Hit Men Turned Hit-Makers. Meet Meat’s 12%ers. Rewarding the Right Stuff. Plus More! #179
Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck – welcome!
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1️⃣ Music, Money-laundering and Murder
It’s murder on the digital dancefloor
My favourite fact of the week came from the FT:
If someone uploaded their own 30-second track to Spotify, and then programmed their phone to listen to it on repeat 24 hours a day, they would receive $1,200 a month in royalties.
Why bother though, when you can pay a click farm to do exactly that.
Spotify is a Swedish company and – apart from fermented herring, meatballs and IKEA – the country’s also famous for its criminal gangs.
From hit men to hit-makers
One gangster told a Swedish newspaper how they used Spotify to launder cash from murders and drug deals.
They paid click farms in crypto.
Instead of patriotically pumping ABBA’s back catalogue they boosted client Swedish gangster rappers.
A million streams could make up to $5k. That cash came back clean thanks to Spotify.
⏭ How Spotify become an ATM for gangs.
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2️⃣ Where’s the Beef?
New research says 12% of Americans eat half its beef. Greedy.
America’s middle-aged men are red meat eating machines, according to new research.
The saturated fatties are getting their pounds of flesh from steak, burgers, burritos, tacos, meatloaf or meat sauce.
That may be good news for XXL coffin manufacturers, but its hard on the loved ones of the lard-bellied steak-scoffers.
Don’t get me wrong. The 4% of beef that comes from grass-fed cows is delicious and nutritious.
But the 95%+ that comes from factory farming is turning American arteries to lard, polluting the planet, and inflicting cruelty on an industrial scale.
The scientists’ advice? Try chicken.
⏭ In case you think things were better in the good old days, read this.
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3️⃣ How To Get the Best From #AI, According to AI
Just be nice to it.
It turns out the best way to get an AI to solve a problem is ask it to take a deep breath.
At least that’s according to the AI.
A fascinating study used LLMs to find better solutions to classic problems.
Scientists tested the AIs on brain-teasers like the travelling salesman problem – trying to find the shortest route between a bunch of places and end up where you started without visiting the same place twice.
When they used them to create prompts to improve the problem-solving, the AI-generated ones were better than the human efforts, sometimes by more than 50%.
The best performing prompt?
Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step.
If you’re too lazy to type all that, “Break this down” works nearly as well.
⏭ Are spooky AI properties evidence of consciousness? No.
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4️⃣ A Management Classic
A BS-free, tongue-in-cheek, slice of 70s academic wisdom
Academic writing can be dull, pedantic and jargon-laden. Occasionally something breaks through that is light, funny, and direct.
Steve Kerr’s 1975 paper “On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B...” is exactly that.
Homely, humble and humourous.
Here’s an example. Kerr explaining the reward system for GIs in World War 2 vs Vietnam:
“What did the GI in World War 2 want? To go home. And when did he get to go home? When the war was won!
“[What did the GI in Vietnam want?] To go home. And when did he get to go home? When his tour of duty was over! This was the case whether or not the war was won.”
Kerr is still with us. As he says at the end of his readers “I wonder if there was much in it that they didn’t know.”
⏭ If you like engaging business literature, try my pal Paolo Gallo’s new book.
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5️⃣ How to Halve Poverty
Do what these 25 countries have done.
⏭ Still 1.1 billion people to go.
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6️⃣ When the Heat is Driving You In-Seine
Try piping some Paris river water round the place.
⏭ The French are holding out against AC for athletes in the 2024 Olympics.
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7️⃣ And Finally, Here’s Me
A face for radio and a voice for peeling paint off doors.
This was at Steffi Czerny’s DLD Conference in Munich – which was the most fun I’ve had in a long time – talking to the irrepressible Yossi Vardi.
⏭ Weekend reading on Bea’s book club podcast.
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If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it!
Best,
Adrian
