Celebrity Plastic Surgery, How One Restaurant Is Thriving What You Can Do To Save The Economy - #210

A Compilation of Free Entertainment + Learning On Demand

Every day this week seemed to bring a new announcement of some type of content that is being made available for free to help people cope with being sheltered in place at home. Here are a few of my favorites that I thought I'd share with you:

• CBS All Access Free Month - Just enough time for you to stream the full first season of Picard ... (use code: GIFT)
• Disney + Pixar Free Online Tutorials - Learn animation directly from an Imagineer.
• "The Science of Well-Being" Yale Course - Widely reviewed as "the most popular class in history" at Yale - this course is now available via streaming for free.
• Live Animal Streams - If you're suffering from wanderlust, one of these interesting live streams of animals might help you get a fix of the outdoors from your couch at home.
• Metropolitan Opera - Nightly streams of encore performances from the stage.
• SXSW Webinar: 10 Megatrends Changing Our Culture - In case you missed it, I also shared the recorded version of my SXSW talk as a webinar and you can watch it online now.

How One Restaurant Is Thriving In A Tough Time

If you're reading the same stories I am, the future looks pretty dire for restaurants ... but this story of how one restaurateur is finding a way to succeed may be a model that other restaurants can follow to survive. Through a smart combination of menu variety, meal purchasing, a wine club and even a charitable element - tech-savvy chef Eric Rivera is one of the few entrepreneurs quickly and effectively adjusting to a difficult moment.

Bandcamp's Big Day: Fans Give $4.3 Million To Musicians

For one day, the online performance platform for musicians waived all its fees and fans gave more than $4 million to watch private shows from their favorite musicians. As tours and festivals are cancelled or postponed for the next several months, this direct performance method of generating revenue is something we will see much more of.

Tinder Helps People Find Quarantine Buddies

Starting this week, Tinder made their global Passport feature free to help people connect with others in different countries. In reading all the stories this week, I consistently valued those that had first hand accounts (like this one from my friend Tamar) of dealing with the virus and lockdowns - and if this feature can enable more of those conversations between real people, I think it will be a valuable way for many people to get a much needed dose of reality amidst all the conflicting stories they see in the media. After all, the best way to understand what's happening across the world is to actually talk to a person who is living there.

Celebrities Use Their Quarantines To Get Plastic Surgery.

This may seem like a tasteless story to share in a time when many people are suffering, but it was interesting to me that some celebrities are looking at this time of lockdown and isolation as the ideal time to get their long-awaited plastic surgery done. It is a slightly more extreme version of what many of us are thinking of doing now ... getting to those backburner projects and doing the things we have planned to do for a long time.

The Most Important Thing You Can Do ...

Many of us in a time like now will be tempted to take a "wait and see" approach to the things we might have otherwise done without a second thought. The problem is, as author Jamie Mustard outlines in a post that is quickly going viral, this type of hesitation can paradoxically end up creating even more challenges for the economy. So as he notes in his post, "Let's STOP holding and turn the curve, freezing the domino effect that comes from holding––by DOING EVEN MORE BUSINESS REMOTELY––for all of us who can."

The Big Questions Of The Future

Author Yuval Noah Harari wrote a piece this past week that offered some wide ranging implications and thoughts around the sort of future we may expect after this current crisis passes. The questions he raises around surveillance, trust, medicine and humanity are quite important and worth a read. Like his books, this is a long and somewhat rambling piece, but also one with plenty of profound observations that will make you think.