There’s always something to howl about.

Month: August 2012 (page 1 of 1)

You haven’t seen a Bloodhound until you’ve seen Odysseus go vertical.

Odysseus is getting to be an old dog, which is not a happy fate for big dogs. Where before he was King Alpha, ready to dominate for everything, of late he has been yielding to Ophelia more and more. But not when it comes to putting the neighbor’s dogs in their place. The wall the dogs are scaling by turns used to be stuccoed and painted, but these two, in particular, have exposed the naked concrete.

When Odysseus goes vertical, you are seeing the most beautiful thing a Bloodhound can do. I would love to have a statue of him frozen in that flash of total commitment.

He blinded them with science: Taking up the vocabulary of self-adoration at The 21Convention.

This is me speaking at The 21Convention earlier this month in Austin. The title of my talk — “Ontologically-Consonant Teleology” — was a joke, an early intimation that I intended to be dry, pedantic and boring. In reality, I gave them my pure schtick, hard-core egoism delivered with a garage-band attitude.

I enjoyed myself hugely, but I always enjoy myself when I get a chance to speak in public. The audience dug it, too, judging from the reactions during and after my presentation.

I want more opportunities like this. If you would like me to speak at your event, let’s talk.

Inciting a media revolution: Oprah meets Rodale meets Breitbart meets Facebook — meets you.

I don’t go to your church.

I’ve taken to saying that when I run up against some testy quibble based in some arcane branch of human knowledge I care nothing about. I don’t go to your church. I don’t shop at your store. I don’t trade in your currency.

I’ve spent a big chunk of time this year trying to figure out how to get ideas that seem obvious to me across to people who seemingly cannot see them at all. I’m getting better at this job, but it hasn’t been easy.

But look at this, from FreeTheAnimal.com: Fifty shades of bleak: Looking for love everywhere it isn’t. The comment stream is huge and growing bigger very rapidly.

Take note of this, which I wrote a couple of summers ago: Yuppie love: The egoist’s guide to mastering the art of frolicking naked with the one you love.

There is tons more in my catalog, and tons upon tons upon tons more still to be explored.

Here is what I see:

There is a media empire stuffed inside the covers of Man Alive! Think Oprah meets Rodale meets Breitbart meets Facebook — a self-sustaining self-help community focused on fully-human values.

I think there is an afternoon TV show in there, Oprah-ville for real, but there are plenty of other opportunities this side of Sixth Avenue.

I am a visionary. I am rich, rich, rich in ideas no one knows to care about until I can convince them that they should care. But I am rich, too, in ideas that will make a community like the one I’m talking about work — possibly making it all the way to Sixth Avenue.

There is money to be made here, and not just a little bit. I need an investor, one with a burning urge to incite a media revolution.

I don’t go to your church. But I can show you and everyone how to get to mine.

Shyly’s delight: Manifesting the secondary consequences of splendor.

Man Alive! elucidates the ontology of human social relationships, but it’s dense, tough sledding. Appended below is a easier-reading summary of some of these ideas. I wrote this as a speech for my Toastmaster’s Club in August of 2001. In the blog.world, I’ll throw out details about our lives, but that’s really just so much plastic fruit, local color. This is the world that I live in, the world I wish everyone lived in… –GSS

 

Shyly’s delight: Manifesting the secondary consequences of splendor.

I have a Labrador mutt named Shyly. She’s about three years old, but because she’s a Lab, she’ll always be a puppy. Always busy, always involved, always eager to be right in the middle of everything.

Shyly is the world’s greatest master at expressing delight. She has a fairly limited emotional range — sadness, boredom, territoriality and contentment. But at expressing delight, Shyly is unequaled. When I come home, even if I’ve only been away for two minutes, Shyly races back and forth through the house, her every muscle rippling with undiluted delight.

It’s an amazing thing to watch, funny and charming and sweet. Shyly’s joy is clean and whole and pure and perfect. Uncontaminated by memories of past pain. Unfiltered by guilt or shame or doubt or self-loathing. Untainted by envy or anger or malice. Unaffected by affectation. Shyly’s delight is impossible to doubt, and the day she fails to express it will be the day she has scampered off this mortal coil.

“What,” you may ask, “does this have to do with me?”

Here’s what:

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “god is dead.” By this he did not mean that there had once been an omnipotent universe creator but that he had since expired. What he meant was that the manifestations of modernity had rendered religion unable to provide significant moral guidance to educated people. Unexpurgated religion had become inoperative as a moral lodestone.

This is actually non-controversial. When we make reasoned arguments about what one ought and ought not do, we do so by reference to philosophy or psychology or practical consequences, not to religion. Even members of the clergy do things this way, precisely Read more

I hate to ask for anything, and yet I am literally reduced to begging for attention.

This is the Big Reveal from the third act of the movie Punchline, a naked confession from Tom Hanks’ character, Steven Gold:

“If you’re sending someone down, you better send him fast — ‘cuz funny Steve’s going under.”

I understood that line much too well when I first I heard it. I’ve lived with it rolling around in my head for the past twenty-odd years, and now I’m living it in real life.

This is from mail Cathleen sent today to someone (one of many someones) we owe money to:

We do have a problem: Greg and I are broke just about to the point where we aren’t able to keep our business afloat. We have shut off notices for our internet and phone (we gave up TV months ago), for our electricity, for our gas, and for our water and city services. Our house is scheduled for foreclosure within the next three weeks.

Since the First of April, we’ve only closed four transactions, for a total of $9,220 in commissions. We have only one transaction in escrow right now, and that’s a short sale, so who knows when it will close. I’ve been busy getting two houses ready to list and trying to sell furniture, lithographs and anything else that might interest anyone to try to keep lights on and our pets fed.

I’ve been keeping a careful eye on our bank accounts, and right now, if we were to send you the money we owe you, we will have a bank balance of $0.00 in the business account and $1.19 in our personal account.

I’m sorry to have to share such bad news. We’ve been working like crazy to turn this situation around…

This post is not an appeal to pity. Too much the contrary. Two Foreclosure Notices ago, Cheryl Johnson tried to beg for money for us, and I shot that idea down with dispatch. The last thing I want is money I haven’t earned. But after a lifetime of working my ass off for about fifteen cents an hour, net, Greg Swann is going under — and not slowly.

This is so stupid. I Read more

Priceless: “Our home ownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent.”

The American Enterprise Institute on the premeditated assault on the prime mortgage:

When it comes to a government centered society and its deleterious consequences, our Government Mortgage Complex is the undisputed poster child. There has been no greater economic failure than the collapse of the housing market due to decades of government intervention and crony capitalism.

Voters need to be reminded about how this disaster came about. It began with the premeditated assault on high-quality, credit-worthy prime mortgages. The perpetrators were Fannie Mae, community groups, and Congress, each of which had the means, motive and opportunity for undertaking this assault.

As early as 1991, community activist Gale Cincotta, was laying the path for undertaking such an assault in her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. “Lenders will respond to the most conservative standards unless [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are aggressive and convincing in their efforts to expand historically narrow underwriting,” she stressed.

Using Fannie and Freddie as the means to expand underwriting standards caused an immediate problem for existing subprime lenders and insurers. In 1992, about 14% of new mortgages had impaired or subprime credit with a FICO credit score below 660. Virtually all these borrowers were already served by private subprime lenders or those using FHA insurance. As Fannie and Freddie expanded into subprime, something had to give-subprime lenders would have to abandon the field or move further out the risk curve. They chose the latter, with the result that both prime and subprime lending got into much more risky loans.

The motives of Fannie, community groups, and Congress were clear. Fannie wished to protect its valuable federal charter by using trillions of dollars in flexible loans to woo and capture its regulator: Congress. Community groups like ACORN relied on flexible lending to create multiple revenue streams from banks, lenders, Fannie and Freddie, HUD, and others, since they made money from counseling homebuyers, assisting in loan originations, and counseling defaulting borrowers. Members of Congress viewed the many trillions of dollars in flexible lending announced by Fannie and Freddie as a superior form of pork to help them get reelected. It was off-budget, costless, and Read more

Why Does Zillow Hate my House?

Why Does Zillow Hate my House?

If you are a real estate geek like me, you are obsessed with real estate valuation.  It’s bad enough that I spend most of my day performing real estate valuations for numerous investments, but my passion for real estate sends me off to open houses on Sunday’s just looking.  You know it’s bad when the realtors know your name and worse when they give your that disapproving stare of disdain as you ask them for the 50th time, “how long has this home been on the market”?

To be fair, my fiancé and I are in the process of searching for a brownstone in Brooklyn.  While we probably won’t be in the market for two or three years, I like to stay on top of pricing and opportunities, so I can jump on any wayward / misinformed price.  Plus, I am a real estate nerd.  Given this, I am also considering selling my New York City condo.  It’s too small for a family, and I haven’t lived in it in three years now.  It will make an awesome pied-a-terre when I am 50, but I am not sure I want to keep paying the gap between my rental income and the very large mortgage / ever increasing condo fee.  I dread the day when the fee will be larger than my mortgage payment, but its coming.

This leads me to a very real problem.  How can I determine the true value of my home without putting it on the market?  I work in real estate private equity.  To determine the price of an asset, I can call an appraiser, three or four brokers and ask a friend what he might pay.  Averaging all those numbers gives me a good approximation of the price of my asset and best of all its free and takes about 10 mins, including idle chitchat.

But what about my home?  It has become easier to see what other people have recently sold their homes for.  Websites like Property Shark, Street Easy, etc. offer a good real estate detective past sales data of comparable property. Read more

Love, sex and philosophy: My book The Unfallen is available on Kindle.

My novel The Unfallen is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. Here is the way I blurbed the book when I wrote it:

The Unfallen is a very sexy book about philosophy and a very philosophical book about love and longing. It’s written about and for smart, productive people who live to love their lives…

I can summarize it Ari Gold-style with three quick synopses:

1. It’s a very romantic novel about philosophy.

2. It’s a send-up of genre romance fiction, a literal inversion of the bodice-ripper how-to book called “Adventurous women, dangerous men.”

3. It’s fifty shades sexier, celebrating the splendor of real love, not the squalor of degradation.

Here’s an extract from The Unfallen, the poem that was the instigating cause of my own marriage:

you come to me by starlight
in a gown of gauzy white
your sacraments revealed concealed
high priestess of the night

you whisper vespers whisper prayers
whisper vows of faith and fear
in still and silent grace you stand
as i in trembling awe draw near

i kneel in worship grasp your hand
press it to my searing lips
pray god to know the endless peace
flowing from your fingertips

you come to me in night divine
your glory lit by crowning gold
you consecrate by hungry glance
devotion’s heat in evening’s cold

you come to me i kneel i stand
you lay me on the dewy ground
you guide my worship guide my hands
lead my heart your heart to sound

you speak to me with loving grace
you catechize in passion’s glow
you reach you teach you seethe and burn
and i am blessed by truth to know

you come to me in gauzy gown
high priestess of the night
i lay in awe in faith in fear
lifted to your heaven’s light

I want you to buy this book, but before that, I want you to help me promote it. If you’d like a free review copy, just say so. The quid-pro-quo is that I will want you to write a review of The Unfallen at Amazon.com. And I would love it if you would recommend the book to your warm network by email, blog or Facebook.

My vow: The Unfallen will more than repay your involvement in the form of a happier, sexier, more-fulfilling marriage. Read more

The Inman Two Step – Errol Samuelson has an opportunity to get it right…

Warning – long post ahead. I had a lot on my mind. 😉

This last week and my trip to Inman has been a whirlwind and I just walked in the door from the airport.

I have literally been too busy to write some of the things that I experienced and I really want to have some time to put them in context and “digest” some of them so that I can (hopefully) use what I saw to provide something useful in future posts.

That said, the first of my impressions was the most clear and thus most easy for me to put out into the arena of public ideas while it is still fresh. One of the panel discussions was the “Syndication Discussion” which included the usual representatives, (Saul Klein, Spencer Rascoff from Zillow, Errol Samuelson from Realtor.com, and others) including Mark McLaughlin of Pacific Union. (Note to Mark – I don’t know you personally, but nicely done. The crack about “I’m not outnumbered the audience is on my side.” was priceless. There were many people in that audience that wanted to get up and say something, but did not…)

Ok, now to my main point. At one point in the panel, Mr. Samuelson turned to Mr. Rascoff and pointed out that they include FSBO listings on their site at which time Mr. Rascoff replied that REALTOR.com included non-REALTOR listings in THEIR site as well. (gulp–start the music and Mr. Samuelson proceeds to do the “Inman 2 Step – a dance done by executives when they want to avoid continuing the line of discussion that THEY started…) This is a point which I had made recently in a post on Real Estate Industry Watch. And the folks at Realtor.com had actually asked to meet me about at Inman (and we did…).

If you read what I wrote at REIW, I specifically was concerned that REALTOR.com has a HIGHER LEVEL of ACCOUNTABILITY because they are the OWNER of the REALTOR trademark. (Please, we can leave the anti-NAR stuff for a later post, I am trying to stick to one issue here) Since they HAVE Read more

Primary Home – Investment or Liability

Pre-2007, I am not sure this topic would have even been controversial; people not only regularly utilized their home as their “primary investment”, but often, treated it as their personal piggy bank.  In hindsight we can all judge others as we secretly lick our own wounds from a vicious downturn no saw coming, but that experience left a visceral taste in many mouths.

Most experts would suggest that your primary residence is not an investment.  Why, you ask?  First, you purchase a home based on need.  Your buy and sell decisions rarely spring from analytical thinking around market timing.  Instead, most times, they are rooted in your changing life needs.  Second, investment strategy wages a secret war with your personal desires.  For example, I want a tricked out man cave equipped with a full wet bar, bathroom and other appropriate amenities.  Am I thinking about the return on my investment, or the endless joy my friends and I will have watching football on Sunday, Monday and Thursday?  Sure, I will likely increase the value of my home with these upgrades, but the anemic return on investment, if any, would never be worth the money.  Said differently, would you make the same upgrades to your rental property; probably not.

If it was that easy, I wouldn’t write the article.

I will start with a question.  Is it easier to invest in stock or buy a house?  Right now, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A) trades at $128,175 per share.  Its five year performance has been strikingly similar to the performance of many real estate markets.  If you have a job making $50k and $7k in the bank, do you think you will ever in your lifetime own a share of Berkshire Hathaway A outside of a very lucky lotto ticket?  The answer is unequivocally no.  You don’t qualify for the right to buy on margin and even if you did, where would you get the 50% required to do a margin buy?  And how would you live on the prison food when the margin call comes?  All important questions to consider…

Now, let’s take that same fellow Read more