Last night I had dinner with two of my favorite people in the whole world, Terry & Paula. I met Terry 27 years ago when I invested in a business he was running. I remember him telling our group of investors that his business was for $50 million. We eventually settled on investing at a $20 million valuation. Terry seems unusually dispassionate about everything during the negotiations. There was no apparent emotion in his business…
At 4am this morning, Kim caught an Uber to San Diego Airport to take the early Delta flight to NYC. I do not envy her her time in JFK Terminal 4, my least favorite airport terminal in the world. My next trip to NYC, which will be in eleven days, will be on the less convenient Jet Blue flight, which at least will put me into Terminal 5, which is far more manageable even though…
I first became aware of Mercedes Benz as a vehicle in 1965 when I moved to Maine. The daughter-in-law of the owner of the Poland Spring Resort, Tudi Feldman, drove a classic Mercedes sedan around the rural hilltop in mid-Central Maine. I’m not sure in those days anyone knew what to make of it. Most locals were still engaged in the Ford v Chevy wars and foreign imports were still a small part of the…
Napoleon was indeed a dictator, though he came to power during a period of political chaos and initially enjoyed significant popular support. Sound familiar? Napoleon seized power through the coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799, overthrowing the Directory government (a lot like the January 6 insurrection attempt). He quickly consolidated authority. By 1802, he became Consul for Life, and in 1804, he crowned himself Emperor of the French (Trump probably has his playbook on his…
I have mentioned both before, but not in one story, but my two gurus these days are Heather Cox Richardson, the historian from Boston College, who lives in Maine, and Scott Galloway, the marketing professor who teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business in New York, lives in London and hails from Los Angeles. The two of these great minds blend many of the life thoughts that have guided my life (I lived in Maine…
The Heart is a world premiere musical currently running at La Jolla Playhouse. Kim’s and I are members of La Jolla Playhouse and attend most performances. It is as close to Broadway as you can get on the west coast and we regularly see shows that should and sometimes do go on to Broadway since this is one of the main feeder theaters for the Great White Way. This nickname for Broadway comes from the…
One of the news feeds I subscribe to is called Puck. Puck is an American digital media company founded in 2021 that focuses on “the inside news and conversation at the nexus of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley & Hollywood.” Puck is described as a platform for “smart, engaging (and, yes, occasionally dishy) journalism owned and operated by the journalists themselves.” It covers what it considers to be the “four centers of power” in the…
My daily writing generally has a flow based on what is going on in the world around me that most affects me on any given day. I have no quarrel with that approach since I long ago decided that I write for my own reasons and am decidedly not grinding any sort of axe with these blog stories. That said, anyone who knows me knows that I am a man of many opinions and am…
It is said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is widely misattributed to Einstein, but he never actually said or wrote this. This misattribution has become so pervasive that it’s one of the most common “fake Einstein quotes” circulating online. Einstein scholars and institutions that manage his archives have repeatedly confirmed that there’s no record of him ever making this statement. The…
Where did your name come from? From the Jim Croce song