July 2nd Newsletter
Thought for the Week: Getting shaken from your comfort zone is an opportunity, use those shakeups to build a life that’s truly you.
I saw yet another seemingly normal person going insane on social media, alleging that AI is going to “put our brain in a jar”. Listen for yourself
Her argument is that getting an AI to do the following:
buy concert tickets
schedule it in your calendar
let all your friends know it was booked
is somehow “putting your brain in a jar”.
So, if you’re a CEO and you have an assistant who books all your travel and manages your meetings, is your brain also in a jar?
So if that assistant is digital, that’s also putting your brain in a jar? I’m struggling to see the difference here.
This is the CEO of Signal, a privacy based texting company, and this is the weak argument she comes up with against agentic AI?
Her other argument about privacy and permissions is fair, but Edward Snowden made it exceedingly clear that all of these companies (likely including Signal) are colluding with the government (yes, your cell phone company and all the major tech companies are sharing data with the government). Anyone going on about privacy in 2025 is a paranoid delusional psychopath and needs to be put on a terrorist watch list before they start blowing up buildings because people made a phone call.
The question is whether this tech is useful and solves a problem.
Regulation is an entirely different problem.
And with the current administration and neither party in the US willing at all to curb corporate excess pining over regulation is just farting into the wind at this point. It’s not happening.
So, do you want the help from a digital assistant that every rich person gets or not? You decide!
Don’t let people like her make your decisions, she’s out to lunch in la la land and talking nonsense.
I saw a mind boggling statistic this morning. So mind boggling in fact that I wondered if the data was made up.
Youth Sports Parent Survey - 22% of parents think their kids has the ability to play college level sports and 11% think their kids have the ability to play professionally.
I was honestly flabbergasted, this number isn’t even close to true.
The truth (drumroll)
-7% of high school athletes play in college at any level
-2% of college athletes play professionally at any level.
If you do your math there, if you are a high school athlete, your chances of playing professionally are .14% or 14 out of 10,000.
Not great, bob!
The sample here was athletes between the ages of 6 and 18. Even if the entire sample was high school athletes, this is incredible levels of delusion.
If 22% of high school athlete parents thought their kids would be college athletes, the truth is less than 1/3 of that.
And if 11% of high school athlete parents thought their kids would play professionally, the levels of delusion are off the charts, the truth is 99% of those kids won’t even sniff the big leagues.
The fact we’re talking about 6 to 18 year olds even makes this more crazy.
I’ve spent a while talking to people about how much youth sports have changed since I was a kid. Travel ball was really just beginning to take hold when I was in the youth sports system in the 90s. Now, 25+ years later, it really is the system.
I think people should be aware that their delusions are being exploited!
Travel ball coaches and teams want to monetize your delusions about your kid playing professional or college ball. They know these numbers as well as I do. But they want everyone to pretend like they’re professionals now so the kids (and parents) get to act like professional athletes on the parents dime.
It’s extremely gross to lie to people about their kids. It’s not fair to the kids, or the system of youth sports that isn’t supposed to be like this.
Youth sports are supposed to be fun, a place to explore your athletic and leadership talents outside the classroom. They’re not supposed to be monetized to the hilt to steal money from delusional parents who should know better that their kids won’t be playing professional sports.
Sorry to be a buzzkill. I hate people who exploit other people and I like fun. Let’s make this system fun like it used to be and not a fake professional athlete factory.
It makes me insane to see people attacking colleges, by and large huge creators of opportunity, while travel ball exploits these parents and kids and they get nothing in return other than going to fantasy camp.
An often underrated element in uptake of new technology is people’s readiness to uptake a new technology.
Two things make it easier to uptake new technology.
You’ve never seen anything like this technology and thus have no frame of reference. This one is the Henry Ford quote about giving people a car “if you’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. You give them something that’s a frame shift, a completely new thing, you become unburdened by what has been. This is also exceptionally hard to do because it’s never been done.
People are already doing something pretty close to what you’re doing but they’re a little frustrated by it. This is the person who is thrilled when they discover Quicken because their Excel spreadsheets were being tortured to death to derive the output. This person has to be frustrated by what they’re currently doing. If you’re offering something incremental (Quicken) but I’m happy with my Excel sheets, I’m probably not going to switch! I may in fact be more invested in staying with what I already have.
The key for the second one isn’t product improvement, it’s customer identification.
A lot of times people run after problems for customers that don’t want their problem solved. Just because YOU think their problem needs to be solved doesn’t mean they even see it as a problem.
When identifying product market fit, you can
Find a customer and solve their problem
Find a problem and identify the customer that has that problem
Identify a solution, see what problems it solves for potential users
Incidentally, they’re all expensive.
The cheapest is probably working with a specific customer to identify their problems then try to solve them. But so many companies want to do the other 2. They build a solution, then back into the customer and the problem it solves. People love building fully baked solutions and then trying to find where they fit.
Just because your solution works doesn’t mean it solves a problem for a single soul that actually exists.
Talking is cheap.
Building is less cheap.
Building solutions that solve nobody’s problems is very expensive.
This is a bit of an aside but I was reminded of this little fact while watching a video in a class I’m taking.
If you’re like me, you’ve been confused by the style choice in many offices of a dress shirt with an outdoor vest.
Well, dear reader, the origin of this look is Midtown Manhattan finance offices, it has even been unofficially dubbed the “Midtown uniform”.
The belief is that it originated with people being required to wear a certain kind of dress shirt and yet working in a cold midtown office (likely because of hot natured higher ups).
So, this look was able to make it clear you were wearing appropriate attire (button-down), while also not being cold.
What’s funny is that this has branched out from original patagonia vest into the puffy vest or the life vest (just kidding, I think).
The look screams business casual - business shirt + casual vest. You’re ready to go to a an office and also go climb a mountain.
I totally get not wanting to wear a tie but there are so many other clothes options! I’m not sure why this one has become ubiquitous.
Fellas, try out another jacket. Get a sports jacket! Linen in the fabric makes it a more versatile option that isn’t as heavy. I’m a big fan of the zip up hoodie. Try some things out, do something new.
I can’t leave this post without writing about AI again
Here’s a key insight that I keep thinking about with regard to LLMs. Ironically, a buddy of mine who’s an excellent graphic designer and tech blogger articulated it when LLMs first started being able to produce images.
AI is a great MVP generator.
You may not have the tools yet to be ready to launch, can you use an LLM to help you create a test version of what you’d like to create eventually?
With the advent of vibe coding, even non-coders now have the ability to build simple mobile applications.
Go forth and try something out. See if you can get it work.
Test your concept then invest the energy in the full build.