Attention Seeking, Celebrity Phones & Bitcoin
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #193 ❤️
This week Elon Musk tries to claw back the world’s attention by suing the most famous company in tech, we teach you how to use your phone like a celebrity, and we have a special lesson for you on Bitcoin.
Plus, what happens when a public figure clashes with a small business, and what is office culture anyway?
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Musk vs OpenAI
Elon Musk has upped his game and is now suing OpenAI and co-founders, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, alleging that they breached the founding agreement of the organisation by allowing it to become too motivated on profit.
We guess nobody had been looking at him enough this week… Yes, Elon, we see you, you’re still there.
That being said, his beef with the company is pretty long standing, as he co-founded it in 2015 as a nonprofit alongside Altman and others. According to him, he left the board in 2018 because he felt like it was straying from its original goals of bettering humanity, not for any other reason, of course…
While we DO agree with him (and we’re furious with Sam Altman for making us say that) that OpenAI HAS strayed too far from it’s non-profit origins, we’ve talked about that at length in one of our earlier newsletters, OpenAI, obviously, “categorically disagrees”.
While technically they are bound to keep their non-profit mission, they now have a for-profit subsidiary, and we reckon they’re making quite a lot of it, at least if Sam Altman’s real estate portfolio is anything to go by.
One of the main points of Musk’s lawsuit is that OpenAI are becoming a “de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft” and licensing their GPT-4 AI model to Microsoft despite their “obligation” to create such sophisticated tools for nonprofit ends.
However, there is a slightly suspect part of the lawsuit which asks the court to require OpenAI's research to be public, which has got people wondering if he may want to poach some of it for his rival AI startup, that nobody cares about, xAI.
Altman delivered a sick burn, saying that he missed when Musk competed by just making better tech. Exceptional.
#2 – How To Use Your Phone Like A Celeb
Nope, not by holding it up to your face and taking a selfie, or by propping it up to film a fake apology video about something terrible that you did.
This article from The Verge explains to us the lessons you can learn from celebrities who want go off grid a little bit, starting with Justin Beiber, who doesn’t have a phone, and is actually an “iPad guy”.
The idea of not having a phone isn’t to disappear completely, he’s reachable by mail (on his iPad) but simply to limit who can get in touch with him, and to get away from that feeling of being constantly reachable. He checks his messages in the morning, and then goes about his day.
Ed Sheeran did the same thing, he says he hasn’t had a phone since 2015 because of how overwhelmed he was when he had one. Instead, much like Beiber, he’s reachable by email on his laptop, which he opens up every few days, answering a dozen or so emails at a time. Once he’s finished, the laptop gets closed, and he goes back to living his life.
The author of the article drops the following huge pearl of wisdom on us: “Whether it’s a laptop on a desk or an iPad on your nightstand, your computer should be a place as much as it is a device”.
He notes that since he’s started following Beiber and Sheeran’s advice (along with Tom Cruise, Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker, Dolly Parton and George Clooney, who also live quite phone-free lives) he feels less weighed down by the immediacy of all information and contact in the world – which is basically what your phone is – coming to the conclusion that maybe a device which contains that sort of thing shouldn’t be within arms reach at all times.
It's really not a bad idea. Who knew we’d be getting influenced by Justin Beiber this year? If anyone asks, we heard George Clooney talking about it…
#3 - Bitcoin 101
Inexplicably, it looks like bitcoin might be back.
According to the BBC, the price of Bitcoin is close to its all-time high. This is thanks in part to big investment firms who are pouring billions into buying it up.
So, if you missed the last few times, now might be a good time to learn some of the lingo, even if you might not get as much of a look in as last time to buy any…
Starting simple, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is not backed or controlled by centralised financial instituations like traditional currencies. This makes it popular for people who want to be “free” from that sort of thing, but also extremely volatile.
Blockchain is the technology behind all crytocurrencies. It’s basically a virtual spreadsheet where all the buying and selling of crypto is recorded. This is done by a network of volunteers who verifiy the authenticity of the transaction using computer programmes – and by being the first to do so they are rewarding in Bitcoin.
This is called “mining” – yep, that’s how bitcoin is mined, not in a magical digital mine. Incidentally, there will only ever by 21 million bitcoins. Half of those are already in circulation, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
A Crypto Exchange is where people swap their “real” money for digital currency, and a Crypto Wallet is where that money is kept. A Hot Wallet is held online, quicker to use but less secure, and a Cold Wallet is held on something physical, like a USB stick, more secure but famously easier to lose.
And voila. This time, you’ll actually know what everyone’s talking about, let’s see how long this up will last.
#4 - Celebs vs. Small Businesses
Elon Musk hasn’t only been in the news for his lawsuit against OpenAI this week, he’s also in hot water over some pies. Yes, really.
Musk got some flack online after Tesla left a San Jose bakery called Giving Pies 2000 dollars out of pocket after they placed an order for 4,000 mini pies and then cancelled at the last minute.
They took to social media complain, and Elon Musk himself then offered to pay for the cancelled order, even placing another one. It was too little too late, as the bakery was so flooded with business from people who took afront with what had happened that they had a queue round the block and couldn’t fulfil the order anyway.
Another celebrity caught up with a small business this week was Kylie Jennner, as a boutique cake company posted an email from her team on their instagram which stated Jenner didn’t have the budget for her cakes.
The cake company basically called them out for being cheap, and refused to take her instagram story down when asked because in her own words, no NDA was signed – she can do whatever she likes.
We are all so chronically online now (except for Dolly Parton, as we discussed earlier) that companies affiliated with high profile people who make a big fuss about how rich they are simply cannot get away with messing around like this.
Because if a company calls you out online with receipts, then you’re in trouble. As Musk found out when so many news outlets posted about him “eating humble pie” by offering to foot the bill, it’s just not worth it.
#5 - What Is Office Culture Anymore?
This week the BBC published an opinion piece going in on office culture, calling it a dead relic from the past that nobody cares about anymore.
What they’re referring to in the article is the pre-pandemic “cool” office, defined by lounging spaces, free snacks, in-office happy hours plus retreats and team building exercises.
And while the world of work looks and feels completely different to what it was before 2020, some employers think that bringing these things back will lure workers back into the office.
Two problems there.
One, hybrid working is here to stay, and people have adapted to a work-life balance that doesn’t necessarily entail hanging out with their co-workers (for better or for worse, we’ve touched before on how lonely remote working can be).
Two, the employees now making up a big chunk of the workforce are Gen Z, and they weren’t here pre-Covid.
One 24-year old interviewed talked about the “infamous fun office activites” they’d heard of like some sort of weird hobby from the past, like rug-making or penny farthing bike riding, and is more interested in tangible benefits like paid time off.
The moral of the story, then, is that you can’t trick the new generation into working longer hours by giving them pizzas every Friday. However, we’d argue that that isn’t really the true definition of your company’s culture.
Culture needs to go further than the office, and remote workplaces need a strong culture as much as any other business does. Your culture is defined by how you treat your people, your values, and how you work together – think the emotional atmosphere as well as the physical, table football corner or not.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
The Willy Wonka Experience
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will probably have heard about the infamous Willy Wonka experience.
A company in glasgow tried to sell a Willy Wonka experience to families, but when they turned up they were met with an empty warehouse, a couple of cheap candy canes, and a lot of other weird stuff.
So why do we care? Well, AI was pretty heavily involved.
The poster images were made with AI, conjuring up a magical experience, and the actor hired to play Willy Wonka said that the script he was given was 15 pages of AI nonsense that the company hadn’t even bothered to read.
When he asked if they had one of the props the script called for, they said they hadn’t got that far.
We didn’t know this was one of the dangers we had to look out for with the rise of AI, but we stand corrected…
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