Author Archives: ghotchkiss

A.I. and Our Current Rugged Landscape

In evolution, there’s something called the adaptive landscape. It’s a complex concept, but in the smallest nutshell possible, it refers to how fit species are for a particular environment. In a relatively static landscape, status quos tend to be maintained. It’s business as usual. 

But a rugged adaptive landscape —-one beset by disruption and adversity — drives evolutionary change through speciation, the introduction of new and distinct species. 

The concept is not unique to evolution. Adapting to adversity is a feature in all complex, dynamic systems. Our economy has its own version. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called them Gales of Creative Destruction.

The same is true for cultural evolution. When shit gets real, the status quo crumbles like a sandcastle at high tide. When it comes to life today and everything we know about it, we are definitely in a rugged landscape. COVID-19 might be driving us to our new future faster than we ever suspected. The question is, what does that future look like?

Homo Deus

In his follow up to his best-seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” author Yuval Noah Harari takes a shot at predicting just that. “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” looks at what our future might be. Written well before the pandemic (in 2015) the book deals frankly with the impending irrelevance of humanity. 

The issue, according to Harari, is the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness. Once we break the link between the two, the human vessels that have traditionally carried intelligence become superfluous. 

In his book, Harari foresees two possible paths: techno-humanism and Dataism. 

Techno-humanism

In this version of our future, we humans remain essential, but not in our current form. Thanks to technology, we get an upgrade and become “super-human.”

Dataism

Alternatively, why do we need humans at all? Once intelligence becomes decoupled from human consciousness, will it simply decide that our corporeal forms are a charming but antiquated oddity and just start with a clean slate?

Our Current Landscape

Speaking of clean slates, many have been talking about the opportunity COVID-19 has presented to us to start anew. As I was writing this column, I received a press release from MIT promoting a new book “Building the New Economy,” edited by Alex Pentland. I haven’t read it yet, but based on the first two lines in the release, it certainly seems to be following this type of thinking:“With each major crisis, be it war, pandemic, or major new technology, there has been a need to reinvent the relationships between individuals, businesses, and governments. Today’s pandemic, joined with the tsunami of data, crypto and AI technologies, is such a crisis.”

We are intrigued by the idea of using the technologies we have available to us to build a societal framework less susceptible to inevitable Black Swans. But is this just an invitation to pry open Pandora’s Box and allow the future Yuval Noah Harari is warning us about?

The Debate 

Harari isn’t the only one seeing the impending doom of the human race. Elon Musk has been warning us about it for years. As we race to embrace artificial intelligence, Musk sees the biggest threat to human existence we have ever faced. 

“I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,” warns Musk. “It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

There are those that pooh-pooh Musk’s alarmism, calling it much ado about nothing. Noted Harvard cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker, whose rose-colored vision of humanity’s future reliably trends up and to the right, dismissed Musk’s warnings with this: “If Elon Musk was really serious about the AI threat, he’d stop building those self-driving cars, which are the first kind of advanced AI that we’re going to see.”

In turn, Musk puts Pinker’s Pollyanna perspective down to human hubris: “This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea — which is fundamentally flawed.”

From Today Forward

This brings us back to our current adaptive landscape. It’s rugged. The peaks and valleys of our day-to-day reality are more rugged then they have ever been — at least in our lifetimes. 

We need help. And when you’re dealing with a massive threat that involves probability modeling and statistical inference, more advanced artificial intelligence is a natural place to look. 

Would we trade more invasive monitoring of our own bio-status and aggregation of that data to prevent more deaths? In a heartbeat.

Would we put our trust in algorithms that can instantly crunch vast amounts of data our own brains couldn’t possibly comprehend? We already have.

Will we even adopt connected devices constantly streaming the bits of data that define our existence to some corporate third party or government agency in return for a promise of better odds that we can extend that existence? Sign us up.

We are willingly tossing the keys to our future to the Googles, Apples, Amazons and Facebooks of the world. As much as the present may be frightening, we should consider the steps we’re taking carefully.

If we continue rushing down the path towards Yuval Noah Harari’s Dataism, we should be prepared for what we find there: “This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”

The Mother of all Mood Swings

How are you doing? 

Yes, you. 

I know how I’m doing — today, anyway. It varies day to day. It depends on the news. It depends on the weather. It depends on Trump’s Twitter stream.

Generally, I’m trying to process the abnormal with the tools I have. I don’t know precisely how you’re doing, but I suspect you’re going through your own processing with your own tools.

I do know one thing. The tools I have are pretty much the same tools you have, at least when we look at them in the broad strokes. It’s one of the surprising things about humans. We all go through some variation of the same process when we deal with life’s big events. 

Take grief and other traumatic life changes. We’re pretty predictable in how we deal with it. So predictable, in fact, that there’s a psychological model with its own acronym for it: DABDA. It’s known as the five stages of grief:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It was first introduced in 1969 by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.  

Noted American neurobiologist and author Robert Sapolsky marvels on the universality of our processing of grief in his book  “The Trouble with Testosterone”:  “Poems, paintings, symphonies by the most creative artists who ever lived, have been born out of mourning… We cry, we rage, we demand that the oceans’ waves stop, that the planets halt their movements in the sky, all because the earth will no longer be graced by the one who sang lullabies as no one else could; yet that, too, is reducible to DABDA. Why should grief be so stereotypical?”

But it’s not just bad stuff we process this way. If you look at how we process any big change, you’ll find there are pretty predictable stages we humans go through.

So why are we so predictable in how we deal with change? In general, these are all variations of the sensemaking cycle, which is how we parse the world around us. We start with a frame — an understanding of what we believe to be true — and we constantly compare this to new information we get from our environment. 

Because we are cognitively energy-efficient, we are reluctant to throw out old frames and adopt new ones, especially when those new ones are being forced upon us. It’s just the way we’re wired. 

But life change is usually a solo journey, and we rely on anchors to help us along the way. We rely on our psychoscapes, the cognitive environments in which our minds typically operate. Friends, families, favorite activities, social diversions: these are the things that we can rely on for an emotional boost, even if only temporarily.

But what if everyone is experiencing trauma at the same time? What if our normal psychoscape is no longer there? What then?

Then we enter the SNAFU zone.

SNAFU is an acronym coined in World War II:  “situation normal, all f*cked up.”  It was used to refer to a situation that is bad, but is also a normal state of affairs. 

We are talking a lot about the new normal. But here’s the thing: The new situation normal is going to be a shit show, guaranteed to be all f*cked up. And it’s going to be that way because everyone  — and I mean everyone — is going to be going through the Mother of all Mood Swings. 

First of all, although the stages of managing change may be somewhat universal, the path we take through them is anything but. Some will get stuck at the denial and anger stage and storm the state legislature with assault weapons demanding a haircut. Some are already at acceptance, trying to navigate through a world that is officially SNAFU. We are all processing the same catalyst of change, but we’re at different places in that process. 

Secondly, the psychological anchors we depend on may not be there for us. When we are going through collective stress, we tend to rely on community. We revert to our evolutionary roots of being natural herders. Without exception, the way humans have always dealt with massive waves of change is to come together with others. And this is where a pandemic that requires social distancing throws a king-sized wrench in the works. We can’t even get a hug to help us through a bad day.

As the levels of our collective stress climb, there are bound to be a lot of WTF moments. Nerves will fray and tempers will flare. We will be walking on eggshells. There will be little patience for perspectives that differ from our own. Societal divides will deepen and widen. The whole world will become moodier than a hormonal teenager. 

Finally, we have all of the above playing out in a media landscape that was already fractured to an unprecedented level going into this. All the many things that are FU in this particular SNAFU will be posted, tweeted, shared and reshared. There will be no escape from it. 

Unlike the hormonal teenager, we can’t send COVID-19 to its room.

The Showdown between Smart and Stupid

If you have been wondering how the hell Dr. Anthony Fauci or Dr. Deborah Brix continues to function in the environment they find themselves in, you have company. I too have had my WTF moments and have been pondering, “Is it just me, or has the entire world become dumber?”

In answer to this question, I don’t think the average IQ of the population has slipped, but it certainly seems so. Especially in the White House.

Now, I meant the above as a rhetorical question. There is evidence that we are – on average – getting smarter. It’s called the Flynn Effect. There is also evidence we’re getting dumber. It probably nets out to zero, or at least to an insignificant move in either direction. I suspect recent signs of stupidity are more a factor of availability bias, as I’ve talked about before. Thanks to our news feeds, the is ample evidence of “Stupid is as stupid does.”

What is true is that dumb people have a voice they’ve never had before, thanks to all types of media, but most especially social media. The current populist political climate has also enshrined stupidity as an unfortunate side effect of democracy and free speech. Ignorance is running rampant across the heartlands of America and many other countries – including my own.

There are some frightening network effects that come from this. As stupidity gums up the gears of the governmental machinery that should be protecting us, we’re starting to see smart people making an end run around it. As the level of public discourse continually gets dumbed down, the really smart people are just avoiding it all together and are quietly reinventing the world according to their own rules.

For example, according to the Brookings Institute, there has been an 86% turn over in Trump’s top advisors since he took office. Based on statistical probability alone, at least a few of these had be to smart people.

This is not surprising. Smart people tend to avoid other people in general. At least one study has found that they are happiest when they’re alone. And this is especially true when they’re surrounded by stupid people. All the smart people I know do not suffer fools gladly. So, what we’re seeing is a polarization of intelligence, with a growing divide between the smart and the stupid.

Unfortunately, this is also polarizing our attitudes towards science. When I was growing up in the Sixties, we revered science and respected smart people. And when I say “we” I mean the greater collective “we.” Maybe it was because science was giving us hope at the time. We were literally shooting for the Moon. But if you listen to scientists today, you are quickly swamped under a tsunami of scary-as-shit bad news. It’s painful to be smart. For the last decade or so, ignorance did appear to be bliss.

That brings us to COVID-19.

One thing that the current pandemic has done has suddenly made the world very interested in things they never cared about before – like the science of epidemiology and the bureaucracy of pharmaceutical clinical trials. It has created a worldwide Venn diagram where the circles of stupidity and science are forced to overlap.

In this sudden focusing of the world’s attention on a single topic, it has also made us realize the price of stupidity. What was before an irritant is now deadly.

The danger here is that we will probably find an intellitocracy emerge. But we won’t realize it, because it will be hidden from most of us. And it will be hidden because smart people are going to get exasperated and avoid stupid people. We don’t want that to happen.

We need science – and smart people – in the public domain. We can’t afford to have them withdraw in order to save themselves from having to deal with stupidity. And more than anything, we mustn’t let science go from being publicly funded to privately funded because it’s the path of least resistance. We need our public domains fully staffed with smart people.

Intelligence will ultimately prevail over ignorance. In the arms race of evolution, stupid people are bringing a knife to a gun fight. It may not seem like that now, but eventually the smart will be the victors. This means that smart people are going to define what our lives and society look like. And we need to know what they’re thinking about. We need as much of that as possible happening in a public forum, not in a private research lab somewhere in Silicon Valley.

Here’s just one example of why we need to be paying attention to what smart people are thinking about. Author and social activist Naomi Klein – who has previously warned us about unbridled capitalism, unethical marketing and other apocalyptical trends – is now warning us about a potential coup against personal privacy that’s taking shape under the cover of the pandemic.

Klein’s latest piece in theintercept.com reveals how New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is assembling a super-smart SWAT team of billionaires including Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and others to help him put a “high-tech dystopia” together as a new post-pandemic future:

“It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.”

We are balanced on a precipice between smart and stupid. Smart will ultimately prevail. When it does, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. Ideally, we should have some say in the formation of our collective future.

Media’s Mea Culpa Moment

It’s hard to see when you’re stuck inside. And I’m not talking about self-isolating during a pandemic. I’m talking about our perspective of the media landscape.

The Problem with Politics

Currently, the concept of “Us vs Them” is embedded into our modern idea of politics. Populist politics, by its very nature, needs an enemy to blame. It forces you to pick sides. It creates a culture of antagonism, eroding social capital and dismantling any bipartisan trust. We are far down this path. Perhaps too far to turn back. But we have to realize that no nation or region in modern history has ever prospered in the long term by wantonly destroying social capital. There are many examples of how regionalism, xenophobia and populism have caused nations to regress. There is no example of these things leading to prosperity and long-term success. Not one. Yet this is the path we seem to have chosen.

If you look at the media, it’s politicians that are to blame for all our problems, whether they’re on the right or left. Based on most mainstream media, with its inherent, left wing bias, there is a personification of the problem, primarily in the President. “If Trump wasn’t there, things would be better.” But the problem would still persist. Much as we left leaning individuals found Obama a more palatable choice for president, the problem was here then as well. That’s how we got to where we are today.

The sad truth is, Trump didn’t cause the problem. He just capitalized on it. So we have to look elsewhere for where the problem originated. And that leads us to an uncomfortable reality. We are the problem – meaning we – the media, particularly in the U.S. But it’s hard to see that when you’re looking from the inside. So last week I changed my perspective.

Because of COVID-19, we should all be focused on the same story, perhaps for the first time in our lives. This gives us an unprecedented opportunity to compare the media landscapes against what should be a fairly objective baseline.

The Canadian Litmus Test

I’m Canadian — and for Americans, I know that living next to Canada is like having “The Simpsons'” Ned Flanders for a neighbor. We seem nice and polite, but you can’t help feeling that we’re constantly judging you. 

But Canada does offers Americans the chance to compare cultures that have much in common but with some key critical differences. It was this comparison that geographer, historian and anthropologist Jared Diamond employed in his latest book, “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.”

“Many of Canada’s social and political practices are drastically different from those of the U.S., such as with regards to national health plans, immigration, education, prisons, and balance between community and individual interests,” he writes. ”Some problems that Americans regard as frustratingly insoluble are solved by Canadians in ways that earn widespread public support.”

As a case in point, Canada has handled COVID-19 in a notably different way. Our pandemic response has been remarkably non-partisan. For example, we have the unusual spectacle of our most Trump-like politician, Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford, stepping up as a compassionate leader who is working effectively with Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his own opposition.

The Myth of Impartial Reporting

This is not the case in the U.S. Because of America’s political divides, it can’t even agree on what should be a simple presentation of fact on the story that affects us all equally. 

A recent PEW study found that where you turn for your news will significantly impact your understanding of things like when a vaccine will be ready or whether coronavirus came about naturally. 

To check this out, I did a comparison of the three most popular U.S. news sites on April 29.

Let’s start with CNN.  Of the 28 news items featured on the home page “above the fold,” 16 had an overt left bias. The most prominent was  inflammatory, dealing with Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his blowing up at press criticism. A Biden story on the Tara Reade accusations was buried in small print links near the bottom.

Now let’s go to the other side of the spectrum: Fox News, which also featured 28 news items “above the fold.” Of these 14 had an overt right bias. Again, the headline was inflammatory, calling out Biden on the Tara Reade allegations. There was no mention of any Trump temper tantrums on the home page. 

Finally, MSNBC’s headline story was actually focused on COVID-19 and the Remdesivir trial results and had no political bias. The site only had nine news items above the fold. Four of these had a left-leaning bias. 

The home pages bore almost no resemblance to each other. You would be hard-pressed to understand that each of these sites represented the news from the same country on the same day.

Now, let’s compare with Canada’s top two news sites, CBC and Global News. 

About 60% of the stories covered were the same on both sites and given roughly the same priority. The same lead story was featured on both — about a missing Canadian military helicopter. On CBC, only one appeared to have any political bias at all and it was definitely not explicit, while none of Global’s did.

That’s in comparison to the American news sites, where over half the stories featured — and all the lead ones — were designed and written to provoke anger, pitting “us” against “them.”

Once mainstream media normalizes this antagonistic approach, it then gets shunted over to social media, where it’s stripped of context, amplified and shared. Mainstream media sets the mood of the nation, and that mood is anger. Social media then whips it into a frenzy. 

Both left- and right-wing media outlets are equally guilty. CNN’s overriding editorial tone is, “Can you believe how stupid they are?” Fox’s is, “They think you’re stupid and they’re trying to pull a fast one on you.” No wonder there is no common ground where public discourse across the political divide can begin.

Before COVID-19, perhaps we could look at this with a certain amount of resignation and even bemusement. If you’re “us” there is a certain satisfaction in vilifying “them.” But today, the stakes are too high. People are dying because of it. Somehow, the media has to turn America’s ideological landscape from a war zone into a safe space.

Our Complicated Relationship with Heroes

It’s not really surprising that we think more about heroes in times of adversity. Many of our most famous superheroes were born in the crucible of crisis: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Captain America were all created during the Great Depression or the early years of World War II.

Today, we are again craving heroes. They are fabricated out of less fantastic stuff: taxi drivers who give free rides to the airport for patients, nurses who staff the front lines of our hospitals, chefs who provide free food to essential workers and a centenarian (as of tomorrow) who is raising millions for his national health care system by walking around his garden every day.

These are ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things. They are being raised to the rank of hero thanks to the surging tides of social media.

Again, this isn’t surprising. We are still in the early stages of what, for most of us, will likely be the defining crisis of our lifetimes. We desperately need some good news.

In fact, everybody’s favorite paper salesman/CIA operative/husband of Mary Poppins — John Krasinski — has curated a weekly webcast collection of feel-good salutes to local heroes called “Some Good News.” As of the writing of this post, it had collectively racked up close to 50 million views.

Krasinski has himself become a hero by doing things like throwing a surprise virtual prom for all the grads who were derived of theirs by the pandemic, or letting a group of ER nurses take the field at an eerily empty Fenway Park.

Having heroes should be a good thing. They should inspire us to be better people  — to become heroes ourselves. Right?

Well…

It’s complicated.

On the surface of it, hero worship is probably a good thing, especially if our heroes are doing things we all could do, if we were so inclined.  “If a 99.9-year-old man can raise millions for a national health service, there must be something I can do.”

On that very theme, the Heroic Imagination Project was formed to help us all be heroes. Headed up by famed psychologist Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, HIP came out of his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. “If,” reasoned Zimbardo, “we all have the capacity to be evil, given the right circumstances, we should also all have the capacity to be heroes, again under the right circumstances.”

But there are a few hurdles between us and heroism. One of them, ironically, comes part and parcel with the very idea of hero worship.

In an extensive analysis of how superheroes reflect the American mythology of their own times, Dublin writer Sally Rooney shows how a country uses its heroes to reassure itself of its own goodness: “The superhero makes sense in times of crisis. Reducing the vast complex of nationhood into the body of an individual means periods of geopolitical turmoil can be repackaged as moments of psychological stress. In the mirror of the superhero, America is reassured of its good qualities. Physical strength is good, as is the ability to make wisecracks under pressure. Masculinity is good, and women are okay as long as they can do very high kicks while making wisecracks. Once America is on the scene, order can be restored.”

So, we use heroes as a moral baseline to make us feel better about collective selves. They can help us reaffirm our faith in our national ideologies. A picture of a nurse in scrubs silently staring down a protester demanding a haircut makes us feel that things are still OK  in the heartland of the nation. It’s a reverse adaptation of the Lake Wobegone effect: “If this person represents the best of what we (as Americans) are, then the average can’t be all that bad.”

Unfortunately, this leads right into the second hurdle, the Bystander Effect: “If something happens that demands heroic action and there are a lot of people around, surely there’s a hero in the crowd that will step forward before I have to.” Being a hero demands a certain amount of sacrifice. As long as someone else is willing to make that sacrifice, we don’t have to — but we can still feel good about ourselves by giving it a like,  or, if we’re truly motivated, sharing it on our feed.

As the greatest real-time sociological experiment in our lifetime continues to play out, we might have yet another example of an unintended consequence brought on by social media. Based on our Facebook feeds, it appears that we have more heroes than ever. That’s great, but will it encourage us or keep us from stepping up and becoming heroes ourselves?

A New Definition of Social

I am an introvert. My wife is an extrovert. Both of us have been self-isolating for about 5 weeks now.  I don’t know if our experiences are representative of introverts and extroverts as a group, but my sample size has – by necessity – been reduced to a “n” of 2. Our respective concepts of what it means to be social have been disruptively redefined, but in very different ways.

The Extro-Version

You’ve probably heard of Dunbar’s Number. It was proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar. It’s the “suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” The number, according to Dunbar, is about 150. But that number is not an absolute. it’s a theoretical limit. Some of us can juggle way more social connections than others.

My wife’s EQ (emotional quotient) is off the charts. She has a need to stay emotionally connected to a staggering number of people. Even in normal times, she probably “checks in” with dozens of people every week. Before COVID-19, this was done face-to-face whenever possible.

Now, her empathetic heart feels an even greater need to make sure everyone is doing okay. But she has to do it through socially distanced channels. She uses text messaging a lot. But she also makes at least a few phone calls every day for those in her network who are not part of the SMS or social media universe.

She has begun using Zoom to coordinate virtual get-togethers of a number of her friends. Many in this circle are also extroverts. A fair number of them are – like my wife – Italian. You can hear them recharging their social batteries as the energy and volume escalates. It’s not cappuccino and biscotti but they are making do with what they’ve got.

Whatever the channel, it has been essential for my wife to maintain this continuum of connection.

The Intro-Version

There are memes circulating that paint the false picture that the time has finally come for us introverts. “I’ve been practicing for this my entire life,” says one. They consistently say that life in lockdown is much harder for extroverts than introverts. They even hint that we should be in introvert’s heaven. They are wrong. I am not having the time of my life.

I’m not alone. Other introverts are having trouble adjusting to a social agenda being forced upon them by their self-isolated extrovert friends and colleagues. We introverts seldom get to write the rules of social acceptability, even in a global pandemic.

If you type “Are introverts more likely” into Google, it will suggest the following ways to complete that sentence: “to be depressed”, “to be single”, “to have anxiety”, “to be alcoholic”, and “to be psychopaths”. The world is not built for introverts.

Understanding introversion vs extroversion is to understand social energy. Unlike my wife for whom social interactions act as a source of renewal, for me they are a depletion of energy. If I’m going to make the effort, it better be worth my while. A non-introvert can’t understand that. It’s often interpreted as aloofness, boredom or just being rude. It’s none of these. It’s just our batteries being run down.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think most introverts are antisocial. We’re just “differently” social. We need connections the same as extroverts. But those connections are of a certain kind. It’s true that introverts are not good at small talk. But under the right circumstances, we do love to talk. Those circumstances are just more challenging in the current situation.

Take Zoom for instance. My wife, the extrovert, and myself, the introvert, have done some Zoom meetings side by side. I have noticed a distinct difference in how we Zoom. But before I talk about that, let me set a comparative to a more typical example of an introvert’s version of hell: the dreaded neighborhood house party.

As an introvert in this scenario, I would be constantly reading body language and non-verbal cues to see if there was an opportunity to reluctantly crowbar my way into a conversation. I would only do so if the topic interested me. Even then, I would be subconsciously monitoring my audience to see if they looked bored. On the slightest sign of disinterest, I would awkwardly wind down the conversation and retreat to my corner.

It’s not that I don’t like to talk. But I much prefer sidebar one-on-one conversations. I don’t do well in environments where there is too much going on. In those scenarios, introverts tend to clam up and just listen.

Now, consider a Zoom “Happy Hour” with a number of other people. All of that non-verbal bandwidth we Introverts rely on to pick and choose where we expend our limited social energy is gone.   Although Zoom adds a video feed, it’s a very low fidelity substitute for an in-the-flesh interaction.

With all this mental picking and choosing happening in the background, you can understand why introverts are slow to jump into the conversational queue and, when we finally do, we find that someone else (probably an extrovert) has started talking first. I’m constantly being asked, “Did you say something Gord?”, at which point everyone stops talking and looks at my little Zoom cubicle, waiting for me to talk. That, my friends, is an introvert’s nightmare.

Finally, I Get the Last Word

Interestingly, neither my wife nor I are using Facebook much for connection. She has joined a few Facebook groups, one of which is a fan club for our provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Dr. Henry has become the most beloved person in B.C.

And I’m doing what I always tell everyone else not to do; follow my Facebook newsfeed and go into self-isolated paroxysms of rage about the Pan-dumb-ic and the battle between science and stupidity.

There is one social sacrifice that both my wife and I agree on. The thing we miss most is the ability to hug those we love.

Is the Marketing Industry Prepared for What Lies Ahead?

It was predictable. Humans are starting to do what humans do. We are beginning to shift gears, working our way through the stages of shock. We are daring to look beyond today and wondering what tomorrow might be like. Very smart people, like Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari, are concerned about what we may trade away in the teeth of this crisis.

Others, like philosopher Barbara Muraca, climate change advocate Greta Thurnberg and Media Spin’s own Kaila Colbin,  are hoping that this might represent a global reset moment for us. Perhaps this will finally break our obsession with continual year after year growth, fueled by our urges to acquire and consume. We in the advertising and marketing business kept dumping gas on this unsustainable dumpster fire. There is hope by some – including myself – that COVID-19 will be a kind of shock therapy, convincing us to take a kinder, gentler approach to both the planet and each other.

My own crystal ball gazing is on a much-reduced scale. Specifically, I’m wondering what advertising and marketing might be like in our immediate future. I started by looking back at what history can teach us about recovery from a crisis.

Both World Wars resulted in explosions of consumerism. One could probably make the argument that the consumerism that happened after World War II has continued pretty much uninterrupted right to the current day. We basically spent our way out of the dotcom implosion of 1999 – 2002 and the Great Recession of 2007 – 2009.

But will this be different? I think it will, for three reasons.

One, both World Wars repressed consumer demand for a matter of years. With World War I it was four years, plus another 3 marked by the Spanish Flu Pandemic and a brief but sharp recession as the economy had to shift gears from wartime to peace time. With World War II, it was 6 years of repressed consumerism. 

Secondly, the wars presented those of us here in North America with a very different psychological landscape. We went “over there” to fight and then “came home” when it was done. The war wasn’t on our front stoop. That gave us both physical and emotional distance after the war was over.

Finally, when the war was over, it was over. The world had to adjust to a new normal, but the fighting had stopped. That gave consumers a clear mental threshold to step beyond. You didn’t have to worry that you might be called back into service on any day, returning once again to the grim reality that was.

For these three reasons, I think our consumer mentality may look significantly different in the coming months. As we struggle back to whatever normal is between now and the discovery of a vaccine – currently estimated at 12 to 18 months – we will have a significantly different consumer reality. We don’t have years of pent up consumer demand that will wash away any pragmatic thoughts of restraint. We have been dealing with a crisis that has crept into our very homes. It has been present in every community, every neighborhood. And – most importantly – we will be living in a constant state of anxiety and fear for the foreseeable future. These three things are going to have a dramatic impact on our desire to consume.

Blogger Tomas Pueyo did a good job of outlining what our new normal may look like in his post The Hammer and The Dance. We are still very much in the “Hammer” phase but we are beginning to wonder what the “Dance” may look like.

In our immediate future, we are going to hear a lot about the Basic reproductive rate – denoted as R0  – or R naught. This is the measure of the number of cases, on average, an infected person will cause during their infectious period. A highly infectious disease, like measles, has a R naught of between 12 and 18. Current estimates on COVID-19 put its R naught between 1.5 and 3.5. Most models assume a R naught of 2.4 or so.

This is important to understand if we want to understand what our habits of consumption might look like until a vaccine is found. As long as that R naught number is higher than 1, the disease continues to spread. If we can get it lower than 1, then the numbers stabilize and eventually decline. The “Dance” Pueyo refers to is the actions that need to be taken to keep the R naught number lower than 1 without completely stalling the economy. With extremely restrictive measures you theoretically could reduce the R naught to zero but in the process, you shut down the entire economy. Relax the restrictions too much and the R naught climbs back up into exponentially increasing territory.

Much of the commentary I’m reading is assuming we will go back to “normal” or some variation of it. But the new “normal” is this dance, where we will be balanced on the knife’s edge between human cost and economic cost. For the next several months we will be teetering from one side to the other. At best, we can forget about widespread travel, large public gatherings and sociability as we previously knew it. At worst, we go back into full lockdown.

This is the psychological foundation our consumption will be based on. We will be in a constant state of anxiety and fear. And our marketing strategies will have to address that. Further, marketing needs to factor in this new normal in an environment where brand messaging is no longer a unilateral exercise. It is amplified and bent through social media. Frayed nerves make for a very precarious arena in which to play a game we’re still learning the rules of. We can expect ideological and ethical divisions to widen and deepen during the Dance.

The duration of the Dance will be another important factor to consider when we think about marketing. If it goes long enough, our temporary behavioral shifts become habits. The changes that are forced upon us may become permanent. Will we ever feel good about stepping aboard a cruise ship? Will we be ever be comfortable again in a crowded restaurant or bar? Will we pay 300 dollars to be jammed into a stadium with 50 thousand other people? We don’t know the answers to these questions yet.

Successful market depends on being able to anticipate the mood of the audience. The Dance will make that much more difficult. We will be racing up and down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at a frenzied pace that would make a game of Snakes and Ladders seem mild by comparison.

That’s what happens in times of crisis. In normal times we spend our lifetimes scaling Abraham Maslow’s elegant model from the bottom – fulfilling our most basic physical needs – to the top – an altruistic concern for the greater good. Most of us spend much of our time stuck somewhere north of the middle, obsessed with our own status and shoring up our self-esteem. It’s this relatively stable mental state that the vast majority of marketing is targeted at.

But in a chronic crisis mode like that which is foretold by the Dance, we can crash from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy in the blink of an eye. And we will all be doing this at different times in different locations.

The Dance introduces a consumer scenario marketers have never encountered before. We will crave comfort and security. We will be desperate for glimpses of positivity. And it’s certain that our values and beliefs will shift but it’s difficult to predict in which direction. While my hope is that we become kinder and gentler people, I suspect it will be a toss-up. It could well go the other way.

If you thought marketing was tough before, buckle up!

Quant vs Qual in the time of Crisis

Digesting reality is becoming more and more difficult. I often find myself gagging on it. Last Friday was a good example. I have been limiting my news intact for my own sanity, but Friday morning I went down the rabbit hole. Truth be told, I started doing some research for the post I was intending to write (which I will probably get to next week) and I was soon overwhelmed with what I was reading.

I’m beginning to suspect that we’re getting an extra dump of frightening news on Fridays as officials realize that it’s more difficult to enforce social distancing on weekends. Whether this is the case or not, I found my chest tightening from anxiety. My hands got shaky as I found myself clicking on frightening link after frightening link. Predictions scared the shit out of me. I was worried for my community and country. I was worried for myself. But most of all, I was worried for my kids, my wife, my dad, my in-laws and my family.

Fear and anxiety swamped my normally rational side. Intellect gave way to despair. That’s not a good mode for me. I have to run cool – I need to be rational to function. Emotions mentally shut me down.

So I retreated to the numbers. My single best source throughout this has been the posts from Tomas Pueyo – the VP of Growth at Course Hero. They are exhaustively researched statistical analyses and “what-if” models assembled by an ad-hoc team of rockstar quants. On his first post on March 10 –  “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now” – Pueyo and his team nailed it. If everyone listened and followed his advice, we wouldn’t be where we are now. Similarly, his post on March 19 – “Coronavirus: The Hammer and The Dance” gave a tough but rational prescription to follow. His latest – “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One” – drills down on a state-by-state analysis of COVID in the US.

I’m not going to blow smoke here. These are tough numbers to read. Even the best-case scenarios would have been impossible to imagine just a few weeks ago. But the worst-case scenarios are exponentially more frightening. And if you – like me – needs to retreat to ration in order to keep functioning, this is the best rationale I’ve found for dealing with COVID 19. It’s not what we want to hear, but it’s what we must listen to.

In my marketing life, I always encouraged a healthy mix of both quantitative and qualitative perspectives in trying to understand what is real. I’ve said in the past: “Quantitative is watching the dashboard while you drive. Qualitative is looking out the windshield.”

I often find that marketers tend to focus too much on the numbers and not enough on the people on the other side of those numbers. We were an industry deluged with data and it made us less human.

Ironically, I now find myself on the other side of that argument. We have to understand that even our most trustworthy media sources are going to be telling us the stories that have the most impact on us. Whether you turn to Fox or CNN as your news source, we would be getting soundbites out of context that are – by design – sensational in nature. They may differ in their editorial slants, but – right or left – we can’t consider them representational of reality. They are the outliers.

Being human, we can’t help but apply these to our current reality. It’s called availability bias. It the simplest terms possible, it means that those things that are most in our face become our understanding of any given situation.

In normal times, these individual examples can heighten our humanity and make us a little less numb. They remind us of the relevance of the individual experience– the importance of every life and the tragedy of even one person suffering.

“If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy.
If millions die, that’s only a statistic.”

– Joseph Stalin

Normally, I would never dream of quoting Joe Stalin in a post. But these are not normal times. And the fact is, Stalin was right. when we start looking at statistics and mathematical modelling, our brain works differently. It forces us to use a more rational cognitive mechanism; one less likely to be influenced by emotion. And in responding to a crisis, this is exactly the type of reasoning required.

This is a time unlike anything any of us has experienced. In times like this, actions should be based on the most accurate and scientific information possible. We need the cold, hard logic of math as a way to not become swamped by the wave of our own emotions. In order to make really difficult decisions for the greater good, we need to distance ourselves from our own little bubbles of reality, especially when that reality is made up of non-representative examples streamed to us through media channels.

Two Timely Stories from my Royal 10 Typewriter

I love old typewriters. My favourite is a 1917 Royal Typewriter 10, made by the Royal Typewriter Company of New York, New York. It is a beautiful piece of engineering, with intricate and mysterious mechanical connections that are revealed by two bevelled glass windows in each side. It was made in a factory in Hartford, Connecticut. Ian Fleming wrote his Bond books on a Royal. Ernest Hemingway also used one.

My Royal 10 is pretty beaten up. There are parts missing and it’s far from functional. But that only adds to its gravitas and charm. It sits beside me in a special place in my office as I write this on an Apple MacBook Pro, circa 2018 – two examples of technical elegance separated by a century. I suspect – though – that the MacBook won’t be on anyone’s desk in 2120.

Last week, I told you about the Lost Generation. If I had been part of that generation, I would probably be writing this on that typewriter.  Today, I wonder what other stories it might have to tell. With that, I’d like to pick up where I left off last week and share two stories that I like to believe lie buried in the Royal 10’s mechanical magnificence. I hope they are two stories that have something to relate to us in our current reality.

First, the Royal 10 was introduced in 1914, the start of World War 1. It was Royal’s first “upright” design and, along with the Underwood 5, it would become a trusted workhorse for many, including news reporters. Much of the coverage of the war, and later, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 – 1920, was probably hammered out on a Royal 10.

But here’s the interesting thing. The 10 represented a pinnacle of typewriter design. Other than cosmetic changes, the inner workings of typewriters didn’t change for decades after its introduction. That meant that most of the major developments of the next 20 years would also be written on a typewriter like the one that sits in my office.

As the world rolled out the ‘Teens and into the Twenties, my Royal was one of the few things that didn’t change. The double gut punch of a global war and a massive pandemic rocked the world back on its feet, but not for long. After a brief but deep recession in 1920 and 21, a global explosion of creativity and enterprise transformed everything. The Roarin’ Twenties ushered in technological revolutions on multiple fronts, including the automobile, aviation, movies, radio, telephones, electricity and medicine.

Society was radically transformed in the Twenties. Jazz and speakeasies flourished. Women marched for their rights. Culture was transformed by writers and artists that were both more liberal in their themes and more apt to criticize hypocrisy and greed. Art deco became the dominant design movement of the decade.

The story is this: after 6 years of devastation and destruction, the world entered 8 years of explosive creativity and change.

That brings me to the second story. The Royal Typewriter Company had to shift gears in 1940. The factory in Hartford no longer built typewriters. They began manufacturing machine guns, rifles, bullets, propellers and spare parts for airplane engines as part of American industry’s support of the war effort. They wouldn’t go back to building typewriters until September 1945.

You, like me, may have become tragically addicted to pandemic models that show the importance of flattening the curve. These models have one thing in common, a flat horizontal line that represents our current capacity to handle the crisis.

But is that line necessarily flat? Just like the Royal Company in 1940, industry is once again ramping up to defeat a common enemy. This time, it’s face masks instead of machine guns; ventilators instead of propellers. The output is different, but the motivation is the same: we can beat this thing.

Again, history may provide us a little perspective. In 1939, the US was the furthest thing imaginable away from being ready to go to war. General George Patton was given command of a unit of 325 tanks that were desperately in need of nuts and bolts in order to keep working. After unsuccessfully trying to order through official channels he ended up ordering from a Sears catalogue and paying for them himself. The American army was so short of equipment that it would borrow Good Humor ice cream trucks to stand in as tanks when they practiced military manoeuvres.

Despite this, by 1945, American industry had produced two-thirds of all the weapons and equipment used by the Allies to win the war. That happened because thousands of companies like the Royal Typewriter Company unified behind a common goal. Chief Executives worked for a $1.00 a year. Volunteer laborers worked double shifts. Factories retooled their production lines. Capacity expanded exponentially when it had to because it’s not a static flat line.

I think my Royal 10 is trying to tell me two things. One I need to remember going into this crisis, and one for when we eventually come out of it.

First, we can do amazing things in the face of incredible adversity when we have to. We just need a little time to be our best.

And secondly, humans tend to bounce higher when we’re on the rebound from adversity.

A Lesson Learned from the Lost Generation

“I wasn’t around for Y2K. Was it like this?”

The question was posed to me by a young man named Jeremy – about 18 or 19 – who brought the online order of groceries to my car. He had just been telling me how store employees had been scrambling to stay ahead of items people were starting to hoard so they could post limits to prevent the shelves being stripped bare. On this day, it was bread. He shook his head, unable to wrap it around people’s panic. He was trying to relate it to something that could serve as a baseline.

My initial reaction to his question was to laugh. Y2K was a nothingburger. We panicked, we nervously rang in the New Year of 2000, and then we laughed sheepishly and went on with life.

This is different. On so many levels. I told that to Jeremy. “I have been around for almost 60 years. I have never experienced anything like this before.”

I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot since. In Jeremy’s short time here on the planet, he probably has never experienced true hardship. But then, neither have I. Not really. Not like what we’re about to experience.

If you were to plot a trendline of my life over the last 6 decades, it would overwhelmingly be up and to the right. Sure, there were blips. But it’s been a pretty damned good 60 years. For me, hardship has been defined by putting off a trip because I couldn’t afford it. Or buying a used car when I wanted a new one. Poor me.

In the writing of this, I tried to find some formula to put magnitude of significance to events like this. I couldn’t find one, so I made my own:

Personal Impact X Number of People Impacted X Duration of Impact

The Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the most significant events of their lifetimes in 2016. If we just look at those events that were negative, they were 9/11 (by a significant margin), the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War.

But now let’s attempt to quantify the magnitude of significance. When I say personal impact, I’m not talking about emotional impact. I’m talking about material impacts on my life that are directly attributable to the event.

My heart broke on 9/11, just like all of yours. That day would change my perspective on many things. But in real terms, it didn’t shift my life in any significant ways. There was tightened security when I travelled, but that was about it. This in no way minimizes the tragedy of the event. I know it was excruciatingly real for some of you reading this. I’m just putting it in perspective for myself.

This will be different. There is a shit-ton of uncertainty about what lies ahead, but I’m pretty sure all our lives are going to change significantly for the next 18 months to 2 years at least.  And it will impact everyone in the world. The vast majority of us have never been through anything like this before.  But others have. In fact, a whole generation has. Unfortunately, none of them are around to talk to. They were called the Lost Generation.

My Grandfather was part of this generation. Officially, those belonging to the Lost Generation were born between 1883 and 1900. Charles Edward Hotchkiss was born in Herefordshire, England in 1888. He died in Ontario, Canada in 1955, at the age of 67. He was just 8 years older than I am today. Given what we’re going through currently, I stopped to think about what “Charlie” experienced in his lifetime.

In 1910, he boarded the SS Lake Champlain in Liverpool and came to Canada. He was 21. Four years later, he volunteered for service in World War I. In the next 4 years, 9 million soldiers would die, 21 million would be wounded (my grandfather was one of them), 7 million would be left permanently disabled. 10 million civilians also died.

Those numbers are staggering, but an even deadlier and more significant event was just getting started in 1917. Today, we remember it as the Spanish Flu but that is a misnomer. It was called that because early reporting of the severity of the influenza pandemic was censored in wartime Europe for fear that troops would panic and desert. The only country where reporting was somewhat accurate was in neutral Spain, which led to the mistaken notion that the impact was worse there than anywhere else. By the time the epidemic subsided in 1920, somewhere between 50 and 100 million people would die. It had infected 500 million people, a quarter of the world’s population.

This was the reality newly discharged Charlie came back to when he stepped off the boat in Halifax on September 14, 1919. He was 31.

Charlie married my grandmother, Rose, in 1926. Three years later, the world slipped into the Great Depression. Half of all banks in the US failed. Unemployment spiked to 25%. International trade collapsed by 65%. Millions became homeless migrants. And it would continue like this for the next 10 years. In the middle of all this – in 1935 – Charlie and Rose had a baby. It was my father, William Francis Hotchkiss.

When my dad was just 4, World War II started. My grandfather, who was 50, was too old to actively serve but the impact of the war was still immense on Rose, William and Charlie. Over the next 6 years, 100 million people would be directly impacted from more than 30 countries. It is estimated 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians would die in those 6 years.

These events, any one of which would be staggering to us, were packed into just 3 decades. I tried to imagine myself going through that from 1990 to today. I couldn’t.

Sometimes, when you can’t see forward, it’s helpful to look back. When I did that, I realized we’re a pretty resilient species. The Lost Generation laid the foundation for the world we live in today. They weathered storm after storm after storm. They made it through. They raised families, started businesses and survived.

It will get hard for us. Really hard. It’s a definition of hardship many of us will be dealing with for the first time in our lives. But we go into this with technological and societal advantages the Lost Generation never had or could even dream of. We should be able to do this without falling apart.

We come from good stock.