I cannot believe it’s been twenty-five years. I can still walk through the entire day in my head, start to finish, like it happened last week. Where I was, where our children were, the people who ended up at our house, the fear of what was happening to our country. It left its mark. And here we are, twenty-five years later, still fighting the same country.

I remember watching the second plane fly directly into the building and realizing, in real time, this was not a mistake. After picking up our children, and with Fred arriving at the same time (just luck because the phone lines were down), we walked up Sixth Avenue holding our children’s hands with hordes of people, many covered in soot, all of whom looked in shock. I felt like I was standing inside a Spielberg film. Not real. Except it was.

We got to our house with a small group of people who were supposed to leave the city that evening. The first thing I thought of was that we needed food, so I went to the grocery store to fill up. I remember listening to other people telling stories at the cash register. There was the fear of the unknown. Some had friends down there who worked in those buildings. Would they be ok? I remember thinking, ” Oh, fuck.

As it all sank in, Jessica (who was 10) and I took large bags of T-shirts and clothing for the victims down to St. Vincent’s (which is no longer there). But there were no victims. A few days later, we drove down again with towels for the hospitals. They didn’t need those either. The doctor at the front door, waiting too, saw Jessica and thanked us for the towels. At that point, we all knew there would be no victims to heal. The doctor who took the towels shook his head, thanked us, and told Jessica, who had engaged him, that he feared they wouldn’t need them. Even though the city blocked off 6th Avenue down to the towers for a week afterward, hoping someone could quickly get to the hospital, the street remained vacant.

The photos went up everywhere after that — on walls, on lampposts, taped to windows, all over the city. I remember picking up our kids one afternoon the following week, driving home, and one of their friends asked from the back seat, “Where do you think all those people are? Are they ever going to find them?” I thought about how these kids were being given hope, and I knew there was none. And I so had to say it: “They’re gone, honey.”

The pain and loss and trauma of that day doesn’t really leave you. The next day we took our kids on the subway, just to see a movie, because I refused to let us become a family living in a city ruled by fear. I remember Josh asking a policeman on the street, “Have they got those people yet?” — like there was still an answer coming that would make it okay. And now, knowing everything I know about how government actually operates — probably more than I ever wanted to know — it makes me wonder about the whole thing all over again. To this day, nobody has been held responsible for 9/11.

Every night I walked the dog and could smell how bad the air was. A pall hung over downtown, and depending on which way the wind blew, the air felt even worse. For weeks, we could smell many things. I developed asthma after 9/11 because of the air.

Then this week, Zohran released 17,000 documents that city hall had buried, revealing how bad the air really was. These were the real victims. The people who worked down there day after day, sifting through the buildings. Our men and women in uniform. Many of them have tried countless times to get the government to pay for the aftermath of many of the first responders’ health issues from being down there for weeks on end. Why does the government hide from the public when the government is supposed to represent the people? We can afford the aftermath of destruction in other countries, but we can’t take care of our own people?

The cost of 9/11 pursuing a country for a handful of people actually destroyed countless families, cost billions of dollars, and what has been accomplished? Twenty-five years later, I still don’t have peace with any of it, and based on the finally released documents, I have to wonder: does anyone think about all the people’s lives who have been destroyed by retaliating, like war? Is that to claim victory? There is no victory here.

Every time I think of that day, my eyes well up with tears. The fear on everyone’s face, especially the children who couldn’t process what happened, and neither could most of the adults. 9/11 changed how we live our lives; the reality is that security has now been amped up to the moon and was not like that 25 years ago. Does that security come with the belief that this will never happen again? Or is it just to keep an eye on us?

Through the memories and tears, I ask myself, as we look back at what has changed over 25 years, are we better off, or are we still fighting the same war? Did we do right by all the people who lost their lives? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

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I am an optimist.  Maybe it’s how I am wired.  I always look at the upside.  I love risk.  I love building things.  I believe most people are generally kind and want to do the right thing.  

Anyone over 60 will tell you age changes your perspective.  The majority of my life I have tried to do the right thing. I’ve given back and served as a Chair as several non profits. I believe that those who have had financial success should help impact those who have not been as fortunate.  

Being an entrepreneur in the cannabis industry has changed my entire perspective. I think I preferred living in my own bubble of belief. Getting an inside look at how government operates (especially during the Trump years) has made me incredibly cynical.   

Maybe it’s the endless poor decisions or the lack of accountability, but I think it comes down to trust. I don’t trust anything our Government does. Most decisions don’t seem to be made on pragmatic grounds, but on who writes the biggest check and who scratches someone’s back, regardless of the outcome. Growing up, I lived in the DC area, and then it was an honor to work for the Government. I wonder why anyone would want to do that now?

This summer was extremely cathartic.  Maybe it is getting older and realizing I’ll soon be a Grandparent. Or maybe I’m finally opening my eyes to the reality of the world.  My optimistic bubble worked for me for a long time.

As people get older, they tend to be more philanthropic and give back in many ways, but as I enter this next phase of life, I am feeling the need to be more selfish. Focusing on me and my desires vs trying to help make change. All the effort I have made, and I wonder: did I really accomplish any change?

I watched the Gloria Steinem show on Netflix called Famous Last Words. Seeing all the impact she made, only to watch it all be rolled back, must have been painful. She was a trailblazer for women’s rights, rights that we should have always had, but for some reason we don’t, and it appears to be getting worse.

I’m not walking away from the Public Housing Community Fund, and I plan to grow Gotham as much as I can, but it has become clearer to me every day that no matter how much I try to do the right thing, it doesn’t seem to matter, particularly in the cannabis industry. 

I know this doesn’t sound like my usual upbeat, positive attitude, but being in the thick of legal battles that should never have happened has changed me. For better or worse, it has definitely made me a cynic. I prefer optimism.

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Our biggest legal predator lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, and his name is Donald Trump. Unfortunately, there are many more out there. Our legal system is built with so many loopholes, which is exactly why we embrace civil debate (at least we used to), and why laws evolve as things change and/or are interpreted differently.

The system was designed to protect with certain guardrails, with the expectation that most people will follow the letter of the law. But what that same system has also created are legal predators — people who sue you for things you didn’t do, from the ADA to unions to employees who come after you for firing them when they had it coming, with thorough documentation, but none of that matters. When you are faced with a lawsuit, you have to respond, hire lawyers, and pay out for something you didn’t see coming.

Many of these predator lawyers know full well their client has a worthless case, but they figure they can still extract cash from someone. It doesn’t matter if they can’t win; they can clog up the legal system. They know the only way out is to pay them off to walk away. It’s happened to us more than once.

What I’ve told plenty of entrepreneurs is this: everything is built on a legal foundation, and it’s a lot like building a house. Your specs can’t be eighty percent complete when you send them out to bid, or you will find yourself paying more than you had bargained. In the legal world, it doesn’t matter how buttoned-up you are — someone can still come after you with a case that has no real merit, just enough teeth to make it expensive to fight. What I don’t understand is how the lawyers who take on these cases, who push them through a system that’s already buried in paperwork and wasn’t built to handle this kind of legal harassment, look at themselves in the mirror every morning and think, “This is what I do for a living. It’s grift, dressed up in a suit and a bar license, working its way through loopholes. And I am utterly disgusted by it.

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I predict a massive tech backlash. I don’t know a single person who isn’t utterly disgusted with the tech titans right now. How much money they’ve made. How little they’ve given back. How they carry themselves like they’re above everybody else. How they seem to control everything, thanks to the Supreme Court giving Super PACs the ability to impact our elections. How they’ve captured every scrap of our data, lied to us about what they’re actually watching and collecting, and never really answered for any of it. People are pissed.

Take Instagram. It’s a genuinely useful app — for sharing family photos, design ideas, building an audience for your business, recipes, DIY projects, podcasts, interesting videos, or whatever you want to pass along. But look at what it’s actually done to us. It’s built a culture that, at its core, is vapid. Take the photo, post the photo, become an “influencer.”

We rented out a boat for an afternoon with a crew so we could enjoy the experience. It didn’t take long for any of us to realize that the journey is set up around “Instagrammable” moments. We bought cheese and wine for the outing, and the next thing I know, one of the crew has taken all the goodies and built a cheeseboard that looks good in photos. Did I ask for you to cube my cheese? The crew member obviously wanted us to acknowledge it and hashtag them. Is this what people only want to do? She basically said, “Look at this beautiful cheeseboard I made for you; it is my favorite thing to do.” Really?

We were lucky to see a group of dolphins leaping out of the water. The crew’s reaction was to circle in any direction so we could photograph the dolphins; literally, he said, “Take photos!” What happened to just being in the moment? What happened to actually enjoying the day instead of documenting it for an audience? And what happens to all these influencers in ten, twenty, or thirty years? This isn’t a real way to build a life or an income unless, of course, you are on OnlyFans.

It’s a strange, revealing window into where people’s heads are right now, and it’s not flattering. I’m hoping more people start choosing platforms like DuckDuckGo, so we can start pulling back from the tech titans show. I am definitely making conscious decisions about which platforms I use. Does anyone really need another app?

I think we’re standing at the edge of major change. Retail, technology, transportation, banking — nothing is going to come out of this “gilded era” unscathed. This has been building since the Reagan years, with those who want to pull us backward toward something that no longer exists, paired with the current holders of power. You cannot go backward. And when that collides with where we actually are, something breaks. I’m predicting massive shifts ahead. It will hit the stock market. It has already hit the cost of goods. It will touch nearly everything we’ve built our daily lives around. I can take decades to build something, and it can all change in a second.

We are ripe for change, and honestly, it’s about time.

The post We Are Overdue for Change appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I sat outside at Doubles in the Amagansett Square waiting for my order the other night. I love it there (full transparency: a family investment), and they have created an incredible community spot with plenty of delicious options….and soon to be in Brooklyn Heights!

While sitting there, instead of doomscrolling, I listened to the conversation across the way. The guy had just been in DC and was showing pictures to the people he was sitting with. I haven’t been down to DC in years, but I grew up in the area and knew the places he was describing. He showed a picture that I caught a glimpse of, where Trump has put up barriers around most of the public mall. He even said that he could barely take a picture without being hassled. It made my heart sink.

I can only ask why. Granted, the Republicans have full ownership in DC now, and that is how our system works, but why have they allowed this to happen? Why have they turned a blind eye to corruption at staggering levels? The questions are endless, but the one word is why, why, why, why?

Where we will be when this ends, and it will end, is the biggest question. Going back to how things were is never a reality, but where we are going is. Our standing in the world has plummeted, our dollar is shit, and all the other countries have figured out how to survive without us.

Politics is grim, and we are all witnessing how grim it really is. Major change needs to take place to even have faith in government again, although that faith slowly eroded, starting with the lies of the Vietnam War, and plummeted with Nixon and then, of course, Reagan.

Every day I ask myself why and what the other side is going to look like?

The post Why? appeared first on Gotham Gal.

I love vices. And honestly, the data says most of America does too—even if we won’t admit it. We have this strange love-hate relationship with them, one that starts young and never really resolves. We tell ourselves that we are a puritanical country. But the numbers say something else entirely. We’re not prim. We’re just pretending.

Start with the basic absurdity. You can go to war at eighteen. You can vote at eighteen. You can be trusted with a rifle and a ballot, but not a beer. You have to wait until twenty-one to touch most of our sanctioned vices. Compare that to Europe, where enjoying a drink or a smoke is treated as something you learn to do responsibly, not something inherently sinful that you’re finally permitted to access once you’ve crossed an arbitrary finish line. We’ve built a culture where even *thinking about* a vice gets coded as bad behavior — while the behavior itself quietly thrives in the background, untouched by all that moralizing.

– Roughly 54% of American adults drink alcohol — down somewhat from a high closer to 65%.
– An estimated 44 million Americans use cannabis regularly.
– Around 57% of Americans gamble in some form.
– About 20% of married men and 13% of married women admit to infidelity.

You don’t need a stats sheet to know this, though. Just look at what we watch. True crime documentaries, murder mysteries, prestige dramas built entirely around vice and its consequences — we can’t get enough of watching other people indulge.

As always in America, it’s a story about money. The alcohol industry doesn’t want cannabis competing for shelf space and social occasions. Cigarettes still find their way into hands they’re not supposed to reach, because there’s too much profit in looking the other way. Gambling moved online and exploded practically overnight, because someone figured out how to monetize it faster than anyone could regulate it. And cannabis — cannabis is a regulatory disaster, a patchwork of fifty different state approaches that will probably take a century to reconcile even after federal legalization finally happens, because no one wants to give up their piece of the pie first.

My father worked as an engineer on Cold War-era projects — the whole absurd theater of secrets and posturing between Russia and America — and his line was: the smartest thing we could do is just dump every classified document we have on top of Russia and let them read all of it, because they’re reading it anyway. In hindsight, he was onto something bigger than he probably even meant. That’s basically how our government treats vices, and a lot of other personal choices too — abortion, healthcare, you name it. They tell us how we’re supposed to behave, hold back information or access “for our own good,” while everyone quietly goes and does what they were going to do anyway, and much of it is underground because of the laws. Of course, if you have the means, it appears nothing applies to you these days.

So why not build a system that actually accounts for how people really behave, instead of how we wish they behaved? A realistic budget doesn’t ignore your actual spending habits — it works with them. Vice policy should work the same way: embrace the fact that people gamble, drink, smoke, and use, and build infrastructure around that reality. Give people a legal, intelligently regulated way to buy what they’re going to buy anyway instead of pushing them onto the street. And give the people who want out a real path — funded social programs, actual support — instead of pure prohibition dressed up as virtue.

We already know what people do. The only question left is whether we’ll keep pretending otherwise but more than likely we will just give it to the highest bidder.

The post America’s Vice Problem Isn’t the Vices — It’s the Hypocrisy appeared first on Gotham Gal.

We were invited to a wedding this past spring and the hostess added a mood board of women and men dressed up in the attire that they were requesting for their wedding. I thought it was genius. No questions to be asked such as do I need to wear a tux? Do I need to wear a long dress? How fancy is this? All the questions that everyone asks when attending an event.

We are about to go to another event, and we have all been asking ourselves, what exactly is summer cocktail attire? Do the men have to wear suits? Ties? This is a conservative bat mitzvah so do the women need to cover their shoulders? So many questions that it feels like most events feel as if nobody is quite sure what the attire should be.

My Grandmother always said, overdressed is better than underdressed although I am not sure how overdressed I would want to be, or visa-versa.

I want to start a trend where people, when they send out invites to an event, are a bit more explicit about the attire. I’d like to send that message out to many of the young New Yorkers who wear workout clothes to nice restaurants. It pains me. In a city once known for being chic, the dumbing down of the clothing choices- and I am fine with casual- drives me insane.

Next event we throw, there will absolutely be more than one line about what to wear. I guarantee you most people will be pleasantly relieved.

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I had someone over for dinner recently whose kids are right at that age where they start to roll out into the world, with their first step being four years of college. Their kids are close in age, so having three, as they do, means that at one point they will be paying for 2 kids in college. I was curious what a top private liberal arts school costs a year now. I know how much private school has gone up in NYC through friends, but I didn’t know how much college has gone up. The price is $106,000 a year, and it includes housing.

Let that number sit for a second. A hundred and six thousand dollars. Per year.

If your parents can’t cover that, and most parents can’t, you’re looking at loans or praying for scholarships. That price is for one thing only: wealthy people whose children can experience college without entering the working world in debt. A graduate carrying this debt, because of interest, could be paying it off well into their late fifties. That is a very long time to have that sit on your head. Does anyone really want to walk out of college in their early twenties already half a million dollars in debt, only to realize the life they actually want to build doesn’t require — or even benefit from — the degree that put them there?

That math doesn’t work. I’m a huge believer in the liberal arts. There is real value in having four years of your life, at exactly that age, to find yourself — to take an opera class, or a film class, to read and argue about literature, to pick up a guitar for the first time, to sit with ideas you never would have encountered otherwise. That kind of education shapes people in ways that show up decades later, long after anyone remembers the syllabus. I see it in our kids and their friends. Their knowledge of culture makes them see the world through a different lens, and that is a gift.

But is that experience worth $106,000 a year? I don’t think so. Not even close. What happens to schools that can’t justify the price, or where the entire student body consists only of wealthy kids and kids with full rides? What happens to the middle that balances out the conversations?

What happens to all the universities charging elite prices for an education that isn’t elite? Where people don’t believe the education is worth it unless they can get a degree from a top university. We are seeing that play out in law school and other graduate schools. Why bother going if the degree isn’t going to get you the job you want in order to pay back that debt? Will families keep paying? Or are we headed toward a system where only the wealthy can afford the full college experience, and everyone else gets priced out entirely?

I think AI is going to be one of the most interesting forces in this story — not as a talking point, but as something every parent will end up paying close attention to, whether they mean to or not. Will schools build AI-forward curricula that let them deliver a real education at a fraction of today’s cost? Will some version of the four-year liberal arts experience survive at a price people can actually afford? Or will the institutions that can’t adapt simply stop existing? What will happen to people entering education as professors and alike?

Education has always been personal. Most parents want for their kids what they themselves had, or better, whether that’s public school, private school, or a particular college. That instinct isn’t going away. But the price tag attached to it might make those choices either impossibly costly or, in some cases, no longer available at all.

Interesting times ahead.

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Over the last decade, cannabis use has gone up by more than 40% across the globe. On its face, that sounds like a straightforward story: as legalization slowly opened the door, state by state, city by city, and country by country, people were walking in to give it a try.

I don’t buy that. People didn’t just start smoking weed. Nobody woke up the morning cannabis became legal in their state and decided, for the first time in their life, to try it. The numbers we see out of the gate in brand-new legal markets — state by state, country by country — are high from day one because the demand was never new. People have been using cannabis for decades, underground, illegally. What changed wasn’t appetite. What changed was who got punished for it.

That is the part of this story that doesn’t get said enough. Black and brown people have been arrested for cannabis, while countless white people have used the exact same substances with a fraction of the consequences. In NYC, 90% of low-level weed arrests have been Black and brown people. They are almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than white people. Legalization didn’t create demand. It just made visible—and taxable—something that was already everywhere.

In New York, there’s still a lot of talk about giving back to the communities most harmed by cannabis prohibition, about building new programs to make things right. But that opportunity was largely lost four years ago, when the state started handing out licenses without ensuring the expectations attached to them were actually met. The intention was right. The execution wasn’t. The powers that be have found out you can’t go backward. Expecting all the licensees to provide social give-back to renew their licenses when that wasn’t part of the original documentation doesn’t work now. We have been doing that at Gotham, but it was part of our plan, not the state’s.

Here’s what’s actually killing legal cannabis businesses across the country is that states legalized the product without seriously confronting the illicit market that was already saturating it. The supply chain overlaps completely. Illegal weed is cheaper — of course it is; it isn’t paying taxes, isn’t paying for licensing, isn’t funding the regulatory apparatus states built around legal sales. And yet there’s no real public effort to change that dynamic. Where are the campaigns telling people not to buy illegal weed? Where’s the oversight and enforcement against illegal shops that are undercutting every legal operator trying to do this the right way? There are also hemp products that can be sold anywhere and have zero oversight, directly taking money from the state dispensaries’ pockets, and that means less taxes for the state. States have done shockingly little.

Meanwhile, the conversation gets buried under nonsense from both directions — the “public health crisis” framing on one side, and the almost religious “cannabis will save us all” enthusiasm on the other. Neither is honest. What actually needs attention is much less dramatic and much harder to fix: an industry undermined by poor oversight and a string of poor decisions made by the people responsible for regulating it. And the unions certainly should not be the regulators of law.

Watching how badly this has been handled makes you wonder what else is being managed this way. Legal cannabis could have been a real correction — economically and in terms of justice. Instead, it’s a case study in how much damage gets done when regulation shows up without follow-through and specific social give-back legislation.

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Years ago, I read a novel — I can’t remember the title now — written by a woman who’d worked at Google. She told a story about being a woman in a corporate company and navigating up to the top, eventually running a division. In her area, every day at six o’clock, the men would head out the door. The women stayed late.

One night, the women were talking about why all these men leave at six, get praised for their work, and we’re still sitting here. Her answer stuck with me. It’s because you do their job. You don’t say no. You take care of them so they don’t have to worry. This book has stuck with me, and I have retold it to many women who somehow are taking on everyone else’s work.

That story came back to me recently after an evening with friends. Two different women, two completely different situations, but the same thread underneath both. One of them was clearly not wanting to do something — you could see it on her face — and I kept asking her, why don’t you just say no? Why don’t you just say no?

It’s harder than it sounds. I think it’s genuinely hard for a lot of women to draw that line. It is easier to bear the consequences that you never wanted to deal with.

The other friend had a client who’d essentially taken advantage of her. They went around her to buy something so they wouldn’t have to pay commission, even though she spent countless hours educating them. Instead of saying, this is bullshit, she went ahead and helped them complete the transaction. She got taken for a ride. And she did the job anyway because I am sure she wanted to look like the good person here, but she should have told them fuck off.

Why do women have a no problem? I wonder a lot about how women are raised differently — how many of us are still, in some quiet way, expected to be the good girl. To say “of course, I’ll take care of that” or “no problem,” while internally we’re frustrated, doing someone else’s work, doing something we never wanted to do in the first place. Did our mothers do that? Did we do that in elementary school?

I’ve never had trouble saying no. These days, honestly, I say no to almost everything unless it falls into maybe three categories I actually care about. Our own kids taught me personal boundaries. Watching them hold a line, plainly and without apology, gave me permission to do the same. They have elevated my ability to say no.

So how do we change this for women — especially young women — before the pattern sets in? How do we teach it early enough that it becomes instinct instead of something learned the hard way after years of overextending? Therapy is a good start, but so is having your own personal boundaries.

No, I won’t do that.
No, that person isn’t being fair to me.
No, I won’t finish that for you.
No, that doesn’t interest me.
No, I don’t want to read that book.

Whatever the version, women need to learn the power of “no.” Not as an act of defiance, just as a plain, ordinary sentence they’re allowed to say out loud, as many of their male counterparts have no problem saying.

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