Dez Reads. Personal Pan Pizzas Are Back.

By. Josh Culling, Anne Marie Malecha, William Kim, Nathaniel Beach, and Madeline Nagler

My childhood was built on pizza and The Boxcar Children.

Every book I read earned me a sticker on my BOOK IT pin. Five stickers = a free personal pan at Pizza Hut, with a side of breadsticks and a Pepsi in a red plastic cup. This is maybe the most nostalgic thing I can imagine, and Anne Marie delights our readership with the news that 144 Pizza Huts have been converted back to the old style, complete with the famous lunch buffet. It’s about time.

We also welcome our newest Dez hire, Madeline Nagler, this week. She looks at the ongoing antitrust trial against Live Nation through the lens of the audience, finding it increasingly difficult to enjoy live entertainment due to oppressive pricing models.

Nathaniel Beach continues on the theme of AI disrupting intellectual property, with an examination of future AI-invented pharmaceuticals. Will Kim informs us that a new urn – yes, urn – just dropped, and it’s programmable to play your favorite Spotify playlist into eternity. Why?

Anne Marie brings us home with a more hopeful application of generative AI, in which Stanford researchers are making progress toward helping stroke and ALS patients make sense of jumbled thoughts. It’s important to remember the miracles that will take place via this technology, amidst all the slop.

Thanks, as always, for reading along with us.

Here we go

Red Roof Revival.

NYT. That Red Roof! Those Tiffany Lamps! It’s a Pizza Hut From the Past

The photos in this story caught my eye first. The red and white tablecloths, shape of the breadsticks, large red Pepsi-branded plastic cups, and the signature pan pizza equate to one thing and one thing only – pizza Fridays at a 1990s Pizza Hut. I remember it like it was yesterday – walking into the dimly lit restaurant, taking my seat on the red vinyl booth, Book It coupon in hand… Not a cell phone in sight.

Dine in Pizza Hut Classics are serving up a salad bar, pizza, and a healthy dose of nostalgia to a Millennial and Gen X clientele longing for simpler times. Yum Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut, doesn’t promote or even acknowledge the existence of the 144 restaurants that have been converted to Pizza Hut Classics.

Thanks to Reddit and other social forums, the Classics have an online community cult following that are dishing on where to experience this red-roofed blast from the past. Retrologists are willing to go the distance to get the full retro experience, planning road trips and vacations around hitting a Classic.

– Anne Marie Malecha

The Velvet Rope Economy.

The Hollywood Reporter. Taylor Swift and Trump Loom Over Live Nation as Antitrust Trial Kicks Off

As a native New Yorker, live music once felt democratic. If you cared enough, saved enough, and waited in Midtown in the rain long enough, you could usually find your way into the room. The experience belonged to anyone willing to chase it.

Today, it increasingly belongs to whoever can afford it.

Ticket prices have crept from indulgent to astronomical. Dynamic pricing models turn fan devotion into demand curves. VIP packages expand, fees multiply, and resale markets balloon. A night at a stadium can rival the cost of a weekend trip. The result is that the communal thrill of live music increasingly resembles a luxury good: scarce, and optimized for the highest bidder.

Artists with real leverage sit at the center of this system. Someone like Taylor Swift can move markets simply by announcing a tour, and that influence carries responsibility.

If the biggest artists remain passive observers, the risk is not just financial. Fans priced out of participation eventually stop feeling like participants at all.

– Madeline Nagler

Inventions that Invent?

DrugPatentWatch. Algorithms Don’t Own Patents: How to Win the AI Drug Race

I’ve spent a bit of time around IP policy in my career, and AI is one of the first shifts in a while that truly feels like it breaks the old assumptions. The debate is incredibly messy when AI is part of the process. Who gets credit when a model does most of the thinking and a human is guiding, selecting, nudging, and validating? Is it the owner of the model that developed it, the person utilizing it, or both? AI usage in invention has made this far more than just an IP debate, creating a moral and political dilemma about what we reward and who we hand power of the patent to.

The USPTO has gone back and forth, but currently has the standing that only people can be inventors, and courts have similarly echoed that in Thaler v. Vidal. The issue I have, though, is that policy still falls behind the real-world complexity of AI-assisted work. I think the next chapter gets written in PTAB challenges and litigation, where patents get stress tested claim by claim, especially when someone tries to claim a huge swath of variants that a model can generate quickly.

Regardless, the worst option is pretending this is business as usual.

– Nathaniel Beach

Tomb Tunes.

TechCrunch. Spotify and Liquid Death release a limited-edition speaker shaped like … an urn?

If you’ve ever joked, “Play this at my funeral,” Spotify’s got you – and maybe even took it a step too far. In a partnership with the trendy canned water brand Liquid Death, they’ve rolled out the “Eternal Playlist Urn”: an urn with a Bluetooth speaker built into the lid, so your playlist can come with you to heaven and hell.

The catch is the price tag: $495. The second catch is its exclusivity: only 150 units made, U.S. only. It’s the kind of “collector’s item” logic that usually applies to sneakers or watches, not human remains. And to top it off, Spotify even made an “Eternal Playlist Generator” that asks you questions about what you want to listen to in the afterlife, then spits out an “external” soundtrack based on your listening algorithm.

Don’t get me wrong – I can’t live without music, but I’m not sure if I’ll want it when I’m dead. Do we really need to “take it to the grave” with a branded, rechargeable, limited-edition boombox? When even dying won’t grant us a digital detox, technology has officially gone too far.

– William Kim

Thoughts, Decoded.

BBC. How AI can read our scrambled inner thoughts

Much of the discussion around AI includes concern, warnings, and cautionary tales. I was delighted to read how AI is helping stroke and ALS patients translate thoughts into real-time text. The Stanford University study is the closest scientists have come to “mind reading.”

Having watched loved ones be robbed of their ability to make sense of their thoughts and speak clearly after suffering from a stroke or the degenerative effects of ALS, the promise of these scientific breakthroughs is incredible.

Generative AI is putting technological development on steroids. Within just a few short years, patients may be able to have AI assistants like Alexa and Siri that sound like they did prior to illness or injury, account for personalized speech and linguistic patterns and that fully translate jumbled thoughts into coherent communication.

Technology that pushes beyond the limits of the human brain to help humanity is an intelligence revolution I can get behind.

– Anne Marie Malecha

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