Rebranding Republicans

A little while back I was happy to take a take a call from a reporter writing from that bible of the beltway, Roll Call.  If you're not familiar with the publication, it's pretty much the trade paper of politics, covering everything that has anything to do with power, punditry and politics.  It wasn't the call that was so intriguing as the subject of the call.  In fact, it was the call I'd been waiting to answer for several decades now:

What's wrong with the Republican Party's brand -- and how would you fix it?

To me, that kind of a question is a letter high fastball, perfect for lofting over the fence and way up into the bleacher seats.  It's a big, fat, juicy steak for a branding carnivore like myself, so I was only too ready to respond.  In fact, I actually made an exception to my "never give a creative solution in a media interview" rule.

The interview went well.  Sadly, it's journey through the editing process did not, with many of the most salient points (as they often do), getting ripped out of the piece by an editor who clearly was more concerned about space than content.

No matter.  That's why God invented blogs.  Thus, I submit to you the important points of how the Republican Party could successfully brand itself, quickly and permanently.

Let's dispense with the easy stuff first, which would be all the ridiculously stupid mistakes the Republicans have made.  Repeatedly. For years.  We've all heard the sound bytes about "the party of 'no'" and the "Republicans' refusal to compromise."  We're all familiar with the tired old grind about Republicans being the party of "old, rich, racist white men."  Fine.  We all know what doesn't work.

Here's what does work:

1.  If they want to dispel the notion that Republicans are not the party of "old, rich, racist white men," the first thing they've got to do is disassociate the party from the guys who are  "old, rich, racist white men," which would include politicians who refer to immigrants as "wetbacks."  So guys like Alaska's Don Young need to be thrown under the bus in a very public, very mediagenic way.  No fooling around.  No apologies.  Just throw him to the wolves and let the rest of the sheep watch what happens if they don't follow the herd.

2.  Focus on what the Republicans like best: Money.  Here's something you may not know: Most immigrants -- legal and otherwise -- are actually politically conservative, not liberal.  The principal reason they immigrate to the United States is to improve their lives, politically and financially.  Which means the vast majority of immigrants have way more in common with Republicans than anyone realizes.

So rebranding Republicans?  Simple.  The main platform needs to be their common interest with immigrants and the financially oppressed, mainly, Empowerment Through Enterprise.  Republicans should be stressing inclusiveness, but prioritizing social and political inclusiveness just below economic inclusiveness.  The problem with the "party of no" is that it never raises an opportunity to answer with a "yes." Empowerment Through Enterprise would do exactly that.  By reaching for its roots, Republicans could be offering immigrants (along with everyone else) a piece of the American Dream by proposing economic means for them, eventually resulting in social and political ascent.

The Republicans have never been good at social programs.  And even when they do, every non-Republican looks at them askew because the Republicans have to be dragged kicking and screaming to go along with social programs.  But if their perceived strength really is "all about the money," why not start there?  Why not propose a bevy or economic incentives and plans that truly do "empower through enterprise?"  Put immigrants into business.  Organize their labor. Show them the way up. Tax their revenues.  Once they own their piece of the pie, just watch how loyal they'll be to the people who served it up to them.

I don't care what your political leanings are -- everyone loves to make a profit.  Even more to the point, nobody wants to be given the American Dream.  Everyone wants to earn it.

People, Pills & Murder

I'm a branding guy, which means that a fair amount of my time is spent monitoring the media, poring over the hype in an attempt to find real value in whatever they pass off as news to the good people of America. Unfortunately, most of stories dumped in our laps is hardly news. The vast majority is little more than titillating tidbits of violence designed to lure viewers past the next commercial and into the depths of gore and pessimism.

As they say in the news biz, "if it bleeds, it leads," which is why bad news permeates the airwaves and interwebs.

To make matters worse, media invites what can loosely be called "experts" to what can even more loosely be called "debate" the causes and effects of the latest violent news stories. As of this writing, the big topic is guns, murders and laws imposed to curb citizens' ability to murder each other with guns.

Let me state at the outset that I have no problem with guns, just like I have no problem with cars. I think cars are great for transportation and picking up dates. I also think that when a deranged lunatic gets behind the wheel of a car with the intent of mowing down innocent people, he's committing an assault with a deadly weapon. In fact, most courts would hold that to be true, and often send those perpetrators to jail. Yet despite the tens of thousands of vehicle deaths that occur each year on American roads, one rarely hears any public call for tighter regulation of automobiles.

The reason that nobody calls for tighter restrictions on cars is, well, I can't really say. I can't really explain it, because the logic for tighter regulations on anything never results in curbing the damage done by errant miscreants who actively choose to inflict harm on others. And this is where the advocates for stricter gun control fall short in their arguments.

If you really want find what causes murderous rampages, you have to look in the right places -- and gun control simply isn't the right place. But I can point to two places that are:

As I wrote in 2010's The Tipping Point of Terror and in 2004's Prozac, Paxil, Pathetic, there are two fundamental reasons why this country suffers from increasing numbers of violent events. One is the sheer number of people in the country. The other is the sheer number of anti-psychotic and psychotropic drugs prescribed indiscriminately as a matter of expedience.

As the first article pointed out, the population of our country has grown to the point where its criminal and mentally unstable element -- a percentage of the population that remains relatively constant -- has grown in real numbers. Two percent of a 50 million member nation is only 100,000 people; but two percent of 350 million is seven million people, where even the chance of random occurrences increases the incidence of violent behavior to a daily certainty.

What that means is we've grown to the point where crime is no longer an anomaly; it's simply a fact of daily life.

The big question is what to do with all those borderline and over-the-edge cases. Since we have neither the facilities nor the will to warehouse them, many of them are controlled with anti-psychotic and psychotropic drugs -- many of which have drastically dangerous side-effects, including tendencies toward suicidal and violent behavior. The thinking is that borderline cases "treated" with these drugs can move about society in a harmless haze, prevented from doing any harm.

But those are just the diagnosed cases.

There are millions of kids, teens and adults who gobble down these pills at the first instance of depression simply because it's more convenient to prescribe than prevent. At any given moment, any of these walking time bombs could blow -- usually during a psychotic episode in which they illegally procure someone else's legally-purchased and registered semi-automatic weapon.

All of which means if you really want to curb the violence in America, you need to regulate mental health in America. Not cars. Not machetes. Not guns. In fact, there's no point of regulating any kind of weapon since almost anything could be used as a weapon. As the mob's late hit man, Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno, once told a reporter who asked him about illegal weapons, "What's a weapon? I could torture you with a pair of pliers; I could kill you with a pencil."

Hey, I'm no gun fanatic. But I'm also no fan of ill-conceived solutions that value expedience over effectiveness. As politically incorrect as it may seem, it's time to realize that cars don't kill people, but drivers do. And guns don't kill people until a human being pulls the trigger.

If you really want to stop the killing, start addressing the real problem. Put less effort into controlling people's behavior and more money into programs to aid those mentally at risk.

The Myth of Job Security

You may have noticed that our society has changed radically in the last decade. What you may not have noticed is that in addition to iPhones, texting and mainstream porn, our expectations from society have changed even more. Technological changes are easy to spot. Not so easy to see are the socio-economic alterations that often blind side us without any warning.

Despite man's delusions of permanence, commerce and human behavior remain in a constant state of flux: What's hot today is stone cold tomorrow, while yesterday's old becomes tomorrow's steampunk cool. In my business, it's just as important to watch the environment as the brand existing therein. If social values shift while you're not looking, your brand's relevance could be sunk before its ever launched. So I watch this stuff. Carefully.

Shifting social and commercial environments have been with us since the day man discovered fire. From that point on, not only was our standard of living changed, but our assessment of human intelligence, as well: After all, if it were freezing, only a moron wouldn't come inside and warm himself. Those who refused to accept the changes brought by fire were, literally, left out in the cold to die. It's been that way ever since.

As these changes evolved, they transformed our economies and our expectations. Laws, customs, holidays and even religious practices mutated from alterations in commerce and lifestyles. Some stayed with us for generations. Others, like presenting your neighbor with a wagon-load of horse manure at Michaelmas, simply died from lack of usefulness. So things can and do keep changing. And over the last few decades, one of the most prominent shifts in social expectations has been the issue of job security .

Depending on how old you are, you may recall a time when most kids went to grade school, then high school and if they were lucky, on to college. Graduating either high school or college was met with the same expectation: Get yourself a good job and a good company, work hard, get promoted, earn raises and retire after 30 years with a pension.

Curious as it may seem today, those 30 years were expected to be with the same company.

Well, that used to be the expectation for most of the twentieth century. One job, one company, for your whole life. The idea was that in exchange for a lifetime of service, the company would reward you with job security . It didn't matter if you worked on the factory line or in the corporate boardroom. If you did your job, you'd get your paycheck. In those days, employers understood the benefit of offering job security: A happier employee was a more loyal, harder working employee -- the kind who stayed late and insisted on higher quality output.

Of course, that was before the invention of the spreadsheet and ascension of mindless CFO savants who ran companies into the ground based on cost-cutting and revenue projections. If you look at history, you'll see that job security as we knew it pretty much died quietly some time in the 1980's. That's when the first middle aged workers felt the swing of the axe, wiping out the jobs that they believed -- based on previous generations' expectations -- they'd had for life.

Believe me, it was pretty ugly to watch career men and women in their forties, fifties and sixties scrounging to feed their families after being tossed into the streets. Perhaps the only thing more shocking than losing their careers was the seemingly impossible realization that there was no longer any such thing as job security .

It's been that way ever since. Oh, sure, you can submit your resumé to any one of a hundred huge companies that offer great pay and benefits. They may be huge, multi-national corporations. But that doesn't mean they're offering you anything more than a day's pay for a day's work. That's because the entire notion of job security has been obsolete since 1980. The truth is that while Coca-Cola is huge and profitable, the minute it decides its South American division isn't generating enough as it should, out the door you go.

Does that mean job security is dead? Hardly. It means that job security as we once knew it is dead. Our atomized economy has mutated into a system where the only true job security one can have is that he builds for himself, usually by running his own business. You can own a machine shop, open a law practice or serve pizza out of a truck. You can invent stuff. Manufacture stuff. Buy and sell stuff. It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you're no longer beholden to anyone else's decision as to whether you have a job or not. Yes, you have to find your own customers, but think about it: Wouldn't you rather solve that problem than to live in daily denial based on someone else's determination of your "need to know?"

"Sure," I hear you saying. "That's easy for you to say, Rob, because you've been an independent consultant for a lot of years." And I'd answer you with this: You know why I left the corporate world to start my own gig? Because I watched too many co-workers go by the wayside for no apparent reason, and never knowing whether I'd be the next man walking the plank. The idea of someone else having control over my fate was far more stressful than dealing with total information about my own fate. Working for myself , I endure the very same business conditions everyone else endures, but the decisions affecting me are mine to make.

Look, the days of huge conglomerates aren't over by a long shot. Their profitability may be growing, but their commitment to their employees has shrunk down to nil. Pensions are gone and benefits are evaporating. Which means you're on your own, financially and otherwise, whether you like it or not.

You want job security? There's only one guy you can get it from. He's in the mirror, smirking at you right now.

Fail and Grow Rich!

Business can be rewarding.  Even entertaining.  But sometimes, it can be downright weird.  And stories like this one are the weirdest because it's entirely true.   I'm publishing this one because undoubtedly, there will come a time when you experience something like this and nobody will believe you.

We're all taught to believe that success is derived from mature, smart, insightful people.  However, as you're about to find out, that's not necessarily so.  In Hollywood, for example, a producer can have one major hit, spend the rest of his career perpetually failing, yet still get work based on his one early success.  In my own travels, I've found much the same thing.  One success is all it takes to justify dozens of failures.  Experiences like the one you're about to read are becoming increasingly common.

I wouldn't have believed this phone call myself had I not been a part of it.  The person on the line was a prospective client who clearly thought my rates were too high.  I've changed one name here, because you'd know him in a heartbeat.  Otherwise, the paraphrasing is as close to verbatim as it gets:

PROSPECT:  Rob, I really want to work with you, but let me tell you what happened with another company of mine a while back.  We had a branding problem, so we went straight to John Fish, the marketing legend.  Spent a whole day with him.  Paid his full rate.  He gave us a solution which we tried for six months.

ME:  How did that work out?

PROSPECT:  It failed, miserably.  So we went back to John and spent another full day with him.  Paid him for another full day and he gave us another solution.  A different one.

ME:  Really?  How did that work out?

PROSPECT:  Well, after six more months, that one didn't do the job, either.  So we went back one more time, paid his full rate and he gave us another solution.....

ME:  ...and.....

PROSPECT:  That one failed, too.  So finally, we just huddled around a conference table and eventually came up with a strategy that actually worked!

ME:  Wow, that's great!  So you mean you paid John Fish three different times over a year and a half and he failed every time?

PROSPECT:  Yep. And now, with our current company, I've brought in two different branding agencies.  Paid them both their full rates....

ME:  ...but since you and I are talking, I'm assuming they both failed, too?

PROSPECT:  Correct.

ME:  Wow. So, if I'm doing the math correctly, you lost three full rate sessions using John Fish, plus the roughly eighteen months of revenue he cost you because his recommendations failed.  And now, for your current company, you've paid two branding agencies their full rates, and they've failed, as well?

PROSPECT:  Yes, that's accurate.

ME:  Hmmmm....so if I've got this right, you'll pay consultants and agencies their full rates for failing, but you want to pay me half my rate because I'm a real, proven branding expert with a successful track record who doesn't fail?

PROSPECT: .........

ME:  You still there? Hello?

The Myth of Passion

If you're a casual reader of this blog, you already know I'm no fan of self-help advocates or "life coaches." One reason is that they don't really help anyone other than the author/coach, who lines his pockets by hawking oversimplifications to innocents too unfortunate to know better.  Another is that, for the most part, their "solutions" simply don't work. 

It turns out that in life, the most effective means of solving problems is by actually solving your problems yourself.  Buying a book, popping a pill,  listening to a CD/podcast or attending a seminar might create the illusion of your being on the way to solving your issues, but none of them really do anything to adjust the situation and make you happier.  They just adjust your wallet and make you that much poorer.

Nevertheless, the self-help and life coach businesses are booming, mainly because most people would rather pay their way out of our problems than work their way out.  And the biggest problem is that most people aren't buying into truth.  They're buying into myths.

Of all the myths, the most dangerous has to be passion.  It accosts me daily in the twittersphere, where groundless quotes of inspiration can be founding teeming with quixotic quasi-poetry offered up by life coaches barely qualified to vote, let alone advise others about life problems.  Yet that doesn't stop them from perpetually parroting  prose about passion as if they were prophets of Providence.

Okay, so that was a little overwritten.  But I continue:

"Work is nothing without passion," notes one.  "If there's no passion, there's no point," spouts another.  And then there are the legions of lemmings who quote famous people -- mostly out of context -- in order to motivate their fix-it-for-a-price followers:  "Steve Jobs, in his address to Stanford's graduating class...."

Let me set the record straight:  Passion is a great thing.  It's the reason why men build great bridges and, more frequently, pay exorbitant prices at expensive restaurants while on dates with beautiful women.  If you've ever experienced real passion, you know what it is and where it lives.  And while it can be said that passion has driven men to do amazing things, the harsh reality is that the one thing passion doesn't do is pay the bills.

I've been around a fair amount of time and not once have I ever seen anyone, anywhere be compensated for his passion.  In business plans, on  spreadsheets or at the conference table, there is no mention nor remuneration for passion.  There is no line item on page 12 in the budget for passion.  Yet all across America, there are thousands of people barely scratching out a living because they're "following their passion" instead of getting down to real business.  They use passion as a salve to soothe their fears of failure and rationalize their inertia, never realizing that it's that very myth of passion that's causing them to fail.  If you doubt that, think about the last time you heard anyone rhapsodize about passion driving his success who wasn't already at the tail end of his career.  Sure, for them it's easy to lay it all on passion -- they're retiring.  They're done.  They can afford the luxury of rewriting history and making it about all passion because they've long since forgotten those times they threatened to quit if they didn't get a raise.

You, on the other hand, have bills to pay.  And last I heard, grocery stores aren't accepting passion in lieu of double coupons.

Actually, in business, passion is far more likely to get you fired than promoted, because more often than not, passion is the euphemism for a completely irrational, highly-motivated nut case -- and nobody wants those hanging around while everyone else is trying to succeed.  If you want the real news, it's this:  businesses are not about passion.  Careers are not about passion.  Careers and businesses are about performance, and the sooner you staple that concept to your frontal lobe, the better off you're going to be.

Now before you get all Rod McKuen on me, let's take a minute to point out that passion, by itself, is not a bad thing.  In fact, I believe that well-placed passion is a really good thing.  But passion is an intensely private, emotional thing.  A human thing, not given to rationality.  It's far more appropriate in a bedroom than a boardroom, which is why you never hear a CEO gasp breathlessly, "Wow, that was some PowerPoint presentation, Bob...will you stay for breakfast?"  Businesses want masters, not martyrs.

While we're on the subject, I should also point out that not every business is even compatible with passion.  When my sewers are clogged, I guarantee you that the guy who shows up wearing hip waders isn't singing The Impossible Dream as he dips his arm into unimaginable filth.  Don't try to tell me he's passionate about sewer stoppage.  And don't try to sell him on it, either, especially on a Sunday when he's earning triple overtime.

The late Malcom Forbes once uttered, "Business is war."  And he was right.  Business is about strategy, tactics -- and if you really want to stick a tag on it -- results.  But one thing business is not about is passion.  Yet time and again, I hear self-help advocates, life coaches and old, mega-wealthy CEO's equating "your level of passion to your ability to succeed."  

And that creates a huge moral, ethical issue for me, as it should for you.  Here's why:  

All across this great nation, millions of young adults are swallowing as much faux guidance as they can eat, in hopes of finding shortcuts that will lift them into successful and rewarding careers.  And most of them subsist on a steady diet of hack, baseless myths of passion, with the erroneous expectation that, as with Tinkerbell, if they're really passionate about it, they'll succeed.  

Well, this is their wake up call.  In the long list of attributes that comprise success, passion ranks pretty close to the bottom, way below smarts, luck, knowledge, talent, connections, parentage, culture, education, social class, persistence and yes, hard work. 

In the business world, passion and two bucks may get you a cup of coffee, but it won't even qualify you for a job as a barista.

Law & Order is for Suckers

The way I see it, it must have been a small man who invented the concept of law.  And before you get all feminist on me, I do believe it was a man who invented law for the very simple reason that only a small guy would have been motivated to do so.  The reason is simple:  Up until the invention and acceptance of law, things generally worked out the way large, brutish males wanted them to.  Back in the pre-law days, society was less ordered by morals than by murder, theft, assault and rape.  The only people who could get away with those acts were the aforementioned large, brutish males.

Smaller men had all the same territorial impulses as the big boys, it's just that they hadn't the physical means to affect them.  After a while, it must have been demoralizing to constantly have their cows stolen, wives kidnapped, daughters raped and sons murdered.  So there's a pretty strong argument that the guys most inclined to level the playing field would be those least capable of winning on the existing playing field:  That would be smaller men, to whom we all owe a huge debt of gratitude.

While I can't place my finger on the actual date when law overtook brute force as a means of establishing social order, it's probably safe to assume it occurred around the same time humans began to domesticate plants and animals.  Tribes became civilizations and somehow, the notion of everyone living by a common code was adopted as more beneficial than everyone killing everyone else for what few resources they had hoarded.

I like to think the ascendance of law is a high point in human history.  What I don't like to think about is what's happened since.  Because centuries of expansion, growth, misinterpretation and reinterpretation have yielded a somewhat counter intuitive result:

Law and order is for suckers.

That's right.  The system that was supposed to encourage individuals and enhance the human condition has actually had the opposite effect -- and it's getting worse on a daily basis.  Hear me out on this, because it's either frighteningly insightful or pointless entertainment.  Either way, you win.

If you believe that human beings are bright, creative, intelligent animals whose primary purpose is to build a better world for each succeeding generation, you might also subscribe to the notion that those very same humans are motivated by reward.  It's hard wired in our systems.  Moreover, since every human being is as individual as the proverbial snowflake, how he or she invents solutions to problems is influenced according to his or her own individual tastes and abilities.  This kind of diversity only adds fuel to humanity's creative fire.

People are only motivated to get out there and do something when we realize the benefits of doing so.  For some people, the benefit is making lots of money.  For others, it's connecting with that blonde sitting at the end of the bar.  Regardless, the only reason a human is going to move off the couch and into action is if he believes he'll be rewarded for his effort.

That's true of just about every aspect of society except for law and order.  True, while there's a vague, intangible benefit of keeping the crime rate lower, there's no realreward for obeying the law, there's only punishment for not obeying the law.  The truth is that by staying within the guidelines and not making trouble, you keep yourself out of trouble.  Which means that law and order, by its very nature, stifles the independent human spirit.

While law and order started out as a leveler of the playing field, it's since mutated into a system of control, actually repressing the very individuality it was originally designed to protect.

But wait.  It  gets weirder.

Not everyone accepts law and order.  Some people break out of the system, determined to flee the bonds of conformity.  These people are as fearless as they are feared, and they fall into two camps:  Leaders and Criminals.  The only real difference between them is that Leaders share their rewards with others, while Criminals keep their rewards for themselves.  And Leaders only share their rewards with others because they know that if they didn't, they'd be classified as Criminals.  That's why Steve Jobs is venerated and Charles Manson isn't:  Surveys and studies suggest higher-than-average rates of sociopathy among CEO's like Meg Whitman, who euphemistically describes the slashing of 29,000 jobs at Hewlett-Packard as "part of the company's turnaround" without batting an eyelash.  Meg's got shareholders with upside potential reward, so she gets a pass.  Charlie's path didn't provide rewards for others, so he got life with no possibility of parole.  Had he disobeyed his commanding officer and committed his same bloody acts against enemy soldiers during a war, he'd probably have earned himself a medal.

Okay, so Meg isn't as handy with a butcher knife, but you get the idea:  Those who step out of line get real rewards, while those who stay in line get their jobs taken away.  If you believe in law and order, you're easy to control.  You don't speak until spoken to. You take your smaller share because that's what you're given. You never complain because you don't want to rock the boat.  A generation or two of that kind of life and pretty soon your children buy into the idea that crowd-sourcing must be the right solution because everyone else thinks so -- no matter how wrong it is -- and besides, to speak above the crowd would invite discord.

Look, I'm a branding guy.  My world revolves around not being like everyone else.  So to me, watching society play out some freakish Ayn Rand reality is not only disturbing, but practically apocalyptic.  It poisons the very core of human nature and suffocates the creativity that fosters human growth.

This weekend when you're bicycling with the kids, leave the helmets at home.  Let them ride with the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces.  Take a risk. Even a small one.  Remind yourself of what an unpredictable adventure life is supposed to be -- instead of worrying about what might possibly get inked on your permanent record.

Unless, you know, you think it might get you in trouble.

Apple's Siri Sucks Your Soul

Nothing feels quite as good as vindication, especially when hordes of sycophants hurl invectives at a guy who's simply telling the truth.  I have to admit, I get more than my share of verbal stones thrown my way.  For example, I've never won any popularity contests for my perennial dismissal of Facebook as nothing more than a highly-charged novelty, played by venture capitalists as a "pump and dump" scheme on all same suckers who bought into Groupon.  For me, it was hard to contain my glee as the world witnessed Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) sink slowly into the muck.  And while I continue to believe Facebook will follow AOL's graceful arc into the meatgrinder, that's not why I'm writing today.

In case you haven't noticed, we live in a world obsessed with media.  "Tell a lie often enough," the professional Nazi machine professed, "and people believe it to be true."  These days, the media is possessed by a wild drive to be hip, cool and at the front of the line for every new fad and fashion, no matter the actual value of the fad or the toxicity of the fashion.

Take Apple, for example.  Yes, that Apple.  The one all your fanboys gush over like blushing schoolgirls.  The one with billions in the bank but only recently with which decided to trickle dividends to shareholders.

I should tell you right here and now that I've been a Mac guy forever. I can also tell you that I won't be a Mac guy forever.  Well, I'll keep using the stuff I have, but I certainly won't get sucked into anything past operating system 10.6.8.  Because after that, it's not about Apple taking your business.

It's about Apple taking your soul.

That's right, while you -- and the rest of the world -- are asleep at the switch, you're ignoring how Apple is deconstructing your humanity, bit by bit, under the guise of media techno-hype.  And if you doubt that at all, take thirty seconds to view this latest charmer from our friends in Cupertino and see if you can spot the fatal flaw:

There you have John Malkovich talking to his iPhone, which isn't all that strange.  But what you may not have noticed is that Malkovich is all by himself.  The machine -- in this case, Apple's Siri -- is the only interaction in his sparse, cold, lonely world.  The man is holding a conversation with a chip set, and convincing himself it's a rewarding experience.  And lest you dismiss this as some kind of anomaly, let me assure you it isn't.  In fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg in the path of humanity's social Titanic:

Increasingly, people are confounded by true social interaction.  They don't know what to say, when to say it or even to whom to say it.  You can yack about illegal immigration all you want, artificial intelligence is literally the job killer.  The media may be selling it as fabulous technology, but the truth is that Apple and its ilk are sucking the humanity out of your soul.  Painlessly, conveniently crippling our society while increasing its dependence on their technologies.

Sure, I sound like your grandpa in his rocker on the porch, but believe me, there was a time when "boy meets girl" happened "the old fashioned way," where someone asked someone else for directions.  Or ran into a shopper at the store.  Or even rode to the eleventh floor with you on her way to the fifteenth.

Now all that romance, all those random chances are vanishing with a simple point and click.

The other day, someone asked me why I wear an analog wristwatch.  After all, you can just pull out your cell phone to see what time it is.  I told them I refused to be tied to an electronic leash.  It's not about knowing the time any more.  It's about asserting your humanity.  Actually, it's about preserving your humanity before the next generation wonders what it was.

Next time you're tempted to ask Siri a question, ask yourself this:  What color are her eyes?