The Life of the Mind
Today I had occasion to speak to a friend and colleague I worked with thirteen years ago and and saw probably five years ago. I have given him my blog address so, full disclosure, he may well be reading this just as you are reading this. Why do I mention that, because I am forever getting into hot water with people who share things with me and then find themselves the subject of some story I have written. I guess I have a bit of the Trump in me (as hard as that is to admit) in that I somehow feel that if I disclose my tendency that is as good as full absolution for whatever wrong someone might attribute to it. We all know how silly that is, but I nonetheless declare to you all that anything I see, hear or do sooner or later ends up in a story of mine in some form or another. I try very hard to be mindful and not offensive to anyone, but I know that what I consider as inoffensive is often not the same to others.
I once wrote a story about a young girl, the daughter of a friend of Kim’s, who went a little wild and crazy at a family gathering/party. Before publishing my story, I showed it to her sister, who told me it was fine and would not be taken as offensive to the girl. As it turned out, her mother thought very differently about the issue and took great offense…even though everything I said was true and said in good humor. That woman is no longer friends with Kim but I think it was far more involved than my tell-all story. Nevertheless, I’m sure it was not a helpful factor in that process. And then there is a performer friend of Kim’s who has become a family friend and is about as quirky as anyone we know (everyone we know in common shares the view of his quirkiness). I once changed a story after reading it to Kim, specifically to avoid offending him. When he read the story, he was, of course, offended, but by something completely unexpected. I referred to him as an “aspiring” singer and he found the word “aspiring” offensive (I suppose versus something like “accomplished”). Go figure.
This friend is someone who has been dealt a particularly bad hand in his career. He was the #2 on a big hedge fund that went bust. He and his boss got indicted for supposedly misleading customers. That was funny because I have rarely met an investment team who tried harder to do the right things by their clients and the firm we all worked for. They ranked relatively low on the Wall Street greed index even though they certainly did well with their fund. Whenever there was a right or wrong way to move, I felt they always chose the right way.
This was not so much the case with all the fund managers in the stable I was responsible for managing. In fact, there was one group which regularly was making the wrong calls and I and my compliance teams were constantly working to course-correct them as best we could. It can be like harnessing and managing a wild stallion, but we always did what we had to do. Naturally, when the hammer fell on the early days of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, it was my friend’s fund that got hit first and it got hit very hard. He and his boss were actually perp-walked into court as a show of law and order strength at a time of great financial angst.
He went through two years of criminal proceedings. I can only imagine how difficult that was because I spent those two years a great deal with the U.S. Attorney as a witness. I was all about full disclosure, but until you have had someone comb through four years of your emails, you don’t understand what regulatory stress is all about. I know how hard it was for me to sleep and I was never under indictment like he was. I was able to testify on their behalf in the trial and the trial went very well in that they were both fully acquitted of all charges in record jury deliberation time. It was a Pyrrhic victory. My friend was actually far more hurt than his boss, who had had years of success to build up a financial cushion. My friend was just hitting his stride when this happened.
He spent the last ten years doing piecemeal project work, probably that he was overqualified for, but one does what one has to do. Both of his children are apparently as smart as he is (he is both very smart and very ethical) and they graduated well and are doing well working in the tech sector. And now my friend is an empty-nester as are many of us and he has weathered the storm and carried on with the important things in life just fine. He has every reason to be proud of his ability to persevere through some very unjust circumstances.
Strangely enough, a few years after his litigation, one of the other big fund managers that was in our stable and not so very straight and narrow in his approach got caught up in an insider-trading case and did indeed plead guilty and went to jail. He too is past it now and living a fine life on all his prior earnings from his hedge fund. In some ways, even though he was incarcerated and my friend was not, he is living an easier life in wealth and physical terms.
When I spoke to my friend today to refer a possible business opportunity to him he was genuinely pleased to hear from me. Sure, the opportunity was nice, but I sensed from our talk that what really pleased him was that we spent some time talking philosophically about what we had gone through and what we are all going through right now in our Coronavirus quarantines. It was an invigorating conversation, not because we were such long-lost pals (I don’t think we ever even dined together other than a lunch date or two). It was invigorating because we were so like-minded about the things that matter in life.
That is what caused my friend to use a term that I think of often. He spoke of the life of the mind and why it mattered so much to him. We spoke of the unique way in which You-Tube personalization throws together all of our unique and seemingly arbitrary likes and interests and offers up shows or podcasts that should interest our eclectic tastes. We had a fascinating discussion of how much it meant to each of us to have our own unique array of preferences and interests and why that was so much more valuable than many of the materialistic things we all spend much of our lives striving to acquire.
When he and I were in the trenches together in 2007 I remember him asking to take a day off for his son’s Bar-Mitzvah. We were all working 24X7 in those days trying to “fend off the Persian hordes of Wall Street at the Pass at Thermopylae”, but I was shocked that he would even ask. Of course he needed to attend his son’s Bar-Mitzvah. What could be more important in life? His expertise was critical to our efforts, but his absence from that blessed event would have been critical to his and our souls had he not attended.
I am promoting him for an expert witness assignment and I know few in the world who are more expert than he is in the arena in question, an arena that almost cost him his freedom. When I looked at his resume I noticed that his undergraduate degree was in philosophy. I should have known.