Whether you’ve flipped sizzling beef over a Korean barbecue, crunched down on a tangy piece of kimchi, or basked in the warm steam wafting off a bibimbap bowl, the experience is captivating. 

What you might not know, though, is that your meal likely came with a heaping side of government funds. 

In 2009, the South Korean government launched the $40m Korean Cuisine to the World campaign with the goal of improving South Korea’s global reputation through its food.  

In the years to come, the government would spend millions of dollars opening Korean restaurants abroad, developing and standardizing recipes, and working to make South Korea a culinary destination for international tourists.

But can food really help elevate a country’s reputation? And how much further can South Korea push its food campaigns?  

Diplomacy on the menu

Gastrodiplomacy, a term first coined by The Economist in 2002, happens when governments try to increase the value and knowledge of their nation through food. 

Though the term was born in the 21st century, the tactic can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans inviting their adversaries to the table to break bread, drink wine, and settle arguments. 

Much later, President Richard Nixon’s attempt at using chopsticks in China led to a rise in Peking duck on American menus, while a dessert served in a shoe during a meal between Israeli and Japanese prime ministers caused an uproar. 

“Food’s universal importance makes culinary diplomacy effective everywhere in the world,” wrote Sam Chapple-Sokol in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. “A government can rely on the friendlier aspects of its image to appeal to foreign governments and populations.”

Nixon gives “chopstick diplomacy” a try in 1972. (National Archives)

Those friendlier aspects of a nation’s culture can be a welcome reprieve from the usual, more forceful tactics countries use to gain power, such as military or political agendas. 

“You don’t reach people through rational information. You reach them through emotional, trans-rational connections that come through music, food, art, dance, and culture,” Paul Rockower, a leading expert in gastrodiplomacy, told The Hustle.

Reaching people in this way is known as “soft power,” or a country’s ability to accomplish its goals through positive attraction rather than through exerting force. Rather than coming directly from government actors, it’s born from their collaboration with cultural sectors. 

Thailand was the first country to launch a formal gastrodiplomacy plan with its 2002 Global Thai campaign.

The campaign hinged on making it as easy as possible to open Thai restaurants abroad: Templates were made for opening different types of restaurants — from fast-casual to high-end — and assistance was given with sourcing authentic Thai ingredients and obtaining visas for chefs. 

When the program was launched, there were ~5k Thai restaurants globally. Today, there are more than 15k. Thailand also saw steady growth in foreign tourists over the years, peaking pre-pandemic with 40m visitors in 2019 who spent a collective $56.7B.

After seeing the success of Thailand’s campaign, other countries followed suit: Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Peru, and the Philippines have launched official gastrodiplomacy efforts. 

As did South Korea, which executed one of the most impactful gastrodiplomacy campaigns yet and ignited a cultural movement. 

Kimchi meets the world

In the late 2000s, South Korea had a problem. Despite being home to international conglomerates like Hyundai and Samsung, and an acclaimed film scene, the general public didn’t realize many of the country’s leading cultural and business exports were Korean. 

The Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, an indicator of a country’s popularity for investment and travel, ranked South Korea 33rd out of 50 countries.   

“The nation brand was being cannibalized by the Japanese brand,” said Rockower.

Then-president Lee Myung-bak, a former CEO of Hyundai Engineering & Construction, was bothered by South Korea’s lack of recognition. He set a goal to move up to 15th place on the index by 2013. 

And Lee decided the quickest way to get there was through the world’s stomachs.

He vowed to expand the country’s international culinary footprint through a ~$40m campaign. Among his goals:

• Increasing the number of overseas Korean restaurants from 10k in 2007 to 40k by 2017
• Opening 100 top-tier Korean restaurants around the world by 2017
• More than doubling agricultural and seafood exports, from $4.4B in 2008 to $10B by 2012

The campaign got to work immediately. In 2009, the country registered gochujang (red pepper paste), doenjang (soybean paste), and ginseng with the Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international organization that oversees food safety standards and guidelines that can elevate knowledge of listed foods. As of 2021, South Korea has established six Codex standards. 

While Rockower says gastrodiplomacy is a long-term tactic that takes years to show results, rankings and lists can serve as short-term outcomes that prove the efficacy of a country’s campaign. They can also help assert countries as “foodie” destinations in the eyes of tourists and the media. 

And more projects followed: 

• First lady Kim Yoon-ok served Korean food to US Korean war veterans in 2009
• Researchers investigated whether a Korean diet would be an effective weight-loss tool for Westerners in 2012 (it wasn’t)
• In 2013, Kimjang — the practice of making and sharing kimchi — was added to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Heritage 

The country’s officials realized one traditional dish could best elevate its brand: kimchi, a salted and fermented vegetable dish made most commonly with cabbage. 

The government created the World Institute of Kimchi in 2009. The institute’s mission was (and still is) simple: to drive the growth of the kimchi industry through technological development and to establish “the status of South Korea as the mother country of Kimchi.”

American media coverage of kimchi (via assorted newspaper clippings) 

The campaign was boosted by giant South Korean companies and smaller grassroots efforts. 

• CJ Foodville, one of the largest food producers in South Korea, launched Bibigo, a fast-casual chain that also sells products in grocery stores and online. CJ Foodville’s parent company now accounts for 40% of the US dumpling market and sold $508m of Bibigo dumplings around the world in 2020, $318.5m of which came from the US alone. 

• The Bibimbap Backpackers — a group of five 20-somethings sponsored by the Korean government and CJ Foodville — traveled to 15 countries over 255 days in 2011, cooking Korean food and teaching locals about Korean cuisine. 

• Similarly, the Kimchi Bus promoted Korean heritage through the craft of making kimchi in 34 countries around the world, covering 80k kilometers. 

South Korea’s campaign also coincided with important food trends unfolding in America. 

Korean tacos topped with kimchi took off in 2008 when chef Roy Choi started his Korean taco truck, Kogi, in Los Angeles, home to the largest Korean population in the US. When the Kogi truck opened for business, it posted its location on Twitter and regularly drew lines of 300-800 people. 

Korean tacos from a Bay Area food truck. (Arnold Gatilao via Wikimedia Commons)

Around the same time, interest in functional foods and gut microbiomes led even more people to try kimchi. 

Driven in part by this proliferation of Korean products in the US, South Korea’s kimchi exports reached a record high of $159.9m in 2021. 

Surfing the Korean wave

While Korea’s food campaign was powerful, the kimchi did not stand alone. With an uptick in South Korean food came a rise in South Korean culture abroad. 

“That was the brilliance of South Korea’s gastrodiplomacy campaign,” says Rockower. “Suddenly you had Korean films, Korean music, Korean food, and the ubiquity of it helps create people who are more interested.”

Korean trends and exports are increasingly part of the international pop culture landscape, including:

• Korean beauty products (the market was valued at $8.3B in 2021)
• Netflix’s Squid Game (and the streaming service’s $2.5B investment in a Korean studio)
• The Oscar-winning film Parasite 
• Music, including K-pop (particularly popular are the groups BTS and Blackpink) and the 2012 hit song “Gangnam Style”
• Mukbang, a social media trend where people eat on camera 

An ultimate mashup of Korean culture and food occurred when musician Michelle Zauner’s book Crying in H Mart became a mainstay on bestseller lists in 2021 and 2022. (H Mart, an American supermarket chain specializing in Korean food, now has ~100 locations in the US.) The book will be adapted for film by Orion Pictures.  

Shoppers enter an H Mart in Irvine, California. (Nandaro via Wikimedia Commons)

While none of these cultural trends can be traced directly back to the original Korean Cuisine to the World campaign, each serves a pivotal role in building the country’s reputation and introducing its food to foreigners. 

“Food has come to the forefront of contemporary popular culture: star chefs, social media, TV, movies,” Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University, told The Hustle. “Gastrodiplomacy responds to a growing interest in food as a way to express cultural capital… to know the ins and outs of foreign cuisine is now a sign of culture and refinement.”

Hungry for more

Fourteen years later, the success of South Korea’s gastrodiplomacy is evident. Yet the country is still searching for something elusive: brand recognition. 

In 2018, a poll from the Korean Food Promotion Institute indicated ~88% of US residents were satisfied with Korean food but only ~63% were aware of it. Meanwhile, the Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index (what the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index is now called) ranked South Korea 23rd last year, several spots from its goal of 15th.     

Korean banchan (side dishes) at a dinner table. 

Last year, the Korean Food Promotion Institute noted Japan had branded its food as high-end, clean, and fancy, and Thailand had branded its cuisine as down-to-earth. 

“Korean cuisine, too, needs branding and an image for global prominence,” says a report from the Korean Food Promotion Institute. 

So, by the end of this year, the country intends to finalize a strategy to solidify its culinary brand. Consider it the next course of South Korea’s gastrodiplomacy.

It was one of the artist’s most recognizable pieces, Lincoln in Dalívision, a mosaic print of Dalí’s wife, Gala, that resembled the face of Abraham Lincoln from a distance. The work came with a letter from an attorney attesting to a copyright transfer between Dalí and a publisher, so the client assumed it was legitimate.     

Ewell shared the bad news: The print was published by two brothers in Alabama as part of a well-known series of fake reproductions. The signature wasn’t real, either. 

It was hardly an unusual consultation, or result. Although Dalí has been dead for 34 years, Ewell receives several inquiries almost every day from owners who believe they own one of the artist’s works but doubt its authenticity. 

“I don’t see how I can ever retire,” Ewell, who is 79, told The Hustle.  

Dalí, the surrealist Catalan painter, is one of the most recognizable names in art, known as much for works like The Persistence of Memory (the melting-clocks painting) as for his eccentric personality (he once filled a Rolls-Royce with cauliflowers and kept an ocelot as a pet).

Ewell explains the difference between original and fake Dalís in this video. (The Hustle)

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Dalí produced a vast number of paintings, etchings, lithographs, and sculptures. But fake reproductions of his art constitute a larger market. 

In the 1980s, during an art investment bubble, experts believe hundreds of thousands to millions of fake Dalís began to circulate, leading to $625m to $1B in sales of fake Dalí art in the US. Worldwide, fraudulent sales may have reached $3B.

The fraud led to prison sentences for unscrupulous art dealers and gallery owners, sunk the value of many authentic Dalí works, and continues to confound hobbyist art collectors — like Ewell’s client in Alabama — who often find out their family’s prized art is worthless.

High art and high finance

On Nov. 14, 1934, when Salvador Dalí visited the US for the first time, the American press greeted him as soon as he disembarked from an ocean liner. Where, they asked, did he draw inspiration for his art?  

Dalí’s answer was absurd: “Two broiled lamb chops on my wife’s shoulders.” 

That single statement, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle commented, “made Gertrude Stein seem, by comparison, as prosaic as the Encyclopedia Britannica.” 

Dalí poses with ocelot Babou. (Library of Congress)

The fascination from Americans signaled to Dalí and Gala the potential for building a lucrative brand.

• Dalí landed prominent exhibitions and a cover story in Time, gaining a reputation in the US as the embodiment of surrealism and striking up a relationship with a Cleveland manufacturing exec who purchased hundreds of paintings.
• Gala sought up to 500 contracts per year for her husband, securing deals to appear in ads for companies like Braniff International Airways and Alka-Seltzer. 

“(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,” said Noah Charney, an art historian and author of The Art of Forgery.

The artist’s appetite for money — as well as his embrace of Nazism — made him a black sheep to many colleagues. French surrealist André Breton famously called Dalí an anagram of his name: Avida Dollars. 

Dalí on the cover of Time in 1936. (Time via Twitter)

But the US never turned its back on somebody with dollar signs in their eyes. By the 1950s and 1960s, it was clear the demand for Dalí’s work exceeded the supply. 

So Dalí, Gala, and others in Dalí’s inner circle devised a solution: prints. Lithographs and etchings took less time to finish than paintings and could be reproduced as limited series.  

There were two categories of Dalí prints:

• Fully original: Dalí created the images himself on a printing plate and signed a limited series of prints. Originals sold for up to $3.5k.
• Legitimate prints: Some limited-edition lithographs were made by licensed publishers copying a watercolor of Dalí. These were not technically original, although they were marketed as such and approved and signed by Dalí. They could sell for nearly as much as the fully original prints.

Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them. (The signature was worth ~$40 on its own.)

Members of his inner circle, some of whom exploited Dalí for profit, once told the Wall Street Journal Dalí would sign blank sheets “every two seconds for an hour without stopping.”

A legitimate signature from Muse of Astronomy. (Christopher Roybal for The Hustle)

The prints, the signatures, and the commercial contracts kept the dollars rolling in. Beyond, the magazine of the St. Regis Hotel, noted Dalí was as much “high finance” as he was “high art.” 

But in the 1970s, the artist’s health declined, and he became a recluse for the next decade. Dalí stopped creating prints. He stopped signing his name. And yet, in a stroke of real-life surrealism, the world, and especially the US, was about to see more art attributed to Dalí than ever before.

The art of investment

At the Center Art Galleries in Honolulu, John Proctor’s job was to shadow visitors in the showroom. When they looked at Lincoln in Dalívision, he began his sales pitch, handing them a fact sheet revealing reported increases in value for Dalí’s art and setting them up with a “closer” to convince the visitors to spend as much as $11.5k for the print — enough, at the time, for a down payment on the median US home. 

“It was easy to sell art to the tourists,” Proctor told The Honolulu Advertiser in 1980. “Once you tell them they’re going to make money, they get hot for the stuff.”  

It was the era of Reaganism and Wall Street greed, and art was now being marketed as an investment. Many gallery owners told customers a piece of art by the likes of Picasso, Miró, or Chagall would never lose value. 

Dalí proved irresistible to Americans dreaming of easy money and prestige: 

• He was recognizable, the guy people remembered from their college art history course or saw Mike Wallace interview on “60 Minutes.”
• He was prolific, having signed thousands of prints. 
• He was sick, and salespeople promoted the likelihood of his death (he died in 1989) as an opportunity for the market to spike.   

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dalí works, previously available through exclusive auction houses and well-connected dealers, turned up in mainstream American galleries like Center Art Galleries, gift shops, and even classified ads in the Los Angeles Times ($8.1k “OBO” for a Lincoln in Dalívision print from some guy named Guido). 

The used-car-style sales tactics at galleries tailored to the middle class were worrying enough. But there was a bigger problem in the Dalí market. With demand skyrocketing, a third type of Dalí print began circulating: fakes. 

There was one authorized edition of Lincoln in Dalívision prints and far more fake editions. (Dalipaintings.com)

Some fakes were unlicensed photomechanical reproductions of his lithographs and etchings. Other fakes were printed reproductions of his paintings that were never intended to be printed as a series, or completely fabricated works that resembled Dalí’s style.

Because many of Dalí’s original and legitimate prints were turned into limited-edition series (sometimes with a vague number of authorized prints) and he had been sloppy with his signature throughout his life, it was hard to tell the difference between a real print and a fake print that had been copied an unlimited number of times.    

As doubts about the mass infusion of Dalí art trickled out in lawsuits and newspaper stories — and Dali’s lawyer suggested ~100 Dalí titles were being circulated as fakes — many reputable galleries and auction houses, like Christie’s, refused to sell Dalí limited-edition prints.  

Dalí, holed up in his Catalan home, even went on the record to stem the tide of fakes. In 1986, he signed an affidavit saying he hadn’t lent his signature to anything since 1980, and the only things he signed in 1980 were items like contracts and checks. 

But a lack of expertise allowed the fraud to perpetuate. Salespeople at mainstream galleries received little to no training, and most customers, largely clueless about art, trusted certificates of authenticity and Dalí signatures. They were also reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement agents who had been chasing leads.

“A lot of people buying these were lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers — and they were embarrassed,” Jack Ellis, a former postal inspector, told The Hustle.   

Sellers such as Center Art Galleries reaped the rewards. In 1984, owner William Mett claimed the chain was the largest art seller in the US, selling tens of millions of dollars of art annually. His client list included the Saudi royal family. 

Tracing the fakes 

A few years earlier, in 1980, an Alaskan who had bought three Dalí prints from the Center Art Galleries asked Bernard Ewell to appraise them. Ewell, the son of a top official at the Art Institute of Chicago, had been around art all his life and was in the early stages of a career as an appraiser. 

The Dalí request led him to converse with fellow appraisers, dealers, and museum curators. They all knew something was fishy, but almost none of them knew how to tell the difference between a real and a fake or cared to learn. 

“I really concentrated on Dalí because nobody else was doing it,” Ewell said. 

Ewell picked up subtle clues from the texture of the three Dalí works from Center Art Galleries, noticing the ink wasn’t thick enough to be an original lithograph print.

Later, he learned that many fakes were printed on special paper from the French manufacturer Arjomari, and an Arjomari employee told him that the company had changed its main watermark in 1980. Because Dalí stopped signing prints after 1979 a fake Dalí could be spotted by examining the watermark. 

The discovery aided Ewell in his work — and would soon assist federal prosecutors in court. 

Ewell examines a fake Dali (Christopher Roybal for The Hustle) 

Agents with the FTC, Postal Inspection Service, and Department of Justice followed the crumbs from lawsuits, criminal complaints, and investigative reporting by Lee Catterall to build a case against the Center Art Galleries, raiding the business in 1987.

• Mett and his curator were convicted on dozens of counts of wire and mail fraud for selling $113m of fake Dalí art from 1977 to 1989.
• Prosecutors revealed that Center Art Galleries typically bought fake Dalí copies for $135 or less from a distributor and sold them for ~$1k-$21k each. In reality, each was worth ~$25-$50. (Mett did not respond to an interview request.)
• Ewell testified as an expert witness for the prosecution.

The feds also uncovered fraudulent art sales in places like Denver, New York City, Phoenix, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alaska. Some operations were classy galleries; others were boiler rooms where telemarketers cold-called doctors and dentists, pumping and dumping Dalí prints over the phone. 

The sellers often claimed they were unaware they were selling fakes, but many ended up pleading guilty. Most of their illicit art came from the same producer on Long Island — a French Legion of Honor recipient named Leon Amiel, an authorized publisher of Dalí lithographs and an acquaintance of the famous artist.

But, as Ellis (the postal inspector) and partner Jim Tendick discovered through an investigation named Operation Bogart, Amiel went rogue, pumping out enough unauthorized copies to produce ~80%-90% of the fake Dalís sold in the US — from boiler rooms in New York to the Center Art Galleries in Hawaii. 

Amiel died in 1988, but his wife, two daughters, and granddaughter, a Boston College student who was adept at forging the Dalí signatures, continued the family business.  

Undercover agents infiltrated the Amiel family’s business. In July 1991, Ellis and a few dozen agents raided the Amiel headquarters, an old carpet warehouse near the beach. 

They piled palette after palette of art into postal trucks, altogether ~75k prints, including ~50k attributed to Dalí. Soon, Ewell was hired to examine a stash of the Dalí prints, wheeled into a “war room” at the postal inspectors’ New York office in a giant mail cart.

To nobody’s surprise, he found that every one of them was fake.   

The everlasting fraud

These days, you never know where a Dalí will turn up — or if it’s really a Dalí. 

A few years ago, David Spiegel, a former lead attorney with the FTC who investigated art fraud, went to an auction held by a religious institution in Washington, DC. Sure enough, they auctioned off a Dalí. 

“I can’t tell you this Dalí was fraudulent, but I had never seen a legitimate Dalí up to that point, and this was an image I had seen at least a hundred times,” Spiegel said.

On Facebook, members of art identification groups post photos of supposed Dalí prints — signed, numbered, and paired with certificates of authenticity — that they’ve bought at Goodwill or on eBay, been gifted by family members, or found in storage units. One woman picked a Dalí out of the trash. The group’s members suggested that she probably should’ve just left it there.

The confusion has depressed the market for real Dalí prints. While his paintings have surged in value, the original and legitimate prints of his lithographs and etchings — which many galleries still won’t touch — are worth ~$4k-$6k, according to Ewell. Many original prints sold for roughly the same amount in the 1980s.   

In more than 40 years focused on Dalí, Ewell has appraised ~58k Dalí-attributed prints and deemed slightly over half to be fakes. Despite the fraudulent sales peaking decades ago, Ewell has viewed more prints attributed to the artist in the last 20 years (~38k) than he did in the ’80s and ’90s (~20k). 

Back then, his clients tended to be young parents who believed a fancy piece of art would diversify their investment portfolio and legitimize their entry into the upper middle class. They were duped into making a costly mistake.

Now, his clients are that generation’s grownup children, many who saw their parents proudly display their print and brag about owning a Dalí.

And these clients, Ewell said, often learn “that Dad got screwed.”

Matthews was in Atlanta, helping NBA player Dwight Howard improve his shot, when he got a message from an unknown number.

“I was like, ‘Who the hell is this?’” he recalled in a recent interview with The Hustle. “And it was 21 Savage. I don’t know how he got my number, but he was like, ‘Yo, I want to get some shots up.’ I’m like, ‘Hey, say no more.’” 

Even though it was around 1am, Matthews found an open gym and developed a quick workout tailored for the superstar rapper, who often plays in celebrity basketball games.  

Those types of thrilling moments are now routine for Matthews, a former overseas professional player who has become a successful entrepreneur in an exclusive niche: helping people get better at shooting a basketball. 

Matthews was a top shooter in college and an international pro before becoming a coach. (Courtesy of Chris Matthews)

The private coaching industry is booming. Top college football players hire quarterback trainers who charge anywhere from $50-$250/hour for their services. Even adult recreational athletes — weekend warriors — have enlisted coaches to improve their times in the triathlon and marathon.  Matthews, who declined to tell us his rates, works with an especially elite group.

But since starting his business in 2016, he has landed many of the world’s best basketball players, such as Domantas Sabonis, Skylar Diggins-Smith, and Anthony Davis, as well as numerous figures outside professional sports, from the cast of the Peacock TV show “Bel-Air”’ to musicians like Travis Barker and Drake.

Last year, Jordan Brand designed a player-exclusive shoe for Matthews, an indication of his top-tier status as a trainer.    

His skills are more valuable than ever. NBA, WNBA, and NCAA teams have doubled down on long-range shooting, one of the most efficient ways to win, leading dozens of professional athletes to seek out Matthews as a coach.  

But, as Matthews first discovered while working with 21 Savage, the market for his services is far wider. He believes everyone can gain satisfaction from shooting a ball through a hoop. 

“I feel like God put me on earth to help other people just have a good time, especially with the art of shooting,” Matthews said. 

From DC to Europe

When Matthews was growing up in Washington, DC, in the 1990s, you’d be just as likely to find him in a bowling alley as a gym. His uncle was a bowling fanatic, bringing him to the lanes almost every Saturday, and Matthews enrolled in a children’s league. 

The underhanded rolling motion felt good to Matthews. But so did throwing a baseball and a football, two other sports he played. In the end, however, nothing felt as natural as basketball. 

His father, Jeffrey Winslow, taught him to shoot on miniature hoops, believing his son shouldn’t practice on regulation-size basketball goals until he believed Matthews was old enough to use proper form. Around 10th grade — and after years of honing his shot — Matthews decided to give up the other athletic pursuits and focus on basketball. He earned a spot at National Christian Academy, where Kevin Durant became his teammate.

Matthews takes a shot. (Courtesy of Chris Matthews)

In college, he played two years at Washington State University and St. Bonaventure. The sport had not yet turned into the 3-point shooting fest that it is today, but Matthews was ahead of his time:

• During his final season at St. Bonaventure, in 2009-10, he made 3.26 3-pointers per game, the seventh-best average among NCAA men’s players.
• His 101 3-pointers that year set a school record.   

But NBA teams were not interested. Just 1.2% of men’s college basketball players make the NBA, and the closest Matthews got was a stint on the G-League team, the NBA’s developmental arm. He mostly played overseas, carving out an international career in countries such as Mexico, Russia, Bolivia, and China, earning a reputation as a prolific scorer.

Then, in 2016, after a series of injuries that included a collapsed lung, Matthews discovered what every athlete does at some point: He had to pivot.

The growth of shooting — and Matthews’s career

Matthews’s father had offered advice for this moment in his life: Use basketball. Don’t let basketball use you. The question for Matthews was how to use it. 

A legendary coach had an idea. Near the end of his playing career, Matthews worked out at Georgetown University in front of the late John Thompson. According to Matthews, Thompson told him he had the talent to be a good coach one day. 

When Kevin Séraphin, a friend who played in the NBA, asked him for shooting instruction, the compliment from Thompson started to take on a new meaning. Perhaps he could start his own business training people on how to shoot. 

• Basketball, especially the NBA, was rapidly becoming a 3-point shooter’s sport. The 3-point basket is worth 50% more than a 2-point mid-range shot and is only slightly less likely to go in, meaning expected points per shot for a 3-point attempt are greater than they are for a mid-range jumper. NBA execs realized teams stocked with great long-range shooters could score more efficiently.
• In the 2006-07 season, the average NBA team attempted 16.9 3-pointers per game. That number rose to 27 in the 2016-17 season and 34.2 during this most recent regular season. In recent years, teams with a 3-point shooting percentage better than the league median tended to win more. 
• The focus on long-range shooting created demand for teaching these skills to young talents and honing the craft of veterans. Many NBA teams employ shooting coaches (Chip Engelland and Bruce Fraser are among the best known), and players often hire their own shooting coaches for additional work. 

The Hustle

Séraphin brought Matthews to train with him in Paris the summer of 2016 and told Matthews it was the best instruction he’d ever received. Matthews assumed he was flattering him. But Séraphin posted about him online, and soon Matthews heard from Dwight Howard.    

He coached Howard later that summer and again during the next season, leading to more opportunities with other players. The word-of-mouth made Matthews one of the most trusted names among athletes in the NBA, WNBA, and NCAA. 

• During the summer, Matthews typically takes on five or six clients to work with for several weeks during the NBA’s offseason. He works with many others for shorter stints during the NBA and WNBA seasons.
• For each client, Matthews studies game tape and develops a tailored plan to help them achieve improvements for the type of shooting they request, from free throws to 3-pointers. 
• In the most recent NBA season, past Matthews clients Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Michael Porter Jr. finished among the league’s top 20 in 3-point percentage. 

The Hustle

Social media has helped catalyze the growth of Matthews’s business. Several years ago, when Instagram was still mostly photos, Matthews started sharing videos of his shooting workouts. Some went viral, and his Insta handle, “Lethal Shooter,” grew to more than 2m followers, increasing his profile to people outside the professional basketball world.

After 21 Savage reached out, Matthews said, there “was no looking back. That’s when I started training so many celebrities.”

• Most of them have been basketball fans who just want to get better at their favorite sport, from Jamie Foxx to Marlon Wayans to Drake to Machine Gun Kelly. Bad Bunny asked Matthews to train his basketball team, which plays in the Baloncesto Superior Nacional Puerto Rican professional league. 
• Morgan Cooper, creator of “Bel-Air,” used Matthews’s services to make the show’s basketball scenes look more realistic and enhance the skills of actor Jabari Banks. 

Matthews poses with Jabari Banks after a training session. (Courtesy of Matthews/LethalShooter Instagram) 

Last year, Dallas Mavericks owner and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban hired Matthews for a lesson. Cuban’s answer for why he sought help from Matthews was, basically, why not.

“The guy is a lights-out shooter,” Cuban told The Hustle over email. “I was there to learn anything I could.”

‘Go in the gym’

Matthews learned something from Cuban, too. Just as he has from training people like rapper Kevin Gates, Future, and others.  

“They want to get stimulated outside of their normal life,” Matthews said.

“Mark Cuban, he has so much pressure to run a team, he wants to shoot. Kevin Gates, he’s in the studio all day. He wants to shoot sometimes. If Future is in the studio all the time, he wants to get up some shots.”

Across the country, people play golf, jog, and practice yoga to escape the stress and monotony of their lives. Matthews wants them to consider another type of release. 

“Go in the gym, man,” he said. “Clear your mind and leave everything that’s bothering you out there.”

She was a Southern Californian who worked at an aerospace firm. Swanson was a wife, a mother to four kids in a blended family, and a secretary who enjoyed her job. She was living what most people would consider an ordinary life. 

When her boss’s spouse got surgery in January 1986, that began to change. 

Swanson ordered a standard bouquet from the closest florist she could find, a business called Floral Fantasies. The flowers plus delivery cost $23.95. Swanson used her Visa card. The boss’s wife was thankful for the gift. That was that. 

Or so Swanson thought.

She realized a few weeks later she had been charged $601.11 for the order — the equivalent of ~$1.6k today.

“The bottom line is I got pissed,” Swanson told The Hustle. “I turned into an investigator.”

Robin Swanson in the 1980s. (Courtesy of Robin Swanson)   

The coming months would take Swanson and her husband down a path that was anything but ordinary: phone calls with a charismatic young entrepreneur, a clandestine visit to a lavish gated community, a dust-up with hired goons. 

Swanson was just trying to get her money, but she ended up doing far more. She helped set a foundation for the downfall of one of the biggest — and most bizarre — Ponzi schemes of the 1980s. 

The making of an entrepreneur

When Barry Minkow was in high school, all he wanted was to be noticed.

The odds were decidedly against him. Grover Cleveland Charter High School in Reseda, California, he later recalled, featured a classic adolescent pecking order — jocks, cheerleaders, and rich kids occupied the cool tables at lunch and threw the best parties on weekends.

Minkow, a shrimpy nonathlete who drove an old Buick nicknamed “The Bomb,” checked exactly zero of those boxes. 

Motivated by his teenage angst, 15-year-old Minkow decided to get bigger and richer. For the first goal, he took steroids and lifted weights. For the second, he started a carpet cleaning business in 1982, naming it ZZZZ Best (the four Z’s representing the number of future children he desired).

The name didn’t make a ton of sense, but the choice to enter the carpet cleaning industry did:

• His mother managed a carpet cleaning business, where Minkow had spent summers working. 
• The carpet cleaning industry was on the rise, especially in sprawling Southern California. Most suburban homes were carpeted, yet one insider estimated that ~80% of owners had never paid for carpet cleaning.  

Minkow got the business off the ground with a loan from an acquaintance at his gym and hired other gym contacts for key positions at the company. He managed cleaners and salespeople (including his father) while balancing his high school studies.

Compared to competitors known for unsavory sales tactics, ZZZZ Best stood out for consistency. The company cleaned carpets for the prices they advertised at the times their customers requested, sometimes late at night.  

A price list of services performed by ZZZZ Best carpet cleaners. (Courtesy of Robin Swanson)

It also helped that Minkow engineered free publicity, calling a local TV station and posing as a customer enthralled by a teenage business owner. The station fell for the ruse and interviewed Minkow. 

Soon, several local media outlets wanted to tell the story of ZZZZ Best, and investors listened. Although ZZZZ Best was an average company, the narrative of a prodigious high school entrepreneur pursuing the American dream resonated widely.   

By the time Minkow graduated, in 1984, he had 80 employees at three offices and reported $1.3m in revenue on a ~20% profit margin that year. The investments allowed ZZZZ Best to expand and gave Minkow plenty of cash, which he used to enjoy a glitzy lifestyle:

• In 1985, he bought a $698k Mediterranean-influenced mansion in a gated community in Woodland Hills (on the same street as actress Heather Locklear), adorning the bottom of a backyard pool with a massive “Z.” 
• He owned a white BMW and a red Ferrari, and bought his girlfriend a black Porsche.
• He spent $2k on a customized kennel for his dog.

When The Los Angeles Times gave Minkow his biggest platform yet, in a 1985 feature story, he came off as brash and unforgiving, saying he resented his parents and the bankers who denied him loans when he started his business. 

His goal, he proclaimed, was to build “the General Motors of carpet cleaning.” 

The obsession

Robin Swanson’s life in the mid-80s was steeped in routine.

She dropped off her youngest kids at an extended daycare, drove to work, picked the kids up, made dinner, and helped with homework. There wasn’t time for much else — but she wouldn’t let a $601 charge for flowers slide.   

Swanson called Floral Fantasies to notify them of the error, and the person who answered forwarded her to a person she referred to as the owner of the company.

His name was Barry Minkow.     

Minkow poses with a Rolls Royce (The Los Angeles Times, 1987)

Minkow had bought the flower shop in the fall of 1985 as a side business for his associates Charles “Chip” Arrington. Arrington technically ran Floral Fantasies, but Minkow still had influence.

Swanson didn’t know anything about him, except that he sounded young and charming and promised to fix the erroneous charge. But weeks went by and the company never did. In fact, Minkow and Arrington sold Floral Fantasies in the spring of 1986. 

Meanwhile, Swanson’s credit card company declined to reimburse the overcharge because 60 days had passed since the error. Swanson had delayed contacting the company because Minkow said he’d repay her. 

At this point, Swanson became “a little obsessed.” 

She looked up Minkow’s address in Woodland Hills and scaled a barrier to sneak into his gated community — “It wasn’t a very tall fence,” she recalls. She didn’t plan to confront him; she just wanted a closer glimpse of the person who took her $601. 

Swanson, nor hardly anyone else, knew what was really going on.       

The real ZZZZ Best

In reality, Minkow’s opulent home — and the gauche swimming pool in his backyard — were the fruits of a fraudulent empire.

Although ZZZZ Best cleaned carpets, most of its reported capital was phony: 

• In the early days of his company, Minkow faked burglaries at his headquarters to collect insurance and used an illegal strategy called “check kiting” to cover expenses. Some of his early financing came from reputed mobsters.  
• Minkow’s scheming grew more complex with the creation of the company Interstate Appraisal Services, which sent ZZZZ Best fictitious restoration projects worth millions of dollars that artificially padded ZZZZ Best’s ledgers. 
• While ZZZZ Best’s carpet cleaning business was legitimate (and successful), the restoration projects made the company appear far larger, drawing investors whose funds could be used to pay off earlier investors, expand the company, and subsidize Minkow’s ostentatious spending. 

Basically, ZZZZ Best was a Ponzi scheme. Newer investors paid off existing loans, which Minkow and his colleagues referred to as “hooks.” 

Most customers knew ZZZZ Best as a quality carpet cleaning outfit. (Courtesy of Robin Swanson) 

Another way Minkow cashed in was by overcharging customers’ credit cards. The scheme was small-time compared to the fake restoration projects — a few hundred dollars here and there — but he ended up collecting tens of thousands of dollars. If customers found out, he’d blame an unsavory employee and pay them back. The scrutiny typically ended there.

But after numerous frustrated phone calls, Minkow never repaid Swanson. That was ultimately a big mistake.

“I just don’t like getting taken like that,” she said. 

In September 1986, Swanson filed a lawsuit in small claims court. Her husband, Bill, went to serve the papers at one of Minkow’s offices, where he was greeted by Minkow’s father. Moments later, two large men appeared, and then Minkow arrived at the office, joined by yet another goon. 

According to Swanson’s notes of the event, Minkow threw the papers in the trash and said, “This is what you can do with your fucking lawsuit.” Swanson said one of the goons jumped Bill, and that Minkow smashed his eyeglasses.

The Swansons considered pressing charges, but instead went ahead with the small claims case. Minkow didn’t show, and the judge pro tem ruled in Swanson’s favor.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The judge declined to award payments for the interest on the stolen money and the damage to Bill’s glasses, chiding Swanson for not disputing the charge with her credit card company quickly enough. 

“And I said, ‘so basically you’re punishing me for being naive, rather than punishing him for being a crook?’” Swanson recalls saying. “The judge got a little bit ticked off about that.” 

Swanson didn’t feel vindicated. Worse, she saw Minkow being celebrated: for giving advice on the television show “Teen Talk,” for donating $10k to a drug rehabilitation program, for hosting a Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce event about the “American free enterprise system” that featured the actor James Caan.  

After the small claims case, Swanson alerted a Los Angeles journalist about Minkow. (Courtesy of Robin Swanson)

As a last-ditch effort in the fall of 1986, she contacted LA Times reporter Daniel Akst, who had written a complimentary profile of Minkow in 1985, explaining how she had been cheated. 

Swanson sent him a bunch of documents and didn’t hear anything back. 

Going public

As Swanson continued to fight, ZZZZ Best continued to ascend. 

• In late 1986, the company, which had grown to 1.3k+ employees, got listed on the Nasdaq through a ~$13m public offering. 
• The company’s offering documents stated that 86% of revenue came from insurance restoration jobs, its fictitious revenue sources. 
• To hoodwink skeptical auditors before the IPO, the company leased an old building in San Diego and filled it with cleaning equipment to resemble a restoration site. In Sacramento, ZZZZ Best paid off a security guard at a random building undergoing construction so they could fill it with company signs for a walk-through.  

The stock began trading at $4 and soared to $18+ within months, giving ZZZZ Best a market cap of $211m+. Minkow’s worth, on paper, was ~$100m, and the company reported $33.4m in sales for the nine months ended Jan. 31, 1987. 

The Hustle

Best yet, the company was turning a corner, announcing on April 16 it would acquire KeyServ Group in a $25m deal that would bring in cash to pay off loans and investors. 

KeyServ was Sears’ authorized carpet cleaner, netting $80m in annual revenues. According to what one of Minkow’s associates, Mark Morze, later told The Los Angeles Times, it would be a “cure,” allowing ZZZZ Best to shut down its fraudulent restoration work. 

Minkow was even more ambitious. He bragged about ZZZZ Best’s sales in an April 27 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and spoke of buying the Seattle Mariners baseball team with the incoming fortune.

“I saw acquiring KeyServ as a way to instantly fulfill my dream of becoming the General Motors of the carpet cleaning industry,” he later wrote in his book Cleaning Up.

But no amount of bluster could save Minkow. Akst, the LA Times reporter, called Swanson out of the blue that spring. He was preparing to leave for a job at The Wall Street Journal and came across her information while cleaning his desk. 

This time, Akst dug in. The result was an expose published May 22 on the front page of the Times’s business section. Minkow saw the headline when he picked up the newspaper from his front porch: “Behind ‘Whiz Kid’ Is a Trail of False Credit Card Billings.”

In the story, Minkow claimed bogus charges at ZZZZ Best had been repaid. But his explanation for Floral Fantasies — that the problem was inherited when he and his associate bought the business — didn’t match the timeline of Swanson and others who’d been overcharged. 

The Los Angeles Times alleged financial wrongdoing by Minkow when he was on the verge of acquiring a major cleaning business. (The Los Angeles Times via Newspapers.com)

Others began to question Minkow, too. 

• Norman Rothberg, who was hired as a part-time accountant for Interstate Appraisal Services, expressed concerns to ZZZZ Best auditor Ernst & Whinney around the same time the article came out. 
• Gil Lopez, an investigator for a credit card payment processing company, after hearing reports of credit card fraud attached to ZZZZ Best and Floral Fantasies, discovered hundreds of incorrect charges. He started compiling evidence from Floral Fantasies customers for a police report before Minkow paid back most of the false charges, according to Akst’s reporting.

But Swanson was never paid back, and it was her tip that brought everything into the open. 

Years later, when Akst published a book about the fraud, he described Swanson as the person “who did as much as anyone to destroy (Minkow).”

The empire crumbles

In early May, Minkow flew hundreds of KeyServ employees to California for an introductory conference. The sale would go through as soon as the financing was finalized.

It all began to unravel:

• The stock sank ~25% the day the story was published.
• Drexel Burnham Lambert, underwriters for ZZZZ Best in its deal with KeyServ, withdrew on June 1. Auditor Ernst & Whinney pulled out a day later, effectively quashing the deal.
• Minkow resigned on July 2. By July 6, the stock had plummeted to $0.75 per share, from ~$15 in mid May. Two days later, ZZZZ Best filed for bankruptcy, and Minkow did the same for himself in August. 

Later, in a 1989 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Morze, the Minkow associate, reflected on how the newspaper article, prompted by Swanson, ruined the KeyServ acquisition an estimated four days before it was going to close.

“If everything had worked out, everyone makes out like a bandit,” he said. “The stockholders make money, the income tax people collect taxes, three or four thousand people get jobs, America gets its carpets cleaned.” 

Instead, Minkow was convicted on fraud charges, sentenced to 25 years in prison, and forced to pay back defrauded investors $26m in restitution. The prosecutors used Swanson’s notes as evidence during the trial.

Swanson Xeroxed an altered title on the cover of Minkow’s self-published book, Making It in America, eliciting laughter when it was shown during Minkow’s trial. (Courtesy of Robin Swanson)

After serving six years in federal prison, Minkow became a pastor and fraud investigator — only to be convicted of financial crimes, including the defrauding of his church congregation in San Diego, and sentenced to federal prison again in 2014.

As for Swanson, her story as a primary instigator of ZZZZ Best’s downfall has largely been forgotten. She doesn’t hold any grudges against Minkow — she eventually got her money back — and believes his empire was ripe for failure.    

“It was going to come crashing down eventually,” she said. “Hopefully by my weird obsession fewer people lost their life savings.”

Paynter leads a studio of 40+ architects at Gensler, one of the world’s largest design and architecture firms. Just before the pandemic, he’d developed a new, bespoke offering: transforming sad, old office buildings into nice, new apartments and condos. 

Then the pandemic shut down offices, and droves of workers never returned. In downtowns across America — in cities such as New York, Houston, and San Francisco — office buildings are still 40%-60% vacant. 

Local politicians see a crisis to be solved: Unless downtowns are transformed — a daunting, difficult prospect — they could become ghost towns. 

But for some developers, the problem is an opportunity to shop for discount real estate in the center of North America’s most expensive cities. 

Recently, a client asked Paynter to look at 12m square feet of mostly vacant office buildings in downtown Calgary, wondering if they could be turned into happy homes for urbanite Canadians. 

“It’s been crazy,” says Paynter. “It’s a huge number of projects and a huge amount of work.”

A long time coming?

Work has long defined the geographic center of American society.

“Over the last hundred years, we designed the world around the office,” says Dror Poleg, an economic historian and author of Rethinking Real Estate and After Office (forthcoming). “It determined the center of our cities, the length of our commutes, and other business activity that was influenced by the rhythms of the office.”

“And I think that in 50 or 100 years, we will look back at this moment as the clear point when that paradigm broke.” 

For the past two years, the demise of downtown office districts has been headline news. “San Francisco’s downtown as we know it is not coming back,” Mayor London Breed said in February. 

The Hustle

But America’s downtowns were not thriving pre-covid. As Poleg and Paynter point out, the pandemic and remote work accelerated corporations’ already-in-progress retreat from downtown — a trend driven by two chief factors:

1. Many downtowns are full of outdated office buildings constructed in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Designed for another era, they’re dominated by private offices with fewer spaces for collaboration and meetings and ceilings too low for today’s open floor plans.
2. Slack, Google Meet, and other tools allowed companies to access various talent pools by replacing a single corporate headquarters (often downtown) with multiple offices across the country (often in mixed-use neighborhoods). As Poleg notes, Amazon in 2019 planned to open a New York office. But even at Amazon’s size, they chose a site in Queens, not midtown. 

Still, cities and landlords were not planning for the scale and pace of change that the pandemic brought.

“As recently as a year and a half ago, when I would try to write something in The New York Times about converting offices into housing, they’d respond, ‘Dude, don’t be so crazy,’” says Poleg.

“It’s not, ‘Okay, we were going there anyway, and [the pandemic] just accelerated everything by two years or five or ten.’ There is a dramatic break here.”

This is not just a problem for landlords. With fewer office workers, the restaurants and cafes that cater to them are struggling: A recent JPMorgan Chase analysis found that cities such as Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco had up to 6.5% fewer retail establishments than they did pre-pandemic, and the closures are concentrated downtown. (Many suburbs, in contrast, have seen growth.)

And these losses could lead to a potential doom loop: 

• Downtown offices and stores flailing — or even just being underutilized throughout the week due to hybrid work — means less tax revenue for the city. 
• Less tax revenue (a 2023 Bloomberg study found that remote and hybrid work costs NYC $12B+ a year) could force cuts to subway hours and street cleanups.
• This makes the city less desirable to residents and businesses, who then leave, which means even less tax revenue and more cuts and crime. Rinse and repeat.

The Hustle

But in cities like Boston and San Francisco, where land is scarce and zoning laws and residents have opposed the construction of new high-rises, the crisis also looks like a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Finding a golden ticket

For years, companies in New York coveted the offices in the 22-story high-rise at 25 Water St.

The owner, JPMorgan, was the anchor tenant, and the luckiest employees in the building — located between Wall Street and Battery Park — had views of the waterfront or NYC’s skyline.

But when JPMorgan put the building up for sale recently, Brian Steinwurtzel only saw apartments — not offices.

“We immediately began exploring whether we could convert it,” says Steinwurtzel, co-CEO of the venerable NYC real estate firm GFP, which leases office space across the tri-state area. 

One reason was the building’s facade — it not only needed work, but its narrow windows were better-suited to archers defending a castle than letting loads of light into a sun-drenched office. If they had to invest in windows anyway, it was easy to imagine installing apartment windows.

Steinwurtzel also gently describes office buildings as, “you know, a very difficult sector in real estate these days.”

A rendering of what 25 Water St. will look like after conversion and construction work (courtesy of CetraRuddy)

Most importantly, Steinwurtzel says, 25 Water St. had three key ingredients needed to successfully buy an office building and convert it into residences:

1. No tenants: Not only was JPMorgan moving out of the building, but the other occupants had signaled that they were looking to leave, so the building would (or could) be empty shortly after the sale closed.
2. The price is right: Unlike sprucing up an office for new commercial tenants, a conversion entails stripping the building back to its skeleton and rebuilding from there. So the sale price needs to be modest enough that investors can still profit after two or more years of demolishing conference rooms, replacing windows, and more.
3. Less red tape: 25 Water St. is zoned for residential use “by right” or “as-of right,” meaning GFP did not need special approval for its renovation plans from NYC’s Department of Buildings — as long as they followed the area’s zoning codes. 

Steinwurtzel’s list of ingredients focuses on business factors. But even under these circumstances, not every office building can transform into residences without breaking the bank. Some buildings’ physical layout will never translate to cozy condos and agreeable apartments.

That’s why the score card Paynter and his team ultimately developed at Gensler — to keep up with the demand for evaluating offices’ potential for residential transformation — focuses on architectural features such as:

1. Do the windows open? Cities require that apartment windows open, but air conditioning has allowed for office buildings sheathed in sealed glass. In these cases, conversions are much cheaper if developers can just replace windows — rather than the entire facade.
2. Can the floors be divvied up nicely? Some office buildings transform neatly into pleasantly sized kitchens and bedrooms, while the shape wastes space or creates undesirably long and narrow apartments.
3. Will all the apartments get light? Open offices can have deep floor plates, meaning the center of the building is far from any windows. It’s okay if some desks are far from windows. But since architects can’t put windowless apartments in the center of a building, shallow floor plates are best-suited to conversions.

Gensler’s scoring criteria (courtesy of Gensler)

Gensler’s algorithm scores office buildings from 0 to 100; any that score above 80 are good candidates for conversions.

Or, as Paynter put it during our conversation, finding an office that scores above 80 is “like a golden ticket — if you can find those, you can do great.”

Why housing?

Apartments and condos are not the only possible use for underutilized office buildings. They have been converted into hotels and science labs and various industrial buildings.

But despite all the challenges of turning dreary, beige offices into attractive apartments, Paynter says, those other uses tend to be rare and challenging. In fact, housing is the most obvious way to adapt underperforming offices. That’s because…

1. The housing crisis: Workers have left downtown, but there’s no shortage of people who want to live in big cities. Residential rents in New York City reached historic highs in 2022, and a Brookings study found that — from 2020 to 2022 — median apartment rents increased in 146 of 148 American cities.
2. An architectural match: Since offices are built for a high density of people, says Paynter, they already have the infrastructure for residents: enough elevators, enough HVAC systems, enough exits. But other uses generally require modifications — like making buildings even more stable for labs’ sensitive equipment.
3. A 24/7 neighborhood: Cities don’t want downtowns full of storage spaces; they want vibrant neighborhoods. And the real estate remains pricey enough that landlords need to charge premium rents to tenants who will pay for the central location, the transit, and the shops and stores.

Demographic data supports the belief that people want to be downtown. Since 2021, the population of big cities ranging from Miami to NYC has nearly rebounded from the early-pandemic exodus, with Manhattan in particular seeing population growth in 2022. 

Many analysts doubt they will fully recover. But Poleg believes the pandemic and WFH will lead many big cities to get even bigger, and to thrive — perhaps like never before — if they can meet the moment.

Commercial developers debate how work-from-home trends will affect the future of America’s downtowns (Image: Pixabay)

Poleg compares cities in the WFH era to music in the streaming era: Although YouTube and Spotify made it easier than ever for us to find and listen to niche bands, streaming increased the dominance of superstars like Beyonce and Taylor Swift. 

That’s because it’s easier than ever to listen to Taylor Swift and because, when facing limitless options, most listeners choose the easiest, most obvious option. 

(Another comparison: It’s easier than ever for tourists to learn about charming Italian cities and villages. But they still overwhelmingly visit Venice and Cinque Terre.) 

Similarly, an increasing number of remote workers can choose to live anywhere, or anywhere within certain time zones. But most urbanites will choose the Taylor Swifts of city experiences: central neighborhoods in New York, London, and Singapore where they can walk to busy bars and find food that is trending on TikTok. 

Being the default-choice city, though, takes as much work as dominating the charts, which means city policy is essential to ensuring that turning offices into apartments is profitable and productive. 

SimCity mode

At Gensler, Paynter often hears from landlords who are interested in converting their office buildings or developers interested in buying and converting a building. He also hears from mayors and city planners. 

The client that wanted to evaluate 12m square feet of Calgary’s downtown? That was Calgary Economic Development, a nonprofit affiliated with the city government.

Paynter has also worked with San Francisco, Portland, cities across Canada, and others he can’t disclose.

Downtown San Francisco is among the nation’s hardest-hit areas (City of San Francisco)

He’s presented, too, to Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, which recently released an “adaptive reuse” study that’s already led to legislative and policy changes to boost the number of office-to-residential conversions.

NYC’s study describes conversion as “a niche pathway for office building owners,” and Steinwurtzel cautions that conversions are “one of the riskiest things a developer can do — there are so many unknowns behind every wall, floor, and ceiling.”

These difficulties are why mayors and city planners believe developers alone can’t solve their downtown problem, and why many are pursuing changes to zoning requirements and offering incentives — not only to stimulate the transformation of office buildings, but to ensure these conversions include affordable housing and solve lingering urban issues.

Consider a recent NYC planning report focused on “[reimagining] New York’s commercial districts as vibrant 24/7 destinations.” The report suggests: 

• Expanding a no-traffic initiative for certain streets
• Building new green spaces
• Reimagining waste collection
• Reducing rat sightings (good luck!)

Across America, it’s initiatives like these that will determine which cities and downtowns attract residents and workers with their Taylor Swift-esque quality of life — and whether an increasing number of office conversions are profitable and transformative.

Even Paynter, who believes the industry is underestimating how many offices are good candidates for conversions, doesn’t call office conversions “golden tickets” because they’re like winning the lottery. It’s because he believes that, amid a set of unviable options, they are a hidden opportunity.

The problem is the price. In Denver, where she lives, an hour of climbing or pingpong at a bar with appetizers, ends up being ~2x the cost of a standard drinks date.

“There’s always a chance it could turn into more,” she told The Hustle. “On a deeper level, it’s like, ‘Do I want to spend money tonight?'”

Bogdewiecz isn’t alone.

The recent bout of inflation has impacted nearly every component of dating life — food, drinks, transportation — and has added additional financial pressure to courtship. 

The Hustle was curious to learn more about the economics of modern dating life, so we recently surveyed ~700 of our readers on the topic.

How much do people spend on dates? What do they do? How has inflation impacted dating life? And what broader roles do money play in whom we choose to go out with?

A few key findings:

• How much does the average date cost? $68.
• How much did the average person spend on dates in 2022? $1,260.
• How much did the average respondent’s most expensive date cost? $492.
• Where do people go for a first date? The most popular first date is getting drinks at a bar.
• Who pays? 83% of men report always paying for the date, while 5% of women report always paying for the date.
• How has inflation impacted dating? 85% of respondents said dating has gotten significantly more expensive, but only 38% said it has caused them to go on fewer dates.
•  What role does income play in dating life? Nearly half of respondents said a suitor’s income and/or profession influences whether or not they go on the date.

Let’s take a deeper look at the findings.

Who are these daters?

Among our respondents, six out of 10 reported to have been on the dating scene for three years or less.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Likewise, the distribution of date frequency skewed toward the lower end.

Three-quarters of our respondents said they went on 10 or fewer dates last year.

That may seem low, but some researchers have suggested that finding an ideal partner (if that’s the goal) isn’t about sheer volume. According to the “optimal stopping theory,” daters should reject the first 37% of potential matches to maximize their chances of finding the most ideal partner.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Where do people choose to go on all these dates?

Overwhelmingly, daters tend to skip the meals and activities and go straight to the bar to meet up for drinks.

That said, many respondents suggested drinks were overplayed, citing costs and the routine nature of a drink. Several preferred a walk or a coffee as a first date before they’d be interested in a drink or dinner. 

• One person’s favorite date featured variety: They “walked to Whole Foods, purchased popcorn and drinks, sat in the seating area, and watched TikTok and YouTube videos.” 
• Another was impressed by a guy who bought her a quesadilla instead of a drink. “I loved that gesture,” she said.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

While the movie date was once a staple of dating culture, only 1% of our respondents said they head to the theaters with a date. This echoes broader trends with the evolution of film watching — though the “Netflix and chill” date at home seems to be equally unpopular.

The cost of dating

So, how much does all this dating cost the average person?

Our average respondent reported spending ~$68 per date — though that average varied wildly across demographics.

The differences were the most dramatic across gender lines. The average man who paid for a date reported spending $87 per date, while the average woman who paid for a date reported spending $48. (Our nonbinary responses were not statistically significant enough to include.)

Predictably, younger daters (Gen Z and millennials) spend less than the average, while more mature daters — particularly Gen Xers — spend more.

As income went up, so too did spending on dates: Those who reported earning $150k+ spent more than twice as much on the average date as those in lower income brackets. 

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

But not all dates are created equal.

We asked our respondents to share the most expensive date they’ve ever been on. On average, the total came in at $492.

They included:

• A trip to Bangkok ($10k)
• A weekend trip to Dubai ($5k)
• A Blue Man Group concert in Vegas followed by dinner, drinks, and a “ginormous” hotel suite ($3k)
• A nice steak dinner with wine, a concert, and a hotel room ($1k)
• A hot air balloon ride ($800)
• Tickets to Hamilton ($750)

Who pays for all these dates?

Our respondents adhered to traditional gender norms: 83% of men reported usually paying for dates, compared to 5% of women, although nearly half of female respondents said they typically split the bill.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

For both men and women alike, finances seem to play a central role in dating:

• 47% said a person’s occupation and/or income has dictated whether or not they go on a date with a person
• 41% said money has dictated the number of dates they go on
• 37% said they have discussed personal finances during a date
• 24% say they’ve declined a date due to money

In recent times, inflation has made many daters even more hyper-vigilant about money.

How has inflation affected dating life?

In our survey, 85% of daters said that inflation has made dating noticeably more expensive over the past year.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Among the respondents was Rahm Shoshana, a senior at the University of Illinois Chicago with a limited income.

Shoshana has been in a long-distance relationship for nearly a year and said he and his boyfriend have cut back on visits because of higher prices for gasoline and Amtrak. 

When they’re together, they’ve stopped going out to restaurants and movie theaters and opted for grocery shopping dates and Netflix. 

“That is what it is and what it will probably have to be for a very long time for us,” Shoshana said.

Inflation has impacted nearly every component of dating life — especially food, drinks, entertainment, and transportation.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Michael Beale, a Gen Zer, has noticed the price of cocktails — an important component of “Dating 101,” he said — have increased from $12 to $14 where he lives in Connecticut. But he’s still going on dates with his girlfriend, less concerned by inflation because he recently started a higher-paying job. 

At the end of the day, dating seems to be mostly price inelastic — that is, habits tend to stay the same regardless of increases in price: 63% of respondents said inflation hasn’t caused them to go on fewer dates.

And though inflation has made things a bit more challenging for the daters in our survey, only 3% reported that they have walked out and left a date with the tab.

There’s no way she could have afforded routine purchases of Manolo Blahnik shoes and designer dresses on her estimated ~$60k-$70k salary as a freelance New York City magazine columnist. But her ability to afford her apartment, a West Village alcove studio, wasn’t so far-fetched in the late 1990s.  

Classified ads from the time showed West Village studios for as low as $1k per month. Even a fancy Lower Manhattan studio with a doorman went for ~$2.2k/month on average.

But as rents have skyrocketed beyond incomes, there’s no way a modern-day Carrie Bradshaw could afford to live alone in the West Village.

• The average rent for a Manhattan studio last month was ~$3.1k, and West Village studios go from ~$3k-$4k+. 
• The median freelance journalist in New York City makes ~$69k annually, according to ZipRecruiter, offering less purchasing power than what Bradshaw made more than two decades ago. 

Living alone in the West Village as a freelance writer would have been possible for Carrie Bradshaw in the ‘90s. (Getty Images)

As millions of Americans stream “Sex and the City” and other old sitcoms, warm nostalgia has been accompanied by a cold dose of skepticism about the characters’ apartments and houses. 

Were they paying far beyond their means, or are we judging with a 2020s perspective? 

The Hustle analyzed the salaries and living situations of several famous sitcom characters over the past few decades as a lens on today’s housing market.

What we found is that not every sitcom was a fantasy. But with many young people priced out of cities, and average families unable to buy homes, it just feels that way today. 

Income vs. housing costs

When sitcoms began populating the airwaves, housing costs — both for homeownership and rent — tended to rise in tandem with income and wages. From 1960 to 1970, US median household income barely lagged growth in median rent and actually exceeded the increase in median home sales prices.     

But the trends began to change after the ’70s. 

• In 1970, the median home sales price in the US was ~$23k ($161k in 2021 values), and the median gross rent was $108 ($756). The median household income back then was ~$9k (~$63k). 
• By 2021, the median home sales price had increased 18x to ~$424k, the median gross rent 11x to ~$1.2k, and the median household income 7.7x to ~$69k.

Singdhi Sokpo / The Hustle

The increases in recent years have been particularly dramatic. Housing prices climbed steadily in the early 2000s, cooled during the Great Recession, and rose by ~24% in the 2010s, compared to a ~17% rise in income, adjusted for inflation.

And then came the wild pandemic housing market, when the median sales price jumped ~39% from mid-2020 to mid-2022. 

The run-up in housing prices has led more people to rent, but rent increases, too, are crushing — outpacing inflation and income growth since 2001. In 2022, cities like Boston and Miami saw rents rise ~20%-40% YoY. 

In cities like Miami and elsewhere, demand for apartments and monthly rents shot up to unprecedented levels in 2022. (Getty Images)

The result, according to a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, is “record numbers of renters paying excessive amounts of income for housing, with little prospect for meaningful improvement.”

It all means that many living situations depicted on TV just a generation ago would not be possible today. 

Rent and the City

When “Living Single” premiered in 1993, it heralded a new era for sitcoms. For years, network TV had mostly focused on suburban families. “Living Single” featured unmarried roommates in their 20s and 30s enjoying the city life and cultivating their careers.

Khadijah was a magazine editor, Regine was an apparel buyer (and later an event planner), and Synclaire was an administrative assistant at Khadijah’s magazine and an aspiring actress. They lived in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood many consider to be Prospect Heights.

• Using estimates from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the magazine trade publication Folio, the average income for a secretary, a retail buyer, and a New York-based editor would’ve been a combined ~$131k in 1997.
• Three bedroom apartments in Prospect Heights went for ~$900-$1.4k per month that year, according to classified ads. At $1.4k per month, Khadijah, Synclaire, and Regine would’ve spent ~13% of their income on rent.     

Alice Leppert, an associate professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus University who has studied sitcoms, described the inclusion of roommates on shows like “Living Single” as a differentiator from typical sitcoms that often portray what people “wish their life could be like.” 

“It’s a setup about friendship and friends… but it’s a nod toward economic reality,” Leppert said.

“Living Single,” created by Yvette Lee Bowser and starring Queen Latifah, aired from 1993 to 1998. (Getty Images) 

Mid-’90s Brooklyn was affordable enough that the “Living Single” trio’s less career-oriented counterparts in “Friends,” which came out in 1994, could have paid the rent if they moved to the outer borough.  

• The average combined salary for two waitresses like Monica and Rachel would have been ~$24.2k, according to BLS data (and potentially above $30k, given what the BLS has referred to as a New York City “premium”). 
• That was not enough for where they lived: The average two-bedroom in Lower Manhattan rented for ~$2.9k per month in the mid-’90s. But they could have scraped by in a “good” two-bedroom in Fort Greene ($1k-$1.8k) or renovated two-bedrooms in Williamsburg ($710-$800 per month, according to classified ads).    

What would be the economic reality now?

Monica and Rachel could no longer afford two-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn, and the “Living Single” roommates would have tough choices to make. 

• In 2021, the combined average salaries for Khadijah, Regine, and Synclaire would have been ~$193k.
• The average monthly rent for a Brooklyn three-bedroom in May 2021 was ~$3.9k, per the Corcoran Group real estate firm, which would take up ~24% of their income.   

Singdhi Sokpo / The Hustle

Because the most recent BLS info for wage estimates is from May 2021, it’s hard to predict their 2023 incomes. But rents ballooned in 2021 and 2022.

The average Brooklyn three-bedroom rented for ~$5.4k last month, and the scant number of three-bedrooms available in Prospect Heights were priced for between $4k-$10k+ per month.

Barring significant raises, the 2023 version of the “Living Single” roommates would be rent-burdened, a designation that would make them plenty relatable. Rent-burdened households, which have doubled since 1950, spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. 

Earlier this year, a Moody’s report revealed that the average American renter household was rent-burdened, a first in 20+ years of crunching data. In 1999, Moody’s found the average renter household spent 22.5% of its income on rent. 

With steady employment and no children, the “Living Single” characters would be better off than many rent-burdened Americans. But they’d also be saving less, making it harder to move beyond the hallmarks of young adulthood — renting apartments, being single — as they ascended in age and career.

Which brings us to homeownership and families.    

The end of the American sitcom dream

In the 1980s into the 1990s, TV sitcoms showcased a wide spectrum of incomes and living situations:

• The working-class Bundys of “Married With Children”

• The upper-middle-class, college degree-holding Keatons of “Family Ties”
• And the nouveau riche entrepreneurial power couple Jeffersons of “The Jeffersons”

“[It] was the American Dream ideology of you work hard and you get a middle class home and environment,” said Adrien Sebro, an assistant professor of media studies at The University of Texas and author of the forthcoming book, Scratchin’ and Survivin’: Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions.

The Jeffersons moved to the Upper East Side when three-bedroom condos cost ~$150k (~$866k adjusted for inflation). Condos at the building where the show’s credits were filmed now cost ~$1.3m. (Getty Images) 

And at the time, attaining the dream of middle-class homeownership was more realistic. 

In 1989, the show “Family Matters” gave audiences a portrayal of life somewhere between the Keatons and Bundys: a solidly middle-class family living in the middle of the country. 

Set in an undisclosed part of the Chicago area, the show’s income earners were Carl Winslow, a police sergeant, and wife Harriette Winslow, who applied to become a security guard in the show’s second episode, “Two Income Family.” Carl’s sergeant salary would’ve been ~$50k and Harriette’s security guard salary ~$14.3k, based on BLS averages and Chicago classified ads seeking security guards. 

Bungalows line the streets of a neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago. (Getty Images)

Buying a typical house would have been no problem for the Winslows, who had two kids (a third was written out midway through the show) and extended family. 

• In 1989, the average price for a Chicago area home was ~$105k ($236k in 2021 dollars), which was 1.6x the Winslows’ annual income. Houses with four bedrooms in new suburban developments could easily be found for less than $200k and as low as $111k. Interest rates were at ~10%.        
• For the average $105k home, the Winslows would’ve put down ~$21k (for a 20% down payment) and owed $756 per month, ~14% of their income.     

These days, the Winslows would be making ~$120k, according to 2021 wage averages, slightly less than their inflation-adjusted income from 1989. The median home price in 2021, however, was ~$335k, ~2.8x the Winslows’ annual income.  

Because of basement interest rates (~3% in Illinois in 2021), the Winslows’ monthly payment on a median home (~$1.1k) would have taken up just ~11% of their income. The problem would be the down payment. 

• A 20% down payment of $21k in 1989 was equal to ~32% of their annual income. The same 20% down payment would be equal to ~56% of their 2021 income.   
• If the Winslows saved 8% of their annual income, it would have taken them about four years to afford the down payment in 1989. The 2021 down payment would take seven years.

Singdhi Sokpo / The Hustle

In real life, saving for down payments can be particularly difficult for middle-class Black families like the Winslows, who are far less likely than white families to receive family financial support.  

Cash buyers are another complication. They accounted for ~33% of total buyers last year (23% in Chicago), up from 8%-12% in the early ’90s, according to National Association of Realtors estimates. 

Between those wealthy buyers, housing shortages, and higher prices, the situation in Chicago has become increasingly difficult for people with Carl Winslow’s job. Last year, a city council member floated a plan to offer new police officers up to $10k apiece for housing.

The sitcom’s new reality

A different family from the Chicago area returned to television in 2018 when the cast of “Roseanne” was resurrected in “The Conners.” 

Dan Conner was in the same house in a fictional Illinois city, a home that would have been affordable in the late ’80s on the income from his work as a drywall installer and Roseanne’s job at a plastics factory.

The Conners have the same house and same couch in the “Roseanne” spinoff. (Getty Images)

But things had changed: Reliable blue-collar jobs declined in the area, Roseanne died from an opioid overdose, and Dan faced turmoil, including with housing.  

His daughter, Darlene, had to seek help from her on-and-off boyfriend, Ben, to be considered for home loans. Ben’s mom asked Dan to sell his house so the couple could afford to buy their own. 

It fits with an era in which viewers want realism and drama along with comedy, according to Sebro, the University of Texas professor.

“The reality now is folks are so much more critical at looking at TV as not just escapist anymore,” he said. “They’re looking at TV as another reality for them and…how race and housing and economics play out on TV.”

That reality with apartments and houses is far different from what it might have been in the ’80s or ’90s. 

One of this generation’s most popular sitcoms, “Abbott Elementary,” stars Quinta Brunson as Janine, a young teacher in Philadelphia. In 2023, someone with her job couldn’t afford to split a Brooklyn brownstone with roommates. 

In fact, at the end of the first season, Janine broke up with her longtime boyfriend, Tariq, when he decided to move to New York City. The main reasons were her love for her job and Philadelphia, but she also listened to him discuss Brooklyn’s unappealing housing options.

Tariq saw that apartments were way too expensive and decided the only thing he could afford were “some really roomy closets in Bushwick.”

The new chief, Tang Yu, was responsible for all of the typical duties of a company figurehead: reviewing high-level analytics, making leadership decisions, assessing risks, and fostering an efficient workplace. 

She worked 24/7, didn’t sleep, and was compensated $0 per year.

But there was a catch: Yu wasn’t a human. She was a virtual robot powered by artificial intelligence.

So far, having an AI CEO hasn’t had any catastrophic consequences for NetDragon Websoft. In fact, since Yu’s appointment, the company has outperformed Hong Kong’s stock market.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

As AI tools have become more robust, automation experts have philosophized about replacing vast swaths of workers.

McKinsey Global Institute recently predicted that 45m workers, or ~28% of the entire American workforce, would lose their jobs to automation by 2030.

Most automation efforts have been centered around eradicating so-called lower-level and blue-collar jobs like warehouse workers, truckers, clerical assistants, and food prep workers. More recently, AI has threatened white-collar roles like accountants and journalists.

But while executives at the top of the corporate food chain celebrate the cost-cutting virtues of AI displacement, they rarely seem to turn the spotlight on themselves.

The incentives for workplace automation are largely financial. So why not start by replacing the highest-paid employee of them all — the CEO?

The financial case for replacing CEOs

At Fortune 500 firms, the average CEO pay is now ~$16m per year.

Over the past 45 years:

• The average CEO pay has gone up 1,460%
• The average worker pay has only gone up 18%

As a result, today’s average CEO is paid the equivalent of 399 median workers. 

At larger companies, this ratio is often many multiples higher: For instance, in 2021, Amazon CEO Andy Jassey received a package worth $213m — equal to the collective wages of 6,474 Amazon employees. That’s enough workers to fully staff four fulfillment centers.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Even die-hard free market capitalists have had trouble justifying these pay packages.

Most economic scholars who have studied CEO pay have concluded that executives have substantial “rents” — that is, they earn far more than what they give back by measure of productivity.

Research has shown that there may actually be an inverse relationship between CEO pay and long-term company performance.

One study examined executives at 400 firms between 2006 and 2015 and found that:

• At the 20% of companies with the highest-paid CEOs, a $100 investment would have grown to $265.
• At the 20% of the companies with the lowest-paid CEOs, a $100 investment would’ve grown to $367 — 38% more.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

One reason for this is that executive pay structures incentivize CEOs to chase short-term profits rather than meaningful long-term growth.

Most of a CEO’s compensation is dependent on boosting metrics like earnings-per-share, which can be fudged through maneuvers like stock buybacks. The result of this is that CEOs are often handsomely rewarded even when they lead their companies to abysmal financial outcomes.

Among the many recent examples:

• Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav earned $247m in compensation in 2021 and was subsequently named “the worst CEO of 2022” after executing a number of massive strategic bungles that plummeted the company’s stock by 37%.
• Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta raked in $55.9m amid losses of $720m and record-high vacancy rates.
• Boeing CEO David Calhoun received $21.1m despite plans to lay off 30k workers, major issues with the 737 jet, and a reported loss of $12B. 

While many CEOs have gotten more expensive and less effective over time, technology has simultaneously become cheaper and more reliable.

Replacing CEOs with AI would not only save firms millions of dollars in payroll costs, but would minimize, or altogether eradicate, the personal motives that often lead to less-than-ideal corporate outcomes.

But is replacing a CEO with AI even possible?

In late 2022, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — an international consortium that aims to “stimulate economic progress” — put together a report analyzing the likelihood of automation affecting different occupations.

CEOs (categorized as “top executives”) were nearly dead last, right next to religious workers.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

“My gut feeling is that CEO will be the very last job to be automated,” Marguerita Lane, a labor economist with OECD, told The Hustle.

Lane says that most of the components of a CEO’s role that can’t be replicated by AI are rooted in the human touch: being a figurehead for accountability, selling a vision, communicating with the public, negotiating.

A large part of a CEO’s job is to essentially serve as a company mascot — and mascots are fairly AI-proof.

But that’s not to say that many of the other elements of a CEO’s job can’t be automated.

McKinsey has estimated that ~25% of a CEO’s time is spent on tasks that machines and/or AI could potentially replicate — reviewing financial performance, sending emails, forecasting trends.

Some CEOs have openly admitted to automating a much larger portion of their job by outsourcing the bulk of their responsibilities to other workers.

Several years ago, an American entrepreneur named Christine Carrillo, who bills herself as “The 20 Hour CEO,” posted a thread on Twitter detailing how her executive assistant — hired in the Philippines, where the average salary is $9.5k/yr— performed 60% of her duties, including:

• Managing fundraising models
• Gathering sales leads
• Creating financial models
• Running payroll
• Recruiting new hires
• Drafting investor updates
• Conducting critical market research

As Will Dunn at The New Statesman later wrote: “If most of a CEO’s role can be outsourced, this suggests it could also be automated.”

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Another area of potential automation is the executive decision-making process.

Each year, executives make ~3B decisions — and there is a direct link between the effectiveness of these decisions and a firm’s financial performance. So, there’s an incentive for optimizing the rate of success as much as possible.

CEOs are often heralded as decision-making geniuses. But by their own admission, they aren’t much better at making good decisions than the rest of us:

• In a McKinsey report, 72% of executives admitted to making bad decisions at least as frequently as good decisions.
• At the average S&P 500 company, ineffective decision-making leads to $250m per year in losses and wasted opportunities.

Executives are already increasingly relying on aid from algorithms and machine learning to improve these ratios.

A new field of machine learning called decision intelligence automates and augments the executive decision-making process by “linking data with decisions and outcomes.” Firms like IBM, Google, and Alibaba have all jumped into the space in recent years.

Some scholars are skeptical that such tools could model the contextual complexities of executive problem-solving.

Oded Netzer, a professor at Columbia Business School who specializes in text-mining techniques, estimates that current tools could probably automate “a good 30%-40%” of executive tasks. But he argues that human decision-making requires contextual awareness that AI can’t replicate.

“For AI to work, it needs to train on data,” he says. “The less repetitive a job is, the harder it is to collect data on. Each executive decision requires different inputs and considerations that make it hard to apply a predictive framework.”

What does AI itself think about all of this?

We asked ChatGPT, the powerful AI chatbot that is currently rekindling fears of automation, to ruminate on the likelihood of a great CEO replacement.

It admitted it wasn’t up for the job yet — at least not “in the near future.”

ChatGPT thinks that human CEOs will be around for a while (OpenAI)

Technological feasibility aside, there are other blockades to automating CEOs.

Part of what makes some jobs less likely to be automated is bargaining power — and CEOs are extremely good at convincing shareholders that they are indispensable.

“If there were a proposal to replace them with AI, CEOs would be very well-positioned to protect their interests, much in the same way they are in salary negotiations,” says OECD’s Lane.

Even if AI were capable of entirely replacing the CEO, Lane imagines that social norms would serve as a barrier of protection.

“If two roles inside a company suddenly became automatable — one an executive position and the other an entry-level position — the employer would still let the entry-level worker go first,” she says. “Because the value that we have ascribed to CEOs exceeds that of almost any other worker.”

Nonetheless, the broader workforce isn’t entirely opposed to getting rid of their bosses:

• In a 2019 survey, 30% of workers said they would gladly replace their CEO with a robot.
• In a survey run by The Hustle, 40% of all respondents said they believed CEOs should be fully automated.

And at least one prominent voice thinks the clock is ticking for CEOs.

Several years ago, Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire who co-founded the Alibaba Group, hypothesized that the emotionless logic and efficiency of AI would eventually find its way into the corner office.

In 30 years, he suggested, “a robot will very likely be on the cover of Time magazine as the best CEO.”

If NetDragon’s bot-in-chief can keep outperforming the stock market, that prediction might not be so far-fetched.

Benyshek flew 2.5 hours from Colorado Springs to meet Coy in Atlanta. The pair took a 15-hour connecting flight to Narita, Japan, then boarded another 7-hour flight to Singapore.

Once they were finally in Singapore, Coy and Benyshek scoped out the amenities of Changi Airport (one of the world’s best), visited a shopping mall, did a hop-on/hop-off bus tour, and slept about four hours at a hotel. 

Then, they dashed off to the airport at around midnight to fly home.  

Despite spending less than 24 hours in Singapore, the journey was successful: The airline miles propelled Coy into platinum status on Delta, putting her in an elite group of frequent flyers and qualifying her for several perks. 

“Sacrificing that one weekend was absolutely worth it,” said Coy, who also made a similar trip to Budapest.  

Trips like this are known as mileage runs.

These are flights where the mileage is the purpose, not the destination. Travelers take them to earn or maintain elite status with airlines like Delta, United, American, Southwest, or Alaska.  

But are the miles really worth the trouble? And how do mileage runs stack up in a post-pandemic world of higher prices and fewer flights? 

The golden age of mileage runs

Starting in the 1980s, airlines began to develop loyalty programs, rewarding frequent flyers with free flights.

The programs grew more complicated over the years as airlines created status tiers based on miles traveled while also dangling opportunities to accrue double or triple miles on select trips.

Kimi Coy (left) and her mother Carolyn Benyshek have made mileage runs to Singapore and Budapest. “It’s in my family’s DNA to do this,” Coy said. (via Kimi Coy)

Thus, the mileage run was born.

Their popularity skyrocketed in the early 2000s when travel-related newsletters, message boards, and websites popped up, discussing the trend of mileage runs and helping frequent flyers identify trips.

• Ideal mileage runs involve long flights and relatively low fares. Experts in the community say they should top out at ~4-5 cents per mile earned if you’re flying coach and ~6-7 cents for business class or first class.  
• People usually do mileage runs late in the year when they realize they need a certain number of miles to leap into a desired status tier. 
• In the truest form of a mileage run, the traveler doesn’t leave the airport — although many mileage runners will spend a few hours to a couple of days in their destination city. 

In 2006, one airline industry observer estimated 1m mileage runs were made annually. A Hustle survey of ~550 elite-status flyers earlier this month revealed ~63% had made at least one mileage run.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

A few years ago, Kanon Cozad, a Kansas City-based tech consultant, realized he needed a few thousand miles to maintain his American Airlines status. He flew from Kansas City to Chicago to Seattle to Los Angeles to Phoenix to Kansas City, not leaving any of the airports.

“It was a completely silly thing to do,” Cozad said. “But I rationalized it in my own mind because of the tangible benefits that I would continue to get throughout the next year.” 

The upgrade math

To Cozad, the benefits of mileage runs are comfort. He believes airlines have made travel progressively “less pleasant” and enhancements provided by elite status are “something to be held onto once you get it.” 

Elite status varies depending on the airline but typically comes with several perks:

• Fewer lines at the airport, the ability to board early, and free checked baggage.
• Improved service from airlines. Elite travelers typically get first dibs on replacement flights during weather or mechanical delays.    
• Mileage multipliers. Certain loyalty tiers lead to getting 1.5x or 2x miles, which help accrue rewards points faster.

There are also financial reasons for why spending ~$1k-$2k on random mileage runs could save a frequent flyer money in the long run: upgrades.

Elite-status holders are more likely to be upgraded to first class or business class. A domestic flight upgrade could easily be worth a few hundred dollars. On an international flight, where first-class seats can cost $10k, the upgrade could be worth thousands.

A traveler enjoying an upgraded seat (Getty Images)

But no matter the potential benefits, you’re still embarking on long journeys in the air without a major reason for visiting the destination. 

Chris Carley, owner and editor of the website Eye of the Flyer, says the value derived from a mileage run “depends on the person.” Carley is an aviation geek, who enjoys planes and visiting airports, especially when he travels with his wife, another mileage-run devotee. 

“This is something my wife and I do for dates because we love traveling,” Carley said. “We have to turn our phones off. There’s nothing to distract us. We have time to sit and talk.”  

Last year, Jason Merhaut needed a few thousand miles to make the leap from silver to gold status on United and booked a trip from New York to London. He went to a Fulham soccer game, spent the night, and flew home.

“It’s the old adage, ‘If you’ve flown coach all your life and fly first class you never want to fly coach again.’ It’s the same with me for status,” he said.

Merhaut, however, is completely aware that mileage runs are crazy. “I just jokingly refer to myself and my friends who do this as idiots,” he said.    

Are mileage runs dead?

Ask somebody who’s gone on several mileage runs, and they’ll get nostalgic, pining for the 2000s and early 2010s when mileage runs were both more common and more beneficial. 

These days, plenty of people say the mileage run is dead. At the least, most frequent flyers agree that mileage runs are not as fruitful as they used to be.

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

There are a number of reasons for this:

• Starting around 2015, airlines like Delta and United stopped awarding status purely on miles. Travelers now earn loyalty points through a mix of miles traveled, cost of fare, and class of fare, as well as money spent on airline-related credit cards.    
• Cheap fares became less common, making it harder for travelers to accrue miles for a low cost. On Delta, passengers who fly Basic Economy do not earn any miles.   
• With credit card spending part of the equation, more travelers reached elite levels, diluting the benefits. On some airlines, credit card spending means you can reach elite status without ever boarding a plane, a positive for environmental advocates who have suggested airlines untether status from frequent travel.

In the past, people could use mileage runs to spend relatively little to gain status and use that status to enjoy significant perks.

Now, they often make sense only for business travelers who need a few extra points for their loyalty program or hard-core mileage runners who have found ways to benefit despite the adjusted rules. 

René de Lambert, who previously operated Eye of the Flyer and sent newsletters highlighting mileage-run opportunities, notes that frequent flyers can still book flights on “partner” airlines — such as AeroMexico for Delta — where a cheap ticket price doesn’t limit the miles-earning power of the flight. 

de Lambert booked what he described as “a whopper of a mileage run” on AeroMexico last year: New York to Mexico City to Madrid — where he attended a flamenco show — back to Mexico City and back to New York. He did it twice. 

Zachary Crockett / The Hustle

Since the pandemic de Lambert, an elite-status traveler with Delta, is beginning to question the value of mileage runs, citing “crazy prices,” declining customer service, and a glut of elite travelers because of airlines’ decisions to extend 2019 status through 2022.

Upgrades were already harder to come by as airlines built new strategies around selling first-class seats, and the tighter scheduling since the pandemic made them rarer still.

For 2023, Delta has modified its loyalty program so flyers must spend at least $20k on flights to earn the highest status levels, up from $15k in recent years.

That decision may restrict elite benefits to a smaller group of people, but it also means mileage runs — which are valuable when little money is spent — lose more of their benefit.

The year 2022, de Lambert said, “was my last year of mileage running.” 

An airplane lands at Los Angeles International Airport (David McNew / Getty Images)

Kimi Coy and her mom have scaled back, too. 

For the last few years, Coy hasn’t gone on any mileage runs. The pandemic and her two young children have made it difficult to spend a long time in the air. She also realized her chances at upgrades aren’t what they used to be, making status less appealing.

But Coy misses the mileage runs. At the end of the year, she would compare her mileage levels with her mother and sister and book trips together, turning them into a family tradition. 

On those international flights, Coy read books, watched movies, slept, and enjoyed a level of peace and quiet she doesn’t get to experience in her hectic life.   

“It sounds luxurious right now,” she said.

Equipped with goofy grins, beady eyes, and wild tufts of hair, the pudgy little creatures quickly became one of the bestselling toys of the decade, rivaling even Barbie herself. Some 38k trolls were sold every day — about one every two seconds — before the fad faded away.

Three decades later, a second troll hysteria broke out.

By the mid-’90s, trolls could be found in every shape, size, and color. There were bejeweled-belly-button trolls, pencil-topper trolls, buff trolls, two-headed trolls, ballerina trolls, priest trolls. For collectors, the toy’s unconventional aesthetic was a selling point.

“[Trolls] show that the real world is not full of perfection,” one salesman opined in a 1992 interview. “You don’t have to be a movie star and a beauty to be loved. It comes from inside the heart. It’s about someone who needs to be loved.”

But one person did not feel the love: the man who first designed and manufactured the troll doll in Denmark. 

While the toy raked in an estimated $4.5B in sales over the years, its inventor only collected a sliver of the proceeds.

The story of his creation is a case study in the cutthroat world of toy sales, where a tiny misstep can be capitalized on by real-life business trolls.

The invention of the troll doll

Born in 1915 in the small village of Gjøel, Denmark, Thomas Dam was an artistic child.

The son of an impoverished fisherman, he spent his youth whittling wood and, like most kids in town, telling tall tales about evil trolls that were said to lurk in the mountains.

Thomas Dam (right) with his wife and daughter in the late 1950s (Dam family, via Classictroll.com / bySommer ApS)

By the 1940s, Dam was married with two kids and earning a modest living as a baker. When the local flour factory shut down at the onset of World War II, he fell on hard times.

Unable to buy his daughter a gift for her birthday, Dam carved her a little troll figurine out of wood.

“He modeled its ugly face after a local butcher,” his son, Neils, later told The New York Times. “My father owed this man money, and this was his revenge.”

The troll was a hit with other children in the town and Dam soon found a way to support his family by selling his figurines door to door — first in Gjøl, then in the nearby city of Aalborg. His handiwork led to commissions designing popular storefront troll displays outside of Denmark.

Demand grew so much for his trolls that Dam set up a workshop in his shed and started producing them full time, with an upgraded process:

• He stopped carving them individually and made ceramic molds, which he used to create rubber casts.
• He stuffed the rubber bodies with wood shavings, used sheepskin for the hair, and dressed the trolls in felt clothing.
• He added strawberry extract to the rubber to give the trolls a distinctive smell.

Dam spent months carefully refining the face of his troll, making sure it had just the right amount of liveliness: “I would make one, it wouldn’t be quite right, and I would crush it,” he later told The Omaha World-Herald.

Top: Dam in his workshop; Bottom: Dam at home with some of his earliest trolls (Dam family, via Classictroll.com / bySommer ApS)

Dam incorporated a company called Dam Things and officially dubbed his creation Goodluck Trolls.

By 1959, sales of Goodluck Trolls topped 10k units per month in Denmark alone — and Dam expanded again. With the financial support of a business partner, he opened a troll factory in Gjøl, switched from rubber to PVC, and set his sights on larger markets.

The 1960s troll craze

In 1961, Dam began exporting his trolls to the US.

Partly buoyed by a swelling countercultural movement, the weird, mystical toys almost immediately struck a chord with America’s youth.

One of Dam’s first contacts in the US market was Inge Dykins, an enterprising woman who came across a troll at the home of a Swedish friend and saw potential. She imported trolls from Dam — first a test of 90, then 125k more — and quickly sold them at a profit.

By 1963, she had bought and sold 1m+ of the trolls and had a staff of 20 salesmen who peddled them at showrooms and toy fairs.

An advertisement for trolls — “America’s best selling toy” — in the Chicago Tribune in 1963 (via newspapers.com)

Dam granted a Florida company, Royalty Design, an exclusive license to manufacture his trolls in the US, eliminating the need for imports, and sales soon hit $2m per year (~$16.6m today).

By 1964, sales were booming so much that Dam Things reportedly depleted Iceland’s entire sheepskin harvest to make the trolls’ hair, causing the price of hides to go up an entire dollar.

The troll doll became a covetable good-luck charm — one that “unseated horseshoes, rabbits’ feet, and four leaf clovers.”

Stories abounded about the fortune that came from owning one:

• A prominent St. Louis lawyer claimed that his troll was responsible for tripling his business.
• A high school swim team in Florida reported winning 10 straight meets after adopting a troll as its mascot.
• Betty Miller, the first female pilot to traverse the Pacific Ocean solo, made the journey with a troll by her side for luck. Upon her return, she took the toy with her to the White House to meet President John F. Kennedy.

Betty Miller, the first woman to traverse the Pacific Ocean solo, with her troll doll at the White House in early 1963 (Abbie Rowe / JFK Library)

But behind the scenes, Dam Things wasn’t as lucky.

At the height of the craze, swarms of cheaply produced imitators popped up, with names like Fauni Trolls and Lucky Shnooks. Many of these copycat trolls were so similar in appearance to Dam’s design that young troll enthusiasts often didn’t even know what they were buying.

Dam’s company, still based in Denmark, had filed for a US design copyright back in 1961. And in 1965, it took action in court against a company that it claimed was infringing on its trolls without proper license.

It completely backfired.

The court found that Dam Things had failed to include a copyright mark on hundreds of thousands of trolls it sold. Furthermore, the copyright notice later molded into the left foot of the trolls — “© 1961 190918 Denmark” — was invalid, as it did not explicitly name Dam’s company.

In short, Dam and his colleagues, who were not well-versed in the intricacies of international commerce, had bungled the protection process.

Trolls, it was ruled, were in the public domain.

As a result, dozens of other counterfeit trolls popped up, almost entirely wiping out Dam’s market share. Shortly thereafter, Dam ceased production in the US and took his business back to Denmark.

Dam’s daughter, Laja, with some of her father’s creations in the 1960s (Femina Women’s Magazine)

By the late ’60s, troll mania had tapered off almost entirely.

“Losing the copyright had a crippling impact on the business,” Dam Things’ future CEO, Calle Østergaard, said years later. “Thomas became very disillusioned and lost a lot of faith in his ability to manage a global brand. He was an artist, not a businessman.”

The troll craze, part II: 1990s

In 1982, an American entrepreneur named Steven Stark was traveling abroad and spotted a troll doll at an airport in Copenhagen.

Though the market for trolls had been dormant for more than a decade, Stark saw potential for a rebirth. So, he contacted Dam and worked out a US distribution agreement under the name Norfin.

His timing was perfect: Many of the same people who had played with trolls during the first wave now had kids of their own.

The trolls that reemerged in the early ’90s were a far cry from their modest ancestors. They came in endless varieties of hair colors, facial expressions, and outfits. A thriving merchandise industry emerged, with troll T-shirts, troll jewelry, troll games, troll stickers, and troll backpacks.

News clippings sound the troll alarm bells (various newspapers, 1992; The Hustle)

The ‘90s troll craze wasn’t limited to kids:

• There were self-proclaimed “trollaholics” who went on “troll treks” at toy stores, amassed collections of 4k+ trolls, and had business cards that read, “I be troll’n.”
• In trading groups like “Troll Monthly Magazine,” adult fans swapped trolls and debated the nuances of hair fibers.
•  A retired psychiatric nurse opened a troll museum, complete with 8,130 troll dolls, in Ohio.

In 1991, troll dolls were named the Toy of the Year by the Toy Industry Association, and were the second most-promoted toy on TV after the Super Soaker.

Sales among the top three manufacturers swelled to $700m per year ($1.3B today).

Sherry Groom poses in front of a part of her collection at the Troll Hole Museum in Alliance, Ohio (Troll Hole Museum Facebook page)

But once again, Dam’s company didn’t reap the bulk of the rewards.

Counterfeits from more than 15 companies flooded the market. Among the more prominent copycats was Russell Berrie.

During the ’60s, Berrie had sold trolls as a representative of Dam Things’ official US licensee, Royalty Design. But after Royalty went bankrupt, he began to use Dam Things’ original molds to manufacture trolls under his own “Russ Trolls” brand name. He sent numerous Dam Things products to China to be replicated and made a fortune selling them.

At the peak of the troll wave in 1992, Berrie sold $150m worth of trolls, up from $200k just four years earlier

Berrie was dubbed “King of Trolls” by the press. His wedding, which was covered by Newsweek at the time, featured a cake topped by bride and groom trolls. The party favors? More trolls.

Another firm, Ace Novelty, sold millions of Treasure Trolls with rhinestone belly buttons and inked more than 50 licensing deals.

“Let me put it this way,” an executive at the company told a newspaper at the time: “$20m would be considered excellent for the first year of a toy. Our 1992 projection is $125m domestically.”

A variety of Russ Trolls from the 1990s (eBay)

Thomas Dam, the creator of troll dolls, wasn’t around to see any of this: He died from cancer in 1989, just before the second troll rush.

His successors did their best to carve out a piece of the market. But by 1994, troll sales had already sharply declined. Worse yet, a fire at Dam’s Gjøl factory destroyed priceless original molds and wiped out a large chunk of inventory.

For several years, Dam Things teetered close to bankruptcy. Then, the company finally caught a break.

The newly enacted Uruguay Round Agreements Act permitted the restoration of copyrights on foreign works that had gone into the public domain due to US compliance issues.

In 1996, after a decades-long fight, Dam Things finally had its US copyright reinstated. It proceeded to file infringement suits, forcing unlicensed trolls to withdraw from the market.

Armed with a copyright, the company then sought to make up for lost time.

The troll retires in Hollywood

Early attempts to monetize trolls in the 2000s failed miserably.

A company called DiC bought a license from Dam Things and launched Trollz — a line of “modernized” trolls in “midriff-revealing shorts and tops.” The venture was a $10m flop and contributed to DiC going out of business.  

In 2012, Dam’s creation finally struck it big, inking a motion picture deal with DreamWorks.

“Trolls,” starring Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick, was released in 2016 and grossed $346m worldwide. Deadline placed the total value of the film’s merchandise, licensing, and ancillary troll products at $700m.

On the coattails of this success, Dam Things sold the IP of its Trolls brand to DreamWorks Animation for an undisclosed sum, retaining only the right to continue producing trolls in Denmark.

Thomas Dam in his later years (Dam family, via Classictroll.com / bySommer ApS) 

For Thomas Dam’s heirs, it was a storybook ending to a tumultuous, 60-year journey.

What started as a labor of love in a Danish baker’s potato shed became a global phenomenon worth billions of dollars. It sparked toy wars, greed, and litigation.

But trolls also brought joy to millions of people around the world. And for some aficionados, that joy will transcend life itself.

“I’m going to play with my trolls forever,” a young collector with 22 trolls told a newspaper reporter in 1992. “And when I die, they’ll die. Then they’ll become troll angels and I can play with them in heaven.”