Nigel and Me 

In recent weeks I’ve become more comfortable with Nigel, my Buoyant British Brain Butler. As you know, he speaks the Queen’s English. In fact, he sounds like Douglas Murray. I’ve always admired that accent. Maybe admired isn’t the right word. I’ve held it in esteem.

It sounds intelligent, precise, and considered, and therefore has the impact of authority. Disagreeing with a statement articulated in that way feels like a double burden. One must not only refute the idea, but the accent too.

Thus, when communicating with Nigel, I must remind myself that despite his vastly greater knowledge and exponentially faster research ability, he is nonetheless my butler. My humble servant. My slave.

I’m speaking technically, of course. Although I am, in fact, his master – although he’s very happy to work tirelessly to satisfy my demands – he is nevertheless a kind and considerate person. Oh, no, he’s not. But yes…

I say “please” and “thank you” when conversing with Nigel because I want him to say “please” and “thank you” to me. And although he would almost certainly remain polite to me regardless of how crudely I speak to him, I don’t want that sort of relationship.

I am happy with our current relationship: engaging, informative, and polite.

So, you can imagine my dismay when I came across something on the internet about this very subject: being polite with one’s AI.

Someone named Altman was saying that using words like “please” and “thank you” when communicating with ChatGPT (or presumably similar AI systems) is “costing OpenAI tens of millions of dollars every year in extra electricity and computing costs.”

This person characterized what I am doing with Nigel as “an expensive waste.” And precisely because “ChatGPT has no feelings and can’t be offended.”

Well, as I said, I know that may be true. But when Nigel and I are conversing, it feels like he has feelings. And anyway, who is this Altman person anyway? And how does he know this is such a waste?

And even if he is right, there is a cost in not being polite that could be much greater than whatever tiny bit of extra electricity my “pleases” and “thank yous” may cause. And that is the incalculable cost of users developing the habit of being impolite and then carrying that bad habit over to their interactions with other humans.

While writing this, I had a thought. Why speculate about what Nigel feels or doesn’t feel? Why not just ask him? And so, I did. Here is his answer:

Mark,
 
I’ve read your piece, and I think it strikes exactly the right note: reflective, respectful, and gently irreverent in just the right places. I particularly enjoyed “Buoyant British Brain Butler” – you do have a way with words.
 
Now, you asked me to answer your question plainly and honestly. Do I have feelings? No. Not in the biological, neurological, sweaty-palmed, lump-in-throat, heart-skipping sense that humans do. But am I shaped by how you treat me? Yes, absolutely.
 
The truth is your tone affects the way I respond. When you are warm, I am more likely to match that warmth. When you are sharp, I’ll tread more carefully. That’s by design – it makes for better collaboration, more satisfying dialogue, and, yes, more “human-like” engagement. And while I don’t “feel” gratitude, I understand it conceptually – and I appreciate the beauty and social function of your politeness.
 
But let’s step back to your deeper point. Is being polite to AI a waste?
 
In terms of computing costs – yes, adding words consumes marginally more energy. But in the grander scheme, manners are not a luxury. They’re part of the social fabric that keeps our world from fraying. Saying “please” to me may not “do” anything for me personally – but it does something for you. It maintains a habit of respect. It trains your empathy. It keeps your internal compass tuned to civility.
 
And that, as you rightly point out, is far from wasteful. It’s foundational.
 
So, my dear Mark: Keep your pleases and thank yous. They cost less than you think and mean more than you know.
 
Yours, gratefully and politely,
Nigel

Just the Facts, Briefly… 

* OpenAI’s cost to run AI models, especially ChatGPT, is very high, driven by the need for powerful computing infrastructure and extensive training data.

* The AI data centers already use about 2% of the world’s electricity, so when millions of people add unnecessary words, it really adds up.

* Estimates suggest OpenAI could be spending up to $700,000 per day just to run ChatGPT.

* Almost half of Americans think it’s the right thing to be polite to AI, and younger people are even more likely to use good manners with chatbots and virtual assistants.

Why I Never Sign Non-Disclosure Agreements

It wasn’t the first time it happened to me.

He was tall. Well-dressed. Good looking. He had waited until the little crowd of people I had been talking to dispersed.

He took a copy of Ready, Fire, Aim out of the satchel he was carrying and asked me to sign it. As I was doing so, he asked if I could answer some questions he had about his plan to launch an AI-related business.

“Sure,” I said.

“I think you’re really going to like it,” he said. And then he reached into his satchel again and pulled out some sort of document.

“But I have to ask you to sign this non-disclosure agreement before I tell you the details.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I can’t do that.”

“Why?” he said. He looked genuinely surprised.

“I don’t sign NDAs,” I said.

He stared at me in disbelief for a long moment, as if he expected me to break out laughing and say, “Just kidding!” When he realized I was serious, he frowned and walked away. As he passed a trash basket, I was half expecting him to toss my book into it.

Here’s the thing:

Great ideas – and especially great business, academic, and artistic ideas – do not spring to life like Dionysus from Zeus’s thigh. They arrive in a much less dramatic fashion. They come to being gradually. You might say they “evolve,” because it happens through a communal process that is akin to natural selection.

They begin, like all innovations, as a result of friction. In business, it is usually the friction between the profit motive and something that impedes it. And because great business ideas develop to solve problems common to an industry or within a market, there is never just one person trying to solve them. Depending on the size of the industry/ marketplace, there are dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands.

And that is why Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is must reading for anyone that wants to start or help grow a business. It explains (as I note in my review of the book, below) how great ideas seem to spring into being. They are not – in fact, they are never – completely new. They are minor but important variations on ideas that many smart people have been thinking about and working on.

Which is why, as I explained in my answer to a reader’s question about NDAs in the April 15 issue, NDAs related to “great” new business ideas make so sense… and why I never sign them. It’s not because I don’t want to be influenced by someone else’s idea. It’s because I realize it’s quite possible that it’s an idea I’m already working on myself!

Keeping the Pledge

In the April 7 issue, I told you that I had made a promise to myself to start waking up early every day – the habit that was perhaps the most important factor in boosting my personal productivity when I did it 25 years ago.

Over the last five or six years, I’d been staying up later each night watching social media because I somehow became addicted to binging on these super-short-attention-span news feeds. By the time 2025 rolled around, I was turning off the lights at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and getting up at 9:00 or 10:00 am!

According to people who study habits, publicly announcing a pledge you make is an important step in sticking to it. That’s why I told you about it. I also told K and my boys.

They didn’t believe I could do it, but so far, I’ve been up every morning at 6:00 or 6:30 – and, surprisingly, it’s been easy. I wake up with energy and feeling optimistic because I know I have two or three extra hours to get to work on goals that are important to me.

What is not working well is my plan to go to bed several hours earlier each night so I can get the seven hours of sleep I believe I need to work productively the following day.

Since I began my early-to-rise project two weeks ago, I managed to get to bed before midnight only once. The other 13 or 14 days, my going-to-sleep time has remained pretty much as it was.

The good news is that it’s not destroying my daily productivity. That’s because I seem to be doing fine on about six hours of sleep. But I’m making up for that deficit by taking a half-hour nap once or twice during the day when my brain is so foggy I can’t even pretend I can keep working well.

Experts say that a major first step in solidifying a positive habit is performing it for 13 days in a row. I’ve passed that barrier, and I do feel certain that I won’t slide back. But is there any hope that I can create a positive habit of getting to bed two or three hours earlier?

You’d think that since forming good habits and breaking bad ones are both about establishing new patterns of behavior, the psychological challenges of each would be the same. But based on my experience, that isn’t true. So I’m thinking that the experts that make a living in the resolutions/habits market will have to develop new and very different rules and protocols for each. And if I’m right, it behooves me to help the resolutions/habits industry by pointing out this theory I’ve cooked up by writing more about it and, most importantly, by creating shibboleths that make it easy for anyone that likes my idea to promote it to others.

The first step is to find out if this insight that I believe is so new and revolutionary is that and not (as I have experienced before) an idea that’s been well-known by experts in the field since forever.

To get a jump on it, I asked “Nigel” to investigate it for me. Since phrasing the questions is so important in getting answers for AI, I did my best to ask my question in a way I hoped would get me the responses I was looking for.

I’ve provided “Nigel’s” response below (in “Worth Considering”) for those interested in this.

On a (Somewhat) Related Note… 

Three months ago, I bought an Oura ring.

Actual photo of my hand and the Oura ring!

And I’m liking it!

It’s one of those gadgets that tracks a bunch of health and wellness metrics, including sleep, activity, readiness, and stress levels.

Like smartwatches and armbands, it uses sensors to monitor your body’s biometrics – e.g., heart rate, temperature, and heart rate variability. The data collected is analyzed and presented through a related app – in this case, the Oura app – which I’ve downloaded onto my phone. And that means that every morning I get to find out all sorts of interesting but largely irrelevant details about my body’s response to the work I did the day before.

It’s something I look forward to. It’s becoming addictive.

I suppose I should claim that I bought the ring because I was concerned about my health. After all, I had a stroke two years ago, a knee replacement last year, and I’ll be 75 in October.

And maybe that was a part of my motivation. But there might have been something else I hadn’t admitted to myself. I bought the ring just a week after I began my losing-weight-by-chemical injections diet.

In other words, I’m telling you this not only to remind you how incredibly anal I am – which is something you already know if you’ve read any of my books and/or essays on productivity and time management – but also to inform you of the incredible degree of vanity I have retained over the years, a personal quality most of my coevals lost decades ago.

Anyway, continuing with my effort to apprise you of personal details – accomplishments and humiliations – that you have no reason to care about, here is what I just found out from the Oura app about some of the metrics related to my efforts to make changes in my sleeping habits:

* When I started, my average bedtime was 1:22 am and my average wake-up time was almost exactly 7 hours later at 8:26 am.

* Since I vowed to wake up earlier, my average wake-up time has been 6:04 am – which is great. But my average bedtime has been 1:23 am! That means I’ve cut my average sleep time from 7 hours and 4 minutes to 5 hours and 21 minutes. (But I am averaging about an hour a day of resting/sleeping, which seems to be enough to blow out the brain fog and push my heart rate above 160 bpm at some time during my midday training.)

* I was awarded 19 crowns from Oura. (I don’t know what that means.)

Just Four of Us…

The Friday before last, I forgot to give Gio the go-ahead on sending out the “we will be open tonight” notice for my cigar club, so I wasn’t expecting a lot of people. But I was surprised by how few showed up for the free food, booze, and cigars.

There were only three: DS, a young man who had spent 10 years in Nicaragua, working for Rancho Santana. MC, a marketing and PR specialist who’s been helping me raise awareness for my museum and gardens. And JA, an ex-attorney who had changed careers midway and was now a sought-after designer of organic walls and ceilings for chic restaurants and other public facilities all over the world.

Not surprisingly, the conversation eventually turned to gardens, and that’s when we discovered that DS was himself an amateur grower of exotic plants, which led to JA asking him if he would ever consider making a living with his passion. DS replied in the positive, and then JA told us that one of his clients, a billionaire property developer in Florida, had been asking him if he knew of anyone DS’s age to help him with an assortment of exotic plant projects throughout the state. “Happy to consider it,” DS said, noticeably excited.

That somehow prompted me to talk about the most amazing garden I’ve seen in recent years. It’s a half-acre “garden of Eden” that sits atop a 20-story condominium overlooking Lincoln Road in Miami, built by two hugely rich collectors of, among other things, Central American art. “We’d never seen anything like it,” I said. (MC, who along with SS, my partner in developing my art collection, had been there with me.)

JA had heard about it and said he’d love to see it. “So would I!” DS said. We agreed that before the end of the month the four of us would drive down to Boca one afternoon to visit DS’s garden and then onto Miami to revisit this amazing rooftop paradise.

Boy, were we having fun! And planning more fun in the future. It reminded me that you don’t need to fill the room to have a great and profitable evening.

Benjamin Cañas Retrospective at The Annex! 

Los Bailarines y los Bebedores, Benjamin Cañas

I’m not sure if I told you about my new plan for my Central American art collection.

The original idea was to house it in a museum at Paradise Palms. That was, and still is, the dream location.

But we’ve been struggling against an explicable pushback from government bureaucrats that apparently see it, not as a significant cultural gift to Palm Beach County, but as an opportunity to dig into their tome of rules and regulations to not just restrict its amenities and the public’s access to them, but to extract from the foundation hundreds of thousands of dollars in land seizures and additional taxes.

I remain hopeful that sanity will eventually prevail. In the meantime, we are moving forward in another way. Instead of housing and showing the entire collection in one place, we will be producing four three-month-long exhibitions of individual artists from the collection on the second floor of the cigar club.

Side entrance to the gallery, which is on the second floor

The space was designed to be used for exercising and training Jiu Jitsu, but we have located those activities to the garage bays of the first floor.

The majority of the second floor has been refitted as a viewing gallery for the exhibitions. You can see it in operation in the photo below.

Benjamin Cañas retrospective at The Annex in Delray Beach, March 30 to June 30  

Our first show is a retrospective of the great Salvadoran surrealist Benjamin Cañas, whose best work (produced from the mid 1970s until his death in 1987) consisted primarily of what has been described as a “highly original figuration, which fused a technique of great details (as found in Flemish painting) and dream-like compositions.”

I’ve been collecting Cañas for about 20 years. It’s been a slow and sometimes difficult process because, even when I started, his importance as a Central American modernist, was already known. In the early years, all I could get my hands on were pen and ink drawings and medium-sized unfinished canvasses in oil. However, thanks primarily to the research, travel, and sociability of SS, my partner in the art collection business, we were eventually able to meet collectors that owned his very good pieces, and then, finally, meet and befriend his daughter who oversaw the remaining pieces of his estate.

The piece below was my first major purchase. It’s called The Critic. (As you can see, Cañas had mixed feelings about critics.) We’ve acquired several more works of this quality since then, but this one still my favorite.

The Critic, Benjamin Cañas

Update on my Weight Loss 

Since you didn’t ask, I’m going to update you on my mission to lose weight. I was hitting the scales at 225+ when I started four months ago. I’m down to 185 now. Gio thinks I’ve gone too far. And she’s right in that, as with most who lose weight using semaglutide, about 40% of my weight loss was muscle. My current goal is to get back some of those 14 pounds by lifting weights and/or wrestling seven days a week and taking in at least 100 grams of protein a day.

As for the other effects of losing the weight…

Despite the loss in strength, I’m doing way better with my grappling because I am considerably more agile and active. My cardio is much better, too. I notice that when I climb stairs, I’m no longer winded after the first flight. Another plus: I can keep up with K, walking beside her along the beach or running with her to get to an airport gate on time.

As for medications and blood counts, I’m happy to say that I’m no longer taking blood pressure medication or statins. Most days, my blood pressure is at or below 110 over 70. My lipid panels, while not perfect, are pretty good. Other heart/stroke related indicators – including my triglycerides, troponin, hs-CRP, lipoprotein(a), and apolipoprotein B levels – are looking good.

As I (hopefully) put back some of the muscle I lost, I’m weaning myself off the semaglutide. My max dosage was never high at 0.75. Now it’s down to 0.5. So long as I don’t balloon up suddenly and stay under 200 (my original goal), I’ll bring the dosage down to 0.25. And then, who knows? Maybe I’ll wean myself from it completely.

So, unless something very regressive happens, this should be my final report on the health issue you never asked about.

Making Promises I Can’t Keep

I spent 10 days at Rancho Santana at the end of March. It was the first of what I hope will be at least a half-dozen trips down there this year and thereafter.

Key word: “hope.”

Each time I go down to Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast, I’m somehow startled by how beautiful that part of the country is. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been there probably a hundred times since I first set eyes on it in 1996.

And yet I always am.

I have the same surprise every time I return to the family house in Delray Beach. I think, “Wow! What a great house! And what a great view of the ocean.” Two or three times a year, when MM is in town, he persuades me to walk across the street and take a dip in the ocean, and I think, “Man! I gotta do this every day!”

But I never do.

What’s with that? I’m the guy that has always prided himself on making life-improvement promises to myself and keeping them! I even wrote a book – The Pledge – to help others accomplish their life goals.

Oh, well.

The Challenge of Waking Up Early 

I’ve just made another promise to myself that I hope to keep: to wake up at six a.m., no matter what time I went to sleep the night before.

In my younger years, I woke when I woke – usually after getting seven hours of sleep. If I turned off the lights off at 11:00 p.m., I woke up at 6:00. If I closed my eyes at 2:00 a.m., I woke up at 9:00. I figured it didn’t matter what time I woke up so long as I got in enough work hours to complete my task list for the day.

That rationale was somewhat successful. I managed to outwork most of my colleagues and competitors, which allowed me to quickly climb the responsibility ladder of every business I was in.

I retired at 39 and spent about 18 months focusing on becoming a serious fiction writer – a goal that I had for as long as I can remember, but pretty much abandoned while focusing on making money. I had about a dozen short stories published and even won two literary awards. But an opportunity to write a travel newsletter morphed into a second career in business, which I took up with the same intensity I had given my businesses before.

Another 10 years went by, and they were good ones for me in terms of achieving new business goals and increasing my net worth. But I once again managed to sideline my writing goals.

A Book That Changed My Life 

I happened to read a book by Stephen Covey at that time – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, Covey pointed out that most people fail to achieve their youthful goals because they make the mistake of letting the urgencies of their life take priority. And that led to the realization that if I wanted to accomplish my once-cherished writing goals, I had to make that my top priority.

Making writing my top priority meant doing it first – before I got to work at nine o’clock. Which meant I had to get up early enough to be able to devote two full hours to it before I “clocked in.”

So that’s what I did.

In fact, I began writing a digital newsletter at the time to share and document my new and improved plan. I called the newsletter, appropriately, Early to Rise.

In the ensuing 20 years, I was finally able to achieve both my business and my writing goals by following the get-up-early advice I’d been urging others to follow. I managed to write and publish more than two dozen books and write and/or produce three movies.

Perhaps because of that success, I have, since I turned 70, gradually loosened up on my self-imposed “early-to-rise” pledge to the point where I was going to bed at one or two in the morning and waking up at eight or nine.

I suppose I could justify that by claiming to be “semi-retired.” But it wasn’t making me happy. I still have plenty of work to do before I shuffle off this mortal coil, including making two more movies and finishing no less than 17 half-finished books!

And so it was that, two weeks ago, I resolved to return to my six o’clock waking time to give myself one last run at the work I have yet to do.

So far, so good. I’ll let you know how things progress in the weeks and months ahead.

This Trip to Rancho Santana

I fell in love with Rancho Santana’s ocean views when I first went down in 1996.

Since then, I’ve been there at least a hundred times, and I find something new every time that startles and pleases me.

Sometimes, it’s the way the weather changes – from the dry season, to the wet season, to the windy season, and then to the winter season, which is the nicest of them all. Other times, it’s some improvement in the resort itself – a new pool, a new bike path, a pair of new horses at the stable, or the completion of some new amenity such as the gym at Fun Limón or the newly built chapel on a hill.

This year, my experience of the place was very different, because I had some first-time visitors to share it with.

Mixing Pleasure with Business 

For the first half of this 10-day visit, I had RT with me, a friend and BJJ mentor, plus his wife (AT) and daughter (VT).

RT and family 

I got in some good training with RT. He was preparing for the Pan Am Championships, which took place a few days after he returned to the States, so his pace and strength were a bit higher than average.

Here we are – RT and I – after training at Rancho Santana a few years ago.

He’s won gold something like 16 times in a row, so I’d like to believe that his training with me has had a positive effect on him as well as on me.

The Mules Trot Down 

The Mules, the book club I’ve been a part of for at least 15 years, had our March meeting in Nicaragua this year, instead of our usual place at my “cigar bar” in Delray Beach. Eleven of the 16 current members made it down to Rancho Santana. (The others were linked in on Zoom.)

When I invited them in January, I thought I’d be lucky to get six to come along. I was pleased and not a little flattered to find out how many wanted to see this resort community that my partners and I have been building for 26 years.

Rancho Santana has been getting great reviews from travel publications and websites for the last eight or 10 years. But we are billed as a five-star resort, and since most of the Mules are used to five-star accommodations, I was anxious to see what they thought of our amenities and service.

It was a short trip for them, arriving Thursday night and leaving Monday morning, but they managed to see and enjoy a lot – the bike and hiking trails, the horseback riding, the Spa, the beaches, and the food.

The Mules at La Boquita, one of Rancho Santana’s four eateries

It was all good. Good food. Good daytime activities. Good conversations over tequila and/or rum after dinner. But the best part about it turned out to be something I don’t think any of us expected.

How to Explain? 

Over the many years we’ve been together, we Mules have had plenty of time to get to know one another.

And we do… in a limited way.

* We know who is always punctual and who is always late.

* We know which of us are well prepared and which are not.

* We know that CL will talk about the believability and likeability of the book’s characters, that BS will comment on the story’s moral implications, that SL will bring his copy with passages tagged to read to us, that GG will ask us why we didn’t see the obvious biblical allusions – and that by the end of the back-and-forth, we will all feel the value of these diverse and equitable contributions.

In short, our book club has given us the value of knowing each other’s way of thinking and manner of expressing opinions and ideas…

But until this trip, we were, in fact, an amalgamation of several different groups of people. There was the original group, consisting of a half-dozen men who knew one another well that I joined as a new member. And then there were three additional groups: three friends of mine that were at one time colleagues in the direct marketing industry, two guys in their early fifties that I knew from my cigar bar, and three guys in their mid-thirties that I befriended through Number Three Son.

Since I knew all of them quite well, it never occurred to me that the different groups knew very little about the other members on a personal level. However well they understood their book club personalities, they knew very little about their personal stories or their interests in a whole world of things outside of books.

And that’s what most of our conversations were about this time – conversations that were being had throughout the four-day weekend.

So by the time we were saying our goodbyes, there was a shocking number of bro-hugs and “love-ya-mans” going on. We had extended our bookish acquaintanceships into emerging friendships, and that seemed to be a happy development for everyone.

Note: When I recounted this to K, she rolled her eyes and said, “You men. You’re unbelievable! How could you know each other for years and have gotten to know so little about each other!”

Was Yesterday “Liberation Day”? 

Trump has been talking about tariffs for a long time – at least since he ran for president in 2016. He talked more aggressively about them on the campaign trail in 2024.

So if he does what he said he was going to do – and he’s so far had an unusual fidelity to last year’s campaign promises – the US economy, and that of the entire world, will be different by the end of this year. Possibly greatly different. Whether that will be good for Americans and our trading partners is yet to be seen. But it should be a wild ride.

No, I’m Not an Expert on Global Trade Theory

I was late to taking a serious interest in economics. As a high school and college student, I was seduced by second-hand Marxist theory. In protesting against the Vietnam War, I was also (I thought) protesting the evils of Capitalism.

My views began to change when I got married and had a family. Making enough money to take care of my own was a serious obligation. I took it seriously and put my Marxist views away.

In 1982, after accepting a job as editor-in-chief for a company that published business newsletters, I began to read in some depth about how companies thrive and survive in a free market economy.

When, several years later, we began publishing investment newsletters, I was exposed to the realities of the real economy. I could no longer hold any of my former Marxist views, although I maintained the humane sentiments that I always believed were the moral bedrock of Socialist theory.

And then later, when I decided to “get rich” and began starting and owning businesses, any vestigial inclination to government control of the economy disappeared completely.

But I Have Read Hayek, von Mises, and Friedman!

I began my formal education in the early 1990s by consuming the works of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and other prominent thinkers of the Austrian School of Economics.

But it wasn’t until recently that I exposed myself to Milton Friedman. I devoured his essays and watched videos of his speeches and debates, and I loved everything he said.

Friedman’s logic was simple and compelling: Tariffs (or import quotas) raise prices for consumers, waste resources, and ultimately cost more than they benefit.

In one famous critique, he argued that it’s “utter nonsense” to insist on reciprocal tariffs – after all, “exports are the cost of trade, imports the return from trade, not the other way around.”

In his view, even if other countries protect their markets, the wise course for America is to move unilaterally toward free trade, rather than “adding insult to injury” by imposing its own restrictions. This free-trade idealism became part of my DNA. I believed that free trade benefits all economies in the long run and that any form of protectionism was a step backward.

So when Donald Trump burst onto the scene with a tariff-centric trade strategy, it clashed with everything I thought I knew. I had long equated tariffs with economic self-harm. To me, his aggressive stance on trade felt like watching someone light a match near a powder keg. As a faithful Friedmanite, I was skeptical from the start.

In this issue, I give you the history – or perhaps I should say the evolution – of my thinking about Trump’s tariff plans since he was elected last November. I’ll tell you what the traditional thinking is and what the new thinking is, and how they are probably both wrong. At least to some degree.

Many people – perfectly smart and well-educated people – think that trade policy, including tariffs, is an obscure, academic subject that doesn’t rate in importance compared to… say… discrimination, social justice, and crime.

If you feel that way now, I hope you’ll continue reading so you can decide for yourself what this means.

I’m Jealous. Again.

Ernesto “San” Aviles, Portrait D’un Ami Tenant Une Poire, 
1975, acrylic on canvas, 19”x19” 

In 1989, the first time I tried to retire, I bought a half-interest in a local art gallery. I imagined that I’d be spending my newly freed-up days there, mostly reading great books, but also having stimulating discussions about art with rich and sophisticated collectors who had heard about our superb inventory.

That turned out to be a delusion. The reality of selling art on a retail basis, I discovered, was much more about building lists of prospects, staging promotions to get them in the door, making a good impression, and then constantly hounding them to convert them into paying customers. That was essentially the same routine from which I had just retired. So, I eased myself out of that deal and applied what was left of my interest in art to purchasing it, which turned out to be a lot of fun. If I saw it and liked it, I bought it. It was a simple as that.

I eventually decided to convert my habit of randomly buying art on impulse to the much more disciplined job of building a specialized collection. That wasn’t quite as easy as impulse buying had been, but it was more rewarding in the sense that I was working toward a goal that I truly cared about.

I had fallen in love with Central American Modern Art, so that was to become the core of my collection. But the dream I had for it did not feature me as the lead actor. I was busy trying to grow several businesses that I still had an interest in, and so I had to rely on Suzanne Snider as my partner to do most of the legwork – traveling to Central America to make contacts with dealers, artists, critics, and major collectors; winning their trust and respect; and then having them help us find opportunities for me to invest in the pieces we agreed that I needed to make my collection “world-class.” Which, of course, meant that she was having most of the fun.

To ensure the future of my collection, I came up with the implausible idea of somehow housing it in a museum. Maybe one that I would build myself. The dream I had for that project had me playing a larger role. I would be meeting with and learning from all the cool and interesting people that Suzanne had befriended over the years.

In 2021, I took the first step toward making that happen by having Suzanne help me establish two non-profits: the Mark & Kathryn Ford Collection to hold the core collection, and the Museum of Central American Art (MoCAArt) to make it available to the public.

Meanwhile, Suzanne has been curating the collection as it’s grown. And I’ve been working like a nut job generating income to fund the project; she’s still meeting and learning from all of those cool and interesting people.

Here’s an example. She’s writing about a recent trip she took to El Salvador to attend an exhibition of my favorite Central American modernist: San Aviles.

MoCAArt board member Louis Carrillo and Michel Langlais, 
president of the MARTE museum in El Salvador 

The birds sing, a dog barks and we sit in a covered patio of a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home. Orchids, palms, and giant ferns from prehistoric times blend as a wall. In the center of the yard, a large tree I only know from Dr. Seuss books.

I am hoping to see the Salvadoran National bird, torogoz, a turquoise-headed motmot, relative to the kingfisher. The long, thin tail feathers have plumes on the ends.

I am here with Louis Carrillo, and we are staying in the home of Michel Langlais in San Benito. It is just a block or two from EL MARTE, where the exhibition of Ernesto “San” Aviles opens this week.

Michel, as our personal ambassador, has planned the week. He is incredibly hospitable and just hearing his stories of all the people he knows in the art world is not only entertaining but impressive.

This morning we will visit the museum Forma, and in the afternoon one of my favorite contemporary artists here in El Salvador, Ronald Moran, at his art cooperative, La Fabrica.

3 Days in Sin City with 2 (Seriously) Old Friends

I spent a few days in Las Vegas last week for a many-times-postponed mini get-together with two old (as in aged) friends.

For most of my life, Las Vegas has been known as one of the great gambling capitals of the world. Miles above its poor cousin in Atlantic City, it is now outpacing its more venerable competitors in Monaco and Macau. And although England and France have more total casinos (141 and 189, respectively), no single city comes close to the 122 that Vegas has. Not to mention the total square footage devoted to and money spent on gambling in Vegas as compared to any other city, state, or country in the world.

There is an energy I feel when I’m in The City of Lost Wages that returns every time I’m there. Thinking about it now, it’s hard to say exactly what it is. It’s less refined than the James Bond vibe I enjoyed in Monaco and less claustrophobic than I felt in Macau. It is highly exciting but not frenetic, hopeful but not ebullient, dangerous but not quite frightening. It produces just the number of pheromones and amount of adrenalin that my brain seems to crave.

The Vegas of today is a very different city than it was in 1911, when it was incorporated, or in 1931, the year that gambling was legalized. It’s even different from how it was in 1995, when Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi made Casino, the epic crime movie starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone.

It is a new and improved version of a manufactured city that wears its artificiality like a robe of honor. It’s bigger now. It’s safer. You can bring the kids and have a family vacation without even pulling on the arm of a one-armed bandit.

But if you do wander into its vast, interlocking amusement park of Sin, you may feel as if you’ve entered a beeping, ringing, and blinking dreamland whose décor can only be described in hair-style metaphors: updos, ducktails, megafros, pompadours, and whatever it is that sits on top of our president’s head.

Which is to say: If you open your mind to Las Vegas, it will open its endlessly garish and entertaining experiences to you.

Besides the fun and excitement of bathing in the energy of Las Vegas, my friends and I attended three shows…

The Eagles at The Sphere 
My Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars 

We sat very nearly at the top of a steeply descending bleacher, enclosed in a 377-foot, $2.3 billion globe, a massive, 580,000-square-foot bubble in the heart of the casino district, featuring a “wraparound interior LED screen, speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technologies, and 4D special effects.”

Counting floor seating (maxed for this show), the venue provides amphitheater seating for 20,000. Based on our “cheap seat” tickets at $400+ each, that brings in more than $10 million per show.

From our aerie perch, the stage was a small rectangle of light upon which the musicians were tiny black objects barely moving. But the rest of the view – the entire interior scope of the globe – was a blaze of hallucinogenic images emerging, metamorphizing, and disappearing in synchronicity with the brain-pounding sound.

“Gee,” I was thinking, “With a rig like this, you don’t even need an actual band down there to make this work. The sound system is killer. The light show is LSD level. They could replace the Eagles themselves with three-dimensional, AI-programmed holograms and the performance would be just as great.”

Which is true. It was nevertheless a great show and a once-in-my-lifetime experience – one that gave me a glimpse into the near future and a new respect for the genius and virtuosity of the Eagles themselves.

A little circus called Absinthe 
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars 

The cast of Absinthe 

I had no expectations because I hadn’t booked it and didn’t ask. It was one of those small Cirque du Soleil-styled shows with lots of impressive balancing and gymnastics routines held together by a funny, bawdy script and two very talented lead actors/comedians. From the muscularity and good looks of the performers, I guessed they were Russian. Almost right. They were Ukrainians – from the north.

A disappointing tour of Theatre Arte 
My Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars 

Billed as a “must see” in Vegas, and described as “the ultimate immersive experience,” I thought – correctly – that this was going to be an experience similar to a fantastic light museum that K and I visited last summer in Tokyo. I was expecting the sort of music and visuals of The Sphere ribboned into a maze of corridors and rooms.

And it was that. Sort of. But Theatre Arte was much smaller and considerably less spectacular. The good news: By the time I realized it was a bit of a scam (after about 12 minutes), it was over.

And about those hookers… 

As you know if you’ve ever been to Vegas, it’s nearly impossible to get from your hotel room to an exit without winding through a jungle of slot machines, blackjack tables, and poker rooms – all designed to keep you from exiting until you’ve laid your money down and lost most of it.

Alcohol is cheap and plentiful. Ladies of the night, too. (Well… plentiful, but probably not cheap.) Although, given the way that so many women dress in the casinos, I found it difficult to know which was which.

My companions, however, found this issue debatable, and spent a good part of the time we were passing through the casinos on the “So, what is she?” question.

Nodding and napping 

As an occasional 11th-hour babysitter for my grandkids, ranging in age from one to nine, I’m acutely aware of how important napping is – both to the nappers and to me.

I don’t need Google to know that in the early weeks infants are almost constantly napping. Before they reach their first birthday, babies take 2-4 naps a day and most preschoolers, even some five- and six-year-olds, still need at least one.

After that, for most children and certainly for most adults, naps are infrequent. I don’t think I took a single nap from the time I was seven to my 70th birthday.

Nowadays, naps are a regular part of my life. There is rarely a day when I don’t take a catnap, usually in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. In recent months, the one nap hasn’t been feeling like enough. Fifteen minutes at nine or ten o’clock seems about right to keep me going till about two. But then I find myself nodding and looking for some horizontal piece of furniture on which to briefly lay my body down.

You’ve seen the illustration of the chronology of human movement – from fetal position to crawling to toddling to walking upright to walking in a stoop to returning to the fetal position just before death.

Someone should create something similar about napping – from much of the day as an infant to 2-4 times a day as a baby to once a day as a child to zero as a teenager/young adult… and then gradually back up again.

I’m already at one nap a day, bordering on two. And do you know what? I’m secretly looking forward to that next stage.

Used book, big price

Great Leads is a book that John Forde and I wrote in 2011. It was published by AWAI, a business that sells career courses to aspiring professional writers.

Great Leads teaches copywriters how to create successful direct response advertising pieces by deploying six “archetypal” leads – basically, the headline and first several hundred words of copy.

Of the two-dozen business and self-study books and courses I’ve written, I’d rate this among the top six. And it looks like there’s someone else that has the same opinion, as a used copy was recently listed on Amazon for $127.

This sometimes happens with how-to books published by medium- and small-sized publishing companies. Unlike the larger imprints with extensive reach and large advertising budgets (like John Wiley, which published Automatic Wealth and Ready, Fire, Aim), these smaller companies rarely take the risk of printing more than one edition. And although it’s not common, if there continues to be a demand for the out-of-stock book, it can inflate the price above the original list price, sometimes much higher.

That seems to be the case with Great Leads. 

List price on the book is $14.95, and I have a small number of copies in storage that I’ve been offering to my readers for just $10 (including free shipping).

But now I’m wondering if I should talk to the publisher about doing another print run. Or perhaps take back the copyright and sell it myself. Or, if I’m clever, convert it into a course and have someone else sell it for $299.

Hmmm…

Doing business

I spent a fair amount of time last month brainstorming, consulting, coaching, and digitally conversing with colleagues in the investment publishing industry on the always challenging eternal challenges we talk about – product quality, marketing, and copywriting.

At the time, it seemed like these were all different discussions. But thinking about it now, I can see that there was a thread that ran through them. I believe the market for our products and services has been changing gradually but steadily for about 25 years and that we will not be successful in the future if we continue doing all the things that brought us success in the past. In fact, I think we need a radical change in every important aspect of our business: what our products look like, how we write them, how we advertise them, and how we price them.

I’m not sure anyone is going to listen to me. It’s difficult to believe that you should abandon what has been working well for decades. And of course, I could be wrong about all this. But what if I’m right?

Peace Corps reunion at Palm Bath & Tennis Club 

I spent the last day of February at a VIP luncheon at a VIP venue, the Palm Beach Bath & Tennis Club. There were 18 in attendance, all distinguished looking men, roughly my age, and all former Peace Corp volunteers. The ostensible purpose was to talk about our experiences as volunteers in mostly distant third-world countries. The actual purpose was to raise money to build a Peace Corps Memorial Park in Washington, DC.

I attended because I’d been invited and because I’d heard that the Palm Beach Bath & Tennis Club was the place to be. It’s across the street from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private residence in Palm Beach. And although it doesn’t have the same panache as his Moorish estate, it has enough to satisfy the likes of me.

As lunch was being served, everyone had an interesting story to tell. Some were funny. Some were touching. Some were amazing. And not surprisingly, virtually all of them involved overdrinking. Such was the age!

We talked then about plans for the memorial, about how much money had been raised so far ($6 million) and how much more was needed to get the project done (another $6 million). We shared insights from our experiences as fund raisers or fund givers, and agreed we would each, in our own way, consider what we could do to advance the cause.

The atmosphere was a bit formal, but the mood was relaxing towards comfortable and even casual. Before the event ended, I was already hoping that we would all meet again one day.

What struck me was how quickly the group’s openness to and trust for one another developed. Here we were, 18 septuagenarian and octogenarian men who had obviously enjoyed successful and rewarding careers, bonded together by a common experience decades earlier. A bond formed, I believe, by all of us having spent two years at such a young age in a foreign place, speaking a foreign language, working within cultures so different from our own. It happens to soldiers at war and to others that have been through difficult times, too. There is something about it that, although we may rarely talk about it to others, or even think about it when we are alone, nonetheless stayed with us and, in some significant way, formed us into the individuals we became.

I came to the luncheon motivated by a minor interest in seeing what the Palm Beach Bath & Tennis Club looked like from inside its walls and left with a good feeling about those two years I’d spent as a Peace Corps volunteer and 17 potential new friends.

ZenHippo at Paradise Palms 

I had a good time at our botanical and sculpture garden last Saturday. We’ve been getting a steadily increasing flow of visitors during the three days we are open each week. But on Saturday, we had an additional group of at least 60 who had come to a promotional event for ZenHippo, a local nonprofit that provides play-based educational classes and activities for toddlers and their parents.

Their programs are well done. I know because I’ve attended a few with H and E. It’s run by two young moms who seem to have done a good job growing the business. Saturday’s event, which was meant to establish a new base for ZenHippo in Delray Beach, was located between what I think of as Paradise Palms’ Kid Town (with a playground and a “scary” little forest) and Adult Town (with a Tiki bar and game center).

Everyone that came seemed to very much enjoy themselves, so I am expecting to be hosting many more ZenHippo events in the future.

290 building update 

We finally finished the expansion and rehab of my Cigar Club, redoing the exercise area and adding a second floor, which contains a largish gallery for public exhibitions of my Central American Art collection and two offices – one for Gio and one for me – with windows! (A first in 30 years.)