 If consumer mass marketing is at war with consumers and the results are so dangerous for us, then why are we doing this? Why do we continue going down this path? There's a bunch of good reasons. First, everybody else is doing it. So if you step out, maybe after a few months you won't have any more customers. If when everybody is busy doing some process, you join in as well. Second, we're talking about mass markets. 7.3 something billion humans on earth. Too many people to call individually. You don't want your call center calling everybody who's ever bought a box of tide or a bar of ivory besides they don't want those calls. You can't imagine there's another way to do this. Like how else would you reach anybody? Anytime we've tried something else it was just a little too risky and maybe the simplest of all reasons. It's just what we do. There's a business here. We were trained in it. There's money that goes around. It's an entire economy. It wasn't always quite this way. Back when we lived in villages, we had trades. Let's say a cobbler, for example. And if your village was lucky enough to have a cobbler, it might have several cobblers, but it probably didn't have enough cobblers that there weren't enough villagers to deal with them. Guilds later on formed up to move skilled workers around, so that got solved. But over time, when the industrial revolution shows up, the cobbler turns into a producer of shoes and that factory can produce more shoes than the village could ever hope to actually purchase. So this is the beginning of creating the separation between producers and consumers and over time we get a really long supply chain. Basically, you have to transport the shoes to wholesalers who have distribution centers where they break bulk, send things off to retailers who have a variety of locations just to get products on store shelves. But nobody knows you've made a lot of shoes. So producers had a demand crisis. They had to figure out how to get heard. That started as classifieds. The good ship Wholesale is going to dock at key number five, bearing a shipment of rum and gunpowder from Jamaica. And that eventually turned into the much more sophisticated system of marketing departments that hire ad agencies that sometimes even hire independent film studios to make the equivalent of a 30-second movie with with the equivalent production quality that then gets sent out through multi-channel distribution to land on our devices and in our spaces just to tantalize us to go into a store and buy product A instead of product B. And you can see how circuitous this is. You can also see that this whole system has been under siege from a variety of different technologies and disruptors, so to speak. But this is what we do. It's what we're accustomed to, but it wasn't always remember the village and it won't always be this way. It used to be back in the village days that we lived in community mostly on the commons and communities had resources, indigenous wisdom that let them know how to live with each other and how to live such that the resources that they really depended on, whether it was fish or forests or bison or whatever, were actually plentiful year after year. In some places they screwed that up and then civilizations would die. When the Industrial Revolution came in, this notion, this concept of how to see nature really was pushed aside and producers started looking at the earth as a source of plentiful natural resources, things that if you could sequester them you could prevent other competitors from coming in and taking your market, so you were looking for monopolies of different kinds. They also had a monopoly on talking to those people who increasingly became consumers. We were sort of minimized into that role partly because the media were one way. Everything was broadcast, first newspapers, then magazines, then radio, then television, all were one-way valves where the people really couldn't talk back. There was no means of talking back and as we all know, that's changed dramatically. So the power relationship between producers and consumers is much more even, will never be even because the producers will always have more money, more access, more power, more reach. But people can get together and do extraordinary things these days. One of the implications of this shift is that the people inside the producer companies need to come out and act as peers in the marketplace and be in authentic relationships with us. This may be sort of a foreign language because there's so many people, but really this is a re-humanization of capitalism. It's a really great thing that we're going through. What it does is it points to the importance of relationships. So we really have to think about what does it mean for a company, a large multinational, to be in authentic relationships? How does technology influence those changes? All of these questions raise really beautiful whys that are much more interesting than this is just the way we've done it before. Thanks for joining this Rexcast about the relationship economy.