“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.

It seems to be having an impact too. This week I also read a story about the iconic fashion looks of older people:

“Old people just look cool. Cooler than the rest of us, for sure. And everything they wear looks cooler by default. Everyone knows it: Fashion brands rake in platitudes every time they cast a senior model and garments associated with the elderly uniformly shape the canon of good clothes. What is the science here? It’s simply that everything, from clothing to cars to people, looks better with some life in it. Everything is cooler with age; a life well lived and all that. That’s partially why old folks make things look cool by default. That’s reality. They are real. (The juxtaposition between the elderly and hip new clothes also helps.) Also, they have a sense of ease that whippersnappers lack. Confidence comes with age (or so they tell me).”

Combined with the idea I shared from a previous week’s newsletter about the shift from men of a certain age talking about “hotspan” versus healthspan where the new focus is “staying hot into your 60s,” there is something fascinating happening here around the current conversation about age. Being older is now cool. Hopefully it stays that way when I get to my 60s too.

This past weekend, I visited two dozen embassies here in DC as part of the Passport DC event. All opened their doors and illustrated the power of something that seems to otherwise be vanishing in our world (and particularly in DC): good diplomacy. A part of this is the modern role of royalty. In many countries, the current royals are not conquerors or self-promoters. Instead, they are cultural ambassadors and positive forces in the world.

Royalty’s relevance today lies not in ceremony or indulgence but in impact. King Bhumibol of Thailand spent 70 years engineering over 4,000 developmental projects for his country’s poorest communities. King Abdullah II has kept Jordan stable and been a force for female empowerment alongside his wife Queen Rania. Queen Mary of Denmark went from an Australian commoner to a queen fighting loneliness, domestic violence, and maternal health inequality. India’s young Maharaja of Jaipur, Padmanabh Singh, uses his global visibility to champion Rajasthani artisans and was recently a viral hit at this past week’s Met Gala. Even the often criticized King Charles was credited by the British Tabloids for his “masterclass in diplomacy” on a recent visit to the US.

The world could use more royals doing work like this. The powerful lesson here may be that a title and tradition can serve as a force for good if it can be separated from the corrupting influence of political power. We definitely don’t need more Kings (or aspiring Kings) if they follow their worst impulses. But maybe not all modern royalty are bad.

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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.

Beyond this one moment, the brand has been investing heavily over the past three years to integrate AI into their operations, even signing a multi-year contract with OpenAI to embed AI engineers into their own teams. At this point, you may be wondering what makes this so significant. Lots of companies must be trying to do this, right? Here are a few reasons this stood out for me and why Customers Bank’s plan to become “AI-native” may be a blueprint for others to follow:

1. Customer Alignment – as a bank positioned to be for entrepreneurs, acting as an early adopter within a highly regulated industry not only makes sense, but it adds authenticity to their brand positioning. Entrepreneurial customers should love banking with a partner who thinks as they do.
2. Long-Term Focus – in a world where every company seems ready to unnecessarily insert “AI” into every conversation (from AI-enabled water bottles, to self-driving strollers), a brand that seems focused on the longer term stands out as more strategic and therefore more credible.

1. Thoughtful Human Integration – while this may be short-lived, for now Customers Bank seems to be investing in helping their people use AI to handle repetitive admin work and provide them with AI masterclass training so they can do better work.
2. Partnership Co-Branding – by embedding engineers from AI leader OpenAI, they are ensuring efforts will be based on the latest product releases and also put themselves in a place where they can be an early enterprise customer of the latest innovations as they happen.
3. Unexpected Theater – the last element of this successful strategy hinges on the brand (and Sidhu himself) being willing to insert themselves unexpectedly into spaces that generally only tech CEOs are venturing right now, such as digital clones.