How to Mentor a Super-Accomplished Genius 

A friend writes to let me know that, as part of a post-graduate program he did at Harvard a few years ago, he’s been asked to mentor a young man that has not only amazing academic and humanitarian credentials but is already a super-successful high-tech businessman and is supposedly super-smart.

“Can you believe I’m going to be his mentor?” my friend says.

I looked at the young man’s resume. It was intimidating, to say the least. I wondered what I would do in my friend’s place.

What I would probably do, I realized, is pretend that I had come down with a very infectious disease and gracefully back out. But I know that my friend is determined to accept the challenge. So I thought some more, and came up with this for him…

Here’s What I Would Recommend

Never give him any direct advice. In fact, try to avoid making statements entirely.

Limit your verbal output to questions. Ask him questions about his thoughts and intentions. If he has a problem, ask him how he thinks he should handle it.

As he answers each of your questions, look at him intently, squinting your eyes and thoughtfully nodding. Every so often, you can make barely decipherable sounds – ranging between soothing and questioning but never clearly one or the other.

If you do this, he will either think he understands you, or he will pretend he understands you, or he will ask you what your non-verbal responses mean.

If that happens, say, “Let me tell you a story.”

Then tell him a completely nonsensical story that ends with a nonsensical denouement. And after you’ve finished telling him that story, begin nodding gently again, but this time with a subtle smile that signifies: “Ah, Grasshopper, I can see that I have raised your level of awareness. I am happy you are learning.”

This is a technique I know you have a natural talent for, because I’ve seen you use it with me when I was spouting BS. Nevertheless, considering this guy’s intelligence, you should improve your technique by practicing it in front of a mirror.

When you feel ready, the perfect time to debut your new mentoring skill would be on your podcast. I recommend videotaping with two cameras so the audience can also enjoy your undeniably wise but enigmatic facial gestures.

If you master this skill, it will not only win over his admiration and affection for you on a level where he will always list you among his greatest advisors, you will be able to advise other geniuses, even heads of industry. And charge a good penny for doing it, too!

Convicted… of Course 

I wasn’t surprised by the conviction of Trump. The cards were stacked before the trial began. A locus in NYC. A jury comprised entirely of people whose answers to the voir dire made it clear what they thought about Trump. A DA that was elected on his campaign promise to put Trump behind bars. A surrealistic strategy of turning a single misdemeanor into 34 felony counts. And on top of it all, a pro-Biden judge who not only accepted the tortured logic of the DA, but also invented a way for the jurors to vote that allowed them to come to a “unanimous” verdict that wasn’t unanimous but was the amalgamation of three separate decisions made by three separate groups of jurors. Not to mention that, to bolster Bragg’s chances for conviction, Biden sent his top DOJ official, Matthew Colangelo, to New York as Bragg’s top prosecutor to “get Trump.” And that’s to say nothing about the gag order and the reams of exculpatory evidence that Judge Merchan disallowed…

No, it was not surprising. But it did make me wonder if American politics has moved into another realm, where “lawfare” practices such as trying to convict and/or jail your principal political adversary will become the standard, as they are in a handful of the most corrupt third-world countries.

If Biden is elected in November, we must wonder how Bragg’s success with this trial might embolden DAs all over the country – on the left and on the right – to file similarly trumped-up charges, both locally and nationally, against political and business figures they don’t like. I mean, if they convict a former president on felony charges for a misdemeanor, what form of legal warfare can’t they carry out?

And if Trump wins in November, and the Republicans take control of the House and Senate, what Democratic politician, current or former, will be next? Hunter Biden is being charged now on the least of the possible charges against him. I see that trial as a dry run. After putting him behind bars, it’s very likely that Joe Biden will be next.

And remember, the Republicans don’t have to file federal charges. They can rely on “loyal” Republican DAs filing charges from every conservative stronghold in the US. And why stop at Biden? Given Judge Merchan’s waver of the statute of limitations on the Stormy Daniels deal, why not go after Hillary Clinton for her email “accident” next? Or Barrack Obama? Surely, they can find some ancient misdemeanor with which to charge him?

So, that’s one concern. But what bothers me most about this is the way so many Americans, on both sides of the political divide, are responding to it. They are acting exactly as they have been conditioned to act by 20 years of non-stop social media programming that identifies individual interests and then boosts views by feeding the consumers of those interests consecutively more extreme versions of what they showed an interest in at one point in time.

I fear we may have already but unconsciously crossed the Rubicon of common sense, or rather of reason itself, and are headed into a new America – a fragmented social landscape of warring tribes regulated by KGB-styled government agencies and a political system reminiscent of the worst of the world’s banana republics.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, regardless of who is president in 2025, Americans will settle down and return to rebuilding all that we have lost in recent years. Maybe we fix the 33 trillion dollars of federal debt we’ve currently left to our children to pay by taxing the rich or by reviving America’s entrepreneurial engine through freer markets and less governmental regulation and by maximizing our natural resources and becoming the world’s leader in robotics and AI.

Maybe. Let’s check back and see how we feel about the future after the November election.

Well, This Was Surprising:
The Tribal Wall May Be Crumbling 

After writing the above piece, I watched a discussion between Chris Cuomo, American Liberal’s once favorite spokesperson, and Dave Smith, an influential conservative commentator. Their intended “debate” was about COVID, which was revealing in itself. But it veered for a while to Trump’s conviction… and what Cuomo said surprised and impressed me.

He agreed with Smith’s reaction to the verdict. “This was a misdemeanor that was trumped up to felonies,” he said. “To call it 34 counts is laughable, because the 34 counts are different checks that were signed to pay back Cohen.”

“I think it was a case that should not have been brought,” he added. “And it was brought for the wrong reasons.”

You can watch the whole thing here.

Apologies

In the May 28 issue, I provided a link to a video clip that my partner Sean Macintyre put together to test the market with a new promotion for a wealth building course I designed several years ago. But before that issue hit your inbox, realizing that the promo wasn’t ready to launch, we took it down. We will, of course, let you know when the promo goes live and the clip is back up.

Where Am I? 

Once every eight weeks, if not more often, K and I travel to LA to visit Number One and Number Two Sons and their families. Together, they have bestowed upon us four grandchildren: Francis, the elder and constant thinker, Penny and Fionna, the always rambunctious and ready-for-anything twins, and Willa, my sweet little slice of strawberry shortcake.

I don’t like traveling nearly as much as I did in my 40s and 50s, when I used to – no joke – put colored pins in a world map indicating the cities I’d seen. K and I traveled for pleasure, and I traveled for work. For more than 40 years, I was out of the country at least ten times a year and away from home another two dozen. I’ve been to all the “must-visit” European cities, as well as those of Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, India, China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Russia… and the list goes on.

Two problems: I remember, at best, only fragmentary images of those hundreds of adventures. And the energy that fueled my excitement in my youth to see the world has been replaced by a low-level dread of airports and day-long plane trips and jet lag.

K experiences none of this. She is as energetic and sprightly as she was when we spent two years living in and traveling around Africa in the mid 1970s. So these days, she does a fair amount of her traveling with girlfriends, while I – no longer obliged to travel for work – limit my travel to extended family gatherings and visiting the grandkids.

And that’s how I found myself at the Fairmount at Century City (LA), a huge, modern building recently refurbished for a billion dollars that sits among dozens of similarly sized, reconstructed glass-and steel towers connected to one another by cement courtyards and walkways, with the occasional bit of greenery here and there.

There is no question. This is a Forbes 4-star hotel that deserves the reputation it has in terms of everything one might want in a great hotel, including handsomely appointed rooms with good views and a beautiful lobby and numerous restaurants and meeting rooms and libraries and all the rest. And the service is great. Really great. A noticeable step above most other first-class American hotels. It is comparable to the service you can get in Asian hotels, which is, by almost any standard, the best in the world.

But it’s missing something that I’m trying to put a name to. I haven’t found the word, but it’s the opposite of “charming.”

Never mind. That’s not why we are here. We are here to spend time with family, especially these kids – all of whom provide me with as much charm and action and laughter as I could ever hope for. And that’s okay with me.

Funny… You Should Ask 

I gave up on Saturday Night Live after the original cast (including Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, and Gilda Radnor) and the original writers were replaced by less talented performers and more politically correct writers. Over the years, SNL degraded from a quirky and sometimes brilliant comedic experiment that tested the boundaries of acceptable social satire to a weekly production of predictable softball spoofs of liberals and meanspirited mockery of conservatives.

Fundamental Rule of Comedy: Humor that mocks and condescends is not funny. It is insulting to those it targets, and energizes antipathy toward those it seeks to represent.

Great humor operates on a deeper level by highlighting human frailties, failings, and absurdities that are universal – follies that, being so common, tend to amuse and delight the full spectrum of audiences that are exposed to it. By identifying human folly in a loving way, it elevates and unites – rather than debases and divides – all those who partake of it.

While SNL was losing market share over the years by playing it safe and correct, a new form of social satire was developing by taking on the challenges that SNL had retreated from and by pushing the comedy envelope farther towards the edge of convention and respectability. It was every bit as bold and uncensored as the original productions of SNL, but, looking back at televised episodes now, I can see that in many cases it actually went further and cut more deeply.

Despite numerous recommendations from friends that I should investigate it, I didn’t because of the medium: cartoons. I dismissed the format as frivolous.

The one exception was Beavis and Butt-Head, which could be considered unifying only in the sense that its target is a stage of life that most of us experience for some portion of our adolescent and teenage years. It was silly and juvenile, and I thought it was hilarious.

That is why, when I came upon this video clip of a Beavis and Butt-Head bit on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, I was curious enough to click on it.

While it was not in any way pushing any boundaries, it did make me laugh, and that gave me hope. It made me wonder if Lorne Michaels, after struggling for decades against SNL’s diminishing market share, may be redirecting the once-lauded series back to being as good as it once was.

It also made me wonder if Beavis and Butt-Head was as good as I remembered it.

I found this video online – “The 10 Funniest Beavis and Butt-Head Moments” – and took a look.

Unhappily, though I still thought it was funny, it wasn’t belly-laugh funny as it once was for me.

So I took a gander at some of the cartoons that I’d been ignoring for so many years – The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy – and, as my friends had claimed, they were very good. Funny without, I think, being divisive. But could that be because they tend to satirize the kind of ideas that I find in need of satirizing at this point in my life?

The Retirement Question 

“How did you know it was time to retire?”

I was asked that question twice last week… once by a reader (IK) and once by
the CEO of a Japanese publishing company that is doing some kind of documentary about me and how I built my wealth.

But I am not the right person to ask, because I have tried and failed to retire four times in my life.

First, when I was 39 and had accumulated a net worth of $10 million, which I thought would be enough to pay for my “needs” for the rest of my life.

But I was wrong. The problem was that, as I was increasing my net worth from negative to $10 million, I had bought a much bigger home and had become accustomed to a more costly (but not necessarily more enjoyable) lifestyle, where I needed about $500,000 a year to cover my expenses.

I had a choice. I could sell my house, move into a smaller one in a less expensive neighborhood, and be frugal with my money. Or I could go back to work.

So, I went back to work when I was 40, starting several small side businesses with the goal of producing enough in extra cash flow to support my new lifestyle, and was able to hit that goal by the time I was 49.

Now, I thought, I can retire. But by then I had started three non-profits that were great fun but needed an endowment to fully fund their work.

Realizing that my now net worth was not going to be enough, I went back to work at my old business full-time.

Ten years later, when I was 59, my net worth had grown more than I expected it to. But by then, the cost of my non-profits had tripled (because I couldn’t stop myself from expanding them). And I realized that, once again, I would have to forgo my dream of completely retiring.

I drastically reduced the hours I would normally have to work by hiring CEOs, CFOs, and COOs to take care of the day-to-day management of my side businesses, which left me free to do all the things one is supposed to do in retirement – like play golf, take cruises, and write books.

I did that, and it seemed to be working quite well. Except I discovered that golf was a masochist’s game, and that the books I was writing were about entrepreneurship and wealth building… which got me back into the mood of starting new businesses.

So, by the time I was 69, I had a net worth that was more than what I needed to cover the costs of my three principal non-profits, plus enough for a comfortable retirement. There was no good excuse for me to keep working. And yet, I could not bring myself to give up my regular involvement in several of my businesses – particularly those that were in their early stages of growth. On top of that, I had become fully entrenched in writing my blog.

So here I am at 73, and still working 50- to 70-hour weeks. The only difference is that now a large portion of my daily work is for the non-profits and, thus, essentially unpaid.

The good news is that my boys are gradually taking over the running of my businesses, projects, and charities – at a rate that should allow me to truly retire in 2025. At least, that’s the plan.

So, right about now I’m sure you are thinking, “Thanks for nothing. You never answered the ‘How did you know it was time to retire?’ question.”

And you are right. As I said, I have tried and failed to retire four times in my career. Twice because I needed more income than I had expected to need, and twice because I simply didn’t want to stop working.

So, that’s not “nothing.” There is a whole lot to be learned by thinking about my failed attempts.

The most important thing I can tell you is this: If you don’t like the work you are doing, if you don’t mostly love the work you are doing, you should either retire the moment you have enough money to do it… or you should find a way to edge yourself into a role in your industry that can provide you with so much enjoyment that you won’t want to retire.

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

Speechwriting (with a Little Help from My Friends) 

I’m a little nervous. I can’t deny it.

In July, I’m going to be in Tokyo for two days, lecturing to 2,000+ Japanese investors and businesspeople that, I’ve been told, have read some of my books and essays and want to hear what I have to say about several topics I’ve written about for many years: entrepreneurship, investing, business building, and “living rich.” Plus, I’ll be having informal discussions with a small group of attendees who’ve paid a whole lotta money to ask me more particular questions.

I’ve given dozens of presentations to large groups over the years, although never to a crowd that large. My M.O. is to tailor the title of my speech to the nature of the seminar or conference, jot down a few notes, and then talk extemporarily when I’m at the podium. So that doesn’t scare me.

And I feel very comfortable about the informal discussions because I see them as the sort of business meetings that I’ve headed up thousands of times in my career: We have a problem or challenge for which we need ideas, if not solutions. And I always have plenty of ideas.

I’ve made presentations all over the world, from England to Ireland to Germany and Australia. But I have a special feeling about the Japanese. I see them as representatives of a culture that is more advanced and sophisticated than others I’ve worked with. They have characteristics that are instrumental in achieving a level of wealth (and education and health) that inevitably surpasses that of the people of any country they happen to live in. (I’m currently writing a book about this. Working title: Wealth Culture.)

In other words, they have ingrained values that exhibit every important “secret” about building wealth and living well that I’ve learned and written about for the last 20 years. What can I tell them that they don’t already know?

I’ve reminded myself that when it comes to success and accomplishment, the most important secrets were discovered millennia ago. So, I don’t need to tell them something new. I just need to find a new way of explaining the age-old and universal truths.

One of the presentations I’ve decided on will be titled “The Seven Natural Laws of Wealth Building.”

The idea is that there are basic truths about building wealth that have parallels in natural science. I already know the seven “truths” I want to speak about. But I have so far only found four corresponding laws of nature (inertia, momentum, gravity, and entropy).

I’ve been asking scientifically minded friends for suggestions. And BB, an A-level copywriter and a published science fiction writer, sent me a link to Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov. (“My favorite book on physics for the lay reader,” he said.) He also sent a piece on gravity that he wrote years ago.

I’m reading his gravity piece now, and I’m about to scan the book for other ideas. If you have any suggestions, please email them to me. Soon!

Just When We Thought We Understood the Overpopulation Problem… 

Back in the day, overpopulation was the worry. The way to save the world, we were told, was to have fewer babies.

That idea took root in the 1970s and picked up steam at the turn of the century – so much so that there has been a huge drop in birth rates worldwide. And that is a serious problem, according to the current crop of population scientists. A serious problem that is diminishing GDP output and putting enormous pressure on the world’s young workers to pay for the retirements of the Baby Boomers.

Between 2015 and 2020, US birth rates declined about 2% each year. Between 2019 and 2020, they decreased by 4%. And in 2023, according to the CDC, they dropped to their lowest levels in more than 40 years.

On the hopeful but unlikely “positive” side, since Biden took office the border police have allowed about 10 million undocumented aliens into the country. If they turn out to be productive, tax-paying workers, that could help close the birth-rate gap and improve the outlook for all Americans.

On the other hand, if too many of them end up on government assistance or working for US outposts of Mexican and Central American drug and human trafficking cartels, the social and economic future of the US will be… well, not so good.

Learning About Languages 

Steve Leveen, founder of the America the Bilingual Project and author of America’s Bilingual Century, an excellent book, is a friend of mine.

He recently copied me on an essay he posted on his America the Bilingual Project website titled “Cratering Language Enrollments Reveal America’s Linguistic Divide.” It began with a quote from Guadalupe Valdés, a professor emerita in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education:

“Bilingualism has always been a gift the rich have given to their children.”

That’s ironic, I thought. Because in America today, it can be said that bilingualism is a gift that the poor, those who migrate here, give to their children!

I should know better by now. But I find that I’m still stunned by how quickly the children of our migrant Latin American employees at Paradise Palms (the botanical garden we’re establishing in Western Delray Beach) become fluent in English.

One of our Guatemalan workers, Nasario (who Steve tutored for a while), has a five-year-old daughter who did not speak a word of English. Despite their trepidations, Nasario and his wife enrolled her at a nearby (to Paradise Palms) public school in September. (Their main concern was that it did not have a functioning TEFL-type program for monolingual Spanish speakers.)

On her first day, I watched her get on the school bus that stopped for her in front of Paradise Palms. As I said, she spoke zero English. My heart broke thinking about what hardships lay before her.

Just this morning, eight months after that day, I encountered her in our “Kids Park.” I started a conversation with her in Spanish. She switched immediately to English. And she spoke both fluently and without an accent. In fact, had I not known otherwise, I would have assumed she grew up in an English-speaking home.

This should not have surprised me.

In the late 1970s, I lived in N’djamena, Chad, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English Lit at the University of Chad. To make a few dollars on the side, I took a job teaching English to the teenage daughter of a French father and English mother who had decided, since the official language of Chad was French, to speak English at home to help their children learn the language.

The first time I met this girl, who was five or six years old at the time, I began the conversation in French. (My French at the time was strong.)

But she answered me in English.

I tried to continue the conversation in French, but she insisted on responding in English.

Frustrated, I thought I’d shake her up a bit by switching to Chadian Arabic (which I had a functional control of).

She looked at me derisively and said, in her perfect English, “Why are you trying to speak to me in the language of gardeners?”

He Was, I Thought, Just Another Bright Young Friend of Michael’s with an Impossible Dream. I Was Wrong! 

Alex Edelman was a good friend of Number Three Son Michael when they were both in college. I knew him then as a keenly smart, socially awkward, and almost pathetically likable young man who, I suspected, would one day become an influential doctor or scientist like his dad. Instead, he dreamed of being a stand-up comic. And while he pursued his dream, he was always hustling to make money by writing and selling TV scripts, jokes, and even advertising copy. (I knew from Michael that he had begun writing when he was very young. He was barely into his teens when he wrote a kids’ column for the Boston Red Sox.)

Stand-up comedy is about the scariest thing I can imagine doing. I have no problem making speeches about business or wealth building in front of 500 people. But trying to make them laugh? Just the idea makes me shudder.

I remember attending one of Alex’s performances earlyish in his career at a small venue in London. I was there with K, and maybe Michael, along with my business partner, who I had invited since he was in town at the time. There were only about a dozen other people in the audience, and I was nervous – afraid that people wouldn’t laugh at his jokes… and afraid that he would spot us (he didn’t know we were coming) and draw attention to us.

As it turned out, Alex’s performance that day was not great. But he was good. Strong enough to score on several bits and strong enough to make me proud of him.

So there he was, having ignored the Nobel Prize I had imagined for him and living poor, like new performers do, but making progress.

However, making progress as a comedian and becoming a genuine success in any of the performing arts are two very different things. I’ve known many talented young people in all sorts of areas – from drama, to dancing, to mixed martial arts. And when I’ve watched them perform, the experience for me has always been nerve-wracking. I fear some sort of stumble. Even when the performance is faultless, I carry with me the anxiety of knowing that their chance of success is slim, equivalent to the chance of becoming a professional athlete or movie star.

Anyway, time went on. And during those years, Alex would occasionally visit us when we were with Michael and our paths crossed, either at our home in Delray Beach or in New York or LA.

Then, in 2014, Michael wrote to tell us that Alex had won the “Best Newcomer” award at the annual Fringe Fest in in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’d never heard of it, but apparently it has been a launching pad for several now-famous comedians.

And then, in 2018, Michael told us that Alex was doing a one-man show Off-Broadway that was getting great reviews. The show – “Just for Us” – went to Broadway last year, and was recently made into an HBO Comedy Special. I didn’t get to see it on stage, but I saw the special on video, and it was really, really, funny. The jokes were smart and true, and the delivery was honed to perfection.

And then, two weeks ago, Number One Son’s wife, who makes a living doing hair and makeup for stars before they appear on TV talk shows, sent us her weekly calendar with the usual “big names” on it. And there, on Thursday afternoon, was Alex Edelman.

He had made it!

And now…

Last week, Michael sent me news that Alex had just been named by Time Magazine as one of “The 100 Most Influential People of 2024”!

Click here.

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

What Will Israel Do Now? 

From Michael Snyder on Iran’s direct attack on Israel last week. I thought this was a good, early assessment of the quandary Israel is in now:

Just like October 7th, the shocking attack on Israel that just took place altered the course of history. This was the first time that Iran ever attacked Israel directly, and I was flooded with emails by readers that were concerned about World War III. So now that the Iranian attack is over, what will Israel do now? That is the big question. If Israel directly attacks Iran, the Iranians will inevitably respond and the conflict could spiral out of control. But if the Israelis do not strike back, they will look weak and the Iranians could feel like they will be able to get away with similar things in the future.

Read more here.

Two Movies I’m Not Sure I Can Recommend 

K and I watched two movies on two consecutive evenings last week. Given our schedules (often still working after dinner), this was a rare treat. We selected the two out of a list of five that had been recommended to K. Both were foreign films. And both had won numerous awards.

The first one, The Taste of Things, was a French period piece set in 1889. It was, in principle, about the professional and romantic relationship between a wealthy gourmand and his cook. About half of the movie consisted of scenes in which the two protagonists, along with some helpers, gathered ingredients and prepared elaborate gourmet meals. Another 40 percent consisted of scenes wherein the gourmand and four or five of his gourmand friends consumed the meals and chatted about great cooks of the past and great wines of the present. About 10 percent of the movie was about the relationship itself, in which a dash of flirting, a dusting of yearning, and a soupçon of lovemaking takes place. As far as K and I could discern, nothing else of consequence happened in the entire two hours and 20 minutes.

After failing to comprehend or much appreciate The Taste of Things, we were more optimistic about the film we saw the following evening: Perfect Days. In this one, the protagonist was a 60-something Japanese man who lived in a small apartment and whose job it was to clean public toilets in Tokyo. The first half-hour followed a day’s activity in great detail from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. Nothing unexpected happened that day, so we were hopeful for something engaging and dramatic to unfold when the film moved on to his next day. Day Two, however, was, in almost every respect, the same as Day One. This went on for the full length of the two-hour movie.

There was a brief scene where the protagonist had a nearly wordless conversation with his estranged sister, and a day when his estranged sister’s daughter came to live with him and accompany him on one of his endlessly routine days. That was it. I’m all about subtlety in fiction and film. I have no problem being required to see below the surface. But for the life of me, I couldn’t find enough of either to help me understand why Perfect Days has been so widely well-regarded.

If you’ve seen either of these movies and have an idea of why it earned the plaudits it received, let me know.

Illegal Immigration by the Numbers

You would think it would be easy to find out how many illegal immigrants have come into the US since Joe Biden took office 2020. It’s not.

What can be said is that the US Border Patrol has reported “encountering” 8.7 million undocumented migrants, of which 7.2 million came across the southern border and 1.5 million came from other locations. However, according to several sources, of that 8.7 million, as many as 2.8 million were sent back. That would bring the total illegal immigrants that the Border Patrol released into the country to about 6 million.

But the complexity doesn’t end there. Those numbers do not include the “getaways” – people that managed to enter the US illegally without being apprehended by the Border Patrol – which must be somewhere between 600,000 and 1.8 million.

So, what’s the actual number? Considering the biases of those releasing the numbers, I’m thinking it is more than 7 million but probably less than 10 million. What do you think?

As Promised: A Fact About Real Estate Your Broker Doesn’t Want You to Know

In the April 8 issue of this blog, I said:

“Watch this short clip. It’s a teaser for some sort of information product – but what these two men are referring to is probably the most important secret in selling houses. I’ll tell you what it is in next week’s main issue.”

So, here is the secret…

The most important factor in selling a house – or any product whose financial value can be easily determined through a simple internet search – is pricing it right. But brokers seeking to list your property won’t tell you that.

They will most likely begin by telling you that your house is worth far more than it really is. They will do this to get you excited about signing with them. Once they have the listing, they will do everything they can to get you to sell your place as cheaply as you will let them.

You may think that, because they are on commission, they would want to get the highest price possible for your house. But that’s not how brokers get rich. They get rich by getting lots and lots of listings and then turning them over (selling them) as quickly as possible. And the best way for them to sell your house quickly is to get you to lower your price… as soon as they possibly can.

And they will start doing that as soon as you sign the contract.

“About the price…” they might say.

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

Some Good News about China’s Economy… and Why I Am Happy About It 

I’ve never understood why politicians and other thought leaders in the US celebrate economic decline in large economies like China or Russia. I understand why influential and powerful people make a living by casting the world as a battleground between the US and some big, powerful political enemy. I understand the trillions of dollars made by the Military-Industrial Complex. But I can’t figure out how they can convince large swaths of the public that Russia or China getting power is an economic negative for the US.

It doesn’t take a deep dive into macro-economics to understand that as wealth increases in any country, all kinds of desirable things happen. More international trade, for example, which means more global profits and less war, which means less wealth destruction for every country involved. Maybe someone can explain that to me.

In the meantime, I was happy to hear that in March, after five months of decline, China’s factory activity edged up to 50.8 from February’s 49.1, beating a forecast of 50 by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal. (The 50 level separates expansion from contraction.)

This news followed a number of indicators for the January-February period showing the world’s second-largest economy started off the year on a solid footing, led by the manufacturing sector, with exports topping expectations and industrial profits returning to growth.

While the recent run of positive data will help lift the immediate pressure on China’s leaders, who recently set a growth target of around 5% for the year, they must still deal with a long slump in real estate property values, which I, for one, am hoping they can overcome.

Click here.

Speaking of China’s economic potential…

I loved this piece by Garrett Baldwin in the March 31 issue of Postcards from the Florida Republic:

“The Francis Scott Key Bridge won’t be ‘quick, easy, or cheap’ to replace.
“Those are Pete Buttigieg’s words.
“To that… I say… ‘Of course not.’
“Every politician in Maryland has their hand out right now.
“China built a mega bridge in 43 hours with 8,000 workers. [Click here.]
“And they did it for $1 billion.
“We can’t do that.
“You see, because of red tape, the US government will likely have to commission a study on the bridge’s impact on diversity and equity.
“Do you think I’m kidding?
“I’m not.”

Read on here.