Upstream #196

learning ??, rev-equity , hush ??, perplexity ??, possibilities ??.

Hey. How's everything? Hope it's all tickety boo. Weathers changing isn’t it. Little darker. Let’s squeeze out the last drops of Summer. Wring it dry. Right, let’s go.

“The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught.”

Richard Feynman

culture // learning ??

This is the most sedentary generation in history. Kids have replaced outdoor with indoor play, walking with scooting, and park time with screen time. Now, cruciate ruptures (normally associated with athletes) are up 2000% in UK children since 2000. Children are losing movement competency. Imagine. In related news,?a recent US survey found 82% of undergrads use AI for homework. The issue is that AI is used to avoid effort. But effort is the point of learning.?No squeeze, no juice. Is learning competency next??Which begs the question,?what does it mean to learn. It’s not just accessing information, it’s the hard yards of acquiring knowledge, that might sit in our mental warehouses for decades until we figure out what to do with it. Joining dots. Sparking ideas. As?the UK’s first AI driven “teacher-less class” launches (ffs),?we need to remember the value of actually learning things, not just accessing information.

brands // rev-equity ??

There’s a clear, profitable, and co-dependent relationship between revenue (making money from brand) and equity (investing money in brand). This applies to B2B, B2C, and our personal brand. Smart investment in the things that create equity (experience, communications, product etc), maintains leadership and a competitive advantage, which drives revenue, which drives profits. This is?the revenue / equity virtuous cycle.?"By being forced to compete on price, you earn less, so can afford to invest less in your experience, which means you compete even harder on price, which means you earn less, which means…". Just as Warren Buffet said "The single-most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.” Easy to forget this simple timeless truth in all the noise.

creativity // hush ??

This piece,?on the resounding creative power of quiet and stillness, was great.?How our noisy world impairs creativity.?How “infobesity”?brings creative disorientation. How as Mr. Rogers once put it, “our society is much more concerned with information than wonder". How in 2022,?80% of global workers reported experiencing information overload, up from 60% in 2020.?How we’re drowning in content slop and disappearing into one bottomless algorithmic vortex after another. How as French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Our global culture of busyness rejects, stillness, boredom and quiet, as nothingness. But that’s exactly what creativity badly needs right now.

technology // perplexity ??

The search business, worth an est €220b annually, is (finally) getting disrupted. The AI driven?conversational search engine?Perplexity, just launched a new ad service (selling eyeballs vs clicks). They’re getting 250m searches monthly and growing rapidly. User feedback is hugely positive. Some say?Perplexity is to Google in 2024, as Google was to Ask Jeeves in 2000. Search is changing, and fragmenting. AI conversational interfaces will mediate more, join the dots of assistance, give better answers, do more. This is the undercurrent of AI. Silently transforming. Then boom. Everything’s changed. Look at AI building apps with a single prompt. Giant leaps forward, overnight. Much of the AI we see, doesn't reflect the real transformation taking place.

five random (ish) things:

1. You can’t fake empathy ??.?
2. People are?amazing ??.
3. Spend 1 minute in parks ???.
4. Know what your job is ??.?
5. TikTok shopping trends ???.

watching // possibilities ??.

One year of a house restoration in a tiny village in northwest Italy.?Beautiful place. Beautifully shot. Huge restoration project. It all feels nice. At the end, she says, “We bought this place because of possibilities and not certainties, because a life close to nature, continuous learning and building new skills, feels like journey we need to be on”. Yasssssss.?