proposition, but in reverse, by providing consumers with the tools of
that communication. It knows that if its products work as mating
brands—the market equivalent of peacock feathers—then higher
margins and profits will follow, frustrating the brain and making the
heart jealous. Whether it’s Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, or
Tesla, luxury is irrational, which makes it the best business in the
world. In 2016 Estée Lauder was worth more than the world’s largest
communications firm, WPP.^9 Richemont, owner of Cartier and Van
Cleef & Arpels, was worth more than T-Mobile.^10 LVMH commands
more value than Goldman Sachs.^11
The Horsemen and the Body Framework
The body framework—brain, heart, and genitals—bears directly on the
extraordinary success of the Four Horsemen.
Consider Google. It speaks to the brain, and supplements it,
scaling up our long-term memory to an almost infinite degree. It does
so not only by accessing petabytes of information around the globe—
but just as important, substitutes for our brain’s complex and singular
search “engine” (and its ability to shortcut at a fantastic speed across
the dendrites of brain neurons). To that remarkable physiological
ability, Google adds the brute force of ultrafast processing and high-
speed broadband networking to race around the world to find, on the
right server, the exact piece of information we desire. Human beings,
of course, can do the same thing—but it would probably take weeks
and a lot of travel to some dusty library to find the same thing. Google
can do all that in less than a second—and offers to find for us the next
obscure fact, and another after that. It never tires, it never gets jet lag.
And it not only finds whatever we’re looking for... but a hundred
thousand other similar things we might be interested in.
Finally, and ultimately most important, we trust the results of
Google searches—even more than our own, sometimes fitful,
memories. We don’t know how the Google algorithm works—but trust
it to the point of betting our careers, even lives, on its answers.
Google has become the nerve center of our shared prosthetic brain.
It dominates the knowledge industry the way Walmart and Amazon,