There once was an annual event that brought together all Americans. The event was a two-hour made for TV spectacle in which women with transcendent physical beauty stalked a catwalk for two hours selling expensive lingerie.

In its own silly way, this event – the Victoria Secret Fashion show - was the crowning marriage of Western capitalism and fashion – driving almost $7.7 billion in annual sales at its peak in 2015.

In June of 1998, one hundred and twenty thousand young people came to RFK Stadium to watch the biggest bands in the world play songs and call out the Chinese Communist Party. The event was called Free Tibet and it was about bringing attention to the genocide there.

Today, you rarely hear about Tibet (the last Free Tibet rock concert was held in 2003).

The reason is not because Tibet became free. The genocide of the Tibetans continues unabated, perhaps accelerated even.

You can’t write about the hooker spectrum and forget their corollary – the fu*k boy. The whole reason why some women have turned to this new spectrum is to avoid dealing with the f-boy (we’ll shorten it to f-boy to avoid the repeated f-bombs).

But before we get into that, something needs to be explained.

Back in the day, your grandfather’s day, finding a wife was not hard. All you had to do was walk down the block.

I was having a work dinner with a French capital allocator and he mentioned to me that he had gone on a date with a female friend of mine.

I asked how they met and what he said next startled me:

Seeking arrangements, you know it?

Have you ever had an experience where you took too much of something and thought I am going to die?

The experience usually resolves itself within hours.

But what if it didn’t take a few hours and lasted almost a week. What if instead of being in the comfort of your home or at a concert, you were having the bad trip while in the middle of the Arctic circle fighting the Russian army on skies.

Growing up, there was a kid at my elementary school who spent years doing karate. He walked around like he was the toughest kid on the planet. Then one day, another kid decided fkkk it, and took a swing at him. Karate kid fell and had no response but to stammer away and tell the other kid that his dad was a lawyer and he would sue him.

As Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Karate didn’t seem to offer much of a plan (but I guess having a lawyer dad did).

Last weekend, for the first time in several years, I ventured into the basement of a NYC night club – not just any NYC night club but Tao Group’s leading entrée into the scene, Little Sister (in my defense a friend of mine had a birthday there).

NYC night clubs are finally opening up and an old social order is trying to re-exert itself.

But will it succeed?

My answer after a one-hour excursion is no.

If you go to a sceney party these days in New York City, you will encounter guys – grown adult men - who dress like wizards.

They wear colorful capes and tunics and crystals. They are surrounded by beautiful women who pulsate about as a DJ pumps trance music set to a tribal African chant.

I realized the other day that this new breed of adult males was becoming a recently formed species in the anthology of American bro types.

When a mass murder shooting happens, we usually get a general media reaction about gun control and then a specific media reaction related to the killer’s motivations – if they are Muslim or brown, the right-wing media will hype up Islamic terrorism and if they are white, the mainstream media will hype up affiliation with white nationalism, Trump.

However, all these commentaries miss the common thread interwoven in all these cases – none of the shooters seem to be the sort of guys who have sex.

In the year 1812 and in the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz, two artistic giants of the 19th century, the great German writer Goethe and the great German composer Beethoven, spent a week together, taking walks every day along the boulevard discussing art and culture and history.

The story goes that one day they were walking when they encountered the Austrian Imperial court proceeding by – the emperor with his key advisors.

Goethe moved aside and removed his cap in respect. Beethoven entirely ignored the whole proceeding.

Let us imagine for a second that you are not you but instead you are Marie, a beautiful peasant girl living in the countryside of 17th century, pre-industrial France.

You have just turned twenty and you have a choice to make.

You can either marry Pierre who is young and handsome and absolutely devoted to you, but also a peasant.

Or you can be the 9th concubine of Louis the 14th. You’ve never met Louis but he is the Sun King of France and he is old and fat and mean and you will be his toy.

What would you choose?

When we think about great political figures of the past – the folks who built empires and rendered the world theirs – we rarely focus on their origin story. We focus instead on the breadth of what they did.

But it is an interesting question to ask – how would great conquerors have appeared to us were they to arrive at power in modern 21st century America?

A friend of mine who is in Congress told me that Congress is a lot like in high school – you have cliques and fractions, the cool kids and the losers. I had heard something similar from someone who worked in the UN. People think they move past the social complexities of high school but the reality is that high school just gets continuously re -created everywhere you go throughout life.  

It got me thinking – what if you took the world and had to cast each country as a character in a 1990s Aaron Spelling high school TV drama set in the early 1990s Southern California. What would each country’s character look like? How would the cliques form?

For basically all of human history, we lived in tribal units that were roughly 150 people in size (also known as Dunbar’s number). These 150 people roamed the earth together, sharing resources, fighting off the elements and surviving danger for literally tens of thousands of years.  

I have two friends who we will call the German groper and the kind Canadian and in the days that we went out these two individuals had two very different methods to approaching women.

There is a great 2019 movie that few people saw called Mr. Jones about a Welsh investigative journalist who goes to the Ukraine in the 1930s and uncovers the massive state orchestrated famine occurring in the countryside there.

The Holodomor (which translated from Ukrainian means murder by hunger) killed between 7 to 10 million Ukrainians according to a 2003 UN Commission.

A Russian friend of mine told me that growing up during the Soviet Union, it was required by law that anytime anything was learned in class, the teacher had to first preface the learning by acknowledging Soviet Socialism.

To re-recap – humanity lived more or less in a superstitious, religious darkness for its entire history until, some Europeans starting in the 16th century, began systematically practicing a thing called the scientific method and then using that thing, they created other things like The Enlightenment, which in turn brought about still other things like Modernism and the Modern World – which gave us long lives, cars and text messaging.

Why does the sky turn black and start bellowing with loud noises, torrential rain, and streaks of light?

Thunderstorms are terrifying even in the context of modern civilization, but they must have been especially terrifying to our ancestors living in the wilderness.