Found in the tubes

Jeff Bezos / Product is the new marketing

Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies...the individual is empowered... The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.

– Jeff Bezos 
 

Bill Murray on comedic pitch. “It’s always a surprise.” Fun read.

I have developed a kind of different style over the years. I hate trying to re-create a tone or a pitch. Saying, “I want to make it sound like I made it sound the last time”? That's insane, because the last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There’s only now. And I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always – or if you’re being good, anyway – you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.

But you asked how you get the comic pitch. Well, obviously a lot of it is rhythm. And as often as not, it’s the surprising rhythm. In life and in movies, you can usually guess what someone is going to say – you can actually hear it – before they say it. But if you undercut that just a little, it can make you fall off your chair. It’s small and simple like that. You’re always trying to get your distractions out of the way and be as calm as you can be [breathes in and out slowly], and emotion will just drive the machine. It will go through the machine without being interrupted, and it comes out in a rhythm that’s naturally funny. And that funny rhythm is either humorous or touching. It can be either one. But it’s always a surprise. I really don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth.

via gq.com

Geological time

Looking at the entire history of the planet as a 12-hour clock, dinosaurs were roughly 7:00 – 7:40. Homo sapiens (“knowing man”) arrived at two seconds to midnight. Religion was invented a split second ago.

Scientists calculate that Earth’s entire lifespan will be something like 12 billion years. Thinking of that as a 12-hour clock, right now we’re at 4:30. Complex life will only exist from 4:00 – 5:00. Man’s time is a millisecond in the middle of that hour. Outside of that hour is bacteria… and silence.

So it’s okay to watch a little TV on a Sunday, c’mon.