This is really stupid, but imagine if there’s a watch on it! Useful AND stupid at the same time! What a concept!
Billionaire Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur, investor, and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, but in one of his more trivial enterprises (sometimes it appears that he is aspiring to be the next Donald Trump—now why would anyone do that?), he serves as a “shark” investor on the ABC TV reality show “Shark Tank.” There investors and nascent entrepreneurs compete to justify their brilliant new ideas to investors, and there Cuban recently distinguished himself as well as served as a much-needed cultural role model by calling out a fraudulent product while attempting to educate a stubbornly ignorant public.
One contestant, Ryan Naylor, hoped to succeed with what he called “a fashion accessory with health benefits.” Esso Watches, he said, restore the body’s “energy field” and improve sense of balance. You’ve seen the bracelets and necklaces that athletes wear and that work on the same theory, the theory being magic, or, if you will “negative ion technology.” When Naylor handed out samples of his product to the judges, Cuban refused to even take one, saying, “No, I’m allergic to scams. Seriously, this is not new. It’s been disproven. What you saw is the placebo effect. There’s athletes that wear it. It’s a joke. It’s a scam. It’s not real. I’m out. Okay. Thank you.” Then, having been emboldened, the rest of the judges piled on: there was blood in the water, and you know how sharks are.
In one of the filmed asides to the camera, a discouraged and bitter Naylor blamed his failure on Cuban, who, he suggested, was so emphatic about the fact that his watch’s health claims were nonsense that nobody would challenge him.
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Ethics Alarms 