Hey Everyone,
Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best content from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. This week I’m testing out a new section called the ‘Chum Bucket’. This section will include links to five of the most topical articles from the past week. Feel free to comment or respond back with any thoughts/feedback on this new section. With that, let’s dive into it.
Quick Bite
What Time Feels Like When You’re Improvising: “Your sense of time is malleable and subjective—it changes in response to changing contexts and input, and it can be distorted when the brain is damaged, or affected by drugs, disease, sleep deprivation, or naturally altered states of consciousness. However, a new set of neuroscience research findings suggests that losing track of time is also intimately bound up with creativity, beauty, and rapture.”
At some point or another, we’ve all entered what psychologists call a “flow state”. For some of us, it's a frequent occurrence. For others, it’s a rarity. In this state of mind, one becomes completely immersed and absorbed in a mental or physical act. When a flow state is achieved, people often report an altered sense of time, place, and self. It’s one of those experiences that you can’t really put into words, but everyone knows how it feels. We’d love to find ourselves in a state of flow every day, but we don’t really understand how to achieve it. Recent advancements in the field of neuroscience are starting to change this.
Two years ago, neuroscientists were able to identify a network of prefrontal brain regions linked to improvisation. Improvisation, which is frequently associated with spontaneous creativity, appears to take place in an altered state of mind/brain. Improvisation is also closely tied to flow states. Flow states are often achieved during improvised acts such as music, acting, and comedy.
By studying these brain regions further, neuroscientists now have a firmer grasp on how the brain operates when we’re improvising. This in turn has led to a deeper understanding of flow states. While neuroscientists haven’t fully cracked the code on flow states, steady progress is being made.
As someone who's fascinated by flow states, I found this excellent article in Nautilus to be a worthwhile read. Check it out to better understand how and why our brains enter the magical state of flow.
Deeper Dive
Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool: “Different users of the “community” word have different motivations, and these motivations will be the origin of conflict — conflict not only about the word’s meaning, but about how this type of business should be operated. But these debates, no matter how uncomfortable, should be had. Because in a very real way, the financial and social sustainability of paid communities will depend on the degree to which the communities are recognized not as a monetizable resource but as a body of people with social needs, emotional lives, and practical concerns of livelihood.”
The concept of “community” has become increasingly important for every player in the Web 2.0 ecosystem. DTC brand customers, creator audiences, sports and influencer fanbases, and new social networks are all considered to be communities. Cultivating and maintaining an active community has become a crucial element of success for businesses in these sectors (and many others).
As online communities continue to evolve, we’ve seen the emergence of a new business model: paid communities. Paid communities are in the very early innings, yet this is a budding space that’s primed for serious growth.
Traditionally, web-based communities have been built off of the back of a product or tool. There is a now-famous business maxim that goes ‘come for the tool, stay for the network’. As Toby Shorin points out in this excellent essay, the Bloomberg Terminal is a perfect example of this maxim. Terminal users come to Bloomberg for the tool, but end up sticking around due to the network. Bloomberg has a bunch of social features within the terminal such as a Craigslist clone, a Hacker News clone, instant messaging, and Bloomberg restricted email. All of this has combined to create a thriving community for finance professionals.
With paid communities, the inverse of this maxim is proving to be equally viable. Now you “come for the network and stay for the tool”. Whereas built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks. In the essay, Toby identifies a handful of business types that can benefit from the model of paid communities. A few examples he mentioned that I found interesting are small media organizations, chat groups for gaming and fantasy sports, and food influencer communities.
Aside from these examples, one that Toby didn’t mention but I’m very excited about, is fitness. I see this as a huge white space for a social network driven by a paid community. I have lots of thoughts on this and plan to write more about them in the coming weeks.
In the interim, give this a read to familiarize yourself with the emergence of paid communities. Toby does an incredible job of outlining the business model and clearly explains why it’s become viable in today’s world.
Chum Bucket
Scoring the Tech CEOs: The Information’s Tech Briefing (The Information)
The Four Quadrants of Conformism (Paul Graham)
How Patrick Mahomes Became the Superstar the NFL Needs Right Now (GQ)
Tweet of the Week
Song of the Week
Apple Music Link
Books
Currently Reading
![Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by [Greg Mckeown]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf9e1fd3-41d7-45c0-89eb-5d50ff464be3_332x500.jpeg "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by [Greg Mckeown]")
![Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III by [Robert A. Caro]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcea5b62d-58f5-4e63-85bd-a8adaf4315da_331x500.jpeg "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III by [Robert A. Caro]")
Parting Thoughts
This Week in History
On July 29, 1958, Congress passed legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA was created in response to the Soviet Union’s October 4, 1957 launch of its first satellite, Sputnik I. (Source)
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl
If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.
-CM
This newsletter is created and authored by Cody McCauley and is published and provided for informational purposes only. The information in the newsletter solely constitutes Cody’s own opinions. None of the information contained in the newsletter constitutes—or should be construed as—investment advice.