Manufacturing propaganda for American Dynamists @ Delta Studio
NYC
Joined October 2015
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The most powerful piece of technology ever created is not a machine or a software.
It's a story.
Story has been wielded by the greatest leaders and innovators throughout history to shape belief, move capital, and inspire action.
That's why we're launching Project Genesis: brand new offering from Delta Studio that turns your founder story into an instrument to bend the arc of history.
Over the course of just three weeks, you’ll receive:
1.) Story coaching with our Head of Narrative Design.
2.) A cinematic storyboard visualizing your company’s founding narrative using professional filmmaking techniques.
3.) A Modular Story Guide with three written versions of your story crafted for fundraising, hiring, and media engagement.
Your Story Bible can be used immediately — Walk into your next investor pitch, recruiting call, or media appearance with the confidence of a cinematic protagonist.
Ready to take control of your narrative? Shoot me a DM and I'll show you what we've been working on...
When we finally capture the Chinese fishing fleets pillaging the South American coast, we're going to feed them to the Shinkei Discombobulator
we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever
this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer
it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique
dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish
here's how it works:
> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat
> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture
> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that
> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews
> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck
> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are
> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds
> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out
> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved
example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything
ALT A gloved fisherman on a boat feeds a live salmon head-first into the steel intake of a white Shinkei Systems robot, with the ocean behind.
Nick Trimmer retweeted
Founders, you started a company! Congrats, you’re now the chief storyteller.
A lot of technical founders don’t love this part of becoming a CEO. You want to build the product, solve hard problems, and assume that if what you’re building is good enough, people will figure it out.
They probably won’t.
As CEO, perhaps the biggest part of your job is explaining what you’re doing over and over again to investors, customers, candidates, and your own team. You have to make them understand why it matters without assuming they have the same technical context you do.
That doesn’t mean turning into a marketing person or dumbing down what you’re building. It means figuring out how to explain a complicated idea clearly enough that other people actually care. A good test is whether you can explain what you’re building, why it matters, and why now without spending the first ten minutes teaching someone the underlying technology.
Start with the problem and why anyone should care, then go as deep on the technical details as the audience wants to go.
You can build something technically incredible, but at some point you still have to convince people to buy it, fund it, work on it, or believe it should exist. Learning how to tell that story is a huge part of the job too.
A reminder that one of the most destructive mistakes made by this administration was its refusal to ban TikTok
anti- AI content is just a big psyop???
@TaylorLorenz is being offered money to promote anti-AI content
But this narrative warfare goes way deeper than domestic dark money...
Foreign adversaries run covert influence operations on our feeds every single day.
"But whyyyy?"
Because they are MAD.
Back in 2022, the U.S. gutted foreign access to advanced AI chips. Beijing called it "suppression to protect American supremacy"
openai’s june 2026 report described an adversarial operation posing as americans and making memes about data centers driving up electricity bills
Narrative warfare is real and influencers are being paid for it.
have you noticed more anti-AI content in your feed lately ??? how authentic do you think it is?
This is a critical fact of life that I have to remind myself of from time to time. Humans, by default, are openly hostile to change.
Yes, narrative is a useful tool that can help frame the change in a more familiar context for the recipient. But it's not *any* narrative that will change people's opinions. It has to be the right one.
Humans have an attention hierarchy that you must abide by if you wish to influence perception. At the top of this hierarchy are more "lizard brain" priorities related to food, shelter, and sex. At the bottom are more abstract concepts like common good and long-term planning.
If you're attempting to counteract a fear-based emotion, you cannot respond with abstract notions of "reduced electrical bills", "reduced property tax", and "more jobs". These heightened states of emotion must either be assuaged or overridden if you wish to appeal to the conceptual.
This is the reason why most narrative operations are built to invoke powerful emotions quickly. You cannot make appeals to logic or rationality when someone feels like they're under threat. In response, most counter-narrative operations attempt to redirect the emotion, rather than to overcome it: "You shouldn't be afraid of THAT -- in reality THIS is much scarier."
There's no perfect, consistent way to overcome this. Narratives that appeal to our rational thinking take longer to penetrate the emotional armor of fear and greed. Admittedly, one of the most consistent ways to pull someone out of an emotional spiral is via some sort of reward mechanism.
Do you want to help someone overcome the fear of getting into a car with a complete stranger? Make it half the price of a taxi.
Want to get someone to try a consumable product for the first time? Give it away for free.
Want to overcome the existential dread about the threat of data centers and AI? Pay off the taxpayer.
Politicians know this better than anyone: Narrative is great, but sometimes a good old-fashioned bribe will do the trick.
Nick Trimmer retweeted
When I got my first big social media job in 2020, I was a proud hater of fancy production for social posts
"All you need is an iPhone!!! People want casual!!!"
That advice made sense when your followers saw your posts
Now the algorithm shows you to strangers at the same clip as your followers, and strangers don't owe you anything. They might not know who you are, and you have to earn their attention immediately
If your video doesn't do well among non-followers, it'll tank
Had Talarico's team used a casual iPhone shot for this video, it would've lost all of its aura and sense of place and you probably would've kept scrolling
Instead, they shot it like a damn movie, and it racked up hundreds of millions of views across platforms
I can't tell you what the zoom and the lens and the angle are doing, but I can tell you it feels good. It earns your attention, and you want to listen
The dynamic captions right in the middle of the screen help keep you hooked too, because those feel good to read
You should trust @parkerpbutler a lot more than me about campaign social, and he said 2026 was the year organic overtook paid social
I don't anticipate organic being any less important in 2028 and beyond
The best campaign teams will operate like miniature production studios, and the entire org will need to give digital a seat at the table from the very beginning, rather than bringing them in at the last minute and asking, "We have an event, how are we going to film it?"
Like it or not, the internet is real life
The most expedient way to retake the data center narrative would be to do two things:
1. Appeal to a common enemy by associating data center opposition with boomer-style NIMBYism
2. Push heavy into the narrative that they're giant cash machines for stagnant local economies
We're past the point where bad narratives surrounding data centers can be explained away with a few rational arguments.
The tech sector has repeatedly made the mistake of assuming that technological progress is an inherent good in itself, and that this goodness will always win out in the end.
This is demonstrably false.
For the past several years, various coalitions and interest groups have hijacked "data centers" as a cause du jour. These structures have become a vessel into which anyone can thrust their generalized anxieties and sacrifice in the name of some platitude like "collective prosperity" or "human dignity". If you want to take control of the narrative, you need to create a new one.
It's not useful to prepare a list of statements detailing why data centers are important. Nor is it impactful to point out the fact that our digital infrastructure has relied on data centers for decades. None of this information changes how a person feels about the topic.
This feeling, of course, is not about what the data center is; it's about what it represents: it's an abstract threat to a person's identity and their ability to exert control over their life and their circumstances.
In order to counteract these narratives, you can do one of two things: you contextualize the threat in terms that assuage the underlying feelings associated with the thing. Or, you build an entirely new association.
I've always wondered if there's a consistent liquidity threshold within any given market that would make the prediction reliably accurate.
i.e. a prediction market with $1M in liquidity can be meaningfully influenced with a $100K bet in either direction.
Nick Trimmer retweeted
Observation: the smarter everything gets, the more valuable dumbness becomes.
I think “offline” is about to become a luxury feature, the way a mechanical watch or a paper notebook became a status signal once everything else went digital.
Nick Trimmer retweeted
THE ARCHĒ (AR-KAY)
The fundamental substrate of the universe, over which the minds of the great Pre-Socratic philosophers wandered in pursuit of the nature of reality.
Born of the conviction that nature possessed some underlying principle or constituent element permeating all things, Thales posited it was water, Pythagoras found it in numbers, and Anaximander conceived of the apeiron, the boundless and indefinite from which all things emerge.
This early philosophical worldview held that beneath the multiplicity of the natural world there might exist some fundamental unity, a substrate from which all things arise, perhaps lurking just beyond our line of sight, or perhaps right before our eyes.
WHAT IS THE ARCHĒ OF OUR WORLD?
Nick Trimmer retweeted
AI is not going to kill journalism.
Hot take: it will have the opposite effect, potentially igniting a golden age
At State Affairs, we believe readers will understand more than ever before when we pair nonpartisan, on-the-ground reporting with a tool that lets them dig DEEP into the government data behind every story.
Think Wikipedia rabbit holes, but for the news
Introducing Deep Facts
Nick Trimmer retweeted
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
Spent the last year writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Commanding-Heights.com
Nick Trimmer retweeted
Time to start sharing: I'm working with an unbelievably talented team to build @cypress__labs
Total shot in the dark here, but it's possible that decades from now, we may find a connection between the ZIRP phenomenon of the early 21st C. and the cultural psychosis that the West has suffered from for the past ~20 years.
Something about easy credit and behavioral sinks.
Nick Trimmer retweeted
It sucks that it's all gamified on X now because when a founder doesn't want to spend $50k+ on these promo accounts, there's an 80/20 chance the video can go viral or "die". It's "guaranteeing" cheap, wide-reaching views to hopefully drive users/demos while gaming the algo.
I think of the Ramp Tony Hawk video- so damn good. I thought it would get millions of views and break into mainstream X. It didn't. It got capped at 170k views from Eric's account with 400k followers
If anything, the X algo still doesn't push original video content organically well. It's all being manipulated to reach the masses and trickle down. The idea now, and the logic behind launches, is that VCs want founders to spend whatever on a launch to get millions of views to trickle down as 1-10% to book demos or download and use. It helps drive the "hype cycles" of fundraising. It helps with hiring and building hype for the next raise of everyone who missed the current one being announced. In theory, it can create fomo + drive the next round of interested parties to the hot potato game.
The VC money is flowing to startups and then flows to meme page networks who rinse and repeat but have a stronghold on "paid promo." Same thing that was happening in 2017-2023 with crypto promo before X rolled out the paid promo tag. It was all undisclosed shilling. The current infinite AI startup "launch cycle" reminds me of previous crypto hype cycles. It will, and already has made people a lot of money, but there will be a lot of losers.
I hate the paid promo launch meta. I hate it but the issue now is the people making the videos are being forced and pressued to make for the algo of "paid promo," and people want to buy the max reach they can to satisfy investors or attract max potential demos or users after a raise. That's reality. It's influencer marketing for X, and the current influencer pages will push as many launches as they can for money, so it cheapens everything when every launch has 100s of quote tweets with the same paid promo tag, but is it working? If a founder spends $100k-500k, does it help them raise more later? Does it drive enough users/revenue to recoup the investment? Does it help them hire elite talent instead of paying recruiters?
I've heard many times from the companies we work with that it helps a ton with attracting talent and customer acquisition. The question is at what point it becomes diminishing returns for the brand, or does no one care, and everyone forgets after a week and moves on.
If anything, this is all an issue with the current X algo for discovery and why YouTube is so good. Videos can be suggested and recommended that are days or weeks old. It's all based on watch time and user interest learning (ML). X is still based on gaming the algo, and the videos don't resurface after the 24-72h window. YT has a far better algo for video, but the VCs and "users" aren't necessarily going to see it or even be on YT for a launch; entirely different marketing strategy for YouTube. X algo is purely gamification now. Nothing launching is really organic, and everything can be manipulated with enough money/big accounts.
Ramp video was exceptional and should have organically gotten way more views - it did 2.9M on Instagram
Whoever you paid for the fake engagement, you should get a refund
The comments are too blatant, too lazy, no finesse. They’re like bad plastic surgery. “Those can’t be natural”
I’m sure they sold you guaranteed virality and charged a boatload. But being associated with fake engagement is not worth the bigger numbers
I'm sympathetic to how difficult it can be to compete for attention on X, but this shit just isn't worth it.
If successful, you get engagement from a bunch of users who likely aren't relevant to your product.
If unsuccessful, it makes you and your company look like hacks.
Related:
teapaw.org/suchenzang/status/2110…
Nick Trimmer retweeted
Look at him, thats my Qual.
Your what?
My Qualitative! My vibe specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.
I'll give you a hint, his name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in bushwick! Yeah I'm sure of the vibe.
Quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants
I've been skeptical about the whole - software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument
But I've seen first hand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists
I predict the trend accelerates
Letter from @AQRCapital below
