If you pass through life without an opponent, no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you. —Seneca
If you’ve been following my health journey, you know that I’ve experienced some problems over the last year. This led me to some forbidden alternative therapies… experimenting with DMSO and Chlorine Dioxide (theuniversalantidote dot com). I also quit going to the gym and got a squat rack and chin-up bar in my room. So far, so good…I’ve gained about 12 pounds of muscle, took care of a complicated infection that was otherwise only treatable with a strong antibiotic, resolved significant aches and pains (although still not 100%), and ejected a worm, or at least something that looked like a worm using CD. I will write more on this journey in February.
It was this year that I stopped taking my health for granted, and started developing more gratitude for every day that I’ve had to live my life. This may sound weird, but I’m actually very thankful for my setbacks and misfortunes, because without them I would have not learned what I know now. I am also thankful for the people in my life who have loved and supported me through many challenges. The foundation of my healing has come from this gratitude, but also from a shift in my beliefs and actions about industry, like the health industry and the financial industry. Not long ago, I heard that in China, doctors get paid when you’re healthy—they don’t get paid when you’re sick. What a novel idea, I thought. I am thankful for the Chinese, too.
The last century has been great fun, with stocks that only go up, but also scary nuclear weapons, biowarfare, and other high-tech machinery designed to destroy and kill. Warren Buffet is perhaps one of the few people still alive who has experienced this “progress” from the beginning. He got on board when he turned 11 years old and made his first investments. His father, Howard Buffet had different ideas about money, however. Howard understood gold and its connection to human freedom; he knew it would limit the ability of government to inflate the money supply and spend beyond its means. Warren, his son, never really got this. If he did, he wouldn’t be holding a record amount of cash right now. Cash (fiat) is antithetical to gold.
Buffet’s main reason for not investing in gold is it can’t do anything, and it can’t produce anything. It’s just a useless rock, more or less, in his opinion. While dollars can’t be put in your gas tank and make your car go, they can be traded for more dollars which can buy things like gas and everything else we want and need. What he sees, and what most people see is progress forever and forever progress. And when markets are looking topsy, he just goes to cash. His intention is to miss the crash and start all over again buying stocks when they’re cheap. This is the American way, but it misses the forest for the trees. It’s not about what he sees, but what he doesn’t see and hasn’t seen in his lifetime. It’s about what he and most all of us have taken for granted that we will appreciate later, the hard way.
Born in 1930, Warren Buffet just missed the stock market crash of 1929 and he was too young to remember much of the Great Depression. It’s understandable that he would have grown up with a completely different worldview than his father did, having never lived in the world where his father grew up. Not his fault, but he doesn’t see the real reason for his success, the precursor to the productivity of the last century. What do I mean? When Warren Buffet was born, the world population was approximately 2.07 billion. Today, the world population is 8.02 billion. That’s a 287.44% increase in consumers. The national debt was $15.05 billion. Today, it’s $36.3 trillion. That’s a 241,096% increase in borrowed money.
I have only one question for Warren Buffet. What do dollars produce? Or more importantly, what produces the dollar? And for how much longer? It is unlikely the population will grow another 287% over the next century. I don’t think our planet has the resources to make this happen. It is also unlikely that the government will be able to borrow like it did before. If inflation stayed the same, then $36,300,000,000,000 in 1930 would be $683,502,916,167,664 today (calculator), which would supposedly fuel productivity for another 95 years. Warren Buffet’s wealth was built on productivity that depended on a 287% increase in the population and a 241,096% increase in credit. I’d say that’s a pretty significant tailwind coming to an end, to which he can be thankful.
So ask yourself every day, what you take for granted, and what you haven’t seen. If you take your health for granted and you get sick, then you’ll be spending a lot of time and money trying to get better. If you take your internet access for granted and then you don’t have it, you might not know how to survive. If you think that your success is all you, and has nothing to do with the external world, you may one day wake up without anything to show for it and have to start all over again. The more gratitude you cultivate in your life, the more insight and knowledge you will acquire, and the better decisions you will be able to make for your future, and the future of your loved ones. I’m thankful for what I can see, even if others are not. The best interviews I saw this week are below. Enjoy!
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