So how do you wake up then???

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked this question after I’ve told someone I don’t drink coffee, I’d be able to, well, buy a coffee.

When you work in the corporate world there’s a few rituals you learn about right away that everyone partakes in on a regular basis.  You’ve got your potlucks organized by the over enthusiastic colleagues that drive you INSANE with their bubbly energy, but you appreciate them when the event actually goes smooth.  You’ve got your after work drinks where you gossip the hell outta people and the workplace.  And you’ve got your going down to <insert where ever they serve it> for a coffee before your day officially “starts”...even though your day starts when you actually get in. Don’t worry, even the president of IBM did this - they’re rituals for a reason.

So when everyone used to go get a coffee I’d get water or a muffin, or just “go for the walk”.  I never acquired the taste for coffee and basically never had the desire to.  I now have friends who have realized coffee is starting to have serious negative effects on their health and are finding alternatives. If you’re thinking about giving up coffee or just caffeine in general here are a few things you might experience alongside some of the things you’ll benefit from:

Headaches!  Yes that’s right, cut off the thing your body yearns for, just like many other vices, and your blood vessels that go to your brain start to go back to normal.  But as they’re going back to a normal size, it’s a pain in your head, literally.

Reduction of heartburn and indigestion! The long story short and non-scientific explanation is that caffeine does stuff to your stomach that causes acid to be released causing you to experience heartburn and indigestion.  And so, reduce your caffeine and therefore reduce that uncomfortable face cringing feeling.  

A brighter smile! When I was in high school we all had this one science teacher who had the WORST coffee breath ever.  Coupled with that was his gastly yellow teeth.  I think he smoked too but it was like the perfect combination of coffee meets cigarettes meets NO THANK YOU.  Coffee breath is a real thing and it stains your teeth.  Unless you plan on drinking coffee from a straw (straws cause wrinkles according to my wife) expect those chompers to become cheese coloured. 

Years ago I heard drinking water and eating an apple had the exact same affect on your body as caffeine does to wake you up - so that’s what I’ve been doing for basically all of my adult life. 

More so, drinking water and awkward conversations about not drinking coffee.

This week's issue is a 4 minute read:

💰️ Songs are the new stonks

🤖 Getting the wrong job with AI

💉 217 vaccines….wtf

What if You Could Own 1989 For Real REAL

Whether you’re the listener or the artist, the act of owning music has seen such a great evolution in such a small period of time. From owning physical copies of songs and albums to illegally owning digital copies to finally being able to legally own digital copies, just trying to piece together how we got from records to streaming is a frikken roller coaster. And now you can invest in songs.

Invest in a song, like a stock? Say what?

A startup called JKBX (obviously pronounced Jukebox) has built a platform that allows fans to invest in artists the same way they would invest in Apple. Basically they have received permission from the SEC to create securities around some of the most popular songs in the world so that you can own a piece of the royalties that the song generates.

For instance you can buy “Welcome to New York” by Taylor Swift for $45/share. And then the idea is you get a dividend payout quarterly based on how much royalties the song generated. Get lucky and buy a song for cheap that blows up on TikTok? Then you could make some decent money for minimal investment. That is if you live in the US. According to JKBX’s website, “[n]on-US customers may be able to purchase Royalty Shares on the JKBX platform but they will not, and might never, be able to sell those Royalty Shares.” Sooooo yeah.

This all definitely sounds like a great idea though. You might have heard of those things called NFT’s where some artists made a killing off of selling them but the majority of people made nothing or lost money because ultimately everything was just a useless JPEG - yeah this platform (regulated by the SEC) seems to be a much more solid step in the right direction for people who are looking to invest in alternative securities around things they actually like.

Don’t even get me started on NBA Top Shot NFT’s. OMG what a waste of time those were!!

AI Spam Bots & Job Applications Don’t Mix

So we’re all supposed to be up in arms about AI taking over the world and displacing our workforce and blah blah blah. But I’m sorry, I must have at least 1-2 experiences a month where I’m trying to get information or automate something through ChatGPT and it COMPLETELY gets it wrong - like confidently wrong. Then I call it an idiot and move on.

Last week Google went back to the drawing board with their AI image generator after it failed to accurately create images of white people. I mean, if Google can’t get AI right, as a writer am I really worried about AI taking over what I do? No, not really. Let’s see it put together witty newsletters week after week, telling engaging stories with actual personality.

Or let’s see it apply for jobs on your behalf and not screw up.

Aki Ito, a writer for Business Insider_, recently tried out a plethora of AI spam bots that automatically apply to jobs for the user. Just give them your profile, a bit of what you’re looking for, and poof, applications spammed to the internet. Although the majority of the bots she tried never actually really worked until she came across LazyApply. LazyApply essentially has you connect your job board accounts and then it goes bananas on applying to up to 750 jobs a day for a lifetime plan of $129.

The bot applies to jobs in real time so you can see as it fills out applications right before your eyes. This is where it went from magical to disastrous for Aki. After only a couple minutes of applying to jobs leveraging her job board profiles, it started making up all kinds of chaotic nonsense claiming that she knew conversational Spanish and checking off that she was African when her LazyApply profile stated she was Asian.

The kicker to the story for me was that the AI pulled an old cover letter from her Linkedin profile from 2020 and started using that to apply to all kinds of jobs, without her permission and without really allowing her to provide any context. The AI just assumed the cover letter would work for what she was looking for, although it also stated how much she wanted to work for the competitors of the companies it applied to! This was too funny.

So yes, am I really worried about AI taking over our jobs - not really, it can’t even apply to them properly!

How Much Vaccine is Too Much Vaccine?

This week we learned that a 62 year old man in Germany received 217 doses of the Covid vaccine. That in itself is insanity. Researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg contacted the man to see if he would be willing to go into their lab for further testing, which he was “very interested in doing”. But what I found more intriguing were the conclusions drawn from their preliminary observations of this 217 vaccine man.

A statement by one of the researchers at the university said:

You don’t say - 217 vaccines is a bit too much, is it?

Well thank goodness that mystery is cleared up - I was a bit on the fence about whether dose #218 should happen or not.

The man provided blood and saliva samples to the researchers however the results of their tests on the man were “insufficient for making far-reaching conclusions, let alone recommendations for the general public”. Again, please take this as you want as I am not a scientist but I’m pretty sure the conclusion here is that this guy was bat-sh*t crazy and decided to lace himself with as much mRNA vaccines as he could get.

What I really want to know is how he scammed so many people to obtain that many vaccinations in the first place!