Launched by a website called Reasons To Be Cheerful, the Depolarization Project is a compilation of stories that are around a single topic: we are not as polarized as people think. And we don’t need to be. Described as “an experiment in curiosity,” the landing page features multiple stories about how people are conquering division and finding a more human way to connect with one another, despite political differences. One recent story focuses on the effectiveness of deep canvassing, a process that involves meeting people face to face to shift perspectives.

The underlying purpose of the project is to demonstrate that we may not be as far apart in what we think as the media we consume might suggest. It demonstrates exactly how the angorithm drives us apart and why more discussion and an open mind could be the secret to not just being more cheerful but maybe changing our world too.

The pipeline for any industry comes from the jobs at the bottom that offer that initial training for what a career is like. One fear quickly becoming reality is that we are at a moment in time when AI is rewiring companies and managers to rethink whether they even need people doing entry level roles anymore. The disappearance of those jobs and the money saved certainly may help the bottom line in the short term, but the longer term question is where the skills for that next generation of leadership will come from if there are no longer entry points into industries on the bottom level. The effect was so pronounced, we declared this the entry cliff and wrote in Future Words about the potential dangers to entire industries and the livelihood and optimism of young people who are seeing these sorts of roles erode. Shining a spotlight on this effect is one of the ways that those of us inside of industries affected might be able to rethink what that entry level role now should mean. If the “grunt work” often associated with the new hire or intern can now be automated, how else might we be able to train that next generation of talent in the things that will matter for our industries moving forward? What if they can help imagine what those priorities will be based on their perspective? The point is, like many of our Future Words, the entry cliff might feel like a dystopian way of looking at the prospects of young workers. It can just as easily become a call to action reminding us that there are some futures that we might describe with new words, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept them as they are.

A recurring theme in the media is the appeal of Americans moving to Europe to escape Trump’s America. People joke about having a second passport “just in case” and the romantic idea of Europe as a “social paradise” is often showcased by digital nomads who rack up hundreds of thousands of views on social media sharing their enviable lives. According to a recent article from WIRED, the truth about abandoning America for Europe may not be quite so easy. It turns out a lot of Americans who did leave encounter cultural challenges, including Europeans who don’t actually like Americans (shocking) and many other life challenges ranging from a lack of widespread home air conditioning to the pacing of work life. When you add in European social unrest that we’re seeing with protests in France and the prominence of right-wing political leaders in places like Italy, Germany and Portugal, the allure of Europe in particular is waning for many of these Americans featured in the article who are now planning to move back to the US. Migrating to another country is not an easy thing to do. I only did it once in my life and it took a little over two years for my adoptive country (Australia) to really feel like home. Certainly, some of these regretful Americans may be giving up on their new homes too quickly. Yet the bigger conclusion is that perhaps the idea of fleeing your home country instead of choosing to stay and create the culture you want to live in was an idea flawed from the start. What do you think? Do you see this as a predictable boomerang from people who were not prepared for the reality of living in a new country, or a sign of something else?

This week Spotify reported that they removed 50 million AI generated “slop and spam” music tracks from their platform. It’s the latest move in their year long effort to prioritize “authentic, human artists” and portray itself as a platform more friendly toward actual musicians. Primarily, the tracks removed were ones reported as spam or frequently skipped by listeners, and Spotify has promised to employ “many signals to help it detect slop and spam, such as metadata, user feedback, upload patterns and third-party AI detection tools.”

Amazon deals with the same problem through a flood of AI generated books on their platform, and also suggests they are doing something to help remove those books. Experts suggest it’s significantly harder to eliminate the slop in music where there are lots of platforms, versus Amazon which could more easily use their monopoly position to largely eliminate this problem. Their “limits” which include reducing the number of books a single account can publish to two per week are still minimal. It’s hard to imagine anyone who publishes two books per week NOT publishing complete slop. The question that both situations raise, though, is what responsibility we should expect platforms to have when it comes to authenticating content or making sure that it passes a certain bar of quality. Retail sites like Stockx have a model here that may be worth copying. The site, which promises to give you “access to the world’s most coveted items in the smartest way possible,” has a sophisticated product verification process that allows them to guarantee that a product you buy on the site is real and not counterfeit. They require sellers to verify their identity, they physically inspect goods and they offer a trusted third-party intermediary to create real trust on their platform. As a result, fraud is minimal and people love the platform. Imagine if Spotify or Amazon used at least some of these similar features on their own platforms. As an author, if I could complete a verification program that would allow books authored by me as a real human to be authenticated, then people could use this as a search vector for books. Spotify could have similar features. Social media platforms could largely eliminate the slop from bot farms and fake accounts doing the same thing. The point is, the technology for this sort of verification exists. We just need to demand that more platforms implement it.

Most weeks in this newsletter there is at least one story about a survey result or a new finding from science or insights groups that might offer a unique perspective on human behavior. In seeking out stories every week, I often gravitate to those sorts of stories myself. This week I encountered a few that got me thinking about how the power of data and what it can unlock for us all is shifting. First there was a story from fashion about how several resale platforms are pivoting more to live auctions [paywall] instead of fixed price sales. The more successful auction deals, the more data they can generate about the real prices people are willing to pay for various items. Then there was the story about the Wheels4Wheels project that uses sensor mapping data from e-scooters to assess what streets are most accessible for wheelchair users. The pilot program in Estonia “generated 40.5 million data points and more than 66,000 surface ratings across eight districts.” Finally, there was a report about a deep dive analysis into the number of shots and cuts in 8,770 movies and how the pacing of those cuts has evolved over time. What is interesting about all of these is how the data itself presents open-source opportunities for any of us to build our own creations from this. I found beauty in this over the summer while I was building The Unwondering Project. The amount of public data that was available on places to spotlight was fascinating. With the data from the stories above and the help of AI, you could build your own pricing engine for various products, create accessibility maps on your own or build a film editing engine based on the editing habits of successful directors. Some of this data is (or should be) owned by someone and the questions of ethical usage of what you can find online aren’t easy to answer. When data becomes this ubiquitously available along with new tools to be able to sift through it to create new meaningful things, the real limit is going to be motivation and imagination for what any of us create next.

October is busy season for conferences which means every week I’m staying in at least one hotel and sometimes more than one in different cities, so I do what most frequent business travelers do ... take a picture of my hotel room number so I don’t mix it up from the night before. We all have these sorts of hacks to make it easier to be a road warrior. There is also a list of familiar travel gripes that you’ll often hear when several of us get together, and often the light switch comes up.

There are always hotels designed by someone to be so elegant that finding the right light switch becomes an unwanted evening crusade. Often, it’s nowhere near the lights. Sometimes, the nightstand has no switch at all, you just tap the light. Or the base. Or double tap. The worst designs are voice activated, which no one wants. This is an unnecessary game. I’ll admit, I was triggered by an article in the NY Times this week suggesting that perhaps your light switches are boring and showing some flashier alternatives. Maybe there are. And at home, more creative liberties with light switches would certainly be an understandable “fun upgrade.”

In hotels, the opposite should be the standard. Finding and flipping a light switch should be a thoughtless movement. Sometimes being customer centric and well-designed means being as boring as possible too.

In November last year I was invited to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration, widely described as the “world’s largest gathering of women in tech.” The annual event attracts more than 30,000 women working across the tech sector and unlike most tech conferences, is predominantly female. For example, CES is twice as large and usually attracts an average of only about 20% females. At GHC last year, the vibe was very different. The hallways were filled with women working at all levels of tech, not just the bosses, and the energy was full of optimism.

Most impressive to me was the scope of the event. From the many sponsors to the companies willing to send dozens of their female employees to the show. There were organizations traveling as groups to meet others, and people who had been coming for years reconnecting with old friends. Most of all, for once in a sector that is almost always male-dominated, there was a place that was specifically for women. It seems that somehow that support collapsed.

Now that it has been cancelled this year because “both individual registrations and sponsorship commitments came in significantly below our expectations.” My friend Sandy Carter had a good perspective on what this news means for women in tech and one of the biggest impacts is likely to be the lost opportunity for networking and connections that would have happened there. She writes:

The cancellation creates a test for GHC’s corporate partners. Some of GHC’s corporate sponsors include Capital One, CVS Health, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Google, Intuit and Morgan Stanley. Will they keep investing in ways to reach and support women in technology, or will those efforts disappear with this year’s event? For companies working to build AI teams, that question has strategic weight.

Across my social media feed, there were women expressing frustration, shock and sadness. Plus, the cancellation is leaving questions that are bigger because of what the show represents. I’m not a woman or someone working in an industry that often fails to recognize my perspective. However, as a speaker who was lucky to be part of the GHC stage once, I know what this gathering means.

Anitab’s Annual Grace Hopper Celebration was a unique thing in the world of tech, and if another program (or series of events) cannot step up to take its place, something really meaningful will be lost. Having more female perspectives in technology makes it better for everyone. That was the truth I saw celebrated in every conversation at GHC last year, and a conversation I hope will carry on in whatever events come up next to keep the flame alive.

For 100 days, tech reporter Victoria Song tried a digital health twin from a service called Twin Health. The service included devices, an app and a suite of habits that encourages you to keep your digital twin up to date on all the things you do, eat and drink in the real world. Sometimes it can do that automatically too. In return, the digital twin offers a visualization of exactly what you should do based on your behavior to maintain or optimize your health.

My digital twin isn’t so much a robotic clone as it is an AI-powered, color-coded food database that predicts how my glucose levels will react to everything I eat. Red is not so good. Orange is so-so. Green is ideal. It’s built based on the data I feed it, as well as data collected from a continuous glucose monitor.

Cheerios for breakfast? No problem, just walk an extra ten minutes right after to equalize your blood sugar. Motivation, habit formation (and retention) and actual health results are all being reported by those who are trying the technology. This is described by some as “metabolic coaching” - like an on-demand nutritionist who already understands your body chemistry and can predict with decent accuracy exactly what eating certain foods or at certain times is likely to do. In the future, experts hope this sort of metabolic twin might also help predict the effects of some types of medication without having to use your own body for testing.

Last week I also saw an engaging video of people actively wading through polluted rivers cleaning garbage along with a caption asking why we have robots making music or running races instead of figuring out how to do this job instead of people. Similarly, if we can make digital twins that can work pervasively in the background under our control to help us get or stay healthy, why not spend more time creating that instead of trying to digitize the likeness of Hollywood personalities to “act” in their place?

Our digital entourage may be able to do more than just track our health, though. Consider the recent story of the tech founders who gathered their AI agents to have a dinner party and to make social or business connections together simultaneously while their human counterparts were aiming to do the same next door. This is one version of the future, where we will all show up everywhere with our digital entourage in tow ready to make the healthy choices we can’t and create the connections we don’t.

I wonder how many of us would welcome that and how many would avoid it?

There’s an apple variety coming to a grocery store near you called Sunpunch that has been twenty-five years in the making. Apples are among the most durable of all fruit, with a stability far beyond almost any other fruit. It’s no wonder it’s the most valuable fruit crop in Canada, according to the Walrus, and the testing ground for some long-term research that may also shape the way we grow, store and consume food in the future too.

In Virginia where I live, the average farmer’s market stall has no less than ten varieties of apples. Contrast this with the well-known story of banana homogenization and you can see two parallel histories. Varieties of apples have survived and thrived, while new varietals are being introduced every year. In the world of apples, innovation and creativity are working overtime. The banana has become the global symbol of the dangers of monoculture and in many cases, is now criticized among banana aficionados as mostly tasteless.

The bigger story about apples is that all the experimentation may be leading to other innovations too. By measuring evolving climate data and working to produce a variety that can sit on a desk for four months without losing flavor or going bad, Canadian apple scientists are learning things that could be applied to the global food industry as well. This is the sort of story I love to share. One invention, creativity from an unexpected place and a lesson that the rest of us can use.

By many accounts, the HYROX race is exploding in growth as the world’s fastest growing fitness race. For the past annual season, nearly 1.5 million people will take part in at least one of their races across the globe. Unlike many other races, the secret to HYROX’s success may be in its boring consistency. Every HYROX race runs through the same eight stations starting with a 1,000-meter run, a 1,000-meter ski erg, a 50-meter sled push, a 50-meter sled pull, 80 meters of burpee broad jumps, a 1,000-meter row, a 200-meter farmers carry, 100 meters of sandbag lunges and a closing set of 100 wall balls (watch the race).

Hyrox’s expansion rests on a single design decision: because the eight runs, eight stations and their order never change, the sport works as one continuous global ranking system rather than a scattering of unconnected local events. A time is a time, wherever it was posted.

That is harder to pull off than it sounds. Road races are shaped by elevation, surface and weather. Obstacle events rebuild their obstacles around whatever terrain a venue offers. Other fitness competitions vary their programming on purpose, so athletes cannot prepare for the exact test. Fixing the format in place gives Hyrox results that mean the same thing on every continent.

The effect on behavior is straightforward. Competitors treat a finish time the way a runner treats a marathon personal best - a number to beat at the next event - which turns a single entry into a repeat habit across a season.

The success of the race comes not only in its ability to allow anyone with a relatively good level of fitness to participate without months of training, but also in its attraction for people to compete over and over, in order to set a personal best time.

One of the consistent challenges in any industry is finding a way to encourage repeat customer loyalty. Despite the temptation to try and always customize or create a unique variety of experiences, sometimes the best option can also be the most boring. That’s a non-obvious winning formula worth considering.

I spent the first half of this week in New York for Advertising Week where the latest in ad tech, media buying and creator tech was on full display. Among the side conversations and stage panels, a few themes stood out for me and are worth thinking about, whether you work in the marketing space or just have a curiosity about the evolution of media and consumer behavior.

1. The AI Data Pollution Problem - As the conversation about AI turns to how data analysis can be automated and dashboards can get sexier, the central problem many companies have no solution for is the pollution of their own data. Put simply, they have a lot of garbage data that is blending with useful data and the process to separate them is missing. This is a major problem that needs a solution.
2. The Creator Economy Is Evolving - Everyone was talking about creators, working with them, monetizing their content and attracting them as brand spokespeople. While creators once were happy to read a script and take the check, more are rejecting those scripted deals and opting for a “take it or leave it” deal focused on authenticity instead. The smart brands agree to take it, because they know it works.
3. Automation Is No Longer An Advantage - When everyone has access to the same technology and tools, simply automating tasks is no longer an advantage. This speaks to a broader shift that I’m seeing in organizations that ran towards the allure of automation to replace human expertise ... they are pivoting back because that human insight is proving less replaceable than it seemed.
4. Advertising’s Dirty Little Secret Stays Under the Radar - There was curiously little conversation on stage this week about the dark money generated by midterm election political spending (estimated at nearly $12 billion). This is a cash cow that is mostly dishonest, manipulative, and 86% of Americans hate it. While the history of free speech in America makes it unlikely to be banned, we could at least remove the exemption from existing Truth In Advertising laws that political ads currently enjoy. Sadly, if David Ogilvy himself couldn’t make it happen despite his famous quote calling for it to be banned, then it’s probably pretty unlikely in my lifetime too.

YouTube creator has tools to help you optimize your videos. Kroger has an AI grocery shopping assistant. DoorDash has an AI bot that can “order the usual.” Instagram is adding an AI assistant to teach you how to post better. Meanwhile, apps like Instinct, Boardy and Haven are getting a lot of attention as personal assistant bots that can help accomplish a variety of tasks on your behalf from answering emails to making introductions. We are headed toward an AI assistant war where every tool you use and every interaction will be infused with help ... whether you want it or not. There is some precedence for this.

Microsoft introduced Clippy back in the early days of Microsoft Office and he was pretty universally hated for popping up unwanted in every situation. Now AI will give us a modern and perhaps more annoying version in every interaction.

This past week the Romanian Football Federation became the first in the world to announce a black card in U7-U16 soccer games, given to misbehaving parents and spectators who start to disrupt a match. The card covers “insults, abusive language, conflicts, hitting or pushing children, players, coaches, referees, officials, or other spectators.” Rather than just being another punishment that requires the offending parent to leave the match, after multiple warnings the issuance of a black card will immediately end the match.

This is more than an individual punishment. There is a social pressure and cost attached to misbehavior. You aren’t just acting alone anymore, you are affecting the outcome for everyone else and as a result other parents and spectators will take more ownership of shutting down this unruly behavior which is really the outcome everyone wants.

To stretch this point a bit, there are some parallels with the need for this to the disturbing facts released so far in the story of the Cornell 7 case where a group of fraternity brothers are accused of gang raping a victim back in 2024 and celebrating in a group chat while 57 other brothers saw the chat and chose to do nothing.

At the time the DA refused to bring criminal charges and the fraternity brothers were given minimal punishments. Now the DA is reopening the case, one of the named students has already lost his job, celebrities are speaking out and there is even an entire website dedicated to the case.

The accountability for who is speaking up (and who isn’t) is making a difference. Just as the Black card may inspire bystanders to step in and help curb unruly behavior on the sidelines of youth sports, all this public outrage and shame pointed toward those 57 bystanders is inspiring many men about what they would or should do if faced with a similar moment.

The idea is pretty simple: take a month off from drinking alcohol. For a few years now, the rise of non-alcoholic drinks has been forecasted as a slump for the alcohol industry. Trend reports declaring that Gen Z is drinking less have usually focused on how the younger generation has figured out the health risks, enjoy alcohol less and have created their own traditions to avoid alcohol - like Dry January or Sober October. The truth, though, may be more interesting and nuanced. Consider this report from a recent Nielsen survey:

“93% of nonalcoholic buyers also purchase alcohol. In bars and restaurants, 47% of consumers mix alcoholic and nonalcoholic choices during the same occasion, a practice sometimes called “zebra striping.” Nonalcoholic beer, wine and spirits have now reached $925 million in U.S. off-premise sales, up 21.9% from the previous year.”

There is an opportunity in non-alcoholic beverages that most of these stories rarely focus on. Let’s call it the “one more drink” phenomenon. Those nights when you want to stay out, but have already had a drink or two (or more!) and now you need to slow down. So you turn to the non-alcoholic option ... and you stay at the party for longer.

This is a perfect example of the sort of insight that can come from seeking the trend within the trend. On the surface, it seems like people are drinking less and so the entire alcohol industry and those that partner with it (such as restaurants and bars) would be in jeopardy. When you dig deeper, you can see the one-more-drink opportunity and cater towards that instead.

There are some predictable problems with self-checkout and they generally aren’t from consumers. Of course, some people are concerned about the job losses that this automation has created, and when something goes wrong, not having a human cashier available can be inconvenient. The bigger problem may be “shrink” - which is the industry term for people basically stealing stuff (or forgetting to scan items or thinking they scanned them when they didn’t). Self-checkout makes all of that easier to do. So, it’s not surprising that a handful of retailers are cutting back on self-checkout kiosks and rehiring human cashiers. This is a shift that has been slowly increasing over the past two years.

This evolution is a perfect metaphor for what we are likely to see happen (or perhaps are already seeing) when it comes to the adoption of other forms of technology within teams and organizations. There is an optimism from senior leaders fueled by a tempting spreadsheet analysis that illustrates savings compounding over time. Executives underestimate what negative repercussions these shifts will have and move ahead with expensive retrofitting anyway. Over time, that “all in” philosophy proves to be flawed, and a scaling back takes place, at which point people get rehired and the business comes back to the fundamentals that made them successful in the first place. There’s probably a framework someone has already developed and named for this cycle, right?

This isn’t exactly a new playbook, but Chipotle launched a new campaign where they invite 100 influencers into their kitchens at locations across the US to see how the food gets made and create their own videos. The predictable tagline is all about how their “real” food has nothing to hide. At the same time, Burger King is heavily promoting their “new” chicken nuggets made with 100% white meat (maybe don’t ask what they were made of before). Meanwhile Arby’s is promoting their steak nuggets as more real because they don’t come in “silly shapes.” This war to declare themselves as more real than their competitors may be playing out among QSR restaurants right now, but it’s a fight that will soon extend to many other industries as well.

As consumers feel more overwhelmed by the fake and overly processed, the battle to be a brand that is more real, authentic and human continues to be more fundamental. Now that the submissions are rolling in for this judging season of the Non-Obvious Book Awards, I am seeing this same trend echoed in multiple books. It’s becoming so common that I’m thinking about creating a compilation of campaigns around this topic and publishing a bigger roundup. For that, I’d love to know if you have seen campaigns or initiatives in other industries like this that might be worth adding to the list. Let me know!

If you’re a fan of the YouTube rabbit hole, managing your screen time might get a little harder. At the Made on YouTube event this past week, the platform made several announcements for features that will change the experience of browsing videos and perhaps the way many products are evaluated and purchased too:

“Soon, you can design your own unique homepage feeds using conversational prompts like “Witty podcasts for my daily 30-minute commute,” “Evening wind down with long documentaries,” or “Help me discover new DIY creators,” tailored to whatever mood or interest you like. You can save multiple custom feeds to your home screen that update automatically with fresh recommendations. We’re also expanding Ask YouTube to be your product recommendation guide, and introducing new ways to explore your favorite artist or discover new podcasts for your commute.”

As part of this announcement, the product recommendation guide aspect could become a game changer in many ways. For me, every time I’m making a more considered purchase such as a 4K camera for my home office or a full function espresso machine - I already turn to YouTube videos. Creators there help compare various products, do extensive reviews and offer their expertise on demand. Usually, the process involves creating my own playlist and saving or sharing multiple videos to compare. Now YouTube is making that process more seamless, and it could transform the relative importance of influencer marketing as a key element of how certain products are discovered and sold.

In addition, the idea that custom homepages can be generated by mood or topic means that videos uploaded to YouTube will need to be extensively optimized to ensure they show up on these user-generated, curated homepages. If you’re a big YouTube user, do you like these changes and will you use them?

Obtuse: To be slow at understanding simple things, or to act like you do not get something that is obvious to everyone else.

That’s probably the best word I can think of to assign to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to any criticism of Meta. When the company is criticized for compromising teenager’s mental health, he suggests the problem isn’t that bad. When people warn that the Meta glasses are being used by perverts to take images of women, he dismisses the concerns and focuses only on the positive use cases. When the world calls for a slowing of AI advancements to really understand their impact on humanity, he “argues that competition and legal liability already give companies sufficient reason to build their models responsibly.”

“Obtuse” describes a fundamental problem with many other leaders of large organizations (or governments) today as well. They see only one small myopic view and are unable or unwilling to understand the broader implications. They focus on the optimistic micro perspective instead of the realistic macro one. Sadly, offering up case studies or examples doesn’t seem to help. They just double down on what they already think. So, what would it take for leaders with these limited mindsets to actually understand the implications of what they promote?

In movies, the only thing that ever works is bringing the consequences to their doorstep. Unless they feel for themselves what it’s like to have privacy compromised, or the toxic effects of cyberbullying, those scenarios are easy to minimize. Sometimes an evolution of thinking doesn’t happen until a wake up call comes first.

40 years ago in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk and his crew travel back in time to San Francisco in 1986 to try and save humpback whales that are extinct in the future because they hold the key to answering an alien message and saving 24th century Earth from destruction. The movie shined a spotlight on the conservation efforts in progress to save the whales and for a time that became a rallying cry of environmental groups. The movie was credited with fueling a resurgence in humpback whales back from the brink of extinction.

The global shift continued this past week, when Iceland quietly joined hundreds of other nations to ban whale hunting, leaving only Norway and Japan as the last two countries on Earth that allow the practice to continue. The reasons for their change of policy, though, did not come down to the moral argument. Rather, increasing tourism dollars from whale watchers was the real driver, combined with a dwindling demand for Icelandic whale meat. The biggest remaining challenge, as the story illustrates, is the connection between whale hunting and the independent identity of some Icelanders. For students of behavior change, this story has everything. Financial incentives, national identity, geopolitical pressure and an environmental win forty years in the making.

Can paying people to spend 15 minutes a day reading actually improve an entire population’s literacy and overall level of intelligence? This is the latest idea from the Singapore government aimed at trying to help people of all ages have a small financial incentive to read more.

“The country has launched a new initiative designed to turn reading into a daily habit. Spend at least 15 minutes reading, record the session through the government’s platform, and you’ll receive 20 virtual coins. Collect 1,000 of them, and you can exchange them for S$ 1, or roughly 80 cents in the US. Since only one reading session counts each day, reaching that first dollar takes 50 days. Nobody is getting rich here, obviously. But that’s what makes the idea interesting. The cash functions more like the achievement badge or daily streak you’d find in an app, except this one tries to pull your attention away from the screen.”

The gamification of this idea and the behavioral psychology behind it is sound. Despite the relatively small payout, the idea of the streak combined with the growing desire among people of all ages to find more time away from their devices could make this a case study in how to shift a population’s reading and media consumption habits through the formation of new habits for reading. As the national library board chief Melissa Tam notes, “we know that habits are built through small, consistent actions. So, we are starting with a simple goal: just read for 15 minutes a day. On the bus, before bed or over lunch.”

Of course, it also raises questions about what sort of reading materials are available through the government portal and whether those are locked to certain topics - but it will be interesting to watch whether this small incentive along with gamified rewards are enough to help break the toxic habits of doomscrolling and get people reading again.

There is a new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk and he is raging about how it’s a “hit job.” The upcoming movie about Sam Altman’s sociopathy is also getting similar PR responses from the Open AI team. Last year, Meta had a similar response to the explosive book Careless People about the leadership failures of Mark Zuckerberg. The year before that, President Trump raged about The Apprentice - a film about his business failures from early in his career. This is sort of the opposite of ragebaiting. Media that incites rage and angst in one person or a small group of people who are the subject of truthtellers who expose them for who they are.

It’s something I was thinking about this week as I started watching another show called The Audacity. It’s a dark satire of Silicon Valley with plenty of villains that are pretty clearly modeled after real companies and people. The behemoth tech brand is called Cupertino, and their CEO is “big Tim.” The show is described as being “powered by a sustaining belief: that the business it chronicles is no longer about creation but about extraction. Its version of Silicon Valley wants to strip-mine its consumers’ digital lives for granules of precious ore.” It’s hopeless depiction of Silicon Valley also created a stir ... and also seems highly plausible.

All of these examples led me to the central question of this article. The TV shows, movies or books that irk their subjects this deeply probably do so because they come closest to the truth. Should that make them irresistible (and necessary) for all of us to seek out and consume?

This week the organizers of the Emmy Awards decided to reduce the number of awards presented live on the show from twenty-six last year to nineteen this year. The rationale is that this will free up the show to offer more live entertainment and make it more fun to watch for the television-loving general public.

The move has already been condemned by several industry trade groups including the DGA, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA who all issued a joint statement saying that “the decision to eliminate these categories from the prime-time broadcast devalues the contributions of the talented people the Academy is meant to honor. An awards show dedicated to recognizing excellence should not reduce recognition for the artists whose work gives it meaning.”

The question this raises, though, is who is an awards show really for? I’ve been invited as a speaker to more than dozen events where awards were also presented. Usually it is to recognize people in front of others from their professional or personal community. The Emmys, Tonys, Grammys and Oscars are all different.

They have an audience of industry peers in the room, but they also have a live audience who don’t really care who won the award for Best Cinematography and would rather experience moments such as the red carpet arrivals of stars or the rapport between presenting duos. So maybe the best solution is to have two award shows. The first for the industry and another where the entertainment value of the show is prioritized. What do you think? And will you be watching the Emmys this weekend?

Social media enshittification has become a popular idea. The term, coined by writer Cory Doctorow, describes the idea that there was a time early in the evolution of many social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter when the user base found them universally delightful and useful. People authentically connected with one another, voices felt democratized and advertising (largely) was missing. The tools were about the people. But over time, Doctorow argues, each of these platforms became compromised by the pressure to scale, monetize and turned into forces of manipulation and addiction.

In a new article NYU Professor Ruby Thelot argues that enshittification isn’t real, it’s “merely platform narcissism.” His argument is that the real problem is:

“What people call enshittification is the feeling of feature-need dislocation. In this case, it is felt by mostly geriatric millennials. The platforms are more popular than ever. You can see it in the Monthly Active Users (MAU) growth mentioned above, 140% in ten years. The revealed preference is that people are using them more and more. Moreover, satisfaction surveys such as ACSI indicate that satisfaction with social media has remained consistent in the last 8 years, with a slight increase in the last three years, from 2020 to 2025, satisfaction grew from 70 to 75 (out of 100). Contrary to the enshittification narrative, when broken down by platform, all platforms show increases in satisfaction.”

The problem is, as 404 Media astutely points out, “Thelot’s argument falls apart when he tries to prove people are actually satisfied with their time on these platforms.” There is plenty of data to show that young people are largely unhappy with the amount of time they are spending on social media and dislike what it has done to their relationships and its negative impact on human society. As someone who fits that “geriatric millennial” age range, I do think social media has indeed enshittified itself ... and in almost every measurable way, from the quality of posts to the invasiveness of advertising, the “good old days” of social media were infinitely better. Do you agree?

It’s easy to poke fun at scientists studying the effects of burying underwear. Or the team exploring the nutrition density of cockroach milk. The Ig Nobel awards are known as the “silliest awards in science” where researchers are chosen for ridicule based on their obscure or seemingly ill-advised research quests. Taunting venomous snakes to study why they bite or asking why bedsheets get wrinkled isn’t for everyone. Though these sorts of questions may not seem useful, there is an underlying truth about what these awards expose year after year that I find intriguing.

There are people who ask questions that others don’t. Some, like Dr. William B. Bean (yes, real name), famously tracked the growth rate of his own fingernails for 35 years. His conclusion? Human nail growth rates slow down over time and middle fingernails grow faster than the others. Will this knowledge change your life? Perhaps not, but there may be an unexpected upside:

While, on the surface, the Ig Nobels might seem like a silly, good time, there is a point to the zaniness: the awards’ twofold purpose is to make people laugh and then think. Scientific advancements don’t proceed in linear fashion; they usually zig and zag before reaching any point of significance for everyday people’s lives. Take, for instance, research honored in 2012 in which scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to find dubious signs of “brain activity” in a stone-dead Atlantic salmon. That seemingly laughable result ultimately led neuroscientists to rethink how they analyze their data.

Along with the fun and quirkiness, the awards also show that listening to people who are bold enough to ask and study the questions that others never think to ask might also offer an underappreciated roadmap to innovation too.

There’s a new Ali G movie coming, and not everyone is happy about it. For those who are unfamiliar with the character that launched actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s career; Ali G was a satirical portrayal of “a dim-witted white man imitating urban British hip-hop and Jamaican culture.” His character routinely played up stereotypes about other cultures, insulted people and offered a “faux rude boy” persona that amassed him lots of fans. Other comedians too have portrayed satirical versions of stereotypical characters like Stephen Colbert with his right-wing pundit portrayal or Paul Sun-Hyung Lee’s brilliantly stubborn Korean patriarch “Appa” in Kim’s Convenience. The question they all seem to pose is one that has become more central to humor itself: what topics are acceptable to satirize and who should do it? Should Cohen’s portrayal of Ali G be treated one way because he is portraying a different race versus Lee’s Appa because he is ethnically Korean? Or should being funny be the only test, and if they can deliver humor then all else is ok? These are the sorts of questions that some people spend a lot of time thinking about while others never do. Maybe you’re somewhere in between. If the question strikes a chord for you, I’d love to hear what you think about it. Let me know and share a comment with me by email.