Tag: Business

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: An obsession with risk and the management of its destructive elements

It’s certainly worth a discussion, although I had been avoiding reading the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, mainly because it was a Time Magazine view of the world, and I tend not to enjoy books like that very much.  I’ve read other books by Isaacson and enjoyed them enough to learn new things.  In this case, Isaacson was given access to Elon Musk for the last few years to study him and learn all he could.  So, it was worth reading about the daily life and details of a person who is often the wealthiest in the world and runs some of the most successful companies.  But politically, I think of Elon Musk as a Barack Obama fanboy and a global greenie weenie.  But I do admire how he built Tesla.  I’m certainly not a EV fan of electric cars, but Tesla has carved out a nice little niche for themselves that I think is valuable.  SpaceX is an incredible company that is doing wonderful things.  I’m a tremendous fan of the Starship program and what has been done with Falcon 9 and the Dragon program.  I appreciate them for what they are, and I think Musk is just a unique personality to continue healthily pushing society places it needs to go.  I think of him as a great case of “dynamic intellectualism” that I talk about with the Metaphysics of Quality and the philosophy of Robert Persig.  But Elon Musk smoked pot on the Joe Rogan Show and wanted to put fart apps into his very expensive Tesla cars, so he’s not my kind of guy and people like Isaacson tend to get the surface qualities of his subjects, but not the real intellectual gist of their value.  However, after reading Elon Musk by Isaacson, the unavoidable trait of the secret to success did emerge without question, which is why I kept hearing about the book from friends and respected business leaders. 

Since the book came out in the fall of 2023, I have had at least someone once a week asking me if I had read the book since I usually read everything that comes out.  But I typically avoid the trendy stuff and lean more toward big-picture things.  I wasn’t interested in another get-rich book by people fascinated with wealth creation viewed through a popular cultural lens.  But so many people were getting the book and passing it out to their management teams, looking for some secret sauce that Musk obviously has.  So when I was at dinner with some very important people at Son of the Butcher at Liberty Center in Ohio, and under great encouragement from those people indicated that I would love the book, I left that dinner, stopped by the bookstore, and bought it just before Barnes and Noble closed for the night, and I promised them the next time I would see them, I would have read the book and told them what I thought of it.  That was on a Thursday night, so by Monday, when I would see some of them again, I had read the book, it’s a pretty big book with a lot of details in it.  Many people had bought the book, but they hadn’t made it very far through, and they wanted to know my opinion on whether to continue slugging through it.  In truth, it was a good book; Walter did a good job for a Simon and Schuster publication intended for static society audiences.  And I would say it’s one of the most important books of our time, for a lot of reasons, which I’ll spend separate articles covering.  But the secret sauce, yes, it was there and in all its glory.  I understood it, and it’s something I relate to. 

Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump when I think of Elon Musk and how wealth has been projected over time.  Trump’s Art of the Comeback from 1997 was about knowing influential people, supermodels, wives, exotic cars, and tall skyscrapers.  And in the part of the book where Elon Musk went through his period of wealth acquisition, Walter Isaacson seemed to be on comfortable ground.  However, in the cover inserts were exciting value changes for Elon Musk.  The things that Musk thinks are successful and what Trump thought was successful have changed a lot over time.  Musk had exhibitions of massive engineering feats displayed in his book, where Trump featured the building of skyscrapers and the New York skyline.  But while the things that wealth could buy as a value may have changed, getting there had not.  Most wealthy people have some prevalent traits they share in common, which is the concern of Walter’s books, especially with Steve Jobs.  What makes successful people successful?  And everyone talking to me about the book wanted to know this.  “If I read this book, will it make me successful?  Can we pass this book on to our super managers and sales teams and learn something from Elon Musk to help us be more successful?”  The answer is yes.  However, knowing how to be successful doesn’t mean most people have the guts to do so.  You can’t cheat that, even though that is what causes most of the corruption in the world—the desire to take the easy way to wealth to have the benefits without the downside. 

The downside with Musk and Trump, along with many others who have done similar things, even Jeff Bezos, is that they are addicted to risk and obsessed with it.   Elon Musk is a classic riverboat gambler who loves risk.  But has the unique personality to be very intelligent enough to know when and how to mitigate risk.  But yes, he is an obsessive gambler who would play Texas Hold ’em’ by pushing all in for every pot, blowing a lot of money in the process.  But in so doing, he would also get the biggest jackpots.  And that’s clearly how he achieved success at the level he did.  Anybody wanting to succeed would have to learn to bring more risk to their lives to have the success that comes from winning big.  A gambler like that might spend a fortune on betting.  But mathematically speaking, people like Musk and Trump know that eventually, things will swing in your direction.  What separates them from everyone else is how much you can take until you fold up on yourself, broke and destitute.  Musk certainly has a personality that could be homeless and poor beyond any reasonable scale because he is a person obsessed with risk.  I get it; I have many of those same traits.  It’s not the money someone like him is interested in.  But its success in risking and surviving, that is.  And without that risk, there would be no success.  Elon Musk would be just another person with Asperger’s and too much brain power, applying it to a static society that is not interested in risk.  They wanted everything safe and predictable and would push themselves by nature as far from the Elon Musk types as they could, to maintain their safe lives.  That’s what makes Walter’s book so good because it indeed chronicles this risky behavior in ways that the public usually doesn’t get to see in people.  But just buying the book wouldn’t make people successful by itself.  What it could do, though, was let people understand that risk is critical to business and how risk is managed is the key to all successful enterprises, which is my general opinion of the book.  Yes, people should read it.  However, they should learn from it how to put more risk into their lives without becoming destructive.  Because there is no way to cheat risk, you either develop a healthy relationship with risk or get standard, predictable results that stagnate and rot you and your culture from the inside out.  Luckily for us, there are people like Elon Musk out there who are making things exciting.  But, there should be a lot more, and maybe yet, there will be.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Attack Against America Through Property Ownership: When the Fed prints fake money to give power to foreign interests it should have always been obvious

It continues to mystify me that more people don’t realize the war that has been waged against America on many fronts. I was reminded of this the other day when I got an offer to buy my home from some investment company which has been happening at least twice a week for a while now. They have been doing this a lot lately, not just me, but lots of people, and the first question everyone should have is where these companies got all this money to buy all these homes for the top price? And why are they doing it? Then I heard that a company I know well north of Dayton, Ohio, family-owned and famous for it, had sold out to a similar conglomerate. If people have not been paying attention, those mom-and-pop shops around the country are becoming very rare and being replaced with corporate conglomerates. Then, we learned the real reason for many of these purchases, which was exposed during COVID-19. The belief that the government has with its corporate partnerships is that it can rule over the world if only it controls how people make money, and the primary way to do that is to turn people from owners of property into renters. In that way, people are forced like hamsters to continue running on the treadmill of life, not off the value of their property, forcing people to do whatever the government says to make money to live. It’s a very sinister game and a very silent and private mode of attack that has been utilized to do what Karl Marx always wanted: to give governments the means of controlling production. To do that, you have to gain power over private ownership, which is the homes and businesses of average Americans.

The game plan was exposed when the government thought it could in 2021 mandate vaccines to all companies somehow connected to government work, which, if you count contractors, was just about everyone in some way or another.  It was quite obvious that a sinister plan was unveiled in those treacherous times of lockdowns and the Biden administration’s open border policies.  But there was something even worse happening that few people had a mind to see, a mode of attack that was always a concern in America, especially when we allowed the Federal Reserve to control our monetary policy starting in 1913.  It has always been a weary experiment, but now the worst of it has become apparent.  It’s a nasty game that we have now witnessed through BlackRock activism and other money managers, and it’s the scheme behind this buying up of property in America so that the mob then owned the ownership of those assets to take that power away from individuals and give it to giant corporate conglomerates.  I have told this story before regarding The Lords of Easy money, in how Federal Reserve policy revolving around Modern Monetary Theory and Quantitative Easing have pumped money into Wall Street markets that are not represented in actual value but simply an overt form of money laundering where fake money is primed into the system to wash out behind a mask of actual value.  Through this method, these money managers have been able to get access to so much cash to buy up all these homes and companies so that they could turn Americans into renters when they were formerly owners. As we saw during COVID-19, attacking ownership was how central governments could flex their muscles under the disguise of a health crisis to test their ability to manipulate the mass public in new and sinister ways. 

This is precisely how all these ridiculous woke policies have been enacted so audaciously into public acceptance, such as ESG standards.  CEOs, too, have been replaced with woke leadership; this is obvious in popular media companies like Disney, where the company has been destroyed away from what Walt Disney envisioned.  Most entertainment these days, from record companies to film production, is now dominated by woke CEOs who put more value in stakeholder capitalism attempts than the traditional understandings of shareholder measures.  When Karl Marx talked about gaining the means of production, this was another way of performing the task.  When we talk about Bill Gates or China buying up massive amounts of American farmland, it’s not because they want to buy a tractor, wear coveralls, and change their careers from blood-sucking parasites to productive farmers.  They want to control the food supply by crushing out private ownership.  That’s what the message is in New York with Leticia James and her thugs of doom against the Trump Organization.  It’s to show that the courts can take away the rights of private businesses.  It’s no different from when the communists took over Russia, with Lenin leading the way.  By gaining control of property ownership, they gain then control of the means of production, which is what they have been after with this sinister game started at the Federal Reserve, where they print money recklessly, then pump it into an economy so that companies like BlackRock can prop up values and gain control of corporate boards with fake majority ownership.  And from there, they can set policies to control the means of production.  Remember when the terrorist Barack Obama told NASA to stop going to space but to study the influence Muslims had on science historically?  That’s what we are talking about and why we see so much of this corporate purchasing of private ownership in America. 

We are being attacked in many ways, all but the traditional ones that everyone is prepared for.  Regarding monetary policy, most people glaze over and assume that any discussion is over their pay grade.  They understand troops and tanks but have no idea how the Federal Reserve is connected to centralized banks and how all those roads go back to the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. They want desperately to impose new rules on the most productive economy in the world, the capitalist-driven wonder that is America fueled by private property ownership.  The concept of private property drives everything in America, and that notion is being attacked at a fundamental level.  It is tempting to sell off a home that people raised their families in and infuse them with sudden cash that disappears in a few years rather than the memories that build lives around the idea of ownership.  The same is true for companies where market values are determined by competitive enterprises rather than adherence to government policies.  The government must have a monopoly over private ownership to get the stakeholder capitalism concept to work. In the 2020s, they thought they had enough to sell the effects of the COVID policy broadcast from sources outside the United States that these money managers had more power than the government that represented the country’s people.  And it was one of the most overt and sinister attacks by any collected mass of enforcement the world has yet witnessed.  But a lot of short-sighted people took the phony, made-up cash from the Federal Reserve and bought a new boat or blew the money on expensive vacations for short-run gains, only to become slaves to the system in the aftermath, which was always an attack on the American way of life to destroy it forever and erase its effectiveness from the pages of history, so a new Marxist policy could be utilized by a one world government, built on fake money and centralized power to enact tyranny to every, single person on earth.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Speed and Risk Make Things Better: The nightmare of the By-Pass 4 interchanges

There is a silent evil that works in the world that I had to explain to a few smart people this past week, which deserves to be heard by everyone.  One of the great examples of this evil is a road I have driven on for many decades, the By-Pass 4 interchange in Butler County, Ohio, one of the largest arteries for industrial traffic in a very productive county.  It used to be that I could drive 100 mph down that road all the time, and it was never a problem.  But these days, there are too many lights at every intersection to get up any speed before you have to slow down again, which is, of course, by design.  Over the years, to answer all the upset families who lost people to car crashes, not to mention the complaints of the insurance industry who had to make payouts on all the minor fender bender claims, the answer to this overly managed world is to lower the speed limit, put up more stop signs and traffic lights to frustrate high-speed travel in the name of safety.  But safety has a cost all its own, and productivity usually gets sacrificed.  If you can’t drive 100 mph, you will arrive at your destination much later, and among the world’s bureaucrats, there is almost a delightful glee when they tell you that something is going to take time because “it’s better safe than sorry.”  But to my eyes, the question must always be asked, “Is it?”  I would argue, and do all the time, that things were much better when we could drive 100 mph down By-Pass 4.  Sure, there were occasional crashes and deaths as a result.  But drivers were noticeably better; they had to be. Whenever you dumb down a human population with over-processing, you tend to inspire them to think less, and high-speed driving makes people think more, and they are better people as a result.

The solution to the By-Pass 4 complaints by the central planners who tend to get involved in these political problems of traffic management was to slow everyone down to where it’s faster to ride a bicycle and to take as much risk out of the process to make it so that accidents rarely happened.  This might be fine if the goal is to remove automobile accidents in your culture.  But if productivity is the goal, and speed is associated with that objective, then the By-Pass 4 exchanges along its path are devastating, which I point out in my video.  Without question, a World Economic Forum or United Nations statistician could show that such an arrangement will save lives and property value by eliminating crashes, but ultimately, the safest thing anybody could do if they didn’t want to have a collision is never to leave their house, and that looks to be the intention behind the traffic pattern design of Butler County.  Without question, everyone had good intentions, but the result of all this activity has produced slow roads that greatly limit personal freedom and make driving a real pain in the neck.  It takes a long time to get anywhere because political problems have always been solved over time by addressing complaints of every crash with more traffic lights, speed limits, and stop signs.  In the case of By-Pass 4, presenting traffic in such a way that a driver-side door never faces oncoming traffic to eliminate crashes that statistically occurred often when traffic had to engage each other at 90-degree angles and human decisions had to be made for everyone’s preservation.  By taking that decision-making process out of human hands, we must now ask whether we are all better off.  Is a safe society better than a risky society if the result is dumber humans? 

Of course, this is about more than traffic, and you can find this same mentality in almost every industry, particularly manufacturing.  Whenever there is an employee accident or an engineering challenge, the trend of the college-trained European worshipper is to put up the stopsticks and slow down a process to make a safer world.  But is it a better world, and I would argue it’s not?  Safer does not make something better.  That may be one value, but it’s certainly not the entire value.  As I always say from my favorite sport, Fast Draw, you have to manage speed and accuracy with the amount of risk your skill level allows.  If people are forced to improve their skills rather than pandering down to their weaknesses, often the result will be much better because the process of thinking makes it so that you get a better human being in the process, rather than playing to those weaknesses so that anybody can do anything.  That is the trend in our highly regulatory environment filled with government bureaucrats.  Their answer to everything is to slow things down so they can get their slow-minded, feeble minds wrapped around the problem.  Once you accept that strategy, your entire society is filled with timid people who lose the skill to manage risk because their lives depend on it.  Instead, they only need to know how to follow the rules and follow the guy in front of them as designed by some centralized planner. 

The result is that you might have fewer accidents, and you may fix the problem of quality escapes in whatever business you might be operating.  But like the traffic patterns, the safest thing you can do is to do nothing, and all too often, that is what we get out of society.  We get things slow, but at least we live to get them.  But the process of getting it kills us.  Because we may be alive physically, but our minds are dying because we stop challenging ourselves.  Such is the case in Butler County, Ohio; due to hundreds and thousands of traffic accidents and residential complaints, there are now traffic lights at almost every intersection where people travel.  And it’s tough to get from one place to another.  Not because the roads are bad.  They are pretty good.  But because there is too much starting and stopping, you can never get a good flow from your commute.  That is because the political solution to traffic problems was to hire pin-headed European-oriented Marxists to solve a uniquely American problem. You embrace risk and manage it for personal fulfillment, resulting in productive output.  Not that safety isn’t necessary, but it doesn’t take priority over productive enterprise, whether it’s getting to your destination 4-6 minutes faster or achieving a higher sales objective in your company.  Managing risk is the way to improve output.  Slowing everything down only panders to people’s weaknesses and, as a result, makes your society much less dynamic.  Everyone might live in the end, but is that the goal of life?  If everyone is just a brain-dead slug, is that better than a society where you could drive 100 mph to rock and roll music with the window down and vastly enjoy the experience because you don’t have to stop?  I’ve seen it both ways, and I can say from experience that driving 100 mph is far better.  Speed is better most of the time.  Among the skilled, accuracy can also be achieved.  But when you pander to society down to the weaknesses of the participants, then you get a lot more of it, and the satisfaction of an enterprise diminishes incredibly, such as we see every day at the By-Pass 4 interchanges created by monsters of Marxism and their bureaucratic plots of doom.  It’s good to live a little dangerously; it makes you a better and much happier person.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Communism of LinkedIn: It’s a dating app for job seekers who desire the destruction of corporate America

I was never a big fan of LinkedIn, even before they banned my account over my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which they thought was disparaging to their excellent relationship with China.  So, to answer the question I get at least 50 times a week, no, I am not on LinkedIn.  I was, for a while, out of some obligation I thought was part of the modern world.  But I had little value for it, so at the first dispute, we parted ways happily, which has provided me with just enough emotional distance to have an objective opinion about it.  LinkedIn has a very menacing presence in all actuality and is laced with communism in ways that an entire generation has not considered, and I find it despicable.  I view people with a job with a good company yet still maintain a LinkedIn profile as adulterous married people who always look at their dating apps with an eye on something better.  It is impossible to be in a committed relationship with a spouse while always looking out to see if there is someone better.  A job, like a good marriage, requires a commitment, and dating apps are a clear sign that one or both spouses are not committed to the relationship.  That is essentially what LinkedIn does; it is a dating app for job seekers.  And if someone has a good job and a good employer, well, they should be committed to that relationship, and they shouldn’t always be looking for a better job.  Some people out there, just like people who get divorced a lot, are always looking for the next best thing, and by jumping from job to job, they might find opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.  But that is my position on LinkedIn. It’s a dating app that shows a lack of commitment to an employer and that people who are on it all the time are one-foot-in, one-foot-out types of people who are not very valuable to an organization. 

Yet, there is something far worse with LinkedIn that indicates its Chinese roots, which it is well known for supporting.  The hidden message of LinkedIn is that people don’t matter and that leadership is embodied in the collective, not the individual.  LinkedIn goes against the gunfighter metaphor that I use often, the comparison of the lone gunfighter who steps into a saloon out of a heavy rain and orders whiskey at the bar with their back turned to the room.  The gunfighter knows that nobody will make a move because the room is full of parasites who want to use anybody they can meet to further their life in some way.  So the gunfighter doesn’t worry about some assassin that might try to shoot them in the back.  Such thoughts are Hollywood fantasy.  In real life, people are much more malicious and lazy.  They’ll use them before trying to kill someone for all they are worth.  Therefore, people of worth are precious in the world because most people fall well short.  Instead, most people reside in the crowd, happy to follow others, which is why the gunfighter knows they can order a whisky at the bar and enjoy it without concern for potential assassins.  Nothing in the world is more valuable than leadership, and leadership is not formed through networks and relationships.  It’s in understanding the motivations of other human beings and what they are willing to do to obtain value, then directing them toward some state of usefulness.  LinkedIn is an audience of people in the saloon looking at the gunfighter, measuring to see if something can be gained from a relationship.  When discussing networking, we are talking about building relationships in this fashion. 

Yet China, as a collectivist, communist society, does not strive to empower its individuals into greatness.  They look for compliance as their primary objective, so they have much trouble building their economy.  Without the outside influence of globalists from the World Economic Forum mentality, China would still be a poor country.  All their wealth has been stolen; it wasn’t generated through individual achievement, as in Western capitalist countries.  In many ways, the designers of Linkedin are well aware of this.  The hidden message of LinkedIn is that individuals do not matter, nor do other companies.  By filtering down individual achievement, the people on LinkedIn are not looking for the next Jack Welsh or President Trump in the world, who ran a very successful show on television about the values of business in The Apprentice.  They want a society of bootlickers who are not committed to corporate leadership and are ultimately easy to control from the centralized state.  By always being willing to jump from one job to another, nobody has deep roots of commitment to their employers, making them weak toward centralized control.  The LinkedIn audience is looking for compliant, noncommitted people to populate the workplaces of the world, and the effect is noticeable.  Professionally, there are a lot of non-committed people out there who show fragile leadership toward their organizations.  And that is by design.  LinkedIn tells the professional world that people don’t matter; they can all be traded like baseball cards and easily replaced.  So, puff yourself up to potential employers looking for just such a poison and destroy the concept of capitalism by destroying the notion of authentic leadership among the corporate community. 

You have to watch these tech firms and understand their overall philosophy for getting into business, to begin with.  Facebook was a dating app that tapped into the human need to be wanted and then exploited that desire with a sense of community or communism.  That same approach was introduced to Western cultures by attacking the concept of marriage with easy divorce.  If you were unhappy with your spouse, get a new one.  Don’t fight out the problems; go somewhere else, which has destroyed the concept of the American family or even a European family.  And in so doing, that gives the state more power over the individuals involved.  Rather than the family or the corporate culture having the strength and ability to resist such temptations.  The way to attack the concept of family was to make divorce more socially acceptable and too tempting whenever things got tough in a marriage.  LinkedIn has sought to do the same in corporate structure, making it easy for talent to leave at the first sign of trouble and keeping CEOs always turning toward the state for approval rather than providing leadership through the frequent storms of life.  In many ways, we see the essential conflict of our times: Do you follow the leadership of Yahweh, or do you seek the many gods of Canaan and sacrifice your firstborn children to appease them?  LinkedIn says to appease the gods, make whatever sacrifices you need to make, and surrender leadership to the state.  I say, be the gunfighter, follow after the individual Yahweh and the rebellion against collectivism that he represented, which formulated the foundations of all Western culture.  Be the leader, not a follower.  And don’t seek the arms of always some new opportunity. Instead, continuously make the best of what you have and fight for a better day.  And stay away from the communist desires of LinkedIn. 

Rich Hoffman

Decoupling from China: Global communism was always only a drug-induced teenage fantasy

It wasn’t that long ago that I told the story about my LinkedIn account, which I no longer have because of an interview about decoupling from China once I released my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  LinkedIn is a bunch of communist China-supporting advocates on the wrong side of history, so I don’t miss them at all, and that’s a topic all its own.  However, the fear of China taking over America is on many people’s minds, and I have assured people that such a possibility is unrealistic.  Even as much as the set-up goes back for many decades by domestic enemies in America who propped up China to become that device for a one-world government run by communism.  Now that people realize that was always the strategy, there is a lot of talk about decoupling the American economy from China.  And now that the cat is out of the bag, there are a lot of lost globalists out there who have no idea what to do next because their entire lives have been planned around this China model taking over the world and collapsing the American market.  People like Larry Fink and Ray Dalio have been moving a lot of money in that direction, and Wall Street has been betting on it for decades, significantly impacting people’s private 401K plans.  But I cover in my book how easy it is for America to defeat any enemy, or any individual can defeat global thugs like gunfighters defeated lots of nasty bad guys in a dusty street for personal preservation and the perpetuation of law and order for a thriving civilization to flourish.  As we speak, the China model is dying, propped up by phony economic numbers and corporations terrified the public will figure out what a lousy bet China has been for them.  So far, the media culture has prevented that knowledge from getting out, but reality is spectacularly showing itself. 

It all goes back to that dumb John Lenin song, “Imagine,” and the high school days of many of the characters causing so much communist trouble today.  It’s not hard to reflect on the young antics of Larry Fink way before BlackRock was created for him by the Federal Reserve looking to dump a bunch of phony money in the market to start a chain reaction toward a collapse and to prop up the China model of global communism.  These current billionaires, like Ray Dalio, smoke dope in the backseat of a car and listen to classic rock and roll songs in favor of communism and how dead America was, such as America Pie.  “They drove their Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry.”  Once they got out of college, many drunken binges later, they were ready to cheerlead America’s destruction while at the same time calling it “smart investments.”  But their minds were never right and always filled with ill intent from their ideological teenage days where their lifelong philosophies of destruction and American hating sentiment solidified as they learned to take off the bra of the next pimple-faced girl in their back seats masked by marijuana smoke.  I could even go back even further as to how those songs, teenage customs of rebellion, and what those young people learned in school were given to them directly by the KGB as their parents watched old westerns on television at home and couldn’t see the bad guys riding into town.  They were looking for people on a black horse in a black hat.  Not a bunch of communists hidden behind popular culture dressed like the Beatles. 

None of this happened quickly, but it is coming apart very fast.  Now that the globalists are in prime time and have been caught on COVID-19 and many other horrendous enterprises, the world economy has been turning away from tyranny for several years, and that decoupling effort is well underway.  And I would offer that trust in China as a global partner is never coming back.  All the corporations that have invested in this merger with globalism are left at the altar as the timid Chinese are losing power by the day.  Their entire strategy depended on secrecy and intimidation, and that has not been the American public’s reaction, suddenly all too aware of the threat.  President Trump certainly wasn’t the cause; he was the effect of this awareness.  And after his previous term, the mask of China has been ripped off, and all those previous business efforts are failing.  Doing business with China has a stigma that was never there previously, and they will never be able to repair that impression now that people have it.  China and the global communists who have infiltrated American politics never had a plan B.  And as scary as it is to hear that China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil are all moving away from a dollar-controlled currency, the sentiment in America, where most of the world’s productivity is centered, is to pull back and internalize, not to partner with hostile communist countries leaving them very vulnerable as a result.  That is why decoupling from China is something most Americans now want to do, meaning all those investments toward China becoming the next dominating centralized government are disintegrating in front of their faces.  So many American billionaires have spent money in that direction, yet the scam is coming apart rapidly.

It won’t happen overnight, but the trend will be anti-China for many future decades until the communist government there, and in other places, is defeated.  Not just cosmetically but economically.  China has difficulty concealing that information from the world, and their state-controlled media has helped them.  But the writing is literally on the wall, so all these corporate alliances where globalism controlled by China was utilized are already considered busted investments.   And if you lose a lot of money because of it, don’t say you weren’t warned.  I warned everyone for several decades now, and just because the Chinese-loving LinkedIn people have essentially employed a strategy of “keep away,” the reality was eventually going to catch up to them.  The teenage fantasies that many of these modern-day losers have been trying to fulfill were never originally ideas built on the hopes and dreams of human ambition but on the backs of the compromised, drunken fools and overly sexed counter-culture druggies who bought the KGB message hook line and sinker only to find themselves dinner of the globalist communist effort.  And they have been slow cooking for several decades now, thinking they were the ones doing the cooking.  But actually, they were the ones being cooked, and now it’s time to eat.  And Americans, those who haven’t become domestic enemies in support of global communism, are the ones at the table with hungry stomachs.   And corporate America, which has fallen for this scam, is on the wrong side of history.  None of what happens next is what anybody thought would happen.  Of course, I’ve been saying it, and those who listened will prosper greatly.  But most didn’t, and the tough times will be their own.  They were warned but didn’t listen because they thought all that rebellious music and drug use they did as teenagers was the wave of the future, instead of the communist propaganda that it was all along. 

Rich Hoffman

The Company of Tomorrow: Political trends are shifting away from the World Economic Forum values, and that’s a great thing

Everyone is always looking for the next great business tip for a competitive advantage, so here it is.  You can tell because of trends like what is going on with the Washington Redskins NFL team and the Cleveland Indians.  The fans of those teams are getting petitions signed to restore their names to what they were pre-woke.  The momentum of wokeness has shifted, and we see the political pendulum swinging the other way.  The Marxists had their chance, which didn’t have a positive impact that society could see for themselves.  The Beatles song “Imagine” didn’t come out very well when the World Economic Forum was starting mass viruses for their Great Reset and turning the responsibility of enforcement over to your local human resource office to do through businesses what nobody would ever be able to do through government regulation.  The Marxists of the world figured out that by design, our political systems in America were established to go slow to keep the government from interrupting the machine of capitalism.  So, they turned their attention to businesses to attack them there, and what we have seen happening in business climates over the last several decades has been Marxism, and people didn’t notice until recently.  Because most people have an adversarial relationship with their employers, it wasn’t something people saw coming in the front door.  But now that it’s here, they want it gone.  And that is the future state of business.  I’ve seen this communist, Marxist approach in the industry for a long time, growing year by year, and finally, after Trump was removed from office after a government-organized coup, no different from the many communist revolutions around the world, people finally have had enough of it, and that trend began to go the other way after the last Covid vaccine mandates. 

Just as professional sports teams were tricked into changing their names into woke acceptance, this is not what society wants.  They want cool names for their sports teams, not the Guardians, but the Indians in Cleveland.  I was just in Cleveland, and that name change a few years into it is still a joke, and it’s not getting better.  I have had some interactions with members of the family of that team, and their woke acceptance has not gone over well.  People are turning on them for allowing woke politics into their sacred sports franchise.  And that is certainly the case with the Washington Football team in D.C.  People want their Redskins back.  This anti-capitalist approach to life is not what people want in the world.  They have been patient with corporations that became politically active toward Marxism, some of America’s largest corporations.  When we talk about globalism, we are essentially talking about Marxism because that is how it is everywhere else.  Americans have taken the advantages of capitalism for granted because they didn’t know any better.  And they assumed that the companies they worked for had at least primary American values.  But that’s not how most corporations are these days; they have drifted into this Marxist compliance because if they had manufacturing plants in China, Vietnam, or Europe, they were dealing with some level of Marxism, whether it was outright communism or socialism.  It was not free market capitalism that was the driver of their economies.  It was the slow-moving and lazy administrative state, and it was slowing things down to levels that have been unacceptable in America.  I’m old enough to know what it was like before, and I have watched over several decades of being on the front line how Marxism has migrated into the human resource departments to influence how people live their everyday lives.  But the final straw happened during Covid and the slow realization that most people have from President Trump being in the White House, then Joe Biden.  Bidenomics has not been good for anybody but the global Marxists. 

I have often pointed out, over a long period, how the Lean Manufacturing trend was filled with cultural Marxism.  Many of the central foundations of business ethics these days attack the notion of the golf-playing CEO with a nice car, a trophy wife, and is oozing with success.  In Lean Manufacturing, they want the members of management to come from their offices out to where the work is done, not just to become more effective in understanding a problem.  That is how it sold to them.  But it’s really to minimize management in the eyes of the employees, to establish a level of sameness among everyone that displays nobody is in charge but the centralized employees.  Not even the marketplace.  Compliance with regulators as they get their talking points from the World Economic Forum has been their weapon of choice and has been a slow burn.  The CEOs and CFOs who have survived the most were those bootlicker types who appeased the bureaucratic regulators and were not focused on giving the public what they wanted—but imposing on the public Marxist restrictions not just in the employer but in the marketplace itself.  Rather than march people into Washington D.C. at gunpoint as Castro did in Cuba and kill political rivals off point blank, the Marxists took a much more passive-aggressive route.  They regulated capitalists out of existence.  But the marketplace is catching on and is pushing back.  Because of Trump’s successful administration, people tasted the good life again and want it back.  So, the political sentiment is swinging the other way. 

The World Economic Forum is failing; many of their 2030 plans, as scary as they are for their intent, are falling apart, much the way the name changes in sports are getting so much public pushback.  I do get to talk to people worldwide for perspective, and the sentiment is pretty much everywhere the same.  They are upset with Marxism and don’t want it in their products or the companies that make them.  And they certainly don’t want it in their sports teams.  People were willing to put up with it as long as they had the illusion of capitalism functioning in the background.  But now that they know differently, they want their capitalism back, so the future of business will go to those companies who most embrace capitalism for the majority of market share in the future.  Further woke trends from the human resource departments, such as paperless paychecks into bank accounts that centralized bankers can completely control, are not tomorrow’s trend.  But quite the opposite.  Ownership was diminished by the Marxists, including how pay was distributed or whether or not your employer could force you to get a vaccine of poison to keep your job.  The Marxists got caught talking out of both sides of their mouth; while they were saying work from home, fair pay for fair work, and make sure you get an excellent ESG score, the radical leftist Larry Fink and the Wall Street insurgents were saying, if you value your job, you’ll get the government medicine from the world’s largest drug dealer, the federal government.  People were willing to listen before and in the years leading up to these ridiculous sentiments of globalism on American corporations.  But now they aren’t, and success will be measured differently.  The less compliant with Marxist measures globally, the better companies will be.  And that is tomorrow’s trend for those who want to get a jump start.  Capitalism works not just because it makes money for those who utilize it.  But also, it’s a measure of morality that the public can influence, which was always at the heart of all economic activity and always will be.

Rich Hoffman

I Had A Vision of the Destruction of the World Economic Forum: The collision of reality and American property ownership

Prizer Point is a great place to see things clearly

It has been one of those unique times where I have been away from home more than I have been home. My wife and I have been traveling extensively throughout the United States, living out of our RV. Some trips have been just she and I, some with immediate family members, and some with extended family. We have been seeing much of the country and interacting with many people. We have not lived in a bubble, and I have not seen any Joe Biden signs. But we have seen a lot of Trump support, even in areas considered otherwise liberal. And it was during one of these trips, I found myself reading Glenn Beck’s new book ‘Dark Future’ for the third time in over two weeks, and it was in the chapter “In the Future, You Will Own Nothing” that I made some important observations about the state of the world. This was ironic because we were at Prizer Point at Land Between the Lakes way down by Paducah, Kentucky, and I was surrounded at our luxury campsite with lots of property ownership. Prizer Point is one of the better marinas I’ve ever seen, and it had some luxurious houseboats docked there within view of our camp. I, of course, was reading my book next to my RV with our outside kitchen next to my mobile reading chair. Next to our site, mostly surrounded by water on a narrow peninsula, was several million dollars in various rig outfits by very committed RVers who had their own golf cars, jet skis, and boats of all kinds. Our kayak was parked next to our car, so I took a picture of where I was for emphasis. Everything about camping in America is about celebrating property ownership, even to the extent that people never really wanted to leave their homes where properties were secure. So, I tried to capture the irony with a photo.

Being off the grid for this type of camping, which is very popular in America, is about something other than roughing it. It’s not about denying yourself of the luxuries of the modern world; it’s about taking those luxuries into nature and enjoying it with all the comforts of home. When you want a shower, you get all cleaned up in your own space. You don’t have to share it with other people. You bring your food. You sleep in your bed. You watch TV when you aren’t listening to all the woodpeckers working on trees in the canopy overhead. You live well, exceptionally well. And it is pretty nice to travel with all your stuff to many different places and still have the same bed, refrigerator, stove, and bathroom. My wife and I have become so in love with this life that we dislike using public restrooms at gas stops. We like to go in our RV and have everything nice and clean. It is the American way of enjoying nature. But when you go to these campsites, one thing is prominent; nature is not in charge; the people are. RV campers love nature, but nature is not in control. Property ownership is, and I found it particularly interesting to be reading the material I was in such an area where property ownership was on full display to such a large extent. Behind my campsite was the boat ramp where people were putting their boats in and out of the lake all day, and it was enjoyable to see all the different kinds of crafts that people had.

Of course, I have been talking about Glenn Beck’s new book a lot. He did a great job with it; it is full of excellent information, which is undoubtedly what most news media needs to cover. ‘Dark Future’ is essentially pulling back the veil of the Klaus Schwab Great Narrative that the World Economic Forum has been planning behind the scenes of the United Nations and the European Union to incorporate the United States into their schemes of full Marxism and China-style communism through a nefarious attack of the global financial institutions. These people have lost touch with reality, but they have convinced enough people who have also lost touch with reality that they are predicting the future and forming the end reality. And that the end was inevitable. Well, I professionally talk to people who think like these World Economic Forum people a lot. There is a reason my wife and I have traveled so much. It’s our way of keeping it real, of not losing touch with reality, by interacting with reality abundantly. Immediately after we spent a week at Prizer’s Point, we traveled over 300 miles up to Darke County, Ohio, for the Annie Oakley competitions. So it was one thing after another for us, never stopping for air but always having the consistency of our mobile life living out of our RV. That kind of life would have helped the World Economic Forum types not lose touch with their liberal reality, which they have done. And most Americans blow them off as irrelevant. But as Beck’s book explains, they are under the assumption that they will rule the world; they will take all our property and force us to rent from them. And they believe that they already possess the power. But they believe it because they don’t know Americans like I do.

Our camp is in the foreground, some of my kids are in the background along the lake.

Prizer Point has a nice floating restaurant and general store on the lake connected to our campsite by only a thin little bridge. The staff at the camp was all very nice; it was a very well-managed place. But it felt like being off the grid, away from the world just enough to see everything very clearly. We had been to other nice campsites this year, and the general theme was evident, and I found it very reassuring. People were willing to live and let live so long as nobody messed with them. People were not taking Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates very seriously because they had lots of private property that allowed them to get away from their vile little clutches. But the minute they felt threatened by those kinds of people, that was another story. My wife and I went to the store several times to get ice cream and enjoyed eating it while watching all the boats come and go. And I could see that Klaus and the gang were facing some outraged Americans shortly, far more angry and hostile than they were prepared to deal with. And that was what I was looking for while spending most of the summer of 2023 on vacation. We’re not done with traveling for the year, not by a long shot. We have some vast trips coming up on the horizon with our various RV rigs. But everything became very clear somewhere between Prizer Point, the Darke County fairgrounds, and some wonderful books, especially that Glenn Beck book. I saw in a vision the end of the World Economic Forum crashing and burning under their misguided assumptions. And that made it a wonderful vacation season. Private property in America would be the straw that breaks the back of the World Economic Forum. And it would be a pleasure to watch.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Alex Soros is Taking Over the 25 Billion Domestic Terrorism Business: But it won’t be as easy for him as it was with George

It looks ol’ George Soros, in his 90s, is finally hanging up his financial holsters in the economic terrorism business and is passing it to his young son Alex.  And the concern is that Alex is more politically active and political than his dad, who is known worldwide as one of the most dangerous people in existence.  George Soros has been working to collapse the United States with economic depravity and has personally funded many acts of terror for most of his adult life.  But in his old age, he has become something of a shell of his former self, and his obvious hope is that his 30-something son will do much more damage now that he’s inherited the multibillion-dollar fortune of his father to fund the globalist intentions of the family business.  The Soros brand has been aggressive in buying up whoring politicians around the world and pushing them into far-left causes.  And “whore” is a fair word.  It’s the word I apply to those who will do anything for money.

Everyone knows that God has blessed me with many ripe talents; if I wanted to, I could likely be one of the wealthiest people on the planet.  As I say all the time, getting rich is easy.  Being a good person is not, so becoming a whore, someone who sells themselves for money, isn’t hard.  In many ways, I view Elon Musk as a whore, because he made much of his money off government subsidies.  He did good things with the money, but he had to play the game to get there, and in a lot of ways, he was not free to express himself publicly because of his relationship with China.  You might meet whores who are nice people, perhaps even intelligent.  But if they are whores and someone is buying them, they switch into boot-licking mode and are no longer themselves because there is money to be made.  And that’s the difference.  I have purposely said no to that kind of thing all my life, and I won’t start now.  And what I have in return for all that restriction is “objectivity” and “freedom of thought,” things I consider much more valuable than money.  And that’s what’s required to call the Soros operation what it is, terrorism.  Because over the years, Daddy George has worked with plenty of whores to help them commit domestic terrorism without being prosecuted because there are plenty of whores out there who love the easy money.

George is proud of Alex.  The old man has other sons, but this one has shown his father that he’s the one most interested in open borders and other radical leftist causes.  So it was Alex who inherited his father’s 25 billion dollar business for conquering national sovereignty, and there are plenty of whores like the Biden crime family, Chuck Schumer, and Kamala Harris who are all too eager to sell away anything to get their hands on some of the Soros money.  By themselves, the Soros family has been very dangerous, and obviously, they have gotten away with it because they sprinkle so much money around that they are very popular.  If you’ve ever been to a strip joint with lots of people we feel more comfortable calling whores, women who sell their bodies for sexual gratification, you can see this behavior in its raw form.  The pretty girls who make themselves available to anybody with money under any condition are considered cheap, unethical, and dangerous to the creation and maintenance of a family.  A married woman attached to a husband who would go to one of these places and give such a girl hard-earned family money for some sexual fulfillment outside of the marriage would have every right to be upset because the act is an attack on everything that motivates the couple to stay married and build a family.  Once sex becomes cheapened, then the essential value of a husband and wife relationship is destroyed. 

That is essentially what George Soros has done in the world politically.  Except it hasn’t been over the topic of sex directly.  It’s been on topics like financial stability through currency manipulation, open borders, and manipulating law and order by funding the campaigns of excessively liberal district attorneys.  George has been that guy in the whore house who tips all the girls and pays for a lap dance from each one and even pays for lap dances for other people because his goal has been to use his money to shape policy, to be the cool guy who spreads his wealth to the lazy and unrighteous.  In many ways, what George Soros has done to American politicians and policymakers has been worse than what goes on in a whorehouse or a strip club.  Sex is just one product of misconduct.  But in such actions, the attack of a family is the destructive mechanism inspired by evil deeds.  In politics, the attack is on our nation, so it impacts every person living in that nation.  We are all disgraced wives to some degree or another, being cheated on by our political class who finds the temptation of Soros money too alluring to say no, or to behave in some whoring fashion because it’s easy to get.  Then once they take it, they are scared for life, so they make no future attempt at ethical behavior, and our society declines in value, just like the family struggling with the tendencies of a cheating husband leaving his wife alone at home while he sluts himself to strange women for the silly benefit of personal pleasure.  But the Soros family isn’t alone in this enterprise.  Many of these billionaires use their money for radical leftist causes in similar ways, and they have been the greatest threat to us all.  China and Ukraine are just distractions.  The real danger has come from these people.

But I don’t think it will be as easy for Alex as it was for his dad.  George was able to hide in the background more than his son will be.  More people are onto this whoring game than they used to be, and I think Alex Soros is going to get criticism where his father got awards.  People don’t like a society of cheats and scandals, and now that it’s been quite visible who in our society goes to the whorehouses and cheats on their constituents for easy pleasure, voters have more value in their say than they used to.  These are not the times of tradition that brought us to this precipice of doom.  As I heard this news, my first thought was that I felt a bit sorry for Alex, the kid.  I don’t think 25 billion dollars is much, and it could be turned around and used against the kid easily If people understand how the game works.  People are tired of whoring politicians and business leaders who are unethical and lazy.  And they are ready to take power back and give it to those who aren’t tempted by the whorehouses of life.  As we now know that there are lots of whores in the world, not just 22-year-old girls who are too lazy to do anything productive in their life but use their looks for some easy money while they can still get it.  Plenty of middle-aged men laugh at all the jokes from someone they consider richer than they are, hoping that some benefit might come their way from the relationship, which is cheap in its own way.  Not much different than the whore selling sex.  And in a world where people pass judgment correctly on such people, it will be much harder for Alex Soros to operate than it was for his father, which will be fun to watch. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

A Guide Across the Change State Economy: Through the traditions of the gunfighter, America can be saved from global communism

It’s not that I’m trying to sell you another book. But I didn’t write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to sell the book as an author. I saw what was happening in the world ahead of some of the terrifying stuff we are seeing now while Trump was still in office. We were seeing market trends that would reflect the world as a whole, and I wanted to provide people with a book on strategy that would help people deal with those changing circumstances. And now, a few years into it, I’m getting a lot of positive feedback on it, and I’m reminding people of it because there are many scared people out there. I’m not afraid, not at all. I worked out a lot of the strategies outlined in the book while competing in Cowboy Fast Draw competitions, and I was just at one in what they call the Shootout in the Black Swamp. It features a lot of chiseled veterans from the fast draw world who have been around the block a time or two, and there were some conversations they had with me that were different this year as opposed to years past, in what they see happening with the Biden administration, global politics in general, and the presence of an absolute evil in the world that has shown an unholy alliance between the world of finance, corporations, and the kind of evil worship that destroyed the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Sumer, and the entire Middle East. It’s with us now; people are scared and want to know what to do. And it is for them that I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which offers a way to live a healthy and productive life in the face of grave danger presented by the essential failures of the Administrative State driven by the needs of the liberal world order under the maniacal direction of the Deep State which resides behind everything and has its roots into evil occults. 

Shootout in the Blackswamp June 2023

It’s not that going to college is a bad thing; most people I know and communicate with daily are people with at least one advanced degree, and in many cases, several. But it’s becoming increasingly evident, which I pointed out in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, that much of our education systems were built not to instruct people but to make them submissive to the ultimate goals of the Deep State. They were designed that way from the beginning, especially the notion that the college system of buying your way into various financial levels of society through the degree program would never be successful. People have been wondering about it for years, but now they are finally starting to admit to themselves what the college experience has really been about, and it hasn’t made our society a better one. As featured in Charlie Kirk’s book, The College Scam, which is fantastic and honest, it’s not just American society that is starting to view college as just an early attempt to subjugate all people to an aristocracy of thought that was a creation of the Liberal World Order. That kind of society was not a meritocracy driven by Adam Smith’s capitalism but a tyranny by a global crime syndicate residing behind the hidden menace of communism, as China had been built around. And the only way to face down that kind of evil was in the classic way of the gunfighter, out in the street against a black-hatted villain to bring justice to a town overrun by crime.

I’m not part of the professional network of LinkedIn. Before I wrote my book, I was, but as it was being released, I did an excellent interview with a guy influential in the media culture of Los Angeles who ran a PAC in Washington D.C. that was professing that America decouple from China. It was a very compelling interview, and the moment it went up, LinkedIn locked up my account and essentially sent me a note that I still have, which says I must submit to the LinkedIn China policies before I can have my account back. I don’t need their account or their network. As we are learning, as is the case with a lot of social media, LinkedIn is already a Chinese asset, which is the case with most of our media and political figures. China pours a lot of money into these various organizations. Many corrupt people are willing to build their entire lives around easy money, and you quickly end up with a very corrupt corporate structure. We are seeing that Chinese style of communism shows itself in corporate brands like Bud Light, Disney, and even Chick-fil-A. It started with the idea that you couldn’t have a good job without an advanced college degree from a liberal thought processing factory. If you don’t respect “trans” rights, you will be removed from all respectable society. But that only works if everyone submits to that communist authority, and many people don’t want to, which has led us to this current impasse. In that LinkedIn interview, I laid out the case that if business owners wanted to save themselves from this communist tyranny, if corporations  wanted to free themselves from the perils of globalism, then I had the strategy that could do it. My book worked on many levels for the personal benefit of the reader or the resurrection of entire nations. The concepts were the same no matter on what scale they were applied. And that if people followed them, China could easily be defeated. 

I advise a sizeable number of people directly on the methods discussed in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which were formed under tremendous pressure. I provide the video here of a sample gunfight in the sport of Fast Draw from that Shootout in the Black Swamp: speed, efficiency, management under the pressure of danger, and duress. As I say to everyone, be the one in the room with the biggest metaphorical gun, and know how to use it. And most of the time, victory follows. Even when it comes to one nation against another, it’s always the same kind of thing in a competitive world that is best represented in the classic gunfights that resulted in American culture. The assumption by the Liberal World Order was that the world would follow them to the ends of the earth and eventually submit to communist rule controlled by global forces. And that if only that Liberal World Order and its minions in the Administrative State, who take their orders from the occults of the Deep State, could control all of global finance, all the world’s big corporations, and rule over people through an education system that dumbed people down instead of teaching them to think, that they’d get away with it. But people are waking up to it, and I’m happy to see it. I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business not just for the success of individual lives but for the eventual destruction of the Liberal World Order, to teach people how to beat it. And now that people see what’s been going on, they want answers, so I have put them in that book to make it easy for people. I’m very happy to see it is starting to do its work right on schedule.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Never “Hang Loose”: Always wear a suit and tie to show respect for work

It was St Patrick’s Day in West Chester, and I had people from the other side of the world with me at a table for eight on the busiest night of the year for a very popular Irish Pub. March Madness was on TV, the music was loud, and there was green beer, as much as anybody could ever want of it. The people I was with had come from a long way to see me, so I wanted to show them the festivities of how Americans celebrate such a unique day, and they were having a lot of fun witnessing the cultural phenomena. But we were all dressed in expensive suits and still had on our ties, which for me is usual. We felt lucky to have a table with such a large crowd when the rest of the place was standing-room only. There were a lot of people singing and dancing everywhere, so having a nice seat in the back of the room to see it all was quite a nice experience for my guests. It was a great evening, but our table attracted a lot of attention because, as I’ve explained before, I don’t dance, and I certainly don’t loosen up, and I was still dressed and would continue to be dressed as if I were going to a formal occasion. That prompted a really large lady in her middle years dressed all in green with Irish-inspired pom poms to slide her chair over and lobby us to take off some of our clothes and loosen our ties. Obligingly, some of the members of our table did so immediately, and the gazes all turned toward me. That’s when I explained to the lady that this was as loose as I would ever get. I put my fingers between the collar of my shirt, fully buttoned, and my neck and explained that if I could do that, that was loose enough.

Well, this lady had invested her entire reputation in this action, and all the people at her table, who looked like another train derailment in Ohio by the way they were dressed and behaved, chided her quickly that her magical womanly charms didn’t seem to be working. My action was not anywhere in the script of social behavior for pub behavior, so there was an awkward moment. So she rewarded the people at my table who had taken off their ties and loosened their shirts with ostentatious flirtation as if sexual opportunity might have been even a remote possibility. But I refused to budge and proceeded to make fun of her loose clothing and her entire table. I have a rule in life: I just don’t do the kinds of things she asked under any social pressure. I usually would never be in such a place where drinking was the key activity and singing to the music of classic rock songs played so loudly that it could burst your eardrums. But we were far enough away to at least have a conversation, even if we had to be so close to each other to speak that intimacy was the very next option. And my refusal was a grave disappointment to this woman who obviously thought she had the charms of a young woman that could easily get young men to do anything she asked for, promising further sexual contact. Once the others at our table realized I wasn’t going to budge, which was no surprise to them, they stopped feeding her encouragement and kept their dress respectful, and that’s how it remained for the rest of the night. The woman went back to her own table, upset and pouting. After another twenty minutes of uncomfortable glances, they all got up and left, and that table was quickly replaced by people standing and waiting for a chance to sit down. 

That wasn’t the only time when people took notice of our table and tried to figure us out. Several of the people with me were taken aside by members of the room and asked what we were all about. People thought we were members of the mob sitting like we were without any dancing and wearing business suits past 8 PM at night. People were very suspicious of us the entire time we were there, and when we finally did get up to leave, there was an odd joy that the people in the room expressed. It was a fun evening and a chance for me to see how other people live in the world. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the basketball. I know my guests had a great time. So it was everything we wanted it to be, but I couldn’t help but notice the negatives, and that traces back to a real problem in our culture, this stupid notion that people can work from home and still be productive and that we can have “casual Fridays” as a rebellion against professional attire, and still maintain the greatest economy in the world. People who think such things are smoking crack. For me, wearing a tie and business attire is the same as wearing weapons of war on a battlefield. It’s a necessity for productive commerce. Nobody wants to deal with some slack-jawed loser with some loose Hawaiian shirt while exchanging business for millions of dollars. This whole notion that such a thing was possible was given to American culture by the lazy Europeans and insurgents of communism around the world looking for sameness among their individuals. Not individual expressions of professionalism, which has always been the standard in America. 

Being loose is not a value system I have any value for. I think Americans should never have accepted the dumb, liberal idea of “hanging loose,” as they say in Hawaii, and bring back from their vacations to Florida, Hawaii, and other places in Europe these dumb ideas about relaxing so much. It should be clear to people by now that all the propaganda we have received about working too hard, avoiding heart attacks and stress, and going to work more casually were all prequels to the kind of work-from-home policies that would come from the Great Reset, a communist takeover of all our industry and to weaken the workforce from warriors of capitalism to mask-wearing submissives who follow instructions from centralized authority and to then become the new standard bearers of a collectivist approach to a new partnership between business and government that provided much less to the consumer than the massive options we had under more freedom and capitalism in general. I dress well because I respect work and enjoy work and pressure. Meanwhile, the government takeover of all things productive was to speak against work, to expand government so that everyone would eventually be a government worker in some form or another. You could see in the court filing that the Biden administration just lost regarding the Covid vaccines the original strategy. The government showed its hand in that one trying to portray Biden as a CEO of the entire Federal workforce, including any contractors, and that a single-point policy infusion would be possible. Of course, the government lost that case because it was unconstitutional, just as all the Covid attempts at a Great Reset were. But these maniacal characters have gotten away with thinking such things because of the kind of barflies that were at that Irish Pub on St. Patrick’s Day.

Loose clothing types who think hanging loose is a value system and that all those uptight, suit-wearing people out there are just working themselves into an early grave with heart attacks and bad health. All of that is untrue. Those beliefs are just early versions of the Covid scare, where health officials could bring communism to our culture through fear of overwork and psychological safety. Drink more. Have more sex with strangers. And waste your time singing to depressing classic rock songs while your country burns to the ground. No, I’ll continue to wear my tie and business jacket even past midnight in such social conditions. And I am very proud to do so. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business