1967, when “Ode to Billy Joe” was at the top of the charts, I liked it but never really appreciated it.

Now I see it as a remarkable artistic accomplishment…

It’s a narrative and a very compelling one. And although the story is fundamentally sentimental, the lyrics are sophisticated and elevate it into something that is touching and bewildering and profound.

It’s interesting to think that this song was written by a young person that grew up in rural Tennessee.

Bobbie Gentry was born in Chickasaw County, Tennessee. She wrote “Ode to Billy Joe” in 1967. It was released the next year and became an international hit.
The Tallahatchie Bridge, mentioned in the song, collapsed in 1972.

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Okay, I May Go Broke – but That’s Fine With Me

We were talking about buying another building to accommodate a growing employee base. NM made the case for it, but BW was reluctant. He suggested we wait six months to give the stock market time to crash. “We’ll have a better idea of what space we need after that,” he suggested.

I have no doubt that the market will crash. I have no doubt that the USA will have to pay for its trillions and trillions of dollars’ worth of public and private debt. I just don’t know when or how it will happen. Will it be a crash followed by a depression? Or inflation? And if inflation, will it be a long period of moderate increases or a short period of Zimbabwe-like inflation?

Because of reasons I’ll get to in a minute, I am not much worried about this eventuality. My inclination was to buy. And so I sent NM and BW this note:

I once talked to a billionaire real estate investor at a cocktail party. I tried to impress him by asking him if the secret was buying right. He said that his secret was to “just keep buying.”

 “When I look back at all the properties I bought,” he said, “I can identify those I felt were well and badly priced at the time. But after 40 years, I can see that I made as much or more on the overpriced properties as I did on the underpriced ones.”

 Maybe he was trying to throw me off, but I have incorporated one element of this idea into my thinking… that accumulating lots of properties is generally a good idea.

To which BW replied:

Yep… as long as you’re in the biggest financial boom the world has ever seen.

And then NM added:

That would not have been good strategy in Rome in 410 AD. 

Fair enough. As Nassim Taleb argues so forcefully in Fooled by Randomness,The Black Swan, and Antifragile, the most important events in life are the most difficult to predict. So, yes, just because the financial markets and our businesses have been growing nicely for so many years, it would be foolish to assume that there is little chance that things can’t collapse terribly in the future. Maybe next week!

Taleb’s concept of “antifragility” – the ability to not just survive but also benefit from random events, errors, and volatility– is his (sort of) solution to this problem. And one reason I don’t worry about financial collapse is because I’ve done everything I can think of to make my wealth antifragile.

Here’s the gist of the way I’ve structured my investments and allocated my assets:

Ninety-plus percent of the stocks I own are of companies that are likely to survive every sort of meltdown except perhaps a nuclear one. My debt portfolio is diversified. I own a small but diverse group of private, traditional businesses. The bulk of my real estate portfolio is in income-producing properties in various locations. I have my gold coins, an emergency fund, a start-over-again fund, and so on.

That gives me comfort.

But the main reason I’m not worried is because at a deeper level I don’t give a shit about how much money I have. I intend to protect and grow my wealth, but I don’t care if I do. Moreover, I’ve imagined myself losing some or even all of it and I’m okay with that, too.

I know that sounds like BS. It’s not. I prepared myself for being poor almost as long as I dreamed about being rich.

As a boy, I literally dreamed about it. And as an adolescent and young man, I attached those dreams to a willingness to spend afternoons and evenings doing odd jobs and even starting little businesses.

Eventually, my fantasies began to feel like fate.

But when, for example, I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer, I remember sitting on the porch of my 200-square-foot mud-walled shack in N’djamena, Chad. Our dog was barking at a monkey that had found shelter on a beam under the roof. Our garden was green and lovely. “One day,” I said to myself, “you will be rich. You will buy a big, expensive house, and you will want to believe that your life in that house is better than it is in this one. But it will not be.”

I was right. As soon as I could, I did buy a big, expensive house. (Over the years, I bought several of them.) And I was right, too, in predicting that my life would never be better than it was in that shack in Africa.

So here’s where I’m going with this…

I’m all for allocating your assets prudently to give yourself a reasonable amount of financial “antifragility” (as Nassim Taleb puts it). But it’s easier to make the right decisions about keeping your wealth if you have emotional antifragility as well. In other words, if you can detach yourself – as I have – from the desire to keep it.

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Evince (verb) – To evince (ih-VINS) is to show clearly; prove. As used by Samuel Adams: “Let us awaken then, and evince a different spirit, a spirit that shall inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in us….”

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Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin

The inside story of the detection of gravitational waves using the most sensitive scientific instrument ever made – the “LIGO.” The machine was designed to detect infinitesimally small sounds (vibrations) created by giant astronomical events such as collapsing stars, merging galaxies, two black holes collapsing into one, and ever so faintly perhaps, the Big Bang.

Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916. This book is the story of how that machine was built and improved upon, culminating, in 2016, in the confirmation of Einstein’s prediction.

Confidently written by someone that clearly knows her subject and is a very accomplished prose stylist. But the subject matter was difficult to grasp.

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Twisting the Night Away video with this intro: Twisting… better than Travolta and Thurman?

 

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The “Extreme Poverty Problem”: Hans Rosling Explodes Yet Another Myth

Answer this: In the last 20 years, the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty has:

  1. Almost doubled?
  2. Remained about the same?
  3. Dropped by two-thirds?

The correct answer is C. The number of people living in extreme poverty is less than 9%. It was more than three times greater, 29%, in 1997.

If you answered A or B, you are not alone. In fact, an online poll conducted by Hans Rosling found that 90% of those polled got it wrong.

I wrote about Rosling before. LINK

His life work is correcting misconceptions. And one of the biggest misconceptions he’s discovered is that most people – and this includes most educated people – believe that poverty is getting worse.

Here are the facts:

In 1800, roughly 85% of the world population lived in extreme poverty, deprived of such basic human needs as food, safe drinking water, shelter, and access to medical care.

And this was not confined to Asia and Africa. It existed everywhere. Even in England, the US, Europe, and Scandinavia. The world economy back then was still agrarian. When crops failed, people starved.

The situation improved only slightly for the next 70 or 80 years. But by then the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Wealth was being created at a rate that was faster, by multiples, than at any previous time in human history. And the beneficiaries were not only big industrialized countries but also their trading partners.  READ MORE

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Sequester (verb) – To sequester (sih-KWES-ter) is to segregate; set apart. As used by Paul Dini: “To overcome any form of adversity, to not give up, to not give up on yourself, your dreams, to not sequester yourself away from people – that’s the most important thing to do with your life.”

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