Andrew McCluskey

Negotiation Mastery

Some of the fantasies in Want are moving - the bereaved woman who craves touch and mourns the secondary loss of sexual relations. “I do wish there were more discussion of grief and spouse loss and sexuality,” she writes.

Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity.

Sharing tastes forges social bonds between people (i.e. bridges), while discrepancies in taste create barriers between people (i.e. fences).

The core idea at the end of that chapter was that anything that reduces fear of “the other” also reduces the idea that some people are fundamentally different or dangerous. Wars and hatred often stem from the notion that other people are so different that conflict becomes justifiable. But exposure to other cultures—whether through travel, food, or... See more

Quantified status also drives entire industries. Influencer marketing is a $24B market growing quickly. The industry is built on status associations. We see this clearly in the 2010s rise of “the lifestyle influencer”—lifestyles are the most obvious markers of status, and the influencer economy is built on aspiration .