Tag: Innovation

Trump’s West Point Speech: Its all about gaining “momentum” in life

I thought Trump’s speech to West Point for their commencement was remarkable and not discussed enough.  The theme of the entire speech was momentum, which was excellent advice that you usually don’t hear coming from a President of the United States, nor do you hear such a thing discussed at any military academy.  Military endeavors, like political experiences, are typically about conformance to a static norm.  Not gaining momentum in life by challenging that static order.  And as examples of capturing momentum in life, Trump mentioned military figures like Billy Mitchell, who was court-martialed and forced into retirement for insisting that the army adopt aerial strategies that utilized the airplane.  Trump mentioned Patten and others who openly challenged the static norms of their day to gain strategic momentum for a tactical advantage, which was excellent advice.  As he was speaking, I thought of the way the great Claire Lee Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers, was treated by the military.  There is a long history of clashes between inside-the-box thinking and challengers from the outside.  Yet what is being celebrated at any graduation ceremony is conformance.  The school you are graduating from sets up rules you must learn and comply with, and if you successfully do so, you get a paper from them saying you graduated, and that the world can trust you to play by the rules that are set up.  That’s what employers think they are looking for when they hire people through their human resources department.  If they want a college graduate, they want someone who will follow the rules and not challenge them, and their graduation from an educational institution provides that proof.  However, instead of celebrating compliance, Trump was advocating for rebellion. 

Trump told the inspiring story, but with a sad ending, of William Levitt, who developed Levittown with his family’s company, Levitt & Sons, on Long Island from 1947 to 1951. This development defined the concept of a planned community that has been copied all over the United States ever since.  Bill Levitt was known for walking his building sites picking up nails to save money and pushing his teams to be very frugal on expenses, and Trump indicated that the key to the success of Levitt was his strong work ethic that captured momentum in life and that through that momentum, he achieved a lot of success.  However, Levitt found it challenging to sustain that momentum after achieving success, and by 1968, they were facing mounting debts and struggling to manage the company’s growth.  They got too far out over their skis and started failing with everything they worked on, leaving Levitt as a crumpled-up old man by the time Trump met him in the 1980s at a party with other very influential real estate developers.   Trump found him in the corner of the party of the big shots, sitting alone, with nobody talking to him.  And when President Trump spoke with him, Levitt told him regretfully that he had lost momentum in life and didn’t have it in him anymore, which is an unfortunate story, but it’s essential and motivational because of what it means to the human race.  Playing it safe is not the path to success.  Neither is doing what other people tell you.  Most people who experience the most tremendous success in life work very hard, take a lot of risks, and manage those risks with significant momentum, riding one success story to another with sheer force.  And if they lose their edge, they start to find all their projects failing. 

Remarkably, Trump discussed the momentum killers in life that impacted Bill Levitt, such as his three marriages, most of which were under the strain of collapsing financial circumstances, and the sale of Levitt & Sons to ITT in 1968 for $92 million.  Levitt had gone from that frugal construction site leader picking up nails to buying lavish mansions and purchasing a yacht.  Then, he moved to a house in southern France.  And he blew through his money quickly and wanted to get back into the game, but had to wait ten years due to a non-compete clause preventing him from developing any real estate in the U.S. until 1978.  And after this period, Levitt tried to make his comeback, but failed miserably, until he was the crumpled mess that Trump saw at the party of tycoons in New York City, broken and pushed aside.  And when Trump asked him what happened, the old man said that “he had lost his momentum.”  This was very valuable information for a group of graduating students from a military academy.  Not the kind of things they typically teach in places like West Point.  However, it is very accurate, and one of those topics we should study more.  And Trump would know.  His life had gone through many of those same types of momentum killers.  However, Trump, guided by his basic philosophy of the Power of Positive Thinking, never lost his momentum.  No matter how bad things got, Trump never stopped being that guy on a construction site who picked up nails.  And he always worked hard and long.  Sure, he married three times, but the women could wait until he was done with work for the day, long after most people go to bed.  Rising early and working until everyone else is sleeping is a great way to maintain momentum in life.

And that’s the point of Trump’s commencement speech to the graduates of West Point in 2025.  It’s one thing to bring in a motivational speaker who says these things, and many consultants out there talk a big game, but they don’t stick around long enough to fight through things and do real work.  The world is starving for these kinds of people who say lots of pretty words, but lack the work ethic to be on a job site picking up nails to save money.  I receive numerous offers to be one of those talkers.  But to Trump’s point, you have to do more than talk in life.  You must be genuinely successful, and one key to achieving this is maintaining momentum.  Not to get sidetracked with fancy boats and expensive vacations, or to live in a house in the south of France.  But to think out of the box and break the rules with an all-in bid to gain momentum.  And once you get it, to keep it, you must work harder than everyone else.  And not listening to the negative people who want to break your momentum so that they can compete with you.  Trump’s West Point speech was wonderfully anti-institutional to a group of people who were graduating from a very rigid institution.  The advice about success is one that few people ever realize in life, but Trump, as a President who had to overcome a lot to even be in that position, gave free advice that was worth many millions of dollars.  And it is valuable to anyone who listens, and it is the key to making America Great Again.  Greatness is not achieved by doing what people tell you to do.  It is achieved by capturing momentum and using it to achieve success where others fail, and avoiding challenges to momentum that might stop it and force people to be just like everyone else in life, stuck in the mud, and complaining that their life is meaningless.  Some people gain momentum in life for a short period, such as when they are teenagers moving out of their parents’ home.  Or as business leaders who happen upon a good thing.  But few people ever get it and maintain it.  And Trump’s advice to the West Point graduates was good in that it told them how to keep it so that their graduation ceremony wouldn’t be the best thing to ever happen to them, but rather, just the beginning of an extraordinary life to come. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Government Losers are Holding Up Starship 5: The trillions and trillions of dollars of lost opportunity that the Biden administration is costing American industry

For context, Starship 5 has not launched yet. This is the mission from SpaceX that will prove the landing of the booster rocket, Super Heavy with the Chopsticks in Texas upon reentry. The FAA has stalled the application for launch due to some ridiculous concerns over the water fire suppression system impacting the environment.  This is not unique to SpaceX and likely has more to do with why Elon Musk has become in 2024 a very fervent supporter of President Trump because he knows what a bunch of nonsense all this environmental talk is.  A year ago, he was a left-of-center World Economic Forum type who was the poster boy for “saving the earth.”  But trying to perform this Starship program, to which he has dedicated his life in partnership with the government, has proven to be a ridiculous proposal.  I can say with great authority that this is not unique to SpaceX.  But because they are such a great company, and they have done such a great job of engineering, this Starship 5 launch has exposed the government radicalism in ways that even bleeding heart liberals are now questioning.  And it’s why we are on the precipice of doing something very unique: for Trump to put Elon Musk on the efficiency board to make the government work better by cutting away all that fat that is getting in the way.  Starship 5 has been ready at StarBase in Boca Chica, Texas, for over three weeks and was set to launch at the start of September 2024.  All the mechanical issues are fixed; all that everyone is waiting on are a bunch of useless government pinheads from a Biden-led government that is upset that Elon Musk no longer supports the Democrats.  So, they are delaying the application process for purely political reasons by using the government’s power to impose political compliance on people at the expense of integrity. 

Yes!

Many people in government and behind the greenie weenie movement are not participating in environmentalism from a rational, scientific perspective.  Many were running around like drug-induced losers with their clothes off, acting like rabid animals at Woodstock just a month after man landed on the moon.  These people do not want humanity to go to space or to advance beyond their control.  They want as a government bureaucrat to preserve their useless jobs with fat pensions paid for by the taxpayer and to retire at age 55 and buy a condo in Florida so they can socialize with similar losers with a latte in the morning and a stiff mixed drink in the evening talking about nothing at a bar going nowhere.  They do not want people like Elon Musk changing their lives with all this going to space stuff.  They want a lovely, comfortable death after a long retirement to satisfy their lazy souls.  Because they are so lazy and worthless, they get jobs in government so they can have power over people like Elon Musk and others trying to do big things in the world.  We saw this conflict with the Woodstock music festival and its media coverage once Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins returned from the moon’s surface.  We could look at almost every industry and show this process of eroding innovation when it is asked why Boeing is struggling with its space program, as everyone is; it’s because of this essential desire of government types to expand government into this environmental religion and impose on the world its limits that have nothing to do with science, but the preservation of laziness by the bottom dwellers of the global economy. 

Most companies in the United States have overloaded their staffing with these compliance terrorists who serve no purpose at all but to stall out economic development, and President Trump has identified that he will be targeting this very aspect during his next term.  I think it is fair to say that this scam of government costs America trillions of dollars in opportunity costs each year and is bankrupting many companies, as we speak, from dried-up revenue waiting on the approval of application processes, which is what SpaceX is currently experiencing.  For years, there was a kind of polite cooperation between these two forces: those who wanted to go into space and invent and those who wanted a government job so they could take off their clothes like a bunch of animals and wallow in the mud like a pig, like what we saw with the Woodstock festival, and thousands like it since then.  The excuse of using unscientific environmentalism as a bureaucratic stoppage of work to control the pace of that work has been purposefully crippling and is one of the greatest dangers to our modern economy.   And I think putting Elon Musk in charge of dismantling that massive government machine would be the best thing that could be done, once and for all, in American business.  The rate of invention is critical to the survivability of the human race.  But of course, there are a lot of bottom feeders in government who could care less and are digging their graves happily, day after day, toward that latte sipped in early retirement.  I think the entire federal government needs to be cut down by 80%, just as Musk did with Twitter when he turned it into X, which works much better after he took over.  And that is one of the fears with Trump returning to the White House and putting people like Musk in charge of government efficiency.  Most of them will find they are out of jobs, which is terrifying.  But it’s what we have to do.

Speaking from personal experience, getting patents from the patent office is not like it was back in Edison’s day when he was getting them approved every week for most of his life.  Most people at the patent office work banker hours and are highly inefficient throughout the day.  The process takes way too long, and it forces you to deal with losers who are terrified of the natural world and seek refuge behind a government job with all the excessive benefits.  As a company, you can hire the best people to do all the right things for new inventions, but eventually, because you have to deal with the government, you’ll have to deal with some slug along the way that is slow and cumbersome and to get through them, you’ll have to throw millions of dollars of inefficiency at them to get through their opposition to your project.  And that is essentially all SpaceX is experiencing: a complete shutdown of their Starship launch ability because of political activism and a strategy imposed on the human race that essentially goes back to the Woodstock response to the landing on the moon.  They let Elon Musk play at launching Starships into space, but after that fourth launch, SpaceX achieved most of its technical milestones, which meant that the human race was close to leaving Earth forever and colonizing the solar system.  That would put human beings out of the reach of the government, which would terrify them.  How can governments live off taxpayers if they can get into a Starship and fly off to Mars?  Who is going to fund their early retirement then?  But that’s what we are dealing with, and with the election of Trump, we can expect dramatic changes in this crazy environmental application process in many industries.  And it can’t happen fast enough at this point.  It has already cost us trillions of dollars in lost opportunity costs.  And suppose we don’t dismantle this government machine. In that case, it will bankrupt us all with trillions of dollars more shortly and keep humanity chained to a jealous Mother Earth like a bunch of slack-jawed losers, lacking enough ambition to get up out of bed in the morning and do anything bold than stuffing our faces with useless food to fuel a worthless life.

Rich Hoffman

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

Process Efficiency Through Fast Draw Shooting Sports: How to eliminate communism from any culture

There is a root cause of big government and communism in general, and it essentially all comes down to laziness.  The best hedge a country could have to protect itself from communism is an emphasis on hard work and personal improvement.  If you have an efficient society where personal conduct is rewarded, you will have a better society generally.  And they will not vote for communism and all the various follies of Marxism.  I have figured out that over time by participating in Cowboy Fast Draw, particularly a great group of people I have known for quite a while, many years before I started shooting with them, The Ohio Fast Draw Association.  I think of it as one of the best sports that the human race has come up with, but in making it an actual sport that has very rigid rules and regulations, as most shooting sports do that involve real guns and ammunition, the drive toward speed and accuracy has created a window into the purity of human intellect that I find endlessly fascinating.  And that’s what was on my mind as my wife and I had a wonderful meal at the Punderson Manor overlooking one of the deepest lakes formed by glaciation near downtown Cleveland, Ohio.  We were camping across the lake and preparing for one of the first Fast Draw competitions of the year just a few miles to the north, and economic systems and process efficiencies were most on my mind as I thought about current events over pork covered in honey and garlic sauce.  Out of all the educational institutions and means of human intellect, I think the best representation of efficiency matched with risk formed out of Cowboy Fast Draw and America’s fascination with Western arts and entertainment. 

It was something most obviously revealed during Covid, which we all know now was created in a Wuhan lab and released by China and a lot of other nefarious governments for a Great Reset by the World Economic Forum to spread communist-style government micromanaged by a massive, leftist, Administrative State.  And so many companies and governments were ready to jump on and sign us all up for it by a media poised to spread the news as fast as television broadcasts could put up death graphs on the side of their visuals.  This was the theme of my 2021 book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I wrote and published during the first year of the Biden presidency, on the heels of the most ostentatious takeover by governments over private industry using Covid as their excuse.  But I wasn’t happy just pointing it out; I wanted to understand why human beings did this to themselves because that is where the real answers to life are.  That is why people were so quick to wear masks during the Covid crises, which were artificially created.  More specifically, when you look at a process for a big company, you will find that they have too many administrative employees and entirely too many rules.  Incompetent people use rules and large administrative practices to hide their incompetency from the eyes of a competitive world.  And you really don’t see that in people until you hang around people addicted to speed like there are in Cowboy Fast Draw events.  Human beings create a lot of rules and drag on any innovation system because they are timid and weak as personalities who look to shield themselves from risk through legislation.  And it is those kinds of people who make governments restrictive and crave communism and the security of a perpetual nanny state.

Of course, the sport of fast draw, especially The Ohio Fast Draw Association that I shoot with several times a year, is to shoot at a target when a light flashes on it and to draw a .45 caliber single action pistol with a wax bullet, as fast as you can from a holster at various distances.  What I like about the Ohio Fast Draw guys is that they have a variety of combat scenarios that are part of their competitions, and it forces you to find the fastest means to achieve the objective within some rigid rules that are always part of shooting sports.  The endeavor aims to manage risk and competence toward the stated goal.  Not to run and hide from it, as most organizations do where this problem of individual merit isn’t addressed.  In my real life, outside of shooting sports, which I consider a real vacation from the sluggish minds of bureaucracy and considerable government inefficiency, I would say that most people have some element of timidity in them that is open to government expansion over improved processing, I see how a lack of management over personal risk drags the world down in unhealthy ways.  People love their rules, their regulations, and their slow rate of completion in things because they are terrified of the actual responsibility of accomplishment.  At Cowboy Fast Draw events, all people generally agree that the goal is to shoot fast, hit the target, and find the most efficient process to perform the task.  That means drawing the gun from my holster in fractions of a second and shooting as soon as the barrel clears the leather.  There is no hiding the intent behind process rules disguised to protect the incompetent from the expectations of performance.  And I never get enough of it.  There are usually six or more events per year, and I always get a lot out of all of them, but what I get most is time away from the sluggish people of the world and their slow obsessions with administrative practices that hide their grotesque lives from competitive expectations. 

Since my last competitive event with these Ohio Fast Draw guys, I have been to Japan twice to deal with real-world issues of efficiency and competence necessity.  In Japan, they do not run from competitive expectations; they fully embrace them as a mass culture.  They are not in love with the process flow that protects themselves from competitive expectations, which is part of their samurai culture that is still alive and well there.  As my wife and I ate our meal and looked out over that lake, this was May of 2024, and my last competition was September of 2023. During that time, I had a chance to observe Japanese culture up close and personal, including how they eat.  Many lights came on for me as to the cause of human society leaning toward communist governments and why corporations of all kinds were so quick to do so.  Those elements of the fast draw and Japanese society painted across the current events of our times revealed a nasty sentiment holding back the human race for many years.  But the sport of fast draw had purged it out and away from its hiding places, and I have found myself obsessed with the results.  It was the root cause behind all the Lean work that had been developed in Japan with the Toyota efficiency standards, into why people behaved the way they did when work was presented to them, and responsibility for success fell on their shoulders.  It would take America’s gun culture to match up with the most successful economy in the world to evolve the sentiment, which I always cherish at competitive shooting events that tell more than just the story of American tradition.  But peel back the veil to the most wonderful elements of human intellect, the ability to use risk to produce efficiency and innovation that otherwise would never come to be.

Rich Hoffman

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

Signs of the Future: The duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk

In so many ways the duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk is indicative of the future warfare that is the key to everything.  Here are two CEOs at the top of their game representing two different directions, and one is distinctly on the wrong side while the other is thriving.  As I say all the time, don’t judge people based on what they say, but on what they do.  And Elon Musk has been evolving slowly for a long time.  This happens to a lot of people as they get more information.  I also say a lot that it’s nearly impossible for a person to have a lot of intelligence and to remain a Democrat.  People might be born into a certain region with specific parents and have certain beliefs.  But through living life and doing things, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and it’s natural to evolve feelings.  And for Elon Musk, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the kind of world he wants to live in, an interplanetary civilization cannot be anything less than a capitalist enterprise.  Centralized governments are too slow and sabotage their society to stay in power, which isn’t good for getting to space.  So Musk has moved in a MAGA direction without calling himself that out of pure necessity, and logic.  Then there is, of course, Bob Iger, Mr. Global Citizen, who has been the CEO of Disney, which has essentially committed suicide to accommodate woke World Economic Forum politics.  Musk has moved away from the World Economic Forum, and Bob Iger has fully embraced it, even giving it a deep French kiss to the doom of his company.  So, it was only a matter of time before these two public personalities would have a very obvious clash.

This new war that we are fighting is one where it’s easy to win against. But the way people are wired exploits them at a very personal level. It is essentially what everyone learned in public school, with the cool kids, the geeks, and the loser social groups and children knowing which one they would all be in, and how social pressure, the need to be liked, would control those behaviors into joining one of those three groups. Because Musk is one of the richest men in the world, of course, he has a lot of parasites looking to live off his efforts, so Disney thought it had leverage on him to pull advertising from the X platform to force Musk to embrace more World Economic Forum strategic goals. Musk responded with an “F You” to Bob Iger and others and made a decidedly sharp turn politically. It was a decided check mate in the chess game of these kinds of activities. Within a few days, Elon Musk facilitated a new show for Tucker Carlson and there was a massive interview with Alex Jones, which resulted in him being reinstated on X, where he had been deplatformed when it was Twitter and a series of events that would spell doom for the World Economic Forum types cascaded into irreversible damage for the big centralized global citizen types that Bob Iger represented. Musk was clearly on the side of tomorrow, whereas Iger was without question on the losing team. But the signs have been stacking up for a while now. The public results were just a matter of time. Disney used to be the center of innovation, but now it was SpaceX and what they have been doing on several technical fronts. Instead of warring with Musk, Disney should have sought to have a relationship with them. Instead, they chose politics, which, as a CEO, was a nail in the coffin for Disney that is quickly sinking the company.

Months before all this occurred, I had taken my family to Disney World for a very large vacation.  I was not crazy about the woke direction of the company, but as I have been saying for several years now, I don’t think that Disney is going to survive as a company, and I wanted my grandchildren and my kids to see it while it is still a great thing.  I love all four of their parks very much, but Epcot Center has always been something special, an optimistic city of tomorrow that showcased all the opportunities of tomorrow.  But tomorrow is today, and many of the things that are showcased at Epcot now look old and out of date.  Disney Parks have become too political; they have not adapted to the true frontier of human need and it shows.  Disney, mainly as Bob Iger has run it, is a looking-back company, not one that is embracing the future.  Bob was all about the World Economic Forum controls from centralized governments that looked to establish equity and inclusion through force and manipulation by those in charge, whereas Elon Musk was embracing the kind of technology that would free people of those methods, and he was looking at capitalism as the means to do it.  Elon Musk wasn’t precisely a Trump guy during his first term.  He wanted to give Joe Biden a chance.  But that quickly changed over the last three years, and now Musk has moved well away from the World Economic Forum view of the world, and that difference is dramatically apparent when you watch SpaceX work and perform a side-by-side analysis of their view of the world with the Epcot Center. 

The trip to Disney had the effect I wanted.  My crew had a really magnificent time at Epcot Center. We went there on two different occasions and used the monorail as our primary means of transportation to get there.  It was great for my family.  But I could see the ghost of a place I used to love, looking old and inward thinking.  It was essentially what the world was trying to do with authoritarian, centralized governments, such as China and the European Union.  That was not the future we were going to experience, and Bob Iger had gambled everything on it.  And when he went to call the bet against Musk, everything went in the opposite direction.  The result was it forced Musk to stop trying to put one foot in and one out on so many topics and go all in toward the future, which means the collapse of central government tyranny.  Putting Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on X was the reason Musk bought Twitter in the first place.  For the same reason, Trump created his own social media platform, Truth Social.  The future requires a decentralized competition of ideas without the restraint of slow-minded authority figures.  And the results will be very similar to what happened between Musk and Bob Iger but on a truly global scale.  The peer pressure leverage Disney attempted to pull on X is the same kind of backfire that all corporations and political sentiments will experience in the years to come and on a much more ostentatious scale.  Like the Epcot Center, the World Economic Forum’s view of the future was dying and outdated.  It was SpaceX that represented all the opportunities that were coming from a future being designed by capitalism.  And now Elon Musk was fully committed.  Disney had lost that final battle toward forcing the world to become a global citizen at the cost of innovation and freedom.  And if there was any indicator of the things to come, it was that.

Rich Hoffman

When Too Many Rules Destroy Happiness: Observations from a Disney World vacation experince

For most of September, I have been traveling. It has only been recently that travel restrictions regarding COVID-19 were lifted in places I needed to go professionally, like Canada, and Japan so these needed visits had been stacked up and a long time required. That was also the case for a family vacation to Disney World, which I had intended to do for the last three years while my grandchildren, mostly close in age, were prime for the experience. Covid restrictions and mask mandates ruined all those plans, so we waited for them to be removed before committing to anything. In September 2023, a slight window opened to do everything, so I stayed swamped catching everything up. By the end of September, I got off a flight from Tokyo, parked my car, hooked up our RV, and towed it to Florida for a week in Disney World to stay at their wonderful campground, Fort Wilderness. We almost canceled it again because of all the new policies at Disney, but we determined that this was the time if we were ever going to take the family to Disney World. Because as I have said many times over the last decade, I don’t think Disney will survive as a company. And after going there again and comparing the experience to just three years prior when my wife and I went there to see some of the new options they had, there is no question, that Disney is failing everywhere behind the veil of happiness, and I can see the entire thing completely falling apart for many reasons they will never tell you about in the media. But the Fort Wilderness Campground, an official resort for Disney was fantastic, at least from the façade of a vacation experience, and I was happy we went when we did.

From the area I walked around in my video of Fort Wilderness, we could take the boat over to Magic Kingdom and get to all the other parks, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot Center with the park hopper option. It was all costly, but I could show my children and grandchildren many exciting things over three days, and camping at the Fort Wilderness Campground was one of the best experiences I have ever had. It was comfortable, luxurious, convenient, and splendid in everything you expect from a lifetime vacation experience. When I think of Disney I think of a media empire built on family values, and of Fort Wilderness itself, I think of the Davy Crockett television show and Zorro. These days, Disney is more of a princess place, but there are still all the excellent references to Americana that I found very refreshing, such as the clear statement at the entrance to Liberty Square, “The hope for freedom for all. And the courage to fight for it at any cost.” Walt Disney never wanted people to forget what a miracle America was, and he dedicated several parts of his amusement parks to that very service. I wanted to take my family there while the parks were still in their heyday. As for what I wanted out of the trip, I am thrilled with the results. The children were happy even though we averaged about 6 miles of walking daily with the park hopper passes. We saw a lot, experienced a tremendous amount of information, and we had a great six days at Fort Wilderness Campground going to the pool, hanging around the restaurant and trading post, and enjoying camp in one of the best in the world. We purposely picked the 100 loop, which requires a lot of advanced planning so that we were a close walk from the boat dock which had us coming and going constantly.

Yet, to my eyes the mistakes were obvious. Disney, because it’s a giant corporation with many thousands of employees to maintain has destroyed itself by the weight of its own success, like many major corporations do, and this goes way beyond the recent woke policies from BlackRock that have seriously destroyed their business model for good. The current park attendance will soon be a thing of the past because of their killed market share worldwide. Bob Iger, the current CEO should have never returned, and I’m sure he’s realizing that now. Disney needs to constantly produce fresh content that makes a billion dollars each at the box office, and those days are mostly over for them because of the status of the current youth, YouTube options, and their alienation of conservative Americans. For instance, most of the vacationers are Trump supporters at the Fort Wilderness Campground. However, the employees are mostly Democrat-leaning and to offset this discrepancy, Disney has a lot of rules they impose on their workforce to keep everyone lined up correctly. But what they end up with is something much like their rides, everything is great so long as you stay on the rails. But the illusions fall apart quickly if you step out of the boat.

And that became most obvious when we were all exhausted one night. Nobody felt like cooking, so we went to Crockett’s Tavern and the Trail’s End Restaurant to get some pizza. On one of them, we asked for a half and half, one side being deluxe, the other completely cheese because none of the little ones like toppings yet. You’d think that we asked those Disney employees to commit murder, they had a meltdown that involved discussions of being fired and all kinds of drama. It was like being in West World where the robots suddenly started shooting the customers. It was odd, but that wasn’t the only time. What was clear to me was that the expensive façade of the Disney vacation experience was thinner than it had ever been and it wasn’t taking much for that illusion to be shattered for the consumer. Disney had adopted many rules to keep their radical workforce in line and on the message that they had destroyed that personal touch that happy individuals bring to work with them. I’ve been to Disney World many times, and this most recent time showed clear signs of stress behind a radicalized workforce that was coming out against the customers such as we saw over that simple pizza. The pizza was good, and we had a fantastic time with our family. But after some old timers still working at Disney are gone, the next generation is not there to pick up the task and carry it into the future. Disney could hide this from the world so long as they could throw money at the problems. But they can’t even do that anymore. In the news this week, right after we left, Disney had to raise their ticket prices to their parks and there are reports that the CEO is seeking a peace treaty with the Republicans of Florida. The woke battles have left Disney permanently damaged as most people inclined to spend a lot of money at Disney World are also MAGA supporters. Disney joined the wrong politics in a volatile economic environment, which has been costly to them. We enjoyed ourselves. I am glad we made the trip now for the historical value of such a Disney experience in American culture. But given many of the things I observed, it won’t be there forever. It’s failing even worse than I had thought it was.

Rich Hoffman

The Dangers of Marxism in California: Supply chain disruptions due to the electric truck mandates

The magic sauce anywhere in the world for successful government is not how much government can you make to create regulation but how much you can offer freedom to individuals and still have a stable society.  If the government becomes too large due to its expansion, you are failing as a society.  Of course, some government is needed, but when it is used as a crutch for creative enterprise, then the trouble starts.  And anywhere in the world this is true, in every country.  You can tell the success of the country and its measure of economic output, GDP, by this ratio.  Therefore, countries attempting to follow the false methods of the Masonic-driven experiment of Marxism where the government was created as a collectivist blob to replace the rulers of the world, then restricted economies are bound to occur, and that was never more obvious than in the movement against rationality with California imposing electric truck mandates that are starting to go into effect by next year, 2024.  There is no reason for the orders other than the government through its mass and force has decided that it wants to impose some limit on creative enterprise because, as a collective effort, they have a religious belief regarding climate change and its role in the universe.  A modern form of sun worship just like every other society of the past that has risen and fallen has embarked on.  Now, the government of California, and in general, the Biden administration, wants to force Americans into an electric car market one way or another.  And this government tampering shows up directly in economic health, especially in supply chain health.  Wherever supply chains slow down, look now to the size of the government and its not-so-well-thought regulations as the primary culprit. 

California has an increasingly hostile group of radical government believers. Once it is discovered that work is safest when laziness can be hidden behind government forces in size, they have decided to show their validity by disrupting supply chains to show their power to the world because they have openly embraced Marxism as a culture.  And that becomes obvious with their commitment to their power grid problems, and general approach to happy living in the world’s fifth largest economy.  California was always an obvious target for global Marxists who have infiltrated the government just as they do in the American government. Their next target is electric trucks to replace diesel semis by the middle of the next decade, starting with regulations for new truck registrations beginning during the next election year.   And they believe these regulations to be reasonable based on their purely fictional religious beliefs about sun worship.  Science or the marketplace is not driving these decisions, but the hunger for gaining the power of government rather than abusing that power to satisfy a mass religion of leftist values.  Even if the electric trucks were ready for prime time, the government’s radicalism into believing they can force society to live with the constrictions of the economy is truly dangerous.  And this is precisely the kind of behavior that has caused price increases at the grocery store during the Biden administration.  The lack of options and their price directly represent the amount of government regulating the behavior, and the result is slower supply chains and much less creative economic activity to meet the market needs of a free society.  When personal freedom is sacrificed to satisfy the power of government you get price inflation and slow supply chains in whatever industry you might be concerned with. 

Electric trucks could be an option under some conditions, but the marketplace must determine those conditions.  For instance, I have had exposure to electric forklifts for thirty years, and I generally like how quiet they are and how much instant power they provide.  But this is always the story with them; the charge rate requires at least an entire shift to utilize whereas their propane-driven counterparts can operate a total of 24 hours per day with the quick change of a tank.  So imposing electric forklift standards would force businesses to limit themselves to one shift per day where the forklift is charging and not doing work.  Or it would have to purchase another electric forklift that can operate while the other charges.  Either way, a restriction has now been placed on the business that it will have to pay for in some fashion, either in lack of output through production or the cost of more than one forklift that it will now have to maintain.  This is how the government causes inflation and disrupts supply chains, slowing the output to the end-use customer.  With the electric trucks of California, the essential same problem becomes apparent: the government assumes that employers will buy more electric trucks as an increase of the price of more than 30% each.  And that work schedules will be restricted to accommodate the lack of versatility to refuel.  Rather than make market decisions based on the logic of free enterprise, and in getting products to the consumer as quickly and efficiently as possible, the government has through force, imposed a religious belief that then limits the output of productivity.  And because they are a monopoly, there is no competitive means to measure success or failure based on competition. 

This is why Marxism generally does not like competition, because free markets expose their monopoly limits through comparison.  As a captured Marxist asset, California has all the other states in America to compete with, so the economic value can quickly become evident unless all forms, through federal mandate, are forced to do the same.  Therefore, if everyone is performing at the same level of insanity, then a better option will never be known to the public, which is their greatest present desire.  To hide their inefficiency behind government power, controlled free speech, and a lack of competitive criteria to measure against.  If electric truck manufacturers are forced to compete with other options, then their recharge time and other failings might be corrected through innovation.  But behind government force, there is no such incentive, and the limits rule the day.  And that is why the electric truck mandates in California are so disastrous and why government policy on them is so terrible.  Because of government intrusion in the free market of car manufacturing, many bankruptcies are on the horizon, and a significant impact on supply chains as old cars will suddenly become valuable because the new cars are so expensive and limited.  The electric vehicle market, in general, is representative of insanity because there are no power grid assumptions that don’t make electric bills horrendously expensive by forcing everyone to work with just another monopoly not using the best means of energy, the power companies.  We should be using nuclear power, but instead, the government has caused significant issues by going to war with fossil fuels and forcing solar energy and wind power, which is dramatically ineffective as a means of supplying energy.  And as a result, the economy of power becomes too expensive and under-supplied.  And society, in general, is much less vibrant because of the intrusions of a government that has too much power, and not nearly enough competition to keep it honest. 

Rich Hoffman

The Debt Ceiling Debacle: Government needs to be cut by 75% or more

The values expressed by the June 1st made-up deadline for the debt ceiling talks were that it was a bi-partisan agreement, which prevents a first-ever default, protects Biden’s key priorities and accomplishments, and rejects extreme cuts to programs for veterans, seniors, and what families count on. It protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and keeps President Biden’s student loan relief program for 40 million hardworking borrowers. That is what the White House is saying about it, and it’s the kind of deal you will always get from a corrupt government with a serious spending problem. And the feeling is that Keven McCarthy got suckered even though members of Congress I like from my area; Jim Jordan and Warren Davidson were happy to push back a bit from the Republican perspective; ultimately, these budget fights are going to get messy and would have been better done now than later. Essentially, Republicans bit on the phony deadline for debt payments that Janet Yellen set from the Biden administration, and House Republicans didn’t want to be blamed for a default. We are dealing with radical employees here; it’s precisely the same argument we have been making for years in public schools where the government simply adds too much payroll, then expects taxpayers to pick up their massive expansion of government through job creation, then overpaying those employees. I tend to agree with Davidson and Jordan that McCarthy played a nice game, but in the end, there weren’t wins to justify the effort, and the Biden Democrats get to celebrate a win at taxpayer expense. 

We aren’t all on the same page with this one. The government needs to be radically shrunk, and it will put a lot of people out of work. The entire issue of these budget talks really comes down to whether we are a better nation with all the government workers we have who do so little for the nation in general. Most government workers make 30-40% above market value for jobs that aren’t needed in most cases. And we could likely afford to cut 75% of those and still get an operational government, much like Elon Musk did at Twitter. Real people who run real companies understand that budget impacts on the payroll are the biggest problem of inflated budgets. If employees get increased productivity with their staffing, and that productivity is valuable to the world, then a company could be said to be successful. But we’re not talking about that with this budget problem with our government. Government is a make-work enterprise where they fill positions we don’t need and pay people too much money to perform the job. I would say that the utilization rate of those employees is under 5%, where it should be somewhere between 70% to 90%. That’s the effective time employees are actually doing their jobs while being paid. What we are dealing with when it comes to government workers are lazy radicals who are hidden from job performance by government labor unions who continue to want to throw bodies at positions they create to expand government and take credit for it as politicians. And politicians are never going to give those jobs away without a major fight. And this debt ceiling talk of 2023 would have required people negotiating who actually want to fight. 

And the kryptonite for Republicans is always military spending, but even with that topic, do we really want to waste money on a woke military? In my view of this problem, everything is on the table. What does our military really do for us these days? It seems to only serve for wars that help globalism. It’s not preventing war with China. China has their guy in our White House. They are fighting wars through finance now; nobody is planning to fight a ground war now or in the future. So, Republicans need to be willing to go there. And they must be willing to take away the credit cards from big-spending Democrats and let them have their head-spinning moments. At some point, we are going to have to call the bluff of the big government types and stop wasting money on these massive government programs in every category. Lots of people need to lose their jobs, and a resizing of the real needs of our federal and state government needs to occur because, at the core of it, that is what we are talking about with these talks. Nobody wants to end well-paying jobs for a government that know-nothing politicians created for a job that society generally doesn’t want or need. We are going into debt to do jobs so that foreign interests can make money off the interest rate, and the only entities benefiting are the communist labor unions attached to the government workers. It’s a treadmill that goes nowhere, and we waste all our time and money on essentially nothing. Our nation has not improved because of all the money wasted on these jobs, and the economic value is a negative rather than a positive. We are paying a lot of money to get in the way of productivity, not to enhance it. 

And that’s where the really hard decisions come into play. We all have family members who work in government and did what they needed to to get a job with the government at that overpaid rate, with all the days off and work-from-home policies we have seen over the past several years. Government workers don’t think they owe any productivity to society. They believe that society owes them a job and that they’ll show up for it whenever they get around to it; that is the true cost to the productivity of our culture. We are paying a lot of money for a government that doesn’t do what we need it to. And unless Kevin McCarthy was willing to argue on those merits, the Democrats would own him in the negotiations. McCarthy made a good show of it, working himself over the Memorial Day Holiday, but Democrats knew from the beginning that all the mainstream Republicans could not fight the budget battle where it is really the costliest. Nobody wants to admit that their friends, family, and fellow union members are actually performing worthless tasks for a worthless government. Eventually, we will have to have this discussion because it is what makes deficit spending such a catastrophe. One that few, perhaps only the 20 or so freedom caucus members, are willing even to discuss. Government, in general, with all their labor unions attached at every level, is a bloated machine of communist corruption of no value, and to be a healthy country, those government jobs need to be private sector jobs at a much lower wage rate. And that would essentially destroy the inflated economy of the Beltway culture that entirely exists on debt, not the actual value of the jobs that fuel that economy. Then until we are willing to have that discussion, which is inevitable, we will continue to see debt ceiling discussions like this one with precisely these results. Kevin McCarthy never had a chance because he was making the wrong argument. The government positions that make up the bloated budget we are dealing with need to go away. People will have to be out of work. And the government will have to be significantly minimized, by 75% or more, because anything productive never happens. And we are a long way from that happening with these government politicians. A long way away from reality.

Rich Hoffman

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Tesla’s New Cybertruck: A Picasso design that reflects American lifestyles

Everyone is talking about the wrong things in regard to the new Cybertruck from Tesla. Elon Musk during the recent unveiling of the new electric vehicle from his line of products was demonstrating the impact resistant glass, and it shattered. But that didn’t matter to me, when I first saw the vehicle I instantly fell in love with it, and would buy one right now if I hadn’t just bought a new car, one of the big Chevy Traverses that they are making these days for the SUV market. For all the reasons I bought that car I would like to have a Tesla Truck, and then some. I thought the design was brilliant and way out of the box, and it is on my list to purchase the next time I’m buying a car. What’s not to like?

For me, a bullet proof car made out of stainless steel is a very attractive option. I do have a need for such things. It would also be good for ANTIFA protests where demonstrators attack capitalism with bats and sticks. The hard-pressed steel panels would hold up and still look good for dinner later that night. No scratched paint, no dents from parking lot foils. You could take it off road and through the brush without tree limbs and rocks kicking up and scratching your paint job. I can think of a million reasons to own a Tesla Cybertruck. Finally, someone is giving us a look into the kind of future that we should have had all along, and I like it.

I think I’m looking at the Tri Motor AWD option when I do get one, it goes 0-60 in 2.9 seconds and has a towing capacity of over 14,000 pounds. There are concepts for a Cybertrailer that goes with the truck that I think would fit my lifestyle in a very good way for the next decade so I’m excited about it. Very. The vehicle itself I think is much more American than even the traditional truck market has been, which to Musk’s point, hasn’t innovated much since its inception a hundred years ago. This vehicle is a bold new step into a world of out of the box lifestyles that are typical for most Americans and a perfect compliment. I can think of a lot of uses for a truck that goes that fast and can travel 500 miles on a single charge.

When people say something is “genius” which I would apply to this new Tesla Cybertruck, is that it breaks the mold of some status quo and is being disruptive toward previous assumptions. I think that is true in science, economics, and certainly vehicle transport. Something like this truck has been contemplated in science fiction for years, yet unimaginative designers at the big three automakers have just been lazy, and complacent to allow themselves to chase after the Japanese automakers, instead of really giving American truck drivers what they want. My son-in-law just bought his dream truck, a Ram which I think is wonderfully large and complete with a top tech approach to the big roads of American lifestyles. And as I said, we just bought in my household a very nice Traverse from Chevrolet. Big like a truck, but as maneuverable as a sports car in a lot of ways, with great power. Much better power than I would have expected. But always in these products is the feeling that they are just a bit better than other offerings. Why not be a lot better? What would be wrong with that? I feel like that is what Tesla is trying to give the market, especially in America.

I’m not a big electric car advocate, in fact that is the only drawback I see on this Cybertruck design is that it runs on batteries. I hate the idea of not being able to stop easily on a long trip to South Dakota and not get a ten-minute fill-up then be back on the road. But for the power that these new electric engines do give, I’d be willing to overlook some of those pitfalls. Without question, Tesla is getting more power out of its electric engines than traditional fuel combustion can, and that is exciting. Power for me is more important than practicality. And that is true of most truck buyers in America. I need something that has tremendous power, that can ride off road in some remote areas getting pelted with rocks, rammed by bears and elk, and still be ready for a night on the town with just a good rainstorm to clean away the mud. As much as I like my new Traverse I still park it a hundred yards from the nearest car in a parking lot because I worry about some runaway shopping cart hitting it from some distracted mother trying to buckle in her screaming kid from nearby, not tending to her business. With the Cybertruck, I wouldn’t worry nearly so much because its essentially a tank.

Watching the unveiling Elon Musk had outside on display the DeLorean from Back to the Future and the Lotus from the movie The Spy Who Loved Me, which were two of my favorite cars growing up as the inspiration of this Cybertruck. That obviously is part of the appeal for me, as people in my age group have been thinking about these kinds of things all of our lives. People have been critical of the angular shape of the Cybertruck, but I think its all extremely practical and American. Hard lines meeting at unique angles to tell a kind of Picasso story of American outdoor life, that is what this truck says to me and the design is actually very brilliant to my eyes. That’s what you get when you think that far outside the box of a very established truck market. Tesla continues to push the limits and it gives me great reason to root for them. This is one of their most exciting installments yet.

Innovation for me is far more important than protecting existing markets. If there is a way to make something better from what we’ve always assumed was a dead market, then why not. And if the electric engines turn out to be better, then why not use them. That is obviously the case with the emerging Skycar markets which is another consideration. If we use skycars more and more in the future for our casual transportation, then we will certainly want something like the new Cybertruck to fulfill our recreation needs. It all makes a lot more sense than in what we’ve been seeing over the last several decades and finally gives us a peak at the possibilities of tomorrow. I can see so many reasons that I’d want to use this truck over other offerings that the benefits far outweigh the draw backs. I have been thinking of getting a big RV for some of my needs for the upcoming decade, and that is still very much a need for me, but this new Tesla Truck has changed my thinking on the matter quite a lot. And that is a very good thing which I greatly appreciate. This is one of the most exciting vehicles I’ve ever seen and I think I need to find a way to put one in my driveway for many adventures to come.

Rich Hoffman

A Philosophy for the 22nd Century: iPhone 6 and Glenn Beck’s American Dream Labs

My wife and I have been getting acclimated to the new iPhone 6 for a few days now and the thoughts I’ve had while going through all the subtle new technology and the emerging business model so obvious, have only convinced me that the 21st century will be full of such extraordinary breakthroughs that by the time mankind gets to the 22nd century the world will be much different. As I write this Apple is not only in the market for making fabulous personal devices like iPhones and personal computing systems—but are developing a new car with their nearly 1 trillion dollars in market value. It costs roughly a billion dollars to perform the R&D for a new car, and Apple is at the front of that cutting edge by 2020 because they have the cash to do the job. The terrorist group ISIS is using some of that technology to broadcast to the world their level of Islamic theocracy in a negative way, and the American government is trying to create Net Neutrality through the FCC to get control of the run-away-technology so to slow it down and put it back in federal control. But more than that, my T-Mobile plan informed me that they offer free data streaming for music—such as iHeart Radio. That means twenty-four hours a day seven days a week no matter where I am, I can listen to The Blaze without any interruption in service. I don’t have to worry about consuming too much data from one place to another where free Wi Fi isn’t available which for my lifestyle of motorcycles and other unconventional travel means I can have 100% access to the new radio station for the first time since its creation without any worry. No wonder the FCC wants so much control.

The iPhone 6 is about the size of my iPod but it does so much more as the technology has shrunk to fit into such a small device. Even now if I am rappelling in the middle of Red River Gorge or backpacking to the top of Mt LeConte I can still listen to The Blaze Radio Network the entire time—which for me is relaxing. I don’t always want to hear the birds and the babbling brooks of nature. I like to hear the ideas of mankind and find out what the disputes are against modern philosophy, and The Blaze gives me that kind of information. More than anyone else in broadcasting on such a large-scale with a large and well-respected retinue of current politicians offering their insights Glenn Beck’s The Blaze is positioned in much the same way as Apple is to bring broadcasting, news, and entertainment to the next century while traditional companies shrink away and go extinct because they couldn’t keep up with the technology. Beck through his American Dream Labs is about to unleash several feature films and is unveiling several new innovations on April 4th of this year—just a few days before my birthday—which I am very excited about. There is a lot going on in the world that is truly scary, but there is a lot to be excited about as well. Glenn Beck’s innovations are among them and I will use my new iPhone equipped with a wonderful T-Mobile deal to stay plugged in along the way.

A few friends of mine from a secret Atlas Shrugged type of real life Galt’s Gulch just yesterday were contemplating the implication of the new iPhone also coming in April. I am certain that I will be getting one at some point in time, but just the sheer opportunity that such a device holds in such a small package is a stunning display of technological ability. If you mathematically apply the types of innovations being unleashed just in the last couple of years to the youthful generation that is taking them for granted in their replication of advancement every 18 months or so—that same generation will expect that type of progress in everything from televisions to automobiles. The self-driving cars from Minority Report will happen regardless of political road blocks because these young people will demand it. They want to play Xbox and text their friends while driving and Apple along with Google looks to be among the first companies poised to provide such a thing. I joked to our T-Mobile rep as he was displaying all the unique features of the iPhone 6 that in two years the phone would be outdated and he laughed, because he knew it was true. Things are moving that fast—yet government isn’t moving with it—because they are functioning from the failed philosophies of the past.

During the week my wife managed to convince me to go to Costco with her, which I seldom ever like doing—not because I dislike shopping or Costco—but because time is often short. I have a very busy and packed life—so grabbing a hot dog at Costco and shopping for necessities is last on the list of things to do. But she managed to convince me, and upon arriving I had to marvel at the prices on their 80” flat screen televisions and their new curved screens which were reasonably priced at under $5000. The prices are coming down to the point where every room in a home could have one of those large televisions without any trouble at all. The technology in them is simply incredible. The next challenge is going to fall on production companies to provide content that people actually want because the technology is there. Again, that’s where I think Glenn Beck will have an advantage over even the most deep pocketed traditional studio. The old way of producing video is long gone. The iPhone 6 has a mini camera in it far superior to what even a $10,000 camera cost in the 1990s so everyone with an iPhone is holding in their hands a television studio if they desire to utilize it. Of course that is another reason the FCC wants to create a Department of the Internet—because that notion scares them intensely.

My two-year old grandson is already speaking in complete sentences. Much of that I would attribute to the various learning devices he has available to him such as the television program on Nickelodeon called Blaze and the Monster Machines—which is a cartoon designed to teach kids about language, science, and physics. It is not as clunky as Sesame Street was—nor as agenda driven. It’s just about learning and having fun while doing it. Consider on top of that he has a Leap Frog tablet and other similar devices that allow his imagination to just soak up all this vast information so quickly the education model is obvious. Everything I have said negative about public education just became much, much, much more relevant. I am convinced that kids could learn everything they would typically learn by age 22 in college by age 10 because of the education options available now, that simply weren’t there 5 years ago, let alone 10.

So given all this rapid acceleration in technology, there is nothing in the adult world that is preparing for this onslaught in thought. Fox News is talking every night about the 2016 election where Republicans will likely put up another boring candidate based on the old machine politics of tradition and Democrats will put up Hillary Clinton, another old hippie progressive out of touch and expecting feminist nut cases to carry her into the White House. Neither political party is poised to deal with the typical iPhone user. Just as the car companies are lecturing Apple about how hard it is to get into the car market. But Apple will expect to do in two years what it takes General Motors a decade to perform, and they have the available R&D cash to pull it off. Just this past week Amazon.Com was upset that the FAA created regulations against their proposed drone delivery system, and they also have the cash to challenge the government’s attempt to preserve the old-fashioned way of delivery by UPS, FedEx, and the United States Postal Service. From the government its business as usual reacting to lobby money poured into their offices—but the marketplace represented by Amazon wants their products delivered within hours not days—and the collision will impact the government more than it will the marketplace because the next generation will expect fast delivery-because technology has always provided them with quick and immediate gratification on anything they have wanted.   They will expect the same out of their politics. Politicians standing in the way of that desire will be chewed up and spit out. Trust me. It’s coming fast and furious.

That is why it’s important to now focus on a philosophy for the 22nd century because it will take that long for the dust to settle. It has taken a 100 years to arrive at this current juncture, and it will take that long for the intellect of mankind to catch up to the philosophy needed by their recent inventions. Politicians like the Hillary Clinton types who expect to show up and walk on stage uttering a few lines of dialogue to pretend they are in the most powerful position in the world aren’t going to be able to deal with the advantages given to the typical person through all these new inventions. The explosion of invention coming available requires a new philosophy to deal with it all, and one of the first things that will have to go is the old adherence to the political machines of the past. The tools given to mankind currently allow for such a philosophy to develop. The old systems will be swept away in the current—car companies will go out of business as new ones emerge, power generation will change dramatically as more and more people learn of the options kept from them through unnecessary regulation, and stonewalling politicians will be crushed by a coming generation deeply impatient and empowered with knowledge at their fingertips. There’s no way to stop it now. What is needed to help the transition is a new way of thinking—a philosophy for the 22nd century so that when the dust clears, the mind of mankind will be aligned with the products of its innovation.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

Ideas are Scary: The important task of being a place that lets them grow

By far my favorite commercial of 2014/2015 is the one below from GE about how ideas can sometimes be scary featuring a little alien looking ET creature being born and ridiculed until GE opened its doors to the innovative prospects of the fledgling creature. It’s a very honest commercial for such a huge corporate giant and it tells me that at least in practice GE hasn’t lost its way in understanding where it came from and what role it plays in America’s future. Growing up in Cincinnati it is impossible to not have GE a major part of my life and whenever I have to travel downtown and drive by the Evendale plant there is a little happy place that keys off in the back of my mind knowing to what a great extent GE has advanced technology and really lived up to the aspects of the commercial on innovation.

Being a corporate giant isn’t easy, and I am often distrustful of them to stay nimble in the field of innovation simply because there comes too much pageantry and fluff just to keep rules and regulations off their back to maintain the kind of forward thinking that made them great in the first place. Jeffrey Immelt after Barrack Obama was elected was put into a very difficult position. Here was a president openly hostile to corporations and business that would see GE as a massive target for socialist implementation. As a CEO it is first the job of such a person to guide their corporation through the potential threats that exist so that those gates of innovation can stay open for such fledging ideas shown in the commercial. So Immelt did what he thought was best, he made a partner out of Obama running the president’s Jobs Council for a few years. In so doing he was able to exploit the lack of financial understanding of the barely concealed socialist by enacting 54 of the 60 recommendations made by the Council—such as fast tracking key infrastructure projects and selling more leases for both oil and gas production. But in the end, only 4 of those recommendations were completed as is typical of government which loses focus quickly as life in the Belt Way quickly kills off ideas like an African hunter on the Serengeti. Under the auspices of government ideas quickly become extinct—and Jeffrey Immelt’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness was one of the first things that Obama hung on his trophy wall. Obama tried to use GE to stimulate his economy, and largely took Immelt’s advice without knowing anything else to do—but failed to nurture those ideas into fruition

http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/01/31/the-one-job-jeff-immelt-might-be-happy-to-lose/

For the last 20 years the GE90 engines from GE have been a game changer in commercial aviation. It is largely because of this engine that oversea travel has been on the increase just because now airlines can perform such a task with such a powerful engine without massive fuel consumption. That engine is exactly what the metaphorical commercial about GE innovation was all about. It was one of the great leaps of innovation from American culture that could have only come from such a large corporation that embraces such invention. And to make the GE90 work, it took a lot of the best minds at the time in the field of aerospace to pull it off.

There is a new generation of engines coming to serve for the next two decades, so the GE90 today is something of a Payton Manning in aviation. It’s still a great engine, but it has set the bar very high and newer, younger players are entering the market to break those previous records—but it took the pace setter first to show everyone what the innovation looked like. While some may look at the GE commercial in respect to Immelt’s work with President Obama and cry foul, I have a tremendous amount of respect for those open doors which allow scary little creatures like new ideas a place to go. I wish there were a thousand GEs in America—and I believe there is plenty of room for all of them—but unfortunately for most, they end up in the trophy case of some politician’s game wall—hunted, killed, and stuffed for memory.

I don’t watch much television so I didn’t see the GE commercial until I was watching the start of NASCAR last weekend. I love NASCAR because of the innovations—the new MAC tools, the tires, the corporate sponsors. I love seeing a pit crew in action trying to troubleshoot a problem in record time to get their driver back on the track as quickly as possible. There are a lot of ideas born on those tracks which end up in the cars we drive, so I love to just watch NASCAR for a glimpse into the future. It was in looking for innovations that I actually saw the GE commercial.

Recently I had one of the worst days of my life where everything that could go wrong did and there was just a mess of activity that had to be cleaned up from more of those idea killing vermin. So to brighten my day, my wife went to McDonald’s and picked up a couple of Big Mac meals so I could watch the news while enjoying that wonderful idea from McDonald’s ancient past—which I still think is one of the greatest inventions ever created. Big Macs would be an impossibility to the typical hunter and gatherer in New Guinea or Africa—yet out of the mind of Ray Kroc came a company called McDonald’s that made quality fast food easy and affordable on the go—the Big Mac was created. When I have a really bad day-one of those days where it’s difficult to breathe from one moment to the next, I typically get a Big Mac and just like that—I’m good to go. My worries and concerns evaporate. It’s not just the taste of the burger that drives my interest, it’s the story of McDonald’s itself that does. It reminds me of what innovation is supposed to look like. As rapidly as McDonald’s makes Big Macs it is astonishing that they always come out well, cooked perfectly, possessing just the right amount of lettuce, onions and sauce, and can be done so quickly. To this very day if I buy a Big Mac in Florida, it will be made nearly to the same specifications as one that I might buy in Wisconsin. They are little miracles—now taken for granted like the GE90 jet engine—but they have changed the way the world interacts with each other—and each one of those ideas is beautiful.

So I have a major soft spot for the GE commercial with the little alien idea being born to the voice over about ideas being scary. Ideas are the natural-born enemy of the way things are. They are ridiculed and mocked, and are often hunted by members of the political class for sport. When Immelt joined Obama’s Job’s Council, the move to me was to protect all the ideas brewing at GE from the hunters of the political class who want to destroy those wonderful creatures before they can bloom into beautiful creatures. That’s what a CEO should do, and if that sometimes means drawing fire away from those they are trying to protect—then so be it. Because as the commercial says, “under the proper care, [ideas] become something beautiful. They do.

The task of a massive corporation like GE is to create an environment where ideas can grow. Not everyone within that culture embodies such a spirit, of course, but in general, the philosophy of the company must seek to strive for such creation. If it does, then it will bring into the world ideas that would otherwise be destroyed by humanity always speculative, and short-sighted. It was a bold commercial from a company that really didn’t need to push the limits of perception—yet they did. They didn’t have to ruffle any feathers, yet they did—and for that I deeply appreciate the commercial. It is good to see that GE is not playing it so safe in the public relations market—and that they are remembering who and what they are—and how they got where they are today. Ideas are beautiful—even when they look scary to the un-enterprising and clandestine political hunters. It is good to be the natural-born enemy to the way things are. That is the spirit of innovation—and the direct benefit is humanity and its offspring.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT