’s fixed obligations remain exactly where they were.
That is a duration mismatch.
Their lifestyle is long-duration. Their labor scarcity is becoming short-duration.
The house assumes 20 more years of elite income.
The school assumes 12 more.
The social network assumes continuity.
The market may reprice the person’s earning power in 18 months.
That mismatch is where the damage compounds.
And this is why the safest people in the next regime will often look less impressive on paper.
They own things.
They have low fixed obligations.
They can move.
They can build.
They can survive three bad years without needing permission from a hiring committee.
They have income streams that do not depend on one institution continuing to classify them as exceptional.
That is the inversion most elite professionals have not psychologically processed yet:
Prestige optimized access. Ownership optimizes survival.
The old elite path trained people to become maximally valuable inside institutions.
The new world increasingly rewards people who can remain valuable when institutions no longer need them.
And AI accelerates that sorting violently.
The coming status symbol will not be the perfect resume.
It will be the ability to walk away from the system that once made the resume valuable.
faris retweeted
Who would have through when you remove the reward for working hard that people don’t want to work hard.
faris retweeted
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career working in data for marketing and advertising. And after a while, you become almost allergic to the bullshit that gets thrown around.
When you understand how the data is harvested, sampled, processed, modelled, then politicised, gated and woven into whatever the predetermined conclusion was in the first place, you start to realise just how much of the profession is built on bullshit dressed up as science.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told people the data they’re showing me is as good as worthless, explained precisely why, and watched them refuse to accept it.
And you can see why, because accepting it means confronting the harder things they should’ve been doing in the first place.
Talking to customers, understanding what actually drives behaviour, telling the real story, making tough decisions, not being afraid to upset some people, and taking responsibility.
Instead, it’s easier to hide behind a wall of bullshit data, dress up assumptions as evidence, and create just enough plausible deniability to plead ignorance when the work inevitably disappoints.
Data should help us understand reality, not act as a substitute for good ideas and risk-taking.
Or maybe I’m just becoming cynical in midlife. 😂😂😂
faris retweeted
Social media has kinda ruined whole generation. Men are out here drooling over women they'll never even meet, and women are stressing out over lifestyles they can never pay for. Husbands are losing interest in their own wives because they can't stop looking at strangers online, and wives are losing respect for their husbands because they're always measuring their normal life against someone else's highlight reel. Regular marriages now feel like total flops, loyal partners feel like they aren't enough, and cozy homes start to feel like traps. We've built a group of people who mix up basic lust with actual love, expensive stuff with true happiness, and random online likes with feeling good about themselves. And the scariest part is that people are messing up the genuinely good things they already have just because they're hooked on the fake lives of total strangers. Social media isn't just wasting your hours. It's actually training you to dislike your own life.
