The Robin Hood Effect

I spend a lot of time persuading people that selflessness can be selfish. Arguing self-interest in philanthropy may seem like an oxymoron, but in fact it is often the difference between success and failure in fundraising for those of us building non-profit organizations. From my two decades of experience, not only does the strategy clearly work, but in addition I suggest its ethics and morality can oftentimes be admirable and appropriate. Most of us feel the urge to do good deeds and support those less fortunate than ourselves based on our shared belief that we are "all in this thing together" and that the strong should support the weak. Quite often we learn this motivation as a core tenet of our religion or when we are taught a philosophy of life. Certainly, I have taught four children that civilization is fragile and that it is the responsibility of each and every member to improve it and to further build resilient and ambitious social structures to pass on to our children and through them to theirs.
But research shows us that there is also self-interest in helping those less fortunate. Ichiro Kawachi, in collaboration with the Social Environment Working Group of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, has demonstrated that the degree of income inequality in a society is related to the health status of that population. Greater income inequality is linked to lower life expectancy, higher mortality rates and worse self-rated health, for the wealthy as well as for the poor, at the U.S. state level. Higher mortality at the U.S. metropolitan level, as well as higher rates of obesity at the U.S. state level, is also linked to income inequality. This association may seem astonishing but it is statistically robust when corrected for differentials of age, race, sex and individual socio-economic characteristics. The bottom line is that affluent people live shorter and less healthy lives the more the people around them are poor.
Why exactly this demonstrable correlation exists is still subject to debate. One can imagine however that one's own health is jeopardized if the man making the salad in a restaurant has inadequate health care and thus a higher incidence of communicable disease. Having worked in several Third World countries where the gulf between rich and poor is gigantic, I can attest to the incremental stress among the affluent caused by protecting themselves... through high walls, armored cars and armed bodyguards, from the potential for theft, violence and dislike by those impoverished souls around them. And stress, as we know, shortens life.
One of most important areas where self-interest is an entirely appropriate motivation for philanthropy is in the brilliant sponsorships I have been able to encourage by Fortune 500 companies. There was a time many years ago when I would fly into the headquarters city of a major corporation. I would visit with the corporation's foundation staff and I would basically beg for their help in supporting one of my children's charities -- "You know that we do good work, you know that we're efficient and that seriously ill children need your help. You are yourself a parent... could you please see a way to making a donation to support these special kids in need?" When things went well I would receive a twenty-five thousand dollar donation for Starlight and be politely asked not to return for another year.
At a certain point, I realized that a worthy cause is capable of presenting a net gain to a major corporation. Put bluntly, a worthy cause can help sell their product or service. So I started visiting with the Executive Vice President for Marketing, rather than with the foundation division of each company. My pitch would be quite different, "In our recent national promotion with Colgate-Palmolive, Starlight demonstrated a twenty-five percent uplift in the brand's Nielsen Scantrack market share. We think we can similarly create a dramatic benefit for your own corporation which will also be very good for Starlight-Starbright's special children". The results were astonishing: instead of receiving twenty-five thousand dollars from the corporation's foundation we were suddenly receiving two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a cause related marketing campaign. Some of these Starlight promotions have generated in excess of a million dollars each year. I am sure they also sold a great deal of product... and I say 'God bless America' in this regard... a perfect example of the corporation acting responsibly not only to society but also to its stockholders: a true win-win.
And what a wonderful thing to understand from research out of the University of Florida that a fifty cent donation to charity triggered by a consumer's purchase of a product or service generates more of an uplift in sales than a fifty cent discount coupon to the same consumer! This means that, generally speaking, consumers are more ready to help needy children than they are their own pocketbooks. It gives one hope for the future...
I still teach my kids that altruism is an ennobling part of character that enriches the giver as well as our whole civilization. I still teach them that any act, however small, by which we build society makes us part of the virtuous forces which heal the world and build a better life for our descendants. I still teach them that it is better to give a man a job than just to give him money, better to build a bridge then to swim the river, and a terrific thing to apply entrepreneurial skills in a non-profit, philanthropic direction.
But I also tell them that my Starlight, First Star and EDAR are the best possible opportunities to meet like-minded souls, brilliant people who have self-selected themselves as worthy citizen whose enthusiasm for life, children and the future will make great friendships blossom. I accurately tell them of the many marriages that have happened between thousands of brilliant volunteers who found a common bond in helping seriously ill kids. I tell them that this is how their Mom and Dad fell in love.
When I lecture in business schools I always tell the students that their career track or volunteer track in philanthropy will be about ten times faster than in an ordinary business for profit... the charities of America are so needy, so eager and so ready to embrace new ways of achieving their goals that generally speaking the rise of a smart and dedicated young person can be meteoric. People know in the meetings of my philanthropies that it is a dangerous thing to suggest a good idea... one immediately finds oneself the head of a taskforce charged with driving its study and implementation.
And for me personally, I laugh when someone talks to me as though I was some noble soul dedicating time and resources to non-profit causes. I know secretly in my heart that the greatest gift I've ever received was the realization that through good works I would make myself very, very happy. I constantly receive much more than I give.

Leadership is not Just for Leaders!

I constantly bang away trying to persuade people that philanthropists can force new solutions to major challenges in our lives, in our children's lives, and in the direction of our society as a whole. I take great pleasure in discussing philanthropic plans over breakfast with a wide spectrum of business people, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and causes. I like to think the advice I give, based on my own experiences founding Starlight, First Star and EDAR, may have had some small strategic value and brought a rather large dose of encouragement to some splendid people.

One common thread in these invigorating conversations at Nate & Al's is that people are concerned that if they are not themselves expert, then they may lack the knowledge necessary to exert leadership in complex areas. "How," as one person asked me, "can I hope to effect change through investing my money in cancer research when I know nothing about cancer beyond what I've read in the newspaper?" The answer cuts directly to the core problem of many apparently insoluble challenges to our future health and happiness: there is simply so much knowledge that generalists fear to tread in areas full of experts, areas that cry out for direction, purpose, coordination and plain old-fashioned leadership.

King Henry VIII of Great Britain was not very clever at marriage, but as a king he was probably the last world leader who really did know as much about every subject relevant to running a country as his most knowledgeable experts. He could debate agriculture with his agronomists, military strategy with his generals, economics with his economists (such as they were!) and philosophy with his philosophers. He knew as much about the law as any lawyer and could lecture all comers on history. Was this because he was a highly intelligent man with a king-sized brain?

Far from it: the simple fact was that in the 16th century human knowledge was not yet very extensive. You actually could know just about all of it if you applied your mind. Those days are long gone. The exponential growth of knowledge since then has not resulted in a commensurate increase in the size of the human brain nor in our mental capacity. We are the same old computers trying to process vastly more complex rafts of knowledge and interrelationships of facts. So how have we coped?

We have responded to daunting amounts of knowledge by narrowing our fields of study and expertise. I recently had trouble with my left knee and was stunned by a conversation with the radiologist at the local university hospital. "Tell me" I asked, "how do knees rank against ankles: are they more or less interesting?" The radiologist replied, "I only do knees; I don't do ankles, elbows or any other part of the body. But I do knees from all across the country: the MRIs come in to me electronically, and I make recommendations... but I am the knee man and nothing else." I immediately had to check that yes, he did right as well as left knees. In business, in government and in science we have been forced to drill down very deep to reach the cutting edge of knowledge and expertise. To get there, we have been forced to yield our flanks: our view of the world is very, very narrow, and our experts see things only through the prism of their own vastly specialized knowledge.

This would be fine if the problems afflicting the world could be solved by applying a single area of knowledge. But this is far from true: as the specialists have become more specialized, the world has become more complex. How could one dare to state an opinion on the Middle East without a profound knowledge of history, comparative religion, agriculture, geography, warfare, and land sciences? How could one really begin to apply scarce resources "highest and best" in medical research without first knowing everything about the interrelated sciences that affect the human body?

But we do: we are a society run by specialists who do not personally possess broad knowledge anywhere near the cutting edge of the multiple areas that together comprise the challenges they seek to address. The needs of the large portions of mankind who slip through the cracks of our attention are daunting precisely because they require collaborations of the knowledgeable, which rarely take place. For good or for bad, such is the arrogance of leadership that our lack of knowledge rarely seems to hold back the firmness of our opinions. What, then, are we to do about this?

Firstly, I suggest that an intelligent generalist, especially one with the power to make significant philanthropic contributions, can drive measurable answers to intractable challenges. Secondly, a business entrepreneur who understands the intricate relationship between goal and process can add greatly to the leadership required to crack complex social and medical problems.

I remember some years ago engineering a meeting with General Norman Schwarzkopf. I flew to Tampa to persuade him to become Campaign Chairman of the Starbright World online network for seriously ill children. I was describing how Starbright brought together three different areas of expertise: pediatric medicine, high technology and the entertainment industry, and that we were always yanking the experts back into the middle, toward the goal we'd set for the Network. He stopped me abruptly. "What do you know about the United States Army?" he asked. "Absolutely nothing, sir," I replied. "Well, let me explain it," he went on. "When you join the Army you are not just given a rank, you are also given a specialty. You're a rifleman, a cook, a signalman... it doesn't matter how much you're promoted up the ranks: you always wear your specialty badge until the day they make you a General. And in the ceremony they take away your specialty badge, because you are no longer a specialist, you're a General, and you are now responsible for the overall goals of the military operation." I realized at that moment why focusing on goals in the Army had raised generalists to a position of supreme power. The Army realized that if they put a specialist in charge, they would always be pulled away from the goal and toward the special focus of that individual. Not only was generalism the origin of the word General, but it made absolute sense in a life-or-death battle situation to put in charge someone who could think about overall goals and purposes without getting bogged down in the lattice-work of supporting specialized thinking.

I am reminded of the story of the eminent architects who met in an expensive restaurant over lunch to discuss how on Earth they could retrofit an elevator into a particular old building where it was now required by the Americans with Disabilities Act. After an agonizing discussion of various solutions, none really workable, the young waiter leaned in and asked, "I apologize, but I have an idea where you could put the elevator." The architects were somewhat contemptuous but asked him to tell them where he, a mere server, might think of locating the elevator when they could not. "What if you put it up the outside of the building?" he asked. And they did.

When the financier Michael Milken was forced to address prostate cancer because of his own illness, he did not just inject money into the existing field of research. He redesigned the whole plan of attack. He applied those same intellectual skills he had developed in the bond market with considerable success to new challenges of research medicine, where dozens of highly specialized researchers had tried hard, but never previously worked together "highest and best."

As philanthropists we can do more than just give money to specialists: we can actually coach them to reassess their impact on their goals and readdress the goals themselves.

When we started First Star a dozen years ago, I had nothing but a vague idea that children's constitutional rights were lacking in the United States and that this directly resulted in our poor performance against the rest of the First World in addressing the needs of abused and neglected children. Over these 12 years we have brought together 500 world-class experts from the fields of child psychology, the judiciary, the legislative and executive branches of government, social work, medicine and law enforcement. On not a single occasion has one of these experts asked me why on Earth I think I can presume to exert leadership in a field of two dozen specialties, in none of which am I an expert. On the contrary, I am told all the time that what has been lacking in the past is leadership. That the solutions we have driven by colliding the different expertises together are self-evident, splendid and much to be desired. I take from this that the failure all along has been one of leadership and not one of knowledge.

When Valerie Sobel lost her child, she made lemonade out of lemons: she formed the Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation to provide financial help to families below the poverty line in which the illness of a child is causing the single mother to lose her grip on financial sufficiency. Valerie Sobel has made a measurable difference in the lives of hundreds of afflicted families with a philanthropy she invented herself, by understanding a need and daring to address it. No amount of organizational training or specialized knowledge could have replaced her over-arching concern, compassion, intelligence and refusal to take "no" for an answer in creating her charity.

If you have been lucky enough to accumulate wealth, and/or if you are an entrepreneur in business, you have the power to change the world as you know it. Do not be held back by vague ideas that only a specialist with decades of training can drive solutions to difficult problems. Sometimes exactly what it takes is someone who can question old assumptions. That person can be you, and the world may be a better place if you dare to lead from the front.

Lighting A Few Bright Candles...

What is the meaning of wealth? This is a question I have wrestled with intermittently for the last twenty-five years. At a certain point, if one is lucky, hard work creates what one needs to live comfortably. Continuous observation suggests that leaving vast sums of money to one's kids is to place a curse on their heads that will more likely challenge than nurture them. So what does one do with the rest?

Chaos Theory teaches us that all systems in the Universe if left unmanaged eventually decay into random nothingness. If that is true, then the quest for civilization is a never ending one: If we wish to bequeath something honorable, helpful and loving to our children's children's children we had better pay attention to the systems within our society which keep it afloat. Passive inactivity is a recipe for decay and atrophy. It really is not an option to sit on one's hands.

It seems to me that there are gigantic opportunities for people who thrive in business to apply the self-same skills to righting some of the wrongs around us. I have tried to focus through a self-invented "entrepreneurial philanthropy" on the grievous challenges of seriously ill children, of those kids who are abused and neglected, and of our urban homeless. It makes no sense to me that in this greatest civilization the world has ever put forth, we so often systematically marginalize our children and other people's children, even though they are our only future. The dark side of the "can do" of the American Dream is to try to fix things after they have broken rather than preventing them from breaking in the first place. For example, two-thirds of the adult males in our prisons were abused or neglected as children. Would it not make some sense to diminish this threat in the future? If self-esteem is so closely tied to living a productive life, should we not be trying to build it wherever we can in our society?

And if half of all foster children are homeless within two years of aging out of the system, wouldn't it be a lot less expensive to use college to get them into productive careers, rather than society paying for the rest of their lives? So why do only 2% of foster kids get a college education? Whose fault is that, and how do we fix it?

There is so much we can productively do by using our resources of intellect, entrepreneurship and a sense that anything is possible if one breaks it down into bite-sized chunks. And, yes, it sometimes takes money as well. Why, as another example, are we not building bridges to develop a strong, prosperous Islamic middle class, probably the only long-term solution to present upheaval in the world, awfulness that will otherwise confront our children for decades to come? And can we really not do better for homeless people sleeping rough amongst us than to give them the cardboard box our Sub-Zero came in?

Some of the most exciting things I have ever done have been through collaborations with like-minded people in philanthropy. An entrepreneur can helpfully exert his or her lateral thinking to serve the planet, not just to take from it. It's really no use to curse the gathering darkness -- much better to light a few bright candles I think.

There is a poem by Shelley called "Ozymandias" about a gigantic crumbled statue in the desert. Erected by a long-forgotten emperor, only the legs still stand. "Look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!" reads the inscription. That's all that's left! As Theilard de Chardin wrote, "Now is the time to build the Earth." If we want our lives to amount to anything worth remembering, should we not pay attention to the true and lasting value of our legacy -- and have some wonderful excitement while doing so?

MY SON HAS READ THE INTERNET

In today’s New York Times there is an article by John Schwartz in which he writes about the future as though we should all assume it is irredeemably screwed. He is nostalgic for the fifties and sixties, and for “….the future we imagined back when it was something to be hoped for rather than feared”. While Mr. Schwartz is entitled to his nihilism and low expectations, I personally think he is bonkers. And I say this because I’ve recently noticed that my 17 year old son Jeffrey has read the Internet.

It started as a dinner table joke. A year or so ago, I noticed that there appeared to be no topic that could be mentioned, certainly if it was anywhere in the sciences, where I knew more than Jeffrey. And I’m 56 and he’s 17. As I pride myself on having been alert, inquisitive and an addicted reader of everything in sight for at least 40 years, this seemed quite odd. So I’ve been studying Jeffrey like a kind of anthropologist and have reached the conclusion that Something Very Big is going on all of a sudden, and it is a seismic shift in culture and society that will soon give the lie to Mr. Schwartz’s negativity. In fact, I think it indicates that an unprecedented wave of progress and improvement will soon be upon us, led by young people like Jeffrey who right now are still teenagers.

OK, so he hasn’t actually read the entire Internet. He’s trying, but it is rather too big for even the autodidactic brainiac who is my son. But I’m telling you that, no kidding, since he was ten years old, this young man has spent around four hours a day, 365 days a year, reading the Internet. And interestingly, very little of this seems to have been distractive entertainment. No, it appears as though he’s been methodically reading just about everything he could access without a password in the widest possible aspects of all the applied sciences and beyond and through them in politics, sociology and generally The World We Live In. And I calculate he’s been reading the Internet so far for about ten thousand hours. I’m not kidding: do the math. And not only has he made that personal investment in the combined online output of two millennia of intellectual writing, but he has wired himself online into a substantial network of deep thinkers, including a bunch of PhD’s as well as abundant other young people who are also reading the knowledge base we call the Internet. And they are endlessly discussing seriously deep stuff online and often as a result face to face.

So what is going on here? Well, apparently, and only in the last decade, we have abolished geography as an impediment to learning. When I used to sit in the Cambridge University Library, which is a mandated Copyright Library that contains as a result pretty much every book you could ever want to read, I was still at a serious disadvantage in acquiring knowledge as against Jeffrey sitting in his teenager’s bedroom in West Los Angeles. First of all, I had to know what I was looking for, so there were few random serendipitous discoveries of tangential knowledge: The professor gave you a list, you went and found the books and you read them. Every so often, you’d use the bibliography in book A to go onwards under your own steam to book B, but mostly, you just read the suggested books to go deeper into your subject. And you pretty much had to start the book at the beginning and read it through to find the relevant stuff. Me, mostly I knew in advance what I wanted to find out, I found it, I read it and left the building.

Not Jeffrey. His reading of the Internet has a whole different methodology and it has little to do with school curricula, assigned reading and “How To Ace the ACT and SAT”. He takes care of those for sure, but he left them behind long ago as a sole basis for his reading. Instead, he has many advantages that I never had: He can word search. He can hyper-click. He can read ten things at a time in ten open windows. He can search the whole massive, aggregate chunk of human knowledge that exists on the Internet by concept and he can meet and discuss it as he sees fit, often with the author, often with others with common interest in the material. He is sitting in a virtual University Library, but with all the books open at once, and with the aisles full of interested parties in one seamless, endless seminar or teach-in, a kind of exogenous brain of all the knowledge of the world. And he's a Rising Senior in high school. Go figure.

I don’t think this has ever been possible before in the ten millennia of human intellectual development. And it makes me a pretty huge optimist as young people like Jeffrey grow up and start asserting themselves intellectually, in politics, as scientists, as thought-leaders and as citizens of the world. And I suspect they might even rescue us from the dysfunctions of old-style democracy.

Consider if you will, the mind of Henry the Eighth, king of Great Britain. Some five centuries ago, he was much more than a womanizer and beheader of inconvenient wives. He was very, very smart…. but that alone did not make him a great leader. The thing was that he knew pretty much everything a human being could know in that place, at that time. When he met with his military advisors, he knew as much as them about the art and science of warfare. When he met with agricultural experts, he was their match in knowing all about farming. His understanding of the weather was as good as anyone else’s he could consult. In fact, in the twenty separate and unrelated areas of knowledge important for a king to make a decision, important for him to be a great leader, he was a world expert, all on his own. He did not always get things right, leaders never do, but he had the huge advantage of being able to process all available resources of knowledge inside his own head, and on the fly. No need for a whole bunch of committee meetings for Henry.

Now think of a modern day leader. Let’s use Bill Clinton in the White House, not because of some other unfortunate similarities to Henry the Eighth, but because when we add in Al Gore as Vice-President, even President Clinton’s most ardent opponents should concede that the two of them together had Very Big Brains at work. They had the Rhodes Scholar intellect we want at work in the White House. But for good or bad, the world in which they operated was one heck of a lot more complicated than in Henry’s simpler age.

And why? Precisely because Henry was pretty much the last leader who could Know Everything Available. Since then, the database of human knowledge has grown exponentially every year…. call it the intellectual parallel to Moore’s Law…. but the poor old human brain has remained exactly the same size, operating at the same speed, with the same mental processes dealing with all the information. So that even the smartest among us until recently have had to go deeper and deeper in order to be an expert in anything at all. But importantly, in order to do so with those same-sized brains, we’ve had to go narrower and narrower. I was joking with the radiologist recently who analyzed the scans of my knee. “How are knees” I asked, “more or less interesting than elbows?” “Oh”, he replied “I don’t do elbows these days. I’m the knee man here”. I was relieved that he confirmed he did actually do both left and right knees, and I took some great comfort from the fact that he must be really good at knees if that’s all he did professionally.

The problem however is obvious: Life is Not Knees. And the colossal challenges that face our civilization are intrinsically multi-disciplinary. If the fixed size of the brain’s traditional capacity to learn has remained static, how can we ever hope to conquer those hellaciously complicated problems that involve twenty disciplines, all of whose experts are in intellectual silos: deep but very, very narrow? And especially when human nature makes grown-ups invariably believe their own silo is more important, more compelling, than all those other silos they little understand.

Well, corporations and governments have taken different stabs at that precise problem over time, with mixed success. Our President has a Cabinet of specialized leaders reporting to him or her. The hope is that they will each know more than the President about their own area of responsibility. In the case of a smart leadership, the Clinton / Gore way to lead was to convene world-class experts and attempt to make them cooperate. But the challenge is that N.I.H. stands for more in such a room than the National Institutes of Health. Though the experts are asked to leave their “Not Invented Here” attitudes at the door, human nature brings them into the room.

When Steven Spielberg and I founded The Starbright Foundation in 1990, we wanted a fearless Campaign Chairman, who would aggressively ask people for big donations to our then fledgling non-profit studio. Kathy Kennedy brilliantly suggest General Norman Schwarzkopf. So off I went to meet him in Tampa. There I was jawing on about how in Starbright we were generalists trying to make a wildly diverse bunch of specialist experts cooperate for the first time to create our special software for sick kids: writers, directors, artists, oncologists, hematologists, psychiatrists…. A set of experts who had never before encountered most of those other experts professionally. And I was saying that our job was to be the generalists in the middle, constantly yanking back the strategy which every expert seemed to want to yank left or right to serve their own narrow silo of expertise. We were the strategic drivers, they were the collaborating resources.

General Schwarzkopf interrupted me: “What do you know about the U.S. Army?” he asked. “Almost nothing” I answered. “Well” he said. “When you join the Army, we don’t just give you a rank. We also give you a Specialty: You are a rifleman or a cook or a driver or a signalman. And we give you a pin that says so. And it does not matter how much we promote you over the years; you still keep your Speciality”.

“Until one day, if you are a damn good leader, we may decide to make you a General. And in the ceremony when you get your Star, we take away your Specialty Pin…. Because you are no longer a Specialist. You are a General”.

I sat there stunned by the enormity of the revelation…. It had never occurred to me before that in an Army, the consequence of failure is death and injury and loss of your defined mission. So you’d better get your act together and put the generalist, the General in charge of the experts.

That’s all well and good, but how are our leaders in any area to possibly possess the necessary knowledge to tame the experts and lead them back to valuing their collaboration with other experts in support of the common mission? How exactly do we do that?

Well, with great difficulty I think! This is arguably now the biggest systemic challenge to the world and to Life As We know It: The leaders know a lot less about each relevant discipline than the experts they must keep in line. Oh dear! Is there hope, and if so, where?

Well, I think it is in Jeffrey Samuelson and, in this country at least, the eighty million other members of Jeff’s Generation Y, the Millennials all around us. It is not only that they are more pro-social, more engaged in their world than any generation in the last three, nor that they are more concerned and more viral in their relationships on and off line.

It dawns on me that the biggest advantage that these 15 to 30 year olds are going to have is that the inspired generalists among them will simply know a great deal more than any previous generation in the history of the human race. The technology of the Internet has granted them easy access to much of the Knowledge Of The World and a toolkit to explore it quickly, widely and deeply. By doing this, they will be empowering their brains to go much farther into the heady world of finding multi-disciplinary solutions for our vast multi-disciplinary challenges. A good brain is good at pattern recognition…. the arena to apply it was just multiplied by a billion billion pages of information. The mind boggles, and that’s a good thing.

So my hat is off to the Gen Y generalists, to our future thought leaders, the crackers of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Global Warming and who knows, of the tribalism, hatred, ignorance, hunger and poverty that afflict our planet every minute of every day.

And to Jeffrey and those like you, I salute you for your dedication to threading your way through all those screens of other people’s thoughts and research. And please also take the time to go sit on a hill every so often and just think about solutions using your unprecedented breadth of knowledge. Remember that Einstein, devoid of an Internet, said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”…. and to that add the thought that if your base of knowledge is exponentially larger, your thinking outside the box of the present, your invention of new solutions, new paradigms, the unprecedented path forward every which way, will truly be a wonder to behold. So please keep reading the Internet Jeff, and go even wider and deeper. I expect great things from you and your friends. And thank you for the ennobling burst of optimism you deliver about our future. The New York Times guy hasn’t met you, and he’s completely wrong. Si, se puede.

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Peter Samuelson is a media executive, producer and pro-social entrepreneur who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children. http://www.samuelson.la/ peter@samuelson.la