Just Thoughts #26: Why Review Content and Final answers to Leadership Development.

This week I cover Lex Fridman's marathon podcast episode and the usual suspects Startup Ministers are back from holidays. I also Finnish the leadership development framework series.

Just Thoughts is for modern-day leaders who want to think better about business, life, leadership, and entrepreneurship every week. You are either inspired or not when reading these thoughts.

The first rule of reading these thoughts is to ask yourself:
Why should I think this way?

This article's Content is “handwritten” and co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and rephrasing for the desired tone of voice. I’m dyslexic, so the tool helps me overcome my impediments.

The free Content includes self-reflections from recent experiences and relatively brief mentions of Content consumed (compared to paid).

The paid Content includes timely and timeless thoughts for modern-day leaders.

Just Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

---

This week, I reflected on two questions about featuring consumed Content;

1. Why should I relay info that A.I. can summarize for you?

2. Why consume Content from which you don’t retain learning?

I could dwell longer around these questions, but the conclusion I came to is;

Answer to Q 1: I haven’t encountered a tool that effectively practices critical thinking around Content consumed or draws bridges between learnings tailored explicitly to any given audience. It can summarize, but A.I. is not cross-checking, nor is it drawing from another source to form an interesting new idea or a new perspective that may be interesting for the unique reader. Hence, human curators can still create value that AI can’t, or somewhat not, flatter me; I haven’t seen anyone build a tool that does this yet.

Answer to Q 2: The short answer would be to entertain, but if you’re listening to learn and not retaining learning, you should stop. Part of forcing myself to write is to keep ideas and insights from consumed Content. Also, I test if it’s useful or if I’m consuming the Content in moments where I can learn from it; I listen to it and then wait a few days to write what I remember without returning to the Content.

Considering these notions, the free Content includes my visits to art promotion events and new Content from the previously featured podcast “The Startup Ministers.”

Free Headlines This Week:

1. Art promotion event

2. Information retention exercise: Startup Ministers back from Holidays

3. Kids and Screen Time.

Paid Content features the end of the Leadership Development Framework, a review of thoughts around Lex Fridmans 8-hour interview. It took me over two weeks to find the time to go through the whole thing.

Paid Headlines This Week:

1. Lex Fridman’s 8-hour interview in review

2. Leadership Development Framework: Part 3

3. Movie Review: U.S.S. Greyhound

I'm always happy to hear your thoughts on the subjects and what you’d like Just Thoughts to cover! Please send me a message and let me know!

---

Art promotion event

Last week, I participated in a promotional event for Kevin Abosch's art project. The interview with him was live-streamed.

Two of his works were featured: the first fully synthetic movie (everything is AI-generated) and a collection of photos of “synthetic” people generated from pictures of people living in Helsinki. Even if I was present at this promotional event, I couldn’t make the movie premiere as I was juggling life with kids and stressed out because I needed to figure out whether or not I should file for bankruptcy. 😅.

After his talk, six people presented something related to AI and art. I am not sharing the works of others here because the event strangely emphasized questions about anonymity, streaming or not streaming, who could be photographed and who didn’t want to be photographed, and having all kinds of uncurated content presented. Instead, I’ll say that I presented my book and our event.

I started with the question, “Why create art?” and referenced Kevin's (as seen in the stream) statement that he creates art to evoke feelings in others. I subscribe to this and share more thoughts in this note.

What struck me is that people seemed to have paid the most attention to my presentation of myself in the diverse story style you can see in Just Thought #12. Additionally, I remarked that we have as much work to do on fighting the bias in the “human world” as we do when it comes to the works of AI. Kevin was forced to comment due to audience questions (51 minutes +).

We also discussed the implications of AI in society from various angles, but I’ll save those for future writing.

Information retention exercise: Startup Ministers back from Holidays

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is Startup Ministers, which has been featured multiple times in Just Thoughts. The main reason is that they’ve positioned the Content at the intersection of business and politics, pushing the boundaries of and addressing the core issues of my country of residence. Back from Holidays, they have Same4.ai 's C.E.O. founder, Antti Karjalainen.

Listening to it as soon as it was released and returning to write about what I learned a few days later, I laughed. I only remembered that participating in crayfish parties was fun and valuable for building trust, mainly because I had just signed up for one. If you’re unfamiliar with what they are. Here are our neighbors from Sweden explaining crayfish parties.

Many Finns are as fond of crayfish as the Swedes, but it’s usually associated with being gorgeous. Nonetheless, you could ask a Finn and a Swede how to consume crayfish; the likelihood of one knowing is more or less the same.

Funny remarks aside, the startup ministers touch upon points already covered in Just Thoughts #24: L.L.M.s are operating systems. However, they highlight that there aren’t too many application-level products that have become household names. Jyri references YouTube as a product that created arbitrage in the form of influencers or channels that were able to create media products that created more value than the platform itself a few years later.

What Jyri fails to acknowledge at the moment is that creating LLM products still has a cost of usage that is significantly greater than the creators had to pay for using YouTube (the cost of using YouTube is zero, and the cost of using or hosting an LLM is greater than zero). The high creation cost is why you’re seeing the LLM pricing wars (I read Alpha signal for in-depth AI-related updates). Whoever has the cheapest increases their likelihood of being the platform for the applications layer products. Additionally, chatGPT first employed a strategy that obliterated a lot of applications that could be equivalent to YouTube funding and created its channels. Albeit, the comparison is not 1:1 here.

Finally, they address the new A.I. act that affected August 1:st. Here’s a perplexing search of its implications. Arguably, this makes it harder for new A.I. startups to operate. It is becoming more challenging due to regulation, which may or may not be the case, but one needs to remember that regulation isn’t always bad for business. It can be good the way Upright Project is capitalizing on the E.U.’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) or how

Jamie Smith

highlights the arbitrage with the E.U.’s digital wallet.

Kids Screentime

Parenting after divorce can be challenging, but I’m happy to say that it doesn’t have to be, and I’m grateful to have a constructive relationship with my children's mother. Although it’s not automatically more challenging, it’s just different. Based on experience, this whole subject could be worth 8 or 9 headlines of Just Thoughts, but I’m mentioning this as the suggestion for the Content came from the mother of my children.

This particular Content is in Finnish: “Caged by screens—did the smartphones kill play and create anxiety?” The short answer is yes.

We’ve had one hour of screen time on weekdays and two hours on weekends; the same rule applies to both homes. That has been two more hours of uninterrupted sleep on weekends when you’re alone with the kids. It’s easy for a parent to give your kids more screen time. It gives you time to attend to what feels like other necessities.

Listening to the Content and hearing from the childcare experts was a good reminder of the dangers of letting your kids use the screen too much. I’m not fond of eradicating it, as they may develop many unhealthier habits when they are older, and it’s more challenging to control. Technology is also an excellent tool if you learn to utilize it at a young age.

However, we sat with the kids and discussed halving their screen time. After all, especially on weekdays, between doing homework and sports, there is little time for screens, and they get disappointed they don’t have time to use them for a full hour.

The kids took it well and seemed to understand the harmful consequences of using screens for too long, especially in a way that causes a lot of dopamine hits in short periods, such as video games. They have their place, but small children spend the rest of their lives amidst technology, and their developing social skills require play with other kids.

Lex Freedman 8-hour interview in Review

I don’t know how Elon does 4x-5x speeds when listening to Content, as no audio streaming service provider offers such speeds; on this statement, I call bullshit. I’ve been going through it at YouTube’s 2x “max speed” offering, even if Lex Freedman advises 1x for fear of disappointment when realizing live discussions are much slower. Nonetheless, the start is simply friends recording their discussion and calling it “work,” as a few million people are watching the recording.

That’s almost as impressive as Warren Buffet making 1 Billion a year by doing nothing, as brilliantly described by

Linas Beliūnas

.

Nonetheless, this all reeks of white privilege due to structural inequalities caused by humanity going unchecked for a few millennia (not because of who the individuals are), but Neuralink may prove to be a way to balance the scale, at least in terms of abilities.