80PTS: I was meeting Hunter at a hotel in D.C. to attend a Cato Institute event celebrating their 25th Anniversary. His father had bought a table and we were about to hear PJ O’Rourke read his Liberty Manifesto for the 100th time and Steve Forbes add nothing but more hot air to his flat tax crusade.
Cato Sidebar: I love the Cato Institute for their clear and simple Libertarian theory and their publishing of super-straightforward recommendations on everything from changing Social Security to evolving the impact of the UN. I love that they were formed in partnership with the Koch family but broke free to maintain intellectual independence. I carried around my pocket-sized Declaration of Independence and Constitution I got from Cato for a decade. One of my favorite podcasts is EconTalk with Russ Roberts out of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is a hardcore Libertarian and one time made the observation that the Libertarian movement has produced a lot of great position papers but very little impact, and that there is marginally more enthusiasm on college campuses today versus a decade ago.
Back to the story.
My flight got in late, and as Hunter, Nick and Hunter’s Dad headed to the ball room I was hustling up to our hotel room to slide on my tux and attempt to render the perfect tie in under five minutes. All bow ties should be natural ties, not pre-ties. Pre-ties should be call “ribbons”, as in “hey, that’s a nice ribbon you’re wearing around your neck.” Kablam, the tie landed in the first minute and I joined a fellow tuxer (and natural tie advocate) on the elevator for the 23 floor journey to the lobby. 19, 18, 17, chugga chugga grind…and the elevator stopped.
I didn’t know what magic was about to unfold.
We talked to the engineers who were “on it”, but it wasn’t clear how long we were going to stranded. For some reason he had two beers and they were screw tops. We started to talk. He was the college roommate of one of the founders of Cato. They had both majored in econ and while one of them aspired to impact-through-thinktank, my partner in lift-prison decided to pursue adult sophisticate entertainment. I was sharing an elevator with porn impresario “Buttman”. He had identified that the porn video industry outside of the “biggies” (Playboy and Vivid) was poorly managed. He also had figured out that while Playboy had largely locked up PPV through major cable systems, the hotel-based delivery of late-night distraction was incredibly fragmented and low quality. He smelled opportunity and between original production and long-term distribution deals he made a ton of money. As a director, he told me he had invented the breakthrough concept of the director coming from behind the camera for the final shot and participating in the scene.
It really didn’t seem like that big an innovation and I found it hard to believe that every director hadn’t had that thought, but, it became a gimmick in the highly successful “Buttman” series. I had worked on digital distribution projects for Playboy, MTV and Big Brother and pretty soon we were in a lively discussion around the dynamics of free versus paid adult content online. After about fifteen minutes the overdrive governor kicked in and we were headed to lobby to go celebrate old white guys advocating smaller government.
Buttman enjoyed the beginnings of our conversation. In addition to his breakthrough work behind the camera he was very facile in the dynamics of his industry and our captive chat was fascinating. He gave me his number and suggested we continue in a different setting. The next morning, as I looked at his phone number on his card I could imagine one very interesting conversation and a surprising window into an interesting industry, and I could also imagine a hundred ways that I might be taking the first step into trouble that I didn’t want. I left the card on the desk in the hotel.