Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George
Speaker 1: nor with you Ken, Grown back with us Ken. When
Speaker 1: the late automobile executive Leia Coca was at Ford Motor
Speaker 1: Company in the sixties and then Chrysler in the eighties,
Speaker 1: he understood demography. He came up with the Mustang. He
Speaker 1: rejuvenated Chrysler. How did he know this stuff? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think it was just intuitive on his part because
Speaker 1: it didn't stay with him, you know, because his later
Speaker 1: in life choices, you know, didn't work out that well.
Speaker 1: But the Mustang is certainly an enormous, enormous success story.
Speaker 1: He saw that coming and they they literally could have
Speaker 1: sold millions of if they could have made him. But
Speaker 1: they couldn't make them fast enough, right, I mean, that
Speaker 1: was one of my first cars. I remember my dad
Speaker 1: got me that for school and I should have kept it.
Speaker 1: You want to hear a break break your heart story, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had. I lived in South Florida and we were
Speaker 1: at ground zero for Ian In fact, you know, we
Speaker 1: stayed and I had in my garage nineteen sixty five
Speaker 1: Mustang K Coop, which is like an extremely rare car
Speaker 1: with a Shelby motor in it, and I lost it
Speaker 1: in a flood. Yeah, heartbreak. I had a sixty seven.
Speaker 1: Well there you go, so we could talk cars all night.
Speaker 1: We don't want to do that. You had told us
Speaker 1: a story years ago about Harley Davidson missing the boat
Speaker 1: with demographics. Tell us that story again. Well the actually,
Speaker 1: you know, we had American Honda as a client. An
Speaker 1: American Honda in nineteen eighty six all of a sudden
Speaker 1: stopped selling. You know, the Honda motorcycles. Kawasaki, Suzuki and
Speaker 1: Yamaha had exactly the same problem. It just stopped selling.
Speaker 1: I got a call from American Handa and that was
Speaker 1: our client, and they said, you know, did you run
Speaker 1: the ads? And I said, yes, I did. What's going on?
Speaker 1: And they said, was no traffic in the dealerships. But
Speaker 1: this this strange, awful bike. Uh, according to this person
Speaker 1: I was talking to it Honda. They said that the
Speaker 1: Harley Davison was selling like crazy, and why what was
Speaker 1: the baby Boomer? The baby Boom were moved on. We
Speaker 1: were selling motorcycles. The Japanese motorcycles were being sold to men.
Speaker 1: Sixteen to twenty four period, and then Boomers moved on.
Speaker 1: But then in in the around the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: you know, Harley's were selling and selling and selling. The
Speaker 1: dealerships had to you know, they built these monumental uh
Speaker 1: dealerships for you know, tens of millions of dollars, and
Speaker 1: then the baby boomers couldn't hold them up any longer
Speaker 1: at night. They were too heavy. Yeah, you know, the
Speaker 1: their signature models way of a thousand pounds, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So they tried putting three wheels, you know, putting an
Speaker 1: extra wheel on them, but that didn't work. You know,
Speaker 1: I live in South Florida and we see that, we
Speaker 1: see this. You know, you can get a Harley for
Speaker 1: nothing done here. That is amazing. Yeah. Why do people
Speaker 1: miss the mark on demographics? You would think it's a
Speaker 1: science that people would jump on right away. You know,
Speaker 1: that's a good question, George, And I think it just
Speaker 1: simply has to do with the fact that most people
Speaker 1: can't count. You know. One of the examples I use
Speaker 1: is in you have a group of five hundred people
Speaker 1: in a group of a thousand people and essentially all
Speaker 1: you know, the same type of people. Which group will
Speaker 1: eat the most food. And most people can't answer that,
Speaker 1: they really can't, and and most marketers don't understand that.
Speaker 1: But that is it's as simple as that. People ask
Speaker 1: me all the time, how did we beat the Russians
Speaker 1: in hockey in nineteen eighty What was so special about that? Actually, well,
Speaker 1: because the that we're playing on the US Olympic team
Speaker 1: were born nineteen fifty seven, fifty eight, fifty nine, sixty
Speaker 1: sixty one, So we had the biggest talent pool that
Speaker 1: we've ever had, and that made all the difference. Talent
Speaker 1: pools and markets are determined by numbers, and numbers are demographics, period. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I've told a lot of art I've told a lot
Speaker 1: of our clients whenever they sponsor in our program that
Speaker 1: you just can't use depending on the market you're going after.
Speaker 1: But if you're going after older people as well, you
Speaker 1: better put in a toll free phone number in your
Speaker 1: advertisement because they're not very savvy just on the internet. Well,
Speaker 1: i'll tell you this too. The you know, I had
Speaker 1: a marketing business for twenty years in New England and
Speaker 1: we very often had to reach seniors and the best
Speaker 1: way to reach seniors was with late night programming exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your audience I guarantee you that your audience one is
Speaker 1: predominantly older because when you get to be our age,
Speaker 1: you can't sleep all that well. And so that's where
Speaker 1: it works. And they buys it off, say again, and
Speaker 1: they buy stuff. Oh are you kidding me? The baby boomers.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you about the baby boomers. Baby. You know,
Speaker 1: we started out with roughly eighty million of them, and
Speaker 1: I don't think we're too much shy of that now.
Speaker 1: They're currently fifty nine to seventy eight years old. They
Speaker 1: have George, they have a hundred trillion dollars in assets,
Speaker 1: they have ten trillion dollars in the bank, twenty twillion
Speaker 1: dollars in the stock market, and seventy trillion dollars in
Speaker 1: real estate. So when you have mass money and motivation,
Speaker 1: you are a market. We're going to take calls next
Speaker 1: hour with can so make sure you're part of the
Speaker 1: program as we talk about changing demographics. Indeed, what about schools.
Speaker 1: Can our school's going to be hit eventually if if
Speaker 1: we have a downturn in younger kids. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: are being hit already, and you can see that, you know,
Speaker 1: get behind it. I don't care where you are. Get
Speaker 1: behind a school bus and and see how a few
Speaker 1: kids are on the school bus. Now, it's it's just
Speaker 1: as it's a factor, and it's fallen off precipitously. We
Speaker 1: need to you know, a healthy healthy years about four
Speaker 1: million a good healthy year, and we're not near that
Speaker 1: now and that's why. But we have the potential to
Speaker 1: be near that if we could just get the millennials,
Speaker 1: the eighty eight million millennials who are nineteen to thirty
Speaker 1: eight years old to get married and have kids. But
Speaker 1: the millennials have literally taken adolescence from twenty years old
Speaker 1: to thirty years old, and many of them are still
Speaker 1: with their parents. What did COVID do to the birthrate?
Speaker 1: Did it slow it down or increase dramatically? Slowed down? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It you know, it's slowed it's slowed down the birth rate.
Speaker 1: But it also um disproportionately killed older people, which I
Speaker 1: think it's and we could talk about that if you want,
Speaker 1: but that's I think that's why it was designed. And
Speaker 1: I think it was designed in China because there's there's
Speaker 1: single biggest issue right now is they're going to have
Speaker 1: four hundred million elderly people in about twenty thirty, twenty forty,
Speaker 1: and they won't be able to feed them. They simply
Speaker 1: don't have enough workers, um to be able to feed them.
Speaker 1: What are they going to do? And just let them die?
Speaker 1: Which is what literally what's happening in Japan. Japan is
Speaker 1: the kids you know in Japan is going to disappear,
Speaker 1: just like did they do the same thing as China.
Speaker 1: Did they have some kind of law or anything. I
Speaker 1: think it was a different reason. Um, I know this
Speaker 1: is probably you know, this is this is a little
Speaker 1: bit of a hairy subject. But uh, technology has replaced
Speaker 1: um a lot of normal uh man wife activity, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and computers don't have babies and then not
Speaker 1: yet at least, and they're not going to um. And
Speaker 1: Japan is far more technical, far more ahead of the
Speaker 1: United States and there ahead of the rest of the
Speaker 1: world technologically. And Japanese young men and women are not
Speaker 1: even dating anymore, not even dating. Wow, what the heck
Speaker 1: is that? So they're all on their smartphones. No, I
Speaker 1: think they're on their computers getting whatever they would have
Speaker 1: normally gotten from But you can use your smartphone as
Speaker 1: a computer. Yeah, it could be. But it's a it's
Speaker 1: it's a changing world and it really is. And that's
Speaker 1: and that's why we're forecasting the end of globalization. So
Speaker 1: what is your prediction for the United States over the
Speaker 1: next twenty years, We're gonna okay, all things being equal, George,
Speaker 1: if if Generation Why and again Generation Why is nineteen
Speaker 1: to thirty eight years old, so they're like the next
Speaker 1: big generation that's coming along. Aids are. Yeah, they start
Speaker 1: having kids and living normal lives and start consuming at
Speaker 1: levels that we're expecting them to and making the kind
Speaker 1: of money necessary so they can buy housing, which is
Speaker 1: a big deal. You're going to see a lot of
Speaker 1: multi family housing as a result of the fact that
Speaker 1: housing is so expensive. Now, I think we're going to
Speaker 1: be fine. And as we talked earlier, the block of
Speaker 1: Latinos that are in our country are going to come
Speaker 1: of age and we're going to have consumption in the
Speaker 1: United States that's going to sustain us for at least
Speaker 1: another twenty thirty years, no problem at all, and healthy,
Speaker 1: healthy consumption in all areas, in all areas. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: talking everything. I'm talking everything from food, clothing, housing, everything, automobiles.
Speaker 1: I've noticed one thing when I see videos of Ukraine
Speaker 1: soldiers and Russian soldiers. They all seem older they are.
Speaker 1: If you looked at the a demographic chart of Russia,
Speaker 1: you would you would see that it's disproportionately older, and
Speaker 1: it's they have like ten million more women than they
Speaker 1: have men and they only have a population about one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty million Russia. Now Ukraine has a population
Speaker 1: of about forty million, and Ukraine is very very heavy
Speaker 1: on women forty plus. And neither country has kids, so
Speaker 1: neither country has a future. And I wish that Putin
Speaker 1: would have called me. I would have told him he's
Speaker 1: wasting his time going in and trying to annex the
Speaker 1: population in Ukraine because it's not worth annexing because there's
Speaker 1: they don't have any kids. It's not healthy. What would
Speaker 1: you do if you were in charge or had the
Speaker 1: ear of people who could make policy, what would you
Speaker 1: be telling them right now? I would be telling them
Speaker 1: to provide employment and housing for the young people, because
Speaker 1: once they're young people have employment and housing, you need housing.
Speaker 1: They will have kids. If you want your country to last,
Speaker 1: you know, to be a country by the year twenty
Speaker 1: one hundred, you have to do that. In housing. What
Speaker 1: would your definition of housing be? Could it be an
Speaker 1: apartment as well? It could be any yeah, it could
Speaker 1: be it. Could you know who? I just I just
Speaker 1: did a a presentation for manufactured housing, and most people
Speaker 1: think manufactured housing is like a trailer court, and it's
Speaker 1: so different. Now if you can buy you know, a
Speaker 1: young person could buy a home for one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars and I'll just use that in numbering because and
Speaker 1: that that may be high for sum or low for
Speaker 1: some I don't know. But you can buy a house now,
Speaker 1: a manufactured house that is beautiful. And once we have
Speaker 1: enough of those that young people can afford and move into,
Speaker 1: you're going to see more children. Did you ever hear
Speaker 1: of Levittown, New York? I have not. What is that? Okay? Well,
Speaker 1: Levittown was. I don't know how many houses they built,
Speaker 1: but it was. It was because nineteen forty seven and
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty one they built eighteen thousand homes. And it
Speaker 1: was a perfect time because we had ten million gis
Speaker 1: coming back from you know, World War Two, so we
Speaker 1: had about eighteen thousand couples. And these eighteen thousand couples
Speaker 1: produced eighty thousand children and these were manufactured homes. I
Speaker 1: think you could buy them for ten grand and they
Speaker 1: came with a TV. They So we need housing. We
Speaker 1: are short housing, and my best estimate we're short about
Speaker 1: twenty five million houses or housing units. I remember my
Speaker 1: dad bought their second house in nineteen fifty eight in
Speaker 1: Dearborn Heights, Michigan, and he paid eighteen thousand dollars for it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: paid it off as fast as he could. Had had
Speaker 1: a mortgage, had a twenty year mortgage, but he paid
Speaker 1: it off way before that. Eighteen thousand dollars for a house. Well,
Speaker 1: how about ten thousand dollars for a house in Levittown?
Speaker 1: I oh my god. Yeah. So the housing housing, housing.
Speaker 1: We need to take our kids seriously, and we're blessed
Speaker 1: with young people here in the United States. We have
Speaker 1: a crop of kids that are nineteen to thirty eight
Speaker 1: years old. That's the largest generation in the history of
Speaker 1: our nation. And we have to make sure they can
Speaker 1: form families, have kids, and live lives. So it's amazing
Speaker 1: statistics to be sure. If you were going into business
Speaker 1: right now, would you build retail or stay on the internet? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know that that's a good question because I get
Speaker 1: asked that, and brick and mortar, I think it's going
Speaker 1: to do fine because the that that's going to foreign
Speaker 1: families is all about experience, and I think you're going
Speaker 1: to see a resurgence in brick and mortar retail. The
Speaker 1: online retail is not going anywhere. I mean, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be fine, and they're gonna you know that, they will
Speaker 1: do fine. But both categories, and again online is staying
Speaker 1: around twenty percent. So which which would you rather be,
Speaker 1: the eighty percent or the twenty percent. I would choose
Speaker 1: the eighty percent with brick and mortar as much as
Speaker 1: you can. That's true. Yeah, restaurants are having a heck
Speaker 1: of a time, maybe since COVID getting employees. What's happening there, well,
Speaker 1: a couple of things. One, helicopter parents, helicopter baby boomer
Speaker 1: parents and their kids, and their kids are the millennials,
Speaker 1: the eighty eight million millennials. They're allowing them to live
Speaker 1: at home and they're not encouraging them to work. But
Speaker 1: it's getting to the point now where they're going to
Speaker 1: have to leave the house. They're gonna have to throw
Speaker 1: away all those trophies they didn't deserve. They're gonna have
Speaker 1: to grow up and date and get married. In start life,
Speaker 1: we will have plenty of labor, and we also have
Speaker 1: lots and lots of immigrants that are filling those rules.
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