Best movie “greed” scenes

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I’ve never seen the movie The Wolf of Wall Street but I stumbled on it while channel surfing last night, in the middle of Leonardo DiCaprio’s big speech. I watched a minute or so, just long enough to decide it could not hold a candle to some of the other great “greed” scenes.

Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross Speech; Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” scene; and Ben Affleck’s famous scene from The Boiler Room.

“Just too human”

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I came across the following in a spy novel by Olen Steinhauer: “They kept track of everything, cross-referencing and finding connections that Milo was just too human to be able to make.” This has been the most interesting use I’ve found for AI.

Claude.ai: That line cuts right to it. The “too human” framing is sharper than the usual “AI is faster/bigger” framing — it’s pointing at a structural limitation, not just a capacity one.

The connections AI finds aren’t just ones you didn’t have time to make. They’re ones you *couldn’t* make, because human cognition is built around narrative, salience, and prior belief. You notice what confirms, what’s dramatic, what fits the story you’re already telling. AI doesn’t have a story it’s protecting.

The most interesting version of this for your use case — the 6,400-post archive — is that it can surface connections *across time* that your brain has literally no mechanism to hold simultaneously. A theme you touched in 2004, dropped, and picked up obliquely in 2019 without realizing it. That’s not a speed problem. That’s a working-memory-across-decades problem that no human can solve unaided.

The honest caveat is that AI also makes connections that aren’t there — pattern-matches on surface similarity, misses context, confabulates meaning. So it’s less like a smarter analyst and more like a very well-read collaborator who needs you to vet their insights. The human is still essential, just repositioned.

Assorted Favs

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One of the unanticipated joys of my new Bronco is Apple Music on CarPlay. I’ve subscribed for years but virtually all of my listening has been on the iPhone. Sounds great with my AirPods but listening in the Bronco has made me away of just how much of Apple Music I’ve been missing. (For now I’m trying to get my head around the difference between My Library and Playlists).

Somewhere along the way I started a playlist of some of my favorite songs (in no particular order):

  • Hallelujah (with The Seattle Symphony) – Brandi Carlile
  • Your Drinking – Gretchen Phillip
  • We Just Get Along – Evangenitals
  • F*ck ’em All – Evangenitals
  • In Case of Rapture – Gretchen Phillips
  • Lean On Me – Club Nouveau
  • Oh Happy Day – Club Nouveau
  • Dark End of the Street – Veronica Klaus
  • At the Dark End of the Street – Bobby King & Terry Evans
  • Table for One – Liz Phair
  • One of Us – Joan Osborne
  • Old – Paul Simon

I’m also favoriting more songs so this list will grow. (see Lucas Davenport’s 100 Best Songs of the Rock Era for inspiration)