A Photo of Me (and The End of The World)

What does a photo of me (handsome devil) and the end of the world have in common? Well, let me demonstrate.

At first I thought I was just putting up a photo of me so that I could add it to my profile. Really. That's it. Took me about 20 minutes. Lots of image resizing. Had to upgrade my graphic converter.

Then I watched Elizabeth Vargas on 20/20 have Stephen Hawking, who is in an electric wheelchair and speaks through a machine tell us how computers are going to be smarter than us in 100 years. And then they showed a clip of The Terminator (cause they couldn't afford to license The Matrix for this lousy Armageddon nonsense that they were airing instead of, say, news) where Arnold Schwarzenegger (who got buff using machines) destroyed the world. Since he already has California, it got me to thinking...

Whoa, I realized, the Matrix was wrong. The evil robots don't need us to make energy for them. Jeeeezuz! How much of your day was spent doing what I did for 20 minutes today: file conversion for a computer? That's right--they are already using us to crop photos, copy and paste calendar items into our Blackberries, and to reformat files from PowerPoint to HTML being careful to get all the bullets to be the same size. Cause if there's one thing robots are bad at, it's making consistently sized and indented bullets.

Think I'm crazy? Here's a company where I got my first real job after fleeing IBM and my parent's house in upstate New York. And DCL is still there changing files from one computer system to another to feed the beast. So Elizabeth Vargas, be more than just afraid of a Nobel Prize winner with a mouth tube because robot overlords--they're already here.

As for the business lesson today, it's this: ABC knows that there are two basic desires you can sell to. One is someone's desire to gain more. For example, real news might tell you something you could use to make money or get a better house. The second is to sell to someone's desire to hang on to what they have. This is the most powerful reason in the world for convincing someone to buy. And that's why I watched 20/20 tell me about the end of the world because I want to hang onto my little piece of it.

And that's not so bad, Mrs. Vargas. After all, my book Typo, is about how I made and lost millions of dollars as an entrepreneur. And I plan on marketing it to exactly the same desire to not lose what you have as you did.