In this article I use money and currency interchangably - don’t get your knickers in a twist. I also say Hoover instead of Vacuum Cleaner too!

Excess

The path of money for people is typically the following two stages - First you buy things that you need. Food, housing, healthcare, transport and so on. Then anything left over, you might treat yourself and save or grow the rest.

Treating yourself and indulgences are down to an individual’s preferences. The individual might like horses, stamp collecting, 18th Century steins from Germany. The point is that these preferences are unique to that individual’s perception and may not valued by others.

Alternately, any surplus money could be stored or grown.

So - Do you buy assets that you think will maintain their value/grow or do you buy assets that you think others think will maintain their value/grow?

Coincidence of Wants

Coincidence of Wants is the term used in Economics to describe when Person A values the item that Person B has more than their own item. And where Person B values Person A’s item more than their own. At the same time and the same place.

When you think about the probabilty of someone wanting to swap a rate German stein for 10 sacks of horse feed at the same time in the same place. It is quite unlikely! It is understandable that the system of barter and direct exchange fizzled out quickly in favor of a unit of abstraction - currency.

Currency affords us that abstraction of value that allows us to swap Steins for horse feed at midnight, across the globe.

Notably - abstraction, liquidity and trust are some of key things to look for in jumping in and out of a transaction.

Holding Cash

Cash is the canonocial example of abstraction, liquidity and high trust, however it comes with a destructive side effect.

Holding cash long term will destroy wealth due to the Debt Based Fiat System - meaning that whenever the ruling party issues debt or prints money your wealth gets eroded.

Therefore you really might only consider being in cash for a short term period, but this is risky as you have no control over when cycles peak and trough.

When you are in cash, you are exposed to active currency debasement as well as opportunity cost of not being invested. So ~5% currency debasement coupled with the cost of not being in a risk free Tresury Bill for example of 5% is effectively a -10% yield.

S&P 500

The S&P 500 is where the Flock Gathers.

It is high trust, liquid and doesn’t have the erosion of wealth that holding cash has.

In 2026, it is in mainstream knowledge and well established as being the defacto place to store excess value to maintain wealth and to grow.

Picking individual stocks is extremely hard. Each individual stock is a market within itself. The aggregate of stocks acts as a common, larger market providing more liquidity and awareness. Plus it reduces risk by spreadking across a wider surface.

Going back to our earlier question - this is the place where other people think it will grow.

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett recently has been mentioning that he doesn’t understand the markets any more with such high valuations and rampant speculation.

So is he following the flock?

Absolutely not - he’s sitting on a TON of cash. ~$400 Billion USD

It takes 2

So why would we not copy the world renowned Warren Buffett and sit in cash?

Well the only reason to do that would be to sell when things are high and to buy in low. And given that buying individual stocks is extremely hard, we’d be aiming to sell out of the S&P 500 when its high and buy in low.

However -

Value cannot exist without an exchange between two parties. Person A has to value Person B’s thing more than their own thing. At the same time Person B has to value Person A’s thing more than their own thing.

If they both had the same thing, no perceived value would be present.

You need two different things to exist before value can be manifested.

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This in math is known as a Division operator or a Ratio. It is a comparison between two items.

5/5 = 1. 100/100 = 1.

Jumping out of the S&P 500 at some point and jumping in at some point implies we can measure perceived value at two different measurements. Yet comparing the same item to the same item is impossible.

The only avenue for value comparison is two distinct things. Or in investing, two different market cycles. Lets say Gold and Oil for example.

Looking at any trading/investing platform - the first class citizen of any platform is pairs (because value cannot exist without 2). See the image below. Each is a pair.

A misconception is that it is a single thing. Anything that isn’t explicity called out at as a pair is implicity a pair against the USD. E.g. S&P 500 below is S&P 500 divided by the USD.

A stock chart is a visual representaton of the ratio over a period of time. Data points of one divided (numerator) divided by the other data point (denominator).

Buffett can pick stocks. 99% can’t. Given we are unable to compare 2 things - this is not a strategy of reality.

Stay Close To The Flock - Until Asymmetry

I have even experimented with this false reality of above. Guess what - it doesn’t work.

As an investor - Stay with the Flock until you see Asymmetry elsewhere. Know there are an unmeasurable amount of markets that you should keep abreast of.

Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, Oil, Commodities, Real Estate, Emerging Markets and so on.

Don’t hold your wealth with 20,000 Beer Steins - people wont want to exchange anything for them. Keep it with the flock until you see asymmetry, then pounce.

Gold market might be extremely low compared to your market of S&P 500. If gold can explode upwards 2-3x - that could well be a sign to move!

White collared work is being destroyed by AI and oraganization’s pyramidal hierarchies can be compressed from 500 → 50 → 5. It is just a matter of time before this new normal catches up with all businesses.

Mental Model

This is how I see things now.

A company of 5000 now can be ran by 500 → which then can be run by 50 → then 5. Meaning a massive compression in human labor for white collared work.

Within a typical Software Department, traditionally there was a pyramid of employees. A top down delegation → Vice President → Director → Manager → Technical Lead → Senior Developer → Intermediate Developer → Junior Developer (roughly like that to give you a simple shape to make the point).

Nowadays a very senior developer/technical lead/architect can do everything from a Manager level down. So you only really might have a Vice President and very senior Technical Staff member. Director optional.

The size of the pyramid of hierarchy collapses.

One can think of the AI as small teams that you can orchestrate. If you were a Software Engineer, you are now an Manager of AIs.

A technically savvy person can instruct the AI “team” to go off and build/deploy some feature. So your role as a technical human is to oversee 1, 2, 3, many concurrent different projects at the same time. My daily work has shifted in the last 6 months to having up to 5 windows open, each of which is a different “team” working on a separate feature. This kind of way to work did not exist a few years ago.

The extent goes as far as - how well can you multitask.

The Architects and the Unemployed

I heard an expression the other day which sums up this situation very well.

“The Architects and the Unemployed”.

Those with the knowledge and who can delegate, using AI will replace everyone below them. Everyone else is unemployed.

This does not bode well for those getting their feet wet in a white collared job. Entry level, intermediate and to some degree Senior level roles are all affected. And those with the highest level knowledge remain.

Soft Skills and Hard Skills

Traditionally with a Software Engineer (and knowledge workers), the value was in their innate knowledge and ability to execute on that knowledge.

Now that that value facet has been carved off from the Engineer - what then remains of value given that Knowledge and Execution is now delegated to the AI.

• Throughput - the more that can be done in parallel

• Sales - Selling still remains vital life-blood to a company

• Emotional Intelligence and Soft Skills - being a human, having empathy, being able to speak to clients

• Vision - having an opinion on what’s best for the business and what to do to get it there

• Process Improvement - Every business has gaps and blind spots where things can be improved. Implementing improvements and showing the business after the fact

• Active and background R&D - The world is moving fast. Being aware of latest/greatest technologies and approaches is still a value add

Affected Industries

Anthropic who are the lead in this space published an article on the impact of AI per industry.

Young people should especially aim for the channels with the least amount of blue in them. If you are about to exit your degree after studying for Computer Science for example I strongly recommend that you pivot immediately before taking a step further.

Hint: Physical world things where a personal touch goes a long way.

In summary - those with the top rung level of knowledge still can make a living while those beneath them get destroyed. This does not mean that those with the top tier knowledge get to name their price - they get to keep an income albeit paltry when factoring in inflation.

What Next for Me

I’m aiming to keep the same trajectory of working but move around less within jobs. The friction of onboarding a new job is extremely high - I think the last job was 6 interview rounds that I did. The sheer number of applicants to a limited number of jobs is overwhelming for the hiring staff. They lean heavily on automated screening to reduce their workload - which is dehumanizing.

My aim is to really dial in being a full time investor as that is my passion and gives me the degree of Control that i need.

One would hope that the interview process changes with time to focus more Soft Skills with time as that is the reality of the world now. AI does everything else.

I’ve been advising my retired in-laws, that they should travel as much as they can now.

The close future looks to be exceedingly-to-prohititively expensive to travel.

If travel is important to you, I suggest you think and plan accordingly to get your travel booked ahead of time.

Energy Production Being Sabotaged

Sleeper cells are a well known military tactic to embed fighting men in countries and leave them dormant until required.

There has been a very high occurance of energy producton being blown up in the last month. If it is oil production or storage being taken offline, that means that demand gets channeled back into the global market, causing higher prices and less supply.

Cumulatively this might account for somewhere between 1.7 million barrels per day or 1.5% - 2% of global refining capacity taken offline in the last 30 days.

Global oil supply plummeted by 10 million barrels per day in March alone and global observed oil inventories fell by ~85 million barrels. Link

Oil For War

Travel is secondary to war from a resource prioritization for a government. EU, USA, Russia, Iran and right away China all have full say in what fuel is used for what purpose internally. They also have very large money printers that can all outbid you and your peasantbucks for oil. The European Union is repositioning itself so they can be engaged with a hot war with Russia.

If it is a toss up between a government buying oil for war and you wanting to go on a Mexican retreat - you lose.

Stagflation

During the fall of fiat based economies, they try to print their way out of trouble. Which obviously never works.

All countries are in the same predicament and all of them will print.

All the extra money causes the cost of living to go up. Having to pay more to live, means less for travel.

3 Letter Acronyms

There are plenty of 3 letter acronym organizations espousing the future beyond 2030 being far less travel.

The elites who are close to the money printing sources, have no such impact - their money increases with the money printing. For the serfs, not so much.

Climate Action embedded in many of the 3 Letter Organizations is the Tenet to which a lot of policy is derrived. The World Economic Forum has a vision where a Carbon Usage is attached to your personal name. This likely would be through some digital Id where you would have a maximum quota.

Fuel Futures

Airline Operators have to gamble based on future fuel prices when buying. There is risk to the traveller in paying a large amount in the future should fuel prices spike. Also there is risk of Aircrafts not flying if the airline miscalculated fuel prices. Which would mean less supply of flights and higher costs.

All of which, operators can point their fingers at war as the culprit.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would recommend travelling now while you still can. Be cognizant of future flight costs spiking as well as a steady trajectory of prices going up.

2026 was the year that I started learning about Geopolitics and History. My goal was to become a better investor. After all they say History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme.

From my brief soire into Geopolitics and History (I don’t know anything yet) - here are my thoughts as an investor of what the environment will look like for the next decade.

Shake the idea out of your head that Democracy is a real thing, that countries are Sovereign and autonomous. Transnational power exists and is real - i.e. Generally speaking, western countries are following orders from higher up, working towards a bigger picture plan that is not for the benefit of a nation.

Stagflation

Stagflation is a composite of two words - inflation and economic stagnation.

Global Debt to GDP ratios are at crazy levels. The United States is at ~125%. Meaning that its debt servicing obligations become unsustainable as well as waning trust from other countries in being able to repay debt.

The same too for most other countries. Russia sitting at a very agreeable 20-25%.

The globalists like to tell you what they are doing a decade ahead. I have no idea why - maybe it is some human psychology thing or maybe it is a deeper universal attraction and manifestation thing. Either way - they do let you know.

You will own nothing and be happy -

Given that they can print money which is effectively infinite power - they can manipulate anything. To rebalance the precarious Debt to GDP levels of a country they must debase their debt obligations.

This means inflating the currency through money printing. This will erase their debt obligation. To negate the negative effects of printing so much they must raise rates to maintain the draw to debt in their currency.

At the same time, by layering in economic stagnation and no growth or negative growth of jobs, plebs will have no money to save. Depending on how hard they ratchet up the pain on jobs, you would either see no new money hitting investments or a sell of as people are forced to sell assets at a loss. Causing a snowball of asset value decline.

This would mean that nefarious powers with a printing machine can erase their debt, take assets at bargain basement prices from the plebs.

Summary: Very High cost of living, Higher Interest Rates, Asset Prices Sideways or Declining, Low Employment

Conflict for the Populace

Talking primarily about the popoulation of a country - its inhabitants.

Division has been sewn in the Western World as a distraction from the bigger picture. Migrant populations have been inserted into Western countries to draw attention away from globalists plans. If groups are focussed on each other with keen intent they are not focussed on other things. If its not migrants being inserted, it is Right vs Left, Race vs Race, indigenous land rights, whatever other means they can think of drawing your attention.

Summary: Distract plebs from the bigger picture. I see this coming from those at the top - the Elites

Conflict for Nations

As I understand it, you have from a nation state point of view, a few big players working to gain the upper hand.

The Control of Europe - Canada, France, England, Germany, Australia.

USA - Recently broken free from the control of The Control of Europe under Trump, hence why The Control of Europe is so hostile to USA in recent times.

Israel - Closely tied to USA, also a previous creation of the Control of Europe. The Sykes-Picot Agreement and The Balfour Declaration.

China and Russia - From what I can tell they are coordinating efforts to negate The Control of Europe. Also somewhat working with USA to undermine the giant web of power that Europe has.

On the roadmap is China taking over Taiwan for historical reasons and miltary empowerment over Japan and Asian seas. Their kamakaze drone production is off the charts.

The Europe gang are chomping at the bit with a hot war with Russia. Germany just broadcast that men between 17-45 are not allowed to leave for longer than 3 months without the army’s awareness.

Russia has been dealing with all of these threats and global bans on interacting with Russia, as well as maintaining its low debt levels. It would make sense for them to put max economic pressure on the faltering European set of countries to push them into economically not being able to attack Russia.

Commodity and Precious Metals Prices

Metals, monetary metals and Oil are all going to crank. They provide the energy for war as well as safety for store of value.

These shouldn’t come as a suprirse to anyone.

The US made Gold Ownership illegal in 1933 - so keep that in the back of your mind

CBDCs & Digital Ids

As the western world is keen for a hot war with Russia, my guess is they would use the perceived agressor as a trojan horse to force Central Bank Digital Currencies on the populace as a reaction to a “major cybersecurity incident” or something along those lines.

The massive influx of migrants can also be used as an excuse to impose Digital Ids as a reaction to “we don’t know who is in our country”, they they delibrately implemented.

These two implementations would mean a huge loss of freedoms and a giant opt into the Slavery system. They are grave concerns.

Austerity, Capital Controls

Austerity is cutting back on pensions, public spending and Capital Controls are limits on what people can do with their wealth. Capital Controls are a game over flag for investors. One must be agile and prepared to be able to move ahead of time to a secondary residence.

It would be prudent for any reader to acknowledge these threats and take measures ahead of time to find attractive, neutral countries as second and third residencies for optionality. Yes it costs money but it can be considered as a form of diversification. And diversification comes at a cost.

It slowly started dawning on me that we live in a well established and sophisticated Slavery System. Thousands of years of experimentation, testing one form or another, ultimately still residing thousands of years later.

I wasn’t reading science fiction that made me see the world in this way. I wasn’t seeking it out.

It was like walking in the night and bumping hard into a brick wall. It was unexpected. Jarring.

It all stemmed from my passion for Economics, for finance, for money. Reading understanding, unpacking, uncovering digging deeper.

Why. Why. Why.

I found if I hit a layer that I didn’t understand I’d go to the layer before that to understand it. Much like Richard Feynman would presribe for learning how to learn. Quite often if you cant explain it to a 5 year old or a 10 year old - any subject at any level, you don’t understand it yourself.

Pulling back the layers and inspecting them, it became shockingly obivous.

We’re a resource that exists to be exploited. We’re in a system that we have no control over. We play in an unwinnable game - they make the rules.

Fiat Currency and a Debt Based System

The two aspects of finance that showed me this were truly understanding Fiat currency coupled with a Debt Based System.

Fiat means they can create infinite power, infinite bribes, infinite weapons, infinite bombs, infinite murders. To shape the world as they see fit.

Debt Based System means they get to steal every asset and thing of value, within that system, along the way.

These are the two main systems work together to take everything and make everything.

With simple reasoning based off facts, the only logical conclusion is that this is a game that they designed and that we are participants.

Illegal really means something they can do but you cannot do. Like counterfeit money by making it whenever they want. They can kill, sell drugs anything they like.

Tongue in cheek - this reminds me of when my brother lost his shit when we were kids and we played Monopoly. I was the banker, I gave myself cash and penalized him.

This is the same.

It may not sound bad, but truthfully it is the root of perpertual war, slavery, death and misery.

Why Do They Need Us?

If they can make currency out of thin air - why do they need a population at all?

They need us as a bridge to turn the the non-physical into the physical.

As I better start to understand the world with age, I see most things roll up to - Perception.

People intuitively believe that value is intrinsic. In fact this is not the case as explained here.

Percieved is the key operative. Perception is everything.

There is no such thing as intrinsic value.

The overlord’s means - being able to produce infinite paper dollars, is only as good as peoples perceived value of it. If that perception gets shaken - it’s value disappears.

Hence, governments guard at all cost the perceived value of their currency. If the perceived value comes into doubt - then game over.

In order to have perception - you need concsioucness.

You need people - to have perceptions - to transmute this percived value into physical world impact.

Effectively they utilize peoples perceptions to convert abstract perceptions into real world manifestations.

They use our perception to control us to do what they want.

Below is a related presentation that highlights the danger of abstract systems that are not tied to physical world constraints.

Unfortunately, this is the precise dilemma that we face ourselves in today.

The Expansionist Game

Most of the time people’s physical outputs are channeled towards building a bigger version of the game that they control. Gather more resources, build army, invade, gather more resources, build army, invade, Gather more resources, build army, invade.

Those that make the rules are in battle with others that make the rules in other parts of the world. The ultimate goal is to own all the streets in Monopoly through violence. A mob gaining power, attacking the other mob to become the victor.

Plato’s Cave

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato describes prisoners chained in a dark cavern who perceive flickering shadows on a wall as the only true reality, unaware that these are merely silhouettes cast by objects passing before a fire. When one prisoner is liberated and ascends into the sun-drenched world above, he undergoes a painful but transformative awakening, discovering the “Forms” - the ultimate, unchanging truths that transcend mere sensory perception. This journey represents the arduous process of education and the philosopher’s duty to transcend societal illusions, moving from the darkness of subjective opinion into the light of objective knowledge, even though returning to share this truth often meets with resistance from those still trapped by their own limited perspectives.

Plato’s Cave perfectly represents everything we’ve discussed.

A ~2,500 year old story. Saddening that it is still reality.

We think we’re much better year later - in fact - we are no different.

Perception is manipulated by those in control to achieve their goals. Infinite money funneled to news and media - their message broadcast. Send your sons to die in this important war. Give half of your income to the Government for roads and hospitals. You dont need firearms to protect yourselves.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy centers on the distinction between how the world appears to us and how it exists independently of our perception.

• Phenomena: These are things as they appear to us. Everything we see, touch, or measure is phenomenal. Our minds automatically organize this raw sensory data using “filters” like space, time, and causality.

• Noumena: This is the “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich). It is reality as it exists completely independent of human observation. Kant argued that because we can only perceive things through the “lens” of our minds, the noumenal world is fundamentally unknowable.

Kant’s work departs from our innate judgement that the world as we sense it, is the be all and end all of reality. But I agree with Kant in the sense that abstractions of subsets of information are where we operate.

Donald Hoffman

Somewhat related - but a thinker that I like to listen to - Donald is a cognitive scientist and professor at UC Ivine.

I really like his thoughts and explanations on Interface Theory of Perception which bolsters Kant’s deliniation between reality and perception. In that reality is dumbed down to us. All of the wavelenths that we cant see, quantum fluctuations all the low level detail gets abstracted and simplified.

Summary

In summary one can conclude that given the fact that rules for thee but not for me exists which facilitates infinite currency creation, when coupled with malleable perceptions - manifests into real world changes.

Propoganda, brainwashing, eduation systems, ignorance and complexity all work towards hiding this extortion in plain sight.

We live in a game that the rulers play but the rules don’t apply to them. The power of the rule maker only exists inside the game. All assets, resources, power only exists within that game.

A key point to be inentional on is that you do have control over however is perception and reaction. You have agency and a Stiulus-Response gap. You have control.

Blinkered perception is only remedied through active discovery and new information aquisition. And as to Plato’s story - comes at a cost of being challenged by those who are inside the cave and cannot, will not, see outside.

Leaving on a happy note - one can exit the game should they choose.

This article covers how I figured out the single key thing that caused all of my Fear and Anger.

(Well really it was my wife that did it)

But I’ll try to back fill the process to figuring out the root cause - I sincerely hope it helps someone, as the feeling that I had once I made the cognitive realization was stunning.

I think what I’d like to highlight that the cause of my Fear and Anger is a single identifiyable thing. Not some amorphous soup of complexity and nuance.

A. Single. Thing

That when you identify and overlay against each occurance of historic Fear and Anger, perfectly explains why I felt that way.

I have an intrinsic bias to always wanting to see the world through black and white and through systems, so this made me very happy.

Obviously we are all psychologically different and we have different backgrounds so your key thing may be different.

Background

An trait that I’ve always advocated for within my family is being extrinsically predictable and linear. Not unhinged, not unpreditable, not overwhelmed by emotion.

But do I feel things? Yes - of course.

The trigger for my lamentation was a powerful bout of Anger.

I was working at a new Job. I work hard. Mentally, I had set the stage. I had set ther terms and conditions for the next few years to be “chill”. Collect a pay check, work from home, do a good job and leave enough mental room to think beyond the 9-5 grind.

However, another worker decided to go full blast with throughput - making everyone else look supurflous. He took my ideas (I have a lot of them), that only he had known and made them happen, then took credit for it.

Rage level 9.

The rage didn’t subside. My body, my heart rate, my blood pressure - constant.

Reflection

I had one of those pouring out verbally to my wife of all the things. A jumbled pile of things thrown on the table in front of her. Hoping that she had some magical card up her sleeve to help me magically sort this pile of information into a single answer.

Astonishingly, she did.

She had picked up on that I had wanted to control the Job by setting the terms of engagement. Me being chill for a few years before retirment. However the other employee trashed that idea with his actions.

Loss of control.

When I overlay Control over every Fear/Anger scenario It literally covers them all - which I think is unituitive and quite astonishing. Each and every of 20 memorable scenarios.

Emotional Reaction

Solving the Fear and Anger issues is particulary elusive, however one can apply some approaches to help.

The primary feedback mechanism I used was Emotion - Fear and Anger. Note these they are key clues to solving your key perogative.

Physical Reaction

Waking up in the middle of the night, Blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety, loss of focus.

These physical traits will alert you when you are deviating from your perogative.

Similarly, once solved - the inverse of them. Calmness, slow heart rate, shallow breathing.

Repeated Conflicts

If you have the same loops occur through your life. For example you keep leaving jobs or there is a period of stability then erruption. Or with relationships - repeated negative outcomes.

Repetative Thoughts

Any thoughts cycling past your mind short term or long term are indicators that you are deviating from your perogative.

Strong Value Reactions

Strong alliance with or repulsion from for key Values around you. You see something and feel a strong draw to or distaste from.

Moral Intensity

Morals that you agree with feel stronger and more poignant.

Self Diagnosis and Treatment

I would start with writing down all of your episodes of Anger and Fear.

Then read up on Self Determination Theory (SDT) - Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (3 Core Types), as well as Schema Therapy - Jeffery Young (18 schemas and 5 domains).

Next identify traits that you most resonate with and go through your list of Anger and Fear occurances to see whether they marry.

If you identify a perogative from either of these models, you can then work to shape your future based off this knowledge.

Listen for body tension - you are deviating from your perogative.

Pre-plan future actions if they are atypical based off your perogative.

Take steps to mitigate deviating from your perogative based off things you have control over.

For example for me and my perogative of Control:

• I like to keep a low profile - I dress shabby. I lurk in the background.

• Given my new realization of my perogative of being Control - I keep information close to me and don’t broadcast information. (Except here - for you guys :) )

I also am keenly aware that for my absolute need for Control - there is a Locus of Control - things that you can and can’t control.

I now actively practice allowing in things that annoy me that are further out on my ability to control, to build up resiliance and tollerance. As well as actively shaping and being cognizant in things that I do have a high degree of control over.

Overview

This post looks at:

• How you can make wealth even if your rental property doesn’t go up in value and if you don’t pay down your mortgage

• How inflation can aid you

Inflation

My worldview lens is typically biased against the Slavery System as it is inherently evil.

The Slavery System is the term that I use to define all of the systems in place to extract value from the serfs of the world, feeding it up to their overlords.

One of the main tools of the Slavery System is Inflation. A deliberate mechanism carried out by governments to silently steal from you.

Rebalancing

I was recently looking at rebalancing investments away from Real Estate. Not fully, but turning down the volume.

What would I move it into?

Probably Gold.

I don’t see any growth with my local market for another decade and governments find things attached to the ground quite easy to extort.

However - as your wealth increases it is important to maintain orthogonal separate investments for diversification.

The reason for this is to avoid the heavy asymmetry experienced with drawdowns. 50% down means to get 100% to get back where you started. A dilemma if you don’t have any asymmetric investments.

So my gut feeling was to buy more Gold.

However, before doing that - let us examine something that is easy to overlook and forget about Real Estate. Debt Debasement.

I believe we are moving towards higher inflation, so I should take that into consideration.

Debt Debasement

You make money when your asset goes up.

You also effectively make money when the debt you owe goes down in purchasing power. The delta between our debt’s purchasing power and any increase in real estate is your wealth increase.

So for example if you owed some money over 25 years and paid it back on the last day. If the Inflation Rate was 3% - You’d effectively be paying only half of it back. And if it was 10% inflation for 25 years, you’d be paying back less than 10% of what you borrowed.

• 3% - 52.2% reduction

• 5% - 70.5% reduction

• 8% - 85.4% reduction

• 10% - 90.8% reduction

Which Inflation Rate To Use?

CPI is a well known lie. Manipulated by Government to hide the secret stealing power of money printing.

I’ll use an alternative source - Trueflation Index - Truflation provides real-time CPI, inflation components, and macro indicators derived from transparent, unbiased data sources.

They keep their numbers closely held to their chests but we can backfill their geometric mean numbers.

This is equal to 4.1% CAGR for that time period.

So for a 10 year period at various inflation levels you can see the debt debasement impact below.

I believe that the next 20 years will be much higher inflation than seen before - I believe much greater than 5%.

But if we take 5% as a round number, over 10 years, the purchasing power of your debt will have been erased by almost half - just shy of 40%. Or said another way the amount of stuff you can buy with that money that you owe has been greatly reduced.

So even if our house didn’t go up in price and even if we didn’t pay down the mortgage, we’d still be up by ~40% over the 10 years.

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If we also factor in the tenant paydown on a purchase price of $625k ($500k mortgage and $125k down payment) and a 5% mortgage interest rate.

So roughly a 13% per year return. If the value of the property goes up then so also does the return.

Obviously if the inflation goes up so does that total wealth effect to you.

We can see from the numbers that a good portion of that wealth increase comes from the Inflation Debasement.

Summary

In summary, I believe inflation is going up.

It is important to remember that inflation can help you by eroding the purchasing power of that debt.

Keep in mind during these strange times, whenever there is a liquidity crunch, Banks can ask for the full debt to be repaid at any point. Also during these times interest rates can increase.

So be very mindful of cash management, liquidity and being over levered.

I’ve recenlty updated my Principles page and added a new parapgraph about Nature being balance, with a recent discovery of mine regarding Evil.

It probably sounds stupid. It feels stupid and obvious saying it.

That Evil exists.

Maybe being aethiest most of my life led me to be blindsided somewhat by it.

It’s not something that I bump into in YouTube, reading, daily life.

I would expect that those around religious communities would have frequent conversations about Good vs Evil. My frame of reference really was perhaps a bad guy in a movie. Spiderman vs Lizardman. But that’s just a movie and I don’t even watch those.

Living a Busy Life

My life has been blinkered and focussed on forward movement, being good at my job, enjoying my time in my 20s, travel, children and so on. To be fair, it is a lifetime of attention and focus - just there.

It took a one two punch of Covid followed up by Epstein for me to take notice of what was going on. I’ve mentioned before that I thought that reality was not behaving as I expected during Covid and I believe that there was Mass Pscyhosis at play. Truthfully something that felt completely unrealistic - the fact that Mass Psychosis could even be a thing. It sounds completely impossible!

Like a bright object that catches your attention - you glance in its direction wondering what that was. Something unexpected, leftfield from your expectations.

I’m naive and ignorant in many ways - and I’m totally fine with that. It is concsious and deliberate.

It gives me focus and happiness.

Unknown Unknowns

Evil. Evil ideas, thoughts actions.

They are not things I ever think about. They aren’t in my character.

So to me any Evil thoughts, actions, deeds are unimagined and invisible to me -

Known knowns, known unknowns, unknowns knowns, unknown unknowns.

I would consider Evil thoughts and actions to be in the realm of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Primarily unknown unknowns.

It’s not something I’ve experienced, thought about or ever considered.

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Evil Shows Itself

The actions during Covid felt deliberate, mal-aligned against populace well being.

Beeing a Feedom enjoyer - I’m keenly sensistive to freedoms being taken away and have seen the rumblings on the horizon for Freedom of Speech supression, Digital Surveilance, CBDCs, Digital Ids, Forced Mass Imigration, Avoidable Wars, Assasination, 3 Letter Acronym Think Tanks telling us what we will and what we wont have.

Epstein - it is clear that something seriously shady, seriously large was going on behind the scenes for all countries.

I wont repeat any of the horrible things that have emerged in the rounds of emails. The worst things you could imagine.

The decision makers, the leaders the suited people, the politicians the leaders of multi nationals. All complicit. All tainted. All readily involved.

They state the things they will do before they do it. A clear pattern.

The things they have stated are deeply troubling. Yet perhaps with time and repetition we become desensitized to it.

If they told you what the final state of Covid would be before it started - people would have risen up. A boiling frog strategy works each and every time. Desensitization through time and repetition.

Weak Men Create Hard Times and Hard Times Create Strong Men periods are upon us.

This isn’t about discussing what was done or is being done or who did it.

It is more the realization, acceptance, awareness that Evil exists and is active, right now.

History And Geopolitics

My goal this year was to learn modern History and Geopolitics to support myself as an Investor with more knowledge.

Within a very short period of time I quickly started to understand what was going on.

The world of History and Geopolitics is effectively propoganda, smoke and mirrors and heavy revisionism. My baby steps into this world (I know nothing) have highlighted that there is something there.

One of the mechanisms that hides this information is the obfuscation and layered architecture. It takes determination and lot of effort to investigate.

The information is also non-binary. It isn’t a bald bad guy with a white cat. Multiple parties all doing their own thing causing some outcome.

Also the information is patchy - you have to join the dots. Like a picture made of dots, if you look closely at it, it is a bunch of dots, pull your head back and you see the full picture. The dots aren’t connceted but the aggregate picture of their placement is telling.

The elements in the cloud of actors sound outlandish, wild, crazy. Maybe because you aren’t evil and comprehend evil. Not even in your wildest dreams or imagination could you imagine what they might imagine. Maybe thats why they sound wild, insane, improbable. And the scale that they operate at also sounds outlandish. But keep in mind they have infinite resouces as they can print money.

Emergence

Emergence is the idea that indiviuals like ants/termites in aggregate can exhibit complex behavior. They can’t speak - there isn’t a master mind Termite with a giant head in the center of the hive planning the cooling ducts of the Termite colony.

Yet Termite mounds are naturally air conditioned through their deisgn. Yet no individual designed it. Textbook emergent behavior.

I believe emergent behavior is partly a factor in the Evil that exists in the world, however I believe it to be more deliberate and focussed by entities.

Balance

The Universe is balanced. Nature is balanced. It is an predicate that I derive reasoning from.

Newton’s Third Law of Motion - For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The First Law of Thermodynamics - Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Some form of balance regulates this energy - less or more.

Rabbit Populations - Carrying Capacity - Natural Rabbit populations can explode. However interestingly there isnt infinite Rabbits on earth. Populations will naturally experience mass deaths due to varying reasons and always balance out to an equilibrium.

Nature is balance. Ying and Yang.

It would be illogical to expect the world to be all good.

Be aware the Evil exists. Rationalizing - it probably is portioned somewhere to 50/50 for balance. It might not be visible or emerge as explosions.

Make provisions to protect yourself, your children, your family from Evil. Consider its presence when making decisions.

Strike the balance between being aware of it and its operation and not tainting your soul by reading into it, seeing it, being a witness to it. Try to smother it with love and effort projected into your family and community.

For the last two decades I had felt energized, excited and driven by doing my daily activities but as I reached mid life - these good feelings expired. Since I had experienced them and could feel the empty hole as they disappeard - I now want to re-orient and re-establish somthing(s) that do energize me and excite me.

Not only that - as I grew older and started to gain more opinions on things, I started feeling angry, frustrated and discontent in some aspects of my daily routine. The manifested for me as anger, quietness and isolation from people. (Just to be clear I am an introvert and love nothing more than making sourdough, reading by myself and being in the mountains by myself)

I’ve been thinking long and hard for years about this and how to make sense of it. Those extremes were increasing with time. The happinesses were dwindling and the angers were increasing.

Two Things

It boils down to two things.

What You Do

and

How You Do Them.

What You Do is what you do in your day and the other is how you go about your day.

Thinking deeply about it (for years) - my angers came from the second - how you go about your day. And my loss of being energized came from the first - what you do in your day.

Let me overlay these two things with my situation.

What you do in your day - Well for me this is building software. As time went on I got bored of it. I had learned everything. It wasn’t fun anymore. The world needs less and less of it due to market saturation of people, globalization and now AI. The pay for this profession is dropping yearly. What I do in my day is not moving the needle on energizing me.

How you go about your day - For me This for the most part was working for someone else on their terms on-site. As I gained more life experience and started to learn myself more, I realize freedom is now MASSIVE on my values. After Covid the company I was helping mandated back-to-office even though I had a laptop and was working from home for years. Not being around the kids to help them here and there. Having to drive 1-1.5 hours a day needlessly. This made me absolutely livid. Angry.

So two things for me to reset, re-orient, re-adjust.

What You Do In Your Day

For most - this is your Job.

But here at YourLastLife - we design our lives. We are intentful. We project our vision into the Universe and manifest it. Our roadmap.

I really think that the Ikigai diagram is excellent - up there with “Weak Men Create Hard Times”.

When I started out in Software it actually fell into the middle bucket - the bullseye.

Ikigai

It fell under all 4!

What You Love, What You Are Good At, What You Can Be Paid For, What The World Needs.

All four! Wow - what a feeling to be in that middle zone!

Getting paid lots, feeling like you were helping the world doing your hobby!

Checking the circles now - I fit under a single circle - What You are Good at. Not even a Venn diagram overlap - not where 2 circles meet.

We are clearly off course. A course correction is absolutely required. The target, the bullseye - Ikigai.

How You Do Your Day

Most if not all written documentation on this subject focusses on a subset of Ikigai and completely neglects the How You Do Your Day aspect.

For me to ignore those things that are making my blood boil is to have a huge flaw in your plan.

What good is having a positive of Ikigai negated by being widly angry trying to do it.

This would be futile.

Everyone is different, but as I learn myself, I must be cognizant of my character which values ABSOLUTELY - Freedom.

The second half to my blueprint for life and action is to accept and embrace that What I Do must fit with How I Do It. Hand-in-glove.

Resources

Time and Money.

Two interchangable resources. At birth you have all the time in the world (relative to money). At death you have all the money in the world (relative to time).

The two are the same, interchangable, equivalent.

(By the way money is really an abstract form of stored energy)

Having a maxxed Ikigai - you’re on the bullseye and Ikigaing all the way. You’re happy doing your thing, you’re doing amazing because you love what you do, you’re earning lots of money doing it!

You’ve earned all that money being excellent 24/7, everyone loves you for doing it and everyone needs it.

Now,

Exchanage some of that money for your conditions. Your terms. Your blueprint for How You Do Your Day.

Reduced pay for increased Freedom? COUNT ME IN.

Two Aspects to Satisfy

Visualize yourself doing What You Love, What You Are Good At, What The World Needs, That You Get Paid for AND On Your Terms.

This is the way.

Challenging? Sure! But its doable. I’m doing it now!

• The first challenge is knowing there is a problem or gap from listening to your feelings

• The second challenge is finding your new North Star - The bullseye - Ikigai’s center

• The third challenge is finding what conditions YOU NEED for you to execute your day

• The fourth challenge is taking action

• The final challenge is making it happen

I’ve spent 2 or more years trying to get this in place. I’m slowly getting there but a lot of the time was figuring out this framework, who I am as a person and what makes me tick.

I really hope this helps anyone in that same lost situation.

Trust your gut, follow your instincts, don’t apologize.

If you found this article helpful - please consider re-stacking to help others!

These are YourLastLife’s list of principles that my family and I will live by, make decisions with and use as a handrail for living life.

Feel free to comment with additions of modifications - I will consider them!

This is a living document. The aim is to make concentrated abstract distillation of core rules.

• Individualism over Collectivism

• Lose the Ego, True Knowledge is knowing that you know nothing - be deeply OK with that

• Always Optimism, Expect things will work out, Have faith - it will take time but they will

• Balance over Extremism (Cycles are nature - the mid point always wins. Stoic Temperance)

• Practice and actively work to not care what others think about you. Never look to external sources for affirmation - it must come from the self. Externally appear poor - while internally rich. Always be yourself - if you can’t be yourself leave.

• Speak Through Action, Not Words. If you find yourself wanting to communicate more, to verbalize to pepople or speak more to solve a problem or to apply salve to a problem situation - then you are doing something very wrong. You are not taking enough of the right action. Speaking is a symptom of not taking the right actions.

• Given Nature and the Universe obeys Balance - Ying and Yang, Black and White, Good and Bad come in equal portions - don’t be naive to think only good exists. Act accordingly

• Manifest Silently - Readily know what you want. Externalize it to paper. TRULY Believe it has already happened (past tense). Don’t tell anyone

• Sovereignty achieved through Self Education, Family Education, Health, Action and Wealth Accumulation

• Nature has already figured it out - No Injections, no GMO

• Healthcare - Treat the root cause not the symptoms (the medical industry is inverted)

• Family First. Spend a portion of your time with Active Community involvement (any community that means something to you).

• Daily Voluntary Discomfort - Exercise Daily, Fast, Develop a thick skin

I’ve never seen anything like it.

A one day drop in the price of Silver.

High of ~$118, ~74 $Low.

A ~37% drop in the Spot price of Silver in a single day.

This isn’t Gamestop stock. Half of the world didn’t decide they hated Silver in a single day. A form of money as old as time.

The veil covering market manipulation is falling off.

A lot of my childhood was learning about Good vs Evil. However it seemed like these topics had disappeared from my life as I grew older. They have now come back full force.

2026 is the year I am studying History and Geopolitics. I realize that Corruption and Evil is all around. I won’t say it is overwhelming as that is dismissive, fatalistic and weak. But be sure, its forces are strong in number.

Price

This is the basis of all economics knowledge. The relationship between supply and demand. Price is a function of the interaction between supply and demand. Too much supply and same demand - prices down. Too much demand and same supply - prices up.

The Evil of Abstraction - Derivatives

You may have heard of Derivatives - they are an abstraction on an underlying fundamental. Effectively a casino that allows for bets of any which way and means.

Common ones are the Futures Market and the Options Market. Others include Swaps, Forwards and Structured Products (There are more…).

Futures - A futures contract is an obligation, not a right, to buy or sell the underlying asset at a fixed price on a fixed future date.

Option - An option is a right, not an obligation, to buy or sell an underlying asset at a fixed price before or at a set date.

Derivatives are somewhat like apparitions. Something from another realm that can come in and influence our decisions without being on the same physical plane.

Imagine If You Will

Imagine if you will - taking the following steps:

• Print money - Fiat system allows for magick money!

• Use that money to sell shorts on the Futures market for <Fill in your Commodity>

• These appear as selling pressure for the future - remember our supply and demand curve? Now the true price is heavily distorted

Should the prices increase against the will of those trying to suppress the market?

Given that money is free to those who make it. They just sell the contract at a loss (it could be 1 cent) in order to stay within the realm of cash and not go into the underlying physical commodity.

The price/money/cash is not the thing of importance here.

It is the suppression of the underlying physical asset being targeted.

Grok

Grok is a GPT that is more relaxed when asking questions that want to be kept from the public’s viewpoint.

I am familiar with a historic cable (around the time private US gold ownership was legalized again) touting the introduction of a futures market and its role in manipulating volatility and price action. See below:

Gold, Silver, Bitcoin

All distinct potential stores of value. Distinct competitors to the USD.

Did you know -

They allowed a Futures market for Bitcoin 6 years before they allowed a public Bitcoin market?

Their pushback on Bitcoin market was painted with protecting the public from manipulation.

Have you ever wondered whether there was an alternative to each generation working till 65, retiring for 10 years, passing away and leaving nothing for the next generation?

The Slavery System that we live in has many levels, all stealing from your life force.

I’d like to enumerate the levels of this Slavery System - here is one of them.

Below is a diagram of what buying a house could look like. The buyer deems that the house is more valuable (to him) than the cash in his hand. The seller deems that the cash is more valuable (to her) than the house she is in.

A transaction occurs.

Now, here is the culturally normalized, modern representation of the same transaction. Notice there are three parties now. The Buyer, the Seller and a new third party - the bank.

The first diagram is a closed loop, a 1-1 transaction between buyer and seller. In this second diagram you can see that somehow the transaction is completely lop sided in favor of the bank.

The bank gives the Buyer monopoly money.

This money is magicked out of thin air when a loan is created.

In return the bank Receives a Physical House AND a promise of life force equivalent to > 2x houses. The value that the Bank receives is effectively greater than 3 houses.

The measly threshold of 6.36% Interest is point of when one’s repayments of a $500,000 home turn into $1,000,000.

Not bad for costing the bank NOTHING in return.

So some pieces of paper (or digits) in exchange for a Physical House and the promise of 25 years of life force.

Mort-gage

When you buy a house - you are paying rent to the Bank for 24.9 years. If you miss your last payment on the mortgage, they can take the house from you and sell it. All while having received 24.9 years of mortgage payments.

You might think that you own the house at 25 years, however local governments ensure that you are still a renter by imposing a property tax on your house. You are now renting the house from the local authority only, albeit at a much lower rent.

The mortgages amassed by banks can be further capitalized upon by banks bundling up all of the IOU notes to be resold as Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) at a premium.

You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy

Sure, semantically wording on ownership will be written as lien or as a claim. But it is just semantics - the truth of the matter is that you CURRENTLY OWN NOTHING.

To me it is wild that a third party can appear and effectively steal real wealth from inputting nothing.

The current Fiat based credit system gives infinite possibilities for those making the rules, to extract your life force in time as well as resources.

You really are no different from a Medieval Serf, temporarily living on the Landlord’s land paying your dues.

What else don’t you own?

Summary - I’d probably wait a bit before buying Bitcoin in 2026.

I’m not usually one for charting, but I thought I’d have a quick look given Bitcoin’s price action of the last few months.

In this article I wrote about the upcoming (September 2025) attack against Bitcoin, which turned out to cause a large selloff.

Normally I’d refer to the stock to flow chart from Plan B, however within recent times, it appears he has put his model behind a paywall. My suspicion is that his r squared value is dropping with time therefore limits exposure to it.

Stock to flow effectively gives a statistically significant plot line for Bitcoin’s future price. Helpful for forecasting its future price.

We can do this as Bitcoin has been engineered to have a finite supply and fairly predictable production levels by time period.

Alternatives to Stock To Flow

As we are looking at alternatives - I produced some diagrams in TradingView.

This first one shows a non-logarithmic chart which shows predictable cadence and steps. This first visualization would suggest we have a 30-40% more period of time for decreasing prices.

This second chart (backing chart) shows a logarithmic plot (10x increases). You can see predictable steps and you can also see the trajectory being more parabolic as it moves right. Vertical direction to the left flattening off to horizontal to the right.

An even more interesting chart I have embedded is the Relative Strength Index (RSI).

Looking at this you can see that RSI as a whole is trending lower highs and higher lows with time. The green checkmark bottom right would roughly suggest that area to target for blood-on-the-streets level timing.

Chart here - https://charts.bitbo.io/monthly-rsi/

This next chart shows logarithmic support and resistance bands and the price. Helpful for seeing projected future price.

And this next one also gives similar information but with an action table associated with each price.

Conclusion

My take on it all is we’re early for a buying period for Bitcoin. Keep an eye on the RSI charts. I believe PlanB had updated his Stock To Flow variants to focus more on RSI recently. I believe that the multipliers on upsides get more and more muted with time. Gold and Silver have taken liquidity away from pure crypto plays in recent years.

Some of my short term orientations for 2026 (hopefully I remembered to include them on my list) were to learn modern History and Geopolitics.

Ignorance is Bliss

I was aware of this gap in knowledge - but it was deliberate. I do chose to be ignorant in certain topics as it affords you bliss. I’ve also shied away from both topics because - History seemed boring at the time and Geopolitics looked miserable and boring.

I guess you change with age.

I wanted to learn both of these subjects to give me a wider world view. I’ve heard the expression History doesn’t repeat - it rhymes. I mean that’s some degree of awareness I’ll take.

Questions To Be Answered

My outlook is that a natural state is for things to be in cycles - just like the seasons.

One of my favorite pictures -

I believe us to be entering Weak Men Create Hard Times.

And with this - I like to stay a step or two ahead with preparation, planning and resource allocation.

So why and what will come next - I guess to that we need to look at Geopolitics.

A Past Life as an NPC

This was me before Covid. Since then I am no longer the same.

The whole thing created enormous confusion in me as I felt that I was in a different reality to logic and reasoning than the rest of the world. It deeply confused me. Honestly it was the weirdest experience.

I see why I was an NPC as I was a product of my environment. I never had a parent who talked to me or tutored me. I was pretty much left to do my own thing. I left home at 18 to pursue my life.

I was focused on School and Friends. Then University. Then my first jobs. Then being in a relationship. Then kids. Then Covid.

I was so absorbed in each of these steps - there was no time for seeing anything beyond that. And I think those periods were lived during Good Times Create Weak Men. So things were fairly good. Some rough edges here and there but generally quite tolerable.

Confusing Decisions

Since realizing something was wonky - like there was a glitch in the matrix I became more curious. Trying to peek behind the scenes - “what’s back there?”.

Questions started coming to me that arose from questionable decisions being made in the countries that I was living in. Decisions that seemed illogical or counter intuitive.

I think things seem hard to understand when you are looking at a decision from the wrong point of view. For example - as a thought exercise Imagine Billy has a crush on Stephanie. Billy is rude to Stephanie. Stephanie is confused as to why Billy was rude. Stephanie thinks Billy is rude as that is the simplest and least nuanced explanation. In reality, Billy is shy and awkward and uses that as a defense mechanism rather than share his true feelings. More nuanced, yet the truth. If Stephanie realized Billy was an awkward kid and pictured things from his point of view and character, his actions might make more sense.

Pillars of an Engineered World

When something is occurs that makes no sense - we are looking at it from the wrong point of view. We need to imagine what Billy is thinking, not taking the first and most immediate answer.

So who are the decision makers and why are they making them?

From my walk into Geopolitics I’ve discovered that (unsurprisingly) the answer to the world, decisions and who makes them is - it’s complicated.

NPCs rejoice! They can stick to the most immediate answer and move on.

I will always be proud to say - I know nothing and am heavily ignorant. This is a freeing mantra as it leaves you selfless, ego free and primed for absorbing knowledge.

From my initial findings into what is going on behind the scenes it rolls into a complex tree of actors. My naive NPC knowledge was that it was just countries with their governments and that was that.

Here are the main top level influencers of power (and yes they all have layers beneath them):

• Dynastic Banking Cartels

• Countries

• Secret Societies

• 3 main religions

• Intel agencies

Excellent Resources

I wont dig into the weeds on what is going on as it is easily 20+ hours of watching.

But I’ll give you links to some excellent channels of conversation that I’ve stumbled over. Each of the people below have heavy presence on YouTube.

YouTube Channels

I won’t break each of these channels down, but if you are interested in learning Geopolitics - I’ve found these to be extremely helpful. Fresh, up to date, opinionated.

RichDoesPolitics

Promethean Updates

Tommy's Podcast

Alex Krainer

So - it is the start of 2026.

Why Goals?

I’ve discovered that I am a person that feels empty when I don’t have a bigger picture or goals to aim for.

So as we transition from the last year into this year, I feel this internal desire to look backwards at last year, reflect and draw upon some new direction for this year.

I want goals so that I’m not aimless. Drifting through life without any direction.

My minds eye of the topic is really sitting in the middle of an ocean in a paddle boat. Which way do we head? How hard do we paddle?

Without any clear agenda, we could just sit here forever.

I’d prefer to have a North Star. Something to orient my direction. Something to help guide me in making progress.

Something to help make decisions when two decisions seem apparently similar. It somewhat acts as a guiderail for making decisions.

Wanting Without Wanting

To complicate it somewhat - I’m keenly aware from Stoic and Buddhist teachings that desire is the source of all suffering.

I could not desire anything but then I’d be back to that image of sitting in the middle of the ocean, not paddling.

I feel empty and un-energized when I’m not working towards something. I like seeing things change as I move forward in life.

So how do I want something without wanting something? I don’t want to aim to achieve something then to be upset by not achieving it.

Focus on Effort

Borrowing from Alex Hormozi’s expression - “It would be unreasonable to expect”

It would be unreasonable to expect not achieving positive outcomes after putting a ton of effort into something.

Therefore I focus on effort and creating goals around effort (and my attention).

So I’ve shifted to making goals not on outcomes, but on the effort that I put into them.

This neuters the language around desire and want of an outcome and shifts the focus onto tangible areas that I can apply effort to.

Neville Goddard and the Past Tense

Neville Goddard - Mr. Manifestation - espouses the use of talking in past tense in the context of having already being achieved.

For example - If you wished to have a Ferrari for example -

You would write down - I have owned a red Ferrari for years.

So in the spirit of this I am writing my Goals in a past tense to imply I have done these things.

1 Year / 5 Year / Lifetime Orientation

I want to write my Goals or I guess I am calling them Orientation (like the North Star).

I’ve split them up into 1 Year, 5 Year and Lifetime.

This way I start at Lifetime and work backwards. I’m effectively identifying at the highest level what I want in the world then work backwards.

It should be an indicator to you that you are unprepared or haven’t put enough thought into things if you are unable to produce a Lifetime Orientation list off the top of your head.

In the Lifetime Orientation it is not TOO concrete. I.e. details and semantics are spared. But the intent is captured.

I check back on mine daily/weekly.

Something I’ve been working on is finding Purpose in life. This is something that I’ve been keenly aware of as being missing.

An emergent aspect of enjoyment for me has been education and teaching others. Now I don’t claim to be an expert in anything - but I enjoy learning, digesting, reformatting and relaying knowledge.

Whilst reflecting upon purpose in life - I considered becoming the seed towards multi-generational wealth.

You know I have strong opinions on how the world is setup and how it is designed to keep you down and without options. I’ve always been quite the contrarian and am allergic to being a normie.

The idea of a 60/40 split stocks to options, accumulating wealth over my lifetime then consuming it all, leaving my children with nothing but for them to start the wealth accumulation lifecycle from scratch.

That is how the world is setup. Each generation is set up to be educated until 18, become debt ridden, work their life to pay off that debt, live a little for 10 years and to pass away. Taxes (theft) to be extracted from anything remaining.

Competition

Given the population of the earth, the system of Globalization (thankfully starting to expire) - it is very hard for kids to bootstrap themselves to success.

Clearly populations in India, China have had a rough go trying to make a start for themselves.

Getting an income, getting a house - all of which, I imagine to be a lot harder than it was for me and the generation before me.

Time - The Only Predictable Variable

Given that there are many variables affecting wealth, the only one we can treat as somewhat controllable is time.

If we are deliberate in our action taking, we can take action earlier and for longer.

Given that a core component of Future Value is the number of periods to compound - the longer the time horizon - the more money accumulated.

Check out this chart for a time period and returns starting with $100,000. You could read it as someone starting in their twenties or thirties and growing for 50 years. Then passing that over to a new generation (obviously simplified for not withdrawing or taxes).

You can see the effect of time on wealth. We have 10% on the left and 20% return on the right.

Banks - Tools of Slavery

For compounding it makes sense to start investing as soon as you are born.

I was shocked (and later unsurprised) to find out that generally speaking - you can’t create an investment account until a person is 18 years old.

So 1/4 of a persons time horizon has been evaporated.

Evil tools at play by evil people.

If you apply that delay to the chart above - you are looking at only getting 1/10th of the return that you otherwise could have.

Education

I have talked to my children about investing since they were a few years old.

I borrowed from Kevin O’Leary’s description of investing as money soldiers. It’s an intuitive description that kids can visualize.

The money soldiers go off on missions. If they fail they die, if they succeed they bring back bad guys, re-program them then send them all out on new missions. This clicked with my kids so now the focus becomes - what missions are they on.

We’ve reviewed Net Worth and returns across many bed times. The kids remember what the amount was last time, and guess as to how much it would be now.

As they started getting older, I started introducing money to them for their sports activities performance and chores.

They get a flat rate for weekly chores and for competing in their sports. My son gets no money for no results in Soccer. If he performs he gets money. We pre-agree at the beginning of the season what that looks like and he keeps a tally on my whiteboard.

When I pay them out, they take 1/3 of it and put it into investments.

I always ask them to show me on their fingers - ratios.

Wealth

Reflecting upon it - I actually think the kids have a greater Net Worth than most members of both sides of the family.

Not something to boast about - but just a realization.

And its not huge amounts I give them, just the fact that we have it put to use early on and use the Time factor.

Generational Wealth

My intent is to create a multigenerational tight-knit family with clear education, frameworks and morals.

There has been family coats of arms in generations before. However the people who were around during my early years had no family direction or cohesion. We’ll be starting off from scratch, starting with my immediate family.

How does this look?

Well it looks like ongoing nurturing, guidance and support of my children all the way through life. Yes if they turn into horrible human beings - we can reconsider. Until that point, that is the direction I’ll be taking.

This would look like multi generational compound living. This looks like us paying for their vacations. This looks like me helping them with housing, cars and so on. This also looks like giving them money and making them make decisions with it.

I’m keenly familiar with the statistics behind how far wealth typically travels between generations. It’s hard at 2 generations and very unlikely statistically for 3 - so there’s that. But hard things are hard. I’m aware.

This is the fun of the game.

And it is a game.

This - is the joy I get from investing.

Watching the horizon for threats and opportunities - Meerkat style.

Reversion to the mean is a natural phenomenon that occurs time and time again. Something high will go low and the low will go high.

Now look at the Silver/Gold ratio above (30 year chart). As of very recently it was very high. However it has been reverting to the mean.

Saying it other ways:

• If you could exchange Silver for Gold at no cost of transaction, now would be a sensible time to consider starting to rebalance from Silver to Gold for a portion of your portfolio

• If you were considering buying Gold OR Silver, you would likely pick Gold

Approaching the Threshold

SilverBullion.com has a really nice chart for the visually inclined. It says here that the current ratio is 51.0 and average since 1971 is 61.0.

At the top there it says “The 80/50 rule would have multiplied your holdings by 7.10 times”. Effectively flipping your Gold to Silver at the top (> 80) then flipping Silver to Gold at the bottom (< 50) would multiply your store of value. (This would be you flipping your entire stack).

The colored bands are very helpful the top is Silver and the bottom is Gold.

So we’re drawing upon this time period. We’re not in it - but coming close.

Barrier To Entry

A key to being a good investor is looking for barriers to entry.

Hard things are hard.

This is what separates the wheat from the chaff - the barrier to entry.

The feeling of risk, having to go out of your way. Having to figure things out. Things not feeling perfectly smooth. Having to research. These are all signs of a barrier to entry and by paying admission through a barrier of entry - you get to ride the ride.

Most people wont ever be aware of a barrier to entry. If they are aware they aren’t willing to go through it.

What I’m saying is positive outcome actions on your portfolio that are meaningful always will have a degree of discomfort.

Epochs

Now this statement is based off this 30 year chart. However one could argue that this may not be the correct window to analyze the ratio.

Truthfully, we’ve seen a few different epochs of the Gold To Silver Ratio. I’m no Gold Bug - but I’m vaguely aware that these numbers were much closer together in ancient times I believe somewhere around 10-15:1. Then during times of stability when a Gold Standard was used, you can roughly generalize the ratio at 30:1. Then post Gold Standard times you are looking at 60-70:1.

Math

When it comes time - let’s see how that would look like from a math point of view.

Now the goal would be to swap our Silver for Gold.

If you want to keep some Silver for smaller denominations of value, that is fine. This might be for Shit hits the fan scenarios.

The idea would be we are looking at moving all non Shit-hits-the-fan bullion from Silver to Gold.

To keep things scoped and simple, lets deal with 1 oz coins - Canadian Maples for example.

How many 1oz Silvers do we need to give up to get a single 1oz Gold?

Looking at a local Bullion Dealer’s website they are charging a premium of 1.76% above spot price for gold and 6.16% above spot for Silver. They also have prices for selling which are under spot.

So they make their money on the buy and the sell.

When I calculate how much I’d lose on selling the Silver and how much I’d be “losing” on buying the Gold its effective dollar value is equivalent to 4.16 pieces of silver.

Or said another way -

I’d be losing 4.16 pieces of silver to get a piece of gold

This makes it intuitive to visualize what I’d need to see to come out ahead.

So if i exchanged at 50:1 - it would simply be the Gold/Silver ratio going from 50:1 to 55:1. Then I’d be at the break even point.

Here is an excerpt from my Q1 Returns Report 2024 (Green meaning I’m in favor of buying)

Silver: Trading around $25 USD per ounce.

Gold: Trading around $2300 USD per ounce.

Silver

Today Silver is at $70 USD

Gold

Today Silver is at $4,457 USD

Rationale

I moved 2.5% of my net worth into Silver and Gold Bullion and a similar sized chunk into Gold and Silver Stocks. I first started buying silver in 2013.

It started with diversification as a goal, but truthfully with time became more of a shit-hit-the-fan hedge. Shit hit the fan both in the context of NATO vs Russia and also the end of the long term debt cycle.

Shit hit the fan meaning that I can carry value on my self without needing permission from the bank or government to take it out of the bank.

The Coles notes of the end of the long term debt cycle is when debt and money creation become so excessive that central banks can no longer stimulate growth, forcing deleveraging through defaults, restructuring, wealth transfers, currency debasement and capital controls. Beware that this is all symptomatic of the evil Fiat system that we live in. Fiat is the root cause of war and death, enslavement and the never ending trod towards lower and lower quality of food and living conditions.

Guide In Stocks

I’ll only broadcast things I believe to be truths or good guides. I don’t get paid by these entities and have no affiliation.

From wider investment listening and absorption my guiding star on who/what was worth its weight was this gentlemen - Rick Rule. Rick has been in the Commodities space for multiple lifetimes and is someone I would consider an expert on sectors and individual stocks for metal commodities.

For this current period - Rick has sold off his speculative Junior stocks and consolidated more into the quality, established names (he is also adding Oil).

Now I’m personally not a believer in picking individual stocks - I prefer indices or sector plays. I did buy many individual stocks but more in the sense of building a mini-index.

Again - I’m not one for talking about individual stocks (unless they are doing something revolutionary or unique such a MSTR).

So if you are looking for ideas - I suggest you keep abreast of his thoughts via YouTube.

The stocks that I have that broke through 100% gain - I will sell the original investment so that the returns thereafter are infinite. (The math is any gain divided by the cost (of 0) is infinite). Sales proceeds are invested into a new candidate (likely orthogonal to my original investment).

If the asset I believe very strongly in - I will not sell in a lifetime no matter how much it has gone up.

Where We Are At

Gun to my head - is there much more of an upside? I assume yes.

From what I can tell, generally speaking Retail (regular people) hasn’t caught onto the Gold and Silver that Central Banks have been buying for the last few years. Also the paper market and physical market are disconnected beyond reality. Arbitrage plays are starting to kick in between China and Western systems.

We have not yet seen the unwinding of paper to physical. I’m not sure that we will but if we did the price would jump up extraordinarily.

In 2008, I remember listening to an interview with a guy who worked for the UK Bullion Markets blowing the whistle about the amount of paper to silver was greater than a 100/1 ratio. It’s still the case now!

If deliveries were demanded the price of Silver and Gold would go through the roof.

We also have just entered Not Quantative Easing MK: II. Which may be the fifth/sixth/seventh? round of gigantic money printing. Meaning that any hard assets will inflate in price regardless of whether anything substantial changes in how the metal markets work. (This is why we see the stock market rise so much even though a lot of it is mal-investment in my opinion).

So do I think prices will double from here - yes at some point. My gut feel is that we are roughly 30-50% through this change (from a time perspective).

Am I investing more? I don’t invest new cash anymore and haven’t for quite some time (maybe 2 years). I move my investments around based off cycles.

The other night I went out and socialized. A rare occurrence!

I was sat opposite a lady who researches DEI, Diversity and is a PhD and works in education.

Now, for those who have come to know my character - this kind of person is effectively the human equivalent of the inverse of me. Ying and Yang.

Well - I’m always civilized and would never get into an argument.

It’s funny - those with titles and work in the academic world do deeply wear this fact on their sleeve. Quite the introduction!

I’m a heavy self educator - I love learning. However most of my knowledge has come from post formal education. It’s me sitting down with paper and pen or a book and reading/studying. It’s fun and relaxing. I think a lot about a lot of things - because its interesting.

She quickly got uncomfortable with the conversation as it poked beyond her shibbolethetic-institutional knowledge. Yea - I made that word up! Yea - it’s a hybridized word. Take that academics!

I avoided the DEI conversation as that would get heated. The topic that I was circling around - because I find it interesting was directly around AI and School and subsequently - what is the Value of a Human going forward?

The Value of Knowledge

The conversation started off with her telling me that AI is discouraged in schools because it masks the students knowledge. Which I rebuffed with the statement that knowledge has no value anymore (generally speaking).

After using Duo Lingo for the last 2-3 years I can safely say - learning from an AI instructor is the best way to learn language. It will show you exactly what you need when you need to learn the most. I’ve learned more in 2-3 years in Spanish than during my entire time at school for French and Spanish combined.

Are they using it in school - nope.

If you are new to my writing - I do paint with broad strokes and generalize - getting stuck in the semantics and edge cases is unproductive. I tend to speak in Black and White as it conveys the end outcome clearer.

Back in the day experts were paid to store knowledge and prescribe knowledge based off of some situation. So;

for an engineer - how thick of beams do we need to cross this roof space?

for a doctor - what is this symptom typically resultant from?

Stored knowledge, unpacked conditionally in some context.

Now - as of 2025 - all human knowledge is packed into a GPT.

Do I need to know how to transform English into French? No - it can do that for me. Do I need to know some element on the periodic table - No it can tell me.
Do I need to be able to learn lots of software languages - No it can do that for me.

Now technically as of 2025 - GPTs hallucinate, so you do need to hold knowledge to spot the crazy responses, but every year it diminishes.

I use AI all day every day - More than 8 hours a day during the week. Its ability to reason and produce without my involvement gets noticeably more every year. At some point, perhaps - no need for us to fact-check or sanity check its result.

Where Is Value For Humans?

The value placed on knowledge is now empty (or on that trajectory).

SO -

If knowledge is no value; humans cannot be valued based off their knowledge - what is their value?

You might expect that an institution set up to guide a human for ~18 years of their life might have a destination or big picture in mind for what they are trying to produce.

What are they trying to achieve if knowledge is worthless?

If they go another decade or two with that child shoving knowledge into that child - that means a waste of 1-2 decades of that child’s life given that knowledge has no value any more.

Clearly - take this statement with a pinch of salt - obviously knowledge has some value - but 18 years of cramming knowledge - is this merited? Is all knowledge worth knowing?

Absolutely not.

An Indoctrination Daycare

Truthfully - I’m not convinced that the education system exists for the benefit of the individual.

I see it as a daycare that conditions participants to be obedient, unquestioning while being sprinkled with the virtues of Democracy and multiculturalism (and whatever else controlling narrative).

The daycare facilitates parents to go out, use their lifeforce to produce value. That life force transformed into value gets forcefully extracted upwards via a monopoly on violence - through the government and controlled by the ruling elites.

I lived a sheltered life up until Covid. A normie.

Until the world seemed to have gone crazy. I couldn’t rationalize or understand anything. The whole event made me take a few steps back and re-asses my knowledge of the world. Since then I started reading a lot. The world makes a lot more sense now I see it from a different angle.

When you view the world from the correct angle things that would not normally make sense, make sense. It comes down looking at the world through the right context of motivation.

Ignorance is bliss - until you chose not to be ignorant. With that comes a burden.

An Alternative

Honestly - I’m of the opinion that deeply understanding Arithmetic (Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division). Understanding - say the 10 commandments. Understanding logic, fallacies, deeply understanding reading and writing and how to convey thought through argument.

That’s roughly - enough for a base layer.

I think that’s honestly enough from a schooling or foundational period. And truthfully this could be completed by the age of 10 years old.

I asked her - if they are trying to set kids up for success - why am I using AI 8 hours a day and the children are not using it at all? The education system isn’t connecting with reality. Reality doesn’t use the same approach as those being prescribed by school.

Personally - with what I know now and with the right resources I would pull the kids out of the education system and home school them, whilst traveling the world.

This would negate unvetted anonymous humans nurturing your child with a menu of topics that are the opposite of what you believe in.

Life is special. Time is the most precious of things.

Burning a quarter of their lives doing pointless activity is saddening.

I would execute action - however my wife is an educator - so you can imagine the conversations we have at home. She always resort to a raised voice and logic-free words. The power of indoctrination and conformity is strong.

My ideal would be to travel constantly round the world - via cruise, via train etc... Teach Math, Philosophy, Logic, Economics, Philosophy and Psychology to the children. I’d have them running their own business in some area of their lives that they enjoy instead of 8 hours in a box. Selling stickers. Printing their own cool shirts. Also getting them to help in a community and charity actively.

The goal would be to build a solid bedrock of logic and reasoning within the first 10 years. Then the remaining 8 years to spend time building their character, their endurance, strength and confidence with the world.

How School can provide Value

So - Generally speaking - if humans have no value from knowledge.

Their remaining value exists as creativity, producing by physical means and entrepreneurial undertakings. However those are both on very shaky grounds as AI continues to advance.

Entrepreneurial abilities are always in demand.

Will school change? No.

Is school of value? No

These are silly naming terms for investment gains - somewhat tongue in cheek Wall Street Bro lingo.

But life should be fun - shouldn’t it?

I was thinking this morning over my 2 cups of coffee, 1 cup of tea and Mediterranean sardines on toast -

Have I ever gotten a 1000 Bagger?

So to be clear - a 1000 Bagger is 3 orders of magnitude growth.

The answer - almost. I’ll let you know if it ever happens. (I don’t include anything that I’ve sold and let ride in my bagger statement)

100 Baggers and 10 baggers - absolutely!

How I think about investing really starts with what I think the next thing to double will be (or 1 bagger).

Stocks yielding 5% or 8% growth annually seem quite astonishing when you compare to even a 1 bagger (100% growth).

My Approach

I personally operate from a gut and intuition point of view as well as being open minded, but layering in awareness of reality. I later will then aim to build conviction by doing deeper and deeper analysis.

I invest chunks of my money in percentages in various bucket sizes. 1.25%, 2.5%, 5%, 10%. I operate from a percentage of portfolio point of view rather than a dollar value. I decide on the percentage based off a bunch of variables then put it it into action. Dealing with percentages means that you distance yourself from thinking too much about what the dollar amount is.

If it tanks immediately I sell and re-evaluate my idea.

At some point it makes no sense to keep contributing to investments if you are at 5 million or 50 million - does it make sense to keep adding 50k? Its a drop in the ocean. Live life more!

Hopefully the article gave you a little insight into my world and may have been fun.

I wish you many baggers!