#5: 🤖 New OpenAI agent for Greg, 📰 read news [Y/N]? 🙏 Rishad, 🇬🇧 London meetup
🤖 This week: OpenAI released a new AI agent for your hungover colleague Greg.
The agent, dubbed Operator-grg, has been trained specifically for days when your colleague Greg is so hungover he wants to crawl under his bed and die.
Operator-grg was able to easily handle your company's Q1 sales meeting, chirping out Greg's sales record for the quarter while Greg himself lay slumped across the table, dribbling onto his company-branded Moleskine.
Particularly impressive was Operator-grg's news about a $350k contract Greg secured a few days ago to supply upholstery to the United Nations — surprising because your company sells cloud storage.
Operator-grg went on to loudly ask every single person in the office whether they're getting up to anything interesting this weekend, drowning out the sound of Greg dry-retching into the nearest trash can.
📰 Q. SHOULD YOU READ THE NEWS?
When I stopped using social media a few years ago I immediately transferred all my doomscrolling energy into two or three news sites. I’d find myself constantly refreshing BBC to see if anything new had popped into the top stories. Now, for what feels like the hundredth time, I'm trying to cut back my news diet. I use Freedom on my phone and desktop to ban myself from news sites. (It's very far from a total news ban — I still read newsletters and print magazines.)
I do all this out of a fairly strong conviction that reading the news 24/7 doesn't make me very happy. It's important to know what's going on in the world, but there's a spectrum, and I've spent nearly all of my adult life very far to one side.
I remember in 2011 how obsessed I became with following the Arab Spring via Al Jazeera's live blog. It felt like I was witnessing history in real time. Over the next few years, the promise of the Arab Spring gave way to despair, but I carried on believing many events were so critical I needed to track every twist in the tale: Brexit, UK/US elections, Harry and Meghan's wedding — and those were the gateway drug for the countless hours I’d spend while stuck on the news site. The Guardian’s popups would often tell me that I was in the top 1% of readers worldwide by number of articles consumed — thousands a year, dozens a day.
Kicking (or rather, reducing) the habit makes me feel happier, less depressed at the state of the world, and gives me a ton of time and thoughtfulness back. Those are pretty big wins. If you’d like to furnish yourself with anti-news arguments, have a read of this polemic essay by a person who wrote a book about not reading the news. I found a lot of it persuasive, even though it's laced with pseudoscientific bullshit like this:
Our brains are optimized for our original hunter-gatherer environment where we lived in small bands of 25 to 100 individuals with limited sources of food and information
Got it, so that's why I get a migraine every time I go into Sainsbury's!
🙏 SHOUTOUT: RISHAD
Rishad Patel is the co-founder of Splice Media, a startup whose mission is to help media organizations survive and thrive in 2025 (🎤 ⬇️). I had the massive pleasure of going to Splice Beta, their annual conference, in Chiang Mai last year. Rishad did two amazing things for Attention in the past couple of weeks. First, he gave us a wonderful write-up in his newsletter:
It’s finally happened — the media startup that trolls tech perfectly. Attention needs your attention.
Second, he gave me two hours of advice on Attention's strategy. In the days since we spoke, I've found myself repeatedly scouring through every last line of the call notes, parsing out all the brilliant suggestions into an action plan.
Thank you so much, Rishad!
🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION
This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.
Coming off my chat with Rishad, you might notice that the newsletter is more structured this week. That's how I'm going to keep it: a mixture of fun stuff, serious stuff, and (coming soon) stuff you can interact with.
The plan is to publish the newsletter every week on Monday/Tuesday, and then typically send one more email towards the back end of the week featuring new Attention content.
🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION
Feeling depressed about how tech is flushing the entire world down a binary toilet? Take a look at the Pessimists Archive. It documents some of the more egregious examples of doom-mongering about new tech since 1850. The pessimists' predictions have not aged well with hindsight.
🇬🇧 LONDON MEETUP
It's finally happened! Due to overwhelming popular demand, as well as the growing movement of shareholder activists seeking to overthrow the management team, we've agreed to make the entire senior leadership of Attention available in person to the community:
6pm Wednesday 26th March, at The Montagu Pyke in Soho, London.
On the very relaxed agenda: make tech fun again! Obviously we'll allow ourselves a little bit of moaning about how terrible everything is, but then we’ll turn to fresh ideas to bring more fun to the tech table.
There are limited spaces available, so please reply to this email to let me know if you're planning on dropping by!
Not sure if I feel seen or called out by operator-grg...
lol