Strands of Genius: 28 Days Under The Sea, Answers via Email, Unstructured Learning

plus our thoughts on: reality TV

Jul 13, 2021

WORKING ON | Travel planning (and it feels so good!!)

LOOKING AHEAD

July 1-14 | Nashville, TN
July 16-20 | New York, NY
July 21-August 15 | Porto, Portugal
August 15-August 29 | Lisbon, Portugal
Aug 29-Sept 3 | Orlando, FL
Sept 3-Oct 3 | (TBD: France/UK)

:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::

We’ve got some international travel locked and loaded, and we’re very much looking forward to getting to spend some time in Europe with friends. Even with our vaccinations, we still find ourselves factoring the pandemic into our planning process. We’re planning on spending longer times in places, and will still be traveling with a collection of masks. But, every little milestone feels significant, and this has been one we’ve been looking forward to for a while now.

This week, we’re especially thankful for:

our families, fireflies, reality TV, Southern Charm, Married to Millions, Wild Wild Country, guitar jam sessions (ie Patio Karaoke), neighborhood hangs, JuJu, Frank & Stephen & Mandy, Chaatable, Erin & Eric, & Noodles!

S C H O O L O F S T O L E N G E N I U S >> H I G H L I G H T S

// SOSG x STEVE CHAPMAN | JULY 14 @ 12p ET/5p BST //

We’ve still got a few tickets available to those who haven’t already attended a School of Stolen Genius event. Steve is an artist and entrepreneur, who is going to be giving a talk using a bingo machine to select which things he’ll talk about. It’s one of the most fun talks we’ve seen, and we’re very much excited about this event!

Hit reply if you want an exclusive invite to sample the School of Stolen Genius experience!

Enroll at http://schoolofstolengeni.us

:: THE LINKS ::

THEY SPENT 28 DAYS UNDER THE SEA

Laurent Ballesta shares his musings and photographs from his 28 days spent as part of a four man team living on a pressurized habitat barge in the Mediterranean. They explored the ocean floor for hours, not minutes, at a time, and discovered some truly wondrous creatures, like narwhal shrimp at 256 feet deep and two veined squid mating at 223 feet deep. The ocean is crazy cool, y’all. (National Geographic)

GIGGLE GIVES YOU ANSWERS VIA EMAIL

This makes me think of the slow food movement. Instead, it’s part of the slow internet movement, if that’s even a thing. Giggle offers 10 categories for requests (poetry, guitar riffs, jokes, fortune cookies, and more) where you’ll send an email and get a single result delivered back to you within a business day. They write, “Today's search engines pummel you with thousands of results for every query. Pages and pages of them. But what if you're not looking for something specific and any one result will do? Meet Giiggle, the latest innovation from the team at HERL. With just an email you can get a result instantly. It may not be the result that you want, but it'll definitely be the result that you *need*. Enjoy Giiggling.” (Giggle)

UNSTRUCTURED LEARNING: HOW TO LEARN HARD SKILLS

Thomas Oppong writes that “successful unstructured learners are in the business of exploring, searching, discovering and experimenting.” But the problem is that once we’re introduced to formal education at such a young edge, we encounter structured learning. We’re given hands to hold for much of our formal education, and our unstructured learning skills atrophy. Oppong shares his approach to unstructured learning, and gives some guidance on how to develop your own. (Medium)

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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: REALITY TV ::

Rosie here, and I’m coming to you with a confession. I’ve recently been sucked into the rabbit hole of Reality TV. This is an entirely new thing for me. I once wrote briefs for Bravo, and while the work was fun, I wasn’t a Bravo addict like others who worked on the brand.

Now it should be said that when I say ‘Reality TV',’ I mean something specific: I mean the emotional people based scripted drama sorta things. I’ve long loved cooking shows, and Queer Eye, and Faris assures me that these are reality tv, too. But for some reason, those don’t seem to need confessing. They don’t feel like guilty pleasures. There are cute accents on GBBO, and they help each other out! During the pandemic, I’d watch an occasional home renovation show or competition show, but even those don’t feel in the same category.

This all started when I was heading to New York on my own. I had been trying to think of a show to watch that Faris wouldn’t want to watch, and Bravo’s Southern Charm was on my mom’s TV. (She lovvvvvvves Bravo, and has a doormat to prove it.) It was a random episode, on a random season, I downloaded the remaining three episodes on the Peacock app (which I had only just recently downloaded.) It was season 5.

And I guess that’s what did it? Because after I watched those final episodes (a collective 4 in total), I decided that I needed to know the backstory. So then I watched the first 10 episodes of season 5. But then I needed to know the fullllll backstory. So I watched season 1.

And while I haven’t watched seasons 2-4, or 6, I feel like it could be in my future. It doesn’t feel ambitious, like watching The Wire (I only made it three episodes) or Lost (I lasted until a college breakup). I know how this works; I know that we see what the producers and editors want us to see. But isn’t that how storytelling works?

Brendan Rooney, Assistant Professor with UCD School of Psychology and Director of the UCD Media and Entertainment Lab, says that, “Stories serve as a kind of emotional treadmill – they allow us to practice empathy and "try out" social strategies without having to experience some of the horrible events from TV or fiction. These stories have the power to make us think and form opinions and learn emotional skills, which we do both consciously and unconsciously when we watch,” he says. At this point we all know that reality TV isn’t entirely real, but "when wrapped up in emotion, they simply don’t think about it,” he said.

I buy it — but again, I feel like this applies to all stories, not just reality TV. I want to know why I like reality TV. And wrapped up in that question is why it seems to be so gendered. I remember seeing the demographic skews back in my NYC days, and I can’t imagine they’ve changed much. Anecdotally, women squeal when I mention Southern Charm, and bring out pictures of that time they met Shep in Atlanta. Men have little to no idea what I’m talking about.

Before I went down this rabbit hole, Faris and I discussed friends’ reality TV obsessions, and wondered why the viewership is so heavily dominated by women. Faris suggested that maybe because women tended to be more interested in talking about their emotions, they enjoyed watching the emotions play out on screen more.

Rooney, the professor above, also speaks about our “need for cognition,” our desire to be able to understand and process what’s going on, and how that impacts enjoyment. For those of us who are more highly skilled at processing social interactions (ahem), we may find these kinds of shows easier to think about. It’s a show that switches off our thinking-side of the brain.

Look, I love the Marvel stuff that Faris also loves. I’m not faking my enjoyment — But it does take a bit more processing power for me. Sometimes I find myself asking Faris an endless stream of questions, because he’s grown up with this stuff, and has a different worldview in his head. Or rather, he has a Marvel worldview. UNIVERSE, I know, I know. But my understanding is piecemeal and based primarily on watching the movies, usually only once, and maybe not remembering as much as Faris. So maybe there is something to the cognitive ease angle for me.

I still don’t feel like I have all the answers — because I’m also wondering why is reality TV a guilty pleasure? Is it a religious overtone that has policed pleasure? Or is it that women can’t really like anything without being mocked? Do men who are highly skilled at processing social interactions also like reality TV? I don’t know, but I’d be curious what you think :)

:: AND NOW… ROSIE’S MOM’S DOORMAT ::

If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co

@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)

Strands of Genius