A Lesson in Branding + How to Think about Trump’s Verdict — with Jessica Tarlov

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1:12episode 303 303 is the area code covering parts of colorado in 1903 henry ford founded the ford motor company true story i left my adderall in my ford fiesta i came back and it's a ford focus true story i was a brand strategy consultant and engaged by ford motor to help sell more cars my idea add anal to every brand anal charger anal challenger anal expedition and anal fiesta. Go, go, go!

1:52Welcome to the 303rd episode of the Prop G-Pod. 303rd, it feels like if I say that three times, some sort of poltergeist is going to show up and turn me into, I don't know, that 59-year-old is angry, depressed, and has erectile dysfunction. Oh wait, no poltergeist needed. Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Jessica Tarlov, a co-host on The Five, Fox's weeknight news program, to hear about Trump's conviction and what it means for American politics. You are going to say that you heard about Jess here, if you don't watch Fox. On Fox, she's a bit of a superstar, but I just love that her star is literally the shooting star.

2:27And she's, I don't know her well, but I do know her, and she's just an impressive, cool woman. A woman. Anyways, Jessica has become our go-to Yoda for all things politics. I find that she kind of hits it up the middle. She's an unabashed Democrat, but she comes from a background of consulting and data. And oh my gosh, you want to see just her. I just love my favorite moment is when the five or four of the five say something just fucking ridiculous. And she just punctures them in the middle of the forehead with a bunch of data. and they all sit there looking as if they've just been caught masturbating.

3:02I mean, they have the strangest looks on their face, like who the fuck invited this smart Democrat to come in and make us look like idiots? Anyways, she's fantastic. What else is happening? The dog is back in London. I went to the UEFA finals. I saw Dortmund play Real Madrid. By the way, Mbappe, not that you care about football. By the way, it's called football, folks. Three billion people can't be wrong. It's called football. Have hired Mbappe, who is arguably the best, maybe the best player in the world right now. I'll probably get shit for that. Football fans are very, very serious about their football.

3:33But Real Madrid did not need Mbappe. They're going to be dominant now. Anyways, took my two sons and their friend Santi from Florida who came all the way over just for three days. You can do that when you're, literally no jet lag when you're 16. No jet lag. I woke him up early in the morning, no problem. Time to go to sleep, no problem going to sleep. So a little bit different, a little bit different when you enter your sixth or seventh decade. It's great to be back here. When I say great, it's just good. It's not great. It's sort of good. It's a beautiful day here for London. It's like almost hit 60 degrees for a moment.

4:07And I think I saw this round orange thing in the side, although I will say I do love London in June as the days go on forever. It's really nice. It's also nice to be back, see my kids, you know, nice to be home, get back, get back in the swing of things. Anyways, let's move on to some news. The Wall Street Journal reported that New York State is proposing a bill that would prohibit social media companies from serving up algorithmically driven feeds to minors and prevent them from delivering notifications during the wee hours of the night without parental consent. Governor Kathy Hochul believes this measure is needed in order to make these platforms less addictive and to address the growing crisis of teens in distress.

4:44According to the journal, opponents, that is industry leaders and trade groups, have questions about the constitutionality of the proposal and believe media literacy would have a more immediate impact. What the fuck does that even mean? They're supposed to read about how terrible these social media platforms are? Look, when we look back on this era of big tech, we're going to regret the income inequality. We're going to regret the monopoly abuse. We're going to regret the weaponization of our elections. We're going to regret the deep fakes, the shallow fakes. But more than anything, more than anything, we're going to ask ourselves, how the fuck did we let this happen to our kids?

5:17My colleague at NYU, Jonathan Hyde, has done great work basically demonstrating irrefutably that levels of self-harm, depression, and suicide have gone up, especially among girls, since social went on mobile. And as a parent and someone who you would think would be really mindful of this stuff, I got to be honest, we're failing. My kid struggles with device addiction. He's on social media too much. And people say, well, just take it away or just get him off the social media platform. said anyone who does not have kids, this is how they get their homework. This is how they communicate with their friends.

5:51I would bet that one third, at least one third, sometimes two thirds of all the anxiety in our house focuses on social media or devices. These things are a fucking cancer. And I also worry that a lot of my creativity, a lot of my risk taking came from the fact that I did not have this amazing casino, movie theater, dope-a-machine, you know, crack pipe in my pocket that I could just sit on the couch all day, that I would call people, I would call friends that I didn't know well or potential friends and say, hey, let's meet at the park or let, where I would go. I used to go to Westwood Park and play in pickup games when I was 10 and 11 years old.

6:32That wasn't easy. It was kind of intimidating and the kids were all bigger than me, but I was so fucking bored. I had to get out of the house. And this is the problem. Kids aren't bored now. They're just at home and they go down these rabbit holes. I've seen some of the shit that these kids say to each other. I mean, you want to talk about overprotecting offline and underprotecting online. Oh, my God. Any parent out there, demand that you get passwords for your kids' social media and go on there and see how these kids are talking to each other. It is pretty, pretty scary. I think that this is something that is going to be fixed.

7:04I think parents are catching on to just how incredibly damaging this has been and that the mendacious fucks who run these companies will pretend that they give a good goddamn about your children. They don't. They pretend about their own wealth and their own ability to get their kids into the right schools. And a lot of them, a lot of them, see above Steve Jobs, didn't allow the kids to be on devices because they know firsthand just how incredibly damaging these things can be. So let's talk about what platforms they're using. A percentage of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who say they visit or use the following apps or sites.

7:36This is from Pew. Number one is YouTube with 71 % of U.S. teens, three out of four teens are on YouTube every day. Think about that, every day. And 54%, over half, over half of 13 to 17-year-olds say they are either almost constantly or several times a day on YouTube. But for TikTok, it is 49%. So almost half of American teenagers are on TikTok either almost constantly or several times a day. And we have the added bonus with a platform influenced by the CCP of knowing they're seeing the world through a frame that is being influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. What could go wrong? What could go wrong?

8:19And then Snapchat, which I would argue is the least mendacious of the mendacious fucks, it's about 43 percent. Then we go to Instagram at 35 percent. And this isn't this isn't the total number. This is the percentage of teens who say they're using it almost constantly or several times a day. And then Facebook, which I guess is turned into the new Lamo one, only has a total of 19 percent or only about 10 percent are using it constantly or several times a day. This is the frame through which our kids are developing their brain. This is what is rewiring. When you're a kid from 13 to 17, their brain gets rewired.

8:55My kid is sort of the same person, but not really in terms of where he was at 12 and where he was now. Their brain gets rewired. The hormones kick in. The prefrontal cortex finally starts to grow. They start perceiving things, reacting to them. Their social capital shows up. And they start thinking about, well, maybe my parents don't know everything. Who do I find or what are the sources of information that influence who I am and my view of the world? That is mostly, I'd like to believe, still their peer group. Interesting study across parents. We like to think that we're engineers of the sheep.

9:27We're not. We're herders. We're shepherds. We get to choose the field they graze on. We get to choose what food they get. We get to choose what direction they graze in. But the sheep comes to us, right? We're not engineers. Just ask yourself, what would the CCP want? So we have this device or this platform or this media that is not only depressing our kids, but is giving them a fucked up view of the world. You don't think the zombie apocalypse of useful idiots on campus has something to do with the frame through which they perceive the world? Are you totally confused as to how they would even get there?

10:00Well, see above, tick and talk. Okay, moving on to a lesson on brand. The aforementioned Wall Street Journal, who broke the news about New York's social media legislation, is going through a multimillion-dollar rebranding campaign. Axios reported that the journal is introducing a new tagline, it's your business as it looks to attract a broader audience beyond the uber finance-centric people and c-suite executives to achieve this rebranding the journal is investing heavily in paid marketing you'll likely see their efforts on billboards and office buildings and social media okay does this make sense keep in mind i'm biased or i should be biased i have spent my entire professional career that's not true the first three quarters of my professional career based on the following algorithm.

10:46From the end of World War II to essentially the introduction of Google, the way you printed money, the algorithm for creating shareholder value was the following. Find a mediocre product you can produce at the lowest cost at scale, a mediocre salty snack, sugary drink, car, tennis shoe, and then wrap it in these amazing brand codes of youth, American masculinity, European elegance, sex never goes out of style, paternal care, maternal love. Why? Why should you spend$3.30 on 30 cents worth of peanut butter paste? Because choosing moms choose Jif. You love your kids more. Why? And how do you prove it?

11:21By branded toothpaste. And this was licensed to print money. Sell a product with 80 or 90 points of margin. The can is the most expensive thing about Coca-Cola in terms of the actual product. But the real expense and the real genius is the brand code that you are American and youthful and you'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. or you're like Michael Jackson if you drink Pepsi, what have you, or just drink more Coors Light and you're gonna be hot and on the beach playing volleyball with other hot people. By the way, that has not happened to me. I've consumed a great deal of beer in my life and modest volleyball player and just don't look the same way on the court.

11:58Anyways, this was the brand code. This was the algorithm for creating shareholder values. These incredibly efficient and cheap broadcast vehicles, you hire very talented people who show up wearing black, who are very attractive and you love to hang out with after hours, who come up with these amazing stories. They tell these stories on these very efficient mediums. They get huge scale, infuse this mediocre product that they can produce at scale at a low cost with these incredible brand associations and brand codes, and then boom, stuff the channel with it. Other people's channels that they spend the capital and they're good at retail.

12:30And we print money. We're Procter and Gamble. We're Chevy. We're like a rock. We're Unilever. I mean, these companies, we're AB InBev, right? Oh my God, aren't those frogs just ridiculously fucking cute. And then, and then Google came along and we no longer needed to defer to the shorthand that is brand. That's what brand is. I don't have time to do diligence on every hotel. So I will defer to the Mandarin Oriental and the Four Seasons. Why? Because usually when I travel, someone else is always paying and it's always an eight. But now I no longer need the shorthand of brand. I no longer need advertising.

13:03What can I do? I can go on my social graph. I can go on TripAdvisor. I can go on Google. I can go to AI. And what I find out is that when I'm in London, I want to stay at the Chiltern Firehouse. Why? Because I am that douchebag that likes to hang out with people who are much younger and much hotter than him. And I'm willing to put up with a substandard room, which they are, and they're choppy, to stay in an Andrew Belas hotel. He's got the algorithm down, underinvest in the actual hotel room, overinvest in the public spaces, create the illusion of scarcity and cool. And people will pay 800 pounds such that they have access to this really cool room.

13:33This is the conversion of the brand age to the innovation age to the social age, where your social graph and these new digital mechanisms of getting you to exactly the right product. Think about the waste of any broadcast commercial. What percentage of people watching Rachel Maddow tonight really have opioid-induced constipation? Well, not a lot. Hopefully not a lot. Jesus Christ, I hope not a lot. Anyways, this is the problem. Whereas if I have opioid-induced constipation, I type it into Google or AI and I get exact information. It's one-to-one. It's pull versus push. So the brand era is over.

14:12Let's bring this back to the Wall Street Journal, Scott. I don't think this is a great idea. I think maybe a little bit of it to announce the rebranding, I would try and get free or earn media. But how do you know? How do you know you are a company that is not going to add 10, 50 or 100 billion dollars in market capitalization over the next 12 months? Easy. You advertise. That's it. Professor Brand Strategy, NYU Stern, founder of Profit Brand Strategy, I have made my living preaching about the power of brand. It outs you now, in this era, is not getting it. Branding in the traditional sense, and that is trying to fill an empty vessel of a mediocre product with these brand associations, the sun has passed midday on that.

14:52Don Draper has been drawn and quartered. We are in an innovation age now where it's about the product. It's mostly about supply chain, in my view, and I'll come back to that at a later date. But to think that rebranding something is going to reignite the structural decline being felt by newspapers and content companies, boss, you're watching too much TV. We'll be right back for our conversation with Jessica Tarlov. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small, From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI.

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16:50Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Jessica Tarloff, a co-host on The Five, Fox's weeknight news program. Jess, where did this podcast find you? I'm at home in New York City in the middle of my maternity leave, so I'm thrilled to talk to an adult about something. Maternity leave? Oh, my gosh. How long is that? I am entitled to 16 weeks paid maternity leave. Good for you. That's a whole other talk, shall we? Yes, it is. I would love to do a child care conversation for sure. By the way, does your husband get paternity leave? He does. They don't have a formal policy. It's just kind of like a take what you need situation.

17:31And I still because he works in finance, I still think that they are a little uneasy with taking a lot of time. But people seem to be splitting it up like they take a bit at the beginning. And then when they really want to be off, like in August, they're like, oh, you know, I'm on paternity leave. So it's kind of a mixed bag. Did you take time? with yours? So just so you know, so I've always had my own businesses, but that take as much as you need is a trick. I used to do the same thing. I used to tell people, people would say, what's your vacation policy? And I'm like, you need a vacation, take a vacation.

18:03And people in a, you know, a high achiever firm all feel this implicit pressure to take no time. So I found it was the perfect model to make sure that no one took any time. How's that for being a terrible boss. I mean, it's honestly how you keep up. But again, it's a whole other story. But I lived, I think, you know, yeah, well, we've talked about it. When I lived in London, I did an internship for someone who was doing a maternity cover, which can be up to a year over there. And then the woman came back. They didn't want to get rid of the guy who had subbed in and had done such a fantastic job.

18:39And in the end, the woman ended up getting pushed out a couple years later because there really wasn't a role for her left, but they legally couldn't let her come, not come back after a year off. And it turned into this whole mess of a thing. So there are big politics with it, to say the least. Kids ruin everything. All right, let's get to the serious stuff here. So 34 felony counts. What do you make of this historic verdict? Well, it seems like it was the correct verdict. And everyone has really been parsing the difference between what the jury did and whether this was politically motivated or if this was the right thing to bring the case.

19:17It seems like the jury did a fantastic job. They evaluated the evidence. They went, they made a timely decision. I was following really closely, at least on social media, all the questions that they were asking, all of the legal commentators kept saying, those are the right questions to be asking, paid great attention, et cetera. And Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's lawyer, went and did a bunch of interviews and he said, you know, So we expected that this could happen. We made all of our decisions together about how to present our case. We obviously approved the jurors and the alternates, and this is the way that it goes sometimes.

19:50We'll see how the appeal process goes. The other side of the coin, which is, should Alvin Bragg have brought this case? And I was listening to your latest episode of Pivot before we got on. So I know that you had Elie Hone gone, who obviously has a bit of a counter opinion to a lot of Democrats who are seething about even mentioning the fact that this was a case that perhaps should not have been brought and that bringing it up to a federal charge with the campaign finance fraud. essentially was not the right way to go, is the other side of the coin. And that's where I think the really interesting stuff is.

20:28Well, let's put forward that thesis. My fear is that this is going to help the president get elected, that the majority of the voting public will see this as basically about sex, and that if they figured out a way to elevate an attempt to cover up sex or hush money to a felony, that they're going to need more courts, that there are a lot of people who pay off mistresses or end up doing things that are illegal under the context of trying to keep affairs discreet or quiet, and that this is selective prosecution, and that this will be further play into the whole narrative of the deep state is coming after me, rally his base.

21:15My understanding is he raised a record amount of money or a lot of money post the verdict. Distinct of the merits of when you bring a case or don't, just strategically, if you don't want Trump to be president, do you think this helps or hurts us? I think it's going to take a few weeks to a month to understand that. And the polling is really fuzzy at this moment. And some people are just ingesting the information. Some people haven't even paid attention to it yet. And the Biden campaign is still figuring out how they want to approach this. Like, how often do you want to call him Donald Trump? And how often do you want to call him convicted felon Donald Trump?

21:49And that's something that the communications people are struggling with as we speak. But I actually am less pessimistic about it than you are. And the reason for that is that I only care about a small subset of voters. The bases of the parties don't matter to me at this point. And I know that Biden's polling has been soft or softer with African-Americans and Latino voters and some young voters, but that happened in 2020 as well. And people came home. So I'm putting that to the side now and thinking, OK, who is my focus? Moderate Republicans and independent voters. And there have been a few surveys taken since the verdict, and we'll get more and more.

22:29But ABC, Ipsos was out there in the field, and they got that 52 percent of independents say that he should withdraw from the race and 16 percent of Republicans. 16 percent might seem like a low number, but there's your swung election, right? Those are your swing states, potentially. Morning Consult got basically a mirror image of that result. CBS also something similar. So if you think about how many people are actually up for grabs, how few we have to persuade that this matters and that this isn't just a one off that he lied about this, but that he is a chronic liar. And that has been a thread through the E.

23:09Jean Carroll case, the civil fraud case. And if we ever get to the marquee cases, which obviously I would have preferred if we were talking about the nuclear secrets that are hanging out in the toilet at Mar-a-Lago or January 6th before we were talking about the hush money case. I think that you can persuade a lot of people with that to just say, you know what, maybe I was thinking about giving him another shot, but the guy is such an effing liar. You work with, I mean, you work with a conservative network. What is the vibe when you talk to people off camera? Do they generally believe this is another example of the deep state going after, you know, as a function of Trump derangement syndrome?

23:51Or are they, this is bad for us? What's the vibe off mic or off camera among conservatives? I think that they actually feel both of those things and that we're always trying to put people into one box, and it's actually a lot more complex than that. So yes, the deep state is real, and they'll go back and try to re-litigate, quote, Russiagate with me, and then I'll get all hot and bothered again about Hillary Clinton, and they'll be like, actually, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore. And then they also understand the fact that this does not help their case. And you can tell that Republicans know that it's a bad thing from the type of panic in the way that they're speaking about him being a convicted felon.