Lab Grown Culture

By now, almost everyone has heard about infamous marketing legends, usually about how something once worthless was marketed to become highly valuable. Sometimes it's merited. Other times, it's manufactured. For example, it's hard to believe that in the 19th century, before the invention of the internal combustion engine, gasoline was considered a nuisance waste product of petroleum. In the mid to late 1800s, rivers in Pennsylvania (home of America's first real oil fields) flowed with highly toxic gasoline, streaming down the river and killing every life form it touched. Eventually, that gasoline was recognized as a highly efficient fuel and that discovery literally changed the oil industry.

Of less value are the commodities whose values were inflated by creating artifical scarcity. Perhaps the best known chesnut is that of diamonds, a stone the public was marketed into believing was very rare, when if fact, diamonds are somewhat common. Before 1920, for example, nobody ever got engaged with a diamond ring. It was only after DeBeers captured a monopoly on diamonds that the concept gained traction. Just before the Great Depression, DeBeers had convinced the world that true devotion cost the average working man at least two months' salary and that "a diamond is forever."

Marketing culture is replete with those kinds of stories, most of which have stood the test of time. At least until now. Today, a combination of the economy, socialist politics, and technology have virtually wiped almost all of those concepts off the map, eradicating many of the hopes and dreams of both boomers and their heirs.

A diamond dealer friend of mine laments the fact that youung couples who still want diamond engagement rings increasingly choose the lab grown variety over natural stones. The reason is always price: The same weight lab grown stone is easily half to one third the price of a natural stone, with nobody able to tell the difference. So why pay more? Same thing with grandma's sets of china: Kids feel fine eating out of take-out boxes or scraping scraps off melmac. What's the difference? Need I go on? Sterling silver cutlery? Young people don't eat with it; they sell it. And crystal? Forget it. They consider it totally impractical, because let's face it, if you drop a plastic pitcher, it doesn't shatter.

The saddest part of this transition into mediocrity is that the boomer business class is still clinging to their values, hoping and praying that it's merely a "typical business cycle that will improve when the economy does." In the past, that was indeed the case. Unfortunately, these markets are never coming back. Ever.

And here's why:

The generations since the year 2000 have never sensed of loss of culture, because they never had one to begin with. Their existence has been completely void of aesthetics. Everything they touch, use and own is built for ease, disposability, affordability or utility. Who cares that Leonardo DaVinci spent years on his back painting the Sistine Chapel, when A.I. can create something just as interesting in seconds with one click of a mouse? What's the difference if it's grown in a lab? It sparkles the same way at a fraction of the price. What does it matter if we eat on paper plates? This way, we don't have to wash them.

And then there's the value aspect. All the old world values were worth something, and latter generations simply don't have the money to invest or spend on them. Tattoos? Sure. Weed? You bet. But saving for a house? Nah. Easier to whine about "affordable housing" and wait for the handout while the single family home gets crowded out by cheaper, smaller multi-story instant slums.

Put them all together and it spells socialism, the political theory based purely on utility and consistently resulting ultimate failure. Of course, it's the promise of socialism that attracts the young people. The notion that the stuff you were told to want was always just one big marketing bluff. Better to own nothing and be happy.

But here's the problem:

This phenomenon is soaking into actual human beings. Lab grown diamonds are one thing. Honor, love, ethics, ownership, pride of achievement, contribution to community, and culture are all quite another. They're not disposable. They're not instant and they're not always easy. They define who we are, and maybe more importantly, why we are.

I'm a firm believer in pendulum swings. And I sure hope the pendulum swings back one day -- and that I live long enough to see it.

Sideways at Sixty

After a few hundred clients and about the same number of blog posts, I finally decided to hang it up and officially retire from brand consulting. To be perfectly accurate, I actually pulled the plug on consulting in 2018, I just didn't make a big thing out of it. A number of my peers were curious as to why I'd retire a bit sooner than convention would have it, but the truth is that for the second time in my career, the landscape had shifted so dramatically as to render any further efforts somewhat futile. Allow me to explain:

The first time I reinvented my career was in the mid-1990s, when the digital revolution was underway and everything seemed to be changing. At the time, I was enjoying success as the owner of Frankel & Anderson, a boutique advertising agency known as "the bady boys of advertising." We had a good run, but by the mid-1990s it was clear that the advertising industry had shifted from a messaging industry to one of pure media. That is to say that ads no longer needed to carry a strategically relevant or compelling message (which was our specialty); clients simply could put anything out there, buy their media wholesale and hammer their logos into the heads of viewers and listeners until they bought something. In the blink of an eye, "garnering sales" gave way to "heightened awareness," which sucked up all the business on which we once thrived.

By 2000, I published The Revenge of Brand X, in which I argued that unless a brand was perceived to be "the only solution to your prospects' problem," it was really nothing more than a logo. Apparently, from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s enough CEO's were noticing that awareness alone wasn't generating sales, and that's when I became a brand strategy consultant. It worked. And for the next two decades, I was able to implement brand strategies that measurably increased profitable revenue for all those CEOs who were fed up with their faux ad agencies and underwhelming marketing staff.

And then the ground shifted again.

In the early 2000s, the typical CEO was at least 50 years old, schooled in the traditional art of business, where generating profitable revenue and growing market share was his perennial goal. By 2015, however, that had all changed: all those CEOs were disappearing, leaving teenagers with no marketing or business acumen in their place. Fewer and fewer CEOs cared about growth, brand value or profitability. I didn't need a second memo. My market was drying up fast. Besides, I was no longer a young buck out to change the world.

I had become older, wiser, and financially secure. And by wiser, I mean smart enough to realize that everyone else wasn't the problem; the problem was thatI had become obsolete. Whatever model the business world deployed, it didn't involve people like me. It was time to close shop and enjoy the fruits of my labors.

That decision may have been one of the best of my life. Stepping back to see the big picture meant stepping off the hamster wheel of a perpetual career. And that led me to a very stark and somewhat somber realization: most of my peers never get off the hamster wheel. They keep working for their future, as if they were still in their twenties. Of course, at 60, you shouldn't be living for your future. You should be switching it up and living for your present.

Unfortunately, I noticed a sad and peculiar phenomenon occurring with many of my over 60 friends: Many of them became former friends right around that birthday. People I'd known for most of my life suddenly disappeared. While I was tending roses in my garden, they were simply wallowing in the miserable realization that they hadn't fulfilled the potential to which they'd felt entitled. They were lawyers, professionals, and creative types -- all kinds of people, all littered with broken dreams, broken marriages, steady diets of alcohol and sharing the prospect of facing the rest of their days with more past behind them than future in front of them.

They're all running out of time, desperately hoping that in whatever time they have left, that miracle will come along that proves to the world just what its missed out on. Of course, the world doesn't care. It doesn't even know who they are. And that's when people go sideways at sixty.

All of these people have lost their parents, who were their safe harbor, constantly assuring them of their over-valued self-image. But now there's nobody left to offer those assurances. Their lives have been shattered by the lonely realization that all of their hopes and dreams were just that. And now there's no more hope.

I guess the lesson here is that life is all about adaptation. Knowing when to stay and when to go. Making difficult decisions and never believing your own press. The fact is that you have to adapt or die -- or die sooner.

Ai Won't Save the Real Estate Market

Forget Ai as the destroyer of economies. Bad as that is, if you really want to see economic destruction happening in real time, look no further than the highly-inflated world of real estate development. This implosion is already under way and gathering momentum. The only question now is which sucker is going to be left holding the bag:

In residential real estate, the big scam is developers overpaying for dirt on which they can overbuild rental units way past their normal density. How? Simple. By devoting up to 10% of the units to "affordable" or "low income" housing, they can kick up the allotted unit maximum to 10% over normal. Parking limits go out the window. No additional roadways or street improvements. Just more congestion and more people who can't afford it.

Did I mention that in a middle class neighborhood, a two bedroom apartment goes for $5,500 a month? Some affordability. But who cares? The developers and lenders are in it for just as long as it takes to flip it out. Take the money and run. Leave the instant slums for some other sucker to manage.

One lot near where I live is maybe an acre, tops. Butts up against a freeway and a major street. Nothing but dirt a year ago. Now it's home to a 375 unit monolith with the same unaffordable affordable housing. Best I can guess is that the communists in charge are banking on so much congestion that worker bees have no choice other than public transportation. With one problem:

None of the worker bees can afford the rents. Which means everything is eventually going to die in default.

It gets worse.

Commercial real estate is playing musical chairs, too. The former AT&T tower in St. Louis was sold for approximately $3.6 million, marking a significant decrease from its peak value of $205 million in 2006. Ouch.

And now the Hackman Group, which just a few years ago overpaid for as many movie studios as it could eat, is swan diving into defaults around the world. One example is the Radford Studios, home to shows like Seinfeld, Mary Tyler Moore and John Wayne's Republic Studios, just fell of the shelf, too: Hackman paid $1.8 billion for it just a year or so ago. This month, Netflix snatched it up for a tick below $400 million.

Do the math. A YUGE crash is coming and there's nobody left to save it. Unless you know people in Dubai.

Moral of the story: Hoard as much cash as you can, as fast as you can. You'll need it.

Where The Jobs Have Gone

At the time of this writing, the biggest bubble about to pop has to be the notion of Artifical Intelligence. But along with the overhyped promises it brings come the nefarious threats: massive unemployment, as large corporate interests begin replacing human employees with digital algorithms. Big boys like Amazon -- itself notorious for being an unbearable employer -- have already begun laying off thousands of white collar workers and the trend doesn't seem to be slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating.

What, if anything, are we to make of this? Well, maybe more than meets the eye.

First, realize that "having a job" is something relatively new to western culture. In fact, the idea of "working for a company" only came into existence around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when massive manufacturers required massive numbers of human employees. In the mid-nineteenth century, there were no electronic systems. No plastic. No digital overlords. Back then, industry required workers with sharp minds and strong backs. Without them, no mills could grind and no trains could roll. And lest you think it was all about physical labor, let me remind you that office work was no less intensive: Purchasing, billing, correspondence and work orders were created, processed and distributed through humans. No photocopy machines meant high rises with floors full of typists, all churning out the same memos because that was the least expensive means of short run printing.

It's no wonder, then, that the mid-nineteenth century was the era in which the United States began to shift its population from rural wheat fields to urban slums. For the first time, more Americans chose working nine to five jobs for a steady paycheck over helping Uncle Ned and Aunt Betty back home on the farm.

This is a fact of which most current Americans have no knowledge, yet it points out a distinctly American characteristic fundamental to our culture: up until this point in history, the vast majority of Americans were self-starters. Whether they tilled the land or repaired wagons, far more people were self-employed, if only because there was nobody else who would employ them. Sure, there were small businesses in dry goods and transport, but for the most part, it was every man for himself.

Artifical intelligence is pushing us back into that culture. If you're the type of person who expects society to create and employ you, you're also somewhat historically illiterate. The whole point of being American is being independent and free, which means avoiding reliance on anything -- government included. So the real pain of artificial intelligence isn't that it's displacing employees; it's that it's forcing an increasing number of people to become self-reliant, a characteristic that government adminstrations have been undermining since about 1932.

Still "want a job?" Okay, have a company pay you for working with your hands: fix stuff, like pipes and wires and rotting roof joists. Trim trees and clean houses. Or rise up and do what your ancestors did: Make stuff, preferably things that robots can't duplicate or imagine. Forget about that "creative" career designing logos. Those days are over.

From here on out, it's back to our roots. Every man for himself, building a world for his family and supporting a society that prides itself on the rewards of innovation instead of the cheap, fast buck.

And while you're at it, you may want to pick up a book or two on American history. It's all there.

Genuinely Artificial

You know, as a branding guy, I've been around a for quite a while. I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. Some incredible brilliance. Some unbelievable stupidity. I've lived through so many fads and frauds that sometimes I feel the events of my life were more fiction than fact. So many Next Big Things that swamped the media, bamboozled investors, and pumped and dumped more worthless stock than you can shake a ledger at.

The first big wave was software. It was the early 1990s, when personal computers were still new, and most early adopters were writing their own code, line by line. There was no internet, just boxes of "floppy disks" with new, pre-written software to process your words, or if you were really avant-garde, balance your checkbook. In those days, everyone wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next big software offering. Silicone Valley wasn't yet widely known, but San Jose and thereabouts was where digital rags to riches stories were being born.

At that time, the media was all about software princes like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and their ilk, writing them up as the Henry Fords and Thomas Edisons of a new generation. The one thing the media never talked about was the venture capital funds on Sandhill Road, who bought those kids' souls with truckloads of cash in the hopes their companies would go public, soaring to ridiculous valuations so that the venture guys would cash out before the companies died at the hands of retail reality.

It was commonly known that venture firms expected to make twenty times their investment on each company in which they invested, figuring that nineteen in twenty would likely fail. And since they took controlling interests, they pretty much decided who lived and died, financially speaking. So companies like Microsoft, Oracle -- and with a lot of struggle, Apple -- made incredible fortunes while sporting hugely unrealistic valuations: For a minute there, Qualcomm even broke the $1000 per share barrier.

But the software market eventually became saturated, and the venture capitalists needed a new source of suckery. That's when, in 1998, the internet came of age. All you have to do is replace the word "software" above with "dot com" and you'll see the exact same story unfolding throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. The only difference was that the stakes were way higher: instead of inventors making millions, they were raking in billions. The needy and greedy got stung by the "dot com bubble," in which hundreds of high-flying start ups got eviscerated about three minutes after they hit the market. All the dopes who felt they missed out of the software craze went broke after margin calls destroyed their overloaded positions in venture-pumped internet fantasies.

Not too long after that came the social media wave. Punks like Marc Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel founded companies like Facebook, Ebay and PayPal. Deals were happening faster, managed by people with established connections. Billions of digital money was sitting around in money markets just waiting for the next pump and dump scheme. Everything from search engines to social media was hyped as the Next Big Thing, with the same press releases and media hype that propelled software a decade earlier.

After the bulk of social media startups evaporated, along came mobile apps. Same venture funds, same wunderkinds, same pumps, same dumps. The promise of the world on your phone allowed high schoolers to squeeze more millions out of their ideas than pimples on their faces. And as you can tell by know, a few apps soared while most others swan-dived straight into the meat grinder.

Next Big Thing of the moment: artificial intelligence.

Let me start by stating that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. In the same way that "the cloud" is just someone else's hard drive with a fancy new name, artificial intelligence is simply ultra-fast computing. It can't invent anything. It can't make subjective judgments. In fact, it really only does one thing: it gathers and analyzes pre-existing data really, really fast. But to hear the media hype it, artificial intelligence is going to become our digital overlords, throwing everyone out of work while making stuff really fast and cheap.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And to prove it, I asked Grok, X's artificial intelligence service, to tell me all about -- you guessed it -- me. It took Grok about one minute and twenty-seven second to gather up and summarize everything about me (you can read it here, if you're interested). It sure looked like a meaty summary of who I am and what I do. But a quick read revealed there was a glaring problem with it: Everything it wrote was the sum total of all the hype I'd smeared around the internet during decades of my career. There was no objective analysis. No verification. No questioning of facts. Just pure, unadulterated regurgitation of stuff that I and everyone else had written about me.

So even though you may think I'm an angel, there's a whole lot about me that might no be so wonderful, none of which can be found by artificial intelligence. And that's hardly a source I -- or anyone else -- could trust.

And that's about all artificial intelligence can do. Despite that limitation, all the usual suspects are lining up to invest and pump the Next Big Thing because that's how they make their money. This is the fourth time in as many decades that the Silicone Valley boys are pulling the digital wool over the eyes of the American public, and a lot of people are falling for it.

Look, I'm not selling artificial intelligence short. It has its place in military and tactical weaponry, for example. But it's going to be a long, long time before artificial intelligence can fix that leak under your sink or write the Great American Novel. Not gonna happen. What is gonna happen is a lot of talking heads yapping about how artificial intelligence is going to be The Next Big Thing.

And if history is any indication, a whole lot of suckers are going to believe it.

Too Different for Democracy

The first years of any century are often the most dynamic.  Certainly the last three centuries have proven that: The 19th century witnessed the birth of the United States of America, its industry, politics and stock market, all of which radically changed the world's socio-political order as the first and only society based on personal freedoms. 

The 20th century experienced what may be the most under-reported transitions in world history: The collapse of centuries-old monarchies throughout the world and their replacement by republics, Bolshevism, Communism and other experimental systems of government. In just two decades, the political and geographic map of the globe was radically altered, setting the stage for multiple revolutions and two major global wars.

The 21st century is no different. At the time of this writing, we're two decades in, and the changes are shaking the planet. Only this time, the shifts are powered by massive amounts of political, financial and instant communications. Make no mistake, these are historic times, no doubt with historic outcomes.

After all this time, however, what have we really learned about people, power and politics? I can tell you what I've learned -- and you're not going to like it:

I submit to you that the vast majority of the world's population doesn't really want personal and political freedom.  Sound harsh? Take a little trip with me down Historical Data Lane and see if you don't agree:

First, understand that enjoying personal and political liberty requires a higher than average amount of intelligence. Sure, this will ring the leftist alarms of sounding racist, but outside of western cultures, the world's intelligence levels aren't terribly impressive. As George Carlin used to admonish, "The average person is pretty stupid, and half of them are stupider than that." He wasn't far off. The average IQ in the western world is 100 -- and half of those are below that.  And the rest of the species is even less impressive. 

Sublimating our animal instincts in favor of ethics, law, morality and innovation is appealing only to those who understand the benefits and accountability that goes with personal liberty. Unfortunately, without the intelligence, there is no understanding. And without the understanding, there is no stability.

Still hurts your feelings? Okay, so let's write all that off as nonsense.  Let's just go with history.

Aside from the United States of America, just about every political uprising "in the name of Democracy" has failed dramatically. Most people don't know that the republic of Haiti erupted into the world's first black democracy in the mid-nineteenth century and has been an impoverished failure ever since. That's almost two centuries of corruption, thievery and cut-throat poverty in a country where literacy is almost unknown. Before the revolution, Haiti was brutally dominated by western taskmasters. Not that life was easy, but it was for more sustainable than what came next.

Not convinced? Ask yourself what happened to the highly publicized "arab spring" of 2010/2011.  Remember that? In a perfectly planned public relations stunt, the persecution of a little vendor exploded into a purportedly long-awaited revolution that eventually spread across the entire Middle East. The theory was that the arab world was ready to embrace personal freedoms and democracy.

Except it wasn't and it didn't. Just as soon as the smoke cleared, all the old school strong man rulers resumed their thrones, with their boots firmly planted on the throats of their people, just like in the good old days. 

Still not sure? The same thing happened when the Soviet Union "collapsed." The "evil empire" became mired in economic confusion, but at the end of the day, a new Russian federation emerged headed up by yet another strongman who engineered a dynasty of his own and runs the place to this day.

Sensing a pattern here? Let me spell it out for you: Not only is most of the world incapable of democracy, they don't even want democracy.  What they want is a strong father figure who will tell them what to do, and where and when to do it. They don't want accountability. They like being free of decision-making. Having someone else do the heavy lifting takes a lot of pressure off them so they can focus on other, more basic life choices, whatever those may be. They want to hand off their fates to political and religious powers so that they don't have to think, period. In exchange for those favors, most of the globe's humans are willing to put up with poverty, corruption and misery.

The big question, then, is why are western cultures trying to force democracy on cultures that expressly reject it?  The big answer is simple: Because western cultures are often too engrained in their own arrogance. Even the furthest left social worker really believes he's "raising the standard of living" amongst people who have proven time and again that they aren't interested.

If one truly believes in self-determination, perhaps a better solution to world peace is simply backing off from other cultures and letting them do what they do, no matter how egregious or distasteful they may seem.  The epitome of western freedom and democracy itself is "your rights end where my nose begins." Their noses begin at their borders and maybe that's as far as we need to go.

As Devo once sang, "Freedom of choice is what you have/Freedom from choice is what you want." No wonder it became a hit.

Arnold Rothstein was Right

In the annals of American history, few can match the notoriety of Arnold Rothstein. If you've never heard of him, you're not alone. His is not a name venerated by historians or patriots, owing to the fact that Arnold Rothstein was the OG of the American underworld. Known for his powerful intelligence, Rothstein financed, fixed and finagled the world of business and professional sports, including --allegedly -- the 1919 World Series.

Rothstein rarely resorted to physical violence. In most cases, he didn't need to. Known as "the Brain," he usually outsmarted his adversaries -- and not always ethically. Legend has it that when betting against a contortionist's ability to swallow and regurgitate a cue ball, Rothstein swapped out the cue ball with one he'd made with a slightly larger diameter. The ball went down. It didn't come back up. The contortionist died and Rothstein collected on his bet.

When asked about his ability to succeed in so many ways on so many levels, Rothstein purportedly responded that everything boiled down to waiting for and acting on opportunity. Sometimes, he said, an opportunity arose quickly, requiring instant action.  Sometimes, an opportunity appeared on the horizon allowing him time to prepare for future action.  But most importantly, he emphasized, when there was no opportunity, it took extreme discipline to do nothing at all.  At that time, he advised, all you can do is wait. For Arnold Rothstein, only losers chased opportunities out of desperation.

Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams said the same thing about waiting for the right pitch, and they're still in the record books.

Though he died tragically at a relatively young age, waiting for the right opportunity proved to be Rothstein's ultimate brilliant legacy, emerging 100 years later on November 5, 2024.

Before you get too far, understand this isn't about gloating; this is about strategy and tactics. Back in 2020, a large portion of the American public was draped in the darkness of depression as they realized their country was is real danger of destruction. The perceived threats seemed to grow in number and effectiveness on a daily basis, with no real remedies in sight.

The truth is that were no remedies in 2021. But by late 2022, an opportunity did appear on the horizon: It was the election of 2024. It would take planning. Organization. Mobilization. And lots and lots of waiting.

A few years later, the general election of 2024 became, without doubt, the most important election in the history of the United States. Unlike the election of 2020, there was no need to swap the cue ball; this game was won by smarter strategies and greater tactics. Most importantly, it was won by waiting for the opportunity.  Preparing for it. And then, as Abraham Lincoln suggested, "executing swiftly."

It doesn't matter for whom you voted. The important aspect is that you -- and the world -- witnessed one of the most powerful moments in American history, one in which the most noble republic was restored and resurrected. 

Congratulations.