ricksmolan

Just heard from Amazon that following CBS piece THE GOOD FIGHT: AMERICA’S ONGOING STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE is soaring: youtube.com/watch?v=y_w-Gr…

Very proud of my long time friend and NatGeo photographer Mike Yamashita. who I had the honor to interview on stage at XPOSURE in Sharjah two weeks ago. sharjah24.ae/en/Articles/20…

Absolute perfection and timely

The CEO of the most advanced AI company in America just went on national television (Save this) Hours after his company was blacklisted by the US government. Here's what he said. Dario Amodei built the only AI deployed inside the Pentagon's classified networks. His company helped run military operations, intelligence, cyber defense. Then the government told him to drop all safety limits. He said no to two things. Just two. "One is domestic mass surveillance." He explained: the government can already buy your location data, your browsing history, your political affiliations from private companies. AI makes it possible to analyze all of it. On every American, all at once. "That actually isn't illegal. It was just never useful before the era of AI." "Case number two is fully autonomous weapons." Not the drones used in Ukraine and the remote-controlled systems. Weapons that select targets and fire without a single human pressing a button. "The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough." "We don't want to sell something that could get our own people killed or that could get innocent people killed." He approved 98% of what the Pentagon wanted. "No one on the ground has actually run into the limits of any of these exceptions." The government wasn't fighting over something it needed. It was fighting over the right to have no limits at all. They gave him three days. He said no. So the President called his company "radical left woke." Then ordered every federal agency to stop using their technology. Then the Pentagon labeled them a national security risk. A designation that has only ever been used against foreign enemies. When asked if he'd received any formal legal action, he said this: "All we've seen are tweets from the president and tweets from Secretary Hegseth." No letter, filing or a legal document. "When we receive some kind of formal action, we will look at it, we will understand it, and we will challenge it in court." He said the Defense Secretary lied about the law. Hegseth tweeted that any company with military contracts can't do business with Anthropic "at all." Amodei: "That is not what the law said." "The nature of the tweet was designed to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt." Asked if this was an abuse of power, he paused. Then said: "This designation has never happened before with an American company." "It was made very clear that this was retaliatory and punitive." "I don't know what else to call it." Asked if Anthropic could survive, he didn't hesitate. "Not only survive it. We're gonna be fine." Then the final question. "If you had a moment with the President right now tonight, what would you say to him?" "We are patriotic Americans." "Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country." "The red lines we have drawn, we drew because we believe that crossing those red lines is contrary to American values." "Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world." "And we are patriots." A CEO just went on national television and told the President of the United States: You can blacklist us. You can call us names. You can threaten our business through tweets. But we will not build machines that spy on Americans or kill without human hands.

I just backed MOTOR-ZERO 5.0 New 2-in-1 design on @Kickstarter kickstarter.com/projects/mech-…

Trio: A Sleek & Foldable 3-in-1 Leather Charging Station kickstarter.com/projects/cubeh…, via Kickstarter

Was absolutely dying at John & Jordi’s live read of my article on @tbpn today. Linked the full thing below.

I just exercised my right as a Member of Congress to conduct an unannounced oversight visit of the ICE field facility in Baltimore. The staff I met with respected my right to visit, but what I saw was disgraceful. Kristi Noem has a budget of $75 billion she could use to ensure humane conditions, but we saw 60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets. Whether it’s for three days or seven days, nobody would want a member of their family warehoused there. The room set aside for dangerous criminals and violent offenders was empty. We’re demanding immediate answers and action.

I am the Chief Marketing Officer of an AI company that spent $8 million on a Super Bowl ad last night. The ad was 30 seconds long.  It featured a child. The child asked our AI a question about the stars.  Our AI answered beautifully.  The spot tested well in focus groups.  The creative team won an internal award.  We generated 40,000 renders to find one where the AI didn't hallucinate.  The approved cut was take 39,847.  The child in the ad is not a real user.  The answer about the stars is not a real answer.  The entire commercial is a proof of concept for a product we have not shipped. By halftime, the audience hated us. Not just us. All of us. Every AI company that bought a spot.  Sports Illustrated reported fans were "vocally fed up" before the first quarter ended. A Harris poll conducted before the game found consumers already felt "mostly negative" about AI advertising. We knew this. The poll was published Friday. We bought the ad in September. I watched the game from a hospitality suite with eleven other CMOs. We had a real-time sentiment dashboard on a monitor next to the bar. By the second quarter, the needle was in the red.  Someone from our analytics team Slacked: "Audience is associating us with the Svedka ad."  The Svedka ad was an AI-generated fever dream of two dancing androids that looked like what happens when you ask a machine to render human desire without ever having experienced it. Critics called it "warm slop." We were being grouped with the warm slop. Twenty-three percent of all Super Bowl ads were AI or tech companies, according to iSpot. More AI ads than beer ads. More AI ads than food ads. We looked at each other across the suite and realized we had made the same mistake simultaneously. We had all bought the same thirty seconds of American attention and said the same thing into it. I watched Ring's ad from that suite. Ring built a network of millions of AI-equipped doorbell cameras pointed at American front doors. They pitched it as a lost-pet finder.  The ad said: "We built a surveillance panopticon and pointed it at your neighbors' homes, and now we're teaching it to recognize faces, but look -- a puppy." They did not use those words. They did not need to.  The audience heard it anyway. Ring accidentally described its own business model in the most damning terms possible and then asked people to feel good about it. I watched AI[.]com's ad from that suite. Nobody in the room understood it. The domain was purchased for $70 million by the CEO of Crypto[.]com. The website crashed immediately after the ad aired, because millions of people tried to find out what they had just watched and found nothing. Seventy million dollars for a URL that could not survive its own commercial. I watched Anthropic mock OpenAI, and then watched Sam Altman call them dishonest, and then watched two companies valued at a combined $1.35 trillion spend the rest of the evening calling each other liars on X. Someone in the suite said: "At least we didn't do that." I said: "We spent $8 million to say the same thing they said, and nobody noticed." I am not sure which is worse. By the fourth quarter, the collateral damage had started. Viewers became so hypervigilant about AI that they started accusing non-AI ads of being AI-generated. Dunkin' Donuts. Comcast. Ads made by humans, by production crews, by directors with cameras and craft services -- called fake because two hours of AI advertising had conditioned 130 million people to distrust everything on their screen. Our industry spent $100 million on Super Bowl ads to build trust in AI. We built the opposite. I need to tell you about a parallel that nobody in that hospitality suite mentioned, although every person in the room was old enough to remember it. Super Bowl XXXVI. February 2022. Crypto firms bought the ad breaks. Coinbase. FTX. Crypto[.]com. They spent $54 million collectively. The ads were flashy and confident and told 100 million Americans that the future was decentralized and inevitable and worth their money. FTX collapsed ten months later. Coinbase spent the following year in court. Crypto[.]com's CEO is now spending $70 million on AI domain names. We spent more than double what crypto spent. I know this because Tech Brew calculated it this morning and my VP of Communications forwarded it to me with no comment. She always adds a comment. The absence was the comment. Here is what I know that I am not supposed to say. The Super Bowl is a lagging indicator of industry health. A lagging indicator means the peak has already happened. It means the industry already believes in itself more than the public does. It means the money has been spent, the bets have been placed, and the audience -- the 130 million people you needed to convince -- sat through your pitch and felt nothing but annoyance. I spent $8 million to learn something that a Harris poll could have told me for free. Nobody wants what we are selling. Not like this. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But "maybe not ever" is not a phrase that survives a board meeting, so we say "not yet" and buy another ad. The earnings call is in six weeks. When the analyst asks about brand strategy, I will say the word "awareness" and the word "consideration" and the word "momentum." I will not say "warm slop." I will not say "lagging indicator." I will not mention FTX. I will not tell them about the sentiment dashboard, or the Slack message, or the eleven CMOs in the suite who watched the needle go red and poured another drink. We will do this again next year.  The budget is already approved. The budget keeps going up and to the right.

Let's put the pieces together. The letter to officials in Minnesota demanding they turn over voting lists. The raid of the Georgia election office. The declaration he wants to "nationalize" elections. He's getting ready to try to steal the November election. We won't let him.

This is the president of the United States.

Thrilled to report that my in depth interview with Mary Virginia Swanson about the current state of photo book publishing was just named on of the top 5 “Most Listened to B&H Photography Podcasts of 2025” bhphotovideo.com/explora/podcas…

Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered. I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.

BREAKING: In a powerful moment, Ana Navarro just delivered the strongest rebuke of Donald Trump’s Rob Reiner post we’ve seen yet. This is a must watch.

Just want to share with my American friends how the Australians respond to a shooting tragedy. Action, rather than thoughts and prayers.

wherever it leads us ✧

Can't thank Phil Mistry at Petapixel enough for devoting so much time and care to writing this article. To be honest it feels a little like reading my own obituary :) petapixel.com/2025/12/15/ric…

I’m experiencing major imposter syndrome! Last week I was in Dubai attending the HIPA awards (the world's most lucrative photographic awards with over a million dollars in prizes). Much to my astonishment, I was awarded their top prize: the Lifetime Achievement Award.

I was not expecting this. It’s been less than a day — and already tens of thousands of Americans have signed up at DEFIANCE.org. People are less afraid than I thought. I guess that means the White House should be more afraid than it is.

This happened in the last 24 hours and I have not seen it on cable TV news once.