Reese Witherspoon and Me

Will I join her on the red carpet some day?

On Friday, I got an email from actress Reese Witherspoon. She says she wants to turn my book The History of Jazz into a film.

Give Reese some credit—she clearly knows my book and describes it in painful detail. Okay, her email was a bit bland and verbose, but Ms. W. writes perfectly, without grammatical errors or even any typos. I feel clumsy by comparison.

And please don’t tell me that it sounds like a scammer with a chatbot. That’s so cruel. Who would dare catfish unsuspecting authors so callously?

Are you envious? Well, it gets better.

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This morning, I heard from Jerry Bruckheimer, the famous Hollywood producer of films such as Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean. He wants to make a movie based on my book Music: A Subversive History.

I’m even more impressed by Bruckheimer. Not only does he know my work—and writes about it just as cogently as Reese—but he has read it in the Italian translation (Musica: Una Storia Sovversiva). What a savant!

Yeah, I hate dropping all these names. But as they say in elite circles: It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.

That said, I’m worried I may have blown it already. Reese ghosted me after I responded to her solicitation.

So I decided to ratchet down my expectations for Jerry B. I’ve already sent out my response—with a more modest request.

I mean, if my book really is an “exceptionally visual foundation for storytelling,” it ought to be worth some socks, no?

Reese Witherspoon on the red carpet—maybe I’ll join her there some day? (Photo by Eve Rinaldi)

I definitely need some new opportunities—because all those book clubs that contacted me last month never actually came through with the goods.

I don’t understand it. They tell me, over and over, that my books are perfect for their readers, but they keep trying to get me on the phone for some reason.

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On a totally unrelated note, I see that the AI backlash has ramped up in just the last few days. It makes you wonder why.

Just last week, I predicted that “we are now embarking on the stage where there’s pushback even inside the slop companies.” And this week it’s already coming true.

Even the bots are now battling the bots. For example, at Anthropic…

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And Spotify is also distancing itself from slop. This headline is from yesterday.

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Or consider this new AI policy at software company Clay. Coders were the first to embrace AI—are they now the first to sicken of it?

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All of this is on top of the recent AI controls implemented at LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) and YouTube (owned by Alphabet).

Are the true believers losing their faith?

Maybe these folks have good reason to distance themselves from AI. The financial world is turning on the bot business. The ten most shorted investment grade bonds are now all linked to AI.

Bonds don’t get mentioned much by the mainstream media, but they will now determine the future of Silicon Valley—which increasingly spends more cash than it brings in.

The trendline is ominous.

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When you borrow too much, you lose control of your destiny. That is now the new normal for the largest tech empires. And if lenders continue to back away, we will witness a fall of Humpty Dumpty proportions.

In a worst case scenario, this could push the whole economy into a tailspin.

That’s why I need to land one of these movie deals—it will be my safe port in the storm.

C’mon Reese, give me another chance….

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POSTSCRIPT:

Some people are taking this article at face value. So I need to declare that I’m fully aware that these are scam emails. I shared them here for humorous purposes (and also as a warning to other writers).

I’m not really bragging about my relationship with Reese Witherspoon. I don’t have one, and I’m sure she had nothing to do with the email I received. The same is true for Jerry Bruckheimer.

I’m flattered that some readers saw these as legit, but my life is nowhere near as glamorous as they imagine.