by John Walters

Starting Five

1. Live, With Kelly & Trump

Kelly Ripa is still searching for a dance partner over on Columbus Ave. and 67th St., but on the other side of Central Park, over on Fifth Avenue in the mid-Fifties, Megyn Kelly sat down with Donald Trump for a live interview last night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NEHiNKjn_c

Kelly finally sat down with Trump last night and after all the build-up, she let him off rather easy. When, for example, she asked if he was sorry about using the word “bimbo” to describe her and others, Donald, here in plaintive Trump mode, replied, “Did I say that? It’s not the most horrible thing. Over the course of your life, you’ve probably been called worse.”

A better interviewer would have pounced on him for this. Kelly froze a little in the headlights, moving on to softball questions about his brother, about when he knew he had a chance to be president, etc. There was no blood coming out of Donald’s eyes, his nose, his whatever.

2. Believeland

Are the Cavaliers this good? Is the East this poor? Or is it a combination of both? Cleveland glided past Toronto in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals by a 115-84 score  and the Cavs are now 9-0 in this postseason.

A quick comparison in three-point shooting between the three teams with a realistic chance to win the title: Threes made per game in the postseason, CLE 15.7, GSW 12.1, OKC 8.5. Three-point shooting %: CLE .455, GSW .403, OKC .347.

At this point, and with Steph Curry’s knee not having time to properly heal, you have to say the Cavs are the favorite to win it all. Okay, you don’t have to, but I will.

Also, last night, the NBA held its draft lottery, which only affects the top three teams that will pick. Form held, as it will go Philadelphia, Lakers, Celtics (inheriting Brooklyn’s pick). The Sixers are bad, but they’re not so dumb that they will not choose Ben Simmons. The Lakers will really, really want the Aussie (and he them, probably), so we’ll have to see how that goes.

Let’s say PHILA stays with Simmons. Do the Lakers taken Brandon Ingram? And the Celtics’ Dragan Bender, this year’s Kristaps Porzingis? (Bummed my Suns couldn’t move up from No. 4; they would’ve loved Bender; still may move up to nab him).

3. “Consider the Bulldog”

On Monday the New York Times called HBO’s Silicon Valley “irrepressible genius” and I dare say the Grey Lady was not effusive enough in her praise. The show, having now developed the characters to a degree that they are family to us, is in its prime and having so much fun being half-Entourage and half-Office Space.

Mike Judge is skewering corporate hypocrisy and idiocy (and likely writing a parable about what it’s like to deal with studios or network bosses as well) as well as Matt Weiner ever did with Mad Men. Sunday’s scene in which Gavin Belson welcomes in a crew of outsiders to work on Nucleus, Hooli’s failed compression system project, even though the outsiders are simply ex-Hooli employees who figured out Richard’s algorithm and then took it to Pied Piper’s chief competitor, a company that Belson then purchased and returned under the Hooli umbrella. If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em, even if they used to work for you.

Silicon Valley has been top shelf for awhile now, but Sunday’s episode may have been its best yet. We got golden moments from Bighead, the Chauncey Gardner of the tech renaissance, who keeps innocuously hitting one grand slam after another; from Jared, Pied Piper‘s innocent den mother (“You guys can’t help but be elegant; you’re like Audrey Hepburn); and from Erlich. I don’t know how many takes it took T.J. Miller to master that coughing up bong smoke while explaining Pied Piper’s new price point, but it was beautiful.

It’s the funniest show on TV, and it’s also the representative show of the zeitgeist: When Jared finds himself in Erlich’s garage because the guy he is Air BnB’ing his condo to is sub-Air BnB’ing it to other tenants, well, who cannot identify with that?

4. The World Gets Smaller

What’s this? This is the island of St. Helena (featured previously in MH for the 699 steps that are Jacob’s Ladder), the final home of Napoleon Bonaparte and one of the world’s most remote locations, as it sits 2,500 miles east of Rio de Janeiro and 1,200 miles west of the coast of Africa. But, hoping to lure tourists, St. Helena recently constructed an airport and last month got its first commercial flight (above). You have to imagine some residents weren’t psyched about this.

I keep hoping the mayor/governor of St. Helena is a dude named Mr. Rourke (“Smiles, smiles everyone!”)

5. A Word About CEO Pay*

*So I’m gonna go on a rant here and feel free to inform, educate, correct me. I don’t have an MBA or anything.

Let me begin with a crude analogy: Just because I’m opposed to rape doesn’t mean I’m opposed to sex. Likewise, just because I’m opposed to Standard & Poor’s 500 CEOs earning on average 335 TIMES what their companies’ standard employees earn does not mean I’m opposed to capitalism.

If, IF you create something where nothing existed, or start your own company, build your own brand, I hope you become as wealthy as humanly possible: Jerry Seinfeld, J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, Ben & Jerry, even Mark Burnett: You’re all extremely wealthy and good on you. You made it yourself.

If, however, you are the CEO of a company, particularly a publicly traded company, then you are an employee. You are part of a team. Now, defenders of CEO pay (if the average worker earns $50,000 a year, then that CEO is earning, on average, $16.8 million a year, not to mention his fabulous perks) will tell me that’s where the market is set. Yes, but WHO is setting the market? And at what point does the salary of the CEO damage the company as a whole?

CEOs are not LeBron James or Steph Curry. One of them, a decade, may be, as there’s one or at most two such NBA players per decade. CEOs are more like college football coaches. For every Nick Saban there are 3 dozen Gary Pinkels getting rich off the top-of-the-market price that Saban has set and, frankly, deserves.

The problems here are many: Salaries are overhead and it is a CEO’s job to keep overhead low. So, if your company is not meeting its projected earnings, why are you laying off 5,000 workers without touching a single dime of your “F U” money?

Second, I have a very close high school friend who does very, very well. You know what he does? He is a consultant. His company goes in and makes a presentation to a CEO, basically acts as a CEO Whisperer, and then collects a check for $3-5 million. He’s basically telling the CEO how to do his job better (but isn’t that why you’re paying the CEO all that money?). And who is footing that $3-5 million bill? The CEO himself? Hell, no. The company.

(Note, on Silicon Valley Gavin Belson’s CEO Whisperer is his guru, and that’s the dude who privately persuaded him to acquire the smaller company, a maneuver that is ultimately about to backfire and big-time for Hooli)

You know how we college football fans hate search firms for coaches because 1) we know we could do just as good a job ourselves at a fraction of the cost and 2) isn’t the AD just abdicating the responsibilities of his job? Well, in the corporate world, consultants are search firms and I don’t mind you using one, but then maybe you admit that you’re not worth the salary you are receiving.

Finally, these salaries breed hubris, a hubris that I’m not sure most people who have not seen it understand. See that photo above? That’s a chocolate embossed with the photo of Norm Pearlstine, former editor in chief of Time, Inc. (the CEO of sorts of its editorial content). A number of years ago Sports Illustrated laid off half a dozen to a dozen (the exact number escapes me, but I survived that cut) employees on the same day it threw a going away party for Pearlstine that cost more than $300,000. The party did. Each partygoer received one of these chocolates.

I keep that chocolate in my freezer as a reminder of what fabulous douchebags corner office types can be (and no, I was not invited to the party; a co-worker gave that edible to me). I’m not a socialist; far from it. If you haven’t watched Jeff Pearlman’s terrific movie Book Whore on Youtube, you can watch it and see first-hand that I’m as entrepreneurial as any writer you’ll meet. But at the end of the day, if a CEO earning 335 times the average salary of his employees is acceptable to you, then why not 700 times? Why not 3,350 times?

If there are 100 lions in the pride, and only one of them eats well, the pride eventually dies out. If you pay Kobe all of your payroll and then populate the rest of your roster with crappy players, then your team goes 17-65. If you pay one person who isn’t even particularly irreplaceable (Congratulations, you and 900 others graduated from Harvard MBA this spring. Woo hoo!) 335 times what the rest of the employees are earning, you are helping to, slowly, destroy this country. You’re eliminating the middle class.

I have a lot of wealthy friends. Not coincidentally, I have a lot of friends who resent paying taxes. And I don’t blame them. But, when we have CEOs leading companies that employ tens of thousands of people, and these same CEOs lay off thousands of employees when THEY fail to do the job they are paid to do while not touching their own salaries, they create a toxic atmosphere of unemployed folk. And I know that deep down a lot of wealthy people I know would just rather these (lazy) unemployed people disappear (die, but they won’t exactly say that), but the facts are that most of the unemployed these CEOs create are not lazy and that we still haven’t legalized class genocide.

But, you know, they’ll vote for Trump because he’s found a way to make it sound like you should be blaming the unemployed or the illegal aliens for your financial woes when actually it’s the CEOs who worship only their almighty stock price and their own salaries. Do you know who is employing the illegal aliens? Ultimately, it’s the same people earning 335x your salary so that they can beat their quarterly earnings estimates. But they want you, the voter, to blame Miguel.

I worked at Del Frisco’s, a publicly traded company. We had plenty of undocumented workers. That helps keep profits up, and that helps keeps the stock price rising, and that helped our manager at the flagship store earn a salary of more than$350,000 per year. And good for him. But let’s not blame Jorge or Domingo back in the kitchen for the absence of the middle class. Let’s remember that there’s a man with 14 pies who just wants a 15th pie, while you can’t even get more than half a slice.

Capitalism is terrific. But, like democracy, it is prone to contamination and corruption. When people tell me that $17 million (to $30 to $40 million) is the market price for a CEO, I must ask, “Who’s setting the market?” The very people who are earning those salaries.

And so I take you to the recent episode of Silicon Valley. Action Jack Barker was a terrible manager and a toxic CEO. Pied Piper succeeded in spite of him, not because of him. It has been my experience, in 25 or so years in the business world, that it’s a coin flip as to whether your CEO is helpful (Mark Mulvoy at SI) or deleterious (Mark Mulvoy’s successor at SI) to your product, but that the magazine has to be published either way. When the episode ended, they left the CEO chair empty. Because maybe they realized that, in the end, they’re no worse off without one.

Meanwhile, I’ll note that the man who succeeded Mark Mulvoy, armed with a degree from Princeton, relied heavily on focus groups to inform his decisions. His parents spent all that  money so he’d be smart enough to let a group of yokels convening in a Holiday Inn conference room in Hackensack tell him how to put out a magazine. That’s not about wisdom or vision; that’s about covering your ass, which is what a lot of CEOs are better at than anything else.

Another thing: Let’s say, as an S&P 500 CEO, you cut your salary by two-thirds. You’re still earning $5 million per year, which is far more than a dude with an MBA and perhaps a law degree ever dreamt of earning without securing his own patent or creating his own company. That’s at least five times, to ten times, more than a surgeon. And while I don’t espouse the Labor Theory of Value (you should earn according to your job’s value), my point is this: Where else is a CEO going to go, in what line of work, is he ever going to earn close to $5 million, based on what he knows how to do?

That $16.7 million “market” is just an artificially bloated price point, made by the very same people earning that money. Now, if you take $10 million out of a CEO’s pay, he’s still earning $5 million annually (you can still afford that second house with ease), while you can actually afford to employ at least 1,000 more people. That’s 1,000 less people who are unemployed, who are making positive contributions to society, who ARE BUYING SHIT.

You see how that works? If everyone earns a living, everyone is a consumer, and the rising tide lifts all boats. It’s just that, as CEO, your boat is now a 35-foot yacht instead of an 80-foot yacht. Boo. Hoo.

Last word: I read once that Ben & Jerry’s, and I don’t know if they still do this, had a rule in which no employee could earn more than seven times any other employee at the company. That may seem socialist to you, and I can go with you on that ratio perhaps being too austere, but there’s something to the principle here. I’d rather play on a 2016 Warriors team where individually we earn less but accomplish more as opposed to a 2016 Laker team where one guy earns everything, the team sucks, and DeAngelo starts secretly tape-recording me and posting it on social media. But that’s just me….

Okay, I’m out.

Music 101

Light My Fire

Jim Morrison and The Doors appearing on the Jonathan Winters Show in 1967. Sure, why not? This was more than a decade before the debut of cable television. The song, off the band’s debut album, spent three weeks at No. 1 in the summer of ’67 and is one of the most emblematic songs of the psychedelic Sixties. Certainly it is the Doors’ signature tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VosTRfaCDfY

Remote Patrol