Strands of Genius: Creativity Test, The Epidemic of Busyness, Rosie on GetInspo, & Rose Tinted Chicken Glasses?
Strands of Genius: Creativity Test, The Epidemic of Busyness, Rosie on GetInspo, & Rose Tinted Chicken Glasses?
plus our thoughts on: chickens in general, and also their contacts
WRITING FROM | Lisbon, Portugal
WORKING ON | Preparation, run through and workshop this week.
LOOKING AHEAD
August 15-August 29 | Lisbon, Portugal
Aug 29-Sept 6 | Orlando, FL
Sept 6-23 | Aix-en-Provence, France
Sept 24-30 | Toulouse, France
Oct 1-31 | London, UK
Nov 1-20 | Mexico
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
We headed down to Lisbon where it is much hotter than up north in Porto but fortunately our apartment has great cross breezes which stop it being stifling. Lisbon is a bigger, busier city and especially so during August, when Europe is on holiday.
We’ve had some great times and excellent foods at the impressive Time Out Food market and some other choice restaurants and have been delighted to meet up and hang out with two lovely agency people who are exploring the nomad life. Seems like a very interesting time for talent - employer negotiations, for lots of obvious reasons.
We’re still enjoying Summer Fridays and explored the Museum of Communications (lots of old Nokia phones, submarine cables and post offices) with our two nomad friends. Over the weekend we took a cycling tour down to Belem, where the Tower of Belem stands proud, protecting the entrance to the River Tagus, from which so much Portuguese culture is ultimately derived.
But, this time next week we’ll be back in the USA for our first in-person gig since the before time - we’re excited!
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Time Out Market, Liv&friends, Whitney, Venus & Hamresh, Pedro, cycling on e-bikes, factor 60 sunscreen, the eleven restaurant and views from the top of Eduardo VII Park overlooking the city, a new fresh herb garden, singing songs with more people, Esporao wines, & YOU.
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 Dhrupad Karwa | Community Meet Up
Starts Wednesday, Aug 25, 2021 at 7:30 AM EDT // 12:30 PM GMT
How AI can help us find inspiration
In this deeply interactive and immersive session, Dhrupad Karwa (Dhru) will humbly attempt to unravel the mysteries of “inspiration”, through the unique lens of culture and technology.
Dhru is the founder and CEO of Inspo – a search engine for inspiration, designed to enrich creative thinking on any topic. Inspo is an AI-human hybrid tool that generates GPT-3 thought-starters and gathers actionable inspiration from sources across the web on any topic, trend or marketing event. Officially launched in May 2021, it is already inspiring creative minds around the world, at organisations such as Dentsu, Royal Enfield and Tinder.
Through this session, Dhru will actively use Inspo to surface inspiration around culturally relevant topics, and demonstrate how machines can partner with humans in the (often elusive) pursuit of finding inspiration. Together, community members will actively use the inspiration to spark conversations, ask questions, live brainstorm and perhaps even probe truth itself… All in all, the experience should leave people with fresh perspectives and a new-age creative toolkit.
We have 5 tickets available for Strands readers who aren’t part of SOSG (and haven’t previously received an invite to a SoSG event) - send ashley@geniussteals.co an email if you are interested!
Enroll at http://schoolofstolengeni.us
Listen to Rosie on Dhrupad’s podcast ‘Think Inspired’ where they talk about stealing, lego, and AI nomadism! (spotify | youtube)
:: THE LINKS ::
DIVERGENT ASSOCATION TEST
A group of international researchers have developed a new, very simple, creativity test, that seems to perform well compared to others and is much shorter. This 4 minute word challenge tests for divergent creativity - the ability to generate diverse solutions to open ended problems. Have a go and find out how ‘creative’ you are compared to other people from around the world. (Fast Company)
THE EPIDEMIC OF BUSYNESS
One of the things that really crystallized our desire to leave New York, more than eight years ago now(!), was the fact that the only acceptable answer to the question “how are you?” was “Busy”. Alistair Humphreys thinks it’s an epidemic and pushes us to consider how we spend our days, which is of course how we spend our lives. He provides some questions he asks himself on occasion. “If you wish you can think of it as The Acme Busyness Scale, by busyness guru Alastair Humphreys. Am I too busy to move to Africa for a year? Am I too busy for life?” (Alistair Humphreys)
ROSIE ON THE THINK INSPIRED PODCAST TALKING ABOUT INSPIRATION
Krishan, one of our friends based in Mumbai, introduced us to Dhru, who is the founder of GetInspo, an AI-based inspiration tool. We’re excited to see how technology can help us with these initial sparks and even connections. (You may remember that we’ve long supported Seenapse, which plays in a similar space, so we were excited to hear what Dhru was up to.) In Dhru’s podcast, Rosie talks about where she seeks inspiration, how the pandemic impacted her creative process, and Dhru uses the GetInspo tool to ask Rosie some AI-generated questions about nomadism. ( Spotify | YouTube)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: CHICKEN GLASSES ::
Thanks to one of our fellow nomads, Whitney, who once had a chicken client, we learned that chickens used to wear red contact lenses. This kind of ‘trivium’ makes Faris’ brain activate, and chicken is probably his favorite meat (Hi! it’s me, Faris. Clearly I have had food on my mind recently. lol). The story of why chickens had red contacts is also, in some ways, the modern (hi)story of chicken.
Chickens didn’t start out as being the favorite meat in the USA. Archaeologists believe it was originally domesticated for cockfighting (all breeds of modern chicken are descended from red junglefowl). Cocks are quite vicious and cockfighting, which is awful, was very popular throughout history. Louisiana (USA) only banned it in 2008…
Chickens were exotic and decorative in the Victorian era. The young Queen Victoria was gifted 7 chickens from the far east and bred them, sending the eggs to her royal relatives and kicking off a short lived “Hen Fever”.
“Never in the history of modern ‘bubbles,'” writes George P. Burnham, in his book, The History of the Hen Fever, A Humorous Record, “did any mania exceed in ridiculousness or ludicrousness, or in the number of its victims surpass this inexplicable humbug.” (NatGeo)
The fad waned but there were now more chickens and more eggs, which ended up being eaten. At the turn of the last century, chickens weren’t really considered a livestock and were kept primarily for eggs by small farmers. There were eaten but not often and remained seasonal, because they didn’t do well in the winter due to a lack of Vitamin D (which was discovered in 1920), and relatively expensive. There was little demand but also very limited supply, mostly in spring, when they were best (hence spring chicken) and so they became associated with wealth, according to Good Housekeeping, which wrote in 1885, “sought by the rich because [it is] so costly as to be an uncommon dish.”
The industrial chicken industry was kicked off thanks to a mistake.
“In 1923, as poultry legend has it, Celia Steele of the Delmarva Peninsula (that little combination of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia that juts into the Chesapeake Bay) was sent 500 chicks instead of the 50 she typically received each year. Unable to return these mail-order birds, Mrs. Steele instead built them a bigger chicken house and sold them off as meat a few weeks before everyone else.”
She made loads of money and in just a few years had purchased a broiler house that could handle 10,000 and then 25,000 chickens (a broiler is any chicken raised for meat) and hatched the modern industry.
During WWII red meat was rationed and people were encouraged to eat more chicken but demand dipped again once rationing stopped. So, to drum up interest and support the fledgling chicken industrial complex, the US Government announced:
the “Chicken of Tomorrow” competition, aimed at breeding a bird with bigger breasts, plumper thighs, and layers of white meat that would grow fatter, faster. (see below)
The winners grew faster, on less food, and had the massive breasts Americans have come to know and love.
So chicken production grows apace, hyper accelerated by innovations like the nugget and the “Chicken Sandwich”, patented by Chick-Fil-A in 1962. At some point, farmers noticed that chickens that were illuminated by red lights didn’t fight as much and so saved energy, ate less and made more money, possibly because it disguised the presence of blood, which gets them riled up.
The endless industrial drive for efficiency led to a bizarre period in which people started trying to get them to wear rose tinted glasses, and ultimately even contact lenses (which they hated and were deemed overly cruel, despite one technology entrepreneur betting the farm on them). This is also, most likely, where the expression ‘rose tinted glasses’ came from.
by @miz0mei
Chicken glasses actually predated this, as a stand alone idea, for safety and to make them look intellectual…
By 1992, chicken had overtaken beef as the favorite meat of Americans and it’s popularity has continued to grow, especially once America decided that red meat wasn’t great for you in large quantities.
Modern chicken farming is very industrial but since the 1980s campaigners have pecked away at standards, leading to antibiotic free chickens, and creating new designations like ‘free-range’ and ‘pasture fed’ and such, all of which means chickens and eggs have a surprisingly large price variance depending on how they are raised. That said, it’s worth noting that ‘free-range’ is largely a marketing device:
selective breeding has made the broilers so docile that even if chickens are given access to outdoor space—a marketing device that qualifies the resulting meat to be sold as “free-range”—they prefer hanging out at the mechanized trough, awaiting the next delivery of feed. “Chickens used to be great browsers but ours can’t do that. All they want to do now is eat.”
All of which ultimately leads us to the chicken sandwich wars of 2020, possibly one of the only highlights of an otherwise not very awesome year, and the current chicken shortage in the UK, yet another unfortunate issue precipitated by changes in labor supply caused by Brexit, but more broadly attributable to the terrible conditions and poor pay that lie in wait for most poultry processors.
:: AND NOW… THE CHICKEN OF TOMORROW ::
The contest was announced with this film, which got the Mystery Science Theatre 300 treatment and can be seen here.
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 :)