You’ve seen this Stoic quote everywhere: in branding decks, on Instagram mood boards, in startup founders’ DMs when they’re dodging accountability.

It’s pithy. Philosophical. Persuasive.

There’s just one problem.

Marcus Aurelius didn’t say it.

Every sob story ends with a call to action.

“I used to struggle with X, until I found Y.
Now I help people like you do Z.”

Relatable? Sure. Effective? Absolutely.
Manipulative? AF.

Martha Stewart is one of the finest mythcrafters in the American brandscape.

And when her brand broke, she didn’t flinch.
She turned prison into PR, and returned more potent than ever.

They tell you that AI will do it for you.
But AI didn’t do the work. The prompt did.
And the prompt came from someone who already knew what they wanted — or knew how to get there.

The inconvenient part:
Their prompt won’t work for you…

We’ve all watched conspiracy theories outperform corrections.
Not because people are stupid.
But because conspiracy theories don’t require nuance, context, or cognitive dissonance.

We don’t fault Disney for being fake.
We fault it for being so expertly crafted, so deeply repeated, that entire generations mistook the spell for the world.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:
Your personal brand is performance art.
And like any performance, it works best when you know the role you’re playing…

At The Lies Agency, we don’t hate Apple.
We’re obsessed with its precision. We respect the spell. We study the spell.
Because Apple didn’t just build a brand — it built a secular religion.