Rabbit Holes 🕳 #7

From web3 labels to resilience, regeneration by design and you-sp

This is Rabbit Holes #7. Get ready to dive into 5 perspective-shifting ideas and stories.

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Rabbit Holes 🕳

🎵 Music x Web3

While being in a very early stage, Web3 music labels demonstrate one of the most exciting and disruptive potentials of web3 in general: Enabling a ‘middle class’ creator economy.

“Web3 has worked best for creators who focus on the quality of individual fans over the quantity of total fans. Instead of optimizing for play count, web3 encourages artists to optimize for superfans.

This model is best exemplified by the concept of 100 True Fans - or the thesis that a creator only needs 100 fans willing to pay $1000 per year to make six figures. With the rise of platforms like Sound, Catalog and Decent - Music NFTs are creating a new mechanism to identify superfans.

The thesis is simple - find 25 fans willing to buy a collectible version of your song.”

Coopahtroopa 🔥_🔥 @Cooopahtroopa

Selling 25 Music NFTs at 0.1 ETH pays more than a million streams on Spotify. Let that sink in.

→ check out the full article here

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🌽 New Crops → New Recipes → New Diets

Climate change is leading to changes in farming in the northern hemisphere as uncertainty necessitates the diversification of crops and the creation of more resilient agricultural systems. With the introduction of new crops, communities in these regions will create and experience new dishes and recipes, while new diets are introduced.

“As temperatures rise and rainfall grows erratic, planting different crops is one way farmers can adapt to climate change. Rising heat in Michigan, for instance, has prompted a boom in vineyards and widened the range of grape varieties that can be grown there, leading some to speculate that the Midwestern state could be the next wine hub. In Kansas, as rainfall declines, cotton is flourishing in fields once dedicated to wheat and corn. And in the Southeastern U.S., tropical crops like taro look particularly attractive.”

“The global food system is anything but diversified: It’s propped up by three crops — rice, wheat, and corn — that supply half the world’s calories. […] Experts say diversifying the food system will help it recover faster when inevitable disruptions come.”

All of this is a good parable for what will or is already happening in all other industries: The need to diversify to become more resilient will lead to entirely new products and services (new crops), to new business models (new recipes), and new consumption patterns (new diets). Get ready!

→ read how a farm in North Carolina is introducing the tropical plant taro

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🦚 Degenerators Become Regenerators

Space10, IKEA’s well-known research and design lab, has a great introduction piece on regeneration. In it, Space10 actually highlights a lot of stuff from Julia Watson and her concept of Lo TEK, which I covered in this newsletter back in May.

“Crucially, we need a new philosophy. We need to put aside the idea that humans are separate from nature, and see ourselves as part of the planet’s systems. Thinkers such as Julia Watson are calling for a “new mythology” in which we see the human-built environment as part of the natural environment, not separate from it, and re-evaluate Indigenous and ancestral ways of building with nature. Because what nurtures nature, nurtures us.”

→ read Space10’s Regenerative By Design

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🔫 Therapy + Money = No Crime

“What if someone told you that you could dramatically reduce the crime rate without resorting to coercive policing or incarceration? In fact, what if they said you could avert a serious crime — a robbery, say, or maybe even a murder — just by shelling out $1.50?”

[A] new study provides experimental evidence that offering at-risk men a few weeks of behavioral therapy plus a bit of cash reduces the future risk of crime and violence, even 10 years after the intervention.”

“But this isn’t just a story about the growing recognition that therapy can play a useful role in preventing crime. That trend is part of a broader movement to adopt an approach to crime that is more carrot, less stick.”

“To give one striking example […]: In 2007, the crime-riddled nation of Ecuador legalized the gangs that had been the source of much of the violence. The country allowed the gangs to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming.

Can you guess what happened to the murder rate over the next few years?

That’s right. It plummeted.”

→ read more about these crime prevention initiatives

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👩‍🎤 YOU-SP

I’d say the below is also true for career and personal brand building.

Auren 𝐇𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐦𝐚𝐧 @auren

Almost every company spends over 95% of its time doing what every other company does. And it spends less than 5% of its time on things that are unique to the company. That makes no sense.

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That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes!

This newsletter also recently made it onto the You Can’t Eat Money podcast 🥳. You can listen to the episode here.

Thomas