2.3 million books are published every year.

7.5 million blog posts are posted every day.

500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

We are drowning in information—and yet we barely retain anything. I’m reminded of a line from the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”

Large language models were trained on the data they gobbled up from all those books and blogs and videos, and now they can answer any question you can imagine.

But can AI teach you?

Teachers

Two of my favorite clients were teachers: Dr. Becky, the co-founder of Good Inside, and Cara Dumaplin, the creator of Taking Cara Babies (if you are a parent of young children you know that working for both of them makes me kind of a big deal).

Both have built massive communities of people who love their courses, books, and podcasts. They bring their whole selves to the work which gives it a particular voice and a grounded point of view. They are both mothers as well as experts in their field (Dr. Becky is a psychologist and Cara was a neonatal nurse). Their courses demonstrate their expertise while effortlessly weaving in stories from their personal lives.

They don’t just transmit information; they teach.

Who is going to teach us?

If you ask ChatGPT to “create a sleep plan for my four-month-old like Cara from Taking Cara Babies,” it will give you one. But will you trust it?

Or would you prefer to watch a video of Cara while she walks you through it? I would choose the latter every single time.

I feel this way because Cara is real. She has a history. She’s been putting babies to sleep her entire life. (She went pro at it!) Not only that, she has preferences like loving Chick-fil-A and Target as well as being very funny. She makes me laugh. In contrast, LLMs have never put a baby to sleep. They can’t fathom the daunting, bewildering experience of becoming a parent and the alternating waves of anxiety and joy that accompany it.

More simply, LLMs can’t experience.

And experience is the best teacher.

We’re after something more than information

One of my best calls this week was with a potential client who wants to rethink their tech stack. We spent most of the call chatting about the similarities between their work in Africa and my nonprofit work with Eight Oaks. We talked about Ghana, power imbalance, the criticality of local autonomy, and how to best support great work happening all over the globe. And after a good long chat, we turned to software.

First experience. Then information.

There is infinite information about how to use software. Every tool has its own academy with its own knowledge base. You have multiple lifetimes of information at your fingertips and can learn whatever you want. Your problem is deciding who you will learn from.

We don’t just want information. We want connection.

Stray comment

My north star for how to teach nonprofits about software is a comment posted on a recipe for Skillet Chicken With Mushrooms and Caramelized Onions in the NYTimes cooking app.

Eugenia from four years ago (this is what I call her) knows a foundational truth:

There is the recipe and how we feel about the recipe.

There is your software and how you feel about your software.

If you learn nothing else from me, it is this: have faith in yourself, your tastes, and your abilities. Use more of the tools you like and fewer of the ones you don’t. Work hard, but not too hard. And enjoy yourself.

By subscribing to this newsletter, you’ve invited me to teach you what I know. I don’t take that lightly. This blog post is one of 7.5 million that will be published today; you took the time to read mine.

Thank you.

Until next week, Ted