Hi nerds,

I salute you from Miami 👋🏼, one of the few places in the world that remained opened while the world was locked down.

And you can feel it on the streets - buzzing restaurants, live music on bars, and conversations filled with innovative ideas from gravitating migrants.

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3 intellectual goodies

Online education: Data suggests around 90% of people who enroll in online courses, or MOOCs, drop the course half-way through. Why? Because we keep forgetting education is social.

We learn more from interacting with peers on a Friday than we do from passively listening to an instructor. That’s why so many creators are smartly releasing their cohort-based courses (CBCs). They realized the power of online education is in fact in the community they’ve built; they act as lighthouses, attracting like-minded people from around the globe, getting them to share interests and insights amongst themselves, and work as facilitators and content moderators of the space.

The future of education is not in selecting better content (that’s all online anyways), but rather in restructuring the model to make the most out of its community.

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Blockchain and veganism: Blockchain faces the same issue veganism does. Most people agree they help paint a brighter future, but few understand it at a granular level or care about why it's relevant.

The winners in both these spaces will be the organizations implementing it so smoothly, that the end user doesn't even realize they're consuming it - and love it anyways.

This is in contrast to the organizations marketing their use at the forefront. That'll get the early adopters and outcasts, but it won't pave the way to critical mass adoption because that requires rabbit-hole-level research and energy.

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Questions vs answers: The person who asks questions is more powerful than the person that holds the answers. This is not necessarily intuitive.

We tend to associate the person answering as the one leading the conversational flow, when really, asking the right questions means you drive the dinner. You shape the topics being discussed on the table and you can have that work to your advantage and interest - especially if you have a good information capture system to store the interesting responses.

Always add more questions than answers to your conversations. You'll see how significantly more interesting your hangouts will be.

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2 brain farts

"The possibility of a global vote would have seemed preposterous only a few short years ago, but technology has finally caught up to the promise of democracy by making it scalable. Indeed, the combination of blockchain and mobile technologies has brought democracy into the internet age with a vengeance, enabling levels of security, transparency, accountability and access that turn the entire world into a literal direct democracy arena, no different than the early agoras of ancient Greece, where every citizen could literally be counted. It’s not just theory — it’s happening."

​Global Citizenship in the 21st century - Sandra Miller​

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"Humility is how you value yourself. Curiosity is how you value your others. Empathy is how you value the bonds between yourself and others."

​3 Keys to Becoming Irresistible - John Grenam​

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1 funky audio

After living in the French-speaking region of Switzerland for a few years, I started geeking out to french tunes. Here are some of my favorite ones. Indulge ✨

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Thank you for reading.

I got so many cool email replies to my last newsletter, I can wait to read what juicy ideas you'll share with me on this one. 💡

The internet truly is engineered serendipity.

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Until next time,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️