Mentoring the Second Generation

I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring many young people throughout my career. With family members, it’s been mostly about watching them grow into responsible and productive adults. With employees, it’s been about helping them grow into business leaders on their own.

I can’t think of anything that has been more rewarding than watching those young people listen to my advice and put it into action.

But lately, I’ve been mentoring a different group of people, and it has turned into a source of extra special pleasure for me. I’m talking about mentoring my partners’ and colleagues’ kids. Sometimes, even their grandkids.

I got a call from DL, who said, “I’m off to Madrid for a few months, but I’d like your help with D, my son.” It turns out that, after a successful career as a yoga instructor in LA, D moved east and was trying to decide whether to start again in the yoga business or do something else. I’d seen D a handful of times in the last 30 years, but we barely knew one another. Because of my relationship with DL, though, I wanted to do everything I could to help him. And I did.

RR called my office to set up an appointment. I remembered him as the first son of NR, our partner in a publishing company in Germany. Several years ago, his dad retired, putting him in charge. RR said that he was going to be in Florida and wanted to hang out with me and talk business. I was honored to spend a day with this young man, as a tribute to the relationship I had with his dad. I took him out to Paradise Palms,  where we spent several hours talking as we moved through the gardens. This kid is the spitting image of his father. And he has his dad’s intellectual and emotional intelligence. He even has the same smile and hand gestures. Can you imagine what a privilege and a pleasure this was for me?

AV, a partner in our Nicaraguan development, asked me to spend some time with his son who’s starting school in the US this year. AV wanted me to encourage the boy to keep his nose to the grindstone. To spread his wings, but remember that success in life is all about doing the work that others won’t. I was happy to do it.

And that’s to say nothing of the relationships that have been developed over the years between businesses I’ve started that are run by my children and businesses my colleagues and partners have started that are now run by their children. Can you imagine how much fun it is to be copied on correspondence between your children and the children of someone you’ve spent years working with?

I’ve had relationships like this in the past. But they are becoming common now, due no doubt to my age and the age of my partners and colleagues. It’s all good. All very good. I feel so lucky.

Making Sense of the State of the Union Address 

Did you listen to Biden’s State of the Union address? Did you hear what he said about his economic priorities?

He said he was going to make America great again by opening oil and gas exploration, reducing the budget deficit, and mandating “Made in America” for manufactured goods.

Huh? Aren’t those Donald Trump’s talking points!

It was such a startling departure from the Democratic party’s prior positions that I found myself momentarily worried for Biden. Worried that he would be harshly called out the next day by both the right- and the left-leaning media.

But no. His pivot to an America-first economic agenda was barely mentioned by the mainstream press. And when it was, the attitude was supportive.

None of my liberal friends mentioned it. Perhaps because they didn’t watch the speech. Not many people did. (It drew an estimated 27.3 million viewers, less than 10% of the population, and the lowest for a SOTU in at least 30 years.)

What happened? Here’s my take:

That Was Then 

Prior to the 2020 election, polls showed that the number-one concern of US voters was COVID-19. This was, as you would expect, truer for Democrats than for Republicans. But it was enough of a concern for all Americans that it turned out to be the tipping point that gave the presidency to Joe Biden.

If you remember, Trump’s campaign was all about urban violence, which had spiked nationwide, but especially in the large, Democratic-run cities. Biden’s was all about the threat posed by the “unmasked” and the “unvaccinated.”

The Biden strategy, as it turned out, was the stronger one. The Trump haters and the Trump lovers were never going to be swayed. But tens of millions of voters were in the middle. And as the summer ended and fall began, fear of the pandemic stayed strong, while fear of urban crime ebbed enough to put Biden in office.

This Is Now 

Since then, things have changed. Significantly.

Hardly anyone is afraid of COVID any more. The facts are being gradually released. COVID was and is a serious threat to a small portion of the population: those that were/are over 65, overweight, and suffering from “comorbidities” like diabetes. For the rest, the danger of COVID was about the same as the regular flu.

Meanwhile, prices of almost everything began to edge up slightly in 2020. They rose 4.5% in 2021, then climbed as high as 8.5% in August of 2022. Instead of acknowledging this, Biden’s advisors were doing everything they could to deny it – calling it a hoax, then temporary, then blaming it on Putin, then on the gas stations, etc.

That strategy didn’t work. Ordinary earners could feel the reality of inflation every time they went shopping or filled their gas tanks. The trillion-plus dollars in COVID relief that the government had spread around a year or so earlier was being spent down. Savings were disappearing. Money was getting tight.

So, regardless of what voters’ political opinions might have been, they began to worry about the economy. That has become increasingly clear from polling.

A Gallup Poll released last week reported that half of those asked said they were worse off economically than they were this time last year. Only 35 percent said they were better off. (Since Gallup first asked this question in 1976, it has been rare for half or more of Americans to say they are worse off. The only other times it happened were during the Great Recession era of 2008 and 2009.)

And economic concerns dominated the top 10 spots of a just-released poll by Pew Research that ranked Americans’ greatest fears. (Also noteworthy: COVID wasn’t even in the top 20. It was outranked not only by economic concerns but by social fears that are traditionally promoted by right-leaning politicians and media, such as crime, terrorism – foreign, not domestic – and immigration.)

Given these drastically changing sentiments among voters, had I written Biden’s State of the Union speech, I’d have crammed it full of Trump talking points and promises to win back the undecided voters. And that, by gosh, is exactly what his speechwriter did!

For more on this from Gallup, go here.

And for more from Pew Research, go here.

Watching the Super Bowl This Weekend?

The Super Bowl is supposed to be the biggest sporting event of the year in the USA. Virtually all my friends and family members watch it. Not moi. I prefer more intellectual sports, like MMA, where contestants get brain-damaged without the protection of pads and helmets.

When I tell people that I don’t watch the game, they’re suspicious. “But what about the commercials?” they ask. “You are missing all those great commercials!”

The Super Bowl is known for its commercials. I’ve heard that many of them are brilliant, so this year, I decided to check them out. And I didn’t have to wait to watch them during the game. Most advertisers release them ahead of time.

Below you will find a link to one website where you can see them now. And as a service to those that don’t have the time, here are my top five in terms of entertainment:

1. “Why Not EV?” with Jim Ferrell
2. “Busch Light” with Sarah McLachlan
3. “Bud Light” with Miles Teller and Keleigh Sperry Teller
4. “Great Acting or Great Taste” with Ben Stiller
5. “Popcorners” with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul

Of course, making entertaining commercials has nothing to do with selling product. I found only two commercials that were any good at all in terms of sales. One was “Popcorners” (see above). But my favorite was “Hellmann’s” with Jon Hamm and Brie Larson.

Check out all the ads here.

Is The China Spy Balloon a Hoax? 

Can we believe anything we read or hear from our elected officials or the mainstream media?

Take, for example, this Chinese “spy” balloon. The idea is preposterous. We are talking about a big, slow-moving balloon that was passing over our country for days before it was declared a danger of some sort and shot down.

How are we supposed to believe that any country would use something so easily detected as a vehicle for spying? Especially since a balloon can’t see anything that cannot be seen from a satellite. And every country that has satellite technology can see everything larger than a car.

How are we to believe that there is anything that could be seen from a balloon or a satellite that would be secret information? If the government wanted to hide the location of anything “top secret,” it would have to be done with camouflage. And if the government does have something on the ground that it wants to hide from China or any other country, it’s already been camouflaged.

The only reporter I found that even asked the question received the most ridiculous response. Click here.

Let’s Talk About Guns and Politics and Zombies 

SC and I were talking about guns. He wanted me to accompany him to a shooting range here in Delray Beach so I could try my hand at various handguns and rifles.

I gave him my spiel…

Many years ago, I saw a list of all the bad things that can happen when people have guns. At the top was having your gun stolen from your bedside table while you slept. That was followed by all sorts of missteps and tragedies – from shooting your foot off to the accidental death of your child.

“With my bad luck and general clumsiness,” I said, “I don’t like the prospects.”

“Take a class in gun safety,” SC told me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “And anyway, as I understand it, the second amendment was not designed to keep me safe from robberies, but from government tyranny.”

“Biden used that logic to argue for gun control,” SC said. (I knew what he meant. Biden had recently made fun of second amendment defenders, saying something like, “For those ‘brave’ right-wing Americans who say that it’s all about keeping America independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something more than a gun.”)

“Well,” I said, “If I was ever going to buy a gun, it wouldn’t be a handgun or a semiautomatic. I want a full-on machine gun.”

He looked surprised. “Why is that?”

“Because the only time I can imagine needing one would be if my house was being attacked by zombies.”

He smiled.

“I’m serious,” I said. “You know how the zombies are these days. They’re not like the old ones, lurching at you, clumsily, one at a time. Today, they move quicker and they come in droves. There’s no way you can protect yourself without a military grade automatic weapon.”

He smiled again.

Later that day, he sent me this link to a great article about how Hollywood has expanded our knowledge of how to kill zombies.

Click here to prepare yourself for the zombie apocalypse!

My First “Paycheck” Job

PP and I were reminiscing about some of the jobs we had in high school. This somehow led to a discussion of “How come kids don’t work hard today?”

It got me thinking about my first job. Not the paper route I had when I was eight or the lawn mowing and attic cleaning I did for extra bucks. I was thinking about my first real job. My first timeclock-punching, paycheck-receiving, tax-withholding job.

It was 1962. I was 12 years old, in 6th grade at St. Agnes grammar school. I had a weekend job at the Rockville Center Car Wash. I worked eight hours on Saturday and Sunday, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with a half-hour for lunch.

I worked in tandem with Brian, a classmate of mine. Our job was to wash and dry the interior windows of every car that went through the automatic carwash machine. At full speed, it spit out a car every 60 or 80 seconds. And on weekends, the place was so busy that they never stopped coming. “It’s a “hustle job,” Joe, the cigar-chomping manager had warned us when we applied for the job. And he was right. We had to jump in the car (I took the front; Brian took the back), spray fluid on the glass, and wipe it clean. In a typical day, we covered 240 cars.

You might wonder: Why did Joe hire 12-year-olds for such a demanding job? The reason was simple: We were small enough and fast enough to jump in and out of the cars all day long.

And what were we paid for hustling non-stop eight hours a day? Our wages were $1.25 an hour. That was $10 a day; $20 for the weekend. And we felt very lucky to have such a grown-up job.

Making a Stranger’s Day

Click here for a video clip about a passenger helping out an Uber driver in trouble. When I watched it, it reminded me of a similar experience I had several years ago.

Here’s my story…

I was getting a haircut in NYC. Through the plate-glass window of the barbershop, I could see a young Black guy pleading with a pair of cops. My barber followed my gaze.

“That’s the young man that cleans all the storefront windows in this area,” he said. “A nice kid. He works hard.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I went outside to see what was going on. A small crowd had gathered, taking in the scene. “I think they’re impounding his car,” one of them told me.

“For what?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sounds like he didn’t pay a bunch of tickets.”

The kid looked frantic. He was pacing back and forth. “I need my car for my work,” he said. “Please! I’m going to pay those tickets.”

“You got the money?” one of the cops asked.

“No. But I will get it,” he said. “Just don’t take the car.”

The cop began writing him up, and his partner walked back to the squad car. I went over to him and asked if they would let the kid go if I paid his tickets. He looked at me as if he thought I was crazy.

“I’m serious,” I said.

He looked through his paperwork. The total is X,” he said. X was a lot of money. More than I expected. But I happened to have almost exactly that in my pocket, because I had just come from the bank.

He pulled his partner aside, spoke to him for a few minutes, then came back to me.

“Are you sure you wanna do this?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

He motioned for me to follow him, and we quietly made the transaction behind his car. I thought about asking for a receipt but decided against it. He walked back to his partner and whispered something to him. Then he said something to the kid, and the kid started screaming and jumping up and down. “I knew it!” he shouted. “There is a god! There is a god!”

He searched the faces in the crowd to see if he could figure out who to thank. But I was already halfway down the street. I don’t believe in a god, but that made my day.