🦝 Cleverness is Currency

Street Smarts is Becoming More Important in the AI Era — Plus, Geopolitical Perspectives from People Who Know the Region Well and Apple's AI Ambitions

Author

Katie Perry
June 24, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture three times a week. Subscribe and tell me what you want to hear about next! - KP

The Big Story: Why Street Smarts Still Matter

Last week, a study from the MIT Media Lab made a controversial conclusion: AI and large language models are making us slower, softer, more dependent, and well …dumber. Similar to the way calculators eroded mental math. And how spell-check (and now, Grammarly) rendered spelling skills obsolete. It’s not all that surprising, really. When everything is at your fingertips, you stop working the muscle.

This is your brain on AI (via MIT Media Lab).

Something the paper didn’t mention is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. With this much access to information, a different skill set is becoming more important: street smarts.

Street smarts don’t come from IQ or academic training. They mostly show up in how you navigate ambiguous situations. Knowing when to speak and when to keep quiet. Reading people quickly. Making decisions when you only have partial information. If everyone has the same tools, the differentiator becomes how you use them.

Let’s quickly define “street smarts.” The phrase came out in the mid-1960s, so it’s relatively new in the grand scheme of etymology. Originally, it described people who had the awareness and instincts to handle life in the city. They didn’t rely on credentials. They relied on their ability to assess what was happening around them and act accordingly.

It’s important to lay out the cultural context here, because while the term itself is not explicitly racial, it has, at times, carried coded connotations that intersect with race, class, and geography.

But, over time, the term has expanded, and while its original usage didn’t completely go away, it’s now used more broadly to describe someone clever, quick-witted, or quick on their feet. Today, street smart refers to someone who can size up a situation, pivot when things change, and solve problems practically.

Psychologist Robert Sternberg called this “contextual intelligence.” It’s the skill of adjusting to your environment and making it work in your favor.

The outsider with street smarts is a common archetype in literature, TV, and film. Consider Ryan Atwood, the scrappy kid from Chino who learned to make his way in the O.C. Aladdin, the “riff raff, street rat” who survives by charm and trickery. Erin Brockovich. Oliver Twist. The list goes on.

Chino’s finest: Ryan Atwood

In business, these traits show up everywhere. FedEx founder Fred Smith recently passed away, and some of his lore was kicked back up into the ether. One of the wilder anecdotes was how he was about to lose the company (everything, really), so he took the last $5,000 he had, flew to Vegas, and ended up turning it into $27,000 at the blackjack table. It was enough to keep the lights on, and the rest is history.

Fred Smith, founder of modern shipping and apparently, helluva blackjack player.

Think of the high school dropout founders who just “have it,” the non-intellectual sellers who use EQ and persistence to rack up huge commissions, and the creatives who see opportunities where nobody else can.

Book smarts might help you more quickly understand frameworks or trends, but street smarts help you make the right move in the moment. Tools like AI level the field when it comes to access to information — but they don’t give you instinct, human judgment, or timing.

And something else fascinating is that every culture has its own way of describing these skills. In the U.S., people call it grit or scrappiness. In parts of Latin America and Asia, it’s about adapting to systems that are often unpredictable or bureaucratic. Social awareness becomes survival. You learn to scan for clues and read subtext.

But perhaps nobody celebrates “street smarts” more than the Italians. They even have a word for it, furbo, which means clever or cunning. If someone’s furbo, they know how to bend rules without necessarily breaking them. Being furbo isn’t always a compliment, but it’s usually said with respect. In Italy, if you can cheat just a little (and get away with it without harming anyone), it’s a positive.

Vito Corleone: Without wealth or formal education, he came to America and built a dynasty.

So, where do street smarts come from? Similar to book smarts, they are acquired, but often through situational environments or lived experience. That’s why people who grow up in unstable or low-resource environments often build street smarts early.

They get good at reading others, making fast decisions, and managing risk. These are learned behaviors that come from needing to get through the day without much safety net. It’s not optional; it’s survival.

But you don’t necessarily have to grow up in chaos or hardship to develop street smarts. It’s a skill you can build with experience. The common thread is exposure. When you face new, unpredictable situations regularly, you learn how to adapt. And you get faster and better at it over time.

Back to the notion of AI. If everyone has similar access to similar tools and shared intelligence, then what truly differentiates us? I would argue it’s our approach to using these tools to solve problems or better our circumstances. With AI doing more of the structured thinking, our real value (at least for now, pre-AGI) is interpretation. The value shifts from traditional “intellectual” knowledge to something harder to replicate: judgment, timing, and emotional intelligence.

There were many truths outlined in the MIT study I referenced earlier. We’ve all felt that “tug” when we’re debating whether to solve a problem by shortcutting with AI, or by driving that strategy ourselves (and increasingly, then using AI to help realize our vision). In those moments, remember what you have that the machine doesn’t — a deeper understanding of human behavior, the compounding effect of your lived experiences, and most importantly, a point of view that’s all your own.

Daily Rip Live: Can Apple M&A its Way Into AI Relevance? Would You Trade Stocks on X? Why is $HIMS Tanking?

Every weekday, my co-host Shay Boloor and I cover the biggest market news and events LIVE on Stocktwits’ morning show, The Daily Rip Live. On Monday, we welcomed back our pal Michael Parekh to the show. Michael has decades of experience helping global companies navigate corporate dev and M&A strategy, and he’s one of the top analytical brains covering AI and the tech sector.

Here’s what we covered:

⇢ 1:48 | Michael and Shay provide context to the escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, pointing out the dangerous nexus between proxy wars, AI-driven cyber threats, and the global economic risks that follow. It was great to hear their POVs, as Michael and Shay have spent a lot of time in Kuwait and Iran, respectively.

⇢ 17:51 | Shay’s a thematic investor, and one of his big areas of focus is on his “new age of defense” thesis. Modern conflict increasingly involves new and different technologies (AI, drones, cybersecurity) and partnering with private companies like Anduril. $CRWD ( â–˛ 1.57% )  $ACHR ( â–˛ 3.09% )  $NET ( â–˛ 1.76% )  $AXON ( â–˛ 0.36% )  $PLTR ( â–˛ 1.64% )  

⇢ 27:30 | Michael calls out that the irony of our ambitions to “de-nuke” Iran could be that more global powers opt to invest in nuclear defense. “The world is rearming," he said.

⇢ 31:15 | Enterprise adoption of cybersecurity solutions comes with a lot of nuance. As an investor, you might have to rely on your street smarts! For example, consider the buyers of this kind of software, CTOs: they likely aren’t going to go for the budget, No. 2 option, and they hate having multiple vendors. Enter Crowdstrike’s robust platform. $CRWD ( â–˛ 1.57% )  

⇢ 33:10 | A Bloomberg piece came out discussing how Apple may have to M&A its way into AI relevance. Who’s it going to be — Perplexity? Cohere?

⇢ 39:40 | Michael made a rare Glenn Frey reference. This made me happy. GLENN FREY FOREVER.

⇢ 41:45 | We then took a hard right to Hims & Hers Health, which dropped 34% on Monday after Novo Nordisk (Wegovy maker) put a halt to their partnership. Hims stock had been ripping YTD before today, and it’s now proving to be one of the more volatile stocks on the market. Are Hims investors fleeing to safety, or a new flavor of the week — that being Oscar Health? $HIMS ( â–˛ 1.39% )  $OSCR ( â–˛ 8.95% )  

⇢ 55:13 | Back to Apple because we do love topic-jumping. Michael shared that the culture of Apple under Tim Cook has always been to build versus buy. But — interesting to note: Apple’s last big acquisition was Beats in 2014, and it cost them about 0.5% of market cap. Applying that same percentage today gets you to $15B, which is in the vicinity of Perplexity’s valuation… $AAPL ( â–˛ 1.27% )  

⇢ 1:03 | Finally, we talked about X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s statement that stock trading and payments could be coming to Elon Musk’s aspiring “everything app” soon. Would you trade stocks on X? I’m fascinated by the implications for investor relations. Sounds like a big opportunity and also a governance nightmare!

🔥 P.S. I’m excited to report that Monday’s show racked up nearly 20,000 streams and views across X, YouTube, and the Stocktwits app. And because I am me — and therefore everything is a competition — the latest episode of TBPN netted just under 4,000 views.

Hope you’ll tune into our next show today (Tuesday) at 9 AM EST!

Now Here’s a Chart

Investment management firm Coatue shared some new data showing how Gen AI usage is cannibalizing Google pageviews over time.

This is a hot topic in marketing right now. For over a decade, companies have been focused on search engine optimization (SEO), a fancy word for the technical elements and copy you put on your website to “game” Google’s algorithm into ranking you higher. Google still is the dominant way people get info, but LLMs are catching up — and they’re, of course, not all Google products. Enter generative AI optimization, or GEO!

👉 Btw, I’m testing out some new strategies with my clients, and we’re seeing promising early results. If you know anyone who needs some fast help on this front, check out our new Get Geo offering.

Source: Coatue (via @tanayj on X)

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.