The Pursuit of Inbox Zero
In this Thursday morning edition of ‘The G-L Review,’ NGL dishes out his informal takes on the intersection of media, business, and culture. In this letter, he touches on the Basecamp Boys’ new product, the brilliance of Eurovision, and the cult of Prof G. You can read his last letter here and subscribe to his mailing list here.
If you’ve been following along with my newsletter over time, you know that I like to take some space to dish some of my more tongue-in-cheek commentary on what’s going on in media, business, and culture. From now on, those more informal takes will be delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday morning.
In other words…welcome back to Links (and Other Things)!
Before I dive into it, though, I just wanted to say that if you like the ideas presented here and have some thoughts of your own, consider shooting me a reply at ngl@powderbluemedia.com, or even sharing it with someone else you think might like it!
On top of that, we’ve been working on building out our Unplugg’d community through our Discord channel and I gotta say, I’ve been really excited to see the conversations that have been popping up. Today, three of us really dug into the controversy surrounding J. Cole’s response to Noname and the value perspectives such as Cole’s place on black women.
Personally, I thought it was really gratifying to have this group of people come together with a shared appreciation of engaging in good-faith dialogue about a topic really important to us, without feeling a need to dunk on anyone else or feel trapped in 280-character replies. Additionally, I know I’m not the only big fan of Mr. Jermaine Cole in the server, and yet after a lot of discussion, we all agreed he was in the wrong here — certainly lending me a different perspective than before the conversation began.
If this is something you’re interested in becoming a part of, reach out to me and I can tell you more about it! I’ll have more updates for you as we continue to build this thing, such as the book club we’re running regarding pieces of art from black creators. A group of us are watching Moonlight before Friday then coming together to discuss it, and I can’t wait to see what I pick up on upon contextualizing others’ thoughts in rewatching the film myself.
We’re still selling our “BLM” Tee in support of Black Lives Matter here!
Past that, two more housekeeping things. First, as part of our initiative to support the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re selling our limited-edition BLM Tee to the left for $16, with 100% of the proceeds going to support BLM and the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective.
I’m closing this order at 11:59 pm on Friday and working on screen-printing them next week, so if this is something you want, make sure to purchase it through our store here!
Second, we’re looking for more writers for UNPLUGG’D MAG. We aim to publish two-to-three really good longform stories on culture and life every month moving forward. We will also be paying writers for their time and product. If you’re interested in getting involved — or know someone who might be — click here to learn more!
Alright, let’s get into it.
The Basecamp Boys Are Back and Better Than Ever
A screenshot of the main inbox using Hey’s service, dubbed the “Imbox.”
The first time I heard of the project management tool Basecamp, it was because of a book I (sort of) read for an entrepreneurship class.
The founders of Basecamp, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (Author’s Note: DHH’s name is most definitely in the running for G.F.N.O.A.T, otherwise known as the Greatest Founder Name Of All Time) published a book called Rework in 2010 that went on to become a New York Times bestseller. In it, they share perspective on building their Chicago-based startup through a widespread embrace of efficiency and the lean business canvas.
These guys have Type P blood flowing through their veins. They live and breathe productivity. As someone who subscribes to the idea of structured procrastination, I follow the duo on both Twitter and LinkedIn because I find their insights to be really interesting. I don’t really fit the typical definition of a quote-on-quote “productive person” because I’m not one of these people who maps out their calendar to a tee, I don’t write out a list of things to get done in a given day, and I certainly never empty my email inbox.
I have tried these things many times. I have gotten overwhelmed by these things many times. I have thus decided to stop trying these things — more on this in future letters.
As soon as I heard about Hey, however, I was hooked. Fried and DHH just released the new email service this week, and though they already have a very public, ongoing beef with Apple, the response it’s getting across the interwebs leads me to believe they have another winner on their hands.
If you don’t have 37 minutes to watch Fried walk through the platform in the video above, here’s the main features of Hey you need to know:
The Screener: When you receive an email from a new contact, they land in The Screener, where you click Yes or No to decide whether you want to receive emails from them moving forward.
The inboxes: You get to organize emails into three unqiue inboxes: The Imbox, for your important reads; The Feed, which turns newsletters, promotional emails, and longform into a scrollable, casual newsfeed; and The Paper Trail, which keeps the clutter of receipts and other transactional emails in one place.
Reply Later: If you receive an email and need to respond to it in due time, by clicking the Reply Later button, Hey moves it into a separate folder and creates a stack for when you’re ready to power through ‘em.
As DHH and Fried say themselves, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The service will cost you a pretty penny to the tune of $99 a year, but honestly, if you use email as much as I do, it might be worth the plunge.
And even if Hey isn’t as fancy as Superhuman — the exclusive email service for Silicon Valley bros that requires a referral code in a Billy McFarland, Magnises-esque fashion — it certainly packs a punch.
Scott Galloway Beefs With Higher Education
(CNBC)
If you haven’t heard of him, Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business. He’s also a speaker, author, TV and podcast show host, and an entrepreneur who’s started four different companies.
Also, you’ve probably heard of him. Because he’s everywhere. There is no timeline where this man actually gets sleep given how much content he pumps out on a weekly basis.
I’m beginning to suspect he doesn’t actually teach at NYU, too.
Anyway, I’ve been following Galloway and his work on Medium since 2017, but it wasn’t until the last three weeks or so that I fully immersed myself into the cult of Prof G. His book, The Four, takes a look at Internet industry titans — Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple — to trace their mythic statures and explain how we got to this point with four near-monopolies. Also, his newsletter (which doubles as a VICE TV show), No Mercy / No Malice, features rants and takes each week on tech and relationships in the digital economy. And while I haven’t started listening to either of his podcasts yet — The Prof G Show or Pivot, which he co-hosts with one of my favorite journalists in Kara Swisher — it’s certainly next on my list of things to get into.
I’ve always gravitated towards his work because it’s both incredible and irreverent. His voice is incredibly strong, yet he also always weaves facts and data into his takes to ensure he’s crafting cohesive arguments. This is not something that’s easy to do, and too often in the media industry, I feel like creators take the lazy route and stick to their lazy, mainstream talking points.
But not Prof G. Take a look at this recent segment from when he appeared on CNN to discuss how the pandemic will bring a “reckoning” to higher education— and Anderson Cooper actually thanked him for the fascinating perspective he brought to the table:
The argument Prof G makes is simple: higher education has been a ticking time bomb for a long time now, and the pandemic just pushed it over the edge. “We’ve raised [college] prices faster than healthcare…and at the same time, the underlying innovation — if you walked into a class today, it wouldn’t look, smell, or feel much different than it did 40 years ago.”
While you should absolutely watch the segment — it’s probably the best thing you’ll see all day — here are some of the key points that stuck out to me:
The argument against college, Galloway says, is that the use of Zoom for classes during this pandemic has exposed how the value proposition of a classroom setting and the explosion of tuition don’t match up. “Think of another product that charges over $100k and gets 90-plus points of gross margin. Other than a pharmaceutical for a rare cancer, there’s no other product in the world…”
Galloway talks about how schools are going to need to go deeper and deeper into their waitlists due to the fear of students not showing up in the fall. This will wipe out many third-tier universities and send reverbations across the industry, he says. “Second-tier universities are to education what department stores are to retail, and that is that they are about to begin a death march.”
“Big tech will come into universities not because they want to, because they have to,” Galloway says. He believes that in order to keep up with their promise to the marketplace — doubling their revenue in the next five years — big tech companies such as Google and Apple will need to go “big-game hunting,” which limits the industries in which they can enter. He thinks universities will thus partner with big tech to leverage their brands and virtually expand their campuses through online classes, slashing their prices and increasing the gross margin.
He talks about how the Ivy League schools won’t be affected due to the “artificial scarcity” they create. “They’re Hermès, he says. “…they brag that they turn away 90% of their applicants, which in my view is tantamount to the head of a housing shelter bragging away 90% of applicants last night…they’re in the business of finishing school for rich people…”
He finishes by saying, “Name an industry that hasn’t had to cut costs over the last 40 years. And there’s one: education. At the top, they’re gonna continue to be Hermès. But everywhere else, you’re gonna see a destruction of pricing power…the companies that can expand their margin dollars by larger volume will do so, which will create an enormous amount of disruption and chaos for the bottom half of universities.”
Leave it to a marketing teacher to analyze universities as brands. I think he brings up some really insightful points, though, as he’s someone who’s in the belly of the beast as a professor. We all knew that higher education was a bubble that was bound to pop at some point, and the thought of colleges pairing with big tech and online classes becoming more mainstream certainly doesn’t seem as crazy as it would have just four months ago.
Throwback Thursday: Eurovision FTW
Cover Art for “A Beginner’s Guide to Eurovision 2019” (Photo Illustration by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)
So, remember that one time Quavo — this humble scribe’s preferred Migo from the rap group Migos — pulled up to the Eurovision Song and Dance Contest, performed a set with Madonna, and referred to the whole thing as, “Tha Culture?”
What do you mean, you don’t remember the greatest moment in recorded history?
If you’re confused as to what the hell I’m talking about, consider staff writer Jake Liker’s words when previewing the 2018 campaign for UNPLUGG’D MAG:
“Imagine a combination of the Hunger Games, the Olympics, and American Idol, and you’ll get something vaguely resembling the Eurovision Song Contest. For the alliteration-inclined, it is an audiovisual spectacle of performance art, pyrotechnics, and political tension.”
Yes, this is a thing that happens every year. And yes, it’s as crazy as it sounds. So crazy that even if the competition got cancelled this year due to COVID-19, we’re still getting the content we never realized we needed.
Because Will Ferrell is starring in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, and it’s coming to Netflix on June 26.
Even as a big fan, Ferrell’s brand of comedy has, admittedly, felt a little tired in recent years. When considering between Anchorman (2004), Talladega Nights (2006), and Step Brothers (2008), the actor truly had an all-time run over the course of the 2000s that is hard to replicate.
And while The Story of Fire Saga certainly does not look like it will compete for an Academy Award any time soon, any excuse to talk about Eurovision is reason enough to talk about the mind-boggingly ridiculous phenomena known as Eurovision. Plus, at the very least, this looks like a phenomenal applicant to the Pantheon of Drinking Game Movies.
I’ve had the pleasure of watching the competitions the last two years, and Jake’s articles have certainly helped in absorbing the absurdity. Therefore, I’m dedicating this week’s Throwback Thursday to him! You can check out his 2019 and 2018 editions here and here, respectively.
TOTW: Two Makes A Lonely Island
(Sundance Film Festival)
My childhood hero, Andy Samberg, is back! And this time, he’s in…a critically-acclaimed, Sundance darling?
Yep, the Lonely Island and SNL star is back on the silver screen, only he’s not making a cult classic Bieber mockumentary (see: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) or a cringy comedy with Adam Sandler (see: That’s My Boy).
Welcome to Palm Springs!
There have been a million plays on the Groundhog Day trope — character wakes up in a time loop, suffers with determining the meaning of life, and ultimately does good and gets out of the loop. There’s some variety — and leeway — here, but the first ones that came to my mind included Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, and 50 First Dates (my second favorite Adam Sandler rom-com after Uncut Gems).
What’s unique about Palm Springs is that it features two people stuck in the loop, not just one. And if the trailer is any indication, it sure seems like both characters have a lot of baggage to unpack.
Also, J.K. Simmons is in this flick, too. I always love me some good J.K.
When I say this movie is critically-acclaimed, too, I don’t say that lightly. It’s currently sitting at a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it sold for a record $17,500,00.69 at Sundance due to widespread love from the audience present.
Also, in a move that seems too good to be unintentional, it broke the previous record by $0.69. Nice.
I think releasing Palm Springs directly to streaming on Hulu makes a ton of sense, too. Samberg diehards like me will flock to see it, but it can also find new audiences without the pressure to sell out theaters (which aren’t exactly being frequented due to the pandemic, anyway). Plus, it’s a bit of a safer bet for studio execs, too, because even if Popstar has received cult-like status over time, it did flop at the box office in a big way back in 2015.
What I’m Bumping: “The Bigger Picture” by Lil Baby
“It’s bigger than black and white / It’s a problem with the whole way of life / It can’t change overnight / But we gotta start somewhere /Might as well gon’ ‘head start here…”
“The Bigger Picture” by Lil Baby is fire. I’m not even a big fan of him, but it’s really incredible seeing this younger generation of artists take action in the face of injustice. The track dropped just days after the rapper went out and protested in Atlanta; at the protest, he led the crowd on his bicycle (as depicted on the cover art) and gave protestors supplies and money. Also, when they reached the march’s destination at Georgia’s State Capitol Building, he got up in front of the crowd and gave a speech.
Really awesome stuff from the 25-year-old. He might’ve gained a new fan.
NGL is the creator of Unplugg’d, a lifestyle brand that creates mission-driven products through longform storytelling. Send your thoughts on this letter to ngl@powderbluemedia.com and join our newsletter here!