Yarui Peng

作者长期赚大钱的一个主要方法，是把持续写作当成一种自己反复推敲，深度思考的方式，提高自身决策质量，而不是惦记着如何兜售 newsletter 给读者。一旦你要惦记着别人，思考就会变形，就会潜意识里开始作茧自缚，把自己拉低到和大部分浅薄读者一样的水平，各个方面变得言不由衷，这样自己其实也没法进步。这样你的思考和文字缺乏真正的灵魂，你自己实际上很清楚，真正深度思考的读者也很清楚，但评论区的各种 spammer 和 scammer 会给你虚假和廉价的喝彩，让你欲罢不能。 而如果把写作当成一种和自己进行足够残酷的坦诚 ( brutally honest ) 的对话的方式，在推敲的过程中，肯定会持续挖掘出以前靠直觉的决策中的各种缺陷，各种完全错误或者不再适用的隐含假设，这样才能持续在第一时间从源头就开始改进，长期看节省了大量时间和资源，也就有时间和资源去捕捉真正高价值的机会。

If you want to understand where media is going, you need to understand how media is made. I'm focusing only on high-quality visual media - whether movies, shows, live action, animated, or non-fiction - which has always followed the same pattern: incredibly long processes, massive budgets, and armies of talent working under harsh conditions and impossible timelines. It's a system built on scarcity, an industry that never recovered from the COVID and strike pauses. But the system is crumbling under its own weight. Demand for content is higher than ever. We all want more, but budgets are skyrocketing while projects dwindle. Creatives spend years of their lives on projects that might never get the funding they need or see the light of day. Even when they do, theatrical releases or distribution are no longer guaranteed. Distribution was the first to change. Streaming services shattered the predictable cadence of weekly television. Social media fragmented attention into infinite streams. YouTube eliminated gatekeepers entirely, enabling single creators to amass billions of views with minimal budgets and simple, low-quality yet compelling stories. The demand patterns changed dramatically, but the supply of high-quality content remained chained to the old system. Now we're crossing the last bridge: high-quality content for mass distribution. What once required hundred-million-dollar budgets is becoming accessible to anyone with a story to tell. I see this in what I call "The rise of AI-first studios": small groups of creative talent - filmmakers, cinematographers, DPs, artists, actors, editors - accomplishing in weeks what used to take years. They're emerging everywhere - New York, Miami, LA, Paris, Brazil, New Zealand. You know you who are ;) These aren't legacy studios adapting to new tools; they're new entities built on different assumptions. They're borrowing workflows and adapting them, experimenting left and right. They have no attachment to how things used to be made, only to good ideas and taste. The dawn of indie storytelling at scale. Relatively unknown creative minds becoming billion-dollar media companies. Small teams achieving what once required years to make. The media companies of tomorrow won't be defined by their size or their history, but by their ability to adapt to this new reality. Creating content on their own terms, owning their rights, sharing directly with audiences everywhere. The best ideas rising to the top because they're the best ideas, not because they had the biggest budgets or the strongest industry connections. We're approaching true creative meritocracy. There will be no excuses.

Never let a good crisis go to waste, my friends