Welcome to The Art of The Impossible, a weekly newsletter where I unearth five pieces of content which I hope will both inspire and embolden you.
This week, I have been pondering on the power of AI and how agents like Devin from Cognition Labs could replace software engineers and if that is the case, what does it mean for all the millions of pounds and time and effort we have all put into getting kids to learn to code? 🤔
Then I realised all technology starts like this and learning to code is not time misspent. What we have now is the ability to have even more people enter tech, who might have normally been held back, which is an excellent thing.
I guess, that is why I have always liked the idea of no code and courses which allow us to understand the tools available to us all, no matter our past (or lack of) technical experience.
And that is also why I am excited to share my latest partnership is with 100DaysOfNoCode and 100DaysOfAI where you can pick up new skills in bite size chunks in just 100 days.
Learn No-Code & AI skills in 100 days
Learn No-Code and AI skills by committing to the 100DaysOfNoCode or 100DaysOfAI challenge. Receive a 30-minute bite-sized lesson straight to your inbox every day. It’s FREE, fun and effective! Both challenges start this Monday, April 1st, 2024⚡️
#100DaysOfNoCode #100DaysOfAI
Back to the newsletter, here are my top 5 recommendations this week for founders and innovators:
PODCAST
To kick off Series 13, it was a delight to interview founder/investor June Angelides for the podcast this week and I look forward to sharing the episode with you over this Easter weekend.
In the episode, we will discuss: the importance of storytelling as a founder, how she went from founder to investor, what she looks for in the founders she invests in, when to shut down a business and much more! Keep your eyes peeled for its release wherever you get your podcasts from.
In the mean time, do also check out
great podcast which I highly recommend - if you haven’t listened to it before, you can start with this interview he did with Demis Hassabis who was knighted this week! Watch here.QUOTE
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
INTERVIEW
Ben Tossell is a great British founder who I had the pleasure of meeting back in 2017 when he came to one of my early Junto Network dinners (for founders and innovators).
He went on to start several startups including Makerpad, a no-code education site which was acquired by Zapier.
He now writes Ben’s Bites—one of the top daily AI newsletters (over 100,000 subscribers) and is an investor in a number of promising early-stage AI startups.
In this interview, Ben details:
How he he integrated AI into his workflow to find new business opportunities and evaluate their performance
How to use ChatGPT as a business strategist
Building your MVP with ChatGPT
Turning interview transcripts into compelling articles
Analyzing business data using AI tools
How to generate persuasive landing page copy with ChatGPT and more!
Watch here.
BOOK
A Curious Mind Expanded Edition: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman
A specially combined edition with a new foreword - Academy Award–winning producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed author Charles Fishman blend their insights from bestselling books A Curious Mind and Face to Face to transform the art of connecting with and through curiosity.
In A Curious Mind, deemed “a captivation account of how the simple act of asking questions can change your life” by Malcolm Gladwell, Grazer offers a brilliant peek into the “curiosity conversations” that inspired him to create some of the world’s most iconic movies and television shows. He shows how curiosity has been the “superpower” that fueled his rise as one of Hollywood’s leading producers and creative visionaries.
And in the captivating follow-up Face to Face, Grazer reveals that the secret to a more fulfilling life lies in personal connections, sparked through curiosity, learning through his interactions with people like Taraji P. Henson, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Eminem, and Prince.
Now with a new foreword with fresh insights about curiosity from the last decade, A Curious Mind Expanded invites you to consider your personal journey of human connection. A fascinating page-turner, this combined edition offers a blueprint for how we can awaken our own curiosity and use it as a superpower in our own lives.
Buy the book here.
FILM
Eno
I am so excited for this film - touted as the definitive documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno, and a groundbreaking generative film that’s different every time it’s shown - made possible, in part, thanks to the groundbreaking work from friend of the podcast, Brendan Dawes (listen to my interview with Brendan here).
For the past 50 years, Brian Eno has been at the forefront of musical creativity, technology, and artistic innovation. The hugely influential British musician, producer, activist, visual artist and self-described “sonic landscaper” began his career as an original member of the legendary Roxy Music in the early 1970s. He left the band to release a series of solo records and later pioneered the genre of ambient music with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. As a producer, Brian Eno has helped define and reinvent the sound of some of the most important artists in music, including David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay, and dozens of others. He also composed what may be the most heard piece of music in the world: the startup sound for Microsoft Windows. Undeniably, Eno has changed the way modern music is made.
Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, Gary Hustwit’s forthcoming documentary Eno employs groundbreaking technology to accomplish something that’s never been done before: a feature film that’s never the same twice. Gary and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Gary’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Each screening of Eno is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live. The generative and infinitely iterative quality of Eno poetically resonates with the artist's own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.
Gary’s collaboration with Eno first began in 2017, when Eno created an original score for Gary’s film Rams, about the German designer Dieter Rams. Gary says, “Much of Brian’s career has been about enabling creativity in himself and others, through his role as a producer but also through his collaborations on projects like the Oblique Strategies cards or the music app Bloom. I think of Eno as an art film about creativity, with the output of Brian’s 50-year career as its raw material. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”
The UK premiere of Eno with live generative film screening and post-film conversation with Brian Eno, Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes takes place Saturday 20th April at the Barbican - get your tickets here.
Thank you for reading the newsletter and for listening to the podcast, and if you enjoy them, please do share with your network - my goal is to have these stories reach as many as possible so that others can be inspired too.
And don’t forget, if you want to learn to code or up your AI skills for FREE, check out this week’s sponsor and sign up below:
Learn No-Code & AI skills in 100 days
Learn No-Code and AI skills by committing to the 100DaysOfNoCode or 100DaysOfAI challenge. Receive a 30-minute bite-sized lesson straight to your inbox every day. It’s FREE, fun and effective! Both challenges start this Monday,
April 1st, 2024 ⚡️ #100DaysOfNoCode #100DaysOfAI
Have a lovely weekend.
Danielle