“Made in Japan” 

After I finished with my business meetings and presentations late Monday, K had us on the train to Takayama, the first of several additional destinations (Hakone, Kyoto, and Naoshima) we have been visiting since then. I’ve been to Kyoto before, but never to Takayama, Hakone, or Naoshima, all of which have lots to offer in terms of natural beauty, world-class hotels and ryokans (traditional inns), art and history museums, gourmet restaurants, friendly food stalls, and more Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples than you could imagine.

We are in Naoshima as I write this, a lush little island in the Seto Sea that is heavily populated with fantastically serene and sophisticated sculpture gardens and museums of contemporary art.

I have to say this about Japan (and I know, I said it before): The Japanese may not be inventors, but when some other country creates something – anything from an idea to a technique to a style – the Japanese “appropriate” it and bring it to a new and better level.

So much of the art, the architecture, the crafts, and the decor in Japan is undeniably more subtle and sophisticated than the originals. And when it comes to anything trendy – from pop music to street art to teen fashion – the Japanese add a self-conscious note of irony to it that makes it less self-important and more fun.

I’m writing from Benesse House on Naoshima. It’s actually much more than a hotel, because it contains three separate museums, including one devoted to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photography. I’ve liked his work when I’ve seen it in US museums, but to see so much of it curated and hung so tastefully here… I am feeling like I often do when I get to see a large collection of an artist’s ouvre. I feel like I really understand why he is considered great.

If you’ve never seen Sugimoto’s work, most of it is less like photography than reductionist paintings. There are some pieces that are strongly reminiscent of Mark Rothko. (Maybe even more intense!)

And others that are muted black and gray landscapes that remind me of Robert Kipniss, a favorite of mine who’s not well enough recognized.

This afternoon, we visited another nearby museum, the Lee Ufan Museum, a collaboration between Ufan, a sculptor that works mostly in steel and natural stone, and Tadao Ando, the architect who created this set of buildings, corridors, gardens, and rooms with views that is reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum in LA, but smaller and much more affecting (and with better views).

Okay, I’ll stop now.

Well, just one more thing: Everything about Japanese architecture, public and private, interior decor and landscape design, furniture, lighting, doors and windows, bathtubs, showers, and even toilets is simply more ingeniously and more thoughtfully made than it is in the US.

The US has contributed many more inventions and novelties to the world, including artistic, cultural, and amusement concepts – but when you embed yourself in Japan, even a little, as we’ve been doing for nearly a month now, you can see how far from perfect American-made is.

I Did It! 

On Saturday, I gave my presentation on “the seven natural laws of wealth building” to an audience of about 1,000 plus another 700 watching the live stream. I won’t grade my performance. Everyone I spoke to later was highly complimentary, but in my experience the Japanese are always complimentary, so I won’t present that as evidentiary.

What I can tell you is that the way my Japanese partners and the hotel staff treated me was absurdly flattering. Throughout the day, I was escorted by at least a half-dozen people who took me through hidden hallways and back staircases and into various “green rooms” and then eventually onto the various stages and platforms I was speaking from – all done, apparently, to “protect me” from my “fans.”

I’m not kidding.

After my three-hour keynote speech, I spent another two hours doing interviews, and then two full hours with 120 individual ticket holders who had paid some crazy additional sum of money to have their photos taken with me and Sean (who runs the business my family has with the Japanese). And after that, there was a cocktail party, where Sean and I separately (each with our own simultaneous translator) visited 11 or 12 tables of about six to eight people each and were given seven minutes to answer their questions before a handler dragged us and our translators to another table.

The next day was devoted to 20 of the 120 who had paid $5,000 each to spend the day with us and listen to our ideas about business, entrepreneurship, and wealth-building. They all had questions, and I had been asked to spend 20 minutes on answering each one. At 20 people times 20 minutes, it took about seven hours.

It was exhausting but energizing, because almost all of the 20 were successful or promising business owners and professionals and the questions were good. They not only asked about business, investing, retirement, and estate planning (which I had expected), but also about American politics, geopolitics, macroeconomics, currencies, cryptocurrencies, real estate investing, art collecting, personal productivity, physical fitness, sleeping habits, child rearing… and I can’t remember what else.

The next day (Monday for me, Sunday for you), I spent another six hours with a different group of people – 100 members of a private wealth education club I had started 14 years ago in the USA, which was now in its second year in Japan. That was an entirely different experience because the crowd was considerably younger and their interests were more in the realm of entrepreneurship and business management.

The final two hours, which could have been a disaster, turned out to be the highlight of the three days, both for me and, I think, the 100 members of the club. My challenge was to answer all of their questions in the 120 minutes we had left after my presentation – which meant that even if each person limited their questioning to 30 seconds, I would have only 30 seconds to respond.

Well, they did, for the most part, limit their questioning to 30 seconds or less, and I was able to answer them in an average of 30 seconds. Which was, as surprising as it may sound, completely fun and exciting.

After one final dinner with my partner, his family, and Miki, my ever-present and super-considerate translator, I was back to the hotel at 10:30 and asleep by 10:45.

That’s the quick recap. There’s a whole lot of other things that happened and lots of interesting thoughts I’ve had about Japan, its culture, and how Americans can profit from it. I’ll tell you more about all that in the coming weeks.

The Japanese Do It Again! 

We were in Osaka for a few days, where we were filming some interviews and meeting with the senior executives of the company that publishes my books and essays. Later this week, I’ll be sending you more of my general observations about Japan. But before I do, I wanted to tell you one amazing thing that I discovered about this city.

Tokyo is, as I said, a great city – great for denizens and tourists in a dozen fun and practical ways. Osaka is not as large, with less to offer tourists, but it is apparently a great place to raise a family.

K and I discovered this while having dinner with SM, my primary partner in Japan, and his wife KM. They have two small children and one on the way. And they are thinking about moving to Osaka.

They mentioned all the benefits of making such a move, including the cost of housing, the cost of living, the opportunity to live abroad for several years, and the fact that Osaka is kid friendly. In an otherwise business-oriented metropolis, millions of Osaka’s residents are young parents. To accommodate them, there are innumerable little parks and amusements for children all over the city. The food markets are replete with kid food from baby formula to pop tarts. Pediatricians and OB-GYNs are as common as iPhone repairmen, and there are child care centers – very reasonably priced – on nearly every residential block.

But the craziest thing is this: Those child care centers are open 24/7.

Let me repeat that: 24/7. Apparently, if you want, you can drop off your kid on a Tuesday morning and pick him/her up Thursday after work!

Once again, the Japanese have taken a Western invention and improved it!

Giving Speeches and Other Frightening Experiences 

I’ve read that, next to dying, most people fear public speaking more than anything else.

I get that. I know what it is like to stand in front of an audience of several hundred people who are waiting to see if you are about to tell them something that is worth an hour or two of their time.

Having given dozens of speeches in my career, I can attest to the growing anxiety one feels as the day of performance draws near. It’s similar to how I feel before a Jiu Jitsu competition, where I face glory or embarrassment in front of onlookers who, I’ve convinced myself, are there not to see any of the other dozens of competitors, but just little old me.

My Jiu Jitsu friends that have competed hundreds of times over many years tell me that the anxiety lessens over time. And I am happy to report that my anxiety about public speaking has likewise diminished over the last 40 years.

In about a week, in Tokyo, I’ll be speaking to the largest group I’ve ever faced: 2,000 Japanese people that have paid money to hear me speak about business, entrepreneurship, and wealth building.

As my confidence in speaking grew over the years and my anxiety ebbed, I adopted the practice of doing very little preparation – just spending an hour or two thinking about what I was going to say, putting down a few notes on an index card, and ad-libbing the actual speech.

But this time I will be in front of 2,000 people and I’ll be speaking for three hours and – to make matters worse – I was asked to prepare written notes on my presentation to help the simultaneous translators do their jobs well. And so I spent many hours and wrote thousands of words and even prepared 56 slides to illustrate the points I intended to make – something I’d never done before.

Yes, I am feeling anxious right now, and I’m sure that anxiety will build in the next five or six days. But I’m sure it won’t get as bad as the anxiety I was feeling leading up to the presentation I made earlier today (I’m writing this on Saturday evening) at the Cornell Art Museum right here in Delray Beach. The subject: Central American Modernism, the book that Suzanne Snider, my partner, and I spent eight years researching and writing.

When I started writing books, I developed a fear about public speaking that I had not confronted before – the fear that I would appear at some random bookstore to talk about one of my books and find myself in a room of 50 or 60 chairs on which sat only five or six people.

That fear was so great that in my contract with John Wiley, which published many of my bestselling books, I had myself exempted from the obligation to face that sort of humiliation.

But there I was this morning, heading from my car to the museum, heart pounding, prepared to be mortified. And sure enough, when I climbed to the museum’s second floor and peeked into the room where Suzanne and I were going to speak, there were about 50 neatly arranged little white chairs on which about a half-dozen people were sitting.

I almost turned around and walked away. But I stayed. And minute by minute, people began strolling in and taking seats. By speaking time, to my utter delight, it was standing room only. And afterwards, for a good half-hour, Suzanne and I were both surrounded by people who wanted to chat about what we had said. And the comments were kind.

That put me in a good and confident mood for the rest of the afternoon. But it’s 8:15 in the evening now, and K and I are waking at 5:30 tomorrow morning to catch our planes to Japan. And already I’m feeling that slowly percolating dread that I thought I had completely subdued many years ago.

Wish me luck.

It Feels Like the Garden of Eden 

I’m neck deep into finishing three separate presentations I’ll be delivering in Tokyo next week. Two of them account for three hours of speaking to 2,000 paid attendees. The third one is a presentation to 20 people that have paid $5,000 apiece to ask me questions.

I’m feeling a lot of pressure to deliver. What makes this especially challenging is that, in order to prepare the translators, I have to basically write out the presentations almost verbatim and get it to them a week before the event… which is NOW!

Needless to say, this morning, when I was told that a new video I had commissioned for Paradise Palms had been completed, my stress levels were sky-high. It is a short but dramatic tour of the gardens, set to music. I watched it and it calmed my nerves for a while.

Which is to say, I like the way it came out. Click here and let me know what you think.

(Make sure you hit the start arrow to activate the sound.)

How to Mentor a Super-Accomplished Genius 

A friend writes to let me know that, as part of a post-graduate program he did at Harvard a few years ago, he’s been asked to mentor a young man that has not only amazing academic and humanitarian credentials but is already a super-successful high-tech businessman and is supposedly super-smart.

“Can you believe I’m going to be his mentor?” my friend says.

I looked at the young man’s resume. It was intimidating, to say the least. I wondered what I would do in my friend’s place.

What I would probably do, I realized, is pretend that I had come down with a very infectious disease and gracefully back out. But I know that my friend is determined to accept the challenge. So I thought some more, and came up with this for him…

Here’s What I Would Recommend

Never give him any direct advice. In fact, try to avoid making statements entirely.

Limit your verbal output to questions. Ask him questions about his thoughts and intentions. If he has a problem, ask him how he thinks he should handle it.

As he answers each of your questions, look at him intently, squinting your eyes and thoughtfully nodding. Every so often, you can make barely decipherable sounds – ranging between soothing and questioning but never clearly one or the other.

If you do this, he will either think he understands you, or he will pretend he understands you, or he will ask you what your non-verbal responses mean.

If that happens, say, “Let me tell you a story.”

Then tell him a completely nonsensical story that ends with a nonsensical denouement. And after you’ve finished telling him that story, begin nodding gently again, but this time with a subtle smile that signifies: “Ah, Grasshopper, I can see that I have raised your level of awareness. I am happy you are learning.”

This is a technique I know you have a natural talent for, because I’ve seen you use it with me when I was spouting BS. Nevertheless, considering this guy’s intelligence, you should improve your technique by practicing it in front of a mirror.

When you feel ready, the perfect time to debut your new mentoring skill would be on your podcast. I recommend videotaping with two cameras so the audience can also enjoy your undeniably wise but enigmatic facial gestures.

If you master this skill, it will not only win over his admiration and affection for you on a level where he will always list you among his greatest advisors, you will be able to advise other geniuses, even heads of industry. And charge a good penny for doing it, too!

Convicted… of Course 

I wasn’t surprised by the conviction of Trump. The cards were stacked before the trial began. A locus in NYC. A jury comprised entirely of people whose answers to the voir dire made it clear what they thought about Trump. A DA that was elected on his campaign promise to put Trump behind bars. A surrealistic strategy of turning a single misdemeanor into 34 felony counts. And on top of it all, a pro-Biden judge who not only accepted the tortured logic of the DA, but also invented a way for the jurors to vote that allowed them to come to a “unanimous” verdict that wasn’t unanimous but was the amalgamation of three separate decisions made by three separate groups of jurors. Not to mention that, to bolster Bragg’s chances for conviction, Biden sent his top DOJ official, Matthew Colangelo, to New York as Bragg’s top prosecutor to “get Trump.” And that’s to say nothing about the gag order and the reams of exculpatory evidence that Judge Merchan disallowed…

No, it was not surprising. But it did make me wonder if American politics has moved into another realm, where “lawfare” practices such as trying to convict and/or jail your principal political adversary will become the standard, as they are in a handful of the most corrupt third-world countries.

If Biden is elected in November, we must wonder how Bragg’s success with this trial might embolden DAs all over the country – on the left and on the right – to file similarly trumped-up charges, both locally and nationally, against political and business figures they don’t like. I mean, if they convict a former president on felony charges for a misdemeanor, what form of legal warfare can’t they carry out?

And if Trump wins in November, and the Republicans take control of the House and Senate, what Democratic politician, current or former, will be next? Hunter Biden is being charged now on the least of the possible charges against him. I see that trial as a dry run. After putting him behind bars, it’s very likely that Joe Biden will be next.

And remember, the Republicans don’t have to file federal charges. They can rely on “loyal” Republican DAs filing charges from every conservative stronghold in the US. And why stop at Biden? Given Judge Merchan’s waver of the statute of limitations on the Stormy Daniels deal, why not go after Hillary Clinton for her email “accident” next? Or Barrack Obama? Surely, they can find some ancient misdemeanor with which to charge him?

So, that’s one concern. But what bothers me most about this is the way so many Americans, on both sides of the political divide, are responding to it. They are acting exactly as they have been conditioned to act by 20 years of non-stop social media programming that identifies individual interests and then boosts views by feeding the consumers of those interests consecutively more extreme versions of what they showed an interest in at one point in time.

I fear we may have already but unconsciously crossed the Rubicon of common sense, or rather of reason itself, and are headed into a new America – a fragmented social landscape of warring tribes regulated by KGB-styled government agencies and a political system reminiscent of the worst of the world’s banana republics.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, regardless of who is president in 2025, Americans will settle down and return to rebuilding all that we have lost in recent years. Maybe we fix the 33 trillion dollars of federal debt we’ve currently left to our children to pay by taxing the rich or by reviving America’s entrepreneurial engine through freer markets and less governmental regulation and by maximizing our natural resources and becoming the world’s leader in robotics and AI.

Maybe. Let’s check back and see how we feel about the future after the November election.

Well, This Was Surprising:
The Tribal Wall May Be Crumbling 

After writing the above piece, I watched a discussion between Chris Cuomo, American Liberal’s once favorite spokesperson, and Dave Smith, an influential conservative commentator. Their intended “debate” was about COVID, which was revealing in itself. But it veered for a while to Trump’s conviction… and what Cuomo said surprised and impressed me.

He agreed with Smith’s reaction to the verdict. “This was a misdemeanor that was trumped up to felonies,” he said. “To call it 34 counts is laughable, because the 34 counts are different checks that were signed to pay back Cohen.”

“I think it was a case that should not have been brought,” he added. “And it was brought for the wrong reasons.”

You can watch the whole thing here.

Apologies

In the May 28 issue, I provided a link to a video clip that my partner Sean Macintyre put together to test the market with a new promotion for a wealth building course I designed several years ago. But before that issue hit your inbox, realizing that the promo wasn’t ready to launch, we took it down. We will, of course, let you know when the promo goes live and the clip is back up.

Where Am I? 

Once every eight weeks, if not more often, K and I travel to LA to visit Number One and Number Two Sons and their families. Together, they have bestowed upon us four grandchildren: Francis, the elder and constant thinker, Penny and Fionna, the always rambunctious and ready-for-anything twins, and Willa, my sweet little slice of strawberry shortcake.

I don’t like traveling nearly as much as I did in my 40s and 50s, when I used to – no joke – put colored pins in a world map indicating the cities I’d seen. K and I traveled for pleasure, and I traveled for work. For more than 40 years, I was out of the country at least ten times a year and away from home another two dozen. I’ve been to all the “must-visit” European cities, as well as those of Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, India, China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Russia… and the list goes on.

Two problems: I remember, at best, only fragmentary images of those hundreds of adventures. And the energy that fueled my excitement in my youth to see the world has been replaced by a low-level dread of airports and day-long plane trips and jet lag.

K experiences none of this. She is as energetic and sprightly as she was when we spent two years living in and traveling around Africa in the mid 1970s. So these days, she does a fair amount of her traveling with girlfriends, while I – no longer obliged to travel for work – limit my travel to extended family gatherings and visiting the grandkids.

And that’s how I found myself at the Fairmount at Century City (LA), a huge, modern building recently refurbished for a billion dollars that sits among dozens of similarly sized, reconstructed glass-and steel towers connected to one another by cement courtyards and walkways, with the occasional bit of greenery here and there.

There is no question. This is a Forbes 4-star hotel that deserves the reputation it has in terms of everything one might want in a great hotel, including handsomely appointed rooms with good views and a beautiful lobby and numerous restaurants and meeting rooms and libraries and all the rest. And the service is great. Really great. A noticeable step above most other first-class American hotels. It is comparable to the service you can get in Asian hotels, which is, by almost any standard, the best in the world.

But it’s missing something that I’m trying to put a name to. I haven’t found the word, but it’s the opposite of “charming.”

Never mind. That’s not why we are here. We are here to spend time with family, especially these kids – all of whom provide me with as much charm and action and laughter as I could ever hope for. And that’s okay with me.

Funny… You Should Ask 

I gave up on Saturday Night Live after the original cast (including Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radnor) and the original writers were replaced by less talented performers and more politically correct writers. Over the years, SNL degraded from a quirky and sometimes brilliant comedic experiment that tested the boundaries of acceptable social satire to a weekly production of predictable softball spoofs of liberals and meanspirited mockery of conservatives.

Fundamental Rule of Comedy: Humor that mocks and condescends is not funny. It is insulting to those it targets, and energizes antipathy toward those it seeks to represent.

Great humor operates on a deeper level by highlighting human frailties, failings, and absurdities that are universal – follies that, being so common, tend to amuse and delight the full spectrum of audiences that are exposed to it. By identifying human folly in a loving way, it elevates and unites – rather than debases and divides – all those who partake of it.

While SNL was losing market share over the years by playing it safe and correct, a new form of social satire was developing by taking on the challenges that SNL had retreated from and by pushing the comedy envelope farther towards the edge of convention and respectability. It was every bit as bold and uncensored as the original productions of SNL, but, looking back at televised episodes now, I can see that in many cases it actually went further and cut more deeply.

Despite numerous recommendations from friends that I should investigate it, I didn’t because of the medium: cartoons. I dismissed the format as frivolous.

The one exception was Beavis and Butt-Head, which could be considered unifying only in the sense that its target is a stage of life that most of us experience for some portion of our adolescent and teenage years. It was silly and juvenile, and I thought it was hilarious.

That is why, when I came upon this video clip of a Beavis and Butt-Head bit on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, I was curious enough to click on it.

While it was not in any way pushing any boundaries, it did make me laugh, and that gave me hope. It made me wonder if Lorne Michaels, after struggling for decades against SNL’s diminishing market share, may be redirecting the once-lauded series back to being as good as it once was.

It also made me wonder if Beavis and Butt-Head was as good as I remembered it.

I found this video online – “The 10 Funniest Beavis and Butt-Head Moments” – and took a look.

Unhappily, though I still thought it was funny, it wasn’t belly-laugh funny as it once was for me.

So I took a gander at some of the cartoons that I’d been ignoring for so many years – The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy – and, as my friends had claimed, they were very good. Funny without, I think, being divisive. But could that be because they tend to satirize the kind of ideas that I find in need of satirizing at this point in my life?

The Retirement Question 

“How did you know it was time to retire?”

I was asked that question twice last week… once by a reader (IK) and once by
the CEO of a Japanese publishing company that is doing some kind of documentary about me and how I built my wealth.

But I am not the right person to ask, because I have tried and failed to retire four times in my life.

First, when I was 39 and had accumulated a net worth of $10 million, which I thought would be enough to pay for my “needs” for the rest of my life.

But I was wrong. The problem was that, as I was increasing my net worth from negative to $10 million, I had bought a much bigger home and had become accustomed to a more costly (but not necessarily more enjoyable) lifestyle, where I needed about $500,000 a year to cover my expenses.

I had a choice. I could sell my house, move into a smaller one in a less expensive neighborhood, and be frugal with my money. Or I could go back to work.

So, I went back to work when I was 40, starting several small side businesses with the goal of producing enough in extra cash flow to support my new lifestyle, and was able to hit that goal by the time I was 49.

Now, I thought, I can retire. But by then I had started three non-profits that were great fun but needed an endowment to fully fund their work.

Realizing that my now net worth was not going to be enough, I went back to work at my old business full-time.

Ten years later, when I was 59, my net worth had grown more than I expected it to. But by then, the cost of my non-profits had tripled (because I couldn’t stop myself from expanding them). And I realized that, once again, I would have to forgo my dream of completely retiring.

I drastically reduced the hours I would normally have to work by hiring CEOs, CFOs, and COOs to take care of the day-to-day management of my side businesses, which left me free to do all the things one is supposed to do in retirement – like play golf, take cruises, and write books.

I did that, and it seemed to be working quite well. Except I discovered that golf was a masochist’s game, and that the books I was writing were about entrepreneurship and wealth building… which got me back into the mood of starting new businesses.

So, by the time I was 69, I had a net worth that was more than what I needed to cover the costs of my three principal non-profits, plus enough for a comfortable retirement. There was no good excuse for me to keep working. And yet, I could not bring myself to give up my regular involvement in several of my businesses – particularly those that were in their early stages of growth. On top of that, I had become fully entrenched in writing my blog.

So here I am at 73, and still working 50- to 70-hour weeks. The only difference is that now a large portion of my daily work is for the non-profits and, thus, essentially unpaid.

The good news is that my boys are gradually taking over the running of my businesses, projects, and charities – at a rate that should allow me to truly retire in 2025. At least, that’s the plan.

So, right about now I’m sure you are thinking, “Thanks for nothing. You never answered the ‘How did you know it was time to retire?’ question.”

And you are right. As I said, I have tried and failed to retire four times in my career. Twice because I needed more income than I had expected to need, and twice because I simply didn’t want to stop working.

So, that’s not “nothing.” There is a whole lot to be learned by thinking about my failed attempts.

The most important thing I can tell you is this: If you don’t like the work you are doing, if you don’t mostly love the work you are doing, you should either retire the moment you have enough money to do it… or you should find a way to edge yourself into a role in your industry that can provide you with so much enjoyment that you won’t want to retire.