Career: Dina Powell

Dina Powell has had a fascinating career in and out of politics and finance, that has left her very well positioned in both industries at a young age. She's 44 years old, and on the management committee at Goldman, and served as Deputy National Security Adviser. She claims never to have planned her career moves but to always have "taken the leap of faith."

What could an equivalent track look like? What relationships would you need to build, and where would you want to work? Is there a logic to moving between media and government that matches Goldman/NSC? Or would there be better logic to moving between cyber security / government?

Miami recommendations

Coffee - All Day. Incredible coffee, food, cocktails. Very instagrammable. Don't miss the cat wall paper in the bathroom. Order multiple food items and multiple coffee concoctions.

Neighborhoods/Areas outside South Beach / Miami Beach - We really enjoyed eating and shopping in Coconut Grove. Ate great burgers (and got great service) at Lokal. We also went to the Rusty Pelican on Key Biscane (sp?) which has a bar with a great view back on Brickell/Miami. Great for sunset cocktails.

My favorite thing to do in Miami is get drinks at the bars in expensive hotels! We got drinks at the Sunset bar at the Faena hotel (next to amazing Hirst sculpture of golden mammoth called "gone but not forgotten"). The restaurant Los Fuegos is there and the chef was on chef's table (the guy who buries everything to burn).

I haven't been recently but on past trips I loved the bar at the Nautilus hotel too (very hip and laid back / not like party-hip).

Apparently the Standard's pool party is the craziest because there are no kids allowed.

Key takeaways from Scott Galloway's "The Four" (Amazon, FB, Apple, Google)

• Decline of brands:
• The importance of brand is declining in an era where fewer and fewer searches start with brands. Consumers are not seeing end of aisle displays, product specs, etc, before making purchase. When purchases are made by voice (i.e., through Alexa, etc) consumers won't know price, product design, etc. 
• Product search is done on Amazon, not Google
• Most "product" searches start on Amazon, not Google (55% of product searches start on Amazon, whereas 28% percent start on Google - remainder is mainly brand websites).
• "Searches for product are lucrative - they get healthy bids, as tehre may be a purchase at the end of it, vs. stalking your high-school crush. Amazon's search franchise may rival Google's in value someday, as the people looking to spend start their search at Amazon." -Pg 60
• Patient capital
• Amazon's success can largely be attributed to the very patient capital they get from issuing stock to investors who they have trained not to expect profits in return. They get cheap capital from investors then plunge it into expensive capital projects or consumer offerings that build a moat around them (e.g., their distribution network, or free two day delivery).
• And by not turning a profit, they don't pay taxes.
• A future without jobs
• Retail is the country's biggest employer
• "Entrepreneurs create jobs, right? No, they don't. Most entrepreneurs, at least in tech, leverage processing power and bandwidth to destroy jobs by offering more for less... The guy [Bezos] who has the greatest insight and influence into the future of the world's largest business (consumer retail) has come to the conclusion that there's no way the economy will be able to create, as it has done in the past, enough jobs to replace those being destroyed. [because he believes we need a universal minimum wage to protect all the workers who will lose their jobs]" - Pg 53
• "...we need business leaders who envision, and enact, a future with more jobs - not billionaires who want the government to fund, with taxes they avoid, social programs for people to sit on their couches and watch Netflix all day." - Pg 62
• "best of times for the remarkable, and the worst of times for the unremarkable." - Pg 61

Obama-Trump voters

"Economic privation does not explain why so many working-class whites chose Mr Trump. The poorest picked Mrs Clinton. Indeed, analysis by the bipartisan Voter Studies Group find no unifying attitude among Trump voters on any economic issue. Much likelier indicators of support for him were cultural and not pretty. They included support for his promised Muslim ban and a belief that white Americans were discriminated against.

As Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist, has written, such biases are fulled by anxiety about socioeconomic status in a changing America. Even as working-class whites find themselves working harder, for less reward, they look around and see women and non-whites on the rise-presumably at their expense, some conclude. This helps explain why there has been a steady flow of working-class whites from the Democrats, the champion of those rising groups, over the past two decades. Mr Trump's success was based on supercharging that pre-existing change, through his attacks on immigrants, Muslims and the trade deals that working-class Americans also decry."

The Economist, November 4, 2017

To me this means that support for Trump among non-college educated whites stems not so much from economic hardship, but from relative economic hardship.

Vietnam history

-President Diem and his brother Nhu were oppressing Buddhists (70% of Vietnam was Buddhist)
-Huge protests erupted against them, in 1963 Buddhist monks began lighting themselves on fire in protest (first one in Saigon).
-Kennedy changed out ambassadors, nominating Henry Cabot Lodge.
-On the day in between when the old ambassador headed out and before Lodge arrived, Diem cut the phone lines for the American embassy and launched a massive crackdown on Buddhist community.
-Vietnamese generals reached out to Lodge to see if he would be amenable to a coup. Without the appropriate level of debate Kennedy approved U.S. support for coup (even though McNamara, CIA director, and others didn't support it).
-Coup was launched in first week of November 1963, and Diem and his brother Nhu were killed in the coup.
-Kennedy died a few weeks later.
-More coups occurred over the next several months, with new general taking charge.
-Through summer of 1965 there were 8 different governments.
-Johnson later replaced Cabot Lodge with GEN Maxwell Taylor as his ambassador.


in 1965 Johnson writes that our interests are:
-70% to avoid humiliation
-20% to contain China
-10% to help the Vietnamese


Battle of Ia Drang - 1965

Is the world worth your sacrifices?

“You have to really believe not only in yourself; you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices.”

— Zaha Hadid 

Why Vietnam was different

Quoted in Hue, 1968, on page 502:

"Emmet John Hughes, a former speechwriter for President Eisenhower who was then working with Republican presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller, wrote in Newsweek that it had been a mistake to consider the struggle in Vietnam as part of global Communist expansionism:

'The fateful basis... has been a false analogy - the dogged insistence that the war in Vietnam signaled precisely the same political commitment as all U.S. actions since WWII... deterring communist aggression. On the contrary, the intervention in Vietnam has been unique and unprecedented... No previous conflict cast America in the role of an effective heir to hated colonial authority, alienating rather than arousing national pride. And no previous conflict engaged America in the audacious labor of creating a new sovereignty... A policy disdainful of such historical differences could have but one end. You cannot truly win a conflict that you cannot truthfully define.'"