These chefs are effectively being held hostage. One had his passport withheld. Another was executed for giving a kid a stomachache. This isn’t careerism.
I ended up going back and reading the article. It’s not bad that it’s bad writing, it’s that the opening is sloppy and turned me off from reading the article instead of pulling me in the way a good lede should.
The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo
No, they did not. Arendt’s point about evil being banal is that the perpetrator’s behavior is motivated by the banal. A chef isn’t the perp. They’re adjacent to the monsters and they might be motivated by and fixated on the banality of doing great work.at most this is juxtaposition of evil and banality.
> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
I see another explanation. A generous take would be that digital marketing agencies generate mixed results. But many would have far worse things to say about the ROI these agencies produce.
I don’t know anything about the author’s agency, but I can imagine that if I were a small business owner and I allocated budget to them, I’d absolutely let them know how I felt if they failed to produce results. This would not be the case if I were a salaried employee at a larger business responsible for outsourcing digital marketing. It just doesn’t matter to an employee in nearly the same way.
I’ve been a founder and I’ve been in sales most of my career, I’ve sold to enterprises as well as to small business owners. This isn’t to say the author isn’t right. I just disagree with a lot of the comments on here about the inherently misanthropic nature of small business owners.
I assume this comment is trolling. But to be clear to readers, the link states psilocybin 50% increase in lifespan of human skin etc. not human lifespan.
The ideal business co-founder has to be strong in distribution AND eliciting product feedback. This is why the “MBA types” and ex-McKinsey consultants fare so poorly - they’re used to companies spending loads of money to hear what they think. As an early-stage startup founder, nobody gives a shit about your product and no one wants to hear what you think. Your job is to identify where demand is highest in the market and then turn that demand into dollars. They also need to be excellent communicators who understand or at least appreciate how much goes into building products.
For those reasons, the best business cofounders in my experience, are former salespeople (for b2b startups), demand generation marketers (for b2c), and product managers.