Well folks, it’s finally here. The end of the summer is upon us and there’s only thing left to do: ROAD TRIP. Since the dawn of time, or at least since cars have been capable enough, road trips have become the right of passage to close out the summer. When I was a kid our big family road trip was down to Cape Cod in Massachusetts to play mini golf at their myriad of mini golf courses and spending the days on the beach avoiding horseshoe crabs.

Back then we’d all pile into the car where the seats were more like couches and the navigation was a big yellow map with lines drawn on it that you would then somehow follow. It’s amazing what kind of tolerance a kid had for sitting in the back of a car for hours on end back then. Nowadays there better be Spotify playing music, a map on a screen telling you how long it’s going to take, a strategically packed snack bag, and if you’re desperate, some form of digital entertainment with a screen.

This weekend we’re driving to “The Young Lion of the West”, the “Flour City”, or the “Flower City” known for it’s garbage plates. Yup, you guessed it, we’re driving to Rochester, New York! The only real reason we’re going is for the National Museum of Play aka the biggest museum you’ll find on the history of toys (video games included). I’m not here to bash anyone’s city so I’ll reserve my commentary and just say the kids tend to have a fun time at the museum.

But lowkey, whenever we go I don’t have a hard time picturing what it would’ve been like to live in upstate New York in the late 80’s / early 90’s.

This week's issue is a 3 minute read:

🔥 Guess who’s back, back again

📺️ We all do it now

🧑‍💻 You lied to me (But I do do do)

Billy McFarland is taking a crack at it again

Why does everyone still hate on Billy McFarland? Dude went to jail, served his time, and has repeatedly said he plans on paying people back. Can’t we all just believe him this time around? Oh, for those of you who don’t remember, Billy was the guy who almost put on the first Fyre Festival until it turned into a giant sh*t show that Netflix later did a documentary on. Now Fyre Festival II has been announced, taking place somewhere in the Caribbean, with no line up or description of any real entertainment yet.

And pre-sale tickets have already sold out.

The current crazy part - I say “current” because I’m sure this will get crazier - is that when you Google Fyre Festival 2, you can’t even find the website because there are countless news websites covering the festival already that come up first in search results. AND according to Billy, there are currently 6900 people on the waitlist for the event.

I think he’s going to pull it off this time around, I really don’t think he’ll have any problem doing that. BUT what I will actually be shocked about is if he’s able to make enough money off of this one festival alone to pay off the investors and workers he still owes. Can a festival make $25M in one go around? Well depending on who you ask, Woodstock ‘99 is considered to be one of the worst festivals of all time and it cleared $25M very easily.

I kind of want to go…and I have no idea what I’d actually be going to. Is that weird?

We all love subtitles

My wife watches all of her TV shows with subtitles, she always has. No matter the language, she keeps the subtitles on. Whenever I used to turn on Netflix, I knew she had been watching because the subtitles would be turned on, in which case I would turn them off - because it was an English show and I am fully fluent (if you can’t tell by now) in English.

However, one day something weird clicked

I kinda didn’t mind having the English subtitles on while I watched an English show, while English is my first language. See, none of that makes sense to the old me. But the new me thinks that makes perfect sense, AND I DON’T KNOW WHY.

That said, a survey was done by YouGov recently that showed that 38% of Americans prefer to have the subtitles on while watching TV, even if it’s in their native language. And when looking at viewers 30 years old or younger, that number jumps up to 63%. Over TWO THIRDS of Millenial-Gen Z’ers watch TV with the subtitles on. And I think I know why.

THIS GUY

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about YouTube it’s that videos with a decent amount of subtitles and captions within them tend to do better than videos that don’t have any at all. Maybe our minds prefer to have words on screen alongside the actions? Or maybe the imagery is just that much more impactful when the words are staring at us in the face. Either way, reading what you’re watching while you can hear and understand it doesn’t seem to be that weird anymore.

Streaming was too good to be true

Ever since I moved out of my parent’s house over 11 years ago, I have not had a cable package in my house. I wish I had written it down because at the time I predicted that everything would be eventually available (legally) on the internet so there would be no need to get cable, you’d just pay for decent internet speeds instead. Well, here we are today where you officially can get everything you need from streaming services. But more and more we’re starting to see that there’s a catch.

Streaming was supposed to be the answer to expensive cable packages. Choose only the content you want and get it whenever you want it versus purchasing one big package where you only want 5% of the channels. The idea was to skip the commercials, have a wide library available to you, and pay a much more digestible price. But look at what Disney+ is doing now, as an example:

And I don’t know about you but it drove me crazy that I was paying for AppleTV and Amazon Prime and somehow that didn’t give me full access to their library of content - I had to pay for specific shows and movies still - CANCELLED. And don’t get me started on password sharing with Netflix! 🙃 Why is there tiers to these services now?

BECAUSE THEY WANT TO MAKE MORE MONEY

But the whole point of these services was to undercut the traditional services and be a cheaper, better alternative, like how most innovative tech companies start out. But oh yeah, eventually they realize they need to make more money so they resort to the same ways their competition makes money - in this case countless tiers and ad revenue.

For now if you’re only using one streaming service then you’re fine with the monthly cost but if you start to subscribe to a bunch of them, you’ll start to see your monthly costs are not that far off from what you’d pay for a traditional cable package.

You want to know what a great alternative is to paying for streaming?

YOUTUBE with this guy: