Philosophy, Linguists, English, Religion – these are all courses of study that were discounted and minimized for years. And it is true that graduating with a degree in any of these may have made it more difficult for you to get that first job out of college. As the thinking always went, what kind of employer hires a philosophy major? In five years, the longtime answer to that question may change.

The most valuable commodity in a future team member may be their capacity to think differently, adapt to change, and communicate clearly with the people (and machines) around them. As enrollment in computer science degrees continues to nosedive year after year, perhaps more students are discovering this new “golden ticket” for themselves. When AI can code anything you want, the most valuable skill anyone can have is knowing what to ask it to build in the first place.

The Equestrian events have never been my favorites. Any sport where your performance is dictated by the bond between a human and an animal might be fun to watch but has always felt to me like it doesn’t belong in the Olympics and typically generates considerable backlash every year. I was thinking about this after reading the announcement this week that the LA 2028 Olympics will be removing Equestrian show jumping and replacing it with an “American Ninja style” obstacle jumping competition.

​LA28 will debut Obstacle, which features a head-to-head race over a Ninja-style sprint course, taking the place of Horse Jumping. Athletes accumulate points in the first three events to determine their starting position for the Laser Run. This final event is a combined running and shooting event where athletes start with a delay corresponding to the number of points between them and the leader. The first athlete to cross the finish line is the winner. This multidimensional contest demands unparalleled physical and mental resolve, calm precision under chaotic conditions and provides spectators with an ever-changing, highly exciting viewing experience.

The move is another in a sequence of shifts by the LA28 organizers to add new exhibition sports that are likely to attract a new and younger audience to watch the Olympics while increasing the modern appeal of the Games. The criteria used to decide which sports get added has 35 different factors including a sport’s global popularity, youth appeal, gender equality, and operational costs.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

This week there was also a story about Etsy’s new marketing campaign focused on why human moments still matter. The effort works because the message feels true to what Etsy has always offered: a fair platform for real people to create things they are passionate about and sell them directly to customers. Then there was the story of former Apple tech guy Steve Wozniak getting cheers for his commencement address where he spoke about how students already have AI: “actual intelligence” …

Speaking to graduates earlier this month, the 75-year-old reflected on decades spent working alongside engineers attempting to recreate human cognition through software and hardware. He joked that despite all the advances in computing, the most reliable way to make a brain still “takes nine months,” drawing another round of laughter from the audience. Wozniak encouraged students to think independently and resist treating AI systems as substitutes for genuine understanding or intuition.

In future weeks, these sorts of stories will continue to pop into all of our feeds and reinforce the same idea. This is a great thing. The more we all hear this reminder that AI cannot and should not substitute your ability to think for yourself, the more likely it is that all of us will make better choices about how we use the tools that are available to us.

“Their faces ask the world questions we can no longer avoid: how many more millions of children will be harmed by products that, while innovative, are still designed without sufficient safeguards? When will children be able to enjoy the extraordinary potential of technology without it compromising their wellbeing.”

The memorial features 50 lightboxes each with the story of a child who died because of some form of online harm – cyberbullying, grooming, sextortion or exposure to self-harm content. It’s an urgent message as part of the movement to recognize child online safety as a public health issue and major societal challenge. This is a challenge that we can solve through demanding more accountability from the companies and leaders building the technology we use every day.

Tapping a larger retro trend, owner Tim Sparks is aiming to restore what he feels is the core identity of the brand and what sets them apart from their delivery competitors. The renovated restaurants in his portfolio include the iconic salad bar, stained glass overhead lighting, plastic checkered tablecloths, red vinyl booths and even the chain’s legendary “Book It” program that offered students a free personal pizza for achieving a monthly reading target.

It will be interesting to watch how this strategy plays out and whether nostalgia alone is enough to get diners to come back to the old school Pizza Hut they might remember.

Over 15 years ago, one student witnessed this annual ritual and decided to try and do something about it to help find a good home or reuse for all those curb-side possessions. His national non-profit is called the Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN) and works to create a school-run, student-led, zero waste initiative on campuses that coordinates with over 200 schools around the US. At his former alma mater at the University of New Hampshire, volunteers spend 600 hours collecting and sorting items left by students departing for the summer. Items are cleaned, put into storage and then saved for resale when students come back after the summer.

This is the sort of non-obvious idea for a non-profit that I love to see stories about. Solving a problem, educating people and helping us manage our throw-away culture to make a change.

Beyond writing a book on the topic, he has partnered with leading organizations (starting with Harvard) to build his School for Moral Ambition to teach this way of thinking to those who need to hear it most. Imagine if the smart minds powering innovations for tomorrow cared deeply about the morality of their solutions. It is movements like this which might actually make this a reality. For that reason, this is a book that is worth your time to read and share. We could all use a bit more moral ambition in our daily lives.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

So essentially Amazon has strong-armed media partners into providing their high-quality content in order to build what is being described as a podslop generator at scale? It’s no wonder the announcement is generating widespread backlash online.

The sad part is how the leadership of many of these content partners likely felt like they had no choice but to participate just so they don’t get left behind. This is the reality of public pressure on media leaders right now to dive into every new AI initiative. Even the ones that are pretty clearly terrible ideas.

As automated tools make our work easier, they also make the reality of brain rot a major concern as we may start forgetting to do the things that were previously essential in our work. Some would suggest that we have seen this before. Most of us who haven’t spent time on a farm don’t know how to skin a chicken or milk a cow anymore. Many younger people have already lost the ability to read a map or write in cursive. Thanks to automation in cars, many next-generation drivers will never need to learn how to parallel park.

You may look at some of these shifts and see them as great modern conveniences. After all, who ever loved parallel parking? Or you may see these as lost arts worth mourning. I do still love a good map, personally. Either way, this is going to be a tension we all experience in our lives with greater frequency. The question of what skills to retain and which ones to give up will soon be a daily decision for us all—if it hasn’t become one already.

In the span of a few days, you can see a perfect compilation of the biggest problem facing Meta right now: a deep lack of trust that prevents any effort, even a seemingly positive one, from being received that way. In time (if it hasn’t happened already), I suspect Meta/Facebook will be studied by academics and top business institutions alike for how completely they have destroyed trust, reputation and goodwill that they did enjoy at one time (back in the early days when they were Facebook). None of that makes it easier to live through right now for those most directly affected, but at least there’s hope future leaders can learn from their missteps and perhaps do better.

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This question of value and what sort of markup is reasonable when thinking about buying or selling anything was a big theme that came up this week. Also this week, big advertising holding company, WPP, reported not just a drop in revenue but also lower margins, sparking some major introspection from industry insiders:

“What drove the decline? Reduced scope of work, fee pressure, or outright budget cuts? The answer determines whether WPP has a cyclical problem or a structural one.

Scope reductions are cyclical: clients buying less of the same thing. Budget cuts are cyclical: economies contract, marketing contracts with them. Fee pressure is structural: clients paying less for the same thing. That is a different animal entirely. It doesn’t respond to patience or strategy decks. Winning accounts while revenue drops is the diagnostic signature of a business defending share by cutting price. Every account won on tighter terms resets the floor for the next pitch … The harder task, the one WPP’s leadership avoided for a decade, is rebuilding a reason for clients to pay full price.”

So in one story, a popup market illustrates a growing shift where “more consumers are separating what a product actually does from the story and packaging built around it.” In another, service-based businesses like ad agencies where the days of clients blindly paying markups for questionable value added (such as entire field of media buying) are widely reported to be numbered.

The bottom line is, consumer mistrust will likely continue to squeeze margins as anyone aiming to sell anything at a premium will need to work harder to prove they are worth the price they hope to get.