Last week, I wrote a short piece about Bernie Madoff. I mentioned it to Bill at a partners meeting, and he sent this out… which takes my observation to a different level.

We were on a 4-hour layover in Seoul, Korea. Someone suggested we should take a taxi into town. We did. There were six of us, three each in two little cabs. When I have more time, I’ll tell you the full story, but suffice it to say that there was a language barrier that had us almost three hours away from the airport by the time we could get our driver to understand we needed to be back in just over an hour. Anywhere but Asia, that would have been impossible. Our two drivers accomplished it by driving their cabs just the way you see these motorcycles driving here.

But our guys were even crazier. They were doing this in the opposite lanes – against traffic!

 When I came across this video today, it brought back memories…

As part of my ongoing quest to master Spanish, I found this…

Bernie Madoff, RIP 

Bernie Madoff is considered by many to be the greatest con artist of all time. At the Cigar Club last night, one friend said he had “stolen” $46 billion. Another said it was higher: $65 billion. Neither of those statements is true.

It is true that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, using new investors’ dollars to pay dividends to old investors’ funds. His explanation was that he got caught up in the scheme in the early 90s when his portfolio went south. Rather than report the truth to his clients and lose his up-to-then sterling reputation for delivering steady, double-digit returns, he decided to cook the books, hoping that one day the portfolio would start to move up and he could make his investors whole.

Almost no one believes that. Maybe not even his wife. But it seems plausible to me. Here are the facts: Over more than 20 years, his firm took in $19 billion from roughly 4,000 clients, including some A-listers. At the time of his arrest, his firm was fraudulently claiming to have assets of $65 billion. After he was convicted in 2009, a court-appointed trustee recovered more than $14.4 billion, which was returned to investors. $14.4 billion is $44.6 billion less than $65 billion. But the actual loss to investors? That was only $4.4 billion, or 25% of their capital.

That sort of thing happens on Wall Street every day.

A lighthearted look at procrastination and how we enable it…

Are you stuck in a schedule that’s less than optimal? Check out this short presentation by Craig Ballantyne, the man that took over Early to Rise after I retired from it.

I do not think AOC is as vacant-headed as she sometimes appears to be. I see her as an intelligent, badly educated person with immense charisma in a millennial sort of way. She made headlines last year when she visited the border and railed against the inhumanity of what she believed were Trump’s policies there. (They were largely the same policies that existed during the Obama administration.) She has not been down there since the surge began, but she did defend that decision in a blog she posted last week.

In the video below, Ben Shapiro, who IMHO is the brightest political podcaster on the internet, is trying to figure out what, exactly, she is saying. It’s a good bit of fun. See what you think.

Feeling stressed? There’s nothing like juvenile humor to correct that…

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was putting together a photo-journal of the sunsets we’ve been enjoying at Rancho Santana. Here are some of my favorites…