I hope the beginning of fall is treating you well. In the brisk fall mornings of Wyoming, I have already seen temperatures in the 30s. The change in seasons is a reminder of the changes in life. There cannot be the beginning of a new spring without a cold, deathly winter before it.
I have been trying to hold on to the decent temperatures by hiking on the weekends. When you are so close to the mountains, you have to get out and enjoy them.
Vedauwoo has been my hiking place of choice. Right off I-80 between Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming. People travel from all over the world to strap on a harness, chalk up their hands, and ascend these walls. A spiritual place for the Native Americans, now an outdoor tourism and rock climbing destination. I recently discovered the rich history behind the rock formations and walking trails.
The actual history of Vedauwoo is much older, of course. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans first inhabited the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest area (including Vedauwoo) roughly 8,000 years ago. Several archaeological sites with stone knives and arrowheads suggest the earliest inhabitants of the region were nomadic hunters.
In response to increased European colonization in the east, many Native American tribes began to migrate west. Eastern tribes often displaced other tribes who, in-turn, migrated further west. By the end of the 1700’s the major tribes in the Medicine Bow region were the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, Shoshone, and Ute. The area was particularly associated with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. The Vedauwoo area may have been a sacred place for rituals and “vision quests.”
The Native Americans had life figured out. A hunting and gathering way of life engulfed by nature, with little of the politics and mental illness of modern day. Yet this savage way of life would have never gotten America to where it is today, it worked for them.
White men proclaimed to be more advanced while the Natives were savages, which is false, as each group had different goals. Native Americans wished to continue their way of life, worshiping Mother Earth, while white settlers wanted to build the greatest country the world had ever seen. Both couldn’t coexist.
The Native American sentiment at the time can be summed up in the quote. “We hunt all day and fuck all night, only the white man is dumb enough to think he could improve a system like that.”
The western frontier has a diverse history stretching from Native Americans to white settlement, and if you do the math, it wasn’t that long ago. The transcontinental railroad was only completed in 1869. That is less than a hundred years from when our parents were born.
After Yellowstone, everyone has a dream of owning a ranch. Yet in our previous newsletter, we described how ranch life is not all unicorns and rainbows. Gold and the promise of a fresh start drew covered wagons westward by the thousands. It also doesn’t hurt that the government was giving out free land.
From googling the Homestead Act:
During America’s western expansion, the Homestead Act of 1862 provided 160 acres of public land to any citizen willing to improve it, requiring them to live on the land, build a home, and cultivate crops for five years to gain ownership. This significant piece of legislation encouraged migration to the West and allowed diverse groups, including freed slaves, immigrants, and women, to become landowners.
This is hard to believe, as land prices are at the highest they’ve ever been. Can you imagine signing a piece of paper, and just like a light switch, 160 acres are in your name? There are 10 acres for sale at home for $990,000, with no house on it, not exaggerating.
This worked out decently for some people, but most people struggled to make it work. As people moved away, land was gobbled up by some families that have turned these large ranches into corporations.
I have spoken to a land baron in Wyoming who manages 155,000 acres, including wind turbines, oil, water, and a hell of a lot of cattle. Yes, water. Wyoming is the only state in the union with water rights built into the state constitution. This may seem ass-backwards to us from Minnesota and Wisconsin, but scarcity breeds profitability.
A few folks who would understand how scarcity can breed profitability are those who saw black shit draining out of rocks in Pennsylvania circa 1850 and did nothing about it. If nothing was done, these folks’ fortune washed away like the oil washing down Oil Creek (a tributary of the Allegheny River).
GET OUT AND TRAVEL. Not traveling leaves you with a narrow view of the world, and it has become dangerous. Humans were not meant to scroll TikTok or watch MSNBC/Fox News 24/7.
Americans are fatter and more medicated than ever, and that isn’t because they are going on hikes to places like Veadauwoo. Activity and the outdoors are the best anti-anxiety and antidepressant out there, but no one ever tells you because it’s free. Native Americans figured this out hundreds of years ago by hanging around the most beautiful areas, and you’re watching screens 80% of your day. Change this and see how it changes your life.
https://www.visitlaramie.org/blog/post/vedauwoo-land-of-the-earthborn-spirit/
“I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been. – Wayne Gretsky
One of the biggest mistakes I made on my investing journey was investing in the past, not the future. The GOAT of the hockey world sums it up beautifully in one sentence. Always ask yourself, where is the world going?
It’s easy to look at a company that has dominated an industry for more than a decade and to conclude it would be a smart investment. However, that may not be the case. Capitalism brings death to everything eventually.
There is a reason Mark Zuckerberg created the Metaverse. There is a reason Nvidia began making chips for video games and transformed into building the best AI chips on the planet (for now). If you are not evolving, you are getting left behind.
In some aspects, Elon Musk is the only one looking to the future in multiple industries for Team America: space exploration, electric cars, humanoid robots, and AI. Early this month, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter:
80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.
Let that sink in. The largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the U.S. will derive 80% of the future value of the company from a humanoid robot that has nothing to do with cars at all.
In mid-2024, Musk predicted that Optimus robots would someday turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company, which was equal to more than half of the entire value of the S&P 500 at the time of his comment.
Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
If you are not looking to the future, let this be your wake-up call. Driverless cars, trucks, and robots will be capable of doing most, if not all, jobs.
Musk said in March that Tesla plans to make 5,000 of its Optimus robots this year. In its first-quarter shareholder deck, Tesla said it was on target for “builds of Optimus on our Fremont pilot production line in 2025, with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”
If you don’t enjoy mowing the lawn and doing dishes? No need to worry, your Optimus robot can take care of that. If you are a business owner who can’t find labor for hire? No need to worry, Optimus robots can take care of that with no need for paid time off, health insurance, or a 401k match.
The biggest competition Elon faces comes from China. It is sad that Elon is the only one competing on the global stage for the U.S. in space exploration, electric cars, and human robots, and China is all in on these industries.
With Tesla in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to competition from lower-cost Chinese competitors, an aging lineup of electric vehicles, and Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric and involvement with the Trump administration, the world’s richest person has been trying to convince Wall Street to look to the future.
I am not trying to hide the elephant in the room of Tesla’s sales troubles occasionally, but it is embarrassing that we have to convince Wall Street to look to the future when you can’t lead the world by looking at the past. Profits are made from what the future holds, and I don’t even work on Wall Street.
It is even more embarrassing that some people in MAGA have made comments about deporting Elon Musk. American technology is declining at a rapid pace, and you think it would be smart to deport the only guy on America’s team keeping us relevant?
Elon silenced the haters, as he is one of the best at it, by purchasing $1 billion of Tesla stock last month. Politics aside, Elon is fighting for America, and we need the world’s first future trillionaire on our side.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/musk-tesla-value-optimus-robot.html
Something we often hear in American media, especially from the China hawks, is that we are already at war with China. We are also at war with Russia. WWIII began in 2008 when Russia began purchasing gold on a large scale to diversify its reserves and avoid the dollar. Avoiding the dollar allowed sanctions to have zero impact on the Russian economy, which is what we are seeing today.
In my Money and Banking class, my professor put a graph on the projector of a list of nations’ GDPs. The point was, China’s growth is cute and all, but look at the GDP. In GDP terms, the U.S. still has a higher GDP than China by about $10 trillion.
With this thought process, we pound our chest, screaming to whoever will listen that we are still the sole world superpower. What you never hear from American economists is the term PPP GDP.
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) GDP represents a country’s total economic output after adjusting for differences in the cost of living across countries.
PPP GDP is what matters in war. How far does $1 get you in purchasing military weapons and equipment? For example, if the U.S. builds one missile for $10, while China builds 10 missiles for $10, both countries add $10 of GDP, but if you’re fighting a war, China obviously wins.
This is what we are seeing in the Ukraine-Russia War. Wars are the most expensive thing a nation can embark on, and high costs and slow production are how you lose. After the Iran-Israel conflict, the U.S. used 15-25% of THAAD missiles in 12 days. You can’t withstand a month-long conflict using 15% of missiles in such a short period, let alone a multi-year war. Probably why the Pentagon announced last week, it is pushing missile suppliers to double production.
So, if WWIII has been going on without military deaths (for now), the graph above highlights that PPP GDP for the BRICS is $70.5T vs. $52.35T for the US and NATO. After reading that, us chest-beating Americans should maybe rethink being the sole superpower in the world, especially militarily.
Here’s the point: With BRIC PPP GDP 140% greater than US and western allies PPP GDP, for the west to have even a chance of winning any “Great Power Competition” (let alone an actual war), it must massively ramp up its industrial and energy production capabilities…but doing so is likely to drive inflation that will quickly blow up the bond market that underpins the west’s existing (highly financialized) GDP.
The only way the West wins this power struggle is to print our way out of it. All roads lead to gold and BTC, as any problem the West faces, the only solution is to print our way out of it. This is at the heart of the dollar debasement trade that you will continue to hear about for years to come.
The dollars printed will need to be allocated to massively ramping up industrial and energy production capabilities. This will also massively ramp up inflation, but Trump has never been afraid to RUN IT HOT!
The impact on the dollar and the economy is only half of it. The U.S. also has major inefficiencies in military spending. The highly touted Patriot missile defense system can cost over $400 million, with a cost of $4 million per missile, and last month, the Patriot systems stopped only 6% of Russian missiles fired at Ukraine. Switzerland just ordered five Patriot Defense Missile Systems, with an expected delivery date of 2028. I would be pissed to spend $2 billion on defense systems that are three years out and will be ineffective at the time of delivery.
How can you remain competitive militarily with costs this high and production so slow? China builds 900 times more drones than the rest of the world combined, and you can buy a drone for. 0.01% the cost of a Patriot system, while these drones fly so low they can’t be detected. Do you see the problem now?
It doesn’t help that the U.S. has built the largest military industrial complex blob to ever exist, who go by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, to name a few. China’s concern is building the most badass equipment as cheaply and as fast as possible, while the U.S. Congress is concerned about how fat a bonus the CEO of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon will get.
Are you still pounding your chest as the sole superpower of the world? Well, how about noting that the only strength in NATO is the U.S., as European countries are on the verge of IMF bailouts, and as debt levels are so high, the world questions how they will continue to exist. Great timing, as China now has India on the BRICS team, and the PPP of India is greater than all other NATO allies combined. India is the third most powerful country in the BRICS.
The attack on Qatar last month by Israel is not getting the attention it deserves; it’s a BIG deal. Qatar is a highly advanced Middle East nation with beautiful cities and a U.S. ally. Israel taking it upon themselves to bomb a modern city with densely populated civilians to kill Hamas leaders was just plain stupid. If you are an ally of the U.S., you now have a creeping doubt in your mind that the U.S. will be able to stand strong to protect you, as the U.S.-funded Israel has free rein to bomb whoever, wherever, and whenever they want.
Most people don’t realize how long it will take to reverse the loss of this power competition. We are talking decades.
https://fftt-treerings.com/tree-rings/fftt-tree-rings-august-29-2025/
Lifestyle:
After 30 years and trying multiple different regimens, I have found the best skincare routine of my life: copper peptides and tallow.
Copper peptides act as signaling molecules that trigger the skin to produce more collagen and elastin, promoting skin repair, increasing firmness and elasticity, reducing fine lines and wrinkles, and acting as antioxidants to protect against free radical damage. They also have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties, support wound healing, and can help improve skin tone and texture
I use the peptides first as soon as my face is dry, after a shower or washing my face, followed by Meraki Blue tallow. This tallow is made of all-natural ingredients, including methylene blue, beef tallow, and coconut oil.
Make fun of me all you want about my skin care routine, but lie to somebody else if you are going to tell me it doesn’t make you feel good when someone assumes you are younger than you are.
Investments:
Cash - $20k No change. Earning interest in Bitcoin via the River App.
Pinstripes PNST: It’s been a month as a Pinstripes investor. They indeed filed for Chapter 11 to restructure and sell assets. Eight locations have been closed while eight remain open. I increased my position to 220,000 shares, therefore, I own 1% of this company. When they filed for Chapter 11 at the end of September, a buyer was already in place. While Pinstripes is not supposed to announce this until mid to late October, when the bankruptcy hearing is finalized and assets have been sold off. I am sitting on the edge of my chair waiting for that announcement.
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