Humble Bragging 

I recently spoke at a meeting in Miami of about 40 entrepreneurs, most of whom had businesses with revenues in the $1 million to $10 million range. Since they were in a range I had written extensively about in Ready, Fire, Aim, my book on “the four stages of entrepreneurial growth,” I thought I’d organize my comments around that.

The book was published in 2007, so I went back to it to remind myself of some of the details. I was half expecting to find statements I had made then that I no longer agree with. But to my delight, I found none. On the contrary, my feeling in reading it was, “Boy, this is really good!”

That assessment was validated at the meeting, as no fewer than half a dozen people stated in the Q&A session and told me privately afterwards that they had used the book in starting and developing their own successful businesses.

Two weeks later, a friend of a friend who “wanted to meet me” came to my office. I was a bit concerned that I was going to be sold something – but it turned out that he, too, had built a successful business by following the book. He had then sold the business for a price large enough for him to retire and begin a second career as a venture capitalist.

He was a young man: 34. He got rich and retired at 34! My first retirement (one of four that I have failed at) was when I was 39.

I’d like to tell you how happy I was for his success. And I was. But I was also mildly irritated by how early in life he had achieved it. I wondered if he had a net worth now that was larger than mine was at his age. He never told me.

She Listened. He Didn’t!

I’m writing this the day after the Harris/Trump debate. If you are reading it now, that’s because what I have to say is still relevant.

In the Aug. 23 issue, I said that the election is not about the Trump Haters or the Trump Lovers or even the Trump Haters-Haters, but about undecideds in the swing states. The advice I gave to Harris and Trump was about how to change the minds of those voters, not about pandering to the already decided.

Harris listened to me. She kept on script and didn’t wander. And she cleverly charged Trump with misleading questions and outright falsehoods (e.g., the “good people on both sides” lie) that she knew the moderators wouldn’t fact-check.

Trump didn’t listen to me. He did his usual bantering and hyperbole, which his base loves. But that isn’t likely to have worked on the undecided voters in the swing states.

Trump did point out, as I told him he should, the insanity of allowing 8 million to 10 million foreigners to enter the country since 2020, without vetting, without medical testing, and without legal grounds for them to be here. But he did not emphasize the angle on that which might have worked with the undecideds – i.e., the fact that the states and cities where these millions were shipped could not afford to house and feed them.

Nor did he make it clear that 90% of them were shipped around the country not by the governors of the border states but by the Biden administration itself – mostly on planes landing secretly in airports around the country at night, under cover of darkness. Had he listened to me, he would have come to the debate with data on the billions of dollars that have been spent to accommodate the migrants and the trillion+ the US will have to spend on them in the next several years.

He mentioned, as I had advised, the fact that the Mexican cartels have been making millions by transporting these people, the majority of which are young men and women who were put at the front of the lines because they had promised to pay their fees by working for the cartel strongholds in the destinations they eventually reached. He mentioned the fentanyl problem, but he should have drilled down on it with specifics on the enormity of that business in terms of dollars and deaths.

Had he stuck to my script, he would have come out of that debate a clear winner. But he couldn’t find it in himself to do the preparation he needed to learn some of the basic facts. Instead, he chose to back up his seemingly outrageous statements with one example: the pet-eating story.

Some of the facts he could have and should have brought up…

* According to NBC News, authorities are currently investigating more than 100 serious crimes that have been committed by an ultra-violent gang of migrants from Venezuela known as Tren de Aragua.

* Two alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang – Julio César Hernández Montero, 27 years old, and Yurwin Salazar Maita, 23 – are facing the death penalty for the 2023 kidnapping and murder of 43-year-old José Luis Sánchez Valera in Miami-Dade County.

* In New York, Bernardo Raul Castro-Mata, a 19-year-old from Venezuela with tattoos associated with Tren de Aragua, shot two police officers. Castro-Mata entered the country illegally last July, a member of Immigration and Customs Enforcement told CNN.

* Members of Tren de Aragua have reportedly established a significant presence in parts of Colorado, Fox News reported, having taken over at least two apartment buildings in Aurora. Gang members were not just living in the buildings, they were using some of the apartments for child prostitution.

* Officials arrested two gang members suspected of being involved in “stash houses” used for human trafficking in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, New Jersey, and Florida, according to a criminal complaint reviewed by CNN.

Trump could have talked about all of that in detail. But he didn’t.

It’s impossible to know if Trump’s debate performance doomed his chances for reelection. Debates, the experts say, don’t usually cause major shifts. But I do think that Harris deserves an A for sticking to my plan, and Trump deserves, at best, a C-.

I doubt they will have another debate. Trump is smart enough to know that he will never be able to follow a script. And his advisors are no doubt telling him to put his time and energy into his rallies. If they don’t have another debate, I think we are looking at a very close election, with the party that loses almost certainly calling it stolen.

Another Thing the Japanese Do Better

Throughout the developed world, people are getting fatter. The British. The Germans. The Poles. Even, to a lesser extent, the Italians and the French. There are exceptions. One of those I’ve written about before: the Japanese.

I’ve been to Japan four or five times in the past 30 years. And each time I got there, I was once again shocked to see how rare it is to see a fat Japanese person. (During my most recent trip a few months ago, I saw only two – and they were both Sumo wrestlers!)

In the Sept. 11 issue of The Rosen Report, Eric Rosen confirms this. Citing data from the World Economic Forum, he notes that only 7.6% of Japanese adults living in Japan are “obese” as compared to 41.6% of Americans. Likewise, only 3.3% of Japanese children fall into this category as compared to more than 20% of American children.

A significant reason for this, Rosen says, is attributable to school lunches. “By law, every school [in Japan] employs a professional nutritionist who has undergone rigorous training, including three years of study beyond becoming a teacher. These nutritionists design meals that are entirely free of processed foods, with each meal prepared from scratch daily.”

Another reason: Japanese children walk to school.

Here’s a short video about this.

Here’s a summary of the data published by the World Economic Forum.

And here is a link to Eric Rosen’s excellent e-letter.