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- [00:00]
A
On this episode of Full Signal, I sit down with Jeff Park. He is the CIO of Pro Cap Financial and this is one of the best macro conversations I have ever had. We get into the historic wealth transfer that's about to happen, the demographic shifts underway, how AI impacts the labor market and the value of labor itself, and much more. This is a must listen conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Jeff, it is great to see you today. I want to get right into this essay you wrote. It's called the Generational Prisoners Dilemma, Three Certain Truths and the Exit Liquidity Trap. And it pretty much lays out three variables that you're watching as a macro. The shifting demographics, accelerating inequality, and AI's impact on labor and labor markets. Can you walk us through your big picture overview of the essay and maybe why now for this piece of.
- [00:53]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So I wrote that piece in my own ways as a justification or response to a viral piece that Citrini wrote you may have read, called 2020 A Global Intelligence Crisis. And when I read that piece, which was very well written, a sense of helplessness came over, which is a very detailed view of where the world is going and whether anyone has any agency to counteract some of these effects to come. And, and it helped me revisit that. You have a lot of agency in your life. You actually should live with full determination for self determination. And because of that it's always important to go back to the drawing board and really try to remember what are the things you can control, what are the things that you know for sure and what are things you can do about knowing those things that can affect a different outcome from a causation perspective. And so that was kind of the genesis of the timing of, of the particular article. And I think the highlights of the three parameters that you pointed out that I hit upon is really because I see those three things as truly incorrigible truths in our modern life. And we'll go through each one of those as it makes sense in our conversation. But I think for all of the audience who can listen to and understand, it'll become pretty self evident that nothing I say is meant to be shock value or controversial or anything beyond the fact that these are actually maybe some of the most basic truths that we know that can counteract some of the big uncertainties that we fear as a result. And with certainty, hopefully people can find some conviction to determine their own outcomes.
- [02:30]
A
Well, the shifting demographics and inequality, those two stories are very old actually. They've been happening for a very long time and accelerating. But the third component of AI's impact on jobs and the labor market, that's the newer variable that I think when you tie it to the other two, makes it a really unique macro story. So I want to start with the demographics. Can you walk us through why this is a variable that you are pointing to right now?
- [02:59]
B
Yeah, it's the variable I start with because it's the most obvious one and it's the most self fulfilling truth, which also is helped by the fact that demographics take a long time to solve. So, so some things, you can make some suppositions about things that are happening and play with a variable of timing. Maybe it's accelerating, maybe it's decelerating, maybe it's actually going to be asymptotic, maybe it's going to be a smooth curve. But the thing about generational trends when it comes to demographics is that because of the definition of population itself is a slow moving variable, we know with a very high degree of certainty what the future is going to look like five, 10 years, 20 years from now. So, for example, by 2030, it is estimated that all of the baby boomers in this country will hit the age of 65 and over and they will constitute 20% of the US population. One out of five Americans will be baby boomers over the age of 65 in about three years. And in 2034, it's estimated that there's going to be more adults than children for the first time ever in American history. That's only seven years away, which where the pendulum is going to swing and the pyramid is going to invert where we will have more adults than children. The third thing is global fertility rate as it's going down is a phenomenon here happening in the US as well. So by 2036, it is estimated that the fertility rate here in the United states will reach 1.5 or maybe below that is well below replacement value. And experts estimate that value is going to hold for at least two decades. Because again, population, population takes time to develop. If we're not having children now, we're certainly not having adults 18 years from now. And so the trend now we know from this point to 2055 is that we're in a secular decline from a demographics perspective where the older people are going to become a bigger proportion of the population to an ever decreasing base of the youth. That is a fact and it's not meant to be controversial. This is something that we know is a slow moving train wreck. And one of the reasons this is so important, even as we all know it, but we don't pay attention to is because I think the entire financialization of our U.S. capital markets and asset markets is based off of not acknowledging this fundamental truth. And that's why we don't see nearly enough coverage, in my opinion, on the mainstream media as to how important this trend is to what it's going to do for asset prices. But really intuitively you can imagine if there's a lot of sellers coming into the next 20 years because these are baby boomers going into retirement where they're going to need to fund their population probably living longer than what mortality curbs can estimate. That means there's going to be a great liquidity event coming. And it's coming for not just US equities, but more importantly, I believe in housing. And housing is equally important in this conversation, which I think is one of the angst that the youth has about this income wealth inequality that is experienced across the demographics of time.
- [05:57]
A
So just to clarify, the liquidity event that's coming, is that mostly people selling their assets or is that also tied to the generational wealth transfer?
- [06:08]
B
So there's a combination. There's going to be a wealth transfer regardless if people die and it needs to be passed down. Hopefully there's children they can, you know, give that to from the form of an estate tax. But otherwise that is wealth that is either going to be passed down who will then spend it, or the older people are still going to find ways to make that into liquid and spend it. So if you think about all of the sectors today in which the service economy is doing really well, it has so far been the ones that has catered to that demographic like healthcare services, hospital services are doing really well. I think generally human services around that demographics has. Has done well, right. Like servicing. That is a big economy now. And so there will be money spent and the old people will spend the money however they deem to spend it in their retirement. And that money's going to eventually kind of flow down in spending. But the other part of it is that to spend that money they have to sell the assets. And so what are they going to sell? It's whatever is in their investment portfolio. And we know that a good chunk of that comes from housing. We also know a good chunk of that comes from ownership of US equities market.
- [07:19]
A
Well, probably a huge amount is passive investing. Right. So you have all the index fund holders of S&P 500. And you know, I talked to several investors who are very worried about when the passive investing bubble stops or it pops. And part of this is probably demographics. So let me ask you about the inequality that you've highlighted. You made a distinction between wealth inequality and income inequality. Can you clarify that for us?
- [07:50]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So income inequality, of course as we know it, is the spread that is experienced between those who are high performing and low performing across the wage gap. And so oftentimes you'll see a CEO of a public company making X amount more than the average employee of a company. And that ratio is followed upon by a lot of academics and historians because they there's probably an acceptable range for that ratio, but there's also a range in which as an outlier, it becomes a little bit too extreme. So if the CEO, for example, makes 300 times more than the average wage of a company, maybe that's not going to be socially stable versus 10 times. So there's probably a subjective range here that people think about with income. But the problem with this diagnosis is that income is actually output for contributing towards some productivity gain. Right? And so the thing you'll always see about this income gap is that the highly paid will always be paid very well because they have generated the performance to deserve that merit. And over time, what you'll see is that gap can widen, but it doesn't mean that widening of the gap in itself is a problem. So take for example, in anything that is competitive, the hedge fund industry, if you are a top decile manager and you're posting great numbers and therefore you're being paid better than the average, I think people will say that is a reward well deserved. Because in the game of competitive Investing you are top 1% talent and you've delivered the goods and so you would make more money than somebody who is actually average or bottom decile. You can almost draw the same for sports. Top athletes probably deserve to get paid better than low performing athletes. And if that ratio is widening, it probably means like productivity at the highest level is reaching astronomical amounts, which is a great thing. You want to see the best always perform at the highest level and contribute even more. So income inequality itself, while it can be a stigmatic problem, doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with the system. Now what is wrong sometimes with the system that people sometimes like fail to ascribe value to is asset wealth inequality. So the point I'm trying to draw is income inequality is fundamentally different in my opinion than wealth inequality. And the reason is wealth is more of a passive construct. Wealth doesn't have performance necessarily tied to it. In the same way That a producer of an economy that contributes towards productivity gain might. And the level of wealth that exists in the system can in the worst case scenario actually be counterproductive to generally a well functioning society if that capital is stagnant. And so when you hear the statistics around top 1% of U.S. households accounting for 30% of the country's wealth, it's important to remember this is not income that they own as a share of the economy, but wealth. And that to me is a pretty jarring number. In fact, even in the Roaring twenties when one might have thought that was one of the greatest times of income equality, in the 1920s, that gap never reached 30%. I believe it peaked around 20% that the top 1% of US household controlled asset wealth for. So we're above that norm 100 years later. When people look at the roaring 20s as one of a time of great inequality and exuberance, we are past it. And so this is I think, probably why a lot of people are concerned about the direction of that gap ever widening. Because the other point I will make is income is an annual test, right? Income is earned every year, presumably if you're a laborer here. And every year there is a metric to justify the income for what you've contributed. However, wealth is unbounded. Wealth has this construct of an infinity to it, which is that capital in itself, when it continues to stay invested, can actually generate capital. And that capital can sometimes be put to good use, but it could also just be a tax on the rest of the system if it is actually not contributing to productivity gains. And I think what people are really worried about is that wealth has a tendency to have like a infinite money glitch type of dynamic that income never could. Because income still is a finite number for which you are tested every year. Hopefully you're delivering the goods and you're getting paid well for it. But wealth has no test like that. Wealth is forever kind of outside of that test. It's just how it accumulates over time and the pressure points that it can develop throughout the decades.
- [12:28]
A
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- [13:46]
B
So it's a great question and we have to think about the wealth transfer happening across two dimensions. The demographic trends is really a vertical slice in the time span that we're measuring from the future and the present. And the income inequality that we're talking about is actually not across time, but across more of a longitudinal study across the population today as a snapshot. So both of those things are causes of inequality in different ways. And I think your question is astute because is there going to be a way that this self corrects by the passage of time? And I think this is the big unknown. And this is where public policy can play a great deal because we all know as a matter of bias that wealth tends to stay within. So just because you know, your grandfather passes away, it's not that then that wealth gets automatically distributed to the rest of society equally. In fact it doesn't. Actually one of the proudest probably feature of the US is that it protects wealth as private property better than many other countries when it comes to that aspect of kind of communal social benefits upon the passage of time. And so that's why estate tax is a big deal. And people have lots of questions about what the fair estate tax should be in times of difficulty across the population. But the US is generally pretty good about that. So the wealth you bestow to your children will generally go to your children. It's not actually going to diversify to the society at large. When it comes to income inequality as it exists today. I think that trend is not self correcting. In fact a lot of people talk about technology being this great equalizer. But those same people will also admit that technology is also not just an equalizer for services, but equal actually one of the accelerants of income inequality because the scale in which it can help develop its output for is so concentrated towards select Beneficial owners. And so the reach of technology, while it's omniscient and great, and it reduces friction and network costs, the funnel is one way as well. And that allows incredible overreach in a format of consolidation that only technology, I think, can achieve. That has, in fact, gotten worse over the decades, which is why income inequality can be a problem, as technology can also be a good. These are not mutually exclusive outcomes. They're in fact probably related outcomes.
- [16:13]
A
So I hear all this, and it makes a ton of sense. It seems definitely like a impossible path to reverse what we're on right now. The next point you bring up, AI's impact on the labor market, actually makes me feel even more concerned, I would say. And one of the things you write here, I have your quote. AI is not only capital intensive, it is labor destructive. I think that's a great jumping off point. Can you explain what you mean by that?
- [16:45]
B
Yeah. At the basic level that most humans, I think, have intuited by now why they're so scared of AI as a technology more than any others in the past, is because it has a level, a threshold level that surpasses what most people would seem to be as an enhancer versus a replacement. So when you think about the evolution of snail mails to emails, you can imagine, oh, yeah, it helps humans write mails faster, and therefore my job gets more efficient. And therefore I'm the beneficiary of the email technology versus mail. Right. Same with horse carriages to cars. I'm still riding the car. I get to benefit because I get somewhere faster. So a lot of the technologies that so far has improved human society is because it empowers the individual to use it in a way that serves their interests. I think there's a lot of people who believe AI can do the same for the people today. But the worry is that gap is actually a lot wider than most people think it is, and that there actually will be some class of labor that will find total displacement. So it's a threshold that has crossed to the point where that kind of ability to do certain kinds of tasks as part of the knowledge economy is no longer going to be valuable and it's going to disappear. You can make cases about how people will reinvent themselves and find value in different ways. But the point is that at some level, most of what society is trying to solve for isn't the job of the median. It's not the job for the top decile, it's the bottom decile. Right. The bottom decile is where kind of the foundational build out of any economy is. And that's where the lowest cost of human capital that can still function in society is valuable. And what AI is going to do is it's going to raise that bar even higher. And so there's a big chance that there's going to just be more displacement of people who are most vulnerable. And I think that is kind of what people are intuitively picking up on. The problem, I think in many ways, unfortunately is exacerbated by the cost of education. So when I talk about AI disrupting the cost of labor versus cost of capital, part of the challenge has been that the cost of labor has been mispriced for so long now for how expensive education has been. If you think about the general trade for the cost of labor being I go to college for four years, I pay whatever 100 grand per year, and the income that I'm able to therefore earn as a result of my college degree should offset that over a certain period of time. Therefore, it's a good positive NPV investment. Well, I think it's safe to say that with the rise of AI, which has probably been a deflationary force for education, as all technology tends to be, a deflationary force, is going to make your education cost a liability. And that's what happens ultimately when you become captive to an artificial price. That was what college education said your labor price is worth. But it turns out actually what you paid had nothing to do with the market clearing price for your labor, because that cost in itself was not determined by those inputs, but something else that is exogenous to the system. That could be a conversation for another day. But it's all to say that I think the mispriced education is really at the center for why this spread is getting actually even more perverse.
- [20:10]
A
Is there any way you see all of that and maybe you see all the data and you see the way these AI agents are developing, how quickly they're getting? Very good. What makes you optimistic about looking at all this and thinking about next steps, if anything?
- [20:28]
B
Well, I'm very optimistic about, first and foremost, the United States as a country. And so we kind of talked about all of these things in the vacuum of a homogenous system that doesn't actually interact outside of our statehoods. But the reality is the market is global, the market is competitive. And if we believe in democracy and capitalism, the flow of human and capital and knowledge should also be freely accessible and soluble. Right. And so in that biased kind of perspective of what I believe to be true. The United States stands pretty much alone, in my opinion, as the single greatest country for where most people are still choosing to come here to achieve their dreams. And so we've talked about the demographic problems, which is serious and it's real. But the US has the best shot of changing that around because they can be pro immigration. Now we have to be careful about what kinds of immigration that I think we want to generally have a prosperous country. But the point is if you create an environment that allows it, people actually will want to come here. And so the population trend can change, it'll be different. It's not just people having kids. But immigration can be a source of a population demographic too. And I would say that is the US's infinite asymmetric edge because there's no country like it, because no country was founded upon the principle of that as a history. So it's not going to happen in Japan, it's not going to happen in China, it generally will not happen in Europe, and it will certainly not happen in the Middle East. The US stands alone as a beacon of an immigration source in that sense, like some of the things we talked about with even like the liquidity trap of boomers dumping stocks. Well, the reality is maybe there's not enough young people in the US that want to buy it, but guess what? There's a lot of foreign boomers who might want to buy US stocks too, right? So if you are living abroad and you've always wanted to buy Nvidia and Apple and Google and you can't because you're not a US citizen or you don't have access to US capital markets, one of the priorities with tokenization as a crypto rail, I believe that is being enthused upon is the possibility to have universal ownership of these types of assets. And so this is one way to almost counteract a trend if you thought there's going to be more buyers than sellers by broadening the base. So there are elements of the us, I think, that stands exceptional to kind of overcome what otherwise is very pessimistic and negative outlay to the conversation. And in the world of kind of that ingenious capitalism for which humans ascribe value to, that's where the future is. And so even if AI is going to be disruptive, as technology generally tends to be for the ones that can do exceptionally well, that they were always going to do well, I mean, the opportunity is even bigger now. So the world has been never as exciting as now for a solo entrepreneur to make a dent in this world because of all these amazing tools that are available and that should ultimately be a positive thing. But I think the question is, how do you do that without fundamentally breaking the social contract of a well functioning society, which has to tend for none of the less, the less exceptional, the less capable, and the less those who are more in need of generally still being kind of part of society at large. And that's why I think this income gap, wealth gap, is going to translate to a skill gap which then eventually is going to exacerbate these problems unless we have public policy that tries to solve for this in a good way.
- [24:13]
A
I agree with you about the optimistic take on things. I think it is an incredible moment in history. If you're ambitious and if you have high agency, I think you can pretty much do anything you want these days, or at least learn how to do anything you want. One thing that I think is a very interesting variable that is not talked enough these days is the idea of universal basic income. Where do you fall on that idea with everything we've talked about in mind?
- [24:43]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. I think universal basic income is going to be more topical and at the same time people will realize we have some of those features already as our fundamental tenets of society today too. So you may have seen Larry Fink came out recently and talked about how AI is probably going to be the single biggest change to the labor force. And what he's trying to enthuse there, actually beyond just that, is this idea of like you got to own a bunch of companies and to counteract that. And then maybe the question of what to own can be solved by having an index fund. Right. So universal basic income can also be a universal basic index fund. And if people can have ownership of the capitalistic outputs of the country by passive investing, is that a kind of a ubi? And you might imagine the Trump account that was set up for children to kind of buy into US equity indices as they're born is a very version of ubi, though not directly a handout. It is meant to give people equal skin in the game of participating in like the growth of the economy. Where I think though, and what you're hinting on with UBI in particular, is an income redistribution game. And once we go down that path, which is how do we redistribute income so that there's fairness that I think is going to just look remarkably different because the way the growth of companies is permitted today makes them almost more in need of having responsibility to the societal code of conduct than ever before. And especially if you believe that your companies are your national defense against external actors. So if you have to sponsor our AI champions, for example, to counteract the trends that otherwise is antagonistic in China and they become more of a quasi sovereign player to some extent, then the role that these companies will have to pay and play for in society is going to look a little bit different than your historic kind of private public partnership models. So I think the great conversations to be had in the future is going to be reimagining what does private public partnership look like? I think it's a sin in the US to talk about that at some level because we stand and we say, hey, we're a capitalistic country, we don't do those kinds of things. We don't do state owned enterprises. But really, I think for anyone who studied history long enough, recognize that the US too is in a spectrum of some kind of private public partnership at all times. When you think about even 2008 with kind of the bailout of the banks, or you think about the joke of the Operation Plunge team buying the stock market when the markets tank too much, these elements are all very much part of what public private partnerships can look like. And I think we're going to see more of these with just the significance of these companies at the national stage that it's going to have for a competitive spirit, just from like a sovereignty perspective as well.
- [27:53]
A
Real quick, we'll get right back to the interview. Just wanted to pop in and say if you like this content, I read a newsletter every single morning called Opening Bell Daily. I cover macro, the stock market, asset prices, why things are going up, why they're going down. And if you want to get that for free, you can sign up at the link in the description. Let's get back to the interview. Well, we've seen the Trump administration sort of step into private markets quite a bit in this last year with various minerals companies or chip companies. So that's been an interesting variable that a lot of public investors have responded to by buying whatever Trump is buying essentially or taking a stake in. So the way to, let's say, play these three mega trends that you highlight, I believe from what you wrote, is bitcoin, right? Is that the ultimate asset here?
- [28:46]
B
It's one of bitcoin's many features that I think makes it so pleasant and likable in that it can fit so many people's narratives into the way that they see the world. But I agree with you that bitcoin is definitely one of them, but it's not the only one. And so the key, I think, is recognizing that if these are the three undeniable truths to which we have to hedge for, you know, demographics issues, income inequality, that's going to get worse, and the fact that cost of labor is going to be distorted by cost of capital. And there's actually a bunch of things you can do to reimagine what modern portfolio theory should look like into the future. And so one of the things I've talked about in the past before as well was the importance of being an ideological investor than, say, the Benjamin Graham's version of the intelligent investor. Well, another way to think about that is instead of being like a Newtonian investor, which is thinking that the world is deterministic and it's zeros and ones and the risk free rate is the risk free rate because of what the T bills represent, the opposite of Newtonian investors, a quantum investor. It's actually just seeing the world through a lens of probability of outcomes that in the past, maybe you didn't ascribe much value to because we were in a system that felt like we could ascribe deterministic outcomes. But the reality is the world is not that antifragile in some sense. And we do have to ascribe room for these types of tail events too. And so by thinking about it from a more probabilistic lens, I think you should be more open minded to owning a lot of more exotic and esoteric assets that historically would have been shunned by your broader pundits of the investment community. So that leads me to sometimes talk about the radical portfolio theory. It's my version of trying to make sense of this world and how to think about the parameters for asset selection in ways that are complementary to otherwise things you probably already own. Because I think a lot of the investors today think that they're diversified by owning a bunch of stocks. And they think that owning this and that through kind of the GameStop era, like gave you enough degrees of freedom for a diversified portfolio. But the reality is it's one giant trade. It's one giant global liquidity trade as long as you're in U.S. stocks. And so the key is, well, how do you get out of the liquidity trade? And what is on the other side of the liquidity trade that can truly be a hedgehog? And Bitcoin, I think, is one of those, and it's a very, well, I think, researched one at this point, that people have gravitated to, but I think there's a whole world of these that are out there that can be discovered. And you've done a great job featuring a variety of these guests over time as I've been a fan to listen to what that could be. It covers anything from farmland to collectibles to Rolex watches to mega yachts that are tax free jurisdiction, it can be anything of these things. But there are certain features that makes it radically different than your fungible kind of liquidity centric assets that I think most people have come to practice investment management in.
- [31:48]
A
Yeah, you're definitely one of the few, if not the only person I know to speak about radical portfolio theory and definitely the only one to write about it. One of the lines you had in your piece which touches on this, as far as what investors should be buying for this macro outlook, you said own what the young will eventually need, own what no government can easily reach, and own what the autonomous economy will actually transact in. So that I think it, you know, logically leads to Bitcoin or maybe even another cryptocurrency. Is there anything else that fits into that? I know you're alluding to some other assets. What else could it be?
- [32:29]
B
Yeah, at the highest metaphysical level, I think what I'm enthusing there really is to invest in yourself. Of course, Bitcoin is a proxy for some of the censorship resistant movement that the young have gravitated towards. But the young has one advantage against the old. It is time they will live much longer. And that means that they have time that the old will not. And that means you have opportunities to invest in ways that the old cannot in yourself into the future that you can live towards where the old will not. And so in that construct, there are so many things that touch upon that sense of agency beyond Bitcoin that I think will be possible in the future. I think data, for example, is one of them. I think right now we just don't know what it means to invest in data because data has been monopolized by the software companies and, and they have been harvesting your data at the expense of essentially the societal kind of good. But the reality is we know data is valuable, we know it's non fungible, we know you are the source that is feeding into these LLMs. And at some point your data is a currency. And how you choose to think about that in the construct of building your own business or actually finding ways to monetize that data, maybe Twitter is one of them. Because there is a way to think about the Content you're producing is being directly monetizable. It could be through writing. But I think in the future there's going to be a world where the idea of people owning their own data and having attribution to then be paid for the contribution you make to society with your own data is valuable. And there is a direct one to one relationship of that service provisioning. I think in that sense there's just a lot of things that open the door towards that effort. And it really is about investing and the ability for you to determine that outcome. I think prediction markets is another great example. Just because people have said prediction markets is illegal doesn't mean it is. And actually a lot of things exist in a spectrum between what is legal and illegal versus what is moral and immoral. And this is a quadrant that doesn't always sit nicely in perfect correlation either. And so with prediction markets, one of the things I've always liked about it as a virtue, regardless of the problems that it has today, and will likely have problems, as all industries do, is that it promotes this idea of being able to be a market participant on information that is entirely human. So you are the beneficiary, the consumer, the producer of the information for which you're able to then monetize upon your edge. And I think that's incredible. The idea that anyone can monetize an edge that is democratically available through information that isn't gated by the automated market makers of the citadels and the virtues of the world is a pretty profound thing. And it's a bet on humanity. So these are all kind of different ways to think about, as you said, what are young people gravitating towards? What are the things that is going to be generally resistant from kind of government overreach, and then having the ability to think about that through a nomadic lens, where it's possible here, it's possible there, it's possible everywhere at any time. And you're not restricted by the rangeness of the physics of being somewhere to be able to do these things.
- [35:55]
A
Wow. It's an amazing way to build a worldview as far as first principles, starting with these building blocks and going from there. I think it's so good. If people wanted to read more and build this viewpoint. Do you have book recommendations that they should be looking into?
- [36:17]
B
Well, let's see. I always tell people to read more fiction than nonfiction, and this is just the general rule that I share, because I think we have a tendency to overread on nonfiction because of the over extension and Abundance of news and media that is constantly like thrust upon us. And everyone's in their own situation room right on X. But the reality is true. I think creative, original thoughts come from reading fiction. And it's the last kind of, I think, place left for people to really practice intention. Because nonfiction can sometimes feel like you're reading for a specific purpose, for which time is of value. But leisure reading is actually when your brain really develops to thinking about big constructs. So to that extent, I was reading a book recently and it was pretty, pretty incredible. It's called When We Cease to Understand the World. And it's written by this Chilean author, philosopher Ben Labutat. And he writes in a genre that is non fiction novel. So what does that mean? That's a bit of an oxymoron. He takes nonfiction historical events, but dramatizes it with a lot of incredible allegories and metaphors and symbols to bring the stories home so that it makes it really rich. So one of the problems that I have when I read this book is like, I'd be fact checking all the time. I'd be like, oh my God, what an interesting guy. He says, this interesting guy did all this stuff, but is it true or did he just make that up? And then I realized, like, wait, why am I fact checking all this stuff? It's just such an incredible story and it's so, like, well written and it's beautiful and like, so what if it's made up a little bit, but like, the general essence is actually being like over delivered with perfection. And I realized we have this bias where, like, if it's fiction, it's not good because it's not trustworthy. But if it's nonfiction, it's facts. So I want to know facts, because facts is what makes me smart and talk about. But hey, facts also doesn't mean it's truths. We know this now. Misinformation as a campaign is one of the tenets of how, you know, the world is suffering. And we have to start practicing some of these muscles away from that notion too. So this book in particular, I think it's great when we cease to understand the world because it is actually about science. It's about a lot of the modern discoveries we take for granted and how to think about that in ways that I think are just so applicable for the future as well as it was for the past. One of the scientists that the book tracks is Haber. And for those who don't know, Haber is often credited as the father of chemical warfare. He was the German scientist that discovered chloric acid and how that could cause severe issues. But at the same time, through that research and the production that he's been able to do through it, he is also called the father of modern agriculture because it was actually then nitrogen fertilizers that he was able to develop on the back of that chemical process. So it's this weird historic thing where you have this person who basically invented modern warfare, who also invented basically the biggest contribution to society having growth because fertilizers is the source of all of our population growth. Is this man evil? Is this man good? That's for you to find out. And you can do that by practicing this part of ambiguity in your brain and seeing the worlds across these lens. And I believe it's only possible through fiction, which is why I recommended a fiction book for you just now.
- [40:00]
A
I mean, I'm a very avid fiction reader. I always have been. And I think the magic of fiction, even like the Harry Potter books, the reason they resonate so much and so globally, is not because they're fact checked in reality, it's because they're truths about ourselves, even if they're not like true in the sense that an AP newswire might be true. Okay, Jeff, where can people find your work online?
- [40:25]
B
You can find me on X, my handle is dgt10011 and I have my substack link there. And I also have a group called the Radical Portfolio Revolution for those who are really interested in engaging more with people who are like minded. It's a Twitter group where I sometimes just post random snippets of things I'm seeing that tie into kind of the mindset of being a Radical Portfolio enthusiast. And if you're interested, you can join that group too and share some banters with us.
- [40:55]
A
Incredible, Jeff. You do amazing work and I'm so glad you wanted to sit down today. So we'll do it again soon.
- [41:01]
B
This was fun. Thanks for having me, Phil.