Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The other Altman is ready for his close-up

• When a fake hurricane makes for good VC networking

• The Top 5: Best philanthropic advisers

• Plus: Taylor Swift’s cybersecurity woes; a demented poker game; and the unsung heroes of the sea who keep the internet afloat.

Judging by the critical unison about Humane AI and its $699 Pin device, the artificial intelligence gadget sure seems like a dud. Generally, the critics have all pointed to the same flaws, but a spotlight has fallen heavily on one reviewer in particular, YouTuber Marques Brownlee, whose tech product commentary has drawn 18.5 million devoted followers to his YouTube channel. 

Brownlee wasn’t harsher than The Verge, Wired or The Washington Post. Yet when a group of Humane defenders hurried this week to tar and feather Pin critics, they directed outsize umbrage at Brownlee. Why? I’d guess it’s because those Humane defenders probably belong to the same crowd who believe tech journalists are inherently anti-tech and anti-founder, and they seemed to think Brownlee—a digital creator—belonged to their tribe within tech, not to the journalists’ world. And how dare he criticize another tribe member’s efforts! (Sheesh. When did everyone in tech get so concerned about supporting each other? I enjoy Silicon Valley more when we all acknowledge it’s a place full of cutthroats.) 

Brownlee could’ve taken an easier route. He exists in a gray middle ground between the new digital media and the older kind. As such, he could’ve chosen to ignore traditional rules and conventions, but he didn’t. He did his job as the traditional media would see it. That makes him an exception among many influencers, who very much don’t try to follow any rules from the past. I’m sure plenty of other gadget influencers didn’t do Pin reviews because they worried they’d seem mean-spirited, and they don’t care to follow the old ways.

But Brownlee did the braver thing and posted his Pin review, which currently has 5.8 million views. It was the smarter thing, too, because he knows no one takes a critic seriously who only dispenses five-star positivity, and his livelihood as a creator depends on his audience taking him seriously.

“People should trust me because I’ve told the truth for a long time. And I have no reason not to. If I’m untrustworthy, it goes against the work I built,” he told me in 2020. (He declined to speak this week.) “My credibility is what I’ve been building in all the reviews that I’ve made. It would be kind of dumb for me not to tell the truth.” It would, which is why he does. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, wrote this newsletter with no gadget more advanced than a wheezing old Mac. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Jack Altman Is Ready for His Spotlight

Back in March, Sam and Jack Altman directed some light teasing our way when we covered the debut of Jack’s new venture fund by introducing him as “Sam Altman’s younger brother.” 

“My brother founded a unicorn, ran it well for a long time, is an extremely accomplished investor, is terrible at all video games, and can only squat about 150 pounds,” Sam, the OpenAI CEO, wrote on X. “Maybe ‘unicorn founder jack altman’ would be a more reasonable way to introduce him?”

Fair enough, Sam! As it happens, I think my new profile of Jack serves as a pretty good introduction to someone we have mostly considered as just another Altman. As Sam pointed out, Jack does have a strong startup investing record—in companies like Figma, Rippling and OpenDoor—and plans to continue the work at his new firm, Alt Capital. (He stepped down as CEO of the software unicorn he co-founded, Lattice, in December.) A solid run at Alt Capital would offer him some distance from his famous last name.

Over the years, Jack has given substantial consideration to the existing perception of him as someone who’s just hanging onto Sam’s vest pocket—and made peace with the realization that he won’t change everyone’s minds. “I don’t know if some of that is having kids or building a company or maybe just getting a little bit older,” he told me, “but you do eventually see life a little bit differently.”

The Venture Capitalists Who Like to Play Disaster

One of the hottest invites in Manhattan these days is to game night up in the 11th floor offices of Lux Capital. Since January 2023, the venture firm has held a monthly session of what it calls “risk games,” which are designed to resemble the classic war game training used by the armed forces: Take an imagined global conflict or crisis, then let the game’s participants play different roles in the event—a mayor, a general, a dock worker—imagining what might happen. 

Lux’s risk games have become a hit, drawing in billionaires, politicians, military leaders and the technorati alike. It fits in well with the firm’s brand: Lux has been one of the leading investors in defense tech startups like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. “It really does reflect a lot of the areas that we operate in, which are not like selling HR payroll software to an employer,” Lux partner Peter Hébert told our Margaux MacColl. “It’s these very multidimensional challenges and problems where you need many constituents to work together to achieve success.”

The Top 5

The Very Best Philanthropic Advisers

Making a fortune is hard. Knowing how to give away some of it can also be challenging, but the consiglieres spotlighted here by our Julia Black come highly recommended after working with names like Soros, Bezos and Zuckerberg. It’s important to note that many—if not all of them—have no desire to help you shove money at Yale or MIT.

Chris Addy, whose organization, The Bridgespan Group, has worked with Bill Gates and MacKenzie Scott, presses potential clients to consider whether they want their donations to have lasting impact beyond seeing their name engraved on campus someplace. “Why would people give money away if it’s not about impact? Actually, people do it all the time,” Addy said. “It’s about ego. It’s about their brand. It’s about washing over other things that they’ve done in their life.”

Listening: Taylor Swift’s Chaos Era

Like many fans, I expected Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” to be a somber reflection on Swift’s six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. When the album leaked on Wednesday, I was shocked instead to hear an hour of heartsick anthems about her brief fling with The 1975 singer Matty Healy. The record is Swift at her messiest, for better (the deliciously petty “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”) or worse (she’s officially too grown-up for songs like “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”).

The leak itself felt like the end of an era. Swift always relishes the lead-up to her albums, leaving trails of breadcrumbs for her fans to gobble up in anticipation. But this time around, even the billionaire megastar wasn’t immune to cybersecurity breaches. Still, Swift had the last laugh when she released an extra 15 songs at 2 a.m. on Friday morning. The devil works hard, but Taylor works a million times harder.—Julia Black

Playing: A Game Flush With Mania 

Phewww! I’m sitting down to tell you about Balatro, a new deck-building videogame ($14.99), and I’m positively perspiring from a hair-raising hand I just narrowly pulled off: Balatro belongs to gaming’s roguelike genre, so the randomization it throws at you is part of the manic enjoyment. Balatro, which has developed a cult following since an anonymous developer released it in February, structures itself around poker hands, but then perverts the game of poker with great relish. You play against adversaries—Blinds—and move through levels called Antes, powering up your hands with joker cards, which can magnify the points scored off specific suits and styles of play, as well as tarot cards, which also work to boost your score in dizzying fashion. Balatro displays some of the obvious flaws of indie design—a user experience with a dull retro charm, no great narrative—that I generally forget about once I’m trying to decide which jokers can goose up my hand to a multimillion-dollar run.—A.B.

Reading: The Sailors Who Save the Internet

Every email you send, every TikTok you watch, every tweet you read relies on 800,000 miles of underwater internet cables transmitting massive amounts of data from continent to continent. When these cables break—as they do 200 times a year—modern civilization relies on 22 repair ships stationed across the globe. The crews of those ships are the internet’s unsung heroes, who get their due in this new piece from The Verge. They often face great peril. For instance, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down in 2011, a repair ship had to descend into the potentially radioactive water and send a submarine to the bottom of the ocean to ensure Japan could reach the outside world at the moment it most needed to.

One day in the near future, though, the biggest threat to the internet won’t be some natural disaster: These crews are struggling to recruit young talent, even as current employees grow older and older. “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world,” one industry veteran told The Verge. “Because things just work.”—Margaux MacColl

Final Thought

Look! Marc can be funny!