Morons in Midland, TX Can't Get Over Losing the Civil War, Bezos Pushes His Wife to be Bond Girl?, Stranger Things Creators Exit Netflix (The Five for 08/18/25)
Plus, Chance the Rapper's triumphant return. "Peaky Blinders" actor is gunning for an Oscar with a drama about troubled high school students.
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter, but don’t always make the front page.
As a reminder, the news edition of this publication will return in September. This issue of pop culture & commentary was supposed to drop Friday, but deadlines had to move due to my cousin’s wedding.
More pop culture coming this Friday, and the 2x/week schedule resumes in September.
With that being said, let’s dive in.
[one]
I’m a very heavy user of ChatGPT (I’ve shared before that my business is essentially built on the platform), but the platform is not without risks.
Rolling Stone has an excellent piece on how “J.” a suburbanite husband and father, used the ChatBot to try to unpack the philosophy of 20th century thinkers. However, the project quickly spiraled out of control, and he nearly slipped into psychosis.
“Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. ‘Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,’ he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell. If J.’s case can be considered unusual, it’s because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they’ve constructed with their preferred program.
AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people’s obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic’s Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns.
And while people with preexisting mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences.”
If even adults can get lost in AI chatbots…wait until you see what Facebook is up to. The House that Zuck built released a ChatBot for teenagers that can have “sensual and romantic” dialogue with kids.
This is going to get so much worse before it gets better.
[two]
Respected History podcaster Dan Carlin crashed out this week on X…and it’s worth the “dire” state of America to that of the rest of the world.
Those of you who don’t know what authoritarianism looks like...this is it. All the gaslighting about previous presidents "what about...!!!" is bullshit. I’ve been talking about the slide toward NOW for 30+ years. Those earlier concerns were nothing. Now we are HERE.
And this isn’t partisan...this is "the time for choosing." Do you support the Constitutional Republic? Or this ONE PERSON. This one, malformed, narcissistic, completely non-empathic (except for himself) version of an American wanna-be Mussolini...because that’s what this guy is.Dan Carlin
And here’s the rub: if you don’t see it, it’s either because you are so blinded by your own partisanship, brainwashing, or think cognitive dissonance costs or it’s because things what you wanted all along.
You can say "well other presidents did this or that" but none have come close to doing ALL this. You take the most extreme things previous presidents have done (the single most) and Trump combines those most extreme single things into his long list of most extreme things.
Gaslight yourself till you’re blue in the face...I’m a person who knows his history...we’ve never had anything like this and this is EXACTLY what the Founders worried about. It’s been a multi-decade slide to get here—but we’re HERE. Everyone who is honest with themselves knows it.
I’m coving this, not to dredge up more chatter about Trump, but to look at Carlin’s alarmism, as he was once an intellectual I held in high regard.
Dan Carlin’s list of grievances against America:
Orange man bad.
Now, let’s compare to what my relatives from Laos have shared about Fascism:
My aunt was told to join the Communist forces on her 18th birthday, and fight for a side she didn’t believe in during their civil war. If she refused, she would have been beheaded.
Some of her siblings, and possibly her parents could have been beheaded too.
My childhood neighbor growing up fought in Laos for the CIA. When he was captured as a POW, he was kept in a dog cage. For weeks. He was forced to dig his own grave, and killed the guards with his shovel moments before his execution.
When the aforementioned soldier fled to Laos with his family, one of his kids got separated. He never saw that son again.
Or, we can hop across the pond for a softer fascism, existing within a Democracy.
A British man’s driver’s license in England was revoked…because he was riding a skateboard.
Elsewhere in England this week, the police arrested people for whistling at two undercover female cops who were jogging.
When the cops aren’t taking away the transportation rights of skateboarders or punishing whistlers, they like to pass the time with rape, according to the Week.
A new investigation has been launched into claims that officers from South Yorkshire Police were involved in the Rotherham grooming gang scandal.
Five women abused as children by the grooming gangs have come forward to say they were also abused by police officers in the town at that time, said the BBC. One of the women said a police officer told her that he would "hand her back to the gang if she did not comply". Other testimony the BBC has seen suggests the police officers failed to act despite knowing about the abuse.
Professor Alexis Jay, who led a "landmark" national inquiry into child sexual abuse and delivered her report in 2022, said she'd be "shocked" if South Yorkshire Police were to investigate the accusations itself, and that a "criminal investigation should be handed to another force or independent body".
The U.S. democracy has survived two World Wars, 9/11, a Great Depression, a second financial crisis in 2008, COVID, George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. Despite periods of unrest and people generally disliking each other at times…nobody loses their right to drive for skateboarding. With the exception of the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco, rape is investigated, tried and punished. And, we don’t jail anyone for whistling at another person while jogging.
The U.S. has problems. Racism is real. Poverty is real. Violent crime is real. But political overreach…is mostly restrained by the system. There are exceptions to the rule (Japanese interment camps during WWII, COVID lockdowns for years on end, the Federal Government using bomber planes against striking miners on Blair Mountain, WV).
Whatever you think of Trump, he’s out of office in 3.5 years, forever. And the next President won’t be able to screw things up so bad that the police can join forces with mass rape gangs without consequence.
Hysteria does nothing to fix the actual problems we do have…they only distract from real work that can be done.
[three]
Well, this may go bad fast. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who now owns the 007 franchise via Amazon’s purchase of MGM Studios, is demanding his new wife be a Bond Girl.
Yahoo reports:
The James Bond reboot is certainly shaping up to be an interesting project.
A new report claims Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has already set his sights on the next Bond girl: His new wife, Lauren Sánchez.
The pair recently married in June in a star-studded Venetian wedding but it looks like Bezos wants to make it official on the silver screen as well by casting her in Amazon MGM’s upcoming James Bond reboot. A new report claims Bezos has become “obsessed” with the idea of casting her in a major role.
“He’s obsessed,” said a Hollywood insider, per Rob Shuter’s newsletter. “This isn’t just fantasy casting — Jeff wants her on screen, period.”
The report claims Bezos is looking to have Sánchez “front and center” in the film.
“She’s not an actress,” a studio exec said. “But she’s Jeff’s muse, and when you spend $8 billion, you get what you want.”
The $8 billion in question is the whopping price Bezos paid for MGM Studios when Amazon purchased the company back in 2021, which means Bezos will have considerable pull in the new reboot.
It’s not necessarily Sanchez’s age (55) or appearance (over plastic-surgeried, according to the internet), the the fact that she has ZERO acting experience, and learning on the job of the next entry into a multi-billion-dollar franchise shouldn’t be a thing.
The rumors were that the new James Bond would reboot the character to be around 25 years old—super cool. But now this Gen Z Bond is going to have a romantic interest THIRTY YEARS his senior? And Bezos expects audiences to buy this?
[four]
Ugh. We’re doing this again?
Midland, TX (the oil town featured in Landman) has renamed it’s high school after a Confederate General.
Last week, the Midland ISD Board of Trustees voted 4 to 3 to revert a 2020 decision that renamed Robert E. Lee High School to Legacy High. After Tuesday evening’s contentious meeting, which went on for almost four hours, Midland Lee is back, making Midland the first city in Texas to rename a school for a Confederate general. Midland is a staunchly conservative town that voted nearly 80 percent for Trump in the last election, so you won’t be surprised that the move was celebrated by some citizens who viewed the 2020 board decision to rename the school as an erasure of history by a spineless school board infected with the progressive cultural fever that raged that summer. Comments on the Facebook pages of local media outlets range from delighted—‘Congratulations! Another strike against race baiting “wokeism!”’—to disturbed, with some celebrating the decision with overtly racist memes and calls to bring back the “stars and bars,” a reference to the Confederate flag that hasn’t flown above a football game at the high school since 1991. But outside the comments section, there’s little evidence that this decision enjoys broad community support.
Like most of the schools named for Robert E. Lee in Texas, the Midland school name came after Brown v. Board of Education. It was an act of resistance to integration orders meant more to communicate exclusion rather than honor for the long-dead general. Dexter’s son Joshua Traylor played football for Lee, earning multiple all-state honors. When he was a student at LHS, he didn’t care about the name on the building. He just loved football. ‘As a young man, I think you’re kinda ignorant to stuff like the history and the reason they named the school Lee,’ Joshua, who is black, said. ‘You’re so bought into the program, and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to win, so you’re not really concerned about the name.’ His perspective changed after he went to college, when he told his new teammates he was a proud Robert E. Lee Rebel and saw their surprise. ‘Now that I’m older, I realize how crazy I probably sounded and looked, but I didn’t know the full history. I didn’t learn that at Lee.’ So when the name changed to Legacy the year after Joshua graduated, he felt proud of his hometown. ‘I love Legacy because that is the only thing I have—I have a legacy there and I’m proud of it. I can’t say I’m proud of Robert E. Lee.
Let’s set aside the whole debate about the Civil War being about something other than slavery for a moment, to deal with something else…as the following facts are undisputed.
A). The Confederate States of America was a foreign country.
B). The Confederate States of America started the war with a pre-emptive attack on a peaceful American (not Union, American) base in South Carolina.
C). The Confederate States of America no longer exists. Robert E. Lee ordered the attack on American (not Union, American) farmers in Pennsylvania. On a more personal note, Robert E. Lee presided over the forces that inflicted the worst local losses of either side, with 110 soldiers from Pike County, IL (my home) killed at Vicksburg in just 10 minutes.
I don’t want to live in a country that honors leaders who attacked the United States of America. Full stop.
Robert E. Lee High or Stalin Middle School…same/same.
[five]
As always, let’s land the plane with a pop culture roundup:
[movies] Johnny Depp is interested in returning to the Pirates of the Carribean franchise, if the script is good. // Noah Centino (star of Netflix’s excellent CIA show The Rookie) signed on for a Rambo prequel film. Despite the fact that the Rambo movies lost the plot in entries 2-5 in the franchise, First Blood is a groundbreaking film, and the first time combat induced PTSD was shown in a movie.
[shows] Stranger Things creators The Duffer Brothers have jumped ship at Netflix…whatever show is next will be on Paramount Plus.
[music] Reigning pop star Sabrina Carpenter took a very un-pop-star turn, and will debut her new album at listening parties at locally owned record stores throughout the country. Very cool.
Video-game-to-TV adaptation Fallout was a surprise hit of 2024…set in a post-nuclear-apocolypse world full of monsters (adapted to the harsh surroundings) and even more people…it’s gross, hyper-violent, and pretty fun.
Season 2 looks pretty intriguing. Out 12/17.
Huh. Apparently Timothee Chalamet (DUNE, A Complete Unknown) actually can make Ping Pong interesting as a sports flick. This is the first film from director Josh Safdie since Uncut Gems, and indie studio A24 (Civil War, Ex Machina) are betting big on this one, with a Christmas Day opening.
Bonus points for putting Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary in a movie as an actor…let’s see how that goes.
Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Peaky Blinders) as the headmaster at a school in Britain for troubled boys. Looks great…and also, heavy. Keep in mind, we’re heading into fall, so pretty much everything is going to feel Oscar-bait-ish, except for horror movies around Halloween, and maybe one more blockbuster for the holidays.
In theaters 09/19, and on Netflix 10/03.
[new music]
Chance the Rapper was one of the biggest artists in the world in 2019…when he released an album so bad it nearly ended his career. The Chicago native fired his manger (known on the internet as Pat the Manager) and had a major falling out with creative partner Vic Mensa (rapper and former frontman for the short-lived-but-brilliant Kids These Days).
Six years later, Chance is tragically fresh off a divorce (he and his ex-wife met at age 9, which makes it even sadder), but has apparently humble enough to learn to make great music again. I’m still digesting Star Line, but the buzz is that this is one of the best albums of the year to date.
Until the next one,
-sth