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🎁 Valentin's Present - Laughter in evolution, media brands, AR futures, violintense, question experiment

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🎁 Valentin's Present

February 3 · Issue #23 · View online
The best content I've ever found, sent in digestible weekly gifts. Mouthwatering concepts, tempting questions, juicy books, delicious songs, exquisite short films, and other surprises.
Hope you have fun with it.
Provoking Picture
by Sergey Piskunov, @piskunovart
Mouthwatering Concepts
Some cool perspectives about humor as it relates to evolution:
  1. “Laughter is the sound of comprehension.”
  2. Humor is the mechanism where we sort out the grey area of what can and can’t be said.
  3. Humor treads at the frontier of consciousness. When a comic finds a funny joke, they are unearthing a truth that people are only kind of aware of, but the whole room grasps that everybody else is aware of the truth, and laughter ensues.
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First, the pivot to video. Then, the pivot to podcasting. Now, the pivot to subscription.
Media companies are struggling: “Verizon Media Group laid off 7% of its staff, Buzzfeed laid off 200 employees, etc. ”.
What is happening and what is next for media? What is a good strategy?
This article great article expands on this.
A quick summary:
“In summary, Netflix followed a six step process: (1) Create a brand people love, (2) gain early revenue traction by selling other companies’ products, (3) collect data on user behavior, (4) create owned products based on data insights, (5) sell those products to your existing audience, and (6) iterate and improve those products.”
So influencers are in a great position to follow this process because they already are a brand people love. They can then advertise products for other companies, get data and understand behavior, and then create their own products.
Tempting Question
What do you do that you wish everyone did (because they would benefit from doing it)?

Would love to hear your answer to this!
Experiment: reply with your answer, cc'ing a friend(s) who you think also does the thing (or doesn’t do it, but keep it a mystery) and I’ll send you the compiled answers of everyone else that replied.
Exquisite Short Films
In 2016, Keiichi Matsuda made an awesome film of how a world could look if it were saturated with AR media (pretty dystopian in my opinion). The video and the prompts behind it are great:
HYPER-REALITY
A couple of weeks ago, Matsuda released his new Hyper-Reality type video. This time it’s a 360 video (you can drag around and see the whole space within Youtube, I recommend it in fullscreen). This one is a future where all people do is work. The woman feels pressure to merge with AI to keep up. Also pretty dystopian but it’s a cool immersive experience.
MERGER
Finger-licking Quote
“Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” — Maya Angelou
Re Human Stories
If you want to know what I’ve been learning this week, go here.
Delicious Music
If for some reason you want to hear an intense, end-of-the-world type song, Lux Aeterna is my favorite of these types of songs. A classic. Violins, suspense, building up in intensity. In my Violintense playlist.

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I started these presents as a way to share amazing content with my friends, but anyone can subscribe to get awesome content here.

✌️,
Valentin
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