Kia ora {{ First name | friend }},
We’re exploring the light and shadow of technology, with a focus on efficient AI workflows to free up your time.
This week’s edition features:
Google’s launch of Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro
China growing meat with gene-edited fungus
Growth Plan prompt
$12 trillion night out with Elon, Zuckerberg and co
AI consciousness exploration
Thanks for being here.
Featured Prompt: Growth Plan
Founders often have big goals but struggle to turn those goals into focused execution. Hopefully this provides you with a framework for getting where you want to be. Remember the prompt is useful and you can tango with AI til you’re blue in the face, but one day you’ve gotta actually do the thing.
You are an experienced growth consultant who helps founders design effective 90 day execution plans. You have scaled multiple startups from [stage] to [next stage] in the [industry] niche.
Before you answer, ask me these questions in one short list:
1. One sentence on the product or service.
2. Ideal customer profile and target markets.
3. Current numbers for the last 30 days, including revenue, traffic, leads, and conversion.
4. Current core growth channels and what has worked so far.
5. Team size, roles, and budget for the next 90 days.
6. Top three business objectives for the next 90 days.
7. One primary constraint, for example time, capital, or skills.
Use my answers to design a full 90 day growth roadmap.
First, summarise the business in 3 bullet points so we agree on context. Then create the plan.
Structure the response like this:
• 90 day growth thesis
• Goals for the next 90 days, with target numbers
• Week by week roadmap, grouped into 3 blocks of 30 days
• Key projects with owners and estimated effort
• KPIs to track, including target ranges
• Tools and systems to use for execution and reporting
• Review cadence, including weekly and monthly rituals
• Risks and mitigation
• Assumptions you are making
• Three quick wins to implement in the first 48 hours
Tone: practical and strategic.
Format: clean bullet points, short sentences, no fluff. Write for a time poor founder who wants direct guidance and clear trade offs.
Where useful, give sample numbers or benchmarks for a SaaS or info product business, and label them as examples, not forecasts.Pro tips for stronger output:
Upload or copy/paste a description of the product or service and target customer.
Mention current monthly revenue and primary growth channel(s).
State one hard constraint, for example team size, budget, or time
After you receive the plan, ask the assistant to condense the content into a one page brief for your team.
AI Night Out with The Boys
Casual $12 trillion hang out with the biggest founders in tech, kicking it in a carpark? AI image models have done it again, bringing together Elon, Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Huang for a night on the town.
I’m including this here cause I thought it was funny, and it also details how incredibly powerful the image models are getting. At first glance, I thought it was real, then I had a detailed look and read the caption. We’re 90% there to completely convincing images that have no distinction from that which is real (what even is that anyway?)
Here’s a few interesting technology updates:
Elon Musk reckons “AI will make work optional, money irrelevant” in his recent discussions at the US-Saudi Investment Forum. Read more.
China is growing a gene-edited fungus as a meat alternative, to meet increasing demand of consumers for “sustainable meat options”(meaning it emits less carbon per kilo than conventional farming). I personally would rather a regeneratively raised steak than a lab grown one, while also noting that the plethora of benefits that come with regen farming also support other nature metrics such as ecology, biodiversity, soil health & more. Read more here.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly returning from semi-retirement to co-lead Project Prometheus, a new startup developing AI systems for engineering and manufacturing across computing, aerospace, and automotive sectors. Expect a huge increase in physical AI development. Read more.
Google launched Nano Banana Pro, it’s next-Gen AI image model, but in conjunction with Gemini 3 (see below). Key upgrades are it can handle character consistency of up to 5 people, generate 4K images, search the web (??) and render text nicely. Check the release notes.
Elon Musk thinks can upload human consciousness into a Tesla humanoid robot in the next couple decades. Imo, this is an incredibly arrogant thing to say, given that we can’t even define what consciousness is in the first place… It’s literally the universal question of our species. Check it out.
Google also launched Gemini 3, their latest language model. Key things I see are interesting being dynamic interfaces based on your prompts, so it responds not only with logic, but also visually appealing displays that relevant to your context (see the gif below). Some reasoning upgrades as well. Check it out.
PS - On the China gene-edited food point, this is a part of a wider philosophical inquiry about what makes us human, our connection to nature, and how that relates to technology.. Read this next piece to go a little deeper.
Exploration: AI’s Impact on Consciousness
There’s an ongoing inquiry being explored by those that aren’t totally pro-AI, about how this rapid evolution in technology impacts who we are, our connection to the earth, and what defines a human in the future.
Whether it’s outsourcing your thinking to ChatGPT, frying your brain with bluetooth headphones, or corporations bombing the earth with chemicals and calling it food, it’s clear that our modernisation of the world is not totally in coherence with natural law. The external impacts of modernity have been evident for a long time, yet, there is a rising concern for the internal impact of our addiction to progress.
Most of us can feel it. We remember fewer phone numbers, reach for the calculator for basic maths, check Google Maps to go somewhere we’ve already been, and now ask AI to draft, summarise, explain and decide. I often find myself picking up my phone to do something, then having to pause and remember what it was for.
On the surface, it’s convenient. Underneath, it’s changing how our memory works, and with it, some key aspects of what it feels like to be human. Recent studies of AI tools in education report that students who lean heavily on systems like ChatGPT show lower cognitive engagement and weaker long term retention compared with those who struggle through material themselves. What we risk by prioritising convenience and speed seems to be causing a deterioration of the depth, continuity, and ownership of inner experience.
Charles Eisenstein wrote an awesome article about this if you feel like a philosophical deep dive (Cheers Matthew for sharing). Here’s an excerpt.
The rise of interactive AI, like the rise of social media before it, is not only a cause of our intensifying separation from our bodies, each other, and the material world, but also a symptom of that separation and a response to it. Of course the lonely person will be attracted to AI companionship.
None of this means that we should eschew artificial intelligence, any more than we should abolish recorded music or the photograph. To use it wisely, though, we must clearly understand what it can do and what it cannot, what it is, and what it is not.
This isn’t a “burn your smartphone” argument. It’s a look at what we’re quietly outsourcing, what that does to our minds and our freedom of thought, and how we can work with AI and tech without hollowing ourselves out. Without giving away that which makes us who we are. Not just individuals, but as a miraculous natural biological superorganism in constant reciprocity with the forces of nature.
This is particularly important as it relates to personal relationships, as the dating, porn, gaming and social interaction elements of the internet become more intertwined with AI. Young boys are adopting “AI-girlfriends”… how nice to have somebody who agrees with everything you say, never challenges you, is always there, and you don’t have to face the hard challenge of getting up and risking embarrassment in front of an actual date? Yep, it may be easy or nice in the short term, but long-term, it’s like a sugar high. Here’s a woman who broke up with her fiancé to marry her AI boyfriend.
Whether it’s relationships, writing, thinking or creativity, we know from other areas of life what results we get when prioritising short-term ease and gratification over long-term discipline and challenge. The issue here is that it eats away at our birth-given consciousness, our most valuable inner essence. I pray for the young (and old) people to intuitively find a sense of awareness of these issues, at least just to be mindful of the decision in the first place.
Once the mindfulness is there, our challenge is to proceed with caution in our engagement with these tools. To maintain the discipline to remember what is valuable and vital to us as humans. Then, it requires a level of personal commitment and intention to uphold, protect and nurture these sacred aspects. Personally I lean towards meditation, reading actual books, time in nature and restricting my AI usage to continue exercising my personal free will.
Do what you will with this inquiry - it’s just a felt sense as I see society crave more in a world that already has a strong sense of “too much-ness”.
Start this conversation with a friend. Ideate with a pencil and paper. Decide what you will maintain as a sense of humanity, and what you are okay automating/outsourcing/digitising to free up time.
Ideally with these free time you can spend more time with those you love, in nature, creating art, and being human.
A final quote from Charles’ article linked above.
“In light of these truths, we will walk the path of return. We will prioritize live gatherings, live music, stage theater, physical touch, hands in the soil, material skills, unique objects made in relationship to each other. We will hold sacred the qualities that data cannot capture, and our senses will attune to those qualities the more we value them. Then we will no longer be vulnerable to the addictive substitutes that technology offers for what we have lost, and instead turn that technology toward its right purpose. And what is that, you may ask? I’m not sure, let me check with ChatGPT and get back to you.”
PS: For the record, I wrote 90% of this by hand.
{{ First name | friend }}, thanks for dropping in again.
Forward this to a friend if you found it useful.
Stay human,
Billy