On the day-to-day level this meant I was meeting with talented peers from universities across the country, exposing myself to high-growth companies, and learning how to best connect the two. While doing so, I got a lot more exposure to the technical landscape in Silicon Valley and saw the technical importance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and all the other buzzwords we hear about nowadays. Nav Talent was working with amazing companies in the autonomous driving space, AR software kits, and plenty of stealth companies. This inspired me to do a deep dive into some of these technologies and I just so happened to be introduced to an amazing conference taking place at Princeton University called Envision through friends at Brown. I applied, got in, and knew I had to go. With that, I wanted to share a few takeaways for other Brown students from the conference (and encourage you to go next year!).

Surround yourself with diverse and interesting people

One of the best parts of the Envision Conference was who else went. I got the chance to meet people who have spent their careers fiddling around with cells, biology and radio waves to create art; I met people who are studying computational neuroscience at uPenn and MIT; others who didn’t go to high school, traveled the world reading books and working and are now fashioning their own education at Duke on Artificial and Biological Intelligence; and several people using ML to model social networks and connections.

Through and through, there were some really talented, passionate, and remarkable people all trying to shape the world in their own way. What’s oddly invaluable, is that you have no clue who will create the next the next big thing. Surrounding yourself with the next generation of changemakers is not only a long term investment, but perhaps more importantly, a fun, inspirational way to grow and make new friends. I believe that by surrounding yourself with amazing individuals, you get more comfortable building out your own dreams, and you find life-long friends to build out visions together.

This may all be obvious — and at the very least, everyone tells you to be cognizant of who you surround yourself with — but conferences are a great way to surround yourself with new, amazing, talented, passionate people.

There are experts and teams working on *wild* projects

This is Neil Harbisson. He’s a cyborg, cyberneticist, futurist enthusiast and so much more. He’s been colorblind from a young age and so over 13 years ago implanted an antenna in his head that transmits the wavelengths of color in the surrounding areas to the parts of his brain that process sound that way he could “hear color”. It’s given him as rich a sense of color (perceived in a completely different way) and the honor of being the first person classified as a cyborg by a government. I won’t do justice explaining the whole story (you can watch his TED talk here) but what’s even cooler is that he demoed a completely new invention he and his team are building that will further hack his biology and give him extra senses. He’s calling it the “Solar Crown” and it is meant to be implanted between his skin and skull and deliver a rotating sense of heat around his skull. The “heat pulse” travels around his skull with the time of the day, giving him a real organ that generates a real and measured sense of time. His goal is to have a perfect sense of time passing, have his brain adapt and become accustomed to the new sense, and then tamper with that sense, slowing down and speeding up the pace of the heat pulse giving him an altered sense of time passing. He hopes this crazy feat will allow him to make boring times feel like they’re passing by quickly, and beautiful moments pass by slowly. This was BY FAR the most unimaginable, and revolutionary technology displayed during the conference and sparked a whole debate about wearables, hacking our senses and more. I truly hope though, that it inspired new people to join the conversation about the ethics and implications of such tampering.

The future risks and rewards of tech are so hard to predict…

At Envision, there were experts, professors, industry professionals, academics, engineers and everything in between. And everyone was hard pressed to come to a reasonably sized consensus about what we were to expect in the next 30–50 years. Not only was it unclear what technology would be prevalent by 2050, but it was widely debated whether it would be a largely good thing or a largely detrimental nightmare ending in our global existential demise. Space colonization was seriously explored as ways to mitigate those risks, AI & ML were thought to be complete wild cards with no clear idea whether we’d have “superintelligent AI” that would need a healthy dollop of humanitarian love and morals. The very notion that AI would at all look like some superintelligent being couldn’t be settled. The matter of the future was only exacerbated with biohacking and genetic engineering. Little was said on blockchain technologies, nuclear proliferation and VR/AR but all have important consequences on governance, international cooperation, and the future of how we spend our time.

…And that’s why more people should be thinking about it, entering the space, and safeguarding the world against the greatest potential dangers tech could bring.

And to the final takeaway… Because the future of tech, and its potential harm/benefit on humanity is so uncertain I sincerely believe that more talented and passionate college students, specifically engineers, neuroscientists, biologists, need to be thinking how to safeguard against misuse, harm and unforeseeable dangers. This of course, cannot and should not be a task simply left to our lovely engineers and scientists, but must also be addressed by designers, sociologists, political scientists, economists and anthropologists. The rate of technological growth and the uncertainty it poses on social structures, pressures and norms, requires us all to think deeply about what could happen, and ensure we agree on measures to minimize the number of catastrophic futures, if not maximize the number of utopian futures.

And I mean, the guys over at All The Rooms are really nice. They’re just trying to make your lives easier by showing you some more rooms. Did you ask for more rooms? We have no idea. Did you ask for all the rooms? Look, why would you? But we give up. We’re really tired. So please just click the g*dd&$m link because we’re done asking. It’s right here: alltherooms.com/AM. If you want to do us a favor, you’ll click it. If you don’t, we don’t care. In the meantime we’ll be leaving the advertising industry to take on careers in underwater cave diving instruction.

Love, The Team

In our years of experience generating a lot of traffic to alltherooms.com/AM — note that’s alltherooms.com/AM with an s at the end of rooms, and definitely a /AM at the end of the url, but in a way that is not unappealing — we’ve learned a lot about advertising.

The first is that it like doesn’t work. Unless you’re a 45 year old Midwestern mother looking for coupons, advertising won’t work on you. Like there just isn’t a chance. Take alltherooms.com/AM — again, that’s with the slash at the end— we’ve got a great product. But people are tired of living in the capitalist cogs of consumer society. People see through advertising, hate being shoved advertisements to, and definitely will not overthrow the bourgeois with the cold, hard cash nexus logic permeating our lives. So yeah, class consciousness — you got it in you unless you’re from Kansas, Missouri, Indiana or Nebraska and married with two kids and are looking for some healthy cereal at a cheap price in which case you’re still very much subject to calculated feel-good campaigns from world-class advertisers like us at All The Rooms or the people over at Google. The takeaway? Just be real. Recognize that inevitably there is a degree of social constructionism that arbitrarily structures the world in an overly deterministic fashion creating the simultaneous sense that life will never be anything more than alienating, rote wage-labor and the evanescent feeling of some superficial fulfillment through material goods and social climbing. Just let go, embrace the proletariat within you and let people know what you’re up to when advertising.

The second big thing is that BuzzFeed — the really popular ad platform, where you can sponsor your content without getting banned for shameless plugs of alltherooms.com/AM — doesn’t work at all. We realized pretty early on that it was better for us to have a mutually agreed upon, completely voluntary contract with BuzzFeed, where they would indefinitely ban us from using their platform ever again, and we would forever take our quality ads about alltherooms.com/AM elsewhere.

The third HUGE thing when advertising is that you cannot, and I repeat, CANNOT, have the lactose-free milk with 2% fat and drink it to mind-stopping satisfaction too. I’m serious here. Given that a lot of our advertising experts at All The Rooms come from northern European descent, plenty of people were lactose intolerant and would leave lactose-free milk with 2% fat, and sometimes, lactose-free whole milk, in the company fridge. And what we noticed is that traffic would CRASH when people drank that milk. We still have no idea what it was, but we realized we just had to leave the milk in the fridge until it expired and then just throw it all out. And don’t get all wishful here — this was not a one-off thing. At the International Advertising Conference for Expert and Veteran Advertisers Sponsored By All The Rooms and Spotify, company experts compared notes and everyone noticed the same thing. So don’t you dare drink the lactose-free milk with 2% fat.

This brings us to an interesting final point… What does work??? I’ve spent a lot of time here letting you know what just flat out doesn’t work. Almost everyone doesn’t really want advertising, and class-conscious advertisers, like most of us in the industry, don’t really want to be annoying with their constant advertisements. Given that, All The Rooms did a lot of testing on things and we’re happy to report some positive news. And it’s not postmodern, hyper self aware, painfully self critical, disparagingly ironic, and bitingly satirical advertising. All The Rooms is far beyond that. No. It’s hyperlinking literally every word and character on all your ads, creative content, blogs, flyers (yes, flyers, get with the program), books, games, word-of-mouth (yes, even the spoken words), Facebook posts, Influencer interviews, and user testimonials. It’s the only try-and-true method. It’s so effective, we realized most of the words you use don’t matter. We’ve had posts filled with literal gibberish like adsis, ruie aimlae tey hikkefziegmnb, and we’ve filled others with horribly misspelled words like beethrum and wootrbaughtel. Every time it has worked. We’re really in love with the method actually. It’s pretty clear that people haven’t caught on and we’re just here now trying to help companies get to our kind of level so that they too can be associated with the Googles and NYTimes and All The Rooms of this century. We hope even just one person takes something away from today. Our motto is, a more hyperlinked internet is an advertising rich, and healthy medium for channeling your every need. Learn from the veterans and the experts. Hyperlink all your content.

Adi Melamed has always been the noble one. He’s definitely more creative than all of his peers, and usually puts it to really good use. Although many of his peers have cited that he channels most of his energy into dumb, sub-funny content, we here like to give people the benefit of the doubt! Yeah so anyways, when All The Rooms challenged him and his fellow interns to get as many people as possible to click on alltherooms.com/AM, Adi put his brain to good use!

Realizing that all of his friends enjoy receiving spam on their Facebook newsfeed and probably enjoy second-tier Onion-style articles even more, Adi started an ambitious campaign to feature alltherooms.com/AM all over the place! While fellow intern, Lisa Schold quite publically stated that this was in fact, a really bad call Adi, and you’re definitely making a fool out of yourself for a company you don’t even work for, in a manner that almost certainly won’t generate relevant traffic to the website, Adi went for it anyways. Isn’t that great?!

Letting things get to his head, Adi almost immediately imagined how viral all his content would definitely get. Like come on, going above the call of duty? That stuff always works. Just the thought of all the recognition he would get for his ingenuity sent him to work. And in the span of just 2 days he made 2 Onion-style posts on Buzzfeed. That’s pretty good. Like really good. Probably took him a few hours and some time up at the drawing board. Good for him. We respect that kind of hustle.

Until he totally got PWNED by Buzzfeed and got permanently banned from posting any content whatsoever on their website! Like WHAT! What a loser! Dreaming about his posts going viral? Pft get your head out of the clouds Adi! Buzzfeed handed him his a$& in a way most people never experience. Good on Buzzfeed. Honestly, what a solid.

Although this was really heartbreaking for Adi, we have to admire his nobility. It is really good to make content that you think will almost definitely go viral. And although Adi has got no shot at virality, Lisa definitely got the last laugh and was reported lightly punching him on the arm and reminding Adi that he definitely made a fool out of himself for a company he doesn’t even work for! Maybe there always is a happy ending!