Instant Relaxation, Coffee Revolution & More
5 cracking ideas from May
Hello reader,
If you’re new here, you must know that the first week of the month is the best.
Apart from getting that orgasmic “Salary credited” SMS, you’ll also get this equally salivatory email with 5 cool ideas that’ll make you feel like the smartest kid in your 2 storeyed building.
Enough of the pathetic sales pitch, let’s get down to business (click on the links to dive deeper):
Air Turbulence: If you haven’t been living under a Bodhi tree, you must’ve heard of the Singapore Airlines flight that experienced so much turbulence that it injured many and killed 1 senior citizen. While such incidents are rare, the bad news is that we can expect more of them in the future. The reason? Climate change. As the earth gets hotter, it warms the air which rises (known as “convective weather”), causing such upheavals. As we continue to emit carbon like there’s no tomorrow, such freak accidents will only become more common.
Longevity: Everyone seems to be excited about the prospects of life-extension and living for way more than 80-85 years. But few seem to deeply think about what life would be like if we do stick around for centuries. Currently, our lives are designed for shorter games- a decade-long game of partying & dating, a 2-decade long game of raising kids, a 3-4 decade long career game- but that’s about it. We walk out of all these games after a point, perhaps because they get too boring. So what happens when we have to play games at the time-scale of a century (or centuries)? We don’t seem to have any idea of what such a game would look like or if we’d be able to engage with them without getting bored. Lots to think about before you sign up for immortality, kid.
The Most Calming Thing: The best way to relax is to be around water. Research shows that being around water bodies for just 2 minutes has an immediate calming effect, lowering blood pressure and heart rate. It works better than being around grass (gardens, forests). The bigger the water body, the more relaxed one will be. No wonder beaches are so popular!
Do this after your boss gives you a “quick 2-min call” Coffee Revolution: With the rise of brands like Subko, Third Wave, and Black Baza, we can see that coffee culture is on the rise. But some feel that the party hasn’t even started yet. Coffee entrepreneurs are looking at China’s numbers and saying that while our neighbor has 1 Lakh cafes, we have only 5000 today. If India is the next China, the growth of the coffee/cafe market hasn’t even begun yet. As the drink finds greater adoption even in Tier 2 cities like Nagpur and Indore, it’d be interesting to see how this category plays out in the coming decades.
Kids In The AI Age: How should we think of the role AI is going to play in the lives of our kids? Kai-Fu Lee, AI expert, and VC, says that we must first stop saying stupid shit like “Oh, but kids are using ChatGPT to cheat on tests”. This kind of thing will prevent them from learning about and using it. It’s a tool- just like Photoshop for an artist- and people’s effectiveness tomorrow will be gauged by how well they do their job, not by what tool they used to get it done. Moreover, GPTs won’t have “a soul”, even though they can try and fake things like empathy. So grooming kids to have a high EQ is a good strategy in a world full of machines.
That’s it for the day, folks. Did you also learn something cool in June? Respond to the email and let’s talk about it.
And if you can’t get enough of Learning Machine, here are a few more hidden gems: