Strands of Genius: Explore/Expoit, Impossible to Possible, Fear of the New

Guest curated by Noah Brier, Founder of BrXnd

Nov 21, 2024

:: A BIT MORE ABOUT GUEST CURATOR, NOAH BRIER ::

LOCATION: Weston, Connecticut

Hello! I'm Noah. I've known Faris for longer than I care to say. We were old blog buddies when that was a thing, and then each held the mantle of "digital guy" at Naked Communications, just on different sides of the Atlantic. When it was announced that Faris was moving to NYC to join the Naked team there, neither of us quite knew if we could occupy the same space, but we turned out to be great friends and collaborators, doing some amazing work (including convincing one of the largest companies in the world NOT to make a TV commercial).

While I was at Naked I taught myself to write code and ended up starting a software company called Percolate in 2011. We built "the system of record for marketing," which was essentially a workflow tool to help global brands manage their marketing content. We sold Percolate in 2019, and in 2022, I fell deeeeeeeep into the rabbit hole of AI, building on early versions of the GPT3 API. That eventually led me to start a conference called BRXND.ai, which I did in NYC in 2023 and 2024 and will bring to LA on February 6, 2025. I just put tickets on sale and have a special additional 10% discount available for Strands readers. Come hang out in February!

Editor’s Note (Genius Steals): Noah is a dear friend, wise advisor and constant source of inspiration. Faris was indeed hesitant to move to NakedNYC because he was intimidated by how brilliant Noah seemed. Fortunately he did it and got to discover Noah is even more brilliant than he seems. We got to launch the world’s biggest browser with a comic book and a website of experiments. He was always not just ahead of but moving the curve, from Naked to Barbarian to Percolate, and continues to do so with the impossible to pronounce BrXnD ;-) <3. He’s also lovely and very patiently tried to teach Faris to code one afternoon, while he was teaching himself! Faris did not take to it. However, Faris is also very into explore/exploit atm and loves the research in the final link as it supports one of his favorite quotes from Douglas Adams:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Thanks so much for an excellent edition and the 10% offer bro! We need Leila on next! And, eventually, in a few years, the kids. ❤️

:: THE LINKS ::

EXPLORE/EXPLOIT

Explore/Exploit is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's a concept from computer science that governs when you should switch from searching for optimal solutions to using them to make a decision. In some ways, I look at my last two years of playing with AI as a period of exploration, one I'm only just shifting out of now to go deeper into some consulting work. Beyond that, though, explore/exploit offers us an interesting way to think about different kinds of problems and people we encounter in brands. This article from Strategyzer does a nice job breaking down the different approaches for when you find yourself in explore versus exploit and, critically, which people are best suited to which side of the equation. I have found myself using explore/exploit quite a bit in my conversations with brands to help them understand why they can’t just assign finance and IT to think about how AI will change their marketing/creative organization. (BrXnd / strategyzer / alephic )

IMPOSSIBLE —> POSSIBLE

There is an unbelievable amount of hype around AI—some of it warranted, some of it not. My personal favorite quote on the topic came from Miles Brundage, who, until recently, worked in public policy for OpenAI. Back in January 2023, he Tweeted, “The value of keeping up with AI these days is not so much detailed foresight but being able to confidently detect when others are too confident, and that things are more uncertain than anyone lets on.” I very much agree. With that said, it’s also the most amazing bit of tech I’ve ever experienced and I really love what Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said about AI at this year’s Build conference: “The challenge, I think, for us, and I think it’s the same challenge that all of you face, is that you really want to focus on things that have made the transition from impossible to merely difficult.” What’s so cool about AI is that it very quickly it has opened up a large set of problems that used to be impossible and are now just very hard. Most of the interesting stuff is in there I think. (News Microsoft)

FEAR OF THE NEW

Allison Gopnik is a favorite thinker of mine. She’s a professor of psychology at Berkeley with a focus on childhood development. Because she’s spent her life researching how babies learn, she’s also got quite a lot to add to the field of AI. Her Rationally Speaking podcast on parenting is a favorite of mine, as is her 2023 Complexity Podcast episode on childhood and AI (related to explore/exploit btw). In that episode, she mentioned this wonderful 2022 WSJ article she wrote on how our experience of new technology is shaped by when in our lives it was introduced.
In particular, the study shows that people think technologies established before their childhood are relatively benign, but that new ones are more sinister. The researchers asked over 2,000 people to rate the benefit or harm of different technologies. The crucial factor was whether the technologies were older or younger than the participant. In one experiment the researchers described an obscure synthetic material called an aerogel (actually developed in the 1930s) and told people that it had been invented either 15 years before or 15 years after their birth date. People consistently said it was more beneficial if they thought it existed before they were born.
(Alison Gopnik / Rationally Speaking Podcast / Complexity Simplecast / The Wallstreet Journal)

Looking for more from Noah? Coming Friday, look for an interview from him in your inbox!

:: AND NOW… SOME FAST FAVORITES ::

:: Game :: At the moment it's Minecraft

:: City :: NYC always (even though I don't live there anymore)

:: Book :: Medium is the Massage

:: Podcast :: Per above, I really enjoyed Rationally Speaking

:: Song :: This is cheating, but the whole mix is on my phone as one song, so I'll go with Michael Mayer's Immer, which I love to run to

:: New Bonds in the Making ::

Here is a picture of Rosie and Faris meeting my daughter for the first time (she is now 9 by the way)!

I think that’s it for now. Buy tickets to BRXND LA, subscribe to the BRXND.ai newsletter, or just email me and say hi.

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)

Strands of Genius