Hungry for Snake Oil: Fyre, Juicero and Donald Trump
If you haven’t noticed, we’re living in an age of the unbelievable. Think about it, within a 5 minute drive of my house I can get access to an incredible array of food and goods from across the planet. I carry a carry a cell phone in my pocket with more computer power than Apollo-era NASA. That same phone is wirelessly connected to a global knowledge infrastructure that’s not only already mind-numbingly huge but also accelerating its growth. A few times a year, I get on a plane and travel distances in a few hours that would have taken my great grandparents weeks or months.
Perhaps that’s why we’re so ready to swallow incredible claims. Our world is living evidence that incredible things can and do happen. If you told me tomorrow that someone had cracked the code on instant teleportation, my first thought would be excitement rather than outright disbelief.
But what happens when the claims really are too good to be true?
Fyre
By now, you’ve no doubt seen numerous takes on the over-hyped Fyre music festival. If not, here’s the skinny. A promoter got the idea to hold a music festival in an exotic foreign location. Said music festival would be defined by luxury and exclusivity. On those promises, funding was procured and promotion began in earnest.
Everything you’d expect from such a festival came next. Famous musical acts signed on. Models, musicians, and celebrities who are famous for being celebrities all started to promote the event in earnest. There were tweets and instagrams of tropical beaches and talk of raging all-night parties.
An exclusive chef was brought on to provide the finest cuisine ever at a music festival. Luxury accommodations were promised to supplement the already incredible experience with the comforts of home.
And never forget, all of this had a price tag. Festival passes, plane tickets and meal plans were being sold at a premium, and people were eating it up.
But when the festival began? Uh oh, the promises suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke. Luxury accommodations turned into tents on the beach. The highest quality cuisine ended up being more like middle-school lunch fare. Security and medical services were understaffed. Festival logistics were laughably unprepared. And festival goers were left asking what happened to the luxury experience they’d paid for.
After the fact, it’s come out that issues existed months before the start of the festival. The team assembling the event clearly had more experience with event promotion than they did with event production, and both they and investors failed to recognize that they needed some experienced grown-ups in the room to actually pull the thing off.
As someone who’s helped to organize an annual international corporate event for several years, I could have told them details matter. By the time the event team arrives, every minute of every day must be meticulously organized, materials have to be in place, and contingencies must be planned.
The organizers are being sued into oblivion, which is what should happen. There needs to be consequences for committing fraud. But what’s amazing to me is how many people shelled out significant money to attend an international event that they probably heard about on social media from a company that had never done this kind of thing before.
Juicero
Here’s one you may not have had heard of. A new juicer made some headlines in the venture capital world. The founder of the company is charismatic and devoted to his mission. Here’s a video of him extolling the virtues of both juicing and his company’s product.
But as often happens with these things, reality didn’t live up to the hype. Doug’s juicer for the world ended up costing $700 initially. They’d hoped to price it around $250, but complicated tooling and manufacturing processes drove the cost up.
The juice packs ended up containing produce from large-scale wholesalers instead of coming exclusively from small organic farm, and the entire of premise of the product was called into question by the production methods of the juice packs. Here’s my favorite line from the Gizmodo profile:
“The process of shredding fruits and vegetables with blades…can cause heavy casualties to good bacteria, enzymes and vitamins,” a company blog post cautions without acknowledging that a Juicero pouch’s contents are themselves chopped “into Pack-friendly pieces.”
Even at a reduced cost of $400 for the juicer and $6-$8 per juice pack, the product was clearly never meant to bring juicing to “the world”. It was only meant to bring juicing to people who were probably already juicing, but with slightly less work and more cost.
The company has been hemorrhaging staff and inside looks say finances aren’t great. But how did this company get funding? Industry investor’s saw an opportunity in the seeming overlap between two lucrative areas: A “tech industry which has run dry on useful new ideas” and “the medically-vague but burgeoning wellness industry”. In other words, there was plenty of hype to buy into.
Donald Trump
Finally, we come to the case that everyone is familiar with. Donald Trump’s presidency is still young, but there’s already been enough action to keep presidential historians in business for years.
Because Donald Trump was known for making promises during the campaign and even posted a list of goals that he’d accomplish in the first 100 days, it’s been easy to rank promises against accomplishments.
According to Poltifact, the campaign promise scorecard shows just under 6% kept, 3% broken, 15% stalled, 28% in process and around 45% without enough movement to issue any judgement.
For a young presidency, that’s not terribly surprising. Governing is hard work. But the biggest strike against President Trump is that he’s a one man hype machine who oversold his promises.
To date, President Trump has admitted that healthcare reform and even the presidency itself are harder than he thought. He’s also reversed firm positions on NATO, NAFTA, the Import-Export Bank and China being a currency manipulator, the military strategy in Syria and relocation of the US Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem. Word is still out on whether peace in the Middle East is really “not as difficult as people thought”. I suspect we’ll have answer on that when the President returns from his Middle East trip.
For most Presidents, the ability to change one’s mind should be a positive turn of events. It shows they’re open to new ideas, taking in new information and willing to shift with changing world tides. But with President Trump, there’s no equivocation in his positions at all. He insisted during the campaign that he was 100% right 100% of the time because of his good brain and self-consultation.
So what does it say that in the first 100 days of his presidency, he has reversed positions on numerous major issues after being shown basic facts? It shows that the hype is alive and well, and as in the cases of the Fyre music festival and Juicero, believing in your own hype can be the most dangerous situation to be in.
Don’t Believe the Hype
In all of three of these situations, people confused charisma and confidence for experience. Festival goers, investors and voters placed their trust in someone because they claimed to have the answers. But in all three cases, a deeper look has exposed mismanagement and a lack of self awareness. At best, the individuals oversold their ability. At worst, they willingly defrauded the public.
We need to be less trusting of smooth talkers. The snake oil salesman of yesteryear never went away. He just got a bunch of followers on social media and swapped his tonic for flashier products. The confidence game is still there, and we’re still all just marks waiting to be had.
The next time you see or hear something too good to be true, kick the tires first. Look at the track record of the company or person. Ask whether anyone else in that industry is calling them out as a phony.
We live in a time of miracles, and we want to believe that anything is possible. But con men have been selling lies since time immemorial, and they’re not going to stop anytime soon.