Folie à Deux (French – literally, “the shared madness of two”) is the term for a psychological phenomenon whereby two people who live together in close quarters and are isolated from external influences, begin to mirror and magnify each other’s delusions. Since these people tend to be co-dependent, they will not risk challenging each other’s beliefs in fear that it might jeopardize the relationship. Over time, their delusions become magnified as they reverberate from one to the other, picking up greater and greater strength each time they are “bounced” back and forth.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to two people and has been described to include several or even many individuals. Manfred Kets De Vries, the psychiatrist and “guru” of leadership development, included a chapter in his book, The Irrational Executive, on how pathological leaders in organizations are capable of creating this shared madness among their subordinates.

But I have come to the realization that it doesn’t necessarily take two to do this dance, when you come down to it; we are perfectly capable of being our own “other” in creating these reverberating delusions.

A number of single friends and acquaintances have settled into a comfortable retirement, surrounded by like-minded individuals (a type of isolation in itself), “keeping busy” with travel, Yoga, spirituality, healthful cooking, and regular gym attendance. Their homes are spotlessly clean and neat, with an order than can only come from the combination of disuse and a maid service. They appear to have a broad intellectual life, reading a vast array of books spanning every conceivable topic.  They have rediscovered the Symphony and The Ballet, have lifetime memberships to museums, and take organized tours of exotic countries. For all intents and purposes they appear to have rather idyllic lives.

But, of course, they are going completely nuts! “Bazooks” as my friend Nick calls it (Nick also coined the expression, “I had one, but the wheels fell off” in response to any topic with which he is unfamiliar…but that’s another story for another day).

One of the great advantages of having young children around is that they are the greatest psychotherapists you can ever have (if you can survive them without losing your marbles in the first place). Children have the terrific skill of excising and cauterizing your narcissism with the efficacy of a brilliant cancer surgeon. If you are to be a good parent, you must first accept that children will absolutely ruin your life. They will destroy all your treasured possessions. Your time will never again be your own. And by the time they do leave you the f*#k alone, they will have produced grandchildren to take you on yet another journey of personal exorcism and flagellation. And the crazy part is: It’s a good thing!

It’s a good thing because narcissism is the biggest barrier to personal development and growth. Comfort is the greatest discomfort of all because it’s a delusion. Paraphrasing the Buddha, life is suffering, and suffering is the path to enlightenment. The Christians understood this concept too, with their “Way of the Cross”.

My recommendation to all my single, wealthy, neat, clean, and comfortable friends? Let someone else into your life, and make sure they have all kinds of nasty habits like leaving up the toilet seat, putting tons of salt in their food and their feet on your mahogany table in order to watch mindless TV for hours. Encourage them to eat a large bag of popcorn at the movie theater by sticking their tongue into the bag like an anteater. Bring a loaf of bread, a pound of cold-cuts and a knife to the movie theater, and then make sandwiches for your friends right on your lap…take a nap if the movie is boring. If you see a dust bunny in a corner of your home…leave it alone…it’s a nice quiet pet. Wrap yourself in a mouldy old blankie.

Share your bed with someone who snores and farts. It’s good for the soul.

Oh yes, and if you have any excess funds, be sure to leave me in your will as I will surely be working till I’m 85 in order to keep supporting these kids and grand-kids!

As the Copenhagen environmental summit threatens to fall apart, the main area of contention appears to be the willingness of developed nations to pay emerging nations to not pollute. Emerging nations on the other hand appear unwilling to submit to external third-party validation of their efforts to clean up the environment, even if they are being paid by us to do so. So let me get this straight:

We’re going to pay you with tax dollars to not pollute. But with a nod and a wink you can continue to pollute in order to keep supplying us with all the low-cost shit you make on behalf of North American companies. In the meantime, we no longer make anything because we can no longer do so profitably enough for those same companies. So we will continue to create jobs and profits for you and a handful of corporate shareholders, while at the same time paying you with public money to not kill us with your products. Huh? So I buy your low-cost shit and then pay you extra to not pollute. So in reality, the low-cost shit is really high-cost shit that we could just as well have made here with local jobs????? Am I missing something? No. Just follow the money…it will always tell the real story.

Poor Tiger Woods. His sponsors are threatening to leave in the wake of his recent scandals. Not to worry though, a new market has opened (my mother used to say…”one door closes…another opens”). From archaeologist daughter earlier today over lunch at Dillalo’s Burgers…”Tiger should start courting  lumber and renovations businesses. After all the slogan is ready-made: Got Wood?”.

It’s amazing how the Greeks managed to create one of the most complex and nuanced languages with only 24 letters. It goes to show you that more isn’t necessarily more, but neither is it necessarily less. The Germans (and German is the cognate of English, i.e. it is the root language of English), managed to achieve their linguistic complexity through the stringing together of different words. For example, the street name on which the train station is located might well be called, “Trainstationstreetonthelefthandsideofthecity”. Hence the enormously long words on street signs that drive tourists crazy in any German city.

English on the other hand takes a more complex approach, putting together words into bundles of meaning, the meaning of which isn’t necessarily transparent, e.g. “Spiritual Materialism” is the term for someone who hides his ego under a cloak of poverty and piety, as in “I’m closer to God than you are because I’m poor, devout, pious, etc.”.  Just hearing the words Spiritual Materialism doesn’t necessarily tell you what it is. The Germans would just as soon have called the phenomenon, “I’mclosertogodthanyouarebecausei’mpoordevoutandpious”. But you get my drift.

The Greeks take a slightly different route, somewhere in between the two. They will string together two or three words, but the sum total of the net word is greater than its parts. One great such word that I love is: Koutoponiros. It is made up of two words:

Koutos: Dumb

Poniros: Cunning or sly

So in effect the word literally means Dumbsly. It is used to describe people who think they are sly but wind up outsmarting themselves. For example, I once had an employee who would routinely fudge his expense reports to make a few extra bucks. Our VP Finance would catch these (usually very minor transgressions like tips, or meter parking) and go ballistic. I would simply shrug my shoulders and say “Forget it”. I figure that every year he “took” the company for about $500. So every year, at bonus time, I would pay him $1500 less in bonuses than I had been authorized to pay out….just to balance the books. I’m sure to this day he smiles smugly thinking that he got away with something…not realizing that he got screwed for far more than he made off with!  That is a classic example of someone who is koutoponiros [noun, male].

Of course this phenomenon is very widespread and not limited to morally challenged people like my former colleague. The world is full of people looking for a “deal” or the goods to “fall off the truck”.  Almost inevitably there are few true deals and they are far between. As the Jews say: “Sevel is sevel” (junk is junk). It always pays to buy quality, stay away from status objects…and have the wisdom to know the difference. The wisdom part is the tough one!

One of the most powerful, yet least publicized and understood psychological concepts, is Locus-of-Control (LOC). LOC identifies the various differences in how people experience the world, based on the extent to which an individual believes he has control over what goes on his life. People with low LOC may experience more depression and anxiety, as well as be more defensive and blaming of others for their misfortunes.

LOC isn’t fixed in stone and may be amenable to positive change. Certainly we can see the negative changes that often happen to high LOC people as they move through the life-span: It isn’t unusual for people who were high in LOC during their working lives, to become low LOC as they get older and experience various changes associated with aging such as retirement, illness, etc. The use of anti-depressants in later life is quite staggering, something the medical establishment likes to link to “chemical imbalance” because they can then prescribe their way out of a psychogenic predicament for which they really have no time, knowledge, nor alternative solutions.

Most of us function best with high, but not too high LOC, i.e. it is best to believe we have some control over our destiny, yet the maturity to also know that “bad things do happen to good people” as part of a normal life.

LOC is of particular significance to weight-loss and health. The overwhelming reason that all diets fail is that they externalize LOC to a  “diet”, “program”, or other external tool such as calorie-counting, points, etc. The idea of using such tools in the first place makes some sense (at least intellectually), i.e. the tools may help us “learn” how to be more aware of what and how much we’re eating. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, evidenced by the now absolute scientific fact that diets do not work at sustainable weight loss.

The problem is that the moment you allow a dietary “tool” into your life, your psyche automatically shifts LOC to the tool! The psyche says to itself, “Whew, what a relief, I no longer have to worry about losing weight because this ‘program’ will do it for me”.

There is no question that it is useful to have an eating and lifestyle philosophy or model that can serve as a platform for what and how you eat. The diabetic and/or cardiac patient needs to understand Metabolic Syndrome and how that affects his disease and how he must eat to control it. The vegetarian has made a commitment to a certain ethical or health paradigm and more power to him. Whatever floats your boat!

But at the end of the day, unless you develop the LOC to know when to start and when to stop eating…the game is over before it has begun. One thing is for sure: Unless your eating fits in with your environment, you are doomed to failure or to becoming a social pariah whom no one wants to be around. Then you’ll really be depressed and need anti-depressants!

The Rorschach Test is a series of ink blots that psychologists use to draw out clients and enable them to bring up issues of relevance to their particular problem or situation. The ink blots themselves are meaningless. One “projects” oneself into the ink blots and will “see” things that are relevant to oneself.

The Tiger Woods fiasco is just one in a long series of events that seem to capture the public fascination. For example, when Lady Di perished in a car accident a decade ago, I was fascinated not so much by her tragic end, as I was by the sheer outpouring of emotion on a global scale. People traveled from all over the world to lay a wreathe. They cried, they swooned, they were inconsolable…..all for a person they had never met and only knew through the media!

My wife and I were listening to the morning news over breakfast today and once again a majority of the news time was centered on Tiger Woods and his rapid fall from Grace.  At one point, The Kommandant, a simple and annoyingly grounded person, slowly raised her eyes from sipping her Greek coffee, looked and me and said: “Who cares!”. And in those two words my Sage of Sanguinity managed to capture the essence of the whole issue, which is not only who cares, but who cares and why?

Here’s a 33-year old golfer. A golfer! Not a Nobel Prize winning scholar of human ethics. A fu^#ing golfer for chrisakes! So he’s getting some on the side and got caught. Like thousands of other men (and women). Why does anyone care? Does this make him a worse golfer? And if we expected him to be anything other than a human being with exceptional golf skills, then whose fault is that? And what does stupidity and lack of ethics on the home front have to do with golfing ability and success?

The truth is, Tiger Woods’ demise has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with why anyone would care. If you do care or find the whole thing “riveting” ask yourself what this says about YOU. Then go and get a life and be your own hero.

From the American Airlines Admniral’s Lounge in Miama (hey, I didn’t know boats flew!).

When I was a corporate person, I routinely traveled all over the world and stayed in some of the best hotels. But when I became an entrepreneur some 15 years ago and had to “live or die by the sword” as the expression goes, I became far more intimately aware of the value of money…since I had none.

I went from Hilton to Hellhole almost overnight and I must confess it was quite a shock to the system. That early entrepereneurial experience has never left me, even today when I stay in some of those same “best” hotels on behalf of clients, I am acutely aware of the value of money and won’t hesitate to balk at the outrageous charges at most of these clip-joints…even though it’s not even my damned money!

Checking out of the Trump Beach Resort in Sunny Isles, Florida, this morning, I see a charge of $19.95 for a 9-minute phone call to Montreal. I almost blew a gasket. In today’s 5-cent a minute competitive landscape, a charge of $19.95 is like a sign saying “STUPID” posted on my forehead. I confronted the manager and he gave the usual song-and-dance about switchboard costs, etc. Bullshit! This is about the never ending stream of hidden uber-charges that these palaces of pretention thrive on. How come the Holiday Inn Express can give me free internet and a continental breakfast for $89, and you have to charge me for farting while in your establshment?

Anyway, cowards that they are, they quickly recinded the phone charges and the internet fee ($19.95 for a “basic” service that was so slow I could hardly get my email). If they really believed their shit, they would have stuck to their guns.

But here’s the rub….I bet 90% of the corporate people there would barely glance at the bill, and 99% wouldn’t challenge the charges. God help you if you ever work for me!

Yes, entrepreneurs really do get Darwin.

And yes, Dear, I’ll get off my soap box now. Just a little necessary catharsis from all the bullshit of business so I can enjoy what’s left of my week-end.

Here’s a funny story about what we each consider valuable.

My stag-party gift in 1980 was a beautiful Renwick leather briefcase. Renwick was a maker of high-quality leather goods very similar in design and build to Hartmann. This was a tan colored, hard-sided briefcase of a style popular in the ’80’s, although you don’t see them very much nowadays. I used that briefcase for some 20 years, and frankly it looked like hell near the end. It was badly scuffed, stained, and weather-beaten. I had reached a point where I was quite embarrassed to carry it and looked forward to its replacement.

One day I was checking into the Toronto Hilton. In the line immediately behind me were two Asian gentlemen, also waiting to check in. I put my briefcase on the counter to get my wallet, and remember once again making a mental note to myself to replace this nasty looking bag asap. After checking in I headed to the elevator and by the time it arrived, the two Asian gents were able to embark at the same time. As soon as the elevator began to move I noticed them eying my briefcase and speaking excitedly to each other in their own language. Eventually, one of them mustered up the nerve to say to me in broken English: “Ahh…that is a very beautiful briefcase…would you consider selling it for $500?”.

Such is the nature of human nature, that once someone wants what you have, even if you don’t want it anymore, it suddenly acquires new value. I smiled at them and said: “No thank you, I couldn’t part with it”. STUPID!, as my business partner Margarita would say.

Many of you will be familiar with the term “nanny state”, which refers to what many see as excessive, institutionalized government intervention for the protection (hence the term “nanny”) of the people against perceived threats, especially in the areas of health, culture, and the environment, among others.

Strangely enough, while the nanny state operates at a macro level, its effects appear to funnel down to the individual level, a condition I call the “ninny state”. This condition appears to intensify as one gets older (perhaps as the prospect of death looms larger), and also appears to be more prevalent in women (based on my purely personal observations, YMMV), perhaps because they are by nature more caring, protective, and nurturing (whew!, talk about the ninny state…just the fact that I felt compelled to qualify my statement is a perfect example).

The ninny state is characterized by an excessive preoccupation with doing things correctly. Here are a few examples:

“Oh my, what a beautiful sunset! Be careful not to look at the sun too long, it might damage your retinas. We should have brought extra-dark sunglasses”.

“I don’t think we can just wander into the hotel lobby like that….isn’t it just for paying guests?”.

“Make sure to put on lots of sunscreen, skin cancer you know!”.

“I don’t eat large fish…too much mercury”.

“Close the balcony door, the air-conditioning is on and you’ll waste electricity” [It was open for all of 30 seconds as I tried to get a whiff of fresh air, Heaven forbid]

“I love the house, but there’s no way I’d live anywhere near there, too many power lines nearby”

“Isn’t this a great cereal…loaded with Omega-3’s and fiber”.

Men, by and large, appear to be more resistant to the ninny state, fueled perhaps by an innate sense of devil-may-care, poor judgment, alcohol, machismo, and other qualities antithetical to the very nature of the ninny state.

My own philosophy on the topic is: “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission….now leave me the f%*k alone”.

Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

One of the dubious benefits of working from a home office is that you can catch occasional glimpses into daytime television, a very special world serving a unique demographic. Oprah is the undisputed ruler of the daytime talk-show genre, and she has even been quite successful in spinning off guests into their own shows, most notably Dr. Phil. Her most recent spin-off has been Dr. Mehmet Oz, the cardiologist and frequent medical contributor to the Oprah show.

I caught the first episode of Dr. Oz a couple of weeks ago and it was absolutely awful. As good as Oz was in simplifying medical concepts to Oprah’s audience, clearly his own demographic must require an almost infantile distillation to the equivalent of Pablum. I’ve caught the show now several times and it hasn’t gotten any better. It is split into essentially two types of topics: Scare tactics intended to make you fearful of just about everything and everyone you come into contact with, and obesity.

Yesterday’s guest was a former supermodel who had opened a cookie business and ballooned to 385 lbs. Dr. Oz had a psychologist guest expert, who apparently specializes in obesity treatment. First, being called an obesity treatment expert is an oxymoron akin to jumbo shrimp. There may be experts on what causes obesity, but there are no experts on its treatment since the research conclusively shows failure rates in the 95-98% range within 2-3 years of losing weight. And frankly, unsustainable weight loss is a worse failure than never having started, since weight-cycling is now known to be a greater risk factor for disease than overweight itself.

I laughed out loud when I saw Oz’s prescription for this lady: He showed her a variety of healthful and low-fat dishes that she could use to reduce her calorie consumption. This while showing video clips of her in near-orgasmic ecstasy as she was sampling the cookie dough and end-products of her business. Jeez, Dr. Oz, you’re right, she probably didn’t have a clue that eating cookies all day and huge platters of pasta and meatballs at night was making her put on weight.

But the killer was the perpetuation of the six-small-meals-per-day recommendation that has reached near mythic status in the modern world. I love how thin people who’ve never been fat love giving recommendations to fat people: “Eat less”, “Stop when you’re full”, Exercise more”, “Never go hungry…eat six or more small meals a day”. Don’t you get it, Dr. Oz? There is no such thing as a small meal for a fat person. Every meal is a big meal….telling them to eat six times instead of three is a license to kill! Hell, if I could eat a small meal of any kind, I wouldn’t be fat!!!!

And to really gauge the true hopelessness of the whole endeavor, just take a look at Oprah herself. She has more money that God, Bob Greene is her personal coach, she can have a crew of personal chefs designing and preparing any diet-conscious meal she wants, she can have an entire Nautilus gym in her house…..and she’s still obese!!!!

There is no hope until someone comes up with a radically new perspective on the problem, and frankly most of the research these days is on drugs rather than behavioral change.