Strands of Genius: M-Theory Part 3, Thick Art, Lilliputian Hallucinations

Strands of Genius is a newsletter from the co-founders of Genius Steals, Faris & Rosie Yakob.

They are award-winning strategists, facilitators, creative directors, writers and public speakers who get excited about working with smart people on interesting challenges.

You should probably go ahead and hit reply so we can collaborate on something together :)

Hello cheeky~

What are you up to? How’s it going? What are you going to do with the rest of your “wild and precious life”? We don’t shy away from the big questions, we ignore the small ones. Then we spend a lot of time worrying and then fixing the problems caused by ignoring the small ones. So it goes.

Being back in the USA means despite it being hot we have proper air conditioning. This is good! It means I don’t really want to go outside - this is bad! Nothing ‘s easy, everything has trade offs.

So I’m off out in a bit. That’ll show me.

Got anything we can help with? Just reply to this email. Rock ON.

M-THEORY PART THREE: MONEY, MEASUREMENT & MACHINES

• What do dead snakes and nails have to do with structural problems in advertising? I’m glad you asked because that’s what I wrote about in Part 3: on the Cobra effect, Goodhart’s Law, measuring something that is always moving and how choices are always political.

  Advertising spend is accounted for as spend, not investment, regardless of how it actually works to build businesses. Procurement takes over managing agency contracts and its mandate is to reduce cost. So we get the distinction between "working" and "non-working" media spend — the latter meaning paying agencies to plan media and create advertising, which isn't media at all and is definitely work, but comes out of the same budget. The metric creates a strong incentive to spend everything on media and let the ads and the planning be done for free by platforms.

  [Warc]

  [BTW the new WARC site requires a free CannesLion login to access my opinion column but it is still outside the paywall. Any probs getting to it let me know? Ta.]

I LIKE ‘EM THICK

• As a pretentious literary aesthete I [the Faris] have always inherently appreciated that art of that is ‘difficult’ might be also ‘brilliant’ but only when I have the energy to work at it. Nowadays especially it can seem onerous to spend your pressure ‘free’ time, which is usually recovery, on something that requires your full and repeated attention. But that is often what makes something great. Or at least rewarding. “Great works of fiction—for that matter, great works of any art—unfurl in response to your attention.”
  

  The Simpsons et al are loaded with comedic details only perceived after repeat viewings, for example. As are the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch [which is one of the best names and should end in an exclamation mark]

  

  Interesting throughout the piece ranges through ‘thick’ work - because the devil is always in the details, especially in The Garden of Earthly Delights above - all the way to AI slop:
  

  “Why is it that Suno can AI-generate you any kind of music you want, but if you go on the Suno Reddit, you’ll find a running joke that no one can stand anyone’s Suno music but their own—a quality that, I can’t help but mention, also applies to farts?”

LILLIPUTIAN HALLUCINATIONS

• isn’t just a very satisfying thing to say, it’s also a description of what happens when people eat a mushroom called Lanmaoa asiatica - popular in the Yunan region of China with a caveat:

  “At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people"

  

  There's another curious factor: other known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported. I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."

  [Possibly small cousins to the machine elves? IYKYK] [BBC]

Here is a AI vision of M-Theory Part Three - any spelling mistakes are mine don’t blame the robot.

This week, we’re writing to you from Surrey. We’re especially thankful for:

Ghost of Tsushima, Mars and Strawberry cake, Scott&Lillian&Marion, Tim&The Chicks, Barking Legs, Rick&Morty Season 9, various Tom Holland history books, Sesame, Jeff, air conditioning, & YOU!

Know someone who could use some inspiration in their inbox? Forward this email to them! We appreciate you spreading the word.

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing [“Ex nihilo nihil fit”]. 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.

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