Rebellious Thoughts #59 - 🤘 Is AI Secretly Shaping What You Believe?

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.

YEW!

Let’s get into today’s:

A close friend sent me this podcast recently. Worth having a listen.

Harari wrote Sapiens, Homo Deus and now Nexus.

A piece stuck with me, not that I didn’t know this but the way he explains it (unsurprisingly) makes it so clear. I am going to paraphrase but it’s something along the lines of:

“Editors shape what we believe in and AI is the new editor”

Come to think of it… the editor of most of your information feeds is an AI with the goal of engagement. The goal is not truth or spreading empathy, or editing according to information that makes people more understanding and loving. The goal is simply to keep people in the app as much as possible.

I’ve spoken a bit about AI in previous newsletters. Pay attention, don’t just let it happen to you.

Oh and if you don’t want your career to just happen to you either, check out our Career Shake Up! course!

Check out Rove Wheelchairs.

I am not sure if I have ever told you about them, it’s a startup I have invested in and help whenever and however I can. Lovely bunch of humans on a wonderful quest.

Today we had an amazing session with a group of amazing OTs to share insights into fitting chairs and the dozens of permutations and adjustments needed to make things just perfect.

I’ll be honest I don’t know if the name “wheelchair” does it justice…it’s definitely not just a chair with wheels.

If you speak a second language teach your kids or a friend or colleague a sentence they can drop in conversation regularly.

If you don’t speak another language, learn a sentence well enough that you can drop in conversations.

Hit "reply” to this email and share your sentences with me!!

Just got a new tattoo - a pile of rocks we built with the kids on one of our many camping trips… dry river beds lend themselves to beautiful balancing sculptures.

Like last week when I spoke about life as a pendulum, life can also be observed as building a pile of rocks balancing one on top of the other… sometimes they fall, break, sometimes we have to let some go and pick new ones, sometimes our foundations are not strong or wide enough to handle the height so we need to start again.

The crazier the shape of the rock the harder it is to balance it and other rocks above it…but all is possible. Sometimes the pile becomes unstable with a rock that is slightly too big or incorrectly shaped...

You can draw more parallels, but here is a challenge…

You know how in my keynotes I often mention the famous saying “turkeys don’t vote for Xmas” - in reference to us never promoting or helping a solution that threatens our livelihood.

Or another way to think about it: you will never engage with novelty that may impact your wage, or embrace anything new that can render you irrelevant.

While reading the book Antifragile (by Nassim Taleb) I came across another concept that is powerful and again a turkey analogy works: mistaking “absence of evidence” for “evidence of absence”.

Nassim explains that a butcher will feed a turkey for 1000 days until Thanksgiving at which point being a turkey sucks. So there is no evidence to suggest harm, in fact if anything, the opposite!… every day that goes by…

Remember we are all turkeys!

We do this, it is one of the most common mistakes that put our careers at risk…

Broken record alert!!!! - feeling comfortable, pushing novelty away from your life to preserve the illusion of safety is paradoxically more dangerous.

Love

Gus

P.S. 🦃 Don't be the turkey that's all comfy, clueless about what's coming next. If you're pushing away novelty to keep things safe, you're actually waddling into danger!

It's time to shake things up before life does it for you.
Check out the Shake Up! Experience and make sure you're carving your own path—not getting carved up!

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