Thursday: Three Change Makers

Morning CMs,

On the docket this morning: 
1/ A Youtuber who might have bankrupted a company? 
2/ A company aiming to prevent all diseases. 
3/ A Harvard student who caught the attention of Hollywood.

An incredibly famous YouTuber provides a stinking review of a product. The company that makes that product crumbles. 

Who is at fault here? The YouTuber or the company who makes the product? Well, the answer is pretty obvious: the company that makes the product.

MKBHD, a YouTuber with over 18 million subscribers and one of the most powerful voices in consumer tech, has been on a rampage recently reviewing a new breed of AI-focused devices. Specifically, the Humane AI pin and Rabbit R1. He described the Humane Pin as the worst product he’d ever reviewed and the Rabbit R1 as barely worth reviewing. And trust Twitter to make a fight over it, with people claiming he hasn’t given these products a chance, they are only V1, some people even comparing his review to reviewing the first flight of the Wright Brothers….really?

The issue with these new AI devices is two-fold:

1. They are trying to produce a new device that is not needed.

We all carry around exceptionally powerful deceives with us every day with most of the hardware these AI models need to run.

2. They are tricking early adopters into buying a useless product to fund development

Now, there is no inherent problem with releasing products to market a little early and asking users for feedback, but spending millions on marketing campaigns to get early users, and then calling foul play once a shitty review comes out seems somewhat duplicitous.

Bad reviews don’t kill companies. Bad products kill companies.

Now you might think, isn’t this newsletter about Change Makers, so shouldn’t they be commending people will to dare to make something new?

And yes it is commendable what they’re trying to achieve, but that doesn’t mean these start-ups can’t be held to account, perhaps even another change maker. MKBHD is that other change maker. He’s pioneered a form of video journalism that puts his entire emphasis on giving consumers the best possible information when buying products. He now carries such power that Apple puts his quotes on their Steve Jobs-esque feature releases.

I hope Rabbit and Humane come back and build better products, but until then I hope MKBHD stays true to himself and acts as the voice of the consumer.

Most chronic diseases are preventable if they are caught in time. The issue is they aren’t. But that might not always be the way.

There are change makers out there trying to solve this very problem, and it might have taken the recent explosion in AI to aid this revolution. 

Neko Health is one such company. Founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, they are on a mission to transform the way health is approached. 

A lot of people drift through life, eating, drinking, and not exercising until they roll into a doctor’s office and get told they have an irreversible condition. The US government spends $4 trillion on the sick and elderly mostly because people either:

1. Wait until it’s too late to reverse the issue and the outcome is unchangeable.

2. Go to see the doctor because they have a cold.

These problems are more or less fixable if you approach human health through prevention rather than cure. What if that was a story of the past, and we could create a world of preventative medicine?

Neko Health opened their first clinic in Stockholm a few years ago, and this week they announced they are coming to London (woo!). 

What Neko Health and other similar approaches could mean for the future?

Human bodies give off millions of signals, whether that’s our heart rate, our temperature, or our glucose levels, and over time scientists are developing techniques and equipment to read these signals and translate them into predictions about our future state. For example, we all know a very high cholesterol level is a good indicator of potential cardiology problems down the road. But what if we learned to translate an order of magnitude more signals, allowing us to start a treatment/preventative therapy before we even got high cholesterol?

Our entire methodology of medicine could (and should) switch to just diagnosing/treating after bad things happen, to stop them from happening entirely. Not only will this prevent countless unnecessary conditions, but it will have an enormous impact on our finances too. 

Now an opposing view might say that the Spotify billionaire has just got bored of disease and is thus creating products to help the super-wealthy. And yeah maybe that is true. But who cares - if it means this technology starts to trickle down to us mere mortals then bring it on!

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Fear of judgment, fear of embarrassment, fear of being laughed at. This is most people’s response when you ask them to publish something publicly.

Yet when these hurdles are overcome wonderful things can happen.

This past week an economics student at Harvard has been at the centre of a bidding war for his first film, by some of the most powerful and deep-pocketed studios in Hollywood. And why? Because he hit publish on a video called nothing, except everything and catapulted him into the Hollywood director’s chair. Watch it.

Now besides this just being a cool story, there are 2 things worth pointing out here:

1/ Gary Player once said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get,” which on the surface is a pretty obvious thing to say. But it’s one of the obvious mantras that no one does. The ability to put in reps over and over and over again is often what separates the good from the great as it gives them many more attempts/chances to find the opportunity.

Many would consider Wesley an overnight success, but this wasn’t the case (and almost never is). He spent years experimenting with different forms of video and put himself in the position to be found. From all the change makers we’ve ever covered this is a recurring theme - put in the reps.

2/ It’s symbolic of a rising (if not risen) tide of decentralised artists, who no longer require the approval of a select few studios who hold all the power. A pretty grim analogy, but there is a reason people like Harvey Weinstein were able to get away with their crimes for so long - they held tremendous power. The creators, who now own the audience, can now hold the power but only if they have the courage to put themselves out there in the first place.

In other words, just hit publish (note to self).