Category: Uncategorized

After the recent pandemic lock down there has been a significant increase in air travel. 

I see several reasons for this movement.

The first was the popularity of college education in America.  (Table) The number of people going to college as measured by bachelor’s degrees tripled over thirty years going from 10% of the population in the 1970s to over 30% by 2000. Americans moved to new geographies after college, often the result of marriage to a college peer from a different locale.

The second was political divergence and social sorting by politics.  Beginning in the 1980s more people chose to live close to other people of their own political persuasion.  Several books have been written on this subject.

By 2000, the Internet was becoming a popular form of communication as was the cell phone with the subsequent disappearance of telephone distance charges. Friendships formed and survived geographic distances.

The final coup d’etat was a pandemic lockdown where nearly 70% of workers found they could work off-premise using the Internet and cell phones.

All four of these major social changes resulted in Americans and other global citizens finding reasons to travel, live in new locales, and feel comfortable doing it.

My best-selling book, Marketing Without Advertising, explains why advertising doesn’t work except on children's products and for tourists. The book explains how to do effective marketing.

A wonderful example is in today's Wall Street Journal, (8/3/2023). 

Bud Light, the most popular American beer, insulted its clients with a frivolous marketing character who is a man dressed as a woman and being silly.  Sales since the ad campaign have fallen 26% and market share has fallen from 10% to the 6% range.

Bud Light increased its national ads from 32 TV ads the same time last year, June and July,  to 34,000 this year (yes, from 2 digits to 5 digits).  While market share dropped 2% points from 8% to 6% during the same period.

Three cheers for the evidence that advertising, even at the million dollar level, is counter productive.

Four years of covid have kept me from my beloved Tokyo.  I have been coming to Japan for nearly 50 years, usually for two months; once longer and now mostly for one month.

What is the difference between Tokyo and San Francisco?  The food is spectacular here, every meal.  In the past I’ve had horse and whale and today I had ox tongue.  I love horse,  some variations of whale are interesting, the tongue was grilled in tiny pieces; it was not as interesting as boiled cow tongue.  I also had clam chowder on a hot dog.  Not as bad as it sounds. Plenty of good espresso.

Everyone on the street is immaculately dressed, immaculately. Much of it is exquisite. 

Everything works; buses are to the minute, trains are to within 30 seconds and clean, clean spotless.  This is a dense city of 40 million compared to dirty S.F. 850,000. 

The biggest surprise is to walk through stores, giant department stores and all the merchandise is out.  Everyone pays for what they take.  In San Francisco, much of the merchandise is behind plastic doors with locks and the merchandise that isn’t is loaded by the criminal underclass into bags to be stolen.

In San Francisco, we now get electric outages on days of good weather, floods from the underground water pipes that aren’t maintained and hypodermic needles nearly everywhere we walk in commercial areas and East of Van Ness. Along with the vast numbers of street people.  Street people use public transportation making it smell awful.  Use of public transport has dropped so low it can no longer survive.

Downtown San Francisco is empty, I’m not exaggerating.  Tourists are few and largely European.  Over ten thousand retail businesses have failed in the City.

I don’t miss the foul life of San Francisco and contemporary America. And we live in a prosperous neighborhood.

It is hard to ignore the idea that America is a failed state. The goal of the military is to ‘fight global warming.’  Enlistment has fallen catastrophically.  Nearly every college and university teaches that America has endemic racism and that meritocracy is malignant white supremacy. No society can survive that self image.

The worst of America is the rapid rise of Jew hate.  No society has ever survived Jew hate, certainly not modern Russia, Poland; Spain or East Europe. 

I’m reading the autobiography of Bibi.  Really great.  History will record that I lived in the time of Bibi and Elon and that I appreciated them both.

Sushi for lunch today.  I only eat sushi in Japan.  Four years without sushi.  Only sushi chefs in Japan love raw fish enough to understand how to recognize high quality fish, cut it, prepare it and serve it.

My goodness, the dollar is strong and the yen is weak for the moment.  I am enjoying my new found wealth.  It's temporary.

Japanese small businesses were not hurt too badly by covid.  Small businesses are financed by their landlords, their suppliers and their neighbors.  American small businesses are only financed by friends and family.  Seldom deep pockets.

Department stores were hurt during covid because tourism, especially Chinese tourism, evaporated.  The Japanese equivalent of Amazon, Rakuten, has hurt too.  Home delivery never got as big for the Japanese as it did in the U.S.  Different ways of shopping and cooking.

Uber is insignificant in Tokyo.  There are so many taxis and they are everywhere.  They are clean, they are immaculate.  Very different from the U.S. yellow cabs.

The Japanese had a tiny fraction of the covid of the U.S. because they are so clean to start with. But still 9 out of 10 people wear masks in public.  I think it is because they are naturally shy.

Evil fools have brought the Bohemian Club into the news recently.  The hatred that the Party of Hate (Democrats) has brought to Justice Thomas has boiled over to the Bohemian Club, where he was invited to visit, claiming it to be some domestic version of Davos.

It isn’t a domestic version of Davos. In fact the only significant event is the two-week summer camp at the Bohemian Grove on the Russian River.  A few famous people have been invited, including a few Republican presidents.  The club is not elite.  Many of my friends have been and are members. There is nothing elite or sinister about us.

Otherwise the most interesting part of the Club's history is that in the late 1880s and 1890s the local social elite, including the hereditary social elite, decided to exclude Jews from the three main clubs and the two women’s clubs.  This was during the great wave of East European Jewish immigration from the late 1880s to the mid 1920s. 

The Jews who had, since the founding of the City, been important leaders and major businessmen simply took over the Bohemian Club for themselves.  Jews were the ones who bought the property on the Russian River and created the Grove and its traditions.  Remember Jews were a key component of the theatrical world at the time, so they humorously made that a part of the Club facade.

The looney haters in the media seem to take public urination as some sign of the Club’s perversity. It is a men’s club and there is a tradition of peeing on the redwood trees.  It is just a form of camaraderie.

It is a men’s club. By Federal law you cannot have a men’s only club with over 200 members if the club is important to business. The Bohemian Club bans all discussion of business and is in fact not important to any local business.

Another obituary; Dick died a week ago.  The other obits I’ve seen about Dick are accurate but lack the personal elements.

I knew Dick when I helped start the Marketing Research department at the Bank of America and then started a national organization of my fellow bank marketing officers. 

When I started my new job at the Bank of California, I went next door to let my friend, Dick, at Wells Fargo know about it.  There were two other marketing men in his office.  That was the meeting that created the future MasterCard.

Dick and I saw each other regularly for the next three years.  Later, when he was president of Bank of America I phoned him to get his help on a project of mine.  I wanted to create an index of the weighted major five global currencies to be used as a standard international currency for internal use in reporting financial statements for multinational corporations.  Dick remembered me after two decades.  He said he was getting rid of his international currency department and couldn’t help.

Dick was a genius exemplified by his purchase of Security Pacific National Bank. He knew, as I did, that all big organizations had internal politics that are very damaging to management.  He picked a top executive at Security and promised him a raise of $5 million to tell him who was productive at Security and who wasn’t.  After he bought and merged the banks he fired the losers and put his friend on the newly merged Board of Directors.

I saw Dick often, after he retired, at the symphony.  He liked symphonic music and was a big financial supporter.

Dick was a very smart man, with a great sense of humor and a warmth that I can never forget.

It's time for me to start commenting on my history with the key people in the history of the modern computer.

Start with Doug Engelbart.  I knew Doug from my monthly board meeting of the Portola Institute in Menlo Park.  Doug was part of a circle of Menlo friends, most of whom were runners.  I visited Doug’s office at SRI by invitation once.  He is credited with inventing the mouse.  His mouse was clunky and had 6 keys on it.  Those were the days when we did line editing.  Each change required citing the line and replacing the whole line, even for a change of one letter.  Doug’s office had a small monitor that matched one on the other side of a wall.  The goal was to write back and forth between the monitors.

Another friend, a very close friend of ten years, Stewart Brand, helped Doug to present his work to the public in San Francisco. Doug, with Stewart’s help, created the ‘Mother of All Demos.’

Stewart deserves a role as a personal and Internet computer father but has not been credited in his recent biography.  Stewart convened the first Hackers’ Conference.  Hackers were the backbone of the personal computer.  Stewart also created the Well, the first active and long lasting community website.

My other friend from that circle was Bill English.  Bill created and ran the Xerox PARC research center for nearly 15 years. PARC was the source of much if not most of the personal computer.  Steve Jobs has publicly admitted that most of the first Apples came from PARC.  Bill, as manager, will not get the credit he deserves.  But people who understand management will know that he is responsible for the dozens of brilliant inventions that came out of his project.

Bill and I were on the board of the Point Foundation (Whole Earth Catalog money).  We met quarterly for three years all day.  His wife Roberta was a good friend.  I spent time with them both in Tokyo where Bill was trying to create a Japanese keyboard.  His system wasn’t used.

Lastly, I have had daily coffee for fifteen years with Scott Prevost who developed natural language for Microsoft’s Bing, then created AI for Adobe, a leader in the field.  Scott is certainly a prime mover in AI.

All four of these men look like Prince Charles, now King Charles.  Only Stewart is not an engineer.  All four would prefer not to carry on a social conversation.  Except for Stewart you would not look twice at any of them, you wouldn’t try to seek them out for a discussion.  But all were/are calm, moderate, subdued and kind.  Their conversation was intelligent but never provocative.  Again, except for Stewart none had interests outside of work, except Bill loved Japan and Japanese art and Scott is interested in the politics of the gay male community.

All were/are confident, strong, honest and very male.

I knew and loved Judy, who died at 75 a few days ago.

Her obituaries fail to mention Ed Roberts, her partner in the Disability Movement.  I give Judy credit for being the mother of the movement but never has the role of a father been clearer; Ed Roberts was the father and the prime mover of the movement. The true founder of a global revolution.

Ed’s disabilities were so great that he was severely limited in his daily movement.  Judy did all the things that Ed needed.  Judy was in a wheelchair but she had energy, administrative skills and mobility that Ed lacked.

This obituary has one purpose. To contrast Ed and Judy.  I loved Judy; she was kind, deeply caring and honest (meaning frank).  But the disability movement succeeded because of Ed. 

Go back and take the time to read my obituary of Ed.  A man who stood out from history with his incredibly intense humanity.  When you met Ed you felt the meaning of being human. Ed moved our hearts.

Judy used the shaming and victimhood methodology of political action.  She was effective because her anger was moderate and because Ed had opened the doors of the world.

I once asked Judy why men were attracted to her, as they were.  She said it was the injured bird syndrome.  Many men see an injured bird and they want to help. A wonderful part of maleness.

I am reminded of my big date, when I recently cleaned and washed Miners' Lettuce.

In the early 1970s I attended a casual soiree at the San Francisco Zen Center (relevant later) where I met an attractive woman and invited her to my house for dinner.  

I then asked around about who she was.  It turned out she was a rising star in the chef-restaurant world.  Her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was already globally famous.

The night of the dinner arrived and my solution to serving a famous chef was to collect local ingredients.  One dish was Miner’s Lettuce since it was Spring and growing nearby in San Francisco. I collected a separate salad of five local greens from the parklet next door. I drove out to get wild spinach from the point near Sutro Baths.

She was due at 7PM.  I started the main course and lit the hearth fire.  Then she phoned to say she would be two hours late, delayed by a wine sales rep.

When she finally arrived, everything was wilted and reheated.

When she saw the Miner’s Lettuce she expressed horror and shock.  She and her father had just lost $200,000 on a Central Valley farm trying to commercially grow Miner’s Lettuce and failed.

She later asked about the apple in my five layer dessert.  ‘Yes’ I had cut the apple on the same board that I had cut onions.

I fell asleep after this disaster and she left by herself. 

Years later, when I was the founder of Green’s Restaurant,  we sent Debbie Madison, our future first chef, to study for a year as a cook at Chez Panisse.  Debbie was a student at the Zen Center.

There is an online fact site that seems to be very popular, Quora, which is consistently wrong on one point.  I just wanted to set the matter straight.

Quora is consistently asked whether people in the Medieval period took baths or cleaned themselves significantly.  The answer is always ‘yes’ and the readers are told that taking a bath in a large tub was common.  

The first problem with this answer is that it doesn’t refer to any geography.  The questioners are probably talking about people in Europe.  In this case Quora is completely wrong in the answer.

In Finland, Hungary and Turkey, the citizens regularly took steam baths, used bathing pools or saunas throughout history.  The same is true in Japan.  In the areas of West Africa that I am familiar with, bathing was ubiquitous.  This was also true, much earlier, in the Roman Empire.

For the rest of Europe, bathing and washing the body was not done.  The popular theories of the time were that being unwashed was healthy and deterred skin infections.  Additionally the smells of everyday life were so egregious that covering one’s body with notions was necessary to survive the fetid smells of everyday life.  Sewer systems were unknown in the English-speaking and European worlds.

All of this is readily determined by reading the literature of the time.  The Japanese were so offended by the horrid smell of Europeans, they were made to stand outside during all encounters with Japanese and forced to live on a separate island.  Africans reacted the same way to Europeans as did Muslims to the Crusaders.

In summary, most Europeans for 1,000 years didn’t bathe or wash.  Many other parts of the world testify to the foul smells of Europe.

I’ve found an element that is crucial to a couple's compatibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.  Physics.

The insight came when a close friend died and I asked my partner if she could have married him.  She asked me the same question about my friend’s wife.  We both answered ‘No’ and came to the same conclusion.  The reason for Our mutual compatibility was the same reason for our incompatibility with our married friends.

My friend and his wife are klutzes.  They can’t connect a TV set to the cable system, can’t assemble the simplest appliance or use their new cell phones.  

Some people are good at manipulating the physical world, hammering, sawing, attaching and detaching and others are not.  From our experience the reason for this effectiveness in dealing with the physical world has to do with their understanding of physics.

Humans develop a physical sense of the world.  What is hard, what is pliable and what is similar. That view shapes how people manipulate the world and how they direct workers around them to manipulate the world. 

I never recommended my best hired workers to my friend and his wife because they could not distinguish a hard job from an easy one and they would complain about the work done by a worker whether it was excellent or shoddy.  Neither of them could give good directions to get a job done, whether for a plumbing problem or putting a new lock on a door.

This view of the world seems to me to be a key element in sexual partnerships.  We know that smell, cleanliness, money views and countless other prominent issues are part of compatibility and are what counts when sexual attraction wears off.  I just want to add the physical view of the world to the list of compatibility issues. 

 Just a note for marriage counselors and people who counsel couples before marriage. Check on whether one or both are ‘handy’ with tools.