NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

HOW TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

One of the reasons that the failure rate of new restaurants is so high is because - even in cases where new operators are moving into existing locations - so much of the necessary capital investment is required upfront for renovations and/or new construction. You’ve got to build out the entire business before you know if the “dogs” are going to eat the dog food, say nice things to their friends, and keep coming back. A rule of thumb is that a successful restaurant needs to convert about 15%-20% of its customers into regulars if it’s going to make it through the first full year of operations. These required retention numbers may have even increased now because fewer diners are drinking as much as they did in the past so each customer is likely to be less profitable. (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/60-40-restaurant-rule-food-beverage-glp-1-ozempic-wegovy-mounjaro-alcohol/91323202 .)

And, as we all know from the media’s obsession with opening weekend box office results, it’s pretty much the same front-end loaded situation with film studios making expensive motion pictures and then hoping that the crowds show up at the theatres so that the players don’t lose millions of production costs and marketing dollars essentially on Day One. Of course, there are occasional attempts with early screenings and test audience previews to get a reading on viewers’ likely reactions and, in some very costly cases, to actually attempt to shoot additional or alternative scenes and re-edit sections of the films. But as noted writer, playwright, and filmmaker David Mamet once said about fixing others’ failed efforts: “it’s
hard to polish a turd”. Once a movie is in the can, it’s a crapshoot at best as to whether it’s gonna be a triumph or a tragedy. But at least it takes a while for the ultimate reckoning in the film business because movies take years to finance, approve, and actually get made.

In the advertising world, where social media commentators and trolls lurk every day around every corner of the web, expensive new ad campaigns which suck, offend some segment’s tender sensibilities, or have the “wrong” spokesperson are condemned, roasted and rejected the same day they are released and sometimes (in the case of Super Bowl ads in particular) even before they are widely distributed and shown to the general public.

Millions of production dollars are flushed down the toilet, media buys and expensive marketing commitments are wasted, and – in some especially problematic cases – as  PepsiCo (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now ), Kendall Jenner, and many others have learned   - even more dollars are spent trying to make amends, repair wrecked brands, resurrect reputations, and apologize to millions of people who may not have even seen the offensive material in the first place.

While there are no guarantees or crystal balls in the ad biz, I wrote many years ago about a company called Dumbstruck (www.Dumbstruck.com), an emotion analytics company founded in 2018, that had developed some crucial technology which reviewed, evaluated and analyzed both proposed videos and actually produced ads in order to determine how that content would be received by the target populations and how they would respond to it. (See   
 https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/catch-me-if-you-can.html). The basic idea was to keep offensive and ineffective materials from ever reaching the marketplace. As I said at the time, it’s much smarter to avoid the potholes than to get a great deal on the cost of the tow truck that pulls you out of the ditch.

But in too many cases, while Dumbstruck’s impressive tools (which measure emotional, behavioral and cognitive reactions to displayed material) could highlight the prospective issues and shortcomings of completed videos, actually making those improvements could require costly edits or reshoots that campaign timelines and budgets simply didn't permit. The insights could still inform media decisions and future creative development, but improving the finished asset itself wasn't always practical. The horse had already left the barn. So, the tech worked, but the insights it provided often came too late in the creative process to provide its clients with the ability to cost-effectively fix the problems that its software had identified.

The good news for the clients – but another unfortunate blow for the traditional creative business – is that through a new technology partnership between Dumbstruck and Luma, which operates a multi-modal general intelligence platform based in California, there may finally be a fast, cost-effective and readily available approach the companies are calling Creative Intelligence which combines Dumbstruck powerful insights and observations about which elements of a given ad will work and connect with viewers and which other parts need to be revised, eliminated or enhanced with the AI-infused tools called Luma Agents that Luma has built which permit editors to: (a) implement the Dumbstruck recommendations and changes in real time into the existing video materials without extensive delays or costly reshooting of scenes and (b) even more importantly - and somewhat frighteningly at the same time – to digitally create and add elements, props, environmental effects and even new actors to the video on the fly and in the moment. The new system combines AI rendering abilities with human response data and applies all of this to the content being developed and enhanced. When the content is revised, updated, and improved, it is retested by Dumbstruck to confirm its value, impact, and effectiveness.

It’s actually hard to imagine a more enormous and disruptive offering which is entirely likely to upset the entire ad creation and production industry in short order. If you can write it and envision it, it’s becoming very clear that the actual video materials including all the personnel and props can now be digitally generated in 4K quality in a matter of hours rather than weeks with all of the obvious cost and time savings which that kind of technological advancement offers. What’s more, specific variations of the content can be made at little or no incremental cost to be directed to slices and segments of the overall audience. But the cost-effective abundance of content and the ease of production isn’t really the critical question, which is whether Dumbstruck’s technology determines that the finalized content will get the job done and resonate with the consumers. After all, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to sell something.

If the traditional ad biz wasn’t already plagued by the same basic time crunches, talent costs, and production issues that many other industries are facing as well as also being under new serious pressure from the rise of inexpensive and ubiquitous user generated content (UGC) as well as A.I. slop that are swamping all of the available channels (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/ai-trend-traditional-ad-agencies-creators-influencers/91366965.), the Luma-Dumbstruck technology partnership may be one of the final blows to the old leisurely days of Madison Avenue when who you knew was much more important than what you knew and could do. A long-past time when how a particular ad did for a client was a matter of good fortune rather than careful planning, precise execution, and after-the-fact analysis and accountability.

Today, thanks largely to Dumbstruck and Luma, advertisers can now “know before they go” exactly how their ads are likely to resonate with their target audiences and also have the immediate ability to improve their ads before significant media dollars are spent.

MAKE THE MIDTERMS A RECKONING

He normalized vulgarity, legitimized stupidity, rewarded incompetence, and made immorality acceptable.

He turned grift into state policy and corruption into a prerequisite for public office.

He recast criminality as patriotism and shamelessness as honor.

He promised prosperity, then left working families paying for his tariffs, his chaos, and his war which is an albatross around his neck.

He’s an abject human being, a failure on every level, now in clear cognitive decline, which may be the only positive thing left to say about him.

He did not do this alone. Every Republican who enabled him, excused him, and surrendered Congress to him owns the result.

Make the midterms a reckoning.

HEATHER

 August 15, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 15, 2026

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On Monday, August 10, Todd Blanche took the oath of office as attorney general, administered by federal appeals court judge Emil Bove, another of Trump’s defense lawyers before moving to the Department of Justice, where he was Blanche’s top deputy. In that capacity, CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz recalled, he fired career prosecutors and pushed Trump’s takeover of the department.

Using Bove to swear in Blanche looked like a victory lap for the Trump team. Although the press was excluded, two other Trump loyalists, FBI director Kash Patel and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, attended Blanche’s swearing-in.

Retired conservative judge J. Michael Luttig told MS NOW: “Todd Blanche now becomes the symbol of Donald Trump’s corruption of the rule of law in America and the actual ruin of the Department of Justice of the United States. This is another shameful act of acquiescence, if not obeisance, by the Senate Republicans; they will bear this badge of shame the rest of their lives.

Never before in American history has an attorney general been confirmed who was as corrupt as Todd Blanche. The Department of Justice is already in shambles.”

“And,” Luttig added, “he will further ruin the Department of Justice.”

As soon as he took office, Blanche issued a memo dramatically expanding executive privilege, which he described as the authority of the president to “withhold certain sensitive information for the public good.” Executive privilege has enabled the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny with the logic that a president must be able to get a wide range of advice, given freely, by those in the executive branch.

Now, though, the Department of Justice under Blanche says the president can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.” The memo defines as a “private adviser” “anyone the President consults outside the Executive Branch.” As John Light of Talking Points Memo notes, this definition would enable the White House to defy congressional subpoenas for anyone to whom the president talks.

As Avery Lotz of Axios reports, Democrats had been planning to begin investigations of Trump’s corruption if they retake control of the House and/or the Senate. Recognizing that the White House would stonewall them, they intended to subpoena companies, college officials, and private citizens to testify. The memo, which is not legally binding but which indicates the administration’s position, would hamper that effort.

Lotz notes that the administration is already fighting a subpoena in a lawsuit filed by the American Bar Association that orders Trump’s senior personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, to testify about the deals the Trump administration struck with major law firms early in his second term.

Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote: “This latest opinion should be seen as a partisan measure to insulate the president and his corrupt activities from Congressional subpoenas when the majority flips.”

Thursday was the day that Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held a status conference in the case of Phang v. Blanche. This is a lawsuit brought by independent journalist Katie Phang to force the Department of Justice to produce unredacted versions of documents from the Epstein files that she says were redacted against the explicit instructions in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With that law, Congress ordered the Department of Justice to release all the files gathered by the FBI investigation into sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, with redactions only to protect victims, no later than December 19, 2025.

Almost eight months later, the Department of Justice has refused to do so, probably producing about half the files, with many of the documents heavily redacted at the same time that it released some of the victim’s names, photographs, and identifying information.

As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in her Civil Discourse, Phang sued in April for access to an unredacted version of a handful of files, including emails about a “torture video” and sexual activity with girls, as well as notes from FBI interviews with a victim who claims Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13 and materials in foreign languages, which the Department of Justice has not produced at all. She also asked the Department of Justice to explain why they made the redactions they did, something the law requires but the Justice Department has not done.

In late June, Sullivan granted Phang’s request.

But the Department of Justice under then–acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who interviewed Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell shortly before she was transferred to a far less restrictive prison that should have been inaccessible to a sex offender, did not turn over those documents.

So, in July, Sullivan ordered the government to turn over the unredacted documents to him so he could review them himself to see if the decision by the Department of Justice not to release them was correct. Once again, the Department of Justice refused. As for an explanation for why the department hadn’t explained the decisions to redact, the Justice Department lawyer told the judge the process was “underway” but couldn’t say when it would be done or why translating documents in foreign languages wasn’t practical. He claimed the materials the department is withholding are simply duplicates of things that have been released, but offered no proof of that assertion.

Ultimately, as Vance explains, Sullivan asked: ““So you’re saying I’ve learned everything I’m going to learn from the government?” The lawyer for the Department of Justice, Andrew Block, answered: “That’s right.”

Sullivan wasn’t satisfied. “The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case. The victims have a right to know. The court has a right to know. The law is still in full force and effect. The court is just ensuring compliance.”

To make it clear he was being reasonable, in expectation of a review from a higher court, Sullivan repeatedly told Block he was willing to work with the department, but warned that he had held prosecutors in contempt of court in the past. Sullivan gave Phang’s lawyers 10 days to propose an order to deal with the failure of the Department of Justice to comply with his orders to produce the files Phang requested.

The administration is also undermining another popular law. This week, under Trump, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the Treasury Department not only ended the registry Congress set up in 2021 over Trump’s veto to make shell companies identify their owners, but also destroyed all the data it has already collected.

FinCEN combats money laundering. Congress set up the Corporate Transparency Act after documents leaked to BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020 found that between 1999 and 2017, banks had flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money, moved by criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria through shell companies. These are legal entities that don’t have physical plants or operations, but can be used for holding and moving money.

Shell companies also meant that the political system in the U.S. was awash in secrecy. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” one Democrat reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.” One of the documents flagged how much Russian money was flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.

The U.S. was the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company enabling them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes—Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from taking the story of her sexual encounter with Trump public before the 2016 election. So Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act to undercut the shell companies that enabled money laundering in America.

The act required the owners of any company that was not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, would go to FinCEN. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.

The plan was to pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. The measure passed on a bipartisan basis; then-senator Marco Rubio of Florida, now secretary of state, co-sponsored it, calling it the “most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades.”

Now the Treasury Department says it will not collect the information the law requires, raising the question of whether the Trump administration is openly refusing to implement a law.

A message to all sane Republicans:

 A message to all sane Republicans:

He pardoned 1,600 violent criminals.
You said nothing.

He bulldozed the East Wing.
You said nothing.

He interfered with the release of the Epstein files. You said nothing.

He took over the Kennedy Center and renamed it after himself. You said nothing.

He accepted a $400 million airplane as a personal gift. You said nothing.

He threatened Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. You said nothing.

He tariffed just about everyone but Russia, causing inflation and instability worldwide. You said nothing.

He attacked a nation during mediated negotiations. You said nothing.

His ill-conceived war killed 175 children on day one. You said nothing.

He alienated and insulted our allies. You said nothing.

His ICE Army terrorized and murdered U.S. citizens. You said nothing.

He committed murder on the high seas. You said nothing.

He co-opted the Justice Department and directed it to prosecute his political enemies. You said nothing.

It’s time to start talking.

ROBERT HUBBELL

  

 

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There is nothing Trump cannot make worse.

August 15, 2026

Robert B. Hubbell Aug 15

 

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I often write that “The period of time between now and the midterms, measured in Trump years, is equal to infinity. Anything that can happen, probably will.”

 

The statement is a bit opaque, but the events of Friday illustrate it perfectly. As Democrats understandably worry about the possibility of election interference, we should take confidence from the fact that Trump works hard every day to make life more difficult for Republican candidates. At the same time, he is literally writing campaign ads that favor Democrats.

 

Time is the enemy of Trump and Republican candidates. Every day brings new waves of outrage and insults, infuriating an already angry electorate. If there is a negative story about Democrats, wait five minutes, and Trump will create a controversy of unthinkable proportions that diminishes the prospects of the Republican candidates in November.

 

Trump is historically unpopular and doing his darndest to become even more so. I say that not to make us feel better, but to rebut the notion that Trump has superpowers that exempt him from the laws of political gravity. Indeed, he is being pulled into a gravity well of his own making. He has become the black hole of the Republican Party, from which there is no escape, only the inevitable collapse of the party as it is crushed under the weight of Trump’s corruption and incompetence.

As congressional Republicans skitter away from D.C. in hopes of distancing themselves from Trump, he is making it impossible for them to escape. On Friday, Trump managed to make three bad stories for Republicans materially worse. Every Republican who entertained thoughts of meeting constituents over the August recess groaned as they heard the latest reporting about Trump’s out-of-touch, arrogant, and narcissistic behavior.

Trump’s comments on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The story about the shabby and dangerous conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln is gathering momentum. In any other administration, it might threaten the presidency. But for Trump, there is no bad story that he cannot make worse. And he did just that on Friday in a brief exchange with a reporter as Trump was boarding Marine One. Per Yahoo News,

 

When told by the same reporter that families of service members were concerned about conditions on board the USS Lincoln, Trump replied, “No, they’re not.”

When asked by a reporter whether the ship’s 9-month deployment had gone on too long, the president replied that it was “not nearly long enough”

See Yahoo News, Trump dismisses concerns about USS Abraham Lincoln, says record-setting deployment is ‘not nearly long enough’.

 

In a mere 15 seconds, Trump managed to call family members of the USS Abraham Lincoln crew liars and insulted every member of that crew by suggesting that the 9-month deployment was not long enough.

Any other president would have issued an abject apology. Not Trump. As he said later in the day (about high gas prices), “I’ll never apologize.” More about that in a moment, but the point is the same. Trump’s response to a mistake is to attack those who point it out. He will soon attack both the families of the crew members and the crew members themselves. But he has already treated them with contempt and callousness, calling into question the veracity of the family members and the dedication of the crew members.

The dire conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln should be above politics. But when the president insults members of the military and their families, it becomes a political issue by definition—and we should make the most of it.

Trump’s comments about the high cost of gasoline

Trump managed to make the issue of high gas prices even worse, as well. At an appearance on Long Island for the Republican nominee for governor of New York, Trump addressed the issue of high gas prices and said,

So I just say this. So, for you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have — a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world, we don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon. So remember that. When you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay, I mean, it’s not — I’ll never apologize, I did the right thing . . . .

As with his comments about the USS Abraham Lincoln, Trump’s comments about gas prices are insulting. Gas prices have increased by about 35% to 39% since Trump started his war against Iran on February 28. That is not “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline.” For some Americans, that is the difference between driving to work or buying groceries—economic choices that Trump cannot understand.

Moreover, the lack of empathy in Trump’s statement that “I’ll never apologize” is the functional equivalent of “I don’t care about you and your economic problems.”

There are many ways to talk about high gas prices that are traceable to Trump’s war against Iran. Telling people to “suck it up” is the worst of them. And it is only going to get worse as the peak summer driving season approaches. I cannot imagine how Trump will make the situation worse, but I am sure that he will.

Trump asks US Supreme Court to allow construction of the ballroom to resume.

The grotesque ballroom that Trump is building on the White House grounds is a national symbol of Trump’s obsession with over-the-top displays of wealth and self-glorification. By a wide margin, the US electorate believes that Trump is spending too much time and money pursuing his own interests to the exclusion of the interests of the American people.

 

On the day that Trump insulted the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln and their families, and told Americans to quit complaining about high gas prices, Trump filed an emergency application asking the US Supreme Court to allow construction of his gilded-age ballroom to resume. See USA Today, Trump seeks Supreme Court help for White House ballroom project.

 

Trump has tried to sell the ballroom as a military communications and command center, but no one believes him. The Supreme Court shouldn’t, either. Trump has described the ballroom in detail, including its marble floors, gold-plated chandeliers, and expensive draperies—none of which are necessary for a military command center.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, it will be a loss for Trump. If the Court allows the construction of the ballroom to resume, the obscene cost of the ballroom and the renovation project ($900 million) will be a millstone around the neck of every GOP candidate seeking election. And if the Court rules against Trump, it will be yet another confirmation that Trump has no respect for the rule of law.

Most importantly, the ballroom is a powerful and instantly recognizable symbol of Trump’s corruption and ego. Trump will not let go of his ballroom; Democrats should accommodate him by reminding voters at every opportunity that Trump is spending nearly a billion dollars on completely unnecessary renovations while Americans are struggling to pay for necessities.

Here’s the point: On a single day, Trump undermined the prospects of Republican candidates across the country by making three bad stories significantly worse—and he has neither the temperament nor the skills to repair the damage. And most importantly, he will repeat that performance on Saturday and every day thereafter, until the midterms.

Our job is to make sure that every voter gets the message: Trump doesn’t care about you, your families, or your economic struggles. The signs and ads write themselves.

As always, none of this means we can relent. To the contrary, we must take these newest outrages and convert them into votes from disillusioned and angry voters. We can do that!

Concluding Thoughts.

About a dozen readers sent me this article by Harry Litman on Substack A Band of Plucky Protesters Nets One Against ICE.

The thesis of the article is this:

How can a citizen or band of citizens, with no title, office, or army of lawyers, achieve something concrete in the daily struggle against authoritarianism?

Litman then describes how a grassroots movement pressured Citizens Bank to stop lending money to private firms that construct ICE detention centers. In small towns across the country, people organized protests and lobbied the bank’s leadership to stop financing ICE facilities. Their determination paid off when Citizens Bank announced in July that it would wind down its financial relationship with the private firms that construct ICE detention centers.

The story is inspiring and instructive, especially in its affirmation of the power of small groups to coordinate and highlight the corporate actors who facilitate Trump’s authoritarianism. I recommend the article in its entirety.

Littman concludes:

So here you have an answer to the recurring question: what can we do in the face of authoritarianism? By all means, stay informed; call out the lies; keep the faith around the dinner table; join in communities such as this one. But the wreckage from the Trump policies lies all around us. Find the Delaney Hall and Citizens Bank in your part of the country. Then ready your slingshots.