The S.W.I.P.E.S. Email (Friday December 30th, 2022)

I like this ad because the headline copy and image work together to show your tires are the only part of your car that touch the road.

The headline uses underlining for "you're only safe as your tires" and the image cleverly removes the body of the car and just shows the tires:

I like this quote: 

Quote

“Once you understand the motivation, reward and punishment structure of any system, you can begin to control it.” 

- Guido Van Rossum (founder of the Python programming language)

I once heard Cesar Millan (the Dog Whisperer) say all dogs like at least 1 of these 3 different rewards: 
- Toys
- Food
- Affection

Once you know the type of reward a dog responds to best, it makes it much easier to train!

Hugsy likes toys, food, and affection:

Sid is primarily motivated by food, and is "meh" on the rest:

Poe mostly responds to affection:

Knowing the reward/punishment structure seems to help in any system!

- Training neural networks
- Training dogs
- Raising kids

Here's a funny term I heard:

A doctor friend said a lot of her patients have “Million Dollar Pee” because they take so many useless supplements 😂

I hope you're having a great holiday season!!

This picture sums up Christmas & New Year's in Austin: Cold enough to wear some long clothes, but warm enough to work outside without freezing to death 😂

Here's an idea for the U.S. Department of Education:

Crowd-source short form videos for every subject & every grade K - 12. Students can casually browse these like TikTok as a supplement to their classes.

Here's An Example: 
Take this 3rd grade Language Arts curriculum and put a $10,000 award for the best short video for each section (1 minute or less)…

Educators across the world will flood social media with their entries.

The $10,000 prize is split up into: 
• 1st place: $6,000 
• 2nd place: $3,000 
• 3rd place: $1,000 

You then take the winning videos and add them to playlists on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. 

Now let’s do the math…

The U.S. Department of Education budget in 2022 was $636 billion. 

Each grade curriculum is 32 weeks, with 5 lessons per week. 

• 160 lessons per grade X 12 grades = 1,920 lessons 

• 1,920 lessons X $10,000 per prize = $19,200,000 

• $636 billion / $19.2 million =  .003% of budget

Conclusion: 
For just .003% of your US Education budget, in one month, you could give high quality supplemental materials to every student in the country (technically the world)…and turn social media from a time-suck to kids, into a powerful teacher that benefits millions!

Evidence crowd sourcing works has been proven by @xprize and @DARPA. Interesting analogy is @thesamparr and @ShaanVP offered $5k for anyone who can make a clip viral…it resulted in hundreds of clips, hundreds of creators, and hundreds of millions of views…for just $5k 😳

Even if this program cost 5x or 10x what’s quoted here it would still be an intensely efficient use of funds.

This same competition could be held every year, or whenever there are changes to the curriculum…massively increasing the quality of the education as people compete.

This program could bring out a whole new generation of digital educators.

A high school English teacher in Missouri may discover she has the skills to educate millions of students online, rather than just 100 students in person.

Digital education would advance quickly with this method.

I hope someone takes this idea and runs with it!

My content consumption has changed in the last few years.

I’d say for every 1 blog post, I’m viewing 100’s of Reels/TikToks/Shorts

I've also noticed far more growth on my short videos than my blog posts recently (see full stats here).

How many blog posts do YOU read vs watching short form video? Reply to this email and let me know!