Strands of Genius: Spotify Genres, The Post Individual, The Radical Idea People Aren't Stupid
Plus: have you ever seen a snail eat?!
WRITING FROM | Worcester Park, UK
WORKING ON | Rosie’s working with the LWS Advisory Board and Faris is writing his monthly columns
LOOKING AHEAD
April 30 - May 18 | Worcester Park, UK
May 18 - 20 | Nashville, TN
May 21-June 16 | Chattanooga, TN
June 16-18 | Atlanta, GA
June 18-29 | Chattanooga, TN
June 29-30 | Nashville, TN
July 1-7 | Beersheba Springs, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Greetings from the UK! We arrived here and I immediately got sick, which has been oh so fun. I even wore a mask when we were traveling, but it turns out that wasn’t enough to save me. (Side note: I used to *rarely* get sick, and this is now the second, maybe third, time I’ve been sick this year. I mean like unable to get out of bed, have a fever, coughing up gunk kind of sick. It turns out I didn’t have COVID this time around, but ever since COVID, I have been getting sick more frequently, and more seriously, and for longer. It sucks.)
Instead of going to London, hanging out with friends, eating Dishoom, wandering the streets of Shoreditch and Stoke Newington, and seeing a show, I’ve been in bed, sleeping, resting, and making my way downstairs for Faris’ dad’s fresh squeezed OJ and chicken shawarma and TV with my father-in-law.
While Faris’ dad Abdulla is not a fan of Below Deck (he thinks the staff should be more grateful and harder workers, ha), we found some reality show middle ground with Come Dine With Me and Four In A Bed, and Faris’ favorite, Pointless. Abdulla also LOVED Pitch Perfect, and we have since made our way through all three movies. (“Fat Amy is my favorite, I just love her,” he reminds us almost every time Rebel Wilson comes on screen.)
Watching movies and TV with my father-in-law is the best. His commentary cracks me up as much as the movies themselves and I’m constantly poking Faris and asking if he heard what his dad said. While he hated Barbie (and omg what I would have given to hear his live commentary on that one knowing the wrath that came through on the family text thread), his commentary is surprisingly modern-minded, especially considering he’s an 81 year old who grew up in Iraq. Every time John Michael Higgins’ character (the one who stars alongside Elizabeth Banks as a commentator of the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella) makes a misogynistic comment, Faris’ dad chimes in with “Bugger him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about” or an “Ok. We don’t care what you think.” When in a different movie last night, a King kills his Queen, Abdulla immediately shouted “What are you doing?! You said you loved her!”
I’m convinced that Abdulla is better than Gogglebox, and that watching TV with your in-laws is a much better form of bonding than I previously would have acknowledged.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Abudlla, Janka, Ramzi & Lyndsey, Rebecca & Laith, Zak & Ariana, Berna, all our extended family who came to say hi, Erik & Marley for making Erin, Erin Wolf (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WE LOVE YOU!!!) & YOU.
:: THE LINKS ::
SPOTIFY’S GENRES & THEIR BREAKDOWNS
Ever since Spotify told me that ‘Stomp & Holler’ was my most played genre, I’ve been curious about how they think about genres. (They’ve been up front in saying that yes, they do make up genres, because they look at clusterings of listening patterns and then define them in that way. They have more than 6,000 genres.) With this data visualization, you can see how both genres and audiences have changed since 2016 and how that’s impacted Spotify. Why are the top genres so different in 2023 than in 2016? Well, for one, in 2016, 75% of streamers were in North America and Europe. In 2023, the same audience represents less than half of Spotify’s streamers. I loved going down this rabbit hole, and hope you do, too! (Pudding)
THE POST-INDIVIDUAL
I’m a huge fan of Yancey Strickler. Obviously, there’s a lot to love about Kickstarter, the company which he co-founded. But he’s also just an incredibly smart chap (look at me in England for one week and already switching my vocabulary) that inspires me to think differently about the world. This is a piece he’s been working on for five years, and y’all... It did not disappoint! (Imagine if we could give ourselves a 5 year kind of runway for thinking!) “Classic individualism is a life-defining quest to establish who you are and to grow into that person over the rest of your life. But in a world where the quest for individualism can be started and repeated merely by logging on or creating a new account in a digital world, the meaning of this process has changed,” writes Yancey. The post-individual experience, then, “happens when someone accepts their individuality, but feels called for a variety of reasons (social, creative, metaphysical, financial) to seek greater meaning and context with others. Post-individualism isn't a rejection of individualism. It's a graduation from it,” he continues. The entire essay is so well-written, and I find that with Yancey’s articulation, I feel hopeful that we do evolve into a post-individualistic society.
(Ideaspace)
THE RADICAL IDEA THAT PEOPLE AREN’T STUPID
It’s a tough time to be alive. It seems that every day I’m confronted by (ahem, someone else’s) stupidity. On our flight over, I had to help someone buckle their seatbelt because they could not figure it out. And instead of my first thought being, “Wow, a grown adult is probably flying for the first time today, how cool” my brain immediately went to “How are there still people who don’t understand how seatbelts work?!” and I texted Faris about the whole interaction (who was not sat next to me, because we don’t fly Southwest often and forgot that you have to really check in exactly when they tell you to if you don’t want a middle seat.) So I feel like I discovered this piece on Experimental History at precisely the right moment in time.
In fact, “people are stupid” seems to be an assumption we all share and a chorus we love to hear. Say it on YouTube and you might get 31 million views. Write it in a book and you might become a bestselling author. Make it into a movie and it might become a cult hit. Dave Ramsey, the professional blowhard, puts it well: You ever get in a room full of stupid people? Like, you know, you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your relatives are saying something that’s absolutely ridiculous, I mean really stupid. […] And you realize there’s not anything to say, because if you say something to them, it’s not going to do any good, because they’ve already made up their mind to live neck deep in the stupidity. - Adam Mastroianni
(also, “Dave Ramsey, the professional blowhard” made me giggle out loud)
So why, then, do we all feel like the last sane person in a ridiculously mad world?
First, there’s naive realism: the belief that you simply see the world as it is. Your brain doesn’t tell you this, but it starts Photoshopping reality as soon as photons hit your retina and vibrations hit your ears. So when other people say that reality is different, they simply seem mistaken. And if they resist when you try to correct them, they simply seem stupid.
Second, there’s psychological distance. Real people are complicated, and if they disagree with you, it’s easy to think of all the reasons why: they were raised differently, they don’t have all the facts, or maybe they even have more facts. But as I wrote in Bureaucratic psychosis, if you’re less connected to someone, you see them less as a person and more as a blob. Blobs are simple. If a blob disagrees with you, that's because it’s a big dumb sack of gelatinous ooze.
And third, there’s correspondence bias, the tendency to attribute other people’s actions to their personalities rather than to their situations. You see a dude get angry and assume he’s an angry dude, rather than he’s having a bad day.
The author goes on to explain that it’s natural human tendency to want to critique. And of course when we’re confronted with differing perspectives, it’s easiest to assume stupidity. According to historian Ada Palmer, plenty of people thought the American government would fail simply because people were too stupid to govern themselves. (And I myself have had this thought more often that I’d like to admit.) But, that implies that only the people in charge are smart. (And whooeeee, we know that’s not true.) Mastroianni writes, “If we can go from “only kings and dukes could possibly become less stupid” to “anybody can become less stupid,” maybe we can make it all the way to “people aren’t fundamentally stupid to begin with.” And, doing something stupid is not the same as being stupid. (Experimental History)
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:: HAVE YOU SEEN A SNAIL EAT?! ::
And because my nature content is what performs best on Instagram (jk, I rarely actually look at stats, but I want this to be true), here’s a video of a snail eating. I took a walk when I was sick and then I was so worn out that I had to stop and sit down for a half an hour before walking home and felt much worse because of it. But I did get to see a snail eating and that’s what made it worth it for me!
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 | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)
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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. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, 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.
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