Today's Nuggets

Don't waste your time yelling into the echo chamber, love him or hate him, your words about Trump make no difference to the other side, it's about doing the work, the anonymous drudgery, no one likes to do the work.

Sometimes the softest voice commands the most power. We're conditioned to yell, but Gus Fring on "Breaking Bad" rarely speaks above a whisper, but everybody listens. We're conditioned by TV talk to believe that he who yells loudest gets his way. This is oftentimes untrue.

The higher up the food chain you are, the nicer you are. The person at the top doesn't have to play politics, they can be congenial. You can hate them as much as you like, that just illustrates you're an outsider. At elite levels everybody gets along, but getting into the club, now that's a thing.

Don't believe the entertainment press, in most cases reporters are stenographers, underpaid people who will write whatever their subject wants.

Just because they said it's sold out doesn't mean it is.

Just because it's illegal doesn't mean they don't do it. Hell, your phone rings all day long with junk calls, even though that's illegal.

It's about continuity, not the one time event. What happened this morning is already forgotten by the afternoon. It's about the continuity of mass shootings, not any individual one. Kinda like hijackings, they were de rigueur until new security protocols were enforced. So if you think your album release date is important, fuggetaboutit, that's just the beginning, the hard work is in front of you.

#1 on the "Billboard" chart is irrelevant. It's one week, a snapshot in time. The charts are for the industry, but they're disseminated to the public. They're nearly meaningless.

It's hard to break through the clutter, which is why hit records sustain, it's so hard to get noticed that when you do there are still people who don't know you, it takes longer than ever for the public to burn out on a song.

The medium affects the message. FM underground radio allowed bands to stretch out, then it was codified into hit programming and disco slipped in. MTV made bands gargantuan, instantly, but they fell to earth just as fast and then it became all about how you looked and the production values of your video. Now streaming rules and how you look and the production values of your video are barely important, oftentimes lyric videos triumph, and when anybody can play only a limited number get attention, it's hip-hop now, but there's no barrier to entry to another genre, it just needs quality and an online culture.

You're not waiting for the cool new app or gadget, that's so last decade.

Virtual reality was an overhype, augmented reality is not.

It's about getting the little stuff right. How come my iPhone doesn't rotate back from landscape to portrait like it used to? The same reason the Watch didn't work on cellular, not only was there not enough testing, there was no difficult guru insisting it be their way. It's like a band, someone's always the leader, it causes problems, but without this you're doomed.

Just because you can make it doesn't mean anybody cares.

Consolidation limits choice. It might be good for Wall Street, but it's rarely good for consumers.

People are invested in their livelihoods. No one at radio will say it's troubled, everybody working for the company will defend it. This is what's wrong with America, we say we want change, but personally we abhor it.

Most of America has fallen out of love with going to the movies. They are not big enough events to break away from your on demand world. We expect everything to be available when we want it.

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, CBS...they all can't succeed as standalone apps. Netflix is winning because they know online there's one victor, one company with 65-70% of the market, and that you gain momentum and keep it with innovation. Starting from scratch is too difficult in a mature world. And people don't like to be pecked to death by ducks, they don't want to sign up for all these different services.

Food is personal in an industrial world. Which is why it triumphs. It's an exponent of creativity, every meal is different. The twentieth century was about mass production, the twenty first century is all about artisanal individuality.

Don't encourage and pay younger people and your business dies. This is what is happening at the major labels, there's one overpaid majordomo and peons who are underpaid and overworked.

We expect everything to just work. Cars, computers... Used to be you knew the inner goings-on, those days are history.

You can't hold back the future. The elimination of subsidies might kill Tesla, but it won't kill the electric car. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that the U.S. dominates in the future. Protect the past at your peril. Can you say FRANCE?

It's about who you know. If you expect excellence to triumph all by its lonesome, you're delusional.

Don't be proud to be poor, it just leaves you out of the discussion.

You've got to play the game to succeed, don't think you can win otherwise.


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