What Price Art?

Artists are often excessive. Van Gogh’s ear.

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull.

Andy Warhol’s wig.

And then there’s Hollywood.

In 1974 a TV commercial director turned screenwriter called Michael Cimino made his first feature.

The movie Thunderbolt & Lightfoot enjoyed solid box office success.

And his second The Deer Hunter, was not only a massive hit but knocked it right out the park, winning 5 Oscar’s including 1979’s Best Picture and Best Director.

So around this time Michael Cimino was arguably the hottest director in Hollywood.

And for his next project he was able to cut a very favourable deal with United Artists.

One unusual feature of this deal was the absence of a penalty clause for cost overruns, a standard contractual practice enforced by the studios at that time.

The film Cimino wanted to make was close to his heart and he had been trying to make it since 1971.

Then, United Artists had passed on the The Johnson County War as it was called, when it failed to attract any stars.

Now Cimino was a star and Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Walken, were duly cast as the film’s three main characters.

Heaven’s Gate is an epic tale set in Wyoming of the 1890s it portrays an almost biblical struggle of ranchers against immigrants.

Shooting took place mainly in Montana.

That is when shooting took place - because the production fell behind schedule, pretty much from day one.

There were rumours of rampant drug use by cast and crew.

Cimino became obsessive about the smallest period details and was soon nicknamed “The Ayatollah”.

Actors originally booked for 3 weeks had their bookings extended to six months.

And an original budget of $11.6 million ballooned to $44 million.

By the time production wrapped over 220 hours of film had been shot.

The year before, Superman had cost $55 million making it the most expensive movie ever made.

So a $44 million budget while hardly insignificant was also not completely unprecedented.

However there was one crucial difference between Superman and Heaven’s Gate.

Superman went on to gross $134.21 million in the U.S. alone.

Heaven’s Gate’s U.S. gross was a wretched $1.3 million.

The New York Times review called it, "an unqualified disaster".

And the movie was pulled from theatres after a week.

Now Cimino’s star fell almost as quickly as it had risen.

But much later, imperceptibly, the pendulum began to swing the other way.

Until in 2011 Time Out called Heaven’s Gate one of the best 12 westerns ever made.

In 2012 a 216 minute director’s cut* was shown at the Venice Film Festival to great acclaim.

And in 2013 The New York Times recanted, stating: "The film’s scope, natural backdrops, massive sets, complex choreography and cinematography are seductive, at times stunning".

I think it’s a great film.

And besides, these days $44 million barely buys a decent Warhol.

Or so I'm told.

* You can get this cut on DVD from Criterion

The Invisible Brief

In 1999 Harvard psychologists Christopher Chabris and Donald Simons conducted a famous experiment on selective attention. If you’d like to try the original experiment, you can find it here before I spoil it.

If you're not going to try it, here’s how it works.

Two teams simultaneously pass two basketballs.

Participants were asked to count how many times the team in white passes the ball.

While they are carrying out this task, a person in a gorilla suit walks across the screen.

Incredibly, the experiment shows that roughly 50% of participants fail to notice the gorilla even though it’s in plain view for 9 seconds.

Proving that when we are completely engrossed in a task, we are quite likely to miss what’s happening around us.

This metaphor applies very well to business.

Companies get so engrossed in day-to-day operations that they fail to spot important trends.

And get blinded sided by the obvious.

And few things are more obvious than the proverbial 900 pound gorilla.

Blockbuster’s gorilla was Netflix.

RIM’s gorilla was the iPhone.

Groupon’s gorilla is a lack of sustainable merchant benefit.

And this metaphor also applies to advertising on an almost daily basis.

Explaining why 90% of advertising is crap.

Because between the strategy documents, the PowerPoint presentations and media charts, the obvious has gone missing on Madison Avenue and along Shoreditch.

(Not that the condition is limited to London and New York.)

It occurs everywhere the industry is too busy complicating things to remember what a simple business advertising essentially is.

Everywhere agencies fail to recognize the invisible brief.

So here it is made fully visible:

Get noticed and remembered for being relevant.

It’s guaranteed to improve any brief.

And it’s often the only one you need.

The X Effect

 {AN A-Z of almost everything in 1897 words}

Introduction

The idea for this blog is simple, but hopefully not simplistic.

A grown-up version of a kid’s alphabet book crossed with the Devil’s Dictionary; dissecting business, cultural and historic effects.

Originally, I posted part one covering A, B, C & D in Sept 2012.

Subsequently I decided it would work better as a single piece.

Readers will inevitably disagree with some of the subjects chosen and observations made.

And that’s fine, naturally it reflects personal bias.

However, I imagine most people will at least agree with the beginning.

As every kid knows, A is for Apple.

The Apple Effect

The Apple effect is an exceptional user experience based on intuition instead of research.

Technology that’s so intuitive, and childishly easy to use, it’s almost anti-technology.

And paradoxically is probably the best technology in the world.

That’s how valuable intuition can be.

Of course it helps when you have a grown-up child running the company.

Steve we miss you.

The Boutique Effect

The boutique effect is the growth of small thinking.

From boutique hotels to boutique law firms, via financial boutiques and boutique spas, what was once a 60’s word for a groovy clothing store signifies what exactly?

It's the antidote to soulless and corporate.

The promise of a personal touch that’s increasingly hard to deliver and therefore more sought after than ever.

It’s the notion that personal and nimble service is better and worth paying more for.

The Churchill Effect

The Churchill effect is victory in the face of overwhelming odds.

He knew when your back is against the wall, you need resolute creativity to stop the wall falling on your head.

He not only played a huge part in saving the free world, he was witty and smart.

He didn’t just write books, he won the Nobel Prize for literature and enjoyed bricklaying and raising pigs.

He was the stuff of legend.

The Da Vinci Effect

The Da Vinci effect goes beyond mere beauty and even beyond genius.

Although it usually takes both to make it happen.

It’s that moment when the sublime connects us to the divine.

People most commonly experience it as a result of great art.

Or when they get lucky, great sex.

However you experience it, you’ll know when you do, because if only for a moment you and the universe will be completely in synch.

The English Effect

The English effect is ubiquitous, the most widely spoken language in the world.

Of course it was spread through Empire and colonialism.

But there‘s more to it than that.

English was the first killer app.

It’s the world’s lingua franca, because it’s easy to learn, fun to use, and comes with some great and truly global literature.

If you only speak one, make sure it’s this one!

The fcuk Effect

The fcuk effect shows how far misspelling a good old Anglo-Saxon word can take you.

Originally an acronym used on internal faxes between the Hong Kong (FCHG) and London Offices (FCUK).

Somebody at TBWA realised it was a gold mine and used it to turn a moderately successful fashion company into a very successful global fashion brand.

Of course it doesn’t hurt to have Jason Statham modeling either.

Sometimes the answer is under your nsoe.

The Google Effect

The Google effect is revolution.

It made algorithms sexy and the internet truly useful and accessible.

It showed the power of a simple idea (ranking sites by number of links) allied with complex layered execution.

On the way it re-wrote media buying with pay-per-click advertising.

Re-wrote corporate slogans with Don’t be Evil.

But the Google effect is changing as the revolutionaries inevitably become the establishment.

What the next five years will bring is far from clear, but one thing’s for sure – we’re going to find out.

The Halloween Effect

The Halloween effect is the commercialization of any and everything.

Halloween used to be a one night event which has crept to a week and is still creeping.

Now Halloween merch hits the shelves in August.

True, holiday creep affects other days like Christmas and Valentine’s

Christmas merch hits the shelves Nov 1.

But when even the supernatural and pagan is haunted by the profit motive, be afraid.

Be very afraid.

The IBM Effect

The IBM effect is innovation, which may surprise some.

But it shouldn’t, IBM has been innovating since its incorporation in 1914.

In 1915, long before think different, IBM’s one word mission statement was THINK.

And think they did inventing the electric typewriter, the mainframe, the web server, and the hard drive.

Today IBM holds over 6,000 patents more than any company in the world.

And IBM employees have won 5 Nobel prizes.

You can never count IBM out.

The Jargon Effect

The jargon effect is content without meaning.

Jargon and especially business jargon, seeks to camouflage a lack of clarity or substance, through dogma and ritual incantation.

By moving forward to drive deeper consumer engagement and nurturing long-term multi-channel relationships to promote true brand champions delivering an excellent brand experience through a great culture underscoring robust vision.

Jargon is a smokescreen for the absence of thinking and thrives in the echo chamber.

Don’t do jargon.

The Knowledge Effect

The Knowledge effect is paradoxically, uncertainty.

Partly because the more we know, the more we’re aware of what we don’t know.

And also because there is no single definition of knowledge, just numerous theories attempting to explain it.

And finally because the gaining of knowledge starts with questions, and those questions, spring from uncertainty.

The only certain thing about knowledge is that it is infinitely preferable to ignorance.

The Luxury Effect

The Luxury effect is largely illusory.

The democratization of luxury means what passes as luxe is essentially just packaged aspiration.

Your “Italian” handbag may be finished in Italy but is likely mass-produced in China.

This doesn’t mean luxury itself is an illusion; it just lives at a more rarefied level.

A place where if you have to ask the price – you simply can’t afford it.

The Mobile Effect

The mobile effect means anywhere is your office and your office can be anywhere.

Which puts you everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

And that’s the same coffee shop as everybody else.

Which is why everyone is confused about mobile.

It’s like the first few seconds of a Tsunami.

The News Effect

The news effect is both hard and soft.

From CNN to Fox, 24/7 news channels need feeding 24/7.

And when there isn’t enough hard news.

They engineer soft news like another Lindsay Lohan story.

So it’s harder and harder to trust the news when half of it is fiction.

Especially when you can’t tell which half.

The Obama Effect

The Obama Effect turns underdogs into overdogs.

From the 2008 primaries to the 2012 second term impossible became is-possible.

And history got made more than once.

Whether you like Obama’s politics, or not is irrelevant.

His significance is indisputable.

As is his organization’s social media nous.

The PayPal Effect

The PayPal effect is monopoly of the first-est.

Inventing the category and then owning the channel is very powerful.

Most people are conservative when it comes to money and brand recognition breeds confidence, as it should when you handle 60% of all web-based payment processing.

This puts you in the enviable position of low price sensitivity.

You can get away with high fees and double down on currency exchange.

The Quantitative Effect

The Quantitative effect is exponential growth, as human understanding increases at an inhuman rate.

We experience this primarily through our daily interaction with consumer technology.

But 90% of what we know about our brains was discovered in the last 10 – 15 years.

And neuroscience is only one area where the enchilada is getting bigger.

Ditto nanotech, astrophysics and bionics - more fields where more leads to more.

The Recreational Drugs Effect

The Recreational Drugs effect is double-edged.

A $400 billion global market that’s bigger than big oil.

At 1% of global GDP it’s big enough to bolster the legit economy.

The other side is an increasingly vacuous, jacked up or strung out populace.

Most people wish they were somewhere else.

Hence the phrase “Travel’s addictive.”

And drugs are often more convenient than travel.

The Starbucks Effect

The Starbucks effect is the effect of camouflage.

Most people don’t like coffee that much.

If they did, they would drink just black-unadulterated-coffee.

What most people really like is the coffee buzz from the caffeine.

You can disguise the coffee with whipped cream or caramel and still get the buzz.

People like whipped cream and caramel, so now you can sell a load of coffee.

The Twitter Effect

The Twitter effect is dichotomy.

Twitter is a superficial community whose lingua franca is fluff.

Twitter is a powerful grassroots news source that levels the playing field.

That both statements are simultaneously true is testament to the power of Twitter.

As is our increasingly limited 140 character attention span.

These 398 characters (with spaces) are probably boring you already.

The Urbanization Effect

The Urbanization effect is greater than mass-migration.

True, the majority of the world’s population living in cities for the first time has huge implications, especially for developing nations.

It’s the price of globalization.

And part of the price is our separation from nature.

Our race is literally moving away from nature and this is hardly reassuring.

How do you treasure and preserve something you’ve never experienced?

The Virgin Effect

The Virgin effect is getting the customer to trust you.

This is the single most powerful thing any brand can do.

When you do it consistently for 40 years your customers will fly with you, communicate through you and invest with you.

They’ll even pay you to take them on a potentially dangerous journey to space, the final frontier.

But the first frontier is trust.

The Walmart Effect

The Walmart effect is the militarization of retail.

From the second largest satellite network after the US military, to a scorched earth policy when it comes to mom and pop shops.

It’s the logistics/machine needed to become the #1 retailer of pretty much everything.

And sell practically anything cheaper than anyone else.

The quest for always low prices is a serious business here.

And everyone likes low prices.

Whatever the cost.

The X Effect

The X effect is unknown.

It lives in a garage or a basement.

Existing as a hazy intention, a feeling, a thought that doesn't quite form.

But it’s going to be big, very big.

So keep working on it and consider this blog as:

a) Inspiration

b) A gentle kick up the arse

It's really up to you.

The YouTube Effect

The YouTube effect is the promise of going viral.

It plays to our narcissism.

Why be a bit player in someone else’s movie, when you can be the star of your own?

The fact that you can’t act, edit or direct is irrelevant.

This very lack of talent may be all it takes to make you an overnight sensation.

What are you waiting for?

The Zebra Effect

The Zebra effect is to be avoided, as the Zebra is a horse invented by a committee.

If you avoid committees, you’ll not only avoid loads of boredom you’ll also avoid creating zebras.

This is a good thing.

They may look cute but by all accounts, even in their natural habitat, they’re fairly useless animals.

Unless you’re a lion – yum yum.

It Smells Like Roses Sire!

Woody Allen’s 2011 movie Midnight in Paris is his best film in years. It’s based around the simple premise that we love looking back to a nostalgically golden age.

Which ipso facto confers a degree of shabbiness on our own.

Splendour resides in renaissance Florence or Paris in the 1920’s or London in the swinging 60’s.

Never in our own age.

I think we’re all sporadically susceptible to this nostalgic yearning for better, more perfect days.

A time when if you left the door unlocked your neighbours would leave a freshly baked pie on your kitchen table.

When a sportsman’s accomplishments were the result of individual talent, unadorned by pharmaceutical enhancement.

A time when bankers were honest, and politicians were, if not exactly truthful, then at least not brazen liars.

But did a golden age, any golden age actually exist?

Many Historians consider the reign of Henry VIII as the start of an English golden age.

If splendour is a criterion, kings don’t come more splendiferous than Henry VIII.

He still fascinates us, The Tudors debuted in 2007 and ran for four seasons on Showtime.

And his appeal is understandable, in his youth Henry was among the best athletes in the country.

He was good-looking and well-educated.

He spent the equivalent of £2 million a year on clothes.

The historian John Guy considers him, "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne".

True, in later life he turned into a paranoid head-chopping  monster afflicted with gout for certain, and either syphilis or, more probably type II diabetes (historians differ).

Well nobody’s perfect but even in his prime Henry had a dirty little secret.

Except it wasn’t really a secret, he was a courtier with a title: The Groom of the Stool.

The Groom of the Stool was a confidant of the King and as such was both feared and respected.

His insider knowledge about the King meant he wielded considerable influence at court.

Even though The Groom of the Stool’s intimacy and power sprung from a rather unsavoury function.

Because in those days of yore and very basic plumbing, The Groom of the Stool was only on hand to wipe the King’s arse.

So it’s safe to say there was never a golden age for politicians.

They have always been full of it.

The phrase Golden Age originally came from Greek mythology.

Maybe a myth is all it ever was.

Perhaps that’s why we still need to hear it from time to time.

From Clay to Silicon via Carbon

This time of year we seem hardwired to look forwards and backwards simultaneously. Pundits pundicize the trends, themes and memes they think will be significant over the next 12 months, while reviewers review the trends, themes and memes of the year gone by.

If to paraphrase Pearl Buck, we can only understand the future when we understand the past - then perhaps looking further back than 12 months, will also allow us to look further ahead.

Around 1800 BC in the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (today’s Iraq), a technological revolution was in full swing.

The Babylonians invented advanced mathematics; they understood fractions, algebra and quadratic equations and more.

We know this because they had already developed writing.

Their cuneiform script was impressed into moist clay tablets using one end of a reed which left wedge-shaped marks.

And clay, once cured is surprisingly durable.

Hundreds of thousands of tablets survive; the British Museum alone has over 70,000.

Early archeologists thought cuneiform was purely decorative, but after studying it for a couple of hundred years they learnt to translate it.

The language was at first called Babylonian and/or Assyrian, but has now come to be known as Akkadian*.

So what compelled the Babylonians to develop Akkadian?

What was so important they had to record it?

The two most famous tablets deal with mathematics.

One shows a square with two diagonals.

While another named Plimpton 322 shows a numerical table.

Together they more or less prove that the Babylonians had substantially cracked** a theorem that some 1,500 years later would be more widely attributed to a Greek chap called Pythagoras.

This is important because of the theorem’s practical application in areas like construction and shipbuilding.

Because not all Babylonians were brainiacs, the majority were preoccupied with…pretty much the same stuff many of us are preoccupied with today.

Consequently, the majority of tablets deal with everyday matters: family, trade and real estate transactions.

Prosaic records like wedding contracts, deeds, bills of lading, bonds, receipts and accounts, the contents of an ancient Banker’s Box gathering dust in a closet.

We’ve serendipitously exchanged one mineral for another and our technology runs on silicon instead of clay.

And while hard drives may double in size every 18 months the central processor called human nature remains a constant.

On the one hand this is disappointing.

It would be nice to see us humans evolve to a higher plane, a place where we could put an end to war and hunger for example.

On the other hand there’s something reassuring about being so obstinately immutable amidst the rapid change of the Digital Age.

Up to now.

Because biology and technology are merging and the silicon is getting physically closer to our carbon selves.

We’ve gone from desktops computers to the augmented reality of Google Glass in ten years or so.

Eventually this cyborgization will erase the distance between silicon and carbon.

Neural implants already exist in research labs.

It won't be long before you can pop into your local Brains "R" Us for a cognitive booster implant.

But we don't need to wait until then to see how technology is changing human nature.

You can already see it in little ways, like a 140 character attention span.

The question is definitely how?

Not if.

Let’s hope it’s changing us for the better.

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* This line is pasted directly from Wikipedia

** For more on the arcane subject of Babylonian mathematics R. Creighton Buck’s monograph, Sherlock Holmes in Babylon is a good place to start.

The X Effect (part one)

The Apple Effect The Apple effect is what happens when you produce exceptional user experience based on intuition instead of research.

And turn it into what is probably the best technology in the world.

Technology that’s so intuitive, and childishly easy to use, it’s almost anti-technology.

That’s how valuable intuition can be.

Of course it helps when you have a grown-up child running the company so well.

Come back Steve we miss you.

The Boutique Effect

The boutique effect is the growth of small thinking.

It’s also ubiquitous, from boutique hotels to boutique law firms, via financial boutiques and boutique spas, what was once a 60’s word for a groovy clothing store signifies what exactly?

It’s simply a French word for shop, but when its usage has even spread to industry, as in boutique manufacturing, it obviously signifies something more.

It’s a promise of a personal touch that’s increasingly hard to deliver and therefore more sought after than ever.

It’s the notion that personal and nimble service is better and worth paying (more) for.

The Churchill Effect

The Churchill effect is persistence writ larger than life, a determination to overcome adversity and mistakes.

It’s self-belief in the face of overwhelming odds.

Because he knew, when your back is against the wall, you need resolute creativity to stop the wall falling on your head.

But there was more.

Here was a man who not only played a huge part in saving the free world, he was witty and smart.

He didn’t just write books, he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

And in his spare time he enjoyed bricklaying and keeping pigs.

So perhaps the real Churchill effect is the stuff of legend.

 The Da Vinci Effect

The Da Vinci effect goes beyond mere beauty and even beyond genius.

Although it usually takes both to make it happen.

It’s that moment when the sublime connects us to the divine.

People most commonly experience it as a result of great art.

Or when they get lucky, great sex.

However you experience it, you’ll know when you do, because if only for a moment you and the universe will be completely in synch.

To be continued...

Rails and Fences

There are true stories and stories that are so good they deserve to be true, even when they’re not. The tale I’m about to relate probably falls into the latter category.

I heard it many years ago and have remembered it ever since, although its provenance escapes me.

It takes place in the heyday of the American West, when railroads were expanding across the country at breakneck speed and fortunes were being made even faster.

An old school Tycoon is being interviewed by a Journalist, in the gilt and velvet splendor of his private railroad car.

In the middle of the interview, the railroad’s Chief Engineer apologizes for interrupting with an urgent matter.

There are mountains on the route ahead, where the track needs to be laid, and the Chief Engineer has identified three options.

A tunnel could be blasted through the mountains.

A detour of many miles could be taken circumventing the mountains altogether.

A series of cuttings and bridges could be built routing the line through the foothills of the mountains.

Each option has its merits and its drawbacks.

The Engineer is stumped and wants the Tycoon’s advice.

A map is hastily unrolled across the Tycoon’s carved mahogany desk and the engineer traces the possibilities with a pencil.

It’s a complex problem involving engineering, obviously, but also immediate and long-term cost effectiveness, supply logistics and more.

The Tycoon ponders for a minute or two.

He asks the Engineer a couple of questions.

Then he tells him to go ahead and start blasting the tunnel.

The Journalist is gob smacked.

When the Engineer leaves he asks the Tycoon how he could solve a problem of such complexity so fast.

The Tycoon admits he had no idea what the best solution was.

And goes onto explain that since none were obviously superior and there was a one-in-three chance of picking the right one, so he just took a guess.

The incredulous Journalist asks how he could let a guess decide such an important financial matter.

A matter with hundreds of millions of dollars, in today's money at stake.

The Tycoon replies that the money was not his first concern, for him the important thing was to show leadership, especially because he was uncertain.

Leadership is one of the holy grails of business.

It’s right up there with profitability and innovation.

Thousands of books have been written, and keynotes delivered, to make business people better leaders.

This is all good.

But the most essential trait of a good leader is simply this.

They don’t sit on the fence.

Gordon Gecko Lied

Wall Street released in 1987, was one of the 80’s movies. And when Gordon Gecko told us, “Greed is good!” the performance was so good, we believed him.

Gecko entered the zeitgeist and the phrase became enmeshed in the era’s collective unconscious.

The corporate world certainly embraced the credo with both hands; greed was good, better than good, Wall Street made greed cool.

The party continued until around 2000 with a couple of blips like Enron.

But by the late Noughties it started going off the charts, first there was Bernie Madoff.

Now, there’s Barclay’s rate fixing and HSBC’s money laundering.

And they’re both small potatoes compared to the $21 trillion hidden offshore by the uber-rich.

Before Wall Street, there was a time when Hollywood was not so obsessed with bling.

Sometimes I’ll catch that old-school Hollywood on TCM.

A Fever in the Blood, made in 1961, mixes murder and courtroom drama with a gubernatorial nomination race.

It’s no classic, just an entertaining film noir or technically neo-noir, of a type Hollywood used to turn out by the hundreds.

It stars Efrem Zimbalist Jr, Don Ameche and the gorgeous Angie Dickinson.

There’s a synopsis of the plot here for movie buffs.

Suffice it to say that the movie’s final scene has Efrem Zimbalist Jnr’s character Judge Leyland Hoffman nominated as his party’s gubernatorial candidate by popular acclaim.

It’s a dramatic moment as he is applauded through the convention hall and takes his place on the podium behind a lectern loaded with microphones.

Of course he gives an inspiring speech, but I wasn’t really listening because something caught my eye.

On the front of the lectern was a campaign slogan:

HEALTH  EDUCATION  PROSPERITY

I don’t think it was there to make a political statement.

It was probably thought up on the spur of the moment by an art director as a plausible generic campaign slogan.

And if movies represent or mirror the culture, then the culture this one reflects is an altogether less greedy one.

Of course that was before political debate got reduced to sound bites like, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

A phrase coined by Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville.

You might reasonably expect the Democrats at least to proclaim, “It’s healthcare stupid.” or “It’s education stupid.”

Their reticence speaks volumes and also highlights the extent to which free market capitalism has taken over the debate.

Today the sign on the lectern would read: PROSPERITY  PROSPERITY  PROSPERITY.

And it doesn’t add up, because HEALTH and EDUCATION are prerequisites for PROSPERITY.

At least for what might be termed a genuinely prosperous society which I’ll loosely define as one where the majority get a chance to fulfill their economic potential.

Which of course free market boosters tell us we already have, with fortunes waiting to be made by everyone with an ounce of grit and derring-do.

Well I don’t believe it.

What I believe is at some point we forgot that there’s a difference between prosperity and greed.

When billionaires are up to their necks in offshore tax evasion, do we really expect young men from the projects to spurn a Hummer ridin’ Hennessy sippin’ thug life, for a slow and steady college education, or minimum wage job at Micky D’s?

Why should they, if greed is so good?

At the risk of sounding like a neo-hippie, we need to re-think this.

We need to find a more balanced way.

Or just douse me in patchouli and lead me to the commune.