Alex Romanovich (00:00):
Hi, this is Alex Romanovich, and welcome to GlobalEdgeTalk. Today is May 5th, 2020. And today we have a very, very special guest, a good friend, Jeffrey Merrihue. Welcome, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Merrihue (00:12):
Welcome, Alex. Happy Cinco de Mayo.

Alex Romanovich (00:15):
Happy Cinco de Mayo. Today is Cinco de Mayo. And we're a privilege to speak with Jeffrey. Let me just tell you quickly about Jeffrey and his tenure. He started as a corporate executive and spent a lot of time at Accenture of all places as the managing partner and the later CEO of one of the most important practice areas in marketing globally. He speaks multiple languages. He, later on, moved on to start his own venture called Mofilm`, which aggregated a lot of global video talent and helped major-major corporations leverage that talent and leverage that content. He helped, by the way, quite a bit to our mutual friend, he provided a lot of help to the CMO Club, chief marketing officer's club. He was a very big part of that. Later on, and now he is a connoisseur, an entrepreneur, and restaurant tour of the famous Heroic Italian, one of the top Italian restaurants in Santa Monica, California, and is leading the charge in that segment in the entire Los Angeles County. Jeffrey, this is an amazing, amazing career, amazing path. We want to talk about this for sure.

Jeffrey Merrihue (01:35):
Well, thank you, Alex. Kindly words.

Alex Romanovich (01:37):
First word. The first question I want to ask of you is how does one go from being a partner at Accenture and then of course becoming an entrepreneur, but still continuing to work with major, major brands and then becoming a foodie, becoming a restaurant tour, becoming an Iron Chef judge in Canada and traveling the world. How does all of this fit? Tell us.

Jeffrey Merrihue (02:04):
Well, we have to rewind 55 years or 50, when I was 5 years old and two things were happening. Number one, my playroom was my family's kitchen, my mom, my aunt, everybody in my family was a cook. So I didn't have a playroom. I had played around the kitchen and help mix things, and start the sauce. And for me, those were my toys. And secondly, I was always trying to make money and I did things like going door to door selling seeds to win a bicycle. Then I collected comic books. I went to comic book conventions and I bought, sold and traded them. And then I sold t-shirts at rock concerts with dubious legitimacy, finally, I landed in a place called Babson College. I was very fortunate because for those of you that don't know, Babson is the number one school for entrepreneurship in the world and it's held that title for decades and decades.

Jeffrey Merrihue (03:12):
So while other schools go up and down the various rankings, Babson has had an iron-clad grip on the number one place for entrepreneurship. And it was very well suited for my early entrepreneurial schemes, and plans, and desires. So I came out of there and went to work corporate first at Nabisco in Barcelona. And then went through a number of countries like Canada, and Ecuador, and Venezuela, Milan, Italy. And then I went on to work at Kellogg's, worked again in multiple international locations, like Columbia, Manchester, England, and so on and so forth. And I think that people from the outside looked at me and said, well, they didn't know what I'd done entrepreneurially with comic books, and t-shirts, and seeds and stuff like that, all they knew was, oh, Jeffrey works for Nabisco, Jeffrey works for Kellogg's, and then, as you mentioned, went on to Accenture.

Jeffrey Merrihue (04:15):
The reality is that because I was always in smaller countries relative to the headquarters the countries themselves were quite sprightly. And this was before major globalization kicked in, which means like today, if you want to change Skippy peanut butter over in England, you'd better get permission, but back then you could do whatever you wanted. And obviously, people were still looking did it work or not? So that mattered, but you could do a lot of stuff internationally in the marketing. So I was zipped around from Spain to Canada, Ecuador to Mexico, Italy, et cetera. I would argue that I was charged with being very entrepreneurial. Like my bosses were like, you got to make something happen, you got to do this. And I would actually sometimes like I'd go back to headquarters at Battle Creek, Michigan for Kellogg's. And there you had hundreds of employees, managers, directors, and all I could sense that headquarters was don't do this, don't do that, don't do this, don't do that. And they didn't even look at our plans overseas and they were like, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, you should do it, what I'm doing, and all these lectures. And of course, then you just go back to Italy or whatever, and you do whatever the hell you want. I mean, I always listened and I took a lot of ideas from headquarters, and I was thinking I was a good student, but certainly, in the environments that I went through in so-called corporate, we're actually massively entrepreneurial.

Jeffrey Merrihue (05:40):
I remember Ecuador. In one year we actually lost 18 products, which was unheard of, and you could never have done that in a big structured company. So I think entrepreneurship is to finish the intro is sometimes misunderstood to be you're either in a big company or you're an entrepreneur in a small company. And I actually think that entrepreneurship is sort of a genetic thing. And you can be entrepreneurial at any level of company. You can be entrepreneurial in a small company, you can be entrepreneurial at the huge company, some big companies like 3M are famous for encouraging it. Other companies are famous for squashing it, but entrepreneurship is a state of mind, not a science company.

Alex Romanovich (06:26):
I totally agree with you. And every time I met you, and I've met you a few times all over the world, you were oozing entrepreneurship. You were always dressed in a very kind of a casual entrepreneurial way. You really didn't care for suits or anything else like that. He always showed up in a very casual way as if you own the place, so to speak. And I was always amazed at how easy it was to talk to you, how approachable you are. Very likable by a lot of people, by everyone. And I agree with you that it has to be something with genetics because a lot of folks are struggling to work for large organizations or to work for large companies. There's this amazing amount of fear to go back into a small environment, to go into a small environment or SMB environment, and maybe realize their dream or realize their passion or something like this.

Alex Romanovich (07:32):
I always looked at you and always realized how much passion you have. Let's talk a little bit about passion because I see it even in the restaurant environment right now, and I've been to your place. The food was amazing. The way you present the food, the way you pay attention to the level of detail, I'm a foodie myself. I love to cook, and I was just amazed at the presentation, but also the taste, the selection of products and ingredients the selection of personnel. I was truly amazed by this, and we'll get to the restaurant a little bit later, but I think what I want to talk about is the level of passion. And let's talk about how passionate you were almost at every step of the way.

Jeffrey Merrihue (08:24):
I mean, passion, I guess, is probably a lot like entrepreneurship and it's kind of hard to learn. Again, I'd argue, I was passionate about what I did when I was five, I would stir my aunt's tomato sauce, so like nobody's business. And yeah, it's just ingrained, my family came from Eastern Europe, nested your wonderful places, like Russia, and Kyiv and so forth. And we were just a hard-working clan and that just was, wake up early, what I still do. I wake up at five and go to work without thinking about it. And I think, I give you an example of the way I express that is when I ran companies both within the big company, like Nabisco, or Kellogg's, or Accenture, or in a small company like Mofilm.

Jeffrey Merrihue (09:14):
I always pick my people based on kind of how hard-working, passionate they were. And a good example of that is at Mofilm, for example, we got rid of bonus. So I grew up in every company I ever worked in. You had a bonus and kind of the idea is if you work harder, you'll make more. And that would never apply because I always work as hard as I could. So someone said, well, I'll give you $50,000 bonus, if you work even harder, it was like, I got nothing left in the tank like I'm up at five, I'd give it my all, and no amount of money will make me work harder. I'm happy to take the money if I succeed, but it won't be because I said, jeez, I'm going to do better, because I can make more money just because I was doing that.

Jeffrey Merrihue (10:06):
And so when we set up Mofilm we actually started with bonus, until I realized now, and we got rid of them. And then when we went to was profit sharing. So, we set targets at the end of the year, there was a bunch of money that if we made it everybody got it exactly proportional to their salary. So that means if you were highly paid, you got 10%. And if you were lowly paid, you got 10%, but everybody got a proportion of the benefit, even poor performers because everyone else was performer. I mean, you try to hire as many perfect people as you can hire. Sometimes you just can't get lucky or whatever. And our philosophy was everyone gets a bonus if they're employed with the company. And if you've got a problem with an employee number, when you warned him, train him, try and get him to fix it.

Jeffrey Merrihue (11:02):
And if you can't, it's not being taken a bonus away because you fired. So the result was at Mofilm and anyone who worked with that kind of saw it, everybody was super passionate and not, I'm going to say between quotes, caring about bonus is knowing that we were all working as a team. And that's the other thing if there's no extra bonus for individual behavior that promotes teamwork. So I think the management of passion is a huge subject and I don't necessarily feel like it's as reported as many of the other topics.

Alex Romanovich (11:43):
It's actually very interesting. I mean, you're in the restaurant business now. It's a very interesting topic because it's kind of related to, Europeans in Europe and Asia, they don't typically tip and in America it's very accepted, right? Say a few words about that. How do you feel about this?

Jeffrey Merrihue (12:00):
The same philosophy. It probably won't surprise you after that intro that when we started and I knew nothing about running a restaurant. I think, some of that back story, oh my God, I've been through a bit of hell and back. We did the usual, the waiters got tips and if they sold more, they made more, and the staff and back slaviing away over the hot stove got nothing. And one day, I hadn't seen the Tiffany, like this isn't right, because if the staff sends out a bad plate, the waiters screwed, and if the staff sends out an amazing plate, waiters going to an extra tip. And so we flipped everything over to tip-sharing where everybody in the exact same format as Mofilm got a bonus or share the tips exactly proportionate to their salary. So from our dishwasher all the way up to our very incredibly handsome waiter, you might recall, they all got the same presenters. Now that causes other problems. Not surprising that the wait staff a couple of them quit because they're like, oh, I want all the tips for me. Well, I didn't want that kind of person in Heroic anyway. So go to work somewhere else.

Alex Romanovich (13:12):
We're going to jump back and forth a little bit because, first of all, for our audience we will post a lot of information about Jeffrey and his adventures on the landing page, so you'll know more about it, with links to the restaurant, with links to other projects that he's been involved with, like Mofilm and so forth. But let's talk about restaurant, right? So you coming out of corporate, you're coming out of Mofilm is a very successful acquisition by you and Jones, or your family and Jones, right? You and Mr. Jones, I apologize. And you're entering the restaurant business where you said you knew very little, but all that passion and the fact that you grew up around the kitchen, you grew up cooking, you grew up with a lot of different background related to this. You decide now to open an Italian restaurant, which is not typical, I guess, in Santa Monica, right? Is that a true statement?

Jeffrey Merrihue (14:23):
No, there's much. Especially in Brentwood, there's Italian Road.

Alex Romanovich (14:29):
But being a marketer, what is so different about Heroic, and what did you bring from the past, besides passion, into this that made it so successful?

Jeffrey Merrihue (14:44):
So there are many things that I didn't know and screwed up, like got bad partners and I didn't know how to do the operations. But there were other things helped me a lot, like being able to cook has been invaluable, also being a foodie has been invaluable because I only let things come out of my kitchen and I want to eat. And I have a website XtremeFoodies. So people would come to me for food recommendations for years. So I think one of the things that I brought to this was I kind of know what people like to eat, like my taste, something I don't like it. I'm pretty sure my friend isn't going to like it either. And if I take something that's delicious, I'm going to recommend it. And people normally find the recommendations I make are good ones. So I think that's probably the biggest talent I brought into a business that I did not know. Why Italian? There are a lot of Italian restaurants.

Jeffrey Merrihue (15:44):
So it started with the sandwiches and I've been a believer that sandwiches in America are generally actually pretty bad. Like all that stuff, like Starbucks. I don't know how people eat those things.

Alex Romanovich (15:55):
I agree. I agree.

New Speaker (15:56):
The bread was soggy nannies. It's like, what? That limp lettuce is I see people eating, I almost want to cry out those do it. And so we started with the sandwiches and the OMT sandwich, and there were two simple principles. One was I had to have the very best ingredients. So the best cold cuts are from Italy. They're better than borders. I have nothing wrong with borders in Columbus, but the Italian, for sure, from Tuscany, they're just better, simple as that. And then the other thing is the bread. You don't have a good bread - you don't have a good sandwich.

Jeffrey Merrihue (16:30):
So I don't care. And I think most people would agree with that, even though they eat crappy bread. So we spend a huge amount of time. You have any piece of bread with two simple characteristics: crunchy on the outside and thin and cloud-like and airy on the inside. I hate those dense pieces of bread where you got to pull the middle out of the bread. You can pull in the middle out of your bread like at Subway, that's not a good piece of bread. So I think we achieved that and then we have other sandwiches, but the first point was looking at an industry where I thought something was wrong and we could bring something to the party. We didn't set out to do the fancy side. But we ended up inheriting a space, whether we should have done it, or that is a discussion for another day that had sort of another kitchen and then another side.

Jeffrey Merrihue (17:21):
And so we set up our secret garden and started doing the fine dining thing. And in a way it's all going to be the exact same thing because I mentioned there are actually a lot of Italian restaurants while not per se in Santa Monica over in Brentwood, which is two miles away. There must be 40 Italian restaurants, but they all have the same menu. And I mean, this is all from New York, you'll find a lot of this there. You go into the Italian restaurant, you open it up and every single item on that menu is familiar, you've had it a million times. It is probably pretty good by the way. So unlike the sandwiches where there are millions of them and they're bad, I think with be tying food, there are millions of them. They're not bad. But we thought, well, let's try and apply the same idea of the sanders to fine dining.

Jeffrey Merrihue (18:10):
And let's simply get better ingredients both fresh, imported and live. So all our seafood comes from Santa Barbara, as much of it live as possible. And let's come up with recipes that are unusual. And we started unusual - we've gotten more unusual, like things that you just don't see on a menu anymore, like Vittelo tonnato, but we've put our own spin to it. And we've gone back and gotten recipes from cookbooks from Rome from 280 called Apicius, or from the 1700s called Artusi, which is the name of our tuna sandwich. And we've tried to take those ancient recipes, add incredible ingredients and freshen them up for a modern era. And that was proved. It was slow to get off the ground, but it's now taken home.

Alex Romanovich (19:07):
So, our audience is listening and I'm hoping that they're beginning to realize that true entrepreneurship is consisting of a lot of different let's call them ingredients, right? And Jeffrey is now telling us more about this in terms of his insights. One obviously is you have to have passion. The other one is you have to have quality ingredients and thirdly is you have to apply those ingredients and passion to make some really amazing products, and nuances playing a big role in this as well.

Jeffrey Merrihue (19:46):
The fourth piece is about the team though. You said three, I'd add fourth, the part about the team and selecting good people and motivating them in the same way you get motivated. By the way, I give myself a bonus at the same ratio as anybody else and trying to build that teamwork. So you're all working towards the same excellent goal is vital. I mean, you can't do any of this alone.

Alex Romanovich (20:09):
Yeah. That's amazing. Let's switch back now and talk a little bit about Mofilm, right? So you're at Accenture, you're working with a lot of amazing people in Accenture, working with a lot of amazing clients worldwide some of the top chief marketing officers. Tell me more. What prompted you to create something like this?

Jeffrey Merrihue (20:34):
So again, Accenture was exactly like the other places I started in London and I was tasked with creating a marketing analytics division, that didn't exist. So it was an entirely entrepreneurial task. And by the way, if people don't know this about Accenture, very entrepreneurial company, so essentially you're on your own as a partner to create and solve stuff, and you make a partner. If you sell like $15-20 million on your own and pull your own piece together. I mean, there's a whole podcast for someone to do about Accenture to reveal the most successful companies of all time. And I just don't think people from the outside understand how, and I didn't know when I joined it, I'm fundamentally an entrepreneurial Accenture. It's absolutely astonishing. I knew my task was entrepreneurial. And so when I came in, I was the first employee. Let me just tell a quick anecdote. I don't know how much time we have, but it just sort of summarized everything.

Alex Romanovich (21:35):
We have as much time as you want, Jeffrey, go ahead.

Jeffrey Merrihue (21:38):
So here's a quick in it. So I'm there sitting around in Accenture and the downside to be entrepreneur is nobody comes over and says, can I help you, if you've got to manage it. But I'm sitting there and nobody at Accenture knew anything about marketing, there wasn't even a word in Accenture about CRM at the time. And I didn't know what CRM meant. So I'm sitting there at my desk in London. The hone's not ringing, nobody's calling me to work on a project. So I started phoning around all my old friends, and I got a tiny job with Mars. I get a small job with a friend in Campbellton, Canada. But this is all peanuts in the world of Accenture, the million-dollar contracts and then goofing around doing $60,000 analytics projects.

Jeffrey Merrihue (22:24):
And then magically my shared secretary walks in one day with this giant loaf of paper and drops it on my desk. And it's an RFP from Samsung Korea, request for proposal, I staring at this thing going, wow, that's absolutely amazing. And it was like for almost a million dollars. My eyes popped out of my head and there was nobody else in Accenture that knew about marketing. So it just essentially never got these things back then. So it was like a procurement mistake that Accenture's even on the list. But anyway, there it is, it landed on my desk. And so I called my boss and said, I shared with you the RFP and I had to go to Korea to present. And he goes, that's crazy, stay focused on Europe and the U.S. If you get unfocused you're going to fail.

Jeffrey Merrihue (23:19):
And so I hung up sort of sad. And I left the RFP on my desk and my phone wouldn't ring and send some more emails, then it's sort of like glowing on the end of my desk. And I said, oh, to hell with it. And so I wrote back to Samsung. I said I'll do it. Without permission from my boss, he didn't quite forbid me. He was sort of getting the advice and that's typical of Accenture. When the reckoning comes again, it's like, we'll just ask you, but it was not a sackable offense, but it was certainly when he found out his eyebrows were raised. So anyway, I get it off to Korea, obviously worked my heart out on the proposal. I had nothing else to do, walked into a room with must've been 25 Korean men, all dressed in black suits, all named Kim or Park.

Jeffrey Merrihue (24:10):
I'm not exaggerating. I kept a stack of business cards. I made my presentation. One guy asked two questions. The meeting ended and I walked out completely defeated. That was the worst decision of my life. I probably will get sad. And I told my brother who lived in California, that I would fly from Korea to Hawaii. He would fly from California to Hawaii and we'd play golf to celebrate my demise at Accenture. So I took off in the afternoon from Seoul, Korea. And as you go back through a time zone. So I actually landed in Hawaii before I presented the sensor and the voicemail I got off the plane was we'd been hired. So when I told my boss, he's like, you went and you won? And that was it. That was the beginning of my career at Accenture.

Alex Romanovich (25:08):
So I guess, you don't ask permission, right? You ask forgiveness.

Jeffrey Merrihue (25:13):
I live by that, but you got to do it smartly. I mean, you can't be rude. You have to have good manners. I have broken more rules than glasses than you can pass through a recount, but I also don't have any belief in real troublemakers and things like that. So that's a very fine line to walk when you're stepping on toes you need to do it with grace.

Alex Romanovich (25:38):
Every time I talk to you and every time I see you, I keep reminding myself that you actually do all of this yourself. You wake up at five o'clock in the morning, you go to the farmer's market, you select the ingredients, you select the veggies and the fruits, and the products and so forth. There's something to be said about this in terms of delegation versus doing this yourself. What can you say about that?

Jeffrey Merrihue (26:09):
Yeah. I want to be careful about that because, when I'm in the farmer's market, as soon as I turn that video off, I'm calling my team and asking, what do we get today? What do we need? And I'm absolutely involving in them. One of my eyes go to, they have spring tax. I never even heard of spring tax. And I found trying to think, yeah, I'd bring you three bunch of notes and then we'll collaborate on. And I probably come up with every single dish concept, but then how we bring it to life as a team effort, it's a team effort on what ingredients should we add or subtract, what different cooking techniques might we add or subtract to make it different and better, because we don't want to make the same dish as everyone else.

Jeffrey Merrihue (26:54):
So steak Osso Bucco, very difficult dish to make well. And we made it and it came out like everybody else has Osso Bucco, and it does it okay. And that was I'm happy with, and then, we added white, fresh cannellini beans to it. You transform your dish, and maybe a thousand times better. And that wasn't my idea. So I think the team thing I'm going to keep coming back to it. Well, yeah, I mean, my hands-on person in that is also leading by example, but you can't do everything yourself and including your team and motivating your team is absolutely crucial.

Alex Romanovich (27:29):
But it's important to set the tone. It's important to be that conductor, right? And I'm totally with you in terms of teamwork, in terms of leveraging the team and getting the best of the team to have the team performed the best as well. A lot of entrepreneurs, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, you do as well. You've done this in your career. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you've made, some of the biggest mistakes you see around you with entrepreneurs that you would love people not to repeat? I guess, what are some of the mistakes that you've made that you would love to not have made?

Jeffrey Merrihue (28:13):
I always thought I was a good people person. And then I convinced myself I was a good business person. And then I convinced myself I was good at interviewing people. And over the years I learned first that I'm crap at interviewing people. And then I kind of came to the conclusion that none of us, well, I'll put it differently. I think interviewing people is really, really, really hard. And the reason is that there are some characteristics, like, let's say you find someone who's incredibly charismatic, but super lazy. Just take those two characteristics as a given, for my example. Well, in the interview, that person is going to blow you away because they're super charismatic. And no matter what subject you talked about, go put the best, spin on it and tell anecdotes. And they'll even see all the mistakes. I'm hiring this person, and then you hire them and they're still super charismatic, but they're lazy.

Jeffrey Merrihue (29:19):
They don't get their work done. They never come in. It's always something. And their excuses are better than anyones'. Laziness is a very, very hard, if not impossible thing to interview for. And I stumbled across this, someone did it to me profiling, all this stuff like Myers Briggs and stuff like that. And at first I hated that. I felt like a front to my amazing people skills, and sort of overtime, I've grudgingly, defeatedly accepted that those programs are worthy, and that and I've actually profiled key positions ever since for years and years at Accenture. Nobody entered more without a profile. I wouldn't do it in the restaurant industry, but for not the same type of tasks, but I think that's a big deal.

Alex Romanovich (30:20):
One final question, Jeffrey. And I love speaking with you. I love learning from you. Let's talk a little bit about your personal side, the family, you are a global traveler, you are an entrepreneurship, it must be very hard with the family. So how do you manage, how do you balance this? You have a wonderful family, kids. How do you balance all of this together?

Jeffrey Merrihue (30:45):
Well, so the first thing is when people ask, how many kids you have, I have three, and how old are they? And I go, well, there's 40, there's 30, and there's 10. And you can tell, everyone's like, oh, you remarried, without saying. And of course, your punch line is, no. Then they're like, trophy wife, right? Like, yes, same trophy wife. We've been married a long time. And then as you travel, I mean, I've taken them everywhere. And if anything, everybody in my family is miserable, because none of us can go anywhere. And the second this curse gets lifted off all of us. I mean, I don't know where we're going, but we're going somewhere and we're going in a hurry. Beause I always took certainly my wife and often the kids with us. I mean, Accenture was a very generous company. So I was fortunate to be able to do that. Number one, not everyone can afford it, but at Accenture I could afford it. And I'm very grateful. Both my wife and kids have seen the world together and those are irreplaceable memories, but I mean, I get that balance when you really got to travel without your family relentlessly. I love to travel. So I guess I probably don't feel that bad.

Alex Romanovich (31:56):
One very important question. And I know we want to get to it, it's always been asked. This entire pandemic, this entire coronavirus, right? From the standpoint of how we're executing on this in the United States, how we're executing on this vis-a-vis small, medium-sized business? And also, what can you say about how we're doing this in comparison to everybody else in the world, other countries, for example?

Jeffrey Merrihue (32:24):
So you got to start by saying that nobody saw this coming. I know some people want to blame the Chinese, but I mean, this could have come from anywhere. I honestly don't think it's anybody's fault. Ccould people have done things better? Well, yeah, like everyone, including China, and America, and Italy. And so while it was very easy to point fingers and complain, and I certainly do it all the time. I think the backdrop has to be the world just confronted something that none of us have ever, ever seen before, except in some crazy movie. And you probably didn't like the movie, he said, that'll never happen. So now, once you accept that and then look at where we are now, I mean, beause no one has an experience, I think, we're making lots and lots of mistakes.

Jeffrey Merrihue (33:18):
So I'm going to jump straight to some of the prescriptions that I've been advocating for. I don't think it makes sense that you're going to walk into Walmart, cough all over the broccoli, and fondle all the children's toys and, go back and forth down the alleys, and then pay, and then walk out. But the toy store next door is closed. I think, both those policies are good example of being wrong. I think that the supercenters should be curbside. Most of them have that technology anyway. There's no reason for people to be going in and coughing all over the broccoli, just ordered to pick it up there. And then the closed toy store. I mean, if he wants to sell a puzzle or a book and deliver curbside, why can't he?. So I think that's a good example where we've made a massive concession, which is killing people to supercenters and we've unnecessarily destroyed the livelihood of hardworking, small families with bookstores, toy stores and things you will like. I think that the right policy to be implemented today immediately is what kind of the restaurant policy is everyone to be curbside until someone figures out a better way, simple as that.

Alex Romanovich (34:36):
It's interesting, we have another guest, we have a COVID convo with Dr. Wendy Tong, my good friend and another guest, who's a physician and she has a very interesting elderly care business as well. And she's from Hong Kong. We just did a podcast recording the tale of two cities. We have four people, four deaths in Hong Kong, the city of 8 million, the city-state of 8 million. And we have 20,000 in New York City alone. How is that possible? I mean, there must be something that folks in Hong Kong are doing that is better or more prudent or whatever. And they're opening everything right now, they're doing this in an orderly fashion, everybody's wearing a mask and so forth. So is this a matter of discipline? Is this a matter of genetics? What do you think it is?

Jeffrey Merrihue (35:28):
I think it's all of the above. The Asians are legendary in many cultures for wearing masks anyway and bowing instead of shaking hands. And I mean, I don't pretend to know even a fraction of what you would need to know to explain some of these extraordinary differences between countries. I mean countries in Latin America have no cases, and then countries like Brazil that have gone nuts, there's this theory that the sun and heat kill Corona, but hot countries have gotten hit and cold countries have gotten spared. So I think even in New York, I think not only it is different by country, it appears to be different by state, and it appears to be different by county. Obviously, the worst, you can hope for, is a dense population argument. But you're right, I mean, Hong Kong is dense.

Jeffrey Merrihue (36:24):
So I don't really feel like I can explain that, but I do think that what we should do is stop swinging back and forth between the extremes and simply go to what I like to call for now, safe society, safe commerce. Everyone should wear masks, whether you want to or not, because in the courtesy to others. We should practice curbside as long as we think we should practice curbside. Probably start to let the kids go back to school as the youth seem to be able to escape sooner than the elderly. And because that's the other thing the economy is killing people too. So, we've got 70,000 deaths in the U.S. We had 48,000-50,000 suicides last year. I bet we'll end up with a hundred thousand suicides this year, because suicide is mostly driven by economics.

New Speaker (37:17):
It is true. It is true.

New Speaker (37:18):
We should consider that opening the economy, balanced against more people dying is an important trade-off. And I think that safe opening and safe commerce, not like those idiots protesting in mobs without masks, they're fools and idiots, but safe commerce, safe education. We need to do it because a meltdown economy will kill people too.

Alex Romanovich (37:50):
Jeffrey, it's been an amazing conversation. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I can't wait to fly over to Santa Monica and visit again with Heroic, and love you, man. And great to see you and great to talk to you.

Jeffrey Merrihue (38:07):
The guy who apparently recovered from Corona, I got to say, Alex, you look absolutely radiant, so well done. You're an inspiration to all of us who are trying to either avoid or get over this same thing.

Alex Romanovich (38:16):
Thank you very much. Thank you. Take care.