Month: July 2025

Maybe it was a result of the free spirit of the late 1960s with all those drugs. Perhaps it was just a reaction to the threat of war and being so worn out with the one in Vietnam. It could also be that we just had nothing to fill the connection voids we were feeling with each other.

Nevertheless, Gary Dahl came up with pet rocks packaged in boxes with ventilation holes and straw bedding imitating a pet carrier. According to Wikipedia, he conceived the idea in a bar while listening to his friends complain about their pets. A rock would not need to be fed, walked, bathed, or groomed, and it would not die, become sick, or be disobedient.

Lacking the capital to launch the product, Dahl convinced some colleagues to invest in it. He purchased the actual rocks from Mexican beaches for less than a penny each. The Pet Rock was introduced in August 1975 at a San Francisco trade show, and Dahl was then swarmed by orders from retailers. The fad lasted about six months, ending after a short increase in sales during the 1975 Christmas season. Although by February 1976 they were discounted due to lower sales, Dahl sold nearly 1.5 million Pet Rocks for just under $4 each during the initial release, turning 95 cents profit on each unit, and became a millionaire.

Fads like this die out. But, before they do, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) steps in to hype everything. The fever pitch of the hype cycle can be alluring and addictive. Perhaps this Wikipedia summary helps the collective obsession.

Collective obsessions have three main features in common. The first, and most obvious sign, is an increase in frequency and intensity of a specific belief or behavior. A fad’s popularity increases quickly in frequency and intensity, whereas a trend grows more slowly. The second is that the behavior is perceived as ridiculous, irrational, or evil by those who are not part of the obsession. Some people might see those who follow certain fads as unreasonable and illogical. To these people, the fad is ridiculous, and people’s obsession with it is equally absurd. The third is that, after it has reached a peak, it drops off abruptly and is followed by a counter obsession.

A counter obsession means that once the fad is over, if one engages in the fad, they will be ridiculed. A fad’s popularity often decreases rapidly once its novelty wears off. Some people might start to criticize the fad after pointing out that it is no longer popular, so it must not have been “worth the hype.”

Please remember that I am an AI advocate and have spent my entire career using it. When Susan wanted to build a company and suggested the name Apogee, I asked her to include the name Interactive because I wanted our initials to be AI. Our lawyer warned me at the time that AI had fallen out of favor because the claims about it just weren’t realistic.

Well, fast forward to today and read the feeding frenzy to find brilliant minds and hope that when you put them in the same group a miracle happens: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-ai-9ded6031?st=ScxWA8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-ai-9ded6031?st=mysDjz&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

and if that wasn’t enough, try this: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-recruiting-mark-zuckerberg-sam-altman-140d5861?st=eZXedc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The problem with this thinking is always the same. First, it will create a mutiny within the historically loyal ranks … good traditional people will jump ship, and the remainder dwindles in effectiveness, and then, when the hype cycle moves to the inevitable down cycle, the entire organization implodes. Gone are the days of “skunk works.”

Secondly, brilliant people tend not to be the best team players, and this business is not about superstars. Finally, and most essentially, the AI game always depends on curated, high-quality data, not just massive, unfiltered information fed into some “black box” models.

I grew up with a simple adage: garbage in … garbage out. It was true 60 years ago and is even truer today.

I grew up under the influence of marketing hype insisting that buying a diamond was a commitment and an investment … Mother Nature was not making any more, and I was buying a rare treasure that was hard to find, cut, and polish. The natural sparkle was discernably different than cubic zirconium, and your jeweler could prove authenticity. That was then …

Artificial diamonds have gained mainstream acceptance, and value-seeking buyers are increasingly rejecting marketing claims by De Beers and others that true love requires mined diamonds. The pace of transition to artificial diamonds is staggering, but facing the facts seems elusive for De Beers. See for yourself: De Beers faces an uncertain future on natural diamonds

The industry survived the blood diamonds disclosures that exposed their practice of mining in war zones, often with children, with profits used to fund insurgencies. But this latest threat may be the final nail in the coffin. And much like the tobacco companies, De Beers is now doubling down on marketing strategies, maligning anything but a natural diamond as having real value, rather than planning for a portfolio approach to their evolution.

A successful approach might be to keep the dominance of the diamond business by offering a range of stone categories, from cubic zirconia to artificial diamonds to natural ones for those who can afford them. Consumer choice also changes over time, and therefore it would be better to keep your brand recognition. But, no … De Beers seems hell bent on doubling down on their historic perspective.

Times they are a changin’ … many underlying factors are driving the transition beyond price. Technology will make the process of manufacturing diamonds less expensive over time, and this also deteriorates the intrinsic value question of a natural diamond.

I remember trying to impress my father with the Porsche brand, explaining how much of the car was hand-built. My father reminded me that anyone still building anything by hand was facing economic failure. At the time, I thought he was wrong … I was a romantic, I guess. There was something precious in my mind for anything that was handmade.

I also recall advising utility executives 20 years ago that the Blockbuster business model needed a makeover.  I predicted that renting a physical memory image would go the way of streaming.  I was ridiculed. They topped the video rental industry with thousands of retail stores and millions of customers. Still, they were unable to pivot fast enough into streaming to avoid filing for bankruptcy in 2010, just five years later.

The harsh reality today is that any commodity is subject to supply and demand volatility and the existential questions about sources of what we thought were limited raw materials. Let’s just suppose nothing thwarts the artificial diamond production process. In that case, it is only a matter of time until the diamond setting will cost more than the diamond itself … after all, you cannot make artificial silver or gold, can you?

Can you see the logical flaws in what I am saying? This whole area is a house of cards when you really think about it. We have a romantic framework of value that is under attack. The only foundation block is that gold and silver are still thought of as rare commodities here on earth.

I once thought that oceanfront real estate was the ultimate investment, albeit far from my reach. Now I read that coastal areas in California and Florida are plummeting in value. Who could have forecast that the insurance industry would shift the economics of property and boat ownership in Florida … but it has. Who would have guessed that red tides driven by multiple environmental bad actors in central Florida would destroy home values?

We live in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Natural diamonds are facing competition from artificial stones, as well as consumer attitudes about lavish gifts and even marriage itself.

Watch the diamond transition for clues about business and life choices. This is going to be a rapid transition, and the floor is going to be littered with companies that ignore current events.

The end game is the very last part of a strategic game, like chess or backgammon. It is the last few moves you make to determine the winner and loser. It’s common knowledge that grandmasters can see many moves ahead, as many as 15 to 20 moves ahead if given enough time. Their tournaments are timed to limit this brilliance. By contrast, I never learned to play the game beyond one or two moves ahead at best. As a result, I rarely won a game.

Our modern world is a giant chess game right now. There are so many pieces, and the range of movement is so great. Politics and perceptions are so far off true science-based logic that our likely demise seems almost certain.  That is, unless we step back, take a timeout, and consider moves that are a bit further along in our mutual journeys than those deemed important by current politics. As just one example of this mental approach, please carefully consider this recent article about the bee populations:  ‘Could become a death spiral’: scientists discover what’s driving record die-offs of US honeybees | Bees | The Guardian

The following quote summarizes the findings: “Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.”

The simple fact is that if the world bee population collapses much further, and pollination of plants gets driven to a fraction of what it is today, the world starves. The same process is happening in our health care system with its use of disinfectants. The bad germs are mutating, gaining resistance, and resulting in the deaths of patients who were not even sick as they entered the hospital.

You may remember the movies titled War of the Worlds where our planet was saved by this process, but our current situation is far from in this hopeful state. Our planet’s microorganisms are mutating in response to our attempts to amplify the natural balance of life. Consider these comments about our health care system since COVID:

“There was a lot of unnecessary use of antibiotics during that time. And so now we see sharp increases in many of those antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Many of these germs live in the intestines. They are generally kept at bay by the good bacteria that we all have in our intestines. But sometimes, when we use antibiotics, or use devices or do surgery, those good bacteria are destroyed. And then these germs can find a hospitable niche and grow and cause infections.”

Ironically, it is our quest for efficiency, scale, and the consequent financial rewards that pushes otherwise natural balances out of balance.  The only form of life that is not mutating is us, so we need to think farther ahead than winning elections and supporting near term business ideas that are simply not sustainable. There are world class energy and societal chess players who can define the sustainable world end game … and trust me, they are not the current brood of politicians or world leaders.

To them I plead: Please come forward and rescue the bees now and us from future calamities like this!  We need the bee’s knees experts for sure.

If you have followed my Captain Obvious blogs over the last few years, you are well aware of my warnings about carbon capture and other sustainability mirages, which are often put forward as solutions to our planet’s energy problems.  One more just bit the dust, and it wasn’t due to Trump’s presidency … it was due to the reality of things:

Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions – Heimildin

The story keeps repeating itself, and if you haven’t watched Planet of the Humans, you are uninformed and are being lulled into a delusional hope that technologies like EVs, solar, wind, and even nuclear are going to save the day.  These are not bad ideas, but they are insufficient to sustain our future world.

We must cut consumption of not only energy but also stop raping the planet of non-renewable natural resources.  The pace of this carnage is completely out of control today, and the first victim will be our oceans and the fish they produce.  Rampant overfishing is collapsing fish stocks.  It seems we do not learn anything from history.

But, unlike in the whaling industry, a new natural resource (the discovery of oil) will not save the day.  We keep searching for something shiny and new to compensate for our guilt and shame.  Recycling makes us feel better about consumption … but it doesn’t work.  EVs make us think we are doing our part, but mining the rare-earth materials for their batteries makes them the blood diamonds of the energy business. 

By analogy, I have been struck by how AA works to help people with addiction to alcohol.  It is not always successful, but there is something to learn from why it works when it works to help people.  There are two huge lessons I learned from a detailed study of the Twelve Steps and The Big Book that they use to share stories of challenges and success:

1. You must get past your excuses and face yourself and all the garbage that your heart and mind have collected to justify your bad behaviors. You can’t just admit you need help … you must “bottom out” in your belief you can do this alone.
2. This can’t just be an intellectual exercise. You must commit to a continuing dialogue of interaction with another person who has gone through these challenges and work weekly on the progress toward sobriety.

The pattern I am seeing in all of life today is our tendency and temptation to use easy buttons and pills to take away our responsibilities.  The easy buttons are to elect people who we think will make our life better without any sacrifices or commitments on our part.  Failing that, we want a pill to take away personal accountabilities and responsibilities.

It is time we admit we are in real trouble as energy addicts and commit to working towards energy and societal sobriety together.

Begin your journey by watching Planet of the Humans, followed by the newly released and widely acclaimed documentary, David Attenborough’s Ocean. At 99, it may be his last production attempting to awaken the world to the reality of man’s impact on the planet.  I would call it his best.