How AI Shamed Irish Pubs into Lowering Beer Prices, the Tragedy of Taxes and India’s Impossible Census

Dear Fellow Non-Obvious Thinker,

Earlier this week I made it to a private event and book launch for Jim Collins’ latest book. He is best known for writing the legendary business book Good to Great, but his latest book goes beyond business to explore over a decade of his research into how “individual lives can be built, sustained, and constantly renewed.” Sitting in the room listening to his interview with Kelly Corrigan (host of the PBS show Tell Me More and the podcast Exactly), one thing he said really got me thinking when he started talking about age and achievement. What if the age of sixty is actually the midpoint in your career, when you have more than half of your achievements yet to come?

Even with nearly a decade to go until I hit that milestone, this was a pretty empowering thing to hear. A good reminder that the impatience we sometimes feel is deeply unnecessary in the long run. A longer book review of his latest work will be coming in a future newsletter edition too. For stories this week, you’ll read about one Irish man’s noble quest to lower the price of a pint of Guinness, how to celebrate local news day today, why no space photos from Artemis II include space junk, India’s ambitious plan to do a census of 1.4 billion people and the usual weekly book and media recommendations.

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

This Week’s New Videos …

How One Man Lowered the Price of Guinness by Using AI to Call 6,000+ Pubs Across Ireland

Here’s a story that has everything: an entrepreneur’s frustration, an immediately useful idea, game changing use of technology … and a great brand name. It starts with an Irish engineer named Matt Cortland who couldn’t shake the feeling that he had just overpaid for a pint of Guinness at a local pub. Lacking the evidence to back up his feeling, he turned to AI and build an agent he named Rachel, programmed it with a female voice in an Irish accent and tasked the agent with calling every pub across Ireland (more than 6,000 are now tracked on his site) and asking whomever answered what the current price of a pint of Guinness was.

The answers were subsequentially compiled by Claude into a chart which he then built into a website that he dubbed the “Guinndex” to illustrate the price of a pint of Ireland’s favorite beer across the country. The average price was €6.06 with the highest price coming in at €11 from the upscale Temple Bar in Dublin. The effort has gone viral, turned Cortland into something of a local folk hero and is even shaming some pubs into lower their prices—which seems to have been his real mission all along. So far, the plentiful marketing opportunities this should offer don’t seem to be happening … which is a major missed opportunity. The Temple Bar could lean into their “most expensive” ranking and serve the beer in gold rimmed glasses. The brand itself could make him an official spokesperson/ambassador. The only thing that could have made this better is if the whole thing launched on St. Patrick’s Day.

3 Big Reasons That Local News Day (Today!) Should Matter to You

Today is the first annual Local News Day in the US (April 9th) and Non-Obvious Company is signed on as a partner and supporter. If you’re a longtime reader of this newsletter, you know that I’m a big advocate for the importance of journalism in our modern world (not be confused with opinion journalism). Local news is a sadly shrinking part of the information landscape and it desperately needs our support to survive. Here are three questions that local news helps to answer and why it should matter to you:

  1. What’s happening in your area? Your local publications are the ones that are often most in tune to local events, places to go and also local legislation that’s likely to affect your life but that’s mostly ignored by other news media. ​
  2. What does the news mean for you? Whether it’s local or state level legislation or the local impact of federal announcements, or just giving you the weather, local news breaks down what the big picture means for your life.
  3. Who are the winners and losers? Like most good journalism, local news can help you understand both sides of an issue by focusing on the all-important question behind a story … who’s winning and who’s losing?

Even though Local News Day is today, there’s still time to sign up as a sponsor or an individual supporter. Better yet, use the map to find and support the local news sources near you (if you’re based in the US).

The Tragedy of American Taxes Isn’t Actually the Taxes

People hate taxes and filing their taxes, yet the tax refund check is the biggest single payment most Americans get all year. It is tax season in the US and so there are plenty of stories about tax policy this week, as well as peripherally related stories like the one about Sam Altman proposing a robot tax (among other things) to help society deal with AI. The story that stood out for me this week, though, offers a perfect glimpse into how effective government is often held back from helping people by entrenched interests. In 2024, the IRS launched an intentionally small “Direct File” pilot program that allowed US taxpayers to submit their taxes directly without the need for expensive consultants or third-party software. It was a big success. In 2025, the program was discontinued, leaving the “Free File” program which has its own sneaky problems:

The Free File program, which dates back to 2002, allows the industry to claim that it’s possible to file taxes free while working to ensure that most people keep on paying. The bottom 70 percent of taxpayers ranked by income are eligible to use the Free File program. That’s about 100 million households. Only about three million use it each year. Instead, every year, millions of people eligible for Free File pay to use virtually the same software from the same companies.​

Intuit’s behavior has been particularly egregious. ProPublica reported in 2019 that the company had concealed the landing page for the Free File version of its product so that it was invisible to Google and other search engines. It also created a stalking horse called TurboTax: Free Edition, which pushed users to pay for add-ons. After it got caught, the company abandoned the Free File program.

Despite its success, the potential growth of a free government system allowing people to pay their taxes quickly online threatened the livelihood of the $17B tax filing software industry. So the lobbyists went to work and the extremely promising IRS system that would have saved Americans an estimated 13 hours and $290 in fees met its untimely end.

So what’s the solution here? There’s a silver lining that may point to the answer. Apparently, in 2025 before abandoning the Free File program, “the federal government published most of the program’s source code on GitHub.” Now all we need is an entrepreneur with a similar sort of vision to what drove Mark Cuban to build CostPlus Drugs as a way to cut the middlemen out of pharmacy sales. If you know one, please forward this email on to them.

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

The 74

The 74 is a nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system from early childhood through college and career. We center our reporting on the teachers, innovators, researchers, school leaders and politicians who shape that education, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

Our mission is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give American students the skills, support and social mobility they deserve.

What’s happening in education across America? The 74 has the answer with authoritative coverage on all things education. While you might add this to your regular reading list, it’s also a good example of the sort of niche focused media site that belongs in your media library because it’s one of the best places you can go to find the truth behind any story related to education you read from any other news source. From a media literacy point of view, having go-to sources like this to verify truths before you believe or share them is critical. For that reason, The 74 is my pick for the Non-Obvious Media Source of the Week.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

How Things Are Made

How did the stuff that made it into your life get made? For most of us, the manufacturing process is a mystery, but if we better understood how these things get to us, we might make different choices about what we choose to buy. That’s the big idea behind this book from college professor and Head of the Institute for Manufacturing, Tim Minshall. His book is an eye-opening look at every part of the manufacturing process, from the making of things all the way through to the transportation of how they get to us. The book is a great read, and (spoiler alert), you can also catch Tim on an upcoming episode of the Non-Obvious Show podcast too.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop? 

Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>