Snake Plissken Escapes America

Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the America of 29 years ago…) where crime has spiraled so badly that Manhattan Island has been converted into a giant maximum-security prison — walled off, with no guards inside, just 40,000 of the country’s worst criminals left to fend for themselves. When Air Force One is hijacked and crashes into Manhattan, the President (first name Donald) is taken hostage by the inmates. The government needs him back fast — he’s carrying a cassette tape critical to an upcoming peace summit. Enter Snake Plissken. The warden offers him a deal: rescue the President within 24 hours and earn a full pardon. To make sure Snake doesn’t run, they inject tiny explosive charges into his arteries set to detonate at the deadline. It’s a lean, cynical thriller with a punk sensibility. Carpenter shot much of it in a bombed-out St. Louis standing in for a decayed New York, giving it a genuinely grim atmosphere. The ending is classic Snake — darkly satisfying and deeply anti-authoritarian. Russell reprised the role in the sequel, Escape from L.A. (1996). In that sequel, Snake activates a “blackbox” device, which sends a global EMP pulse that shuts down all electricity on Earth — every computer, every power grid, every piece of technology goes dark worldwide. Civilization as it exists is effectively reset to zero. It’s an even more nihilistic ending than the first film — Snake doesn’t just stick it to one corrupt system, he wipes the slate clean for the entire planet. The government officials are horrified, demanding to know what he’s done. Snake just smirks and lights a cigarette in the darkness, delivering his final line: “Welcome to the human race.”

I am working as a sort of venture partner with a team that is working to build the next generation of real estate brokerage, an industry that symbolizes the American Dream of home ownership. The residential real estate brokerage industry is navigating a genuinely difficult environment right now, with pressures hitting from multiple directions simultaneously. Commission structure upheaval is the biggest structural issue. A recent court case has created fundamental uncertainty about how agents get paid and what value they can demonstrate to clients. Margin compression is becoming relentless. Commission rates have slipped from around 3% in the late 1990s to about 2.7% today, placing a premium on scale, operational efficiency, and consolidation. Recruiting and talent retention remains the single biggest operational headache for broker networks. Brokerage leaders spend lots of time recruiting top agents, followed by agent productivity and trying to skew towards younger agents whenever possible. Housing market fundamentals are working against transaction volume. Firms are facing pressure from worsening housing affordability and increasing operational costs. AI and technology adoption is both an opportunity and a burden, but is both necessary and inevitable. But the question about AI tools has shifted from if to how — with training, workflows, productivity, and return on investment being the ongoing hurdles. The industry is stressed but not broken, and those with scale and technology advantages appear to be pulling away from the rest of the field. Our team has as a co-founder one of the new-age gurus of the broker community. He has 250,000 online followers and to put a fine point on it, despite there being some 3 million licensed real estate agents, the full-time cadre has fallen to about 400,000. So, our co-founder has some serious impact on the community and a critical issue facing the industry. His tag-line comes from Bruce Lee (a sort of Snake Plissken character for sure)… “Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.”.

Today, the guru asked his audience about the growing trend of people wanting to leave the United States. He blamed it mostly on affordability and it caused me to reply to him privately. Here is what I said. I’ve lived for 11 of my 72 years outside the United States in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Italy, and Canada. I never wanted to live anywhere but the U.S., but now I’m applying for dual citizenship in Italy. I doubt I will really ever leave the U.S., but the sense of needing an alternative is quite high. To some people it’s all about affordability as suggested, but the examples are not really about affordability as much as they are about national policy in those countries. The biggest impact these days comes from healthcare cost, and the other countries where people wanna live have a stronger commitment to universal healthcare as a human right. It’s also noteworthy that when you look at homeownership statistics the U.S. is very low as a percentage of the population compared the most countries. And that’s despite having one of the broadest mortgage markets in the world. Why does all this prosperity not translate into everyone wanting to live here? Well, the truth is they all do want to live here when you look at immigration statistics. Everyone wants to be in the U.S., no one wants to move to Russia, China, or India.  And increasingly, Europeans are feeling put upon (by taxes and tourists, among other things like their immigration policies) and are thinking of leaving. The problem has become …. where can you go? And the answer is… it depends. What does it depend mostly on?  Obviously, it’s about how much wealth you have (as unfair as that seems). In the same way that wealthy people don’t worry about healthcare or their pensions, wealthy people don’t worry about where they live because they can keep moving to wherever the next best places might be.  It’s the other 90+ percent of the population that are really those for whom we are asking this question about. And that makes sense because those are the people who the guru’s constituents want to sell homes to. 

You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m very liberal, so it won’t surprise anyone if I say that the biggest problem this country faces is in its policies regarding wealth distribution. Since 1980, things have been sliding in the direction of more and more wealth disparity, and so we find ourselves today in this crisis of affordability that is being described every day to us all. I have all sorts of ideas about what needs to be done, but the truth is it’s a very difficult problem to solve. For years, what made this country great was our spirit of independence and our work ethic that allowed us to achieve anything we wanted to. But the world changed and that was all about population growth, which was all about our success. From 1930 until 1980 we saw more prosperity overall for Americans (and the rest of the world’s population) than at any other time in human history and the reason was because we had national policies that emphasized collective prosperity and not wealth concentration. We need more of that kind of thinking and far far less of what our slanted national policies are doing (or not doing) for the majority of Americans today.

Could you blame Snake Plissken if he wanted to escape America? Welcome to the human race.