Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

In a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his campaign yesterday and announced his support for Donald Trump. Well, okay, the exact timing of Kennedy ending his failing campaign— he was down to about 5% support in polling averages— was anybody's guess. But the fact he aligns with Trump should be no surprise to anybody.

Kennedy rose to national prominence as an anti-vaccine skeptic and crusader. In 2007 he founded a fringe nonprofit that has gone on to become the most well funded anti-fax organization in the US. He promoted health conspiracies during the Covid pandemic, argued that the government should force medical journals to publish provably flawed research, and wanted Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted. Oh, and recently campaigned on dismantling the HHS. He called the NIH, CDC, and FDA "corrupt" and called for replacing their leadership with "like-minded"— read: antivaxx, anti-government crackpot— people.

This is just one that Kennedy has championed, but it's a big one and it's clearly Trump/extreme right aligned. Still, Kennedy campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 2023 before dropping out and seeking the Libertarian party nomination, then running as an independent. Along the way he's done a lot of his campaigning through extreme right wing media.

Kennedy does have some credibility as a Democratic candidate. Frankly, though, his biggest credential is his name. He's the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy.

Earlier this year it was widely reported repeated in the news that Kennedy's independent campaign was a big threat to Joe Biden, as he would likely siphon off more Biden voters than Trump voters. This argument was published in right-wing echo chamber media such as Fox News and the National Review. The craven mainstream media credulously repeated these claims, attempting no factual counterpoint— this is why I replaced "reported" with "repeated" above— not even scratching the surface of the claims to show audiences how untrue what they were repeating was.

Now we learn that Kennedy, in a Trump-like move, apparently hit up both campaigns (Harris and Trump) offering his endorsement in exchange for the promise of a cabinet level position. The Harris campaign rejected his overtures through intermediaries, while sources speaking on condition of anonymity say Eric Trump has been brokering conversations with him for weeks.

Kennedy's latest Trump-like move came in his public comments on his endorsement,. He went long on complaining about "attacks on democracy" while endorsing Trump, who's spent 4 years promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen. This is the mindset of the guy they thought would take votes from Democrats?

Trump, who previously called Kennedy "one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office" and "the dumbest member" of the Kennedy family, now calls him "a brilliant guy", "very smart", and indicates he may offer him a cabinet role in his administration.

I was busy this past week at work. It was QBR week, where QBR is Quarterly Business Review. It's an every-3-months process for people in sales where we get the extended team together— extended meaning not just the people in sales but also representatives of teams who support us— to review what happened in the past quarter, discuss and defend our plans for how we'll meet targets this next quarter, and receive a bit of training. Sometimes QBRs mean the stresses of travel in addition to long days of being crammed in a conference room subjected to Death By PowerPoint, but this one was local for me in San Jose. That's one of the benefits of living in Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world.

Monday and Tuesday were normal days (mostly) as the QBR didn't start in earnest until Wednesday afternoon. Meetings were a bit light as many people on the team had travel booked. I used the unstructured time in my schedule to knock off some research and prep work for later.

Tuesday evening I met a few colleagues for dinner. They'd flown in to San Jose a day ahead of time as they were coming from Texas and the east coast. Plus, the three of us were going to visit a major new client onsite the next morning to improve how well we understand their objectives, build our relationship face-to-face, and start planning how best we can help them. The two of them are leaders in post-sales functions, so the conversation over dinner was me helping them understand what I know from working with this customer for almost a year now in a pre-sales capacity. It was a good dinner as we kept the work conversation balanced reasonably with enjoying ourselves over dinner.

Wednesday morning I had multiple meetings before the QBR. The day started at 7:30 with a CEO all-hands, then I had an hour-long meeting where I led a technical workshop introducing a new stakeholder at one of our prospects to our flagship product so that he can help run an evaluation with us, then I hit the road for that in-person meeting I talked about above. The f2f meeting went really well. We accomplished everything we set out to do and the customer seemed to value the experience. Oh, and when my sales leader started talking up one of our new products I boldly offered to take over the white board and give and impromptu walkthrough of how it works. Everyone on both sides of the table was impressed.



People took pictures. So did I. (That's a selfie above.)

Wednesday afternoon I joined the QBR already in progress. I was 15-20 minutes late because the customer visit ran so long. I texted my boss so he'd know. Absolutely nobody at the meeting minded that I came in late. We're in sales; making customers excited and successful with our products is what we do. Plus, I got to brag about rocking that chalk talk. I mean, there was no chalk involved. I haven't used a chalkboard since... er... sometime in high school. But I still call it chalk talk since WTF rhymes with "dry erase marker"? 😂

The QBR training on Wednesday wasn't bad. It wasn't bad because it wasn't too long and wasn't Death by PowerPoint. But it also wasn't good because the sales leader who delivered it was too familiar with the material and didn't really believe in it anyway. I was sitting there so much of the time thinking to myself, "Okay, Ace"— 'Ace' was the person delivering the training— "The person who most needs to change to incorporate this lesson is you." 🙄

Wednesday evening we had a team dinner. The food was decent and the drinks were... free. 😂 I started early as the first person at the bar. The maître d' asked if I was the organizer... partly because I was first there and partly because I was dressed in a jacket with a snazzy folded pocket square. I was almost done with margarita number 2 by the time our actual leader arrived. 😂 By the end of the dinner I'd had probably 2 more drinks than I should have had. Good thing I was taking Uber home.

Thursday was another early morning. I woke up at 6:15am. And I woke up still drunk from the night before. 🤣 Well, partly drunk. A shower, a bit of breakfast, and caffeine helped wash some of it off. But I was glad I was taking Uber to the office again. 😂

Thursday was a long day. We were supposed to finish before 4 but ran 'til just after 5. We might've gone til 6 but most of the execs had started filtering out after 1pm so there were fewer people grilling the last few account managers with questions. It's always amusing when execs pound the table about how we've got to be "all in" and "110% committed" then leave early because they don't want to take flights at inconvenient times. 🙄

Thursday evening I enjoyed a casual dinner with those who were left. Instead of going to a fancy-ish restaurant we walked a few blocks over to San Pedro Square, a food hall in San Jose. We sat at a big table outside and enjoyed live music from a rock/jazz cover band while eating.

Edited to add: It was at Thursday's dinner I got an email from the colleague I'd been siting next to for 2 days that he just tested positive for Covid-19. 😨😡😞 That put a damper on the rest of the evening.

Friday was my catch-up day. I had been hoping it'd be an easy half-day to recuperate from the busy-ness of the week, but alas it ended up fairly packed. Still, it was just gentle enough to finish off a busy week.