Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the Sky Lounge. It’s a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen and we get their stories. If you could like and subscribe, it really helps us get our word out.

Today’s guest in the Sky Lounge, Michael Weinstein. Hi, Michael.

Michael Weinstein:

Hey, Todd. How are you today?

Todd Merrill:

Hey, doing awesome. So, Michael, who are you and what are you working on?

Michael Weinstein:

So, I work as a fractional CFO for a bunch of companies as a partner in a firm called TechCXO. Currently, I have a range of customers who range from a family business in bakery delivery services through to a healthcare AI startup and a couple of things in between.

Todd Merrill:

Very cool. And you’ve had a career in New York or in and around Wall Street for a long time.

Michael Weinstein:

Well, my career is kind of fun, funny Todd. So, I really started my career in corporate planning at Anheuser-Busch in the early 80s when I was in graduate school, where I sort of got all the beer I could drink for free. And I left that and went to work for a steel company in Chicago where I got all the steel I could eat for free, and I’m still working on that first pound. And I left Inland Steel in Chicago and went to work as a strategy consultant for Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, Mass, and basically spent my time traveling the world doing strange things at steel companies and aluminum companies and for big Wall Street firms. And then I left that and that’s when I went to Wall Street, which I swore I was never going to do, having seen how Wall Street worked as an insider, where I worked for Putnam Investment Management for about nine years in the 90s into the early aughts as doing all kinds of different things, including being co-head of the investment strategy team, which was interesting. And particularly in times like this, when stock markets are trying to figure out what to do. I left there and went to the sell side, believe it or not, which is sort of counter how people do it, to build a bespoke research operation for a boutique broker-dealer owned by Swiss Re, the big reinsurance firm.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

Left that to run all asset class research for the US operations of Credit Agricole. And then the GFC hit and I said I’m done working on Wall Street. And I’ve been working as a consultant/CFO for all kinds of interesting companies ever since and joined TechCXO just to continue to extend what I was doing.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. A lot of cool things to talk about, but let’s go to the economy. You’ve got a really good grasp on what’s going on in the economy and seeing it from lots of different angles.

So today, as we’re recording, the stock market has been down a couple of big days in a row. The economy is not great. A lot of people are laying off. It feels like there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market, you know, stemming from the regime change in Washington. And then, you know, so everybody feels like he’s trying to figure out what’s going on. What do you think is going on with the economy right now? And then kind of how does the pendulum going to swing back around to happy days again?

Michael Weinstein:

So, there are a couple of interrelated things, I think, which people should take into account and to give them perspective. The first is regardless of who had won the election. So, let’s try and take value sort of out of this. We had been in a long expansion, which was already fraying at the edges. And on top of that, the people were looking for the Fed to start cutting rates late last summer, early fall as a way of bringing stimulus back into the economy. And that was the consensus view back in July, August. And because of a variety of reasons, the Fed did not cut as much as people thought they were. So, you already had, consumer confidence was slowing. Consumer debt parameters were not going in the right direction. Delinquencies were rising. Company investment was slowing in certain sectors, accelerating in others because some of the programs of the Biden administration were now starting to pay off like the CHIPS Act, because it just takes time to do things, particularly with big multibillion-dollar investments. They don’t happen overnight. Just add water and have a new factory.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Michael Weinstein:

So, you combine that with a president who comes in and says I’m going to change things. And I think there were a lot of people who wanted change and hoped that he would bring change in. And I think the economy is kind of like a computer. It’s got a hardware piece and a software piece. And what was Trump really saying is I’m going to change the software. I’m going to change the rule set as to what kind of outcome that our economy is going to produce. The hard part, I think, for all of us who’ve watched these things more than once in their lives or in their careers is change the rule set to be what? And that, on top of everything else, brings in a lot of uncertainty. So, I think what I will be watching in the next couple of days, at least, will not over the weekend…

Todd Merrill:

… it’s Friday.

Michael Weinstein:

Friday. Is what’s happening on Wall Street cause some things retreat, in which case the signal is as we’ve done, you know. People talked about the Greenspan Put, the Volcker Put, and the Powell Put, which is protecting financiers or financial investors. Or are we going to continue down a program that is going to try and alter the economy to be more balanced between labor and capital? And I don’t think we know the answer to that and so we’re in a multilayered period of uncertainty. So, uncertainty as to interest rates, uncertainty as to trade policy, uncertainty as to where the economy is going, uncertainty as to what the tax regime is. And I’ll come back to tariffs in one more second if I can. Uncertainty about a lot of things. And the one thing we know about uncertainty is that people don’t invest. I mean, corporations don’t build new factories, or hire people when they’re in these kinds of periods of uncertainty. They don’t know which way to go and what the rule set might be three months from now, six months from now, three years from now. And when they have to think in very long timeframes, and that almost puts a pause into things, you know, in a weird way, which means that the growth that we’d be investing for in 18 months from now, we’re not making the investments today that that would under support that growth 18 months from now. So, it catches up with you at some point. So, let’s see, you know? I would ignore the shiny object, which is the stock market and think about what are the real economic metrics telling us and what are they trying to tell us about what kind of economy they want to have. When the noise settles down, look through the noise for what the real signal is.

Todd Merrill:

You mentioned tariffs, and I know you’ve been involved in several industries that would be highly affected, both good and bad by tariffs. Obviously, if you are a net manufacturer in the United States, that helps. If you’re an importer, you know, not so great. What was your thought on tariffs or how does this tariff announcement change things in the United States?

Michael Weinstein:

Let’s assume they stick or they’re going to stick for some reasonable period of time.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Okay.

Michael Weinstein:

We just enacted the largest tax increase in the history of the country.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Okay.

Michael Weinstein:

So, I’m a coffee drinker. We import 99% of our coffee from outside the United States because we’re not in the right climate to grow coffee. Am I now going to have to pay 30% more for my coffee? Right? 60, 70% of citizens in the United States spend all their disposable income on food, rent or housing, cars, gasoline, and clothing. These budgets just got changed. They don’t have more money to spend. So, the mix is going to change. And you can’t rapidly replace this stuff. So, what does it mean? I’ll keep my car next year. I don’t buy. We’re going to get into back-to-school shopping season. Johnny is not getting new blue jeans for school this year at the margin. Right? Because they’re sewn in Indonesia, even though they say Levi’s on them, or wherever or in Vietnam. I suspect next winter we’re not going to be eating a lot of guacamole.

Todd Merrill:

It’s California.

Michael Weinstein:

It’s Mexico. It’s where the avocados come from. Right? So, you know, we’re in this chicken and egg situation of tell me what the rules are going to be and we can sort of figure out what happens. In the interim, if I’m a shipper and I got a boat in the middle of the Pacific and I got all these containers on it that have stuff in them from all over the place and the customs people can’t even tell me what paperwork I need to provide them when my ship arrives in Los Angeles port. So, you get all these now kind of bureaucratic disruptions. Right? Do I send my ship back? Where do I send it to? Am I going to be allowed to unload it? And again, our systems are very highly refined, which also makes them brittle.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Michael Weinstein:

We saw that when we had the port disruptions during Covid where we had to change all the transshipment systems and all the problems that caused in the port because then you don’t have longshoremen there. The cranes aren’t in the right places at the right time. People who move the containers out of the ports into shipping yards, they’re not there at the right time. They compound them back up because people don’t know what they have to do. What paperwork do I have to present to the customs guys? You know, it’s a very paperwork-intensive industry shipping when I arrive on shore. So, you’re going to have people, I suspect, which I’m also hearing informally, people asking a lot of questions because they don’t know.

Todd Merrill:

Right. Right.

Michael Weinstein:

So, it’s not like this was a program. Here’s the program. Here’s the manual that goes with the program. So, the chances that it will cause unintended consequences are great. We didn’t see four other cabinet secretaries at the announcement saying, all right, Secretary of Transportation, this is how this gets managed or this is where you go. Secretary of Agriculture, right now we know there are grains and warehouses and things like that spoiling because people can’t ship it. And we don’t know how our trading partners are going to react. Will the EU band together and say, you know something? We’re as big an economy as you. We’re not going to blink first. Right? And we know human history is sadly rife with unintended stupidity. I’m not assigning who’s stupid. I’m just saying that people just don’t talk about it.

Well, there’s a great history book. I’m going to get the name a little wrong, Sleepwalking to War, about how World War I started. And it was like people just never thought it would happen and then it would last two weeks. The Civil War. Right? It would last two weeks and it would be over. And it was carnage for four or four and a half years.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Generational disruption for sure.

Michael Weinstein:

People misread by just not talking to each other.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s that short-term or near-term uncertainty, and everybody has to figure out what’s going on. Everybody’s smart. There are a lot of really smart leaders. Everybody will adjust. We just got to figure out which way the wind’s blowing and then we’ll figure it out. But I think even before this year, even before we knew who the next president was going to be, even before the policies were going to change, I think structurally we were having trouble in a lot of markets. We work a lot with venture and private investments, private equity. It seemed like vintage 2019, 2020, 2021, anything that started in there had a hiccup. I think Silicon Valley Bank crapped out and a couple of other things happened that were part of a larger issue. What do you think that was all about? That’s another thread we have to pull on to figure out how this all gets unwound again.

Michael Weinstein:

Which is another multidimensional problem, right? Depending on the angle that you come at it from. So, venture capital does its thing, right? It forms companies and it has an expectation that we’re going to be able to exit by a certain point in time, right? And right, sell it forward. Again, I’m not making a value judgment and we’re going to get our return and then we’re going to take that money, turn it to our LPs, raise the next fund and go start and do the process again. And a funny thing happens on the way to trying to do all that and that capital markets and the IPO markets kind of stop, right? So, one of the natural avenues for exit goes into pause mode.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Michael Weinstein:

So the private equity firms, which are more in certain sectors would be more natural IPO vehicles because they’re later-stage companies with revenues and EBITDA and all those good things, but they’re the ones who might buy the company from the VC companies because they’re out of the hyper-growth stage into a growth stage and then they want to sell it. So, the whole pipeline clogs up. And again, what was the bet? The bet was when the Fed started to ease and money became easier and cheaper, maybe we don’t go back to zero interest rates, that the machine starts up again, right? Wall Street was gearing up for M&A activity, for IPO activity, and it started to thaw a little last August, September, and then the Fed didn’t go on a protracted, predictable program of reducing interest rates and the whole thing stopped again. Right? So, we’ve gotten a couple of ish-ish IPOs since then. Birkenstock, brand name. We all wear them, we all like them, or at least we tell ourselves we’re supposed to like ugly shoes or ugly… I think they’re great and comfortable, but…

Todd Merrill:

… very comfy, yeah, for sure.

Right? But CoreWeave tried to come public two weeks ago and kind of was initially a flop, and certainly in terms of the amount of money they wanted to raise, and he’s sort of got everything in between. So, we also know from studies that have been done that there’s a large number of companies, like, I thought the number was like 20 plus thousand, I think. Some crazy number that should have transacted by now across…

Todd Merrill:

20,000?

Michael Weinstein:

I think, yeah. I think it’s something like that.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Michael Weinstein:

I apologize if I have an extra zero, but even if it’s… that’s a lot. The whole system is clogged.

Todd Merrill:

So why? So, what’s preventing those companies from… was it just bad timing or just a little bit?

Michael Weinstein:

And they’re overvalued.

Todd Merrill:

Overvalued

Michael Weinstein:

Because private money gets to set the value.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Michael Weinstein:

And studies I could dig out say that something like a third to 40% of them are overvalued by at least a third. So, their carrying value in the portfolio was too high. No one wants to mark down.

Todd Merrill:

So, there’s a reset that has to happen.

Michael Weinstein:

Right. So again, interest rates go down, the denominator falls, the value, you get closer to where you’re carrying it. But who wants to sell at a loss?

Todd Merrill:

So, if money gets cheaper, then that could be part of it, right?

Michael Weinstein:

It helps ease the pressure off of valuations.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. And then there’s the more money that’s floating around the economy, the cheaper things get. Right? And then so therefore the valuation could float up a little bit relative to other things based on that. Okay. So, it sounds like interest rates are a big…

Michael Weinstein:

…because then you can tell your LP I got my 28.3% internal rate of return that I’ve been showing you.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Michael Weinstein:

Which I couldn’t get if I had to sell it. So, I can justify you giving me more money to do the game again.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Looking at the year-end fund metrics, some of the things I’m in, it’s like, oh man, how’s this ever going to make any money? And I think in a microcosm. I’m a little fish investor, but imagine you’re California or some big state like New York that has pensions, it has to deploy the money to get a return in excess of the hurdle rate of the T-bills or whatever. How the heck are you going to do that?

Michael Weinstein:

The excess return because they’re underfunded pensions to make the fact that the contributions weren’t enough. And on top of it, they haven’t gotten the cash that they thought they were going to get by now. Right? So, they could pay because they have, you know, pensions are actuarially-based. And then if I’m a VC trying to raise my next fund, they haven’t gotten the cash back. So, they can’t roll it forward into Fund Number 7 or whatever the number they’re up to. And maybe the other thing is people had it too easy for too long with zero interest rates and they don’t know how to function in a 4% treasury environment. It’s much easier to do all this when they’re 35 basis points or 50 basis points.

Todd Merrill:

Right, right, right. Well, I had a discussion. I had dinner with a guy yesterday and he was an older, wealthy person in a certain industry. And we’re talking about a certain company in that industry. And he said, “I was thinking about throwing some money in five or six digits into this private company, early stage. But man, the stock market today, the wealth effect is real.” Right? So, it’s on the margin. He was sitting there having a beer, going from, yeah, I’m going to invest to, I don’t know, you know, green light to red or yellow light. Well, and that’s what’s going on all over the place, right? It’s easier just to hang.

Michael Weinstein:

Whereas the flipside is right now is the exact probably time you should make that investment because if it looked good a week ago, it looks better today. The private investments look better today than the public investments do.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. So, let’s talk about that. What is the end of all this? What is the dip in the curve? What does the inflection point have to look like here? Or what do you think?

Michael Weinstein:

I saw a statistic yesterday or this morning that 20% of US equities are owned by foreigners.

Todd Merrill:

20% are owned by foreigners, including governments?

Michael Weinstein:

Equities are owned by foreigners. No, it could be foreign pension funds. It could be foreign asset managers. It could be. It could probably less, so sovereign wealth funds. They tend to be more private investors. So, this is where my international trade and money economics is a little rusty so bear with me. The Fed has now another problem. Here we go. Are they going to bail out Wall Street or Main Street? You would argue if you want to bring manufacturing back to the US, you have to weaken the dollar, right? Because our relative costs are high with a strong dollar. Where the world’s reserve currency, that makes sense. If I’m the Fed and I cut interest rates to try and help Wall Street, I now weaken the dollar. I now strengthen, no, I weaken the dollar, right? Because if I hold net, and if I’m a foreign investor, I think in FX adjusted return terms. So, if I’m a euro investor and I’m investing in dollars, I got to buy dollars to make the investment. If my euro is strengthening to the dollar, if I have the math right, don’t hold me, right? Then my US dollar-denominated financial asset return looks weaker because I’m not benefiting from the currency trains, right? Because if the dollar gets stronger, it buys more euros when I make the translation back into euros, right? So now I’ve lost that part of the treadmill that’s helped me out. So a lot of people, not just me, are worried that foreign investors are going to consider it, putting aside that by all accounts, they’re very angry right now, that they’re on net going to take money out of the US equity markets and move it into their markets.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Michael Weinstein:

And on top of that, into buying their domestic companies that can operate tariff-free inside Europe.So, you get this big rotational shift in things. And if that’s the case, and then look, let’s be candid. Profit margins before this happened in corporations were at an all-time high. So, they can’t get better, right? Top-line growth was getting harder to achieve. Financial engineering was driving earnings per share. Back to late business cycle kind of stuff. So, what do you need to keep the market continuing to go up? You need the discount rate to fall. What does that mean? The Fed has to cut interest rates. If the Fed is not going to do that, valuations, which a lot of people, including me, think would be, the market wasn’t cheap, right? Because the US market has gone up relative to everything else until this happened. So, you see a valuation correction. And I don’t know. And then I’m not going to put a number out because all I’m going to do is make people mad at me because I’ll be wrong, but it will be a meaningful number. 

Todd Merrill:

Okay, yeah. So, you’ve seen a couple of business cycles. Which one is this most like that you’ve seen in the past?

Michael Weinstein:

None because this is completely self-inflicted.

Todd Merrill:

It’s a weird one, right? It’s just a sum of a lot of things that have to get flushed out.

Michael Weinstein:

The post-World War II business cycle basically plays out largely the same, right? Particularly when we deregulate banking. So now central banks become pretty important in the 80s going forward. But basically, the economy, the central bank gets concerned that the economy is getting too hot. The central bank wants to slow the economy down. The central bank raises interest rates. Economically sensitive sectors slow, construction, housing, things like that. Now, we didn’t have credit cards in the 50s, 60s, early 70s. So, they slow things down. They get them slowed down enough, they bring interest rates back down. Interest rates sensitive sectors of the economy come back first. Housing construction, building construction resumes. They start hiring people and away we go. Now we have something where we can’t look at and say, this is like those recessions. Well, we had a COVID recession, right? That was different. And what do we do? We threw a lot of money at it, which I think was the right thing to do.

Todd Merrill:

Inflation, yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

But you can’t stop a $20 trillion economy cold in its tracks. We configure everything, shut down institutions, and then not have dislocations occur. We just call that inflation. And would the better alternative be to have people starve?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, right. Exactly.

Michael Weinstein:

And it’s easier to stay in hindsight that it caused it. We didn’t know how bad COVID was going to be, but it got people really scared in March of 2020 and April of 2020. People were dying. You know? I’m a New Yorker. Our hospitals and morgues were overflowing with bodies at that point. There were no hospital beds. My friends who were doctors said we can’t get lung equipment to help people breathe. We didn’t have a vaccine yet. What a modern miracle of science. We should be celebrating the fact that we came up with these vaccines that probably saved millions of lives. But the GFC, we at least sort of knew what to do in the GFC. We had to buy financial assets that emanated out of a zero interest rate environment, that were never AAA, got treated as though they were AAA. And surprise, surprise, it turned out to be not to be AAA. So quantitative easing. The Fed just put them on their balance sheet, right? But again, it bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. But we’ve never had a late in a business cycle, let’s impose a giant tax on the economy recession.

Todd Merrill:

So, if other parts of the tax structure move or are brought down, is that going to work? I guess that will work for some people and not work for others.

Michael Weinstein:

Right. So, if we know … I’ll get the number of it, that certainly up to like $80,000 a year of disposable income, people spend it all, right? That’s food, housing, car, kids, medicine. They don’t save; they save very little. So even if they got a 25% reduction in their taxes, they’re going to spend that money, right? It goes right into buying stuff because they need it. If you have it, again, I’m not trying to, I have personal views on what I like to see happen, but all I’m saying is you’re writing a piece of software, you’re writing a set of rules that will produce an outcome. If you give the top 10% of the economy more money, they have to do something with it. Well, they don’t need another home. What do they do? They buy financial assets, NFTs, bananas taped to a wall for $6 million, right?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Michael Weinstein:

Because they have to do something with the money, but mostly they buy financial assets. What does that do? It causes inflation of financial assets. Well, when we see the stock market inflate because it’s not driven by corporate growth, corporate earnings, and things like that, it’s driven by people who just have to buy stuff. We don’t complain about that. We like it when the stock market goes up, right?

Let’s go back to the late 80s, I’m sorry, the late 90s. Think about a really interesting thing that happened. We started running a budget surplus at the federal level. Everyone said this is good. This is virtuous. It shows that we’re being responsible. What are we really doing? We’re removing money out of the economy. Where does ultimately that money have to come from? Again, that proverbial family of four, that’s just working middle-class, working day-to-day, it’s not coming from them. It’s coming from the upper wealth tiers of the economy who now do not have net new cash to put into financial assets. I would argue, part of the dot-com correction was, yeah, a lot of those businesses weren’t businesses, but part of it was, there was no new money coming into the market to keep pushing those stock prices up and they relied on stock prices and stock issuances as one of the big funding, the publicly traded ones as one of their big funding mechanisms, right? So, you’ve now taken that away because you’re net removing money from the system.

So now, it’s the change in the tax regime. If we stick with the current tax regime, which we know is set to expire, then it’s not adding new money into the system on net, right? It’s holding, if you will, the money supply and velocity money and all those good things that economists like to talk about kind of the same. If you cut the taxes yet again by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you’ve given that part of the citizenry money to spend on buying financial assets and capital formation.

Todd Merrill:

Capital formation. Yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

Right. So, think about one other thing that tariffs have done, which I don’t think is getting enough attention. From a corporation’s perspective, they also just faced a huge tax increase. Apple, just picking on Apple, we know that they run the bulk of their profits through a tax haven domiciled in Ireland, and they don’t pay taxes on it. What did we just do? We just put a tax on Apple, a corporate tax on Apple.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Michael Weinstein:

We’ve reduced corporate profitability for companies who are doing things like that. What does that do? That’s less incremental money that they can use to repurchase their stock.

Todd Merrill:

Okay, so stock prices are not so great.

Michael Weinstein:

They are reflecting the fact that net profit margins are going to look different because, well, putting aside, right, because yes, they have a deferred tax asset. They’re going to have to start paying. They potentially have to start paying cash taxes that they’ve not been paying, and we can go dig into footnotes and SEC filing and lose the audience, but that’s also part of what’s going on, is it’s not just that they make their stuff all over the world, which by the way, we wrote a software code that told them to do that.

Todd Merrill:

Right, all right, be global, figure it out.

Michael Weinstein:

We told all corporations to run an ecosystem, not run a homogeneous, vertically integrated economic system in your own country, but we’ve just reduced their profit margin and the amount of excess cash they’ll be able to generate going forward if these things stay in place. Not unique to Apple. It’s just people are familiar with the story of Apple domiciling their profits in Ireland.

Todd Merrill:

Let’s look at the other side of the equation. Companies like, you see JOANN Fabric is going bankrupt again, but for real this time. No, I think, yeah, so they’re definitely liquidating this time.

Michael Weinstein:

Did you see, what is it? RH, the furniture guy?

Todd Merrill:

Okay, what happened there?

Michael Weinstein:

He fell 25% or something like that in the first hour of training and he was on an earnings conference call and he literally said, oh…

Todd Merrill:

… got to go. Oh, no kidding.

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah, because I think it ended up down 40% yesterday or something like that.

Todd Merrill:

That’s crazy.

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Well, there’s definitely something going on. Corporate leadership at all kinds of different phases of growth, sizes of companies are a little bit freaked out and on pause, wait and see. For the most part, I think you look structurally at jobs, lots of layoffs in the news, lots of companies going out that have been institutions on bricks and mortar basis, but also tech and lots of other places. You see, you look at the federal government, there’s definitely a downsizing going on there. You look at the last couple of years, jobs have been fairly steady, but you look at, like, you dig into which jobs, it was all government jobs.

Michael Weinstein:

No, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Well, a lot of government jobs.

Michael Weinstein:

Employment has been slowly shrinking for a long time at the federal level. Again, at the federal level.

Todd Merrill:

But I think this is a shock event in that employment arena.

Michael Weinstein:

 Yeah

Todd Merrill:

I don’t know how long, I can’t get a good reading. I talked to a couple of people in DC this last week and they said, yeah, we’re getting laid off, but not for a while. So nobody is really acting, but then you talk to other people and it’s like, oh my God, we’re losing all our contracts in the consulting world.

Michael Weinstein:

Not going to lose sleep over that one person.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. Well, you know, you don’t want anybody to lose business or lose a job, but it is a shock economically. What are all those people going to do? And then surely that’s a boat anchor on the economy or economic development. How does all that get unwound? Government doesn’t all of a sudden start doing anything usually. So, what’s going to happen to DC and places like that? A lot of these government jobs aren’t there anymore. But a lot of big companies are laying off, downsizing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50%, some of them. You think that’s really … that’s not just like AI is more efficient, right? This is something else.

Michael Weinstein:

There’s an alignment of surveys and behavior that are telling us that the headline number of unemployment and how people feel about their employment are not in sync. If we said we’ve had protracted U-3 unemployment in the three and a half, 4% for a couple of years, you would think employees would be feeling pretty good. And even we’ve known for months that people feel comfortable about switching jobs, that stopped, right? That’s a really important economic indicator, which is people choose a bird in the hand over potentially something better in the bush. Right? That’s the uncertainty effect. The NFIB survey of capital spending by small businesses fell drastically in the February reading. It looked like the beginning of COVID. Well, that’s a problem because small businesses, which are where the growth is, are the hirers of tomorrow. So, if they’re not going to spend money, they’re not going to hire, right? So, here we go. It’s like we’re removing a segment of the natural process of the business cycle out of the process, and then we’re putting some external shock, and we don’t know the magnitude of the shock yet, onto the system, right? If the federal government says, whether rightly or wrongly, we’re going to let a half a million people or a million people put them on the unemployment rolls who have a particular set of skills that aren’t necessary because we’ve told them we want you to have these skills, and they’re all over the country, even though we think a lot of it’s concentrated in DC.

Todd Merrill:

That’s true.

Michael Weinstein:

Where do people go, right? I used to work in a national park in Utah, and they just… and then in some of these things, you get a secondary and tertiary, a multiplier effect, right? Because if now we can’t have as many people go into national parks and things like that, in a lot of towns around national parks, their economic livelihood is dependent on the tourism for the national park, right? So, you get a multiplier around it. We know airlines have cut back on their summer expectations for travel. We know foreigners are cutting back on coming to the US. But your point is well taken, which is we don’t have… the closest thing we might have to this, but it was so different, was the end of World War II, where we had 5.5 million GIs coming home, and we had to have something for them to do, places to live. We had to feed them. We had to get them jobs. We had to get them educated, right? Because you could think of them as government employees, all of a sudden unemployed, right? We had a mini recession, 46, 47, and then we passed the rule set. We put in software into our economy that said we’re going to support housing construction. We’re going to have the GI Bill to educate them. We’re going to support manufacturing growth because we have to employ that. All those people and the secondary people and the tertiary people who are coming out of the… and we have to transition our factories from making airplanes and tanks back to making cars and washing machines, right?

So, we wrote rules to do that, and it worked, right? And then for a long period of time, we had this really, really… the greatest period of reported GDP growth in the United States, 1950s, because you also get new household formation. We were having babies, and so we needed bigger houses and more washing machines and refrigerators. No one sort of articulated a vision. Well, this is where we want to get to so you can say, will that rule set get us there?

So, we have all this noise, and I think on net, that makes people more uncomfortable. And there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable speaking in public that otherwise might be speaking in public right now, who are just choosing not to answer questions because of the way our media ecosystems work. So, if they say, look, I just think what we’re doing… let’s say a CEO of a major bank came out and said, I think what we’re doing is probably going to cause a recession, and it’s going to be bad.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Michael Weinstein:

Almost like people are self-censoring. Or if Larry Fink, one of the biggest asset managers in the world, came out and said, wait a minute, this… because they were one of the big pushes into, we should invest in renewables and alternative energy because of climate change. And now there’s no incentive to voice your opinion in the public square. So, people aren’t hearing from the people we would otherwise think as our informal leaders what might be doing. We haven’t seen the CEO of Stellantis, General Motors, or Chrysler come into… Chrysler, sorry, Ford, get on CNBC and say, this is what this will do to our business. And we’re going to have…

Stellantis has shut factories, but the others can’t be far behind because we now can’t get parts. So, the cost of manufacturing has gone up. It’s going to hurt employment. Okay. So direct employment goes down. Auto parts employment goes down. The community surrounding those auto parts manufacturers goes… right. The local main street in those little towns is affected. And to say, well, in three years, we’re going to have moved. So, we’re making 85% of our cars, assembling 85% of our cars onshore. That’s cold comfort to people while they’re going through all this. And if I’m an executive, I’m facing a multi-billion dollar investment decision for a factory that’s going to have to last me 15, 20, 30 years. And I’m going to say, wait a minute. But in two years, this whole thing may just change. How do I make investment decisions of that magnitude and that duration?

Todd Merrill:

Right. I think one thing is clear. Somebody is going to have to start some new activity, right? Entrepreneurship has to lead us out. So, we have to start new initiatives, either new manufacturing, new sectors, new something, new software technology businesses, new real estate businesses, real, you know, all the above. Somebody has to fix the toilet. Somebody has to plumb the electric wires through the house. These are all economic activities. And then I think if I look at the tech ecosystem, it’s very difficult to raise money on that second round. We used to call it Series A. I’m not sure what they call it now. Maybe it’s a seed or I don’t know.

Michael Weinstein:

Seed plots.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, I don’t know. So, you raise a little bit of money from your friends and family. I think there are still people who will put money behind their friends and family. Capital-efficient startups, whatever that is, right? Figure that out. Start to turn revenue quickly, right? So not that many moonshots because you can’t risk it right now. There’s no room for mulligans in this economy. And then I saw a thing go by where they call it… what is it called? Seed strapping, where people are now getting real funny because entrepreneurs are just going, yeah, we’ll raise a safe round, which is convertible debt.

Michael Weinstein:

That’s the info way of writing.

Todd Merrill:

And it never converts because, hey, we don’t want to grow corn status. We’re just going to have a lifestyle business. And then you keep these people in it. It’s a liquidity problem like you were talking about on another scale. But I think people are starting to think through, okay, how can we do this fairly? And then determine evaluation later, even if you don’t take another round of money, or time-bound or something. So, you see the juices of creativity in the entrepreneur sector, financing. It’s all kind of related.

Michael Weinstein:

So, isn’t that the silver lining in this, we hope? We suffer from survivor bias.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. For sure.

Michael Weinstein:

Right? It’s really easy to see like Intel and Microsoft after it happens, right? Because we don’t know if all the guys in Apple when they come out with the Mac because we don’t know who is to who. We saw a lot of it in COVID, right? People left corporate kind of normal jobs, and they started all kinds of interesting businesses. So, Etsy then takes off in their garages. So, here’s my one bet, history tells us that the incumbent large companies are not the ones that create the next new thing.

Michael Weinstein:

Yes

Todd Merrill:

Even if they try and create barriers to what happened through monopolization, oligopolization, making the capital ante be a billion dollars, things like that. What we don’t know is, who is Steve Jobs and Wozniak in a garage, playing with parts and coming up with something. Who’s the Henry Ford coming up with something that looks so obvious after the fact? And creates potentially a whole new industry with mass employment associated with it, that five years from now, we’ll look back and go, of course, that made sense, right? It’s so obvious to see after it happened. And I think the great hope in all of this is that we’ve had these cycles of entrepreneurialism in the United States repeatedly occur. Because again, the memory of, we don’t educate people real well, but people don’t remember the depression of the 1880s. It was horrible. It was as bad, if not worse, of the 1930s, right? And every railroad went bust. But out of that emerges US Steel. Out of that emerges, you know, Georgia-Pacific, out of that emerges, right? But you had to build the stuff first so that things like that could happen and then you could have the growth of the steel industry. And you couldn’t have, again, I just know a lot about the steel industry, but you know, we talk about technology today and we think of it as computers and software and the internet and AI. But think about the technology of the day, which is, oh my God, now there’s this thing called the Bessemer furnace. Oh, now we have this thing called the open hearth. Oh, now we have this thing called the basic oxygen furnace. Because you don’t have plentiful, cheap hydrocarbons and you don’t have steel. You don’t have an industrial revolution. But you couldn’t go to 1850 and say this was going to happen.

It was iron, right? And it happened. So maybe the hope in all this is someone will get some kids coming out of, you know, Georgia Tech, I don’t know. And it’s going to say, I don’t want to work for one of those companies. I’m going to go into my garage because I got an idea.

Todd Merrill:

You know, it’s interesting. I’m doing a couple of mentor programs, you know, pitch competitions for the university crowd associated with an investment organization. So, somebody was commenting over the last two years, you know, it’s not all tech. It’s not another app. You know, you’re seeing, hey, I’m going to have a lifestyle resort. Hey, I’m going to do a cooking channel or catering kitchen. People are starting really basic businesses and getting traction. And it was kind of interesting and refreshing. Yes, you have a couple of medical devices. Yes, you have a couple of software companies, but they’re not doing like, hey, we’re going to be the Uber for whatever. You know, it’s no, we’re just like, I’m going to write this little bit of software. It’s going to help a couple of nurses do their job a little better. And, you know, we’re charging $59.95 a month and people are buying it. You know, they’re like, oh, okay. You know, this is kind of fun.

Michael Weinstein:

I don’t know the answer to this question off the top of my head. But what is McDonald’s annual domestic sales, right? It’s some ridiculous number, right? So, when Ray Kroc sold a milkshake machine to a bunch of guys with a stand outside of Chicago where the whole thing started. Could you have ever looked at that and said it’s going to have $100 billion in sales so we can look it up quick, right? But you couldn’t look at it at that time. One of the most prominent tech companies, I know some, which I don’t want to use their name because I don’t want to cause a problem, but I know people who work for a very prominent former CEO who’s associated with having created it. Okay? And I asked these guys, they’re very senior. They since left, they said, did that person know it was going to turn into what it would turn into at the time they did it? They said no.

Todd Merrill:

No. Just a good thing.

Michael Weinstein:

It was just the right thing at the right time. Even when it was a big, prominent name, it nearly failed a couple of times and broke the economic conditions or they had to transition the business or they needed to develop new skills to turn into one of the most prominent corporations in the US 20 years later.

Todd Merrill:

So, my family has quick-serve restaurant franchises. Not that one, but different ones. And so we talk about this a lot. So you make the money on the dirt, not necessarily on the franchise.

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

And then McDonald is a classic, hey, you’re not in the burger business, you’re in the real estate business. So, if you look at commercial real estate right now, it’s another kind of major shock to the system from five, six years ago. And how does all that get unwound? We’re looking around our little small town where my dad still is. And he’s going, man, I don’t understand why people are paying that much for that dirt. And then over and over and over again, where’s all this stupid money coming from? And then what game are they playing? So, there’s a lot of weird economic, either he doesn’t understand the economy, which I don’t think is true, or somebody else is like just spraying and praying, or there’s some kind of weird greater fool theory going on.

Michael Weinstein:

Or there’s another option, which is debt increases fixed asset prices.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. Okay. So, it’s harder to get the dirt at any price.

Michael Weinstein:

If there’s more debt available, people can use more of the debt to buy homes, home prices go up.

Todd Merrill:

Money is cheaper, stuff is cheaper.

Michael Weinstein:

If I can borrow more money, I can afford to go to college. The colleges can raise the prices, right? On a real basis, relative to what I paid to go to undergraduate, relative to what it costs today. I’m like, huh? Right? But it’s because it’s all done with that.

Todd Merrill:

Sure

Michael Weinstein:

Right. So, what is commercial real estate? We’ve increased the leverage underneath it throughout the system. It increases asset prices. The asset price has increased, either you’re buying it or your lease rates just went up.

Todd Merrill:

And you can’t sell it because you’re highly leveraged. Okay.

Michael Weinstein:

And if the market pauses, right? You’re stuck.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

Maybe again. So, people should learn what a debt jubilee is.

Todd Merrill:

Debt jubilee. Okay. That’s old school. Okay.

Michael Weinstein:

In 2009 had a debt jubilee. What is that? Just cancel it all. All of it. Right? So, then you restore the loan to values back to reasonable levels. Right? People aren’t just running to stand still to service debt. So, I tell this really interesting story. There’s a longer component to it. But the basic, the part that matters is I work for friends, very close friends, owned a medium-sized supermarket chain in the Northeast. And actually, the guy who becomes the CEO, this is a true story, is responsible for the fact that we have barcoding. There is a verifiable story with a great twist in it. So, I needed a summer job in high school. I worked in the supermarket. So, look at a supermarket in that the store manager, the produce manager, the meat manager on Long Island, not the cheapest place in the world, could own a house, send their kids to college, live in a nice community, take their vacation every year. They could have a middle-class existence working in a supermarket. Can’t do that now.

Todd Merrill:

On one income.

Michael Weinstein:

On one income.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Michael Weinstein:

Because now the amount of debt service that people have to service because we told people to borrow more money, you can live a better lifestyle. So instead of real income going up, we said borrow more. And we reached lever up and we’ve reached the end of that kind of ability for the middle class to play that game. So it goes back to sort of your, one more thing, commercial real estate. We’re not talking like tall buildings in midtown Manhattan. We’re talking, you know, Main Street kind of commercial real estate.

Todd Merrill:

Four-story class A, you know, office space.

Michael Weinstein:

And it’s levered up.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Michael Weinstein:

So, then they got to service the debt. You got to service the debt or it’s collateralized into an instrument and you got to service that instrument and now tenants have to pay for it. So, it’s just increased the cost. And that’s one of the reasons why the US is a high cost. You know, they call it FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate). We are an expensive place because of those sectors to do business. Because they take, I got to use an economic word, they take rent out of the system. And by the way, insurance rates are going up because of climate change and losses and storms and all those kinds of things. Different issue.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Michael Weinstein:

People leaving in Florida, why? My insurance cost is too high relative to my mortgage. I can’t afford it. Bye.

Todd Merrill:

Right? Right. Yeah. Well, my cousin is a realtor in Sarasota and he was saying, you know, locally, there’s a lot of people exiting the economy down there for a lot of reasons.

Michael Weinstein:

Mom was from Sarasota.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Okay. A small world.

Michael Weinstein:

Underage world after all.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So, tell her to hang on to her house.

Michael Weinstein:

She had been in a planned community for a few years when she had to give up driving. You know, she’s elderly. And has a great situation and it’s a really good setup. And she just wants to get her sons and grandkids to come visit her more often. And we keep telling her, it’s too hot and humid in Florida. Forget it, Mom.

Todd Merrill:

So, you had a really cool story I want to get in here at the end. You said something to me one time where, you know, you were talking about the skill set needed to early career versus late career. You said something that was kind of cool. Early, it’s about the technical execution skills. And at some point, you cross the boundary and it’s all about the politics. And the bigger the company, the more politics. Everybody kind of, you know, always bitches and moans about politics. But you want to talk about that for a second?

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah. I can’t draw it on the screen. But if people thought about two equilateral triangles, right? So early in your career, a lot of the things you do are about your sort of technical skills in a broad sense of the word, technical skills, right? Or your ability to do things. And you don’t need a lot of political skills to exist in an organization. We shouldn’t view politics necessarily as a bad word. As soon as you put two people in a room, we have politics. We’re human beings. We’re social animals. But over time, advancing becomes less about, in my view, the technical skills and more about the political skills. And I think one of the things that made me think about this was Steve Jobs. Right?

So, Steve Jobs was running this big multi-billion-dollar corporation, yet he never let go of the fundamental parts of the technology in terms of how they were designed, how they worked. He wasn’t sitting in an office tower, you know, 2,000 miles away from where things were happening. His technical skills remain very strong. And I think that was one of the reasons that Apple was able to innovate sort of all these products, which were mostly evolutionary anyway because he could still do both.

Todd Merrill:

Very rare, right? Very rare.

Michael Weinstein:

I think it’s too rare. For those of us who are old enough, there was a TV show called TV Nation or something like that, and by Michael Moore. It was kind of funny. He stands out of the Colgate-Palmolive building and says … I can’t remember who the CEO is. “Can you come down and show me how you get the toothpaste into the tube?”

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha. Okay.

Michael Weinstein:

And he challenges the then-CEO of Ford, can you change the oil in a car? And he took him up on it and showed that he could do it. Maybe the message here is if you lose touch with the core business that your business is really in, manufacturing and making cars work or selling consumer products or making loans, how many CEOs of banks actually know how originating loans really function anymore? Because they’ve been so far away from it for so long. If you’re in American Express, how your customers really use your piece of plastic these days. So, what struck me, again, where I came up with that sort of little simple model is, was thinking about Steve Jobs and the fact that we associated technology as much with him with the corporation. And I don’t think that was false and I don’t think that was an accident. So don’t lose sight of what your company really does and what you really need to do just because you want to advance up the corporate ladder. And I think that would produce a better class of CEOs and corporate executives, right? Or sales guys. Who was the guy who founded Southwest Airlines? So, Kellerman or Kelleher. He still sat in the plane. He didn’t sit in a select. He didn’t fly in a private plane. He sat on the plane with customers. He experienced what their product was. So, he could go back and say, hey, we got people who are unhappy because we need to fix this, right? It took us too long to push away from the gate. So, he knew how the product fundamentally functioned, and he could do both. And I think that’s the lesson that I would urge people to take away from that.

Todd Merrill:

So, I have this theory that’s kind of interesting. It dovetails into what you’re talking about is, I believe that as you go up the growth curve, and this is based on your academic research, different skill sets are needed to get you up in different parts of the build. So very focused individual contributor, very talented, high risk, high reward. And then there’s a second gear where, hey, you’re building the infrastructure, you’re building the policy procedure systems. You’re still building. Can’t be a cowboy. And then so now that kind of aligns with your, you know, you’ve gone from technical or individual execution to people organizational skills, right? And then at some point, you shift in this late stage, just don’t screw up. Protect the monopoly.

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Just advance a little bit. Hey, we got a good thing going here. Just keep it going, right? And then just up until the right, just a little bit. Don’t do it all in one quarter. And manage steady, right? And then so that kind of transforms into a lot of people skills. You’d call it political type of skills, right? And politics has got a nasty tone to it.

Michael Weinstein:

I’m not trying to suggest that at all.

Todd Merrill:

But, you know, there’s a lot of complex interaction at a very large organization. At the C level, I think a lot of people don’t get to see that, but there’s a lot of trade-offs all the time. A lot of involvement. Why does it take so long for Apple to come out with a new product or Ford or whatever? Well, there’s a lot going on, right? Everything has a trade-off because you’re into everything. It’s not so simple.

Michael Weinstein:

Probably 10, 12 years after I got my MBA, I was sitting with the dean of my business school. I said, “Look, let’s be honest about something. I could take an MBA education, and I could probably get the whole thing into a 55-page PowerPoint deck. And he kind of stares at me and goes, well. I said, “No, no, no. What’s the real value of going to business school? Learning how to work with people who you wouldn’t necessarily choose to work with of your own free will because that’s how the real world of business is. How to work with people.” I don’t want to work with Todd, right? Why would I want to work with Todd? He doesn’t…

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha. Yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

And it’s all those little compromises, which are… I’m not saying that’s not a bad thing.

Todd Merrill:

Right. You have to coexist and move forward.

Michael Weinstein:

Right. Right.

Todd Merrill:

And sales hates engineering, hates marketing, hates the lawyers, hates the whatever, right? Or not hates, but doesn’t enjoy working with because it’s at odds to progress.

Michael Weinstein:

I just want to sell. I just want to sell. I want to sell. Why can’t manufacturing deliver the time? Well, but you’re not saying we have these other problems that we have to deal with. And a lot of times, what are senior managers doing? They’re playing referees or marriage counselors.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, right.

Michael Weinstein:

The natural tensions in an organization to coexist with each other.

Todd Merrill:

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that’s sage advice. Well, just wrapping up, Michael, you’re a traveling man. I know you’ve got some really awesome travel stories to share. Can you pick one for us and maybe share that with us?

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah. So, I thought about which one to use because like you said, I’ve traveled a lot in my career. And I think I settled on the following one. So, I had a four-month-old daughter. And I was working as a management consultant in Boston. And I was working for one of the more prominent Indian companies from India. And the phone rings. Am I allowed to say name names?

Todd Merrill:

Sure, why not?

Michael Weinstein:

So, Ratan Tata.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Michael Weinstein:

I could have lunch with you in Paris tomorrow.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, okay. Yes, sir.

Michael Weinstein:

All good consultants. There was a thing called the garment bag in those days that we could travel with. This was probably 1991 or 90 or something like that. And it’s called, my wife said, you know, because it’s my anniversary. I said, you know, our anniversary dinner tomorrow, right? And she goes, yes. And you might want to cancel it. She goes why? I’m going to Paris. Sorry, I got to get on a plane. So, I fly to Paris. And we have this great lunch. And this is where the fun part of the story kind of really starts. So, it’s like probably 2:33. And I had to get back to De Gaulle from downtown central Paris to get a plane, an Air France plane to connect to an American Airlines plane in London to get back onto the East Coast of the United States for a business meeting the next day. And I said, you know, it’s right in that time zone where I’ll take the Metro because it may not be faster, but it’s predictable.

Todd Merrill:

Sure

Michael Weinstein:

Right? And I’m not going to hop in a cab. So, my luck as you can see De Gaulle and there’s a problem and we sit there and we sit there and I’m like, now I’m starting to look at my watch. And I get out of the train and I get into the interterminal bus. And I don’t remember all the terminal letters in De Gaulle, but we get to terminal E and I’m trying to get to G, which is like around the loop. And I said to the bus driver, and he’s just sitting there. I said, “Can we go? I’m trying to catch my plane.” “We will go when we will go.” If he says anything else, we’re definitely not going. So, I finally get to my terminal and I go running through the door with my briefcase and my full-size garment bag. And I emigrate out of the country and I go walking up to the gate really quickly. And there’s my plane sitting there attached to the jetway. And I probably had 30, 35 minutes to spare, said, “Here’s my ticket.” There were these things called paper tickets in those days. The gate attendant says, “You weren’t here 45 minutes before the flight. You can’t board the flight.” I said, “It’s not going anywhere for another half hour.” “You’re here in time. You’re not boarding the flight.” I said, “Well, who do I talk to? I want to try and get back to the US?” “Go talk to that guy over there.” So, I pick up my bag and I go over to this guy who’s sitting typing something into a terminal. I said, “Can you help me?” He goes when I’m done with what I’m doing, I will help you. That’s it.

Yep. Okay. Cue the Jeopardy music. I said, “I need to get back to the US tonight.” And he types into his terminal. He says, “British Airways has a flight coming at, going at a terminal,” whatever, which is the octopus-like terminal that can get you to London, that can get you on a BA flight back. I can’t remember if I was going to New York or Boston. I said, “Okay. I go.” Now I have to emigrate back to France.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, yeah. Great.

Michael Weinstein:

And it’s like coming out the door of the terminal. They’re cruising in a terminal bus.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Michael Weinstein:

Hop in a cab and said, take me to the terminal. I can’t remember the letter. And the guy starts grousing. And I said, “Look, I’m going to give you the same amount of money in francs that you would get as though you were taking me to Central Paris. And I know that the way the system works because you’re just taking me from one terminal to another, you get back at the front of the line anyway. So just shut up and drive.”

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha. Oh, God.

Michael Weinstein:

I didn’t want to be rude. But, you know, so I go rushing into the British Airways terminal. I go up to the counter and I say to the guy, “Can I get back to the States tonight?” And he goes to his computer and he says, “Yep.” And I said, “Great.” He said, “We have one more business class seat left out of London.” I go, “Terrific. I’m not going to be crammed in the back of the plane.” And I hand him my American Airlines ticket. He goes, “Oh.” I said, “Oh, what?” Well, again, people who weren’t around those days, people like me remember the computer systems and talk to each other because I called American and got permission to transfer this ticket to a British Airways ticket. I said, “Stop right there.” And he goes, “What?” I go, “How long before the plane to London leaves? Do I have to be at the gate? Because if I have a time limit, I’m just going to buy a new ticket.”  When I get back to the States, I’ll just return the ticket for a credit. It goes, “Oh, as long as you’re there before we close the door, we don’t care.” So, it’s fine. So, he called American Airlines, and American, of course, gave him the right code. And I got my British Airways seat and I walked up to the British Airways flight and I got on the plane and I made it to London and I made it back to the States and unnecessarily hassled. And people should be really glad for the technologies that let all these things talk to themselves now because there was a time when it was all manual.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

That’s my little story in the time we had from just a fun snippet of no stress, a lot of stress, a lot, a lot of stress. I think I’ll have a scotch sitting in my seat flying to London.

Todd Merrill:

And then how did your wife take it when you came home?

Michael Weinstein:

Okay, that’s that. Because I travel as a consultant like 200 plus nights a year and racked up frequent flyer miles like, you know, their candy. And again, this is still paper tickets. I said, well, I call up American. Well, one of the things I used to do is I used to give my assistant four ticket vouchers for her holiday gift because the last thing I want to do is get in an airplane. So, I called up American and I was in the first group of people ever to be platinum on American. So, I call them up. I get two first-class tickets to Paris. My wife at that point never been to Paris. And I put them in a drawer. They sent me that, you know, the nice American cardboard folder and the crappy paper ticket that was inside it with the…it was like carbon paper.

Todd Merrill:

Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Weinstein:

I put it in my underwear drawer where she would never go. And I come home from a business trip four or five months later, and I don’t know if she’s upset about something. She is a new mom. It’s a lot of stress being a new mom. You know, I wasn’t going to tell her until I had arranged to fly my parents up and they were going to take care of our daughter. Then we’re going to go for the anniversary. So, you know, exactly a year later. So, I said I’ll let her know and I handed her one of these ticket envelopes and she opened it up and goes, “You’re going to Paris again?” And I go, “Look at whose name is on the ticket.” And she sees her name and then breaks out in tears. So that’s that. And we had a great trip to Paris.

Todd Merrill:

Very nice.

Michael Weinstein:

So, it does sort of have a really, really happy ending and a very, very memorable trip for the two of us.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Michael Weinstein:

And our first trip away from our daughter. A toddler at that point.

Todd Merrill:

Super memorable. And Paris is great. Except for the airport. You know, a lot of people don’t like that airport.

Michael Weinstein:

So yeah, but flying American in those days, you went to Orly. You didn’t go to De Gaulle.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That would be better for sure. Wow!

Michael Weinstein:

Yeah. But now we’re at the stage where all airports stink.

Todd Merrill:

Well, yeah, for sure. Well, Michael, it’s been great having you on the show. How could people get in touch with you after this on the internet if they want to follow up on anything?

Michael Weinstein:

The easiest way to find me is to go to techcxo.com and look at our people and you’ll find all my contact information there. And certainly, we welcome people reaching out and continuing the dialogue in a different venue.

Todd Merrill:

Well, great, Michael. Thanks.

Michael Weinstein:

And thanks, Todd. And have a great weekend.

Todd Merrill:

Bye for now.

Michael Weinstein:

Bye