I wrote today’s review of King Richard before Will Smith had his sad and embarrassing Academy Award moment. What was worse? The slap? His tears in apologizing to everyone but Chris Rock? Or the standing ovation he received when he won?

Art, it is said, holds a mirror to life. Hollywood holds a mirror to our culture’s fundamental characteristic: our adolescent self-centeredness.

But boy was he good in King Richard!

I got my ass whooped. And it wasn’t fun. 

The Pan Am IBJJF is one of the three most important Jiu Jitsu competitions in the world. Each year, thousands of competitors from Brazil, the US, Canada, and the rest of Central and South America assemble to battle for the prestige of winning. In the Mar. 28 issue, I mentioned that I was preparing for this year’s event, which took place in Kissimmee, FL (near Orlando) from April 6 to April 10.

I’ve been practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) for more than 20 years. I got my black belt from Master Marcel Ferreira in 2015. I train four times a week. My training partners are national and world champions. They are much, much better than I am. Plus, they are younger, stronger, quicker, and more athletic. And so, most of the time when I’m training with them, I’m losing.

That doesn’t bother me. Quite the contrary. It feels like playing. I look forward to my lessons because they are fun.

BJJ is a very technical sport. It’s way more technical – in terms of the number of techniques you have to master – than any martial art I can imagine. But that is yet another thing that makes it so enjoyable. It is a constant learning experience.

Competing is another story. It is not playful. It’s not fun. And it’s not about learning. You want to completely dominate your opponent. You want to crush him, mentally and physically. You want to break his heart. Or, at the very least, break a limb.

Grammatically speaking, I’m using the second-person here to describe these feelings. But I’m implying, as second-person often does (ironically), that I’m describing my own feelings. I have no such desire when I step on the mat to grapple with an opponent. I’m too old to muster up the ferocity I used to have when fighting. My desire is to grapple well, score points, and, if possible, win.

But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with losing. Especially to someone I don’t know. It feels miserable. Completely terrible. It feels like I was beaten up and humiliated.

I lost to someone I didn’t know – except by his record and reputation. He is currently ranked number one in the world in Masters 6, the division I competed in. (Black belts older than 55. I am 71.) He is numero uno out of more than 1,000 active competitors. In the IBJJF alone.

He didn’t just beat me. He tapped me out. An expert in judo, he spent the first minute of the match tossing me around like a ragdoll. And then, after he put me on the ground (with an inside leg flip), he spent the next 90 seconds expertly defending my best technique – the “deep half-guard sweep.” In the midst of doing that, I made the small, momentary mistake of extending my arms too far ahead of me, which he seized to put me in an arm bar.

That was the end of that. The referee held up his hand. My head was down.

“Great fight,” he said, afterwards. I don’t know whether he was serious or being courteous. In either case, my thought was, “Thanks. Fuck you.”

I spent the rest of the day and evening stewing on it.

Renato, one of my instructors who had persuaded me to enter, wrote me to say that when you compete you give yourself two possible happy outcomes: “to win or to learn.” I would have preferred the former. I’m working on the latter.

What can I learn from this?

To be better prepared? I don’t think so. I spent a month training very hard before the match. I was in good shape. I had lost 28 pounds. My cardiovascular capacity was good – better than it’s been in years. And my instructors and I had studied my opponent’s “game” and trained for it. No, I can’t say that I should have been better prepared.

In that Mar. 28 issue, I talked about what I was doing to reduce the stress I was experiencing as fight day approached. I also said that I knew I had to prepare myself for the possibility that I might lose. But I did not – as I should have done – imagine myself losing… and being okay with that. This last bit of preparation, I did not do.

So, here I am, mentally climbing, inch by inch, out of this well I dug of disappointment and self-recrimination. When I get to the surface, I will have to accept something that I should have been able to contemplate all along: that there are people out there, even older guys, that are better than I am at Jiu Jitsu. When I put this in print, and read it back, the absurdity of my ego is embarrassingly obvious.

Oh… I almost forgot. One oddly happy thing happened within minutes of my loss. I was making my way out of the crowded arena when I was stopped by a young man, a Brazilian, who identified me as Michael Masterson. He was very excited to meet me. He said that he’d heard me speak in Sao Paulo two years ago and had put one of my ideas to work for him. He asked for a photo with him. I smiled as well as I could.

Life Cycles of Big, Whacky Ideas

In a recent issue of his blog, Peter Diamandis tells the story of Tony Spear, a NASA jet propulsion expert, who, in 1997, was given the impossible job of engineering the successful landing of a probe on Mars with a budget of only $150 million. A fraction of the $3.5 billion (in 1997 dollars) NASA had spent on the Viking mission in 1976.

One of Spear’s key ideas for getting it done was to use airbags, rather than retrorockets and propulsion systems, to cushion the craft’s landing. It was a novel idea. But the experts, Spear remembers, had two responses to it:

1. “Don’t use airbags.”
2. “No, we’re totally serious, don’t even consider using airbags.”

“Two of them,” said Spear, “told me flat out that I was wasting government money and should cancel the project. Finally, when they realized I wasn’t going to give up, they decided to dig in and help me.”

Together, they tested more than a dozen designs, skidding them along a faux rocky Martian surface to see which would survive without shredding to pieces.

“In the weeks just prior to landing,” said Spear, “everyone was very nervous, speculating whether we’d have a big splat when we arrived.”

But when the landing was a success, everyone was thrilled. And relieved. And a week later, they claimed to have known, all along, that the airbags would work.

In an essay I posted here last year, I talked about this in terms of some of the novel ideas I’ve promoted in my career. Like Tony Spear’s airbag, many of my ideas were rejected out of hand. But almost all of the criticisms were about challenges and difficulties that could arise. In my book, petty problems that could and would be overcome. But my critics didn’t seem interested in making those ideas work. On the contrary, it was as if they were competing in a game called: Who Can Discount the Idea First?

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explained how big, new ideas go from a spark to a full-blown wildfire. He was writing about all sorts of social phenomena, but it applied perfectly to business. And that’s why I recommend The Tipping Point to anyone interested in starting a business.

Of course, Gladwell is not the only public intellectual to offer a viewpoint on how ideas grow and take hold. In that same issue of his blog, Peter Diamandis points out that Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the inventor of the geostationary communication satellite and author of dozens of bestselling science-fiction books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, had discussed this problem with him many times. Clarke, he recalled, said all new ideas go through a three-phase acceptance cycle:

1. In the beginning, people will tell you that the idea is “crazy” – that it will never work.
2. Next, people will say: “Well, it might work but it’s not worth doing.”
3. Finally, they’ll say: “I told you that it was a great idea!”

What I Believe: About Taxation

Taxation is a necessary evil.

The logic is this: Societies cannot exist without law and order. Law and order cannot exist without government. Government cannot exist without income to support its work. Since the government doesn’t create wealth, it must pay for its programs through taxation. In other words, you can’t have civilization without taxation. But for a society to be free and democratic, the rules of taxation must be freely given to the government by its people. And even that is not enough. Taxation must also be sustainable.

Economic history tells us that when tax rates are too high, economic productivity gets lower. To make taxation work over the long term, it must be high enough to support at least the minimum responsibility of the government (maintaining law and order), but not so high that it reduces economic growth.

I was skeptical. Doubly skeptical. I’ve never liked the idea of modernizing Shakespeare. Much less converting one of his plays – a tragedy – into a movie musical. But Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim proved me wrong. The original (1961) West Side Story film, which, itself, was an adaptation of the hit 1957 Broadway musical, won me over.

It was perfect for its time. And it was a period piece. So why do it again? It seemed like a crazy idea. This time, the Dream Team was Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner.

Causes of The Great Depression Reconsidered 

On Mar. 28, I reported that conventional wisdom has it that there were five causes of The Great Depression.

1. Credit-fueled Consumption: Consumers buying things they can’t afford with borrowed money.
2. Financial Speculation: Investors (and especially institutional investors) trading stocks “on margin” (i.e., leveraged with credit).
3. The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930: Intended to protect the interests of US farmers, it raised import duties by about 20%. When foreign countries retaliated with their own tariffs, trade dropped by 65%. US exports fell from $7 billion in 1929 to $2.5 billion in 1932.
4. The Federal Reserve: In 1929, to counter inflation, the Fed hiked up its lending rate. This made it difficult for many businesses to pay their existing debts and borrow new money, forcing many of them to close their doors.
5. The Gold Standard: Today, when the government wants to stimulate the economy, it lowers the Fed interest rate. When the cost of borrowing money goes down, businesses are incentivized to borrow and invest. In 1929, the government couldn’t do that because – like many other countries at the time – the US was on the gold standard. The gold standard was basically a law that limited the printing of dollars to the amount of real wealth (i.e., gold) that the government owned. Thus, the lending rate hike, mentioned above, was not optional. It was mandated by law.

What I didn’t have time to point out when I touched on this last week was this:

The first two causes are legit. Debt and speculation are and always have been the root causes of every great depression in economic history.

But including the gold standard and the Fed’s rate hike as causes is retroactive academic bullshit, designed to justify the crazy system we have now. Pegging a country’s currency to a limited asset, like gold, is the best and perhaps the only way to prevent the government from printing more money than it can afford to spend. A gold standard is an iron-clad way to prevent inflation and hyperinflation.

The Fed back then had to raise its interest rates. And it should have done so. It contributed to a panic, but the US might never have recovered from The Great Depression without it.

As for the Smoot-Hawley Act: It’s disingenuous to list it as a cause of The Great Depression. It certainly didn’t improve the economy. But it was not an underlying cause.

Trade wars, like all wars, are economically and socially costly. The idea of “protecting” domestic industries from the lower prices of foreign competition through high import duties is a demonstrably bad idea. It is true that if you measure the effect of tariffs narrowly, from the perspective of the protected group, they seem to work. The protected group prospers. But if you measure it holistically – the effect on the entire economy – they are, at best, a breakeven.

The Smoot-Hawley Act didn’t work in 1930, just as Trump’s tariff battle with China didn’t work during his term. The concept is specious and morally corrupt. It’s a political stunt that populist politicians use to pander to their voting bases. And since politics is about power and not sound economics, it will probably be part of American politics forever.

I found this on page 67 of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia:

“The psychologist Daniel Wagner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love.

“You don’t need to remember your child’s relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because your daughter will.

“That’s transactive memory. Little bits of our memory reside in other people’s minds. Wagner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will say after the other member dies – that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wagner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.”

This week’s book? 

Aha! It was sitting on my desk – a gift from a reader: Soonish, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. The gift card read, “From a top scientist and the creator of the hugely popular webcomic ‘Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal,’ an illustrated investigation into future technologies.”

It was 368 pages. It had a snappy subtitle: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. And it was illustrated!

 What’s not to like?

Needless to say, I read it immediately…

The market is, for the most part, overvalued. And it’s been fluctuating scarily since Russia invaded Ukraine.

My friend and colleague Alex Green wrote an essay in The Oxford Insight recently, which made a point about investing that I learned from him (and others) 20 years ago. It has been the foundation of my passive wealth building strategy for all those years. And I credit it with two important facts: (1) My portfolio of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets has grown steadily all this time without a single down year. And (2) during uncertain economic times like we are living through today, I don’t worry much about market fluctuations.

Today, I give you my core wealth building philosophy, which is based on my personality. (See “What I Believe,” below.)

And then, I give you a part of Alex’s essay that addresses this point.

The Truth About Stress 

Stress is bad for you. It wears you down. Makes you irritable. Clouds your brain. And over the long run, it shortens your life.

 I knew that.

Until I read a review of The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal.

McGonigal argues that stress, in itself, is not necessarily bad for you. What matters is how you think about it.

In one test cited, researchers asked 30,000 adults how much stress they felt in the past year – and whether or not they thought stress was a negative. Eight years later, the researchers checked in on them. And sure enough, most of the high-stress people had experienced both physical and mental health problems.

But not all of them. Those respondents that reported high levels of stress but did not view their stress as harmful did not suffer. And they had lower rates of death. Even lower than respondents that initially reported experiencing very little stress.

The bottom line, per McGonigal: The effect of stress on health is relative. If you view it as harmful, it will be harmful. If you view it positively, it can improve your health and increase your longevity.

The secret for making stress work for you, McGonigal says, is to understand what stress is biologically, and how to think about it when you have it.

“Stress arises, she says, when something you care about it at stake.” (We don’t stress about things we don’t perceive as important.)

Stress produces definite physical responses, such as a faster heartbeat, hypersensitivity, and the production of adrenaline and cortisol. And they arise unconsciously and instinctively.

You shouldn’t try to stop them, McGonigal says. They are normal. In fact, they are healthy. Studies show that these responses, and particularly the secretion of adrenaline and cortisol, allow for better performance under pressure.

Rather than trying to resist or deny your stress responses, do this:

1. Notice them. Be aware of how they are affecting your body.
2. Accept them for what they are: your body’s intelligent responses to a challenge you are facing concerning something you care about. Ask yourself, “What is at stake here and why do I care about it?”
3. Rather than think of the source of the stress as a threat, try to think of it as something that can make you in some ways better.
4. Consider the resources you have available to deal with that challenge and make a commitment to use them.
5. Put the threat into perspective by recognizing the big picture.

And I would add this (from my own experience): Consider the worst-possible outcome of the challenge you are facing and imagine yourself being “okay” with it.

I’ve put this protocol into practice in preparing for a competition I’ve entered: the Pan American Jiu Jitsu tournament. I’m going to have at least two matches with high-level black belts that will be doing their best to beat the crap out of me – maybe break my arm or choke me into unconsciousness. To make matters worse, it’s a public event, which means that something more precious than my body will be at stake. My self-esteem!

I’ve been nervous about the competition since the day I decided to participate. I’m worried about making weight. I’m worried about getting injured. But most of all, I’m worried about losing and thereby disappointing my training partners and teachers, who are convinced I’m going to do well.

So, every time I feel anxious, I tell myself, “This is normal. It’s good. Your brain parts are helping you get ready.”

I’m getting ready by dieting, sprinting (for stamina), and with brutally tough training sessions with my instructors, who are much younger, stronger, faster, and more technical than I am. And this is helping. I’m getting in better shape and feeling more prepared, if not confident.

What I haven’t yet done is follow my own advice: I haven’t imagined myself losing and feeling okay about it afterwards. That, I’ll have to work on.