By Mark Whitney

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Fifteen years ago, I heard the phrase “Limited Kinetic Action” for the first time, and I said to myself, “Self, that there is some world-class, American bullshit!” In 2011, it was the Obama administration spewing this highfalutin political jargon to describe the unconstitutional participation of U.S. Armed Forces in the Libyan Civil War.

The goal was simple: bypass the U.S. Constitution. By rebranding war as “kinetic action,” the Executive Branch argued that it did not need a permission slip from Congress to unilaterally bomb a sovereign nation. It claimed a one-sided drone war did not technically constitute “hostilities”, and therefore, the mandatory “shall” of Article I—which silos the power to declare war exclusively in the hands of the people’s representatives in Congress—could be ignored.

At the Comedy Store I was like, “Hey—it’s not a war if they can’t shoot back!” I am nothing if not a slut for cheap applause breaks.

But, as a citizen, things took a dark turn for me when Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified to Congress: “If I’m in Qaddafi’s palace, I suspect I’d think I’m at war.” Shortly therafter, Gates doubled down on his doublespeak.

And with that, after voting for Obama, I unwittingly became the only citizen to independently sue the United States (see Whitney v. Obama, 845 F.Supp.2d 136 (2012)) to end the unconstitutional participation of U.S. Armed Forces in the Libyan Civil War.

The point was simple. My congressweasel did not vote my proxy, I was therefore unrepresented on a matter of war, and accordingly, this shit has to stop.

Today the Government of the United States is one month into Operation Epic Fuck-up—I think they call it—and constitutional scholars from both parties are finally ringing the identical bell I rang fifteen years ago.

Writing today in Executive Functions1, Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer—veterans of the Bush and Obama administrations—call this moment the “second most consequential unilateral use of force in American history,” surpassed only by the Korean War. They note that Obama’s Libya and Trump’s Iran, represent the death of the Congressional check, even as the addled Trump jokes that he is to avoid saying “war” because “you’re supposed to get approval.”

Stuffy people often brand a literal interpretation of the Constitution “strict,” as if reading the plain language of a document is an act of political extremism. But we don’t apply “liberal” readings to election dates. Nobody buys the argument that a four-year presidential term should be construed as a “flexible duration based on U.S. interests.”

Why, then, does the political class tolerate parallel legal universes when it comes to aggressive wars waged against sovereign nations?

Article II does not provide a mechanism for such rebranding. It does not allow Presidents to unilaterally wage war in your name. War Without Representation violates the injunction We The People imposed on presidents when we ratified our nation’s organizational bylaws.

As we look forward to the many satirical monologues that will define the 2028 presidential campaign, I predict that the lessons of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan will once again be ignored.

We know how these things go. Surgical strikes, followed by support operations, followed by boots on the ground, followed by presidential primaries. In 2027, when the 2028 campaign starts in earnest, candidates on both sides will debate the best way to withdraw from Iran, while never credibly noting that U.S. Armed Forces were not lawfully deployed in the first place.

I sued the United States because, by acting unilaterally, President Obama bombed you, he bombed me, and he bombed my sons, thereby laying the foundation for Trump to now bomb my grandson who is not yet one. Stated differently, I sued because Obama bombed the “highest office in the land—the office of Citizen,” as the constitutional law professor loves to say when quoting Justice Brandeis.

So, go ahead with your highfalutin kinetic nomenclature where words don’t mean what they say. Let me know how that goes for ya’ come high noon on January 20, 2029, when President Ballroom raises his right pussygrabber for an unconstitutional third term.

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Writing for the spoken word is different from writing for the written word, in that proper grammar need not apply to words spoken. This is especially true when humor is involved.

The following short clip is a multi-part joke announcing the thesis of “Fool For A Client”, the 75 minute political dramedy I wrote, produced, and toured internationally on the independent theatre circuit from 2007-2011. I performed iterations of this show nearly 500 times over five seasons, before finally deciding to point a few cameras at it.

Transcript · Studio Theatre, Washington DC · 2010

At 51, my wife Julie and I are among the last of the Baby Boomers, a generation raised perhaps more than any other on the promise of the American dream. But somewhere along the line, we evolve into the generation of internally inconsistent ideologies.

[THESIS] We’re the generation of tolerance and zero tolerance. [Chuckles]

[SETUP] Tolerance is when it’s my kid. [Chuckles]

[PAYOFF] Zero tolerance is when it’s your little piece of shit! [Laughter]

[SETUP] Tolerance is the lowest form of acceptance. [Chuckles]

[TENSION] Don’t believe me—this your wife right here? Okay. What I want you to do, on the way home, pick up some chocolates, flowers, card that says, “I tolerate you…” [Laughter]

[TAG] Let me know how that goes for ya’! [Laughter]

This is the original 43-word final element of the foregoing joke, which received snickers.

“Don’t believe me? Is this your wife right here? Okay. What I want you to do, on the way home tonight, pick up some chocolates, some flowers, and a card that says, ‘I tolerate you — let me know how that goes for you.”

The version from the clip which receives laughs, gets us to “I tolerate you” five words faster.

Don’t believe me? This your wife right here? Okay. What I want you to do, on the way home, pick up some chocolates, flowers, card that says, “I tolerate you…” Let me know how that goes for ya’!

When I tell this joke today it is way more efficient. At just 25 words, the Setup Velocity is 30% faster and 100% more rhythmic.

“Don’t believe me? You together?

After the show pick up some chocolatesflowerscard says, ‘I tolerate you—

Lemme know how that goes for ya’!”

Now it’s like a waltz. Can you hear the music?

• Beat 1: pick up some chocolatesflowerscard

• Beat 2: says, ‘I tolerate you’—

• Beat 3: Lemme know how that goes for ya’!

In my script it’s “chocolatesflowerscard” because I don’t want my mind’s eye to see commas or white spaces when I bring the page to the stage.

When I recorded Fool 16 years ago, I was convinced I had optimized the Setup Velocity of the final beat—that it couldn’t be improved.

The joke was on me all along.

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By Mark Whitney

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I push a button and a machine opens the garage door. As I love to do every morning at 7:30, I strap myself into a machine that hurls me up the coast to my studio, a 500-square-foot space brimming with a whole array of additional machines.

I push another button and my driving machine wirelessly connects itself to a machine at SiriusXM and suddenly I am listening to a throwback episode of American Top 40, which instantly transports me to the 1970s when I used to spin the very same episode as part of my weekend DJ shift at WFAD in Middlebury, Vermont.

I know what you’re thinking. “What about your phone, Mark? How many messages did you respond to?”

Great question! Today is Essay Day. So, both handheld machines, an iPhone 15 Titanium Cummins-Turbo Pro Max and a Samsung S29+ Sky-Jacker Ultra High-Lift, are off. Not muted. Not sleeping. Off.

As I love to do three times a week, I hit the organic salad bar at Jimbo’s in Del Mar Highlands. After securing my salad with a rubber band, a human named Lucky places my salad on a weighing machine that is connected to a second machine that automatically calculates how much I owe. I tap my magic card on a third machine that is magically connected to a fourth machine at my bank which then magically sends money to a fifth machine at the bank Jimbo’s uses.

From Jimbo’s perspective the foregoing system is a huge uptick from the prior century in which my Dad didn’t even pay for groceries. He wrote a bad check, which, if you think about it, is quite dignified when compared to simply making a break for it.

Phones are still off, it’s the weekend, and this essay already mentions the word “machine” 11 times. “Coffee machine” makes it an even dozen.

After I hit “PUBLISH” I’m going to turn the handheld machines on and there will be messages delivered by various machines owned and operated by family, friends, and business associates. Across my many email accounts, I guarantee you that somebody will want me to check my credit score.

You think you’re not already controlled by machines? Please send me a copy of the letter you wrote to the machines at the credit bureaus—the ones that sell access to your personal financial information to every other machine at every past, present, and future creditor.

Oh, that’s right. You never asked for this. It just happened.

In the last century I was concerned with the unfair loss of privacy. Today nobody has privacy—which is fair. So, problem solved?

That is an essay for another day. For now let’s smash PUBLISH so I can check my handheld machines over salad.

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The lovely and somewhat talented Chris Hemsworth, plays a former homeless kid made good. He steals from jewelry thieves, insurance fraudsters, and tax evaders, but he’s never hurt anyone. We know this because the lovely and talented, Detective Mark Ruffalo says, “He’s never hurt anyone.”

That four-word flash of explicit empathy and tacit respect is when I knew Hemsworth was going to somehow save Ruffalo’s life shortly before the credit roll.

Hemsworth, who has meticulous systems, does not need to get work from Nick Nolte, who plays his behind-the-scenes scary guy. Nolte doesn’t scare me at all. It’s not that old people don’t scare me. Mom is 89 and scares me plenty.

The high bar for portraying a behind-the-scenes scary guy was set sixteen years ago by Pete Postlethwaite’s portrayal of Fergie in The Town. When Ben Affleck killed Fergie it made you happy because Fergie deserved to die. In Crime 101, Nolte deserves to be arrested, released on bail pending trial, convicted, and sentenced to house arrest at the local Old Fools Home. He does not deserve to die, he doesn’t die, and we don’t care.

The presence of Nolte’s character is a logic hole. Thing is the entire story arc hangs on the fact that Hemsworth never hurt anyone. To get there we need Hemsworth to have a falling out with Nolte, so Nolte can promptly replace him with Berry Keoghan, who has zero systems and recklessly hurts everybody, including the lovely and talented, and I’m going with, post-menopausal, Halle Berry, who is really into yoga.

Every institution in Crime 101 is rotten to the core, which is to say it could have been a documentary. The LAPD is bad apples but for Ruffalo. The insurance company is ageist, sexist, and racist. When Berry fails to close a rich guy on a new policy, she loses the account to a white, much younger version of herself. Berry was willing to suck it up and play the part of billionaire bait, until she was ultimately blown off for a long-promised promotion to equity partner.

That’s when Berry takes Hemsworth up on his first freelance offer to collaborate on shaking down Berry’s former billionaire client for $11 million in cash and diamonds. Fortunately for the plot, Ruffalo’s wife has had all the good cop she can handle, matter-of-factly confessing to multiple affairs over diner burgers, which makes Ruffalo a victim at home as well as at work.

What would you do? Think carefully because first prize is the Cadillac. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Now, ring the bell if you said, “Move to the beach and take yoga with Halle Berry!”

We already hate the billionaire whose fiancée looks like her legal status changed to Post-Epstein as recently as Tuesday. If that’s not enough, this billionaire is cheap, resorting to tax fraud and money laundering in connection with the measly $5 million in diamond parting gifts he pulls together for members of the wedding party.

True to form, Keoghan, the guy who hurts everyone, shoots and wounds the billionaire. When the fiancée finds out her future husband is cheap she yells something like, “You Asshole!”, thereby wounding the billionaire a second time. Keoghan shoots Ruffalo in what turns out to be his bulletproof police vest. The shot could well have been fatal but for the fast thinking Hemsworth, who breaks character by finally and fatally hurting Keoghan who definitely had it coming.

All of this is to say, “Great popcorn movie!”

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By Mark Whitney

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November 2022, I drop dead of a heart attack. I wake up to eight pairs of wide eyes looking down at me, and I’m like, “How many of you here for the first time?”

The first line of my second life gets a chuckle. This bodes well.

My wife says God didn’t talk to me because I “wasn’t dead long enough.” I was, however, dead long enough to hear the nurse mutter, “Smells like he defecated.”

Defecation is a natural part of the post-mortem process. Talking to God? Apparently not. I give you that to give you this. Video is killing you. Video is the salt, sugar, and saturated fat of media.

I produce a fledgling TikTok series for my business partner in which she showcases the many southern California coastal homes she manages and lightly remodels. My job is to shoot while heckling from behind the lens.

We have the choice of telling our stories with video, audio, graphics, photos, or text.

Video makes the most sense because the story plays out against a visual backdrop that changes every week. It’s one thing to see the $3 million apartment where the roof caves in, killing the 94-year-old tenant in the bathtub.

But what does she leave in the fridge?

Pete Holmes and Taylor Tomlinson recently spent 90 minutes discussing the art and business of humorous speaking, in support of the other Taylor’s new Netflix hour, premiering Tuesday. I listened to the first half on my 45 minute fast-walk to the studio. I caught the second half on the second fast-walk home.

Audio is to video as banana (life) is to banana bread (death).

The best way to experience a Pete or a Taylor is the late show on a Saturday night in your local, sold-out 250-seat comedy club. Second best is the healthy audio-only-banana while exercising with earbuds. There is no third best.

When it comes to Jim Breuer there are no second options. He must be seen. You choke down the banana bread and you’re like, “He totally killed!”

Audio is way more flexible than video, even when physical and visual performance art is at play. Audio is my favorite medium because I can sketch the visual while leaving plenty of room for you to fill in the blanks with whatever your mind’s eye conjures up.

Don’t believe me? Check out the side-splitting, audio-only piece I created shortly after the Coronation of King Charles.

It’s forty minutes or 160 TikToks. But it’s bananas!

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By Mark Whitney

Coupla’ days back I hammered out a 775-word piece How Much Would You Pay To Get Your Mother Back?, in which I contemplate the pros and cons of croaking my mom with a poison frog.

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Satire takes a minute. The darker it is, the longer it takes. I was in the chair for seven hours. Didn’t get up once. No chugs of water. I was locked in. Two days later I am still excited about Mother Back.

My favorite line has nothing to do with the frog, the dissident, the kidnapped mother, or the one I’m holding hostage in La Jolla.

“I know this comic, Basab, from the Palindrome region of India.”

I knew there was a word for words that are spelled the same forward or backward. Had to look it up because I had forgotten that the word is palindrome.

When you have a special frog, you have a job to do. How many frogs make The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on the same day?

Generations from now when the murderous frog’s progeny is profiled on Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates will be like, “How does it make you feel knowing your third great-grandfather murdered a kind-hearted, Russian dissident who stood up to a sociopathic dictator?

As much as my Irish-Catholic mother drives me nuts, I get my sense of humor from her.

Yesterday I’m in Mom and a social worker who looks up from her fillable PDF, turns to Mom, and asks, “Do you have cancer?”

Mom, who is prit near deaf, turns to me, and I’m like, “DO YOU HAVE CANCER?”

Mom turns to the social worker. “No.”

As the social worker types, she asks another question. Mom turns to me again, and I’m like, “DO YOU WEAR A DIAPER?”

Mom is like, “What are we doing?”

“COMPLETING YOUR DEATH CERTIFICATE!”

You simply can’t walk away from a poison frog. Don’t believe me? Ask Alexei Navalny.

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By Mark Whitney

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I do not know Alexei Navalny or Savannah Guthrie.

Until yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I never even heard of the Russian dissident. Turns out he was “killed by a poison derived from a rare frog toxin.”

If you build your brand as a political enemy of Vladimir Putin, knowing full well that the Russian strongman operates an Arctic Circle penal colony called Polar Wolf, you have my respect.

But when you so thoroughly worm your way under the President For Life’s Grinchy skin that it’s not enough for him to render you to Polar Wolf, he whacks you with a poison frog. That’s a Disney movie: the ultimate grim fairy tale.1

As mentioned, I also do not know Savannah Guthrie. Outside my silo though she may be, I am aware of reports that Ms. Guthrie apparently offered The Kidnappers™ $6 million for the return of her 84-year-old mom.

Today is my mother’s birthday. She is 89. Mom runs me about $50,000 a year. I am man enough to admit that poison frog never occurred to me. My only concern is that the pyllobates terribilis is vulnerable to parasites, so Mom may have the edge. But, it’s worth a shot!

I reached out to The Kidnappers™ via Snapchat, offering them $50,000 a year for Mom, and they’re like, “Dude, we don’t have your Mom.”

That’s when it hit them. “Wait a minute. You want us to kidnap her? Dude, that’s fucked up! This is your Mom we’re talking about!”

Definitely not the real The Kidnappers™.

Not everyone knows this, but my adopted home of San Diego is the most biodiverse city in the United States. I might be able to find one of these Dart Frogs in the wild. But, Plan A is I know this comic, Basab, from the Palindrome region of India.

“My name is Basab. I am part Asian and part Caucasian. ‘Cauc’ is a small part of it.” (pause for silence)

When Basab is not bombing at our World Famous Comedy Store, he works part-time at our World Famous San Diego Zoo. Maybe Basab can hook me up.

Dart Frogs are laced with epibatidine, causing full-body numbness, as opposed to the from-the-neck-up numbness which has long afflicted my mother.

Don’t believe me?

Every Sunday I bring Mom two old fashioned donuts, coffee, some kind of breakfast sandwich, and the New York Times in hardcopy, which she complains is getting too heavy for her.

Mom lives alone. Her choice. She falls down. Her choice. She is not safe. Her choice. She does not eat right. Her choice. But that’s not why I called.

During Sunday’s visit, she looks up from the New York Times, takes a sip of coffee, looks me dead in the eye and says, “The Obamas are not apes. But they look like apes.”2

She is not joking. “Where do you come up with this?” I query.

Gesticulating toward her own impenetrable skull: “Brains!”

Brains. Plural.

In fairness to Mom, she was born in Westerly, R.I., in 1937. When she was four, Mom’s aunt took her away from her drunk mother, a cliché Mahoney, and her drunk father, a cliché O’Neil. In Mom’s day, racism was less subtle. For example, it was totally normal for the Times to report accordingly:

“Patrolman Michael Darienzo of Motorcycle Squad 1 was in a patrol car near the subway station at about 7 A. M., when he saw Hinton, who is a Negro, running from the station and heard cries of “Help! police!’” ~NY Times, July 31, 1939

In high school Mom worked in the kitchen at the Misquamicut Club, just up the shore from Taylor Swift’s place in Watch Hill.

Mom likes to repeat the story about that one time after a late-night, private function, she and her sister loaded a loaded Ethel Kennedy into the back of their M.G. and drove her home.

If we’ve learned one thing in the past ten years it is that nothing good happens at the golf course.

In a more perfect world, Mom might be a candidate for conservatorship. But she would also be entitled to counsel. You cannot defeat a blissfully, unaware 89 year-old woman who freely contradicts herself by unwittingly crafting the world’s first, one word, internally inconsistent sentence.

“Brains!”

Elderly parents — be they free or kidnapped, $50,000 a year or $6M lump sum — always fall to the oldest. I’m the guy cash-flowing a one woman Solar Wolf in sunny southern California, while swapping 5-Star TSA jokes for a biological weapon that croaks.

The only thing Mom took from Catholic school is The One Commandment.

“Honor thy mother.”

And so I do.

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By Mark Whitney

In a couple of weeks my only grandchild will be six months old. My imagination wanders accordingly:

1. What might have been required of me as a father had my sons been born in 2025 instead of the 1980s?

2. When Mael turns 18 in 2043, how might his options be different from the choices my sons had when they turned 18 more than twenty years ago?

THE ESTABLISHED ORDER

When my sons, Michael and Christopher, were born in the 1980s, it was easy for me to imagine how their adult lives might play out. We lived in Norwich, VT, a bedroom community of 4,000 white people across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College.

My wife, Julie, and I grew up in redneck Vermont. Julie went to the University of Vermont. I did not go to college. When Julie graduated in 1981, I said “We settle in Norwich; some of that Ivy League just might rub off on us. We could do worse.”

Norwich turned out to be a great place to raise a young family. But eventually you have to move because a tiny Ivy League town is about as linear and rigidly moral as it gets. In utero is not too soon to start cobbling together the elements of your child’s college application.

“The status symbol here is not what car you drive but where your kids go to college," says Jim Kenyon, a longtime columnist for the Valley News. In his 2025 retirement piece, Kenyon gleefully republished his own 1996 characterization of his adopted hometown as “Disneyworld with maple trees.”

The elementary school and the high school are ranked #1 in their respective states by US News, a statistic made possible by an Act of Congress which established SAU70 as our nation’s first interstate school district.

Norwich has been noted by the New York Times and elsewhere for disproportionately producing Olympians. My son cut his figure skating teeth on the homemade rink in the photo below, and thereafter won a shoebox full of gold medals until he shot up to 6’5”. Chris’s skating coach was a retired treasurer of Dartmouth College and a benevolent Olympic Gold Medalist who established the Skating Club at Dartmouth, and generously shared his knowledge and expertise for $7 a lesson.

Norwich residents are masters of a system that was invented, layered and honed over many centuries by their forebears. Norwich was established in 1761. Its British namesake was founded in the tenth century. Norwich reflexively resists change, including changes like affordable housing, which it champions. Just not in Norwich, lest we, um, sully the character of the town.

The slogan at the 75-year-old general store is more to the point: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”

That’s Norwich in a nutshell.

THE EARTH SHIFTS

My oldest son is 41. He’s never known a day on earth without a personal computer. When Michael was born in 1984, it was easy to imagine what the pillars of his life might look like as an adult. He will likely go to college, get married, have a family, and own a home that he will likely finance, not from a wage provided by an employer, but from a business he built with a keyboard.

It should come as no surprise that life as Michael experienced it in his formative years was indeed predictive of the aforementioned five pillars.

The earth shifted when Michael and Chris were still in single digits, as former Silicon Graphics Founder and CEO, Jim Clark, and then-University of Illinois programmer, Marc Andreessen, founded Netscape in 1994.

The world has been browsing ever since.

Netscape obliterated the Walled Garden that secreted elite information sources in cloistered conclaves. Suddenly every curious individual had direct, unfettered access to official documents and the individuals responsible for creating and curating them.

As for my family, nearly every dollar my adult sons and I have earned in the past 30 years has been via the Internet. AIRS, a competitive intelligence company I co-founded in 1996, and THELAWNET, the legal research company I founded in 1999, could not have been imagined before I experienced the magical, graphical Internet in the summer of 1995, through the window provided by the Netscape browser.

Thirty years of innovation later, from the mouse to the rollout of the browser to cell phones and smart phones, from 28K to 56K to ISDN to T1 to 5G, nothing about these technological advances invited me to reimagine what my sons’ lives might look like as adults.

But when I think about my little grandson, I’m like, “What does it even mean to be educated? What are you preparing for? How do you gain a sustainable advantage?”

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Part 2 will upload next week.

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By Mark Whitney

Everybody loves a funny, ballsy ad campaign.

I built my software company exclusively with a newsletter that we persistently emailed to 1M+ lawyers every week for more than 15 years. Our competition was two multibillion dollar, multinational publishers: Reuters (Westlaw) and Reed Elsevier (Lexis-Nexis).

Based on my personal experience with the criminal justice system, I had concluded that these companies were bad for America.

The way I framed the situation for the lawyers was that they had been victimized by two foreign corporations, Westlaw owned by a Canadian outfit and Lexis owned by some clowns in London. Then we have you, the loyal American attorney, who already sent your hard-earned tax dollars to the people down at the IRS so Congress could make laws and courts could write opinions construing them.

Why should you have to pay these soulless, foreign interlopers a second time, when all they do is scrape public records off your government’s servers, re-bundle them, and sell them back to you for more than your car payment.

How are you going to do God’s work solving the everyday legal problems for workaday Americans from your humble corner office on Mainstreet USA, when we have this menacing situation whereby Wall Street-traded corporations, insurance companies, and governmental instrumentalities have unfettered access to all of the law from the comfort of their climate controlled watchtower, while you poor schmucks are schlepping halfway across the state to a law library or calling a colleague to see if they might have a book that can provide guidance?

Stop the madness!

Our campaigns were often defined by satire, irony, and most frequently, mocking. Our most effective recurring campaign was when we linked to a story in the Washington Post about a lawyer who shot his computer. Our take?

We gently and regularly poked West and Lexis for being a duopoly. Our campaigns were so effective that eventually Lexis leveraged their economic superiority, retaining a Who’s Who of D.C. Dipshits, in an ironic attempt to sue us out of business. It did not go well for them. Why? Because everything we said was true and we had the goods!

The fantastic Anthropic campaign that inspired this post was created by Mother. But the flawless creative execution is not the hardest part of a campaign like this. The hardest part is convincing your client to actually run the commercials. That’s where the real salesmanship comes in as Jon Hamm’s Emmy Award-winning Don Draper character teaches in this iconic pitch session from a 2008 episode of Mad Men.

Anthropic #1: What do you think of my business idea?

Anthropic #2: Can I get a six pack quickly?

Anthropic #3: Is my essay making a clear argument?

Anthropic #4: How can I communicate better with my Mom?

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By Mark Whitney

As an end user of good writing, I know that whenever there’s a layoff at some big news operation I am in for a treat. See, e.g. You Can’t Kill Swagger: My old corner of The Washington Post raised some of the best journalists in the business by Sally Jenkins; How Jeff Bezos Broke The Washington Post: The paper of record for the nation’s capital cut a third of its staff this week. It didn’t have to be like this. by Hanna Rosin.

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Sally and Hanna are 65 and 55, respectively. They have forgotten more about writing than I will ever know.

But, if I’ve learned one thing about myself at 66 it is this: The reason I am an entrepreneur is my low tolerance for risk. This was especially true when my children were counting on me for essentials like food and shelter, and upgrades like skiing, go-carts, figure skating, flying lessons, and private school.

I had a dozen jobs during the four years my wife was in college studying for one. I quit six and was fired from the other half. Five of those jobs were at two radio stations and three TV stations.

One of the radio stations was in Middlebury, Vermont. At 19 I was actually getting paid to run my mouth on the air. Running my mouth is what I was born to do, and at one level or another, I’ve been running my mouth ever since. But that’s not why I called.

We had a couple of guys who actually supported their families selling advertising for this tiny station in a town of 7,000 people. This was commission sales, which means the advertising had to be expensive enough to pay the sales guy, the on-air staff, the office staff, the program director, the engineers, and the owner.

If you owned an AM/FM setup in 1978, you needed a swamp for the AM transmitter. For an FM station, you needed a mountaintop and snowmobiles for the FM transmitter.

During my on-air shifts I ran both stations at the same time. On the AM side I was live. On the FM side, I pre-recorded newsbreaks, sports updates, and weather forecasts, for playback on a rack of four, semi-autonomous 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape machines, containing latest hits which were shipped to us once a week from a subscription service via UPS.

In 1978, the only way to know this week’s #1 song was to listen to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. After he retired, Casey was replaced by Radio Hall Of Famer, Shadoe Stevens, whose credentials include hosting Hollywood Squares, being the house announcer for Craig Ferguson’s late night show, and the house announcer for, Late Nite Last Week, the smash hit of a podcast which I created, produced, wrote, and hosted for four seasons from 2016-2019.1

If you owned a radio station like the one I worked at in 1979, it was a valuable asset. You could sell it for a lot of money. You don’t want to own a station like this today, just as you do not want to own The Washington Post.

When Mom wanted to hear me on the radio, she had to drive ten miles from the other side of the mountain, to the parking lot of the Middlebury Snow Bowl. When she turned on the radio, there we were: Me and static.

All of that expense, transmitters, and engineers—and if you were outside a 10-mile radius, you had no way of knowing this little radio station existed.

In 2011, when I wanted Shadoe as a house announcer on my first of several failed podcasts, I sent him an email: “Yo, Shadoe! Whassup?! Long time listener. First time caller.”

We made a deal. No middle man. No gatekeepers. No permission slips. No editors. No advertising staff. No engineers.

We are the owners. We do all this from our personal, static-free, digital sound studios, as do hundreds of thousands of folks from around the world.

Be honest.

Would you invest in The Washington Post as a business model? Will the Post even exist five years from now? What if it doesn’t?

Stay honest.

Google is essential. Amazon is essential. The Post is disposable.

I don’t want a job because I don’t want 100% of my revenue in the same basket. Especially when the basket is owned by somebody else.

I much prefer B2B subscription businesses like the legal research infomediary I founded in 1999, and which over the years amassed 40,000 subscribers. A subscription is $495 annually. Subscribers come and go. Do I care? I do not.

I especially appreciate Sally Jenkins.2 But, consider the opening salvo from her piece in The Atlantic, that I linked to above.

If this happened today, by the time Wilbon arrives on the scene, it’s too late. Video of the crash, from every conceivable angle, is already viral. Podcasters are firing up their cameras and pulling up to their SM7s. Substackers are cranking out think pieces. “How The Crash Impacts My Lived Experience As A Person Who Once Saw The Potomac On A Ninth Grade Field Trip.”

Jenkins is nostalgic. I get it. Nostalgia is a powerful human emotion. In your sixties you spend more time building upon the rear view mirror, than imagining what’s in front of you.

The challenge is to create a reliable, forward path. For me, since 1995, that path has been intentionally defined by thousands of individuals and organizations, each paying me a little bit of money, thereby freeing me to run my mouth on stage and screen, as I was born to do.

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By Mark Whitney

I spent 1992 in Federal prison. When I arrived, I was a thirty-two-year-old married father with two boys, ages five and seven. Our family was destitute, and I needed a hustle.

I looked out my cell door and saw 900 men with legal problems. Prison is a great place to practice law.

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For fans of irony, prison is the only place you can practice law without a license. It is actually encouraged. The First Amendment brings with it the right to access the courts, and the Supreme Court itself says that such access must be meaningful.

What does meaningful mean? Meaningful means that prison officials must let you have access to legal materials, including a law library.

I practically lived in the law library, reading and writing my way out of prison. After 452 days, my sentencing proceeding was found to be so unconstitutional it was wiped from the books by Stephen G. Breyer, who recently retired from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The law library was very small. It had all the Federal materials a prisoner might need. It had nine typewriters for nine hundred prisoners, and I could always get a typewriter. That tells you something about the number of prisoners who had given up hope.

Getting back to what meaningful meant, it also meant that prison officials allowed you to seek legal help from your fellow prisoners.

I helped everybody I could, reversing several sentencing decisions, modifying conditions of supervised release, and knocking out a ton of illegal restitution orders that Federal judges were issuing in connection with transactions for which my somewhat clients were neither charged nor convicted.

I did a lot of work for mobsters and executives from Wall Street, which is redundant. I got so good at this, even some of the locked-up lawyers sought my assistance.

When I helped somebody, I got into all of their personal business, including things like money. If you were broke, I’d help you for a bag of chips or a roll of dimes. The fee was the same if I couldn’t trust you.

But if I crafted a strategy that your lawyer used to set aside a multi-million dollar civil judgment and if I felt I could trust you, I would risk a month in the hole, and ask you to have your wife or girlfriend send a postal money order or two or three to my wife.

This was a knowing violation of prison policy—which is to say it was not illegal. It would have been illegal to not report the income to the IRS, which is why we reported it.

I am no victim. We have all seen movies and read stories about our fellow citizens, like Calvin Duncan below, who, after being convicted by a jury, were illegally locked up for decades because as it turned out, they were actually innocent.

I was actually guilty. But, my guilt does not change the fact that whatever else can be said about being thrown into a cage, it cannot be said that it is not an enormous setback.

My solution then? My solution since? My solution today? Open your eyes. Look out the window. Define the market. Take down some territory.

At 66, I am confident that 20 years or so from now, when I am sitting in the local Old Fool’s Home with a tube up my ass, I will still find a way to shake down yo’ mama!

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QUOTABLE

• “There are two kinds of people in the world: people with systems, and people who are broke.”

• “We weren’t poor. We were vintage.”

• “I would never take a check from my father.”

• “Goals are for idiots. Systems are subject to constant refinement.”

• “The right system never lets you fail.”

• “What my father did with thousands, I did with millions.”

• “I was my father with three more zeros.”

• “On the one hand, we lost everything. On the other hand, we never really had it.”

• “Small & Smart is not just the best way to do business. It is the best way to live.”

ESSAY VERSION

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There are two kinds of people in the world. People who have systems, and people who are broke.

My parents had no systems. They never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, or a dishwasher. Our 125-year-old rental had a dirt-floor basement and no running water in the kitchen. For six years, my father lugged water from the bathtub to the kitchen sink to wash dishes.

• Why not pivot?

• Why not selfishly respect your own time?

• Why not learn?

We weren’t poor. We were vintage. We had the world’s first split-level, dirt-floor, BYOW (Bring Your Own Water) kitchen.

My family presented as functional. Dad was a popular high school teacher, a strong-voiced lector at mass. Mom sat in the front row with my siblings. We had all our teeth. I was an altar boy—not for God, but to get paying gigs like weddings and funerals.

Dad worked constantly for extra cash. Coaching and refereeing year-round. Painting houses in warm months. Teaching 15-year-olds to drive in the cold months (which explains the lack of hair and fingernails).

Mom worked full-time nagging Dad. Her questions were not unfair:

• “Why don’t we have heat?”

• “Why is the car repossessed again?”

• “Why are checks bouncing again?”

• “Why is the phone disconnected again?”

• “When are you going to pay the tab at Kamuda’s? We’re out of food.”

Dad was great at landing paint jobs, terrible at getting paid. He never invoiced customers. When he did, he guessed at hours and failed to document reimbursable expenses. When he was paid, he co-mingled money for supplies with money the family needed for food.

The low point: Dad hired four of my best teenage friends one summer and paid them with bad checks. He was prosecuted, pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and was forced to make restitution under threat of jail.

I can’t say he knew the checks would bounce. I can say he knew his checks had a way of bouncing. The money might be there, but he didn’t know for sure. I remember being 10, watching Dad write a $2 check for gas, thinking: “I would never take a check from my father.”

Shortly after the debacle, Dad claimed he retired from teaching to paint full-time. I suspect he was invited to resign. He never recovered, delivering pizza and teaching driving until he passed peacefully in 2016, a broke and broken man.

At 66, the defining memory of my childhood is the nightly argument about money. My mother picked and picked and picked until eventually my father’s head exploded.

Can we all get some sleep now?

Me? I always had money. At ten, I painted with my dad. By 12, I convinced most of his customers to hire me to mow their lawns. At 14, I had my own mower. I excelled at getting paid. In 1973, I got $3 an hour in seventh grade, more than Dad got to teach seventh grade.

The lawn business, unlike house painting, was a subscription model. Peak season meant payment every four or five days. Fall was like Christmas. Pay me once to cut the grass. Pay me again to rake the leaves.

My invoices were handcrafted, timely, detailed, and accurate.

I didn’t shovel snow. I outsourced it before outsourcing was a thing. Another industrious kid with a snow blower took care of my customers; I paid him 75% in shop class. The customers were mine, not his. I was getting paid to ski.

We had a small ski area a mile away, thanks to a neighbor who married a Vanderbilt girl. He and his wife owned 5,000 acres. Seventy-five bucks for the season! I bought my own new equipment and a season pass. I chipped in on used gear and passes for my brother and sister.

I played bass and could sing a little. At 16, I hid behind a dumpster while my adult bandmates snuck me into the Wobbly Barn, Wobbly II, the Pickle Barrel, and other Killington joints.

This was all good stuff, right? Nobody cared that none of my activity was legal. Everything you’ve read so far was against the law. I was a human crime wave:

• I was not 18. I couldn’t contract. But, I was contracting.

• I was not drinking age. But, I was in the bar.

• Nobody asked or cared if my mowing business was registered with the Vermont Secretary of State. I was not reporting my business income. What’s a 1099?!

As President of the Otter Valley Union High School student council, I hired the band for school dances. They wanted $300. I told them to invoice the student council $400 so they could grease me back a $100 booking fee. I started and ran a school store and put myself on the payroll.

It’s not like Mom and Dad were sending me to school with lunch money.

I didn’t clear this activity through the council, which is an abuse of trust. I promise you, as the current Chairman and co-founder of two corporations with stockholders, I would never—ever—consider such behavior now.

I’m confident Dad never paid a dime of taxes on his business income. He wouldn’t know where to start. Even if he knew the law required, he couldn’t have pulled it off administratively. He was too busy with the important business of lugging dishwater from the bathtub to the kitchen.

Dad’s back office skills were non-existent, and my Mom was, and is, a bloviating, economic ignoramus, who my family has been supporting for over 40 years. And by support, I don’t mean McDonald’s money. We’re talking houses, apartments, and cars.

My first easy credit experience: The local drug kingpin, who laundered weed profits through a guitar and amp shop, trusted me to make payments on gear. I never missed one. When an amp broke, he charged me double: once for his repair, once to repair the repair I did.

To this day, I can’t explain why my parents couldn’t get it together. They found each other, then spent their lives steering clear of each other.

My wife, Julie, and I married at 22 and owned our first home before 25. It was $65,000. Two years later, we bought 10 acres in Norwich, Vermont for $35,000. We clear-cut three acres, got $10,000 for the wood, and built my dream home. I say “my dream home” because Julie never liked the place due to the position of the sun.

“Why you lookin’ at me like that?! I didn’t put the sun there!”

We owed $125,000 on a home appraisers valued at $250,000 ($750K in today’s dollars). We had a one-year-old son and another on the way. Our neighbors were Dartmouth College professors and doctors at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

By 30, I was no longer an idiot. I was no longer a goals guy. Goals are for idiots. I’m a systems guy. The right system never lets you fail. A goal can be part of a system. But, goals standing alone are a zero-sum game. Systems are subject to constant refinement.

In my 20s, my #1 goal was financial independence by 35. It’s not that I won’t work. It’s that I won’t have to.

At 27, I walked away from the debt-free, cashflow machine of an advertising agency I started at 22, swapping it for the biggest thing to hit our little state of Vermont.

Ben & Jerry are franchising.

I effectively bought the rights for New Hampshire for $60,000 and built stores everywhere. I had no restaurant experience. No intention of working in the stores. Never negotiated a commercial lease. Never heard the term triple-net.

My advertising business produced television and radio commercials for area banks. If I learned one thing from dozens of marketing meetings with up-and-coming New England bank presidents, it’s that banks sell money.

Banks need your deposits so they can resell a piece of your savings to morons like me.

I wasn’t careful. The banks weren’t careful. They were selling money; I was buying. Needless to say, none of it worked out. Not even a little bit.

There was one, ironic bright spot.

For $7 a day, I got a permit for an ice cream cart in front of the town hall in Hanover, NH. That Small & Smart cart was throwing off $100 an hour in net profit. Meanwhile, the Big & Stupid stores I wasted millions retrofitting and maintaining were hemorrhaging cash.

Cost of goods was 40%, and the bank debt was killing us.

Of the ten small businesses I’ve founded or co-founded, the only one I lost was the Big & Stupid one. Two of the Small & Smart ones have been in business for nearly 30 years.

I grew the Big & Stupid one so fast that by the time I understood the flaws in the business plan, it was too late. Approximately 85% of the first 100 Ben & Jerry’s franchisees went bankrupt. Three of the bankers I did business with were sentenced to multiple-year timeouts for criminal stupidity. On January 10, 1992, I was forced to join them.

Seven hundred days. Five federal prisons. One conjugal visit (that’s from the guy in the next cell).

What my father did with thousands, I did with millions.

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Three years before the criminal indignity, my wife and I filed bankruptcy. Everything had to go: Two homes. Sixty acres of land. Seven stores. Three corporations. 120 employees.

The one thing that survived bankruptcy was my close to seven-figure personal debt to the IRS.

On the one hand, we lost everything. On the other hand, we never really had it, did we? We owned nothing outright. It was paper on top of more paper.

Julie, fortunately, has a sense of humor. She never liked that house anyway.

It’s a reliable joke. But the fact is, Julie understood the multiple truths that defined my buffooneries. I’ve known Julie since the sixth grade. We graduated high school the same day. Her family sat through the same masses at the same St. Mary’s.

If you ask, she will tell you that I was a changed man years before the FBI and DOJ showed up.

I was my father with three additional zeros. But I was also the father of two sons. The maladministration of my back office, the unreported income, the unfiled tax returns—that shit no longer runs in the family.

After a jury convicted me on counts of giving the banks tax returns that weren’t quite what they appeared to be, I could have earned points at sentencing by apologizing and accepting responsibility. I refused. These banks aggressively blew money out the door. The more I wanted, the faster they put it in my hot little hands.

The banks and I deserved each other.

As for accepting responsibility, I know my felonious chicanery pre-dates our young family of four. I know this is never happening again, and that’s all that matters.

The new me was a methodical, meticulous, grown-ass systems guy in my 30s. Nose down in the books. Criminal procedure. Civil procedure. Judicial procedure. Administrative procedure. Statutes. Rules. Regulations.

From a prison typewriter, I beat the Department of Justice like a rented mule. What the Government hoped would be 4-1/2 years disassembled into 15 months in, a win on appeal, two years out, five months back in, and three months of home confinement. I served my time on the installment plan, which made all the difference for our family.

Summer of 1993—back on the street pending appeal—my eight-year-old wanted to do a lemonade stand.

What an opportunity to do what my father failed to do: Immerse my sons in applied business administration with money they earned themselves. I built a lemonade stand that looked like Lucy Van Pelt’s Psychiatric Booth from Peanuts®.

“The sign says, ‘Ice Cold Lemonade’ so it has to be ice cold,” I told them. Julie and I taught them:

• Buy Low. Sell High.

  • Stockpile frozen concentrate when it’s on sale for 10 cents a can.

• Cost of Goods.

  • Keep receipts, maintain accurate books, and set aside earnings for the next round of supplies.

• Get More Money From Customers You Already Have.

  • Add homemade, fresh-from-the-oven, still-warm chocolate chip cookies.

• Buy In Bulk, Then Unbundle.

  • Hit local pick-your-own strawberry fields for cheap flats, then break them down into pints and quarts to sell for high cash.

• Know Your Worth.

  • If the lemonade is ice cold, the chocolate chips are still warm and gooey, the strawberries were picked this morning, and you keep regular hours, you can charge the same price as the adults at the general store.

• Roll Your Profits Back In Your Business.

  • Stay debt-free. Maintain unilateral control. No borrowing—not even from Mom or Dad.

Like my lawn mowing business, all of this was completely illegal. Throw in federal and state child labor violations if you want. Doesn’t matter. My sons had regulars who swung by the stand like clockwork.

The chief of police was not only their biggest customer, but also the perfect emblem of how tight-knit communities often appropriately turn a blind eye to the legal niceties that define adulthood.

Now, 41 and 39 respectively, my sons reflect on the lemonade stand as foundational to their entrepreneurial mindset. My youngest dropped out of college to build a Small & Smart eight-figure Amazon store with money he saved working at In-N-Out. At 17, my oldest became the youngest-ever operations manager at AMC Theatre in La Jolla (a restaurant that shows movies). Later, he left corporate America to bootstrap his own eight-figure advertising business from cashflow. His Small & Smart business model is stout and efficient. His company persists while his Big & Stupid competitors are gobbled up by their own hubris.

Neither of them has ever had a car payment. They pay cash. They’ve never paid a dime in credit card interest, and they own their own homes in southern California.

I will never forget the Small & Smart lesson of that ice cream cart, even as I muse daily on the horrendous consequences associated with those Big & Stupid ice cream shops.

Small & Smart is not just the best way to do business. It’s the best way to live.

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Update: In the original January 12 post, we said, “This is going to be great in concert.” The concert version of I Just Might, debuted a month later on the 2026 Grammys.

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