Please treat this more as an outline of things I'm thinking about after talking with @profplum99 this morning, longer article to follow after I think more

Mike, if there's anything here you want taken down, let me know.

Need to say thank you first to Mike, when I first started taking a deeper dive into finance, I never thought someone on his level would read what I write and then care enough to jump on a call with me

That means an incredible amount to me, and I take it seriously

I can say the high level of work Mike has done on bitcoin, tether, dollars is on par with any briefing I've received on a strategic level threat

What bothers me is I agree with his assessment, and that leaves me in a personal struggle in several ways

First issue:

I started out sharing investment notes, but I take the fact you are here and reading this as seriously as I did when I lead men overseas who depended on me to make the right call

100% we all make our own choices, but I want to be right since I invest my own capital

This comes from a very painful lesson when I thought I was doing the right thing in 2017 only to lose $500k as an LP

I will never invest in something where the GP isn't invested alongside and I don't fully understand exactly how that investment fits into my framework

Which is how this all started, it was driven by a need to be better as an individual investor and understand how to be the best steward I could be of my own capital so what does that look like with this information?

Second issue:

Thread yesterday wasn't meant to be nihilistic

Friends are struggling, calling me about having to arrest a dude on a felony charge for $5k who got laid off while my buddy's wife got laid off too and I'm like this is justice?

$100B forgiven in PPP loans no problem

So starting to understand what the Fed and Wall Street have been doing for over the last decade and mixing it with our politician's willful and decadent abdication of their duties as citizens for personal gain leads to a shattering world view

My friends and I are not teenagers in bike helmets from Target protesting injustice, we have years of training and money put into us to make us who we are and seeing the gleeful decadence of the elite at the expense of people you swore to protect gives you a crisis of conscience

When this crisis of conscience collides with your world view being shattered it is painful and one of two things happens in my experience

People are radicalized or they put their spear down and opt out

This is why Politicians normalizing political violence is so dangerous

Normalizing political violence isn't happening in a vacuum, it is happening in an environment where people are in deep pain, doesn't matter if it is BLM from this summer, or people at the Capitol

Their pain came from the same place, all of us are struggling and feel abandoned

We all feel it, and some of us chose to walk away thinking it was more honorable (myself included) to opt out to bitcoin

It is absolutely not fair or right that this burden has fallen to our generation

It is ok to not be ok with it, but it is still our responsibility

Because what is the other choice?

I can promise you after a decade on five continents there is no where to hide, if you think it will be bad in the US you don't want to see what good looks like in the border region of Sudan and Eritrea so we are all in this together

Third thing:

Checking out isn't as fun as you think, speaking from experience, I walked away after 39 months straight in high threat operations

Turns out you can only go to the gym at 10am so many times before you start writing about needing a mission https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/you-need-a-mission-in-life

So what does that mean for me after the briefing this morning?

One of my favorite movies as a kid was the Rocketeer

There's a point where the popular Hollywood actor turns out to be a Nazi spy, and tries to get the American gangster to turn a blind eye to evil to make money

And the American gangster tells the Nazi spy,

"I may not make an honest buck, but I'm 100% American"

This is the point I am at, @profplum99 laid it out, and I REALLY don't like any of it

I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do yet, I don't like making emotional decisions

Fifth thing:

My entire focus is on making good decisions for my own capital to build wealth and live well

I firmly believe there is a right way to do that, and I also know I cannot let fear of the unknown or risks paralyze me from moving forward into uncertainty

So the questions I really need to answer is what does my vision of living well look like, and how much money do I need to feel like I am on the right path to building wealth?

And how much do I really want to contribute to the problem which bothers me so much?

And just as important, if I don't like the game the Fed and Wall Street are playing with the market and housing now, and I don't like what I'm seeing with bitcoin and crypto now, then where does that leave me?

Because I may have gotten off the wall, but I am 100% American

I want to build wealth the right way, do long term things with long term people, and avoid people of low moral character

Which leads to the final thing, I'm getting back in the game

I'm not sure how yet, but I didn't sit out the GWOT, and sure as hell am not sitting out the greatest struggle of our life

Will be back out there making a difference because that is who we are

Longer piece to follow