* Thoughts on the mutually beneficial “event” I engineered last Friday night
* 25 quick videos worth watching – and when I say “quick,” I mean QUICK. You can watch them all in just 37 minutes.
* Thoughts on the mutually beneficial “event” I engineered last Friday night
* 25 quick videos worth watching – and when I say “quick,” I mean QUICK. You can watch them all in just 37 minutes.
Making New Friends at the Cigar Club
On Friday nights, from 5:30 to 9:30, my “Cigar Club” is open to friends and colleagues for drinks, smokes, and conversation. I’m not always there, but Frank is.
Frank is more than just the bartender. He’s the person who greets everyone when they enter, remembers what they like to drink, laughs at their jokes even when they aren’t funny, and counsels them when they are feeling low.
Frank is also the reason that, when I am there, I usually don’t come downstairs to join my guests until an hour or so after they begin arriving. The buzzer first sounds almost always at precisely 5:30, and continues to buzz every five or 10 minutes. I glance at the monitor on my desk to take note of who is visiting, then I get back to whatever it is that I was working on.
Most of those that come early are “regulars,” so I don’t feel any obligation to entertain them. I know they will be happy chatting with Frank while they settle into their favorite barstool or couch or seat with their favorite drink without my intervention.
I spent about 10 years during my college and graduate school days in and out of the bar business. The business knowledge I acquired was invaluable later in my life, but the social education may have been even more useful.
Among the things I learned was that the best results are had when you introduce someone brilliant or fascinating to a group in a way that demands their respect. If you can pull that off (and it depends significantly on the quality of the catalyst), what you will have is a fascinating and even edifying conversation.
I engineered such an event last Friday when BN, a young real estate baron I know, brought in an artist friend of his who was renting BN’s nearby warehouse to serve as his atelier. I had heard about him – that his “name” was rising quickly among the low-echelon art collectors that religiously attend Art Basel every year in Miami.
The regulars that evening happened to be men of roughly his age that I know from the martial arts world – muscled and tattooed, but good souls with open minds. And so I let them know (even though I hadn’t yet made the judgment) that they were in the presence of an artistic genius.
The fact that he, too, was a student of Jiu Jitsu and that he was about their size (over six feet and two hundred pounds) and had two sleeves of tattoos, one of which reached to his left ear, made my job even easier.
After getting the attention of my regulars, I asked him how he had gotten into the art business. His story was exactly right to win the respect and even admiration of his audience. I may have some details wrong, but here’s the basic plot…
He was working as a humble waiter in various restaurants in Delray Beach while improving his Jiu Jitsu skills, when the owner of the dojo he attended mentioned to him that he was planning on commissioning a large mural for one of the walls of the studio. On impulse, he said that he happened to be a mural artist and would do the work for a small fraction of his normal fee. What he didn’t say, he told us, was that his only experience as an artist had been scribbling in a pocket-sized notebook that he carried with him. He secured the job, and to no one’s surprise but his own, his mural pleased not only the owner, but his students. Thus, a career was launched.
I was in awe of his gumption – that he gave himself permission to take on a job for which he was entirely unqualified and continue to accept commissions while he in the early stages of learning his craft. I was equally struck by the fact that he was able to generate art that would be accepted into Art Basel in less than a year.
I told him so, and he invited me to walk over to his atelier and see some of his work. I did and was immediately charmed and impressed by what I saw – the artwork as well as the eclectic mess of a studio he had put together.
I asked him if he’d be willing to do some sort of mural on one of the sides of my building. He said he’d be “honored” to do “something cool” for me and that I could pay for it with future invitations to the Cigar Club for him and a few of his friends. We shook hands on that.
Driving home that night I was thinking how lucky I am – at my age – to be adding 20- and 30-year-old entrepreneurs and artists to my circle of friends.
Funny,Interesting,Surprising,Thrilling, Enlightening…
25 Quick Videos Worth the Watching
Average Watch Time: 1.5 min.
Total Watch Time: 37 min.
1. Good business advice from Jeff Bezos (based on a fundamental Warren Buffett insight).
Watch Time: about 1 min.
2. Entitlement and dependency. The left is in an uproar about President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the mostly evil USAID. Here is a former Kenyan president telling his fellow Kenyans what he thinks about it.
Watch Time: about 1 min.
3. Is DOGE legal?
Watch Time: 2 min.
4. A mother’s revenge. This looks like justice to me. What do you think?
Watch Time: about 1 min.
5. Curious. Did you know that there is a class system in trailer parks?
Watch Time: about 1 min.
6. Disturbing. The MGRM experiment.
Watch Time: 2 min.
7. Pulse-pounding. According to someone, “Mongol metal is the new metal genre rocking the whole world.” And then there’s this.
Watch Time: 4 min.
8. Interesting. Who discovered the lost Amazon cities and destroyed them?
Watch Time: less than 1 min.
9. Cute animal videos are just… well, cute. Here’s one that I especially enjoyed last week.
Watch Time: 23 sec.
10. I feel the same way about cute kid videos. Like this one.
Watch Time: 26 sec.
11. This is opera. A trailer for a recent production at La Scala that shows why this venerable opera house still matters.
Watch Time: 1 min.
12. Don’t say this to a truly big man.
Watch Time: about 1 min.
13. Remarkable. How rats survived the Ice Age and conquered the world.
Watch Time: 2.5 min.
14. A great idea. “Smart glasses” to aid the deaf. (But I don’t think this is ready for prime time. Maybe in another few years.)
Watch Time: 3 min.
15. Funny. Bill Burr on happiness and the simple male brain.
Watch Time: about 2.5 min.
16. Funny and true. Random comedian goes off on the Obamas.
Watch Time: less than 1 min.
17. Funny and cool. When Sam Jackson met Marlon Brando.
Watch Time: less than 1 min.
18. Africana kids dancing. I can’t get enough of this stuff.
Watch Time: about 1 min.
19. Relive Myanmar star Thway Lin Htet’s all-out brawl with Thai standout Ganchai.
Watch Time: 3 min.
20. Unwelcome facts. Man silences Woke crowd with immigration data.
Watch Time: less than 1 min.
21. When asked a tough question… Trump shuts down CNN hosts.
Watch Time: about 2 min.
22. Fun. Cop trolls man who identifies as a cat.
Watch Time: about 1 min.
23. Iconic. Michael Jackson’s standstill at the 1993 Super Bowl halftime show.
Watch Time: 2 min.
24. Want REAL Romance? Ian McKellen shares his story.
Watch Time: 1.5 min.
25. Tell me if you don’t think this Radiohead cover is beautiful.
Watch Time: about 1 min.
Conspiracy theory?
This video keeps getting taken down. I wonder why?
Watch Time: 1 min.