It’s tempting to work on mass-audience projects because the scale makes high-impact results more likely. Such projects are often less striking, personal, bloody, etc. than their “weirder” alternatives. They might garner a lot more mass attention but a lot less attention from unusual, singular people. Those people are frequently sources of surprising (and more meaningful) insights and opportunities.
We were thinking about the 20th %ile outcomes of developing a weird experimental media studio, vs. trying to make deals with publishers to create mnemonic media of popular texts. The latter seems to have the better 20th %ile on the surface, but the former is much more likely to lead to the kinds of surprising connections we’ll find most exciting.