When I was growing up in Potomac, Maryland, it was just being developed from rural farmland into a burgeoning suburb. Camotop, yes Potomac spelled backward, was a new development with large “McMansions.” I taught guitar lessons to a kid who lived there, and I was blown away by the size of the house and what it must cost. Although I have not been back in decades, from what I understand, Potomac has nothing rural left.

Fifteen years ago, we went to an exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and in the garden, there was an installation called Design For the Other 90%. It was an intelligent, inexpensive design for third-world countries, giving each home water, storage, and a roof over its head. These homes are needed now more than ever for refugees, and that includes homeless people in our own country.

Many entrepreneurs were getting into the prefab space at one time. I looked at investing in one of those companies, but in the end, they self-funded. What I loved about the concept was that these homes had the basic needs, were small, were built off-site, and could scale up, adding additional components when needed or not.

The cost of homes has gone through the roof, and the name “Design For the Other 90%” says it all. It is imperative that people can buy less house for less money. I have read that the trend towards small homes is beginning as mortgage rates increase. When entry-level homes cost over $250m, there must be opportunities for everyone to have the “American Dream” of owning a home.

I also read that in Paris, 75% of the shops are independent due to strict rent caps and controls, and a semi-planning company buys large abandoned units and rents them at cut prices to revitalize neighborhoods. In France, people have homes in their families for generations because they are not allowed to be bought and sold as an asset class like we do in the US. Also, in France, 25% of people live in public housing that happens to be beautiful and well-maintained, keeping their communities robust.

There is something here between the small homes, the high cost of rent and purchases, the importance of community at the street levels, and ensuring everyone can afford to have a roof over their head. Where the small home market goes will be interesting to watch.

My Mother and Grandmother connected being thin to beauty. So, it is not shocking that I have been on a conscious diet since I was born. There are too many stories to tell, but I would never be tall with long legs and effortlessly thin unless I came from different parents. Regardless, who paid attention to the gene pool while I dieted away? As my Grandma used to say, “A minute on your lips, forever on your hips.” She would have loved Ozempic.

The only people we used to see in the media, be it TV or magazines, were thin white people. The good news is that it has changed. Fashion spreads now have a myriad of faces and bodies; TV shows probably cast the most significant net.

I spent the morning at the Olympic Spa in Los Angeles this past week. I got to soak in a hot jacuzzi, hit the cold plunge, took an herbal steam, sat in an oxygen room, did an ice-cold sauna, and the highlight was the scrub. A woman dressed in a black bra and black boy shorts underwear scrubs your body down, tosses warm water over you, oils you up, and stretches you out. It is quite the experience; your skin feels like a baby when you are done.

The spa is for women only, and everyone walks around naked. Seeing everyone waltz around, appearing to be comfortable, is not something I necessarily feel comfortable in. I grew up in a family of body shaming. Sitting there and being tossed around like meat in my scrub gave me a new appreciation for the human body and embracing ourselves, even if we are not thin and leggy. Even thin and leggy people have bumps and lumps. Nothing like a bit of reality, seeing naked women strolling about enjoying their spa day. I can hardly wait to go back.

When people rise to fame, such as sports figures, politicians, business people, community leaders, parents to their children, and anybody people look up to, they become role models. There have been role models forever.

I have heard many, particularly sports icons, say that people shouldn’t look to them as role models; they didn’t ask for that. That is bullshit. If you ever find yourself at that level in your career, where crowds of people come out to watch you play, you have become a role model even if you didn’t want to be. It comes with the territory, particularly in America.

With success comes responsibility. Many people who have made a lot of money set up foundations because they are tax shelters and allow people to impact areas close to their hearts. It could be anything from education to medicine to any meaningful targeting given to the donor.

People used to wait until they retired to start giving money away. The technology boom changed all of that. Many people who have made incredible amounts of money have created foundations to give some of their capital to things they care about.

Some of the numbers we see from tech giants appear to be significant sums of cash they are giving back to the community, but when you look under the cover, the amount they are giving away is not very big compared to their wealth. Sad but true.

Then we get to Elon Musk, who appears to not give a fuck about anything but himself. He created a $7b fund, but not much has gone anywhere. Just enough to keep the foundation active in the eye of the law. It is shocking but not shocking.

I can’t help but ask myself, what’s wrong with this picture? Why does this country create so many financially successful individuals who give away the least amount of money they can or none at all? We are one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, yet too many with financial success choose to build a rocket to the moon instead of creating social programs that can help the communities around which they live.

I wonder why anyone cares who Elon votes for and who he gets behind for President. He has proven himself to be an incredible entrepreneur who has impacted our world; SpaceX is the next one. Still, when it comes to doing the right thing with billions of dollars in his foundation for tax purposes, he can’t find it in his soul to give back as impactfully as his businesses have made to us.

The importance of public-private partnerships will increase in the decades since Reagan destroyed the concept of paying taxes for the greater good of running an efficient Government that would bleed down to the streets (literally), education, healthcare, breaking the cycle of poverty, etc.

I wonder how we got here in America and why we applaud people like this.

NYC is my home, but Los Angeles owns a part of my home, too. I was born there, and I did an internship there in college. My brother and his family live there, and one of our kids lives there. We have such important people in our lives who live there, and I could not live there full-time, but I love our LA trips.

Years ago, we went on a trip to Stockholm, a gem of a city, and we kept running into someone with whom Fred had scheduled to have coffee at one point. He is American but, at the time, was living in Stockholm. What stuck with me is that he was leaving right before Christmas to go on the annual family ski vacation, and it was evident that he had a close relationship with his family, although they lived pretty far away.

Unless you were ridiculously wealthy, keeping those connections would have been challenging twenty years ago. Today, you can keep connecting with family and friends no matter what you are in the world. Our kids are in three different cities right now, one in NYC, one in Amsterdam, and one in LA, and although they are not in our hometown, we talk, we FT, and we see each other more than a few times over the year, and we are all living our own lives. It doesn’t have the feeling of being so far away as it did decades ago.

Here are the highlights from two weeks in LA; obviously, I am a NYer at heart because I did not go on a hike and kept very busy when I wasn’t on Zoom with Gotham. The first night is always Echigo; we can’t help ourselves, Echigo first, and then the Bigg Chill for a soft ice cream cone. We ended up going twice!

One night, we had dinner at Vito, an old school spot in very old LA, with the family, and then we had a fantastic paella that my brother whipped up one night.

We went with Emily and her boyfriend to the Frederick R. Weisman house; this was my second time. It is worth going to. He amassed quite an art collection, and it still hangs in the house today as it did decades ago.

That night, Fred and I went back east to Si! Mon is a new spot in Venice that has delicious food. That is not the norm in Venice. These fried chicken drumsticks, using flavors from Central America, are delicious! I will be happy to return.

We made a pilgrimage to Dover Street Market, a fan fave, and went to a Clippers Game.

After the game and some Oscar-watching, we drove to Bistro Nas‘ in the San Gabriel Valley, where Emily had pre-ordered the Peking duck. San Gabriel Valley has countless Asian restaurants, and many are going upscale. The duck and fried shrimp are a must. The place feels a bit like an old Manchurian palace.

The other highlight is meeting Emily for a spa morning at the Olympic Spa and then having lunch at Cookbook. There is nothing that a good scrub can’t wash away. Cookbook is the best combination of LA meets Europe. I love the small local shop filled with everything you need for your home and kitchen, but you can also have a meal. It’s just perfect.

Our last two outings were to Anajak in Sherman Oaks—an exceptional Thai spot on multiple levels. The hip-hop music creates the setting the second you walk in. It is not a down-and-dirty Thai spot but a place between high-end and low-end. The wine list is exceptional, and there are boxes of wine placed around the restaurant to create separation. The tablecloths are identical prints as you would find on plastic in a Thai spot, but here, they are made of cloth with a glass top over them. The owner, who returned to the family biz after his father passed, like the Bear, created what we all need: good food, music, and wine with casual elegance.

Last night was at La Dolce Vita to celebrate the birthday girl. A perfect end to a few weeks in LA!

The phone has become an extension of our arm. How many of us have asked out loud where is my phone? Did you feel the need to check Instagram? Or the next to answer a text immediately? Or the endless scroll to send us into a numb zone?

After COVID began to recede and we could actually see other human beings, I remember hanging out with another couple, whom we obviously kept at a distance. What was eye-opening was how long we hung out and talked. Even this past week, we were hanging out at my brother and sister-in-law’s house outside with no distractions, and before we knew it, hours had gone by. The need for human connection is real.

Call me crazy, but a few bright spots speak to people’s desire to put the phone down. There are more dinner parties, more intimate conferences, and more events where people show up repeatedly to meet new people. There is an underlying desire for human contact outside of the phone.

Being able to call someone when you are late, or a parent knowing their child is in touch, or perhaps shopping for something on the fly is a bonus, but when the phone and social media start to impede our lives, it is time to take those benefits and shelve the rest.

My gut is human nature will get us there.

Cannabis might still be Federally illegal, but pay attention to the trends.

Alcohol consumption is down for multiple reasons. Some site mental health, others site the way they feel the next day, regardless people are drinking less. What are they doing instead to cut the edge? They are taking gummies, or cannabis-infused drinks, or smoking a joint.

The access to cannabis in 24 states has also made an impact on the Pharma industry. The market cap is down, and people are turning to other drugs for pain and sleeping. It could be a combination of things, considering how Pharma misled doctors and the public about many of the drugs that they pushed for profit, aka Oxi.

Alcohol sales are down at concerts and sporting events, accounting for much of the profitability. How does this affect hospitality? Fifty percent of a restaurant’s profits come out of alcohol.

As we think about Gotham, we see trends at the ground level. 54% of people who buy cannabis take it to sleep. We also talk to those who have pain and/or those who want to have a good giggle and take the edge off. We want the ability to show up at all the places where alcohol consumption has prevailed and give that consumer cannabis instead. Thanks to lobbyists and the false narrative that has been fed for decades that weed is bad, the one-day license to serve those at public events will take time, which is unfortunate. In the end, cannabis will prevail.

We all know how slow the Government is, and it is getting worse as the divide and anger get larger and people live to be older. It is also not shocking to see Pharma and large alcohol companies start to figure out how to get into the cannabis space. They will need to because their market share is dropping. It is time to change the ability to consume in the same places that alcohol is consumed, or sooner than later, the bottom line at concerts and other large forums is going to be in big trouble. Their margins are slim enough, and selling 20% fewer products at events will not be pretty.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting and seeing those not given the opportunities that most people I know have grown up with. There is not a time that I have not walked away in awe.

Years ago, I remember going to Carnegie Hall where, a non-profit organization that brings string instruments, mostly violins, into underserved communities in NYC and brings the kids they touch on the stage. These kids were brilliant. It speaks to the human spirit and how empowering someone can change their life.

I saw a photo this past week of an incarcerated person graduating from Yale. Yale is not the only university that works to educate people in prisons. Looking at those tears, one can’t help but wonder where this person grew up, what led this person to commit a crime, and the trauma of being locked up yet still being able to find something within themselves to graduate from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Perhaps it was the first time they were given any lifeline.

How can we not say to ourselves damn, how can we make sure that more people/children get the opportunity to be the best they can be regardless of the terrible decisions their parents made that they had to grow up on.  It’s an endless cycle.  I’m old enough to witness the cycle. The question we ask ourselves is how do we or can we ever break the cycle?  

Instead of spending so much time taking money out of these communities, doesn’t it make more sense to put capital into them, giving kids a beacon of hope? If every kid was handed a violin or given the opportunity to get to Yale regardless of the circumstances they were born into, wouldn’t that be the right thing to do, the way to break a cycle?

The chances for success are slim as these programs get funded and cut depending on the budget and disregard of each administration. If every kid had the opportunity to have the education and support system our kids have had, what a different world we would live in. There would be less hate, more happiness, and a better economic impact. Why is that so difficult to see? More importantly, why is it so difficult not to have empathy and want that for those not as fortunate as yourself?

Today is International Women’s Day, perhaps a Hallmark activity, but I bristled after seeing Katie Britt of Alabama deliver the “rebuttal” speech to Biden’s State of the Union speech. At first, I thought she wasn’t real and that it was all AI. This is a woman vying to be Trump’s running mate who seems okay with giving her speech from a kitchen with her large gold cross hanging from her neck. What message is the GOP trying to get across here?

What is frightening is that this woman and I gather others, are okay with women remaining in the kitchen, having no protection over their bodies, not being allowed to have IVF or perhaps birth control, and god knows what else.

Supposedly, Oklahoma wants a database of every woman who has ever had an abortion, a new low for the red states that can’t function without Federal money but seem content with having the worst schools, highest murder rates, and lack of healthcare. And why is Katie okay with this?

After all these years of Mitch McConnell, he could have retired and not supported Trump when he left, but no, he had to put his support behind Trump. The GOP is defending a man convicted and charged with rape, how lovely. How can any sane female get behind a political party that appears hellbent on bringing women back to the kitchen with zero rights over his body?

International Women’s Day is the day to remember women leaders and women’s rights activists who advocated for gender equality and gender justice. Let’s highlight the word equality for Katie Britt and all the other women supporting the GOP.

I understand that the Republican mantra is something that almost 50% of the country believes in. Still, perhaps when it comes to their policies and women’s empowerment, women should begin to vote on this one issue and this one issue alone. Otherwise, I fear that if the Republican dream comes true, we will have a woman abuser in the white house and more women looking like Katie, who appears to be fully medicated, following the speech written for her while cooking in the kitchen with zero rights of her own. I wonder if she is barefoot?

If you spend less than 180 days in a state, you are not considered a permanent resident, so you do not have to pay the state and local taxes on your income. Countless people own apartments in NYC and work extraordinarily hard to ensure they do not stay in NY for more than 180 days, making their permanent resident status in places like Florida, where the taxes are much lower. It infuriates me.

Many of these people came to NY to make their fame and fortune, growing their careers from their early 20s. They also raised their families here, but once the kids flew the coop, so did the entire family to keep from paying their taxes. Yet they still return to NY to enjoy all the cultural pleasures available.

We raised our kids in NY, and there is still not a day that I cannot thank my lucky stars for being able to enjoy everything NYC has to offer. We also give back to our city-building businesses and involve ourselves in organizations that impact underserved communities. We feel a responsibility to NY.

That law needs to be changed. The taxes should be pro-rata based on the time you live there and if you own property. Taxes keep our cities running; to think otherwise, you are fooling yourself. Reagonomics and “no new taxes” has taken our nation to a place where we are no longer as strong as we used to be. Our airports, our roads, our military equipment, our schools, and so much more are no longer top in the world or cutting edge because of debt and tax structures. Unclear how we get back without cash, but we could begin with abolishing the 180-day rule and creating a proforma tax structure where you pay to play if you own your residence.

Macy’s has decided to close 150 underperforming stores to avoid a takeover and hedge its bets on high-end luxury. I am calling it here: high-end will not end well. Perhaps the middle class has shrunk, and what Macy’s calls luxury is questionable here, but we will soon find out what that means.

At the end of the 1980s, Macy’s bet on high-end luxury when they began to lose market share from the Gap and the Limited. It did not work well, considering most customers walking in the door were not looking for Balmain or Prada but a one-day sale or well-priced items for everyday wear.

What is worth noting is that in Europe, Department stores prevail. Why can’t they figure that out in the US? Is it because the singular brand stores compete with the department stores’ inventory? Is it the lack of originality from curation to customer interaction or store salespeople?

I have been espousing the end of department stores for a long time. Perhaps this is it? The department stores in the US have become dinosaurs. Sad but true.