The boy got new shoes today. Enjoy the Yoda slip-ons while you can. (Taken with instagram)

Two men enter, one man leaves. Ping pong tourney time. (Taken with instagram)

How LessConf Is What I Thought SXSW Was

Last week I was one of 250 privileged people who were at LessConf 2012 in Atlanta, GA. 

I had never been to a LessEverything event, and I first heard about LessConf when I saw this video on Twitter:

After looking through the Interwebs and seeing people talk about the previous LessConf’s I thought it would be a good conference to attend. I mentioned it to my boss and he told me to go for it. One video, a little bit of research, and I was booked in Atlanta for late February. 

Fast forward to last week and I’m driving to Atlanta, to attend a conference full of people I’ve never met with speakers that haven’t been announced. Yeah, that’s right. The speaker lineup was never announced, not even during the conference. I started to wonder if I had chosen wisely. 

Yes, yes I had.

Let me explain the difference between LessConf and other conferences I’ve experienced. I attended SXSW last year and enjoyed it. There were great sessions, I meet lots of interesting people, and brought home a list of things to think about and act on. One thing I did notice was that it seemed like most people I met were constantly looking for their chance to meet *insert tech/social media/startup celeb here*. I had some great conversations, but they didn’t happen with everyone I met.

At LessConf I never got the sense anyone was on the lookout for their next conversation. It seemed that everyone was in the moment, ready to have a conversation about almost anything. We talked about barbecue, SEO, family, what kind of work we do/enjoy, what we liked about what a speaker said, what we didn’t like about what a speaker said, what we would do for an iPad (only 4 of us would stand and hug for 6+ hours).  

It was fun, enlightening, and enriching.

I left with the impression that LessConf is the conference other conferences dream of becoming. Plato would say that LessConf was the cave conference, a Form of what a conference should be. By saying that I’m not suggesting it was perfect, but it was ideal.

And here’s the big difference between LessConf and SXSW.

I been on Twitter for a few years, but I’ve never really seen it sustain connections after an event like at SXSW 2007. Last year I made it to some great sessions at SXSW, connected with old friends and made a few new ones. At LessConf I learned something from every speaker, didn’t know a single person when I showed up, and left with 250+ new friends. Not BFF (yet), but people I can’t wait to break bread with again next year.

That’s how LessConf is what I thought SXSW was, it’s not just an great event. It’s a place where you make connections you take home. 

The Box Is Not The Gift

Great tweet from Chad Poe about a birthday present his son got today:

     ”He doesn’t realize the box is not the gift.”

Makes me think of how we can miss the boat on a lot of things in life.

The box…

sex

Truth

today

is not the gift…

love

Jesus

experience

Civic duty. Check. (Taken with instagram)

Spotify, Netflix, and How Radio Didn’t Kill Music Industry

I love random conversations on Twitter. Yesterday, I started talking with one friend about Spotify and ended up talking to another one of his friends who I’ve never met IRL. I read a bit of his blog, and we have a lot of the same interests and tastes (what’s up A Million Miles in a Thousand Years).

So three of us were talking about the value of Spotify, it’s advertising, owning music vs. renting, and how musicians are paid by Spotify.

I subscribe to Spotify for two reasons: I don’t have a big budget to spend on music anymore and my daughter loves Disney music. I mean, with a white-hot burning passion loves it. We are still listening to the Phineas and Ferb Christmas Album, “From the beginning” as she likes to say. I’m glad to not have a huge stack of CD’s to rip, store, and otherwise have to manage for the next few years.

Spotify doesn’t pay much per play, which is what we started discussing last night. I’ve seen a couple of different figures and I think their agreement with each label varies and is not publicly available. The consensus is Spotify pays fractions of a cent for every time a song is played. 

I think musicians should be rewarded for their hard work. I don’t think they are alone in the crunch presented when looking at streaming services. Filmmakers should be rewarded too. I pointed out that documentary filmmakers are prominently featured on Netflix and that probably represents a similar pay-scale to Spotify for that community. The argument was made that Netflix gips studios, and Spotify gips artists. 

Here’s how I see it:

Studios=Labels

Directors, writers, actors, & movie support community = musicians and music support community

So the big dogs get paid the most in any streaming scenario, which can leave a lot of hard working artists with a meager take for their hard work.

Netflix and Spotify are forced to participate in a system that rewards the largest corporate players, while independent filmmakers and musicians have to weigh the rewards of exposure versus the cost of lost revenue when using their platforms.

Separate thought thought I had related to the music biz, musicians don’t get paid for radio play. Only songwriters do, or at least that’s the way it is right now according to my Google-fu. At least filmmakers get paid if their product is broadcast on TV. At least with Spotify some revenue makes it way into artists pockets.

areasofmyexpertise:

“Leon Cooperman the Omega Advisors Inc. chairman and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s money-management unit….  [wrote that] Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be….’

“[Now] Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.”

***

Max Abelson wrote a story today for Bloomberg about the hurt feelings of many bankers and CEOs who feel they are for some weird reason being cast as the villains in “A Christmas Carol” the bleak economy.

Allow me to tell you a story.

At one point on my book tour, I was approached in the airport by a former banker.

He told me he was a life long Democrat and a huge fan of The Daily Show, but he also felt that Jon and the show had it all wrong.

(Because he was a multi millionaire, he has the right to just start critizing anyone in the airport he wants.)

He said that the bankers were not the bad guys in the subprime mortgage scandal and near financial collapse that they had everything to do with. They were just doing what the government allowed them to do.*

And so: he felt it was unfair and hurtful to make the bankers out to be the bad guys.

I was very happy to finally have the chance to say this to someone’s face:

I told him that as a freelance person, I had no idea how much money I would make this year. I never do.

But during the previous few years, due to hard work and exceedingly strange circumstance, I had made more money than I had ever conceived of making in my life. I had also paid a huge bucket of local, state, and city taxes, and that was JUST FINE WITH ME.

Because I knew that I had very little to worry about when it came to providing for my family and me this holiday season. And I suspected he didn’t as well.

But there are many, many people who are VERY worried about this. And out of consideration to them, it seemed to me a little unseemly for wealthy to care so much about the names they might be called.

“From my point of view,” I said, “I think you and me and other wealthy people should just suck it in and take it.”

I have never said anything like this out loud to a stranger before in my life, never mind a stranger who has money; but as I am now a Deranged Millionaire, I now have that right to speak my mind.

Naturally, he just ignored what I said and offered to consult on the Daily Show if we wanted.

 

***

LOOK: I do not mean to suggest that anyone in this piece is a monster. I am sure they are smart, innovative, and good to their families and employees. I respect success IMMENSELY and I am a capitalist.

However, I know better now than ever that wealth deranges.

It disconnects you from the world. It inflates your self-regard. It allows you to believe that four people congratulating you at your country club makes you a GODDAMN HERO OF AMERICA.

And it leads you to say things like former banker John A. Allison said in the article linked:

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.”

Because of course, you non-millionaires are not productive, and not worthy.

I know this from experience: when wealth takes hold, the brain creates a new reality in order to explain your new fortune over the poor fortunes of others.

It is not enough to say, as some of these men do, “I am wealthy, and I got some lucky advantages, but I also worked really hard and found some opportunities, and I am proud of it.”

You must instead say: “my extreme wealth proves that I DESERVE to be wealthy, because I am better.”

This logical fallacy is the core of Social Darwinism, but you’d think after a while that Homo Robber Baronensis would have bred some thicker skin.

But it’s like no one around these rich and powerful men have ever called them a name or even disagreed with them!

Oh! That’s right: no one has. At least, not for a long time.

Well, some of these guys are childish, and some of them are creeps. 

That is all.

AMAZING IMAGE OF ME AS A POOR DERANGED MILLIONAIRE COURTESY: THE AMAZING APE-LAD.  

*This was his actual argument. It is not an argument an adult makes. It’s the actual argument that TEENAGERS make at prestigious high schools where cheating is rampant: everyone was doing it, and no teacher was stopping them. So they WERE FORCED to cheat in order to be competitive. TEENAGERS ARE NOT JOB CREATORS.

 

Great post from John Hodgman about a conversation he had with a banker.

jimmyjamawalk:

at precisely 10:04 PM

(via wilwheaton)

Rocking the chiminea with Jen after putting kids to bed. (Taken with instagram)

I carved my 1st pumpkin using a pattern last night. Hooty hoo. (Taken with instagram)