Nov 21

Coolest things I’ve learned today:

1/ Music is social programming

Most people don’t even notice, but music is one of the most powerful social-programming tools out there. It bypasses the critical mind completely and hits the limbic system (our emotions) directly. When a song drills a message into your head hundreds of times, your brain starts accepting the lyrics as emotional truth—even if you’d reject them with your conscious mind.

From a business angle this can be genius: slip your brand into a hit song and you’ve got millions of people subconsciously nudged toward buying/trusting it.

However it can be disturbing that we are nudged silently into overspending or empty/meaningless relationships (like a hollow one-night stand) because of the songs we listen to. So, pick your playlist carefully.

2/ “Anthropogenic mass”

Humanity never stops churning out stuff—buildings, roads, phones, plastic… All this human-made material is called anthropogenic mass and it has surpassed the total biomass of every living thing on Earth (all plants, animals, bacteria, etc. combined).

That’s genuinely alarming. In roughly a century, we’ve built more mass than nature took billions of years of evolution to grow.