Cohesion and commerce (E)

0:00Why don't we spatchcock the turkey? Every competent chef knows that a 15-pound turkey with its large cavity, with its white meat and its dark meat, is almost impossible to roast properly. It takes a long time. The dark meat isn't cooked. The white meat gets dry. It's a pain in the neck. Why not spatchcock the turkey, in which we remove the spine, push it down flat on a baking sheet, and in less time, with less fuss, we get a better turkey. The reason we don't spatchcock the turkey is that Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton didn't do it that way. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:56You might be listening to this around Thanksgiving, or you might not. It doesn't matter. The lessons transfer to so many elements of our culture. The reason that we care about Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton is that she was Norman Rockwell's neighbor. and Norman Rockwell painted a painting in the early 1940s that was on the cover of the most important, largest circulation magazine in the country. And that painting, Freedom from Want, ended up teaching everyone what Thanksgiving was supposed to be like. Thanksgiving, like Christmas, like so many other elements of mass culture, is about two things. cohesion, and commerce.

1:46At the first Thanksgiving, if there was a first Thanksgiving, at the Thanksgiving of legend, they almost certainly didn't eat a turkey the way Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton served a turkey. They probably ate seal. They definitely ate lobster. And they almost certainly didn't have cranberries, because cranberries weren't commercially cultivated in North America until after the Revolutionary War. We have Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada, and in the United States, more than 90 % of the people in the country celebrate together every year. That's one of the highest levels of conformance to a cultural meme that I can think of.

2:31Why do we do that? Why is it celebrated in Liberia? Why is it celebrated in Scandinavia? and why is it always celebrated in such a similar way? Before 1910, before the era of mass media, none of this was true. That Christmas was a religious holiday, perhaps for some a drinking holiday, but it certainly wasn't a cultural phenomenon. And Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving came in dribs and drabs. There's an excellent argument to be made that the first Thanksgiving was actually in Virginia, not in Massachusetts, but it was a local holiday. It didn't happen on the same day around the country. The memes and the tropes were not coherent or all lined up.

3:19Then in 1827, a woman, a writer, Sarah Joseph Hale, started a letter writing campaign. It lasted for 40 years. For 40 year she agitated, she lobbied, and she wrote letters. And it wasn't until Abraham Lincoln showed up needing something to possibly unify his fractured country that Thanksgiving became, quote, an official holiday, unquote. But even then, it wasn't always celebrated in the same way. Fast forward to the early 1920s. Macy's has a problem. Their problem is they're a newly public company, a retailer, a retailer with some success. They have a new store, a city block long in New York City, but they still have arch enemies like Gimbel's, and they are still fretting about the fact that Americans aren't buying enough stuff.

4:20That in the 1920s, industrialists had a very significant problem. And their problem was that factories were better than ever at making stuff. They could make stuff in huge quantities, but that people, people weren't that good at buying stuff. That the typical person had two or three pairs of shoes. That the typical person might get by with two or three pairs of slacks. That the idea that we would need a storage unit, that we would pay money to keep our stuff somewhere else because our house is too full was insane. So Macy's needed a way to get people into the buying mood. Of course, they came up with a parade.

5:04Well, they didn't really come up with a parade. They stole the idea from Gimbel's. And the first Thanksgiving Day parade featured lions and tigers and bears somehow taken from the derelict Central Park Zoo, which sort of bothered a lot of the people on the parade route. And in future years, after the success of the first parade, Macy's switched to balloons. The first one was Felix the Cat. They filled him with helium. When they were done, they let him go. As far as I know, he's now on the moon. The Thanksgiving Day Parade had a very specific purpose. And its purpose was to get people into the holiday mood.

5:45Because once Thanksgiving is here, Christmas is just around the corner. And the idea that we should buy lots and lots of stuff for other people for Christmas is a deliberate invention by people who have lots and lots of stuff to sell us. Let's go sideways for a minute and talk about cranberry sauce. Because almost all of the cranberries that are sold whole in North America are sold just before Thanksgiving. Now, almost all the cranberries are grown through a cooperative called Ocean Spray. And because cranberries are harvested basically underwater, more chemicals are used on cranberries than the typical fruit or vegetable.

6:30In fact, in 1959, the first carcinogen scare in the history of our country happened when a chemical called aminotriazole was applied too late in the cranberry growing process, and they found an entire barrel of cranberries covered with this carcinogen. As a result, the president didn't serve cranberries at his Thanksgiving dinner, and sales of cranberries went down 70 % that year. Still, 60 years later, fewer than one in a thousand cranberries that are grown are grown organically because we need yield, because commerce rules the day, because cranberries go with turkey, because ocean spray fought hard to put cranberries on the menu.

7:21There's a cultural dynamic here. It might even be genetic, that human beings want to do what other people like us are doing. And that's a good thing because it enables us to have society, to have community. But what marketers have done, aided by mass media, is weaponized it, is amplified it. As Mick Jagger sang,

7:54So what Mick is saying is, your manhood, your position in the community, is directly related to what kind of cigarettes you're smoking, which of course makes no sense whatsoever unless you're the marketer of that brand of cigarette. So if it weren't for the power of the Saturday Evening Post, with it reaching almost every culturally aware citizen in the United States, if it weren't for the vivid imagery of Norman Rockwell, if it weren't for his ability to tap into a deep-seated desire to do what other people were doing, then no, we wouldn't be eating a Thanksgiving turkey that looked just like that one.

8:41As a vegetarian, I haven't had a turkey in a really long time, but I see products like tofurkey. I see the stress that shows up. Oh, you're coming on Friday, not on Thursday, but Thursday is the official day. Thursday is the day where we're supposed to have Thanksgiving. Okay, let's slip back in time to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the Depression, it was largely understood by economists that one way out of the Depression would be to get people to buy more stuff. So what did Franklin Delano Roosevelt do? He moved the day of Thanksgiving. He moved it from its, quote, official day, which of course had only been official for 80 years, to a week earlier.

9:29His theory was that getting people into the buying spirit a week earlier would spur sales. Critics called it Franksgiving instead of Thanksgiving. And our desire for cohesion, the regular kind, fitting in, doing it on the appointed day, made it so that his experiment failed and Thanksgiving went back to the day it's supposed to be. Supposed to be in quotation marks because there is no real origin story to Thanksgiving. It's about cohesion and commerce. Back to the idea of commerce. Black Friday, where does that come from? Well, it has nothing to do with the stock market crash. Black Friday is named because of football.

10:15Football is inextricably linked with Thanksgiving because both seasons overlap. And there's an Army-Navy game every year. I believe it's still held near Philadelphia, still on the Saturday around Thanksgiving. And what was happening in Philadelphia is that fans would come to Philadelphia a couple days early to party, to get together, to be ready for the game. And they would invade the local retailers. And the retailers at first didn't like this because they needed extra police because there was shoplifting, because there was revelry in the aisles. And then over time, they came to understand that more shopping was a good thing.

10:58And so they paid extra for security and Black Friday was born. Then the National Retail Federation, a huge association of merchants and retailers, saw a business opportunity. And the business opportunity was this. There's not a lot to write about on Thanksgiving Day. That the newspapers can't publish recipes, it's too late. The newspapers don't have that much news because not much happened the day before Thanksgiving. So what to write about? Well, what the NRF came up with was an annual opportunity to write about and on the local news to broadcast about Black Friday. They turned shopping into both a business event and a sport.

11:46And so one retailer after another would go out of their way to create a loss-leading sale that would lead to mania, perhaps riots if everything went well, that would get on the news and make people feel insecure about their cohesion to cultural standards and thus have them engage in ever more commerce. Here's my favorite quote. It was a strong weekend for retailers, but an even better weekend for consumers who took advantage of some really incredible deals, NRF president and CEO Matthew Shea said. In fact, over one-third of shoppers said 100 % of their purchases were on sale. There are so many falsehoods and statistical weasels in this one sentence, I'm sort of stunned that someone could put together such a perfect sentence.

12:37What does on sale even mean? That what the Anaroff has done has created this pseudoscientific accounting charade that implies that there's some sort of moment in time where businesses either go into the black or they don't, where this magical day, the day after Thanksgiving, is both a commercial imperative and a cultural essential, that going to the stores on Friday is just as important as celebrating with your family on Thursday. So now we get to my peripheral participation in all of this nonsense. Back in the 1990s, when internet shopping was in its infancy, I was running a company that did internet marketing, Yo-Yo Dime.

13:27Well, one of the organizations we dealt with was called Shop.org. And they called upon our head of marketing, Jerry Sharoshefsky, and said, how are we going to get people to start shopping online? Well, Jerry was instrumental in inventing Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday meant don't deal with all the craziness and the crowds on Friday. Just wait till you get to work on Monday because at work, there's reliable internet and at work, you can avoid work by shopping online. And so one person sitting in a committee room invented Cyber Monday. So we have Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Back to Norman Rockwell.

14:08If you look at Norman Rockwell's painting, the one that established that the turkey shouldn't be spatchcocked, the one that established that the point of the holiday was to sit at a certain style of New England table with a certain kind of family unit, eating a huge sort of tasteless turkey while pretending to get along with one another. If you look in the corner of that painting, you will see Jim Martin. And Jim Martin is looking right at the camera. It's not quite a selfie, but it's awfully close. What modern culture has done is taken family events, private events, personal interactions, and had us realize that we are on camera, that we are part of the culture, that as we see others, they are seeing us, that fitting in is part of the deal, that being in sync, cohesion and commerce is part of what we're supposed to do.

15:08It's important to remember that we can benefit from these cultural tropes that have been invented for selfish reasons by marketers and media companies, but we don't have to do the ones that don't benefit us, that we can take what we take and leave the rest because it's not up to someone else to decide what sort of holiday we're going to have. In fact, it's up to us to decide what sort of holiday we're willing to respect, how we will spend our time, whether we will be stressed by the fact that we weren't one of the 30 % of shoppers that got 100 % of their stuff on sale, that we don't have to spend 20 to 40 percent of our discretionary income on Christmas presents if we don't want to, that the purpose of culture is not to enable capitalism.

16:05The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture. And so we have these holidays. Back in the 1500s, it turned out, there were more than 130 holidays a year. So we've certainly scaled back. But as we've scaled back, we've loaded them up. We've made them fraught with compliance. Compliance leads to cohesion, and cohesion enables commerce. But we don't have to enable either if we don't want to. One more thing. Several months from now, around the world, people of the Jewish faith will be celebrating Passover. If Thanksgiving is a harvest holiday, Passover is a planting holiday, a spring holiday. But one of the things that goes on at the Passover celebration, which is remarkably like Thanksgiving in that the family is sitting at the table, not that they are going to a place of worship, is that people go around the table and read from a prayer book called a Haggadah.

17:10Well, in the United States, there was a challenge. And in 1932, the Maxwell House Coffee Company, seeing a commercial opportunity to create cohesion, stepped up and took advantage of the opportunity. What they started doing was publishing the first widely available English Hebrew Haggadah and giving it away for free or close to free at supermarkets around the country. 1932, a key moment in mass marketing as we were coming out of the Depression, as standards were being established, suddenly one of the things that it meant to be part of the Jewish community is that you understood the layout and you had used the Maxwell House Haggadah.

17:55In fact, when President Obama had seders in the White House, this is the Haggadah that they used. going around the table, reading the words in English that everybody else was also reading. Well, combining those two ideas, several years ago, Alex Peck and I put together a free Thanksgiving reader. You can find it at thethanksgivingreader.com. And there you will find a beautifully designed PDF that you can download and print out and that people can go around the table and read in any form that you want because it's your Thanksgiving dinner. That cohesion might not require commerce. And that cohesion might not mean that you are doing what everybody else is doing.

18:40It might just mean that you're doing what you and the people you care about are doing. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As always, I truly love to hear from you. If you visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, you'll find the show notes for this and every other episode, including a link to the Thanksgiving reader.

19:26And there's also the appropriate button there to press and ask a question. So please go ahead and chime in with yours. Hey, Seth, it's Stephen from Belfont, Pennsylvania. I have a question about questions. Some questions prompt a really generous answer, a riff or a rant or something that seems to serve everyone. But I've been in some settings where questions fall flat. So from your perspective, what makes a question juicy? Thanks, Seth, for the ratchet you turn and for the ruckus you make and for teaching us to do it too. Yeah, what makes a good question? I'm going to highlight a few elements that seem to work.

20:13The first one is enrollment, meaning that the questioner is on the same journey as the person being asked. This is very different than the hostile witness mindset. This is very different than using questions to berate or to even seek to change someone's mind. That if you are open and seeking to go where the other person can help you go, the right question can inspire the person you're asking to bring out their best version of an answer. And the second piece, which is also critical, is that a good question is filled with respect. The respect of, this person might know something I need to know. So a good question feels to the person you're asking it to, like it's giving them a chance to speak up and contribute.

21:09Too often, both of those elements are missing, particularly in a school setting. Hi Seth, I'll be here from London. My question is about the conflict between capitalism and the free market. Peter Thiel has also recognised the dichotomy between these two things, but he seems to welcome the accumulation of capital in business and the creation of monopoly. I think he believes that to truly exploit the disruptive potential of data in our society, we have to allow these monopolies into our lives. If we were to realize your hypothetical example of the smart fridge, do we have to necessarily give up our privacy and freedom to do these?

21:50I want to start by highlighting that privacy and freedom aren't always the same thing. As I've talked about previously, if you are using almost any system in our modern world, if you are going outdoors without a mask on, if you are carrying a smartphone, you gave up your privacy a long time ago. But what we really want is to not be surprised. What we really want is the independent freedom to do what we want to do, as long as it's not bothering other people, without a powerful entity somehow getting involved. And this freedom is part of data portability. Can I take my social graph with me when I leave Facebook?

22:35Yes or no? If I have a fridge and it's really smart, is the data mine? Can I teach the data to act on my behalf, to trade and engage with other parties in a way that benefits me? because a data monopoly is only profitable because it's a monopoly. A data monopoly is dependent on people not having a choice. On the other hand, if we can create a free market in data where your data is your data, where we can trade and leverage our own data to learn more and to get more of what we want, where we can leave one open market and go to another open market, then the law of the free market can't help but make it more likely that we will be served better.

23:25Because the middle people, the people who are somehow creating value from exchanging data, they know that we can go to the next place. It's really fascinating that a lot of the rich people who have made so much money in the open free market of trading dollars around the world decide that the rest of us have to live with places where we don't have many choices. The fact is, if you've got money to invest, it's a free market in where you will invest it. If you're looking for a bank account, there are lots of places you can put your money. Your money isn't locked into one place forever just because a bank touched it.

24:09And so going forward, I think we need to agitate, and I think it's unlikely it's going to work, for open, free markets in things like information and data. Because only when we do that do we get away from the regime of the SAT, the ACT, cable television, social networks, and on and on, where natural monopolies are forming because it's just too hard to move our data around. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. In the next week, we will play the game.