Dear Reader,
Greetings from sunny LA! It's been a travel week with talks for AT&T and Warner Brothers and some private gatherings as well - including a book launch event for my friend (and Ideapress author) Jamie Shapiro. In stories this week, you'll read about an emotional new museum opening, how one non-profit is trying to solve the mass discard problem on college campuses as students leave for the summer, and how Pizza Hut is bringing back retro restaurants.
Enjoy this week's stories and stay curious!
Rohit
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Solving The Mass Discard Problem on College Campuses
Imagine a day or series of days when people pile up all sorts of stuff on the curb and give it away for free. Unopened food, near new mini-fridges. Perfectly good furniture. Even digital devices like monitors or TVs. Anyone can come up and take anything they want. This is the reality on college campuses across the country right now as students move out of dorms and find themselves unable or unwilling to take all the stuff they used all year. So they just leave it on the curb.
Over 15 years ago, one student witnessed this annual ritual and decided to try and do something about it to help find a good home or reuse for all those curb-side possessions. His national non-profit is called the Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN) and works to create a school-run, student-led, zero waste initiative on campuses that works with over 200 schools around the US. At his former alma mater at the Universty of New Hampshire, volunteers spend 600 hours collecting and sorting items left by students departing for the summer. Items are cleaned, put into storage and then saved for resale when students come back after the summer.
This is the sort of non-obvious idea for a non-profit that I love to see stories about. Solving a problem, educating people and helping us manage our throw-away culture to make a change.
Pizza Hut and the Retro Restaurant Movement
For delivery pizza, the leader for years has been Dominos. For sit down pizzerias, there are plenty of options in most cities. Pizza Hut has largely been stuck in the middle and left behind. It has been the weakest performing brand in parent company YUM Brands' portfolio and the chain's U.S. same store sales fell 4% last quarter. One franchisee who owns nearly 100 locations has a vision to try and turn this slide around: by bringing back the look and ambiance of the old Pizza Hut restaurants many of us might remember from the 80s and 90s.
Tapping a larger retro trend, owner Tim Sparks is aiming to restore what he feels is the core identity of the brand and what sets them apart from their delivery competitors. The renovated restaurants in his portfolio include the iconic salad bar, stained glass overhead lighting, plastic checkered tablecloths, red vinyl booths and even the chain's legendary "Book It" program that offered students a free personal pizza for achieving a monthly reading target.
It will be interesting to watch how this strategy plays out and whether nostalgia alone is enough to get diners to come back in to the old school Pizza Hut they might remember.
The Most Depressing Museum In The World Has A Message To Share
I've been to my fair share of depressing museums. The Holocaust museums in LA and DC and parts of the African American Museum in DC definitely qualify. The sadness built into most of them is intentional. A way for each of us to relive past injustices and tragedies so perhaps we can all be a voice to help prevent them from happening again the future. This week Megan Markle inaugurated the Lost Screen Memorial at Place des Nations in Geneva during World Health Assembly Week. It's aim is to spotlight the "human toll of unchecked digital spaces" while also offering a call for coordinated global action to make digital spaces safe by design.
"Their faces ask the world questions we can no longer avoid: how many more millions of children will be harmed by products that, while innovative, are still designed without sufficient safeguards? When will children be able to enjoy the extraordinary potential of technology without it compromising their wellbeing."
The memorial features 50 lightboxes each with the story of a child who died because of some form of online harm - cyberbullying, grooming, sextortion or exposure to self-harm content. It's an urgent message as part of the movement to recognize child online safety as a public health issue and major societal challenge. This is a challenge that we can solve through demanding more accountability from the companies and leaders building the technology we use every day.
Amazon Invents Another Way to Steal Media With Ai Generated Podslop
Amazon just announced Alexa Podcasts, a new Alexa+ feature available to paying Amazon Prime members. The platform allows you to ask for information on any topic and it will auto-generate an "explainer" podcast episode of any length with AI voices that are in one of their default personalities (Alexa, brief, sweet, chill, and sassy) along with its conversational style. The episode will then pull content from over 200 news sources that have "signed up" to participate, including "Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today, and publications from Conde Nast, Hearst and Vox."
So essentially Amazon has strong-armed media partners into providing their high quality content in order to build what is being described as a podslop generator at scale? It's no wonder the announcement is generating widespread backlash online.
The sad part is how the leadership of many of these content partners likely felt like they had no choice but to participate just so they don't get left behind. This is the reality of public pressure on media leaders right now to dive into every new AI initiative. Even the ones that are pretty clearly terrible ideas.
