Ladies and Gentlemen, if I can have your attention please. We are about to begin. As you know, it is now the year 2500. More than 400 years ago, a man named Marvin Keating founded a business in what was then called the state of New York. Now this was a very unusual business, quite unlike anything the world had ever seen at the time. To put it simply, Marvin Keating sold fame. Not just any kind of fame, but intergenerational long-lasting fame. The kind of fame that could make one into a well-known historical figure, centuries, if not millennia into the future.

            In short, for a hefty price, Mr. Keating claimed to be able to make anyone into a Pericles or a George Washington, without requiring any effort on the part of the client. Using an array of advanced social media techniques and his vast business and political connections, Keating aimed to transform his clients into history book material, figures that schoolchildren would remember and revere for generations. As far as the records indicate, Mr. Keating was only able to acquire one client before he was investigated and indicted for fraud. Enter Richard Berger of Napa Valley, California.

            On paper, Richard Berger seemed to be the perfect client to test the effectiveness of Keating’s business. All available records show that Berger was a dull, unimaginative, spineless, untalented, and overall, unremarkable man. With the exception of his deep pockets, Berger was about as average as anyone in the state of California at the time. If Keating could transform this man into a Pericles, he could do so with anyone. And so, he tried. Under Keating’s powerful influence, Berger acquired a record deal, six civic achievement awards from the state of Tennessee, the honorary presidency of the National Audubon Society, four Guinness World Records, a twenty-foot stretch of Interstate 5 named in his honor, authorship of two self-published ghostwritten novellas, and one square mile of the Moon.

            Of course, all of these enviable achievements were heavily publicized in Keating’s all out social media blitz. Indeed, for the rest of Berger’s life, every citizen of the United States was bombarded with spam, telling of his many accomplishments. Keating claimed that Richard Berger would be a household name well past the year 2500. Now that we have come to the year of Keating’s prediction, I ask the audience, has anyone heard of this man?