Business

The publisher will join HubSpot’s growing media portfolio as the software giant doubles down on content-led customer acquisition.Read More

We need to end the long, drawn-out, overly formal business dinner. Because while I absolutely believe in the value of spending time outside the office with prospective partners, current partners, teammates, agencies, and more—frankly, I’d rather do it over quesadillas.Read More

Millions of folks are about to get snowed in. Stay safe.

Here’s a code for last year’s Thriving with AI course on Udemy. It’s free for the first 1,000 people. Sorry, we hit Udemy’s limit. That was quick. Here’s an unlimited 50% off for the Strategy course.

And I see that This is Marketing is currently half-price on Amazon.

Or you could build a snowman.

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It depends.

A freelancer, a brand, a musician–they’re here to serve. If people come to the restaurant for your famous marinara sauce, if new clients hire you to architect your signature style home or they want to dance to your top 40 hit, that’s what you’re here for.

Brands shouldn’t change their logo or their offerings when they get bored. They should do it when their accountant gets bored.

Unless…

Unless you’re an artist who doesn’t want to become a cover band of their former self.

Unless you use the frontier as fuel for creating more value in the long run.

Unless you’re no longer proud of what you used to do.

That hit is a gift from your former self. Like all gifts, you don’t have to accept it.

In addition to sunk costs, there are sunk benefits. Just because an asset belongs to you doesn’t mean you have to use it.

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Rice is one of the most consumed foods in the world, and it gives us insight into our relentless search for status and for affiliation.

Once rice is harvested for consumption, it’s brown. The outer layers of the rice husk contain the bran and many of the nutrients in the rice. And yet, most people, including many of the poorest people in any population, only eat white rice.

White rice takes more work to prepare for sale and leaves behind the vitamin-rich bran. We need to harvest more brown rice to make a single serving of white.

The origin of milling rice has to do with storage. Brown rice goes rancid much sooner, particularly in warm climates. As a result, white rice is more reliable–you’re not going to serve a bad batch.

The reliability led to status. Status in serving it and in consuming it. You might not have much, but at least you can eat white rice.

Once that signal is established, it becomes a sign of cultural affiliation. If your family or neighbors are doing it, it’s important to fit in. People insist that white rice is normal and that they prefer it, but that’s only because of their history and culture.

When white rice became a popular commodity and a signal, the demand for brown rice went down. Now it’s a specialty item, and that increases the price, apparently contradicting the very signal about status that made it unusual in the first place. (For some folks, the rarity, healthiness and price of brown rice make it a new sort of status symbol).

With improved supply chains and storage, brown rice is nearly as resilient as white rice is now, but the cultural trope remains. And because people like what they like, we’ve learned to prefer the blander flavor of the rice we were raised with.

If status and affiliation transform the market for one of our most basic commodities, it’s not hard to imagine what they do for wine, for clothing, or even for smartphones.

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A private premiere screening of “Holiguards Saga – The Portal of Force,” the pilot installment of the planned Holiguards Saga franchise, was held on February 16 at ASTOR Film Lounge Berlin. The event took place in a closed format with invited industry guests, partners, and media representatives. The screening was organized as a formal black-tie […]

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Dept Studios is the agency’s response to growing content demands for brandsRead More

The Tessa Thompson-led miniseries His & Hers dropped from No. 1 to No. 4.Read More

A growing number of startups are rushing to build software that thinks fast. But one of the hardest parts of teaching machines to improve isn’t raw computing power, it’s human insight at scale. Zurich-based startup Rapidata has just taken a significant step toward fixing that with a €7.2 million seed round aimed at scaling a […]

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Sean Hannity adds to his busy work schedule with a new twice-weekly podcast.Read More