Category: Business Advice

Business Advice Love Retirement

Growing Pains

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

People grow continuously throughout life. While that is a true statement, the picture is more nuanced than simple linear growth. What clearly continues throughout life are the obvious things like wisdom and judgment, which tend to improve well into old age. In terms of emotional regulation, most people genuinely get better at managing feelings over the decades, that that is not a universal truth by any means. Vocabulary and crystallized knowledge (accumulated facts, expertise) certainly…

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Business Advice Memoir Politics

Token Spoken Here

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

When I was just clicking into my teens and living in Maine, noted academic and author, J.R.R. Tolkien was about the age I am now. Besides being an Oxford Don (twice over), he had already written The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in the following 17 years after that. Tolkien’s Rise to popularity developed in waves with his early reception through the war years for The Hobbit thought of as a…

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Business Advice Memoir Politics

Guns, Butter and Angels

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Towards the end of listening to 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I’ve heard of Pinker’s book, but never read it and there was an upcoming opening on my Audible dance card, so I downloaded the book and have started listening to it. Notably, Pinker wrote the book in 2011, fifteen years ago. In it, he argues that, despite widespread perception to…

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Business Advice Memoir Politics

Hacking and Wheezing

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and…

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Business Advice Memoir

The Kardashev Project

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Social Media is a very perplexing arena for me and I find myself thinking about it a lot and pondering its place in the universe. My exposure to it began in 1998 when I invested in a start-up called Six Degrees. The “six degrees of separation” idea comes from a few places. The original concept traces to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who in a 1929 short story called Chains proposed that any two people on…

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Business Advice Memoir

Digging In

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

My stories are organized into six categories that I designate after I’ve written the story and am posting it to my site. I recognize that while I’ve written across all six categories and find that some stories fit neatly into those buckets, I suspect that if I were to redo the blog, i would change and probably expand the categories to better conform with what I actually write about the most. Without trying to construct…

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Business Advice Memoir Politics

Snake Plissken Escapes America

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…

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Business Advice Memoir Politics

Futurevision

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

In 1983 I was asked to launch a futures and options subsidiary for my bank, Bankers Trust. Don’t stop reading because you think I am using this as a launchpad for another boring discussion of derivative products and how I was the Robert Oppenheimer of banking who helped create the atomic bomb of the financial world. This little futures and options subsidiary was intentionally a separate legal entity that would have its own subsidiaries to…

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Business Advice Love Politics

Cry, The Beloved Media

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

We have all spent a lot of time over the past year watching the Ellison Dynasty exert its influence over global media. I managed to keep my thoughts to myself during the Warner Brothers / Discovery wars between Paramount and Netflix, not knowing who would inflict more change/harm on the things I cared about in the movie and media universe. But then Pete Hegseth had to step to the podium this weekend doing what all…

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Business Advice Memoir

Finding My Financial Heritage

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

The other day, my colleague Damiano, who runs the expert witness business with which I have chosen to affiliate, called me from London. He had just attended some sort of gathering of litigation professionals and had come away with a distinct impression that there is a crisis blossoming in the arena of private credit that will be leading to a substantial wave of litigation. It’s Damiano’s job to stay tuned into the financial markets and…

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