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[Music]
Hello, and welcome to the Gold Goats & Dunns Podcast for October 26, 2023.
My name is Tom Lillongo and we have a lot to talk about. It is episode 159 and I have with me Tom Bodrovich of Palisades Gold Radio.
And Tom's, you know, I've been on Tom's show a number of times and it was interesting when Sean Newman brought Alex Krainer and I up to Edmonton to do the show in Lloyd Minster back in June.
Tom made the trip up for dinner in Edmonton one night. We got to meet in person.
And we had all the great time and he told his story about how he wound up where he is.
And I was saying to myself, that's just a great story. And I want to talk about it.
So Tom is usually the host of his podcast, which he does a fantastic job.
And I thought, wouldn't it be fun to have him on as the guest and just talk about that, that kind of thing,
because we both have a kind of weird elliptical way of having gotten to where we are in this life.
So Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time out and doing this. I know you just got done doing another interview because you work far harder at your podcast and I do it mine.
Thank you, Tom and welcome to the show.
Happy to be here, Tom. And you know, this is this is the first time that I've been on the other side of the mic per se as an interview.
I never say that I'm an expert in anything. So I've kind of shied away from being interviewed, but out of all the conversations that you and I've had both offline and online, I'm sure this will make for an excellent chat.
Yeah, it was just really interesting. And I was listening to you to talk about how you wound up over a policy is already out.
You know, I hadn't even considered, you know, the path, right? And so if I go back over it, I'm trying to remember now, I hate to say this, but I remember the story being really interesting.
I remember involving the oil industry because obviously it's Northern Canada, but I don't remember much of anything else. And they just, to me, I know that when I look at my history, I got my bio that I put out to people and they're all like, damn, this guy is better than interesting life.
And I'm like, well, not really. We never ever think our own lives are particularly interesting until you start telling the story and everybody's like, dude, are you kidding me?
So I guess, and the point of that, of me wanting to talk to you about this this way is that it's kind of an important lesson to talk about how we never really think about, you know, when we're kids, we have an idea about what we think our lives are going to look like.
And then we get into our 20s and we think, are we happy? I even a better idea. And then you get like me in my 50s and like, never in a million years would have thought this is where I would wind up.
And yet this seems like the most natural thing in the world. And when I listen to you and I watch your other shows, it seems to me that you seem to be in a place that you would rather never, you wouldn't never want to be doing anything else I'm doing right now.
And that's what I got from when I heard you talk, you know, over dinner that night.
Well, I think it's an interesting kind of idea to consider, right? I mean, to give everybody some context, I'm 37 now.
I have done many different things in my life, you know, growing up, I had a lot of different interests. I was always reading always just kind of really a nerd, an auto die doc that had many different interests.
And when I look back and I try to be a mentor to some younger friends of mine.
They're really worried about finding their passion, finding something that they're that they want to do. I never set out, as you said, set out for a specific plan in my life.
I never laid out a specific plan, career path, anything like that.
But I think I think it's interesting to to step back and think about it the way that that I do maybe because instead of setting out a specific area that I wanted to work in.
I ended up just following what gave me energy, what gave me some type of intrinsic motivation and intrinsic energy and drive to to end up exploring.
So when I came out of high school, I really pushed myself really hard academically and got into engineering.
I love taking things apart, figuring out how things work. I love the idea of being an engineer until I actually got into it.
I hated being stuck in a classroom. I was out of all the people I was exposed to.
I was the only one that actually knew how to build anything that had an idea of actually working with my hands and different types of materials.
And having to do the prerequisites, no offense of chemistry. I didn't want anything to do with that.
Being forced to learn that stuff is not something I was very interested in.
I came out of my first year of engineering feeling kind of lost in intending to go back.
Got into the the oil field in Alberta here because I needed a good paying summer job to be able to support myself through through university.
And I never ended up going back because once I got into the oil field, I got into.
And I was like, say, through through chance, I was exposed to kind of the welding side of things.
And I found out, oh, you know, these these blue collar guys, these welders are making how much money.
And they don't only have to do how much schooling.
So, you know, just comparing the two of saying, OK, if I go through five or four more years at that point of engineering school, I'm going to be X amount in debt.
You know, not having made money during that time, basically, other than to be able to cover my costs.
And I can actually start building things and learn these real world skills and seems far more interesting and motivating to me to take this path.
And I can come out and be done with this in far fewer school school days, let's say, which I just hated.
And end up, you know, being, let's say, on my way with my life earlier, with less debt, that ended up kind of being the calculus that led me to not go back to engineering.
Well, it's fascinating. I'm listening to you saying you use the phrase, follow your passion.
And then you went, these welders make how much? And I'm sitting here thinking to myself, the guy who should be interviewing you shouldn't be me. It should be Mike Rowe.
Yeah, because you and I've talked about that before. Like so, you know, Mike Rowe makes this, the mixes point all the time is like, follow your passion, follow your, the guy, you know, all the guys I met on dirty jobs, he says this all the time.
Like none of those guys followed their passion to, you know, being a, you know, a pig shit farmer or whatever and figuring out a way to monetize pig shit and, and all the other stuff like now or human sewage or whatever it is.
But they make a great life and they have a great family and they have these great, you may have these great lives that they go to work, they do their thing and then they have the rest of their time to themselves and they're probably all going to retire at a reasonable age and and continue doing it.
And it's like, we've been sold this kind of weird bill of goods about that. And I know now from, from my perspective, I had a similar moment after my first year of college. I came home thinking I was going to be a chemical engineer.
Because this, because chemistry was the only, you know, class in high school that I actually had any fun in.
And it wasn't because we got the blow things up either. I didn't learn how to do that until I got to college.
And, you know, but I came home after that and I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing here.
And then I, and I didn't even, I was so dumb, I didn't even realize you could get a degree in chemistry as opposed to chemical engineering. I'm like, why would you study chemistry if you weren't going to physically apply it and do something with it, right?
And I'm like, oh, and I looked at the requirements for a chemistry degree versus a chemical engineering degree and I went, yeah, I can do that.
That was just that simple. And it was mostly because that afforded me the time to go and pursue other things that I actually wanted to pursue.
Because at my heart, I'm an artist and a musician and a writer, not a chemist, right?
So, you know, I had that moment and then I was able to, in many ways, you know, my parents were willing to pay for most of my school.
I had some savings, which I wanted to be deploying. And I came out of school with a little bit of dad, but, you know, my parents took care of most of it.
And it was mostly my dad that wanted that because he wanted, because he wanted on his tombstone that he sent all of his kids to college.
And he worked his entire life to do that.
And so, you know, from my perspective, I kind of, you know, okay, I'll just pay it forward.
And they were willing to pay for the degree. That was the degree that they wanted me to, that they were willing to, that was the compromise for us.
And that's what we did.
But I can tell you that when I got out of college and I graduated and then I got my first job in the industry, literally, in town, the Friday before commencement, my parents were coming into town and my mother was freaking out that I was going to be indigent.
That's a story that kept going until the day she died.
Or even after she died. And, you know, I was never a passion.
It was just the thing he did in order to fuel the other things that you wanted to do with your time.
Right?
So I don't know if that resonates with you at all, but that's what I, that was part of my path.
Well, I mean, I think we've all gotten different advice through our lives in, you know, older, older people, let's say, give you some advice of, oh, don't take your passion and make it work.
And I can completely understand that sentiment, you know, I, at the end of the day, I think I, I love building things and I still, you know, having completely switched roles.
I couldn't think of two worlds that are, that are more opposed than being a pipe welder to being a podcaster.
I always say to people, well, it was a really easy transition, you know, working with metal to talking about metals, super easy transition.
And I think in some ways, you have to service parts of what you're passionate about.
Because otherwise you're just going to hate your life, your work life.
So to, to kind of, I guess, close the loop on that thread, as I was learning more about economics and stuff like that, I ended up going to a entrepreneurship camp in Lithuania of all places.
And I remember the, one of the best pieces or one of the quotes that sticks with me the most from that was a previous attendee.
We had dinner with him and he said, it doesn't necessarily matter what you learn from the instructors at this, at this camp.
It's the connections that you make that are going to be the most important.
And, you know, here I am 10 plus years later, and that is absolutely the most, the most important thing that I took from that, that time in Lithuania.
And so, as I was welding, it's, it can be a fairly repetitive job.
And I would just crush podcasts and audio books constantly for 10 plus hours a day.
I'm listening to everything at 1.5 speed.
And I couldn't find enough material for a long time to be able to kind of satisfy that, that knowledge thirst that I had.
In a way, that's how I was able to form this basis of knowledge that I have.
I think I know just enough about, let's say, the metals industry or economics to have a conversation about it.
But as I said, I've never professed to be, you know, the person that knows all about it.
And especially on the show, I try to, to be able to have conversations with people from every day to day.
And I think that we, every data point so that we can try and triangulate where we are in the world.
Rather than only, you know, listening to one particular person or two particular people.
I think, you know, there's, there's different conversations that I've listened to, to you have in the past where, and I would, I would use your conversation with, or your recent conversation with Brent Johnson, being a perfect example of that.
The importance of thinking about things, you know, secondarily or the tertiary outcomes of some of these situations.
That, I think, is the, the more important piece of having these conversations is not taking things on face value.
But what happens next and the downstream actual effects of, let's say, demand for the USD or whatever it's going to be.
Well, again, I think that's a very important point. It's one of the things that I learned very quickly when I started to go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what was wrong.
I'm being honest with you, like, you know, I told the story before, like I came home from work one day.
I was working on O'Cala and, and the oil reclamation, the waste oil reclamation industry where you take, you know, go around, take waste, motor oil, clean it up and then resell it as a number five fuel.
And for those few in the oil industry, you know exactly what the different rates of fuel are.
Number two is gasoline. Number two is on road diesel. Number two is two B is heavy diesel. Well, well, well, number five fuel is basically cleaned up motor oil, which is a very good fuel if it doesn't have too much water and it doesn't have too much dirt in it.
And I think it's number five fuels, right? Number four fuel. Oh, God, this little, a little, it doesn't matter. I came home one day after taking the world's smallest political quiz.
And I said, honey, I'm going to turn to Camille, I'm going, honey, I know what our problem is. We're libertarians because I've been angry at the world for so long that I had nothing fit for me, right? And then it was down that.
And once I found something that wasn't bullshit, you know, even if there's, you know, there's limitations to those arguments of, you know, there's limitations to Austrian economics of this limitation of libertarianism doesn't matter.
At that moment in time, you're like, oh, my God, I found something that is real. I found something I can hang my hat on and I cannot be ashamed of being a part, you know, attaching to myself as a person.
Now, as an ethos with which to live my life around or to structure my life and think of myself in terms of.
And that just led me down that path. And so then I wound up like you in a different way doing exactly the same thing. I would sit there and listen to podcast it for podcast.
I spent five and a half years away from home working on a, you know, working for a startup company down in South Florida, working on a novel nickel, not electrical, nickel, boron.
And which I'm very proud of because I, you know, I crushed it and I made it into something that was insanely great for what it was in terms of process improvement, you know, just blew the entire industry away.
But during that time, what was I doing? I was listening to, I couldn't find enough material to listen to my four and a half hour drive home every week.
From the me since the two from this place, from that place, Jim Papalvo's news hour, this guy's news hour, I listen to everything.
You know, I would listen to all of this into all of human action. I listen all of man economy and state. I listen all this stuff.
And like I couldn't get enough of it so that by the time I left that job or that job left me. I had now a wealth of knowledge that what became my, what that was my hobby.
And then something I could probably start to do professionally and that transition was fraught with many, many dangers and took a while in order to turn itself into something.
But it had, but it also had the same simultaneously had been bogging both, you know, kind of, you know, just wrote a bog that nobody read.
And then I had a, a, a blog about hockey and became a prominent hockey blogger at that moment in time.
And just a discipline of writing every day. You need to teach that yourself and you teach that, you know, if you show up to work every day.
So for a while, I was literally doing two full time jobs. Right. As a research chemist or one man research department and the one man, you know,
I was kind of crazy and then still trying to be a father and a husband, which is insane. And I was, but I only was able to do that because I worked for, I was away from home.
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one, one word that you mentioned there to me that is extremely important is discipline.
You, you can't, you can't do jobs like this. If you have no discipline. And I think, I mean, I love the, I love the phrase from Jocco Willink says that discipline is freedom.
Because really, if I, if I have the discipline to crush this out and, and do, do the work that I need to do during the week or whatever, then I have the ability to go spend the rest of my time around that schedule the way I want.
But, you know, as, as you and I are both talking about spending hours upon hours upon hours, learning about economics or whatever it is going to be, you, you definitely have to have some passion for those, those topics.
And, and definitely for, for myself, following any, anything like that in my life that gave me energy that was intrinsically motivating.
Is, is how I ended up, let's say, let's say where I am today, right?
I guess the other, the other side of my life, I, I, I claim to be a half time podcaster, half time athlete. I, I race motorcycles.
I've raised motorcycles for probably the better part of 15 years of my life now.
Everybody always tells me to be careful, everything like that. But that's, that's something that has literally taken me all over the world. And, you know, I've, I've, I've had the, the great fortune to in at, at times, kind of, combine to, of my passions here.
You know, I literally on, I'm, we're speaking today on Thursday, on Sunday afternoon, I just got back from Africa, where I ended up doing a, a 10 day motorcycle trip with Francis Hunt, the market sniper, who somebody I have, I've interviewed several times.
We rode literally across Africa. So we, in a way, we combined, you know, work, podcasting, our love for motorcycles, our love for adventure.
I had never met Francis in person, and I showed up at the airport. He picked me up. I went and got my bike. And we went on a, on a 10 day adventure through South Africa, Botswana and into Zimbabwe, where you can see the real world repercussions of,
the insane printing that that government has, has gone through in the last, in the last several years here.
That, that, that's, that's, that's, that's fantastic to hear that's money. That's because I'm going to be on with Francis to show tomorrow, right?
So, one of the, one of the things that's, that's funny about this week is that I've terribly overscadred myself.
But, you know, Francis, and I had, you know, I had set this thing up with Francis a couple weeks ago, and his staff reached out to me to, to be on again, which is great.
And I love Francis. He's fantastic. And that's just, it sounds to me like, all I'm hearing here is, I look, so Tom just did his, you know, a peer trip of, you know, bicycle across Africa.
Neil Perk was an avid bicycleist and world traveler and, and the first bookie wrote was about, by, bicycling across Africa. And like, how cool is that?
Dude, like, that's, that's fantastic. And, you know, and did you ever think that you would be on a motorcycle trip, through South Africa, doing basically a top gear special with, you know, the market sniper.
Like, you know, I can, no, but this free, it's fantastic. But that's the kind of thing that if you leave yourself open, kind of to where the world is going to take you.
And, you know, you, you're, I think your passions are really discovered in the slides. Right. As opposed to, you know, you don't know what your passions are when you're a kid.
Do you think you have an idea? But you don't really, you know, and then there's a, I think that's the whole point of, of what we're talking about is to end up following those things that give you energy.
Rather than, you know, saying, I'm going to put myself in this little box. And that as, I mean, thinking about it as, as, as funny as it is, being, being, let's say, anywhere from 14 to 18 years old and thinking, I'm going to make this one decision for the rest of my life.
We can apply that to many different, many different avenues that are relevant to, to today's, let's say, cultural context, but putting yourself in that box at that time is to me just, just absolutely crazy.
It's, it's funny. It really is. And, you know, I've talked to my wife about this at length and I've talked about it even to us, works in here on the podcast here and there.
And we just kind of looked at each other and what, how did, you know, we made decisions that were kind of conscious, you know, building a house out here in North Florida, getting goats doing that.
And, you know, and then realizing at times like, okay, that was not a great decision or this was a good decision or wasn't a good decision, but it was, but all those decisions, whether they were good, battering, different led you to where you are today.
And one of the things that was very freeing for me emotionally was getting to that, getting past the anger of seeing the world as this unfair thing, right.
And seeing the system around us is this unfair thing and realizing that it is an unfair thing and then being angry about it and not understanding that you still have agency to navigate your way through it.
And once you make the kind of the emotional flip, and I know I did this consciously, I had to do a consciously, this is the way my brain operates, which is I had to say, no, no, dude.
I had to reframe this. Now, you are exactly where you are because the decisions that you made previous to these moments and no one forced you into any other path than yourself.
Once you take full responsibility for yourself like that, all of a sudden, the rest of your life becomes a lot easier to process because now you're capable of looking back on yourself and go, but shit, that didn't work.
That didn't work. That was a mistake. These people are a row massive apologies. These people are, you know, and then you just go through the whole thing. I don't know if you've, you've like hit that moment in your life or not, but I know I did.
And I think I probably hit that point right in my early 30s.
So, well, I mean, the idea of it's kind of funny talking about these, let's say keywords or buzzwords of responsibility, discipline, responsibility is something that I think the world needs a hell of a lot more of, right?
If you are in a place that you don't like in a way, I mean, we can talk about determinism. We can talk about all these different things, but, you know, there is a good amount of your own volition that comes into getting you into that position, you know, granted, we were both had the, had the fortune of being born, being born, you know, Caucasian in North America.
That is a great, absolutely. That's a great step forwarder class. Absolutely. Yeah.
But at the same time, when I step back and think about what has gotten me to this point is just the idea of taking responsibility at, as you said, pivotal times in my life and saying, I might not have all the information, but this is the best direction that I think is, is,
or this is the, the direction that I'm going to is that I'm going to be best served by taking at this time and say, I can change my mind if I, if new information presents itself.
And I mean, that's a, that's another great topic to kind of touch on is the idea of being able to change your mind having that flexibility is extremely important.
Yeah, I mean, it has to be really in a world where we, you know, I mean, the, the older I get the more I do this, right, I keep saying I come up with, you know, catch words and phrases and whatnot that rips that, you know, as a, as a media, quote unquote, media personality.
You, you know, you want to see it into the zeitgeist and, you know, I, and one of those is, is, um, no God now that I lose myself is the, you, oh, shit, I think I did lose it.
Um, prompt me again, Tom, and I'll try and make, make, make not get lost in my own positives.
We're, we're talking about personal responsibility and these, these kind of sayings that you've come up with.
Yeah, and one, and one of those things is, is now trying to think about what it was. And it's that, you know, you, I know it's, I know it's gone now. It's really annoying when this happens because my brain is a friggin elliptical.
But it, what's, you say these, you come up with these ideas that, that garner where you are at a particular moment in your life and you're like, okay, um, yeah, I'm not, I'm no one's victim.
I'm, I'm going to deal with, with what comes my way. And, and, you know, you try and, and part that to people so that, well, taking responsibility for everything you've done so that you can move forward with a sense of calm and a sense of,
of, of, again, I think the, the, the, the current word of those days is agency, right, called free will it's agency, right, it is what it is. And, you know, we, all we really have to do is realize that once we take responsibility for ourselves and our behavior that way,
the clarity is, is, is, is stunning. And, you know, you, every time you sit down to start another project, whether it's, you know, turn on the open up zoom and start a podcast or I start writing another blog post or I write an issue of the newsletter or whatever it is, or I get behind the drum set,
I do it with a sense of, like, I chose this moment, I chose this path and no one is, no one, as many, as much as people think that they're going to like make me pay a toll to do all of these things, ultimately you don't have to, you can get around every, almost every toll booth that they put up in front of us.
And just, you know, you're not a victim, like, so go that forth and do the thing.
Well, yeah, I think that's, that's great advice because as soon as you, you know, stop being a victim or seeing the world that way and take that responsibility, then, then I think you have the ability to obviously have more choice in your life, but, but that's a, that's a very freeing thing.
You know, you and I have talked before about the ideas of, you know, quote unquote, being a prepper or being prepared for some of these financial economic outcomes that everybody that has taken 10 minutes to learn anything about this time in history, these are eventualities.
There are a handful of eventualities that are going to play out here and if you buy some gold and some land and you have some ability to have, you know, be independent of let's say, having to get every single one of your meals for the next week from the grocery store.
You're not going to be at all worse off for doing that and that's, that's something that that I have said on on my show many times is, I don't necessarily want to be put in a box of being a conspiracy theorist or being a prepper or any of these things.
I don't think, I don't think that's helpful.
Again, being open minded to learning new information about many of those topics does lend itself to, you know, being kind of conspiratorially minded, but when you take that responsibility of saying, I'm going to, let's say, have some type of ability to filter my own water or have my own power source, whatever it is.
Again, I think that's, that's very freeing and, and again, to go back to my recent trip in South Africa, you know, even the really nice, very first world parts of South Africa that I visited.
We visited a lot of very poor parts.
I would say those people in a way are more free because they have the ability to make a fire, whatever they're going to do, they're not reliant on scom shutting off power to their million dollar house and not having internet, not having lights, not having water, having their food start to spoil just because they have to do load shedding and they don't have enough power to actually provide the entire city or the entire country.
Reliable power 24/7 right now it is a, it is a thing. I mean, when, when we started the, the process out here and, and we didn't end up anywhere close to where I envisioned us 20 years ago, right, we started building out on 35.
It literally is this is the 20th, we remove, we, this is now about the 20th anniversary of us moving into this place, because I sold my housing in Gainesville right around this time in October of 2003.
And, you know, the house, so we, we moved in before we got in our certificate of occupancy, but we had already passed like the pre-final inspection. So we have full power, you know, we hadn't finished the siding on the house yet.
We got the winter finishing siding, we got our cert, cert of occupancy in early January, 2024, our 22,000, for sorry. But I, you know, all these grandiose plans about what we're going to do and yada, yada, yada.
But I was also working at the university at the time making 35 grand a year. So the whole structure of the thing was, this is all we could afford. This is all we were ever going to afford because I didn't see another path for us.
So that meant, yeah, we put in a wood burning stove because I got, you know, I've got 13 acres of hardwoods and why would I ever want to go, why would I want to be rely on clay electric to provide heat for my home?
Like that's right there. Like what are you going to do, right?
But so you start thinking in those terms and you, I weeded the houses as a skill building exercise.
Now that's the way I viewed it, like I now know how to do things that I would have never done otherwise. And I don't need to have the skills today because I'm, you know, I'm better, I'm a better blogger and podcaster that I am a home builder, right?
Apparently because the market is proven that, right? But you also don't have the same amount of reps in as a home builder as you do writing blogs.
I am, you know, this places mine at this point, right? So I did it all right.
And so, but at the same time, you know, if I had children that were of that, of that bent that wanted to learn how to do things. I had children that were more like you than my daughter, then I would be teaching them those skills and we would be out on the weekends, you know, building a goat shelter or doing this or doing that together.
My daughter is not interested in that. That's fine. But she knows that the skills are there. My friends all know that the skills are there. You know, I've maintained my, you know, my body well enough to know that I can get back into shape and do the things that I needed to do them.
Like it's all still there, right? And that's what's important is the experiences of having done all those things that then inform the work you do today, even in a completely orthogonal idiot.
And that's, I think, the, the park that, you know, you don't realize the skills you're building and why you're building them are, you know, they're going to be applicable in so many other areas of your life. So, you know, that's what knowledge is for, right?
Well, I think that's a really interesting point because the idea that, you know, being only in one lane services your life to me is, it doesn't make for me a full life.
Like if I look back at all of the different things that I've done, my, my advice to younger guys like some of the young guys we had on this trip with us, I was telling this 19 year old guy, you know,
do several different things that bring you energy that bring you passion and you're going to build confidence from, let's say, lane X that is going to translate into lane Y or, or skills or whatever that that might be, right?
And when, when I, you know, I never necessarily had any, any media training I had, but before, you know, when I was a little kid, my, my parents forced me into a program in western Canada here called 4H.
And as much as I hated having to do public speaking, boy, has that ended up kind of servicing serving serving my, my life later on, right?
But I, I did small engines, I did outdoorsmen, I did all of these different programs that, that really have added up to, to the, let's say, the diversity in the skill set that I now have.
And your ability to, and there's, there's another layer to that as I had this comes up in conversation all the time when extra white and I strategize just talk, talk about anything.
And it, you know, our past experiences give us the opportunity and the ability to analyze balance sheets, business models, this, all of these things that come, that come up, right?
In this, in this business that we're doing, because you have these other experiences.
So you learned how to, I, you know, I worked on cars with my dad on the weekends because, you know, he had to keep a jolopy running to, to come you back and forth from, you know, the safe space we had up in upstate New York, well, he went to the South Bronx every day to be a policeman.
But he wasn't, he couldn't drive decent cars 60 miles each way every day because if he did, they just steal him.
Right? So we spent how much of, of how many weekends of my teenage life that I spend working on cars with my dad, I hate working on cars.
I hated working on cars when we did it together, but I did it with him anyway because my dad had to and, you know, and I learned it.
But what did I learn? I learned, well, you know, yeah, sometimes you spend your time working for other people sometimes, you know, but at the same time you did internalize some of those ideas about how an internal combustion engine works, how this works, how that works.
You know, and so you have this intrinsic, whether you realize it or not, you have this intrinsic bullshit meter across so many different little disciplines.
And then, and that just, and if you're listening, if you keep your mind open and you're listening and you're not day dreaming, all of a sudden, you don't realize, oh my god, I know about, I know about all this stuff.
And I didn't know before. And yeah, you may be more in, in my case, you may have been more interested in, you know, what time signature, just what time signature some forget earthworks track was billberver's earthworks track was in.
And they couldn't, and I couldn't figure out how to count it. And I spent an hour figuring it out. But reality is, is it important? I don't know. I learned it. And maybe it, it was something else that again, once being applicable sometime in the future.
And you know, realize that you're training yourself for the job. You know, we train ourselves with the jobs we wind up in if we're, if we're open to it, but I think what I'm hearing, I'm hearing, you know, that's why you move through the life doing various things.
While you're doing that, you're training yourself. You don't know what you're doing, but you are. And I didn't realize like for the years that I was playing, you know, stupid card games that I was training myself to be able to do multi variant,
so I was in real time of threats of opponents. Wow. And then you realize it. And then I go, huh? That's why I'm so good at this particular thing. Or that's why I seem to be this good at it. I don't know that I'm good at it. I mean, people tell me I'm good at it. But that doesn't mean I am. Right. It just means that I'm better at than they are.
Not because I am. There's nothing intrinsic about that. It's not you go involved in this, right? So I don't know. It's just it's a very interesting thing. I think what I'm hearing from you, Tom is that by doing all these things, it's it made it helps you to become the guy who owns the podcast of effect owns the podcast that allows you to continue on the learning track by bringing the knowledge to you is supposed to have into your mind.
That's the thing. I very much look at myself as a professional researcher and question asker. That's the that's the biggest part of my job. And, you know, many people, I mean, even this afternoon, I interviewed Danielle D Martino booth and she said, you know, as big of a personality as she is, I feel like a nobody. And I just try to keep up with her.
She even says, good job on doing your homework again. Appreciate it, Tom. And and that's that's my thing is is I force myself to go through and do very least an hour of research for every single conversation that I have.
So I can lay out exactly the points that these particular people are making. I have gone through and, you know, let's say excluding books that I have read specifically for the podcast.
There are interviews that I've done 15 plus hours of research just to get through to make sure that I understand, let's say somebody's thesis so I can help them explain it to the average person because, you know, at the end of the day,
I am an average person just trying to figure out this stuff as everybody else is, but something that that you brought up, Tom is your ability to let's say, look at balance sheets of companies and and make an assessment of those companies based on your knowledge.
Do you, do you stop to think about what your biases might be? So, so the reason I bring that up is is for for myself, I feel like I'm allergic to debt. That's one thing my dad always taught me if you can't buy something cash, you don't buy it.
And in some ways I, I look back and I'm like, well, I could have been better served by taking on a little bit of debt, but I like, I'm comfortable with the position that I am in because of not having debt.
So I'm saying if you have that bias of having this aversion to debt and you're looking at a company's balance sheet that has a lot of debt that has the maybe the ability to service that debt, that's where I always try to question myself to come back and say, you know, where are where do my biases lie and try and acknowledge them so that I can get a clearer picture of some of these, some of these, you know, puzzles, which I think is a lot of the things that I'm going to do.
So I think that's the key to the puzzle, which I know you love in, in the world today.
It's a good question. I had, I do think about that stuff. I, I recognize when, when looking at a company, depending on the company, this is something that's been taught to me and hard one over the years.
I was a man who I worked with when, you know, when I referenced the person I used to work with a guy over in Vietnam, his name was Peter Fam and Peter taught me how to read a balance sheet. He taught me how to think about companies from different perspectives.
And, and, and, and consider, and he and his, and his expertise and his passion within markets was completely orthogonal to mine. He like consumer products.
Like, and I'm a gold and natural resources guy. I'm a monitoring. I, at the time, I'm more monetary theorist and, you know, and proto geop, geopolitical guy. And he's teaching me about, you know, channel checks and, you know, and, and all of that stuff. And I'm like, so we learn, I learned a lot about reading a company.
reading a company's balance sheet from analyzing and having to research reports for Vietnamese
microcaps.
I'm the dead serious, like, $2 million Vietnamese furniture companies, because we had a client
that had a huge portfolio of these things and wanted regular updates on them.
And... my bias isn't necessarily against that, what's what I learned in terms of looking
at a company's balance sheet.
One of the tricks that Peter taught me about a balance sheet is that you just strip out
goodwill and intangibles and just look at on the asset side and then get down to what's
their real equity position, what's their real, you know, liability position, can they service
the debt?
Are they the cash flow and all the basic stuff?
That also helps that debt to write is... has that background as well as being an entrepreneur
and business development guy.
He understands that stuff much better than for years than I did and I've just learned
all this to Ross Moses through listening to people who were better at the stuff than
I am.
Same way that I've learned about the bond market, like talking to people, listening to people
like Danielle Talk and listening to others.
You learn this stuff over time.
One of my favorite commentators over the past 20 years was Jim Sinclair, who died recently.
I tried to do... I tried to do him some amount of justice the other day on a blog post.
And Jim taught us all sorts of things that I had no understanding of.
But it was... and it's all hard one, it's all hard fought and yes, you do have to constantly
check your premises.
I was iron-ran, but put it.
I'm trained as a scientist.
Like my primary training during the most formative years of my intellectual training, which
was 18 to 23, and 24 was done in a scientific environment, right?
Where hypotheses are apolitical and they're most likely wrong.
And so no matter how big your ego is, ain't nothing like real science, especially in high
energy physics, which is what I was doing, quantum mechanics and high energy physics.
Laser spectroscopy of novel, transition, metal, rare gas clusters, if anybody actually wants
to know what I was doing as a 22-year-old as an undergraduate.
You learn real quick, you don't know anything.
And when you start to think about the fractal nature of information and all the rest of it,
and you apply that either scientifically or ontologically, or all of these different
disciplines, you learn the same thing.
Well, you learn that one, scientists are all devoutly religious because they understand
a little bit of their own knowledge.
That's one, real scientists.
And two, you're like, oh, this training is applicable across multiple, as I said earlier,
multiple idioms.
And so it helps to strip your biases out as best you can because you know how to create
an argument that's not a part of your personal persona.
It's just an argument.
And you argue it out here, you argue it in an intellectual space, so radically or in an
operatory fashion.
And then you do some data, and then you collect some data to see if your hypothesis was
correct.
And it doesn't reflect badly on you as a person because there's an opportunity to learn
something.
So what, in many ways, you ask that question, I almost go out of my way sometimes.
to put forth ideas that I don't even believe in.
Right?
Time, I hope.
And then see if it works, right?
And I love that idea, something that I was thinking about,
coming to this conversation is,
I'm happy to ask a question that makes me look like an idiot.
I'm happy to ask those questions that I know are completely wrong,
but just to make that point.
And I mean, this kind of goes back to the idea of that you brought up of ego,
let's say, and of constantly testing yourself.
You growing up in the science environment.
And I would say for myself, there were many parts of my life where I am tested every single day.
Right?
I, when I was welding, every single one of the welds, depending on the job, was X-rayed
and has to be free of any imperfections.
So you're constantly being held in a way under the gun,
but in a more removed way, you're getting constant feedback.
As well, when I'm racing, there is nothing better for your ego than to go line up with
100 plus other people and get your ass absolutely handed to you because you didn't do your prep work properly.
There is, I think that personally is really important.
Going through this, the world understanding that there is a winner and a loser,
depending on how much you busted your ass to get to that point,
I think that's, that's so important.
And it is, it's something that I continue to expose myself to,
is to put myself into novel situations, so that I know what I can and can't handle.
You know, if, if I go to Africa and it's 40 plus degrees out,
I know I can handle that kind of heat under that kind of workload on a bike, whatever it is.
But the idea of constantly testing yourself, having that feedback and challenging yourself,
to really, in a lot of ways, end up removing the ego that you can bring to a lot of situations,
is really important. I bring this book up many times in conversations,
but it's called the art of thinking clearly.
I think it's an excellent, excellent book I've read it many times.
But it brings up the idea of analyzing your successes just as deliberately as you analyze,
let's say, a failure because if you just got lucky doing something,
that doesn't necessarily teach you the lessons of, or that you should be taking from that,
from that particular situation.
Yeah, no, I use the analogy of behockey-golly.
It doesn't matter if you saved the last shot that came at you or you let the last one in.
The next one is all that matters because you have to live in the moment
and once you're done with the game, then you have the opportunity to sit back,
review tape, review what you did right, review what you did wrong,
are your fundamentals off?
I would listen to, you know, I used to listen to hours and hours of this kind of analysis.
I remember when I was a Buffalo Sabers fan during the Hoshik and Ryan Miller here,
and Ryan Miller as a hockey golly, as a person, was very open about this.
He talked about that process a lot in interviews, right, and how important the prep work was
and the review work was.
And then he was very technically focused in that respect.
And then there's the mental toughness that goes along with that as well.
And you know, some guys are just built for it and some other guys have to learn it.
And I would argue, and you could argue, and you should argue,
that Ryan Miller is a second tier gold tender in NHL history because it didn't come naturally to him.
He had to work at it as opposed to guys like Dominik Hoshik or Patrick Warr,
or some of the other ones who were just natural alpha personalities who knew how to do that, right?
And that's why I don't think Miller ever wanted to put the ring, and that's why Warr wound up with many.
And Hoshik and then they end wound up with a couple.
And it's because of those things.
And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that.
My name is Roberto Longo does not have a ring.
He didn't have the mental toughness to make it through, but he had all the physical skills he had.
All the discipline and everything else, but there was missing that one little spark
or whatever it was that separates the grades from the rest.
And there's nothing. And again, doesn't mean you can't be great at it.
Can't be top-year profession, make a lot of money, do all the rest of it.
You just understand that it's part of, and then this is kind of that thing,
is that constant process of continuous improvement.
We're all on the Pareto scale, folks, every day doing a little bit of process improvement on ourselves,
on our careers, our relationships, or whatever.
That's the way I view it.
And when you stop thinking in those terms, that's when you become an NPC.
That's when, as David Boas said years ago,
because this has been rattling around in my head recently,
you become a knee-turquilitarian, for example.
You don't process the information.
And you just finally react to what someone's saying.
I had a couple of those people show up after my podcast recently with Jim Kunseler,
because they just missed everything that Jim was saying,
because it didn't comport with their worldview.
And I'm like, "Oh, well, that's interesting. I'll publish that comment
just so that you can out yourself in public for being an idiot."
Right? So, yeah, there's a lot of that in-inherent in all this time.
I really do think that.
And I don't know about biases.
I don't have them, and we all have to work around them as best we can.
And that's why I appreciate that part of this...
I appreciate that that weren't anything else, and I love the idea,
that being able to do process improvement in public space
is what keeps me from becoming an NPC.
I used to be one.
I used to be a knee-dirt-liberitarian.
It was no fun.
I used to be a friend, but it was also irrelevant.
So, therefore...
I mean, it's interesting that you bring up that,
the idea of doing that process improvement through your life,
but in public.
I mean, I've done interviews where I had a guest on...
the way that they explained, let's say, particular issues,
I thought that was legit,
and then I published the interview, and I get, you know,
do criticism from people that actually understand how some of these different structures work.
And then I have the ability to go back to the drawing board and say,
"Man, I really messed that up, because I didn't necessarily vet that guest properly,
whatever it is,
at the time, it feels bad, and it kind of sucks."
And I said to the particular person that gave me those corrections.
I would... I should go back and delete that interview.
And he said, "No, don't go back and delete it, because it serves as an important signpost,
as Luke Gromund says, to understand what might be wrong with a particular piece of information,
and as you and I both know, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
It is much more important to talk about anything that you might have gotten wrong openly,
and show people... I think that's another important thing to going through this world is,
is to be able to highlight your faults or mistakes that you've made to show that it's not going to kill you, right?
Yeah, and it's one of the problems in the financial space, right?
We're all kind of taught, this is something I've been saying a lot recently.
We were all been trained, like politicians, never show weakness, but we's the lead.
I was taught this from the day the day I started at Newsmax, it was,
"You're the leader, you show no equivocation, you make a mistake, you own it, you move on,
and you... it's like... it's like Caesar Milan, the dog whisper. He walks in the room and he does this thing,
and the dog says submit to him because he's the alpha dog."
Yeah, that's a very frondable place to be.
Because that means you can never be wrong. And you're going to be wrong, especially in stockpicking.
And especially in trying to read the teen leaves of geopolitics where you have nothing but imperfect information.
So I go back and I read some of my old blog posts and I'm like, "Got that one wrong."
"Oh, yeah, whatever, it's still there."
And it's all there in the open record and I get people will come back to me and say, "Well, you said this three years ago,
and it's like, "Well, I will... as in trying to get a gotcha moment."
I'm like, "No, clearly I was wrong."
And my thoughts on this situation now are completely different and here's why.
We had a conversation with Sean Newman the other day without a scrainer.
And one of the things we discussed was this idea that we get better at this as we do this by wrote in repetition and continually applying the trade.
And we're not going to be right 100% of the time as long as you approach the topic with an open heart in an open mind.
I hate the quote rush here, but I'm doing it.
Then the audience will be for the most part will be forgiving because they understand that you're going through the same process that they are.
And in many ways that's what most people are actually looking for from stuff like this.
We're not going to get everything right.
We're going to put our ideas out there in an imperfect form.
Hopefully they'll be great because we don't come out the box, I think, fully formed, insuciant and wise.
Last I checked.
Well, I mean, that's where I always kind of find this difficulty, let's say, is to be able to make these decisions based on whatever decision it is, whether you're going to invest in X, Y, or Z.
Based on, let's say imperfect information.
That is something that does kind of frustrate me because you can have somebody, as you said, that is reading the tea leaves one way might not have acknowledged or understands where they might be wrong.
And that's why it's important to listen to not only my podcast, your podcast, all these different ideas so that we can, as I said, triangulate a view of the world.
And be able to hold two competing ideas in our heads that might be totally orthogonal and then let those ideas hash themselves out and come out on one side or the other.
Sure.
No, that's exactly what we should be doing.
And I think that that is something that I'll be honest with you.
I'll be honest with you. Scares the living crap out of them because they understand now that all of a sudden everybody's learning how to think better.
All of a sudden it's not a matter of we can just push this limbic button and get you to ab react and do something and say something stupid.
And then all of a sudden you're sitting there having to defend, you know, genocide.
When you got like roped into it and you didn't even realize it. It's the power of propaganda, the power of, you know, the side of us if you want to use that term.
And it's something that that's why we have to constantly, you know, that's why I think podcasting is so freaking valuable.
And it's why I think, you know, it's why I wanted to have you on the show today because it's clear that that's how you run Palisades Gold Radio.
And it's a great way to constantly error check what's going on.
And I remember the first time you reach out to me to have me on the show and I was like, whoa, this is now way outside of the circles that I've gone before.
So by the way, that was like the first kind of level up for me to be honest.
And I was like, this is a big deal. And I'm like, I got to bring my A game.
I got to be on top of it. I have to be well prepared for this because it's not because you only get these opportunities, you know, every so often.
So I really wanted to make that abundantly clear. And I just think that this is a, this is a very interesting moment in time where the toll booth operators, the gatekeepers, the, you know, the guildsmiths or whatever you want to call it, the guild leaders.
They don't have the opportunity anymore to just baffle us with guild speak and bullshit and, you know, and knock a call on it because they don't control an error.
If anymore now they've got to error check there. Everybody's error checking their ideas in real time.
Well, I find it interesting that you said that coming on my show was was a big deal for you.
Every time I book any guest, I, I feel that I have to be extremely well prepared just so that I can in a way that that's my form of payment.
You know, we don't pay any of our guests. We don't let anybody sponsor our show.
And that is something that has become way more valuable because we can be totally neutral within the space and we're not pushing anybody's crap.
But, you know, I think going through all of this, it is, it is so difficult to, like you say, kind of maintain that, that ability to really be impartial and, and hold or, or try to understand these ideas.
No, it is very important. I know that, you know, we've thought I've been very, both to take advertising a little bit here and there. I, you know, there's going to put advertising on this podcast.
Simply to cover the cost of running the podcast. It's like literally I make enough money to cover this podcast doesn't make a lot of money.
And it's not, it's not a job. It's job is to, you know, validate the process and then get people to, to go, yeah, no, Tom is worth my time because they can book some good guests and is going to all the rest of it.
And then, you know, and build a, an entire tapestry of information that is valuable to people and hopefully drives more value than the price point that I'm asking for.
And we're all doing the same and that's, that's the, the thing as well. And I know that that's what, and I do appreciate that after, you know, all this time that you keep the, that's part of your ethos as well because I think it's, it's very important within the context of all of this.
So, yeah, this is, it's, it's, it's important. So, maybe one last thing before we, we should be shut it down, which is, you know, maybe speak a little bit to what you really think about how important the medium is in this moment.
And this is a very important moment, really. And I want to get your thoughts on that before we, before we check out for the afternoon.
The, the medium of podcasting itself or, I think I think that that's in this podcasting itself alternative media. Anything you want to say in that, in that, that, that, that thing to drive a different ethos because I think that's where we're getting out here, right.
We're getting to the point where we're like, I think we're trying to change the ethos of media as a, I mean, that's, that's interesting that you bring it up in, in that way, because, you know, while you were explaining your, your last kind of answer there.
It was making me wonder how, or, or you were saying that people are starting to think differently. And I was going to ask you, if, if you have a sense of how many people are really starting to think differently.
And if, you know, I can, I can give an example of, there were certain government statistics within the last, let's say, three years here that in within my sample set, I thought to myself, there's no possible way that those, you know, quote unquote government figures.
So, I think it, I think it is extremely important, but, but how many people do you think, out of the average, the average, thousand people that you would meet on the street are really starting to think differently. And then I'll get to your, your question.
I don't know, I know there doesn't have to be that many, but when I, you know, one of the things that I'm in a weird position now, because, you know, all of my, the very, very few people that I actually interact with outside of my, my circle, you know, outside of my community, my, my family, whatnot.
They all know who I am now, right? They all know what I do for a living, they, and they all have an idea of what I do for a living. And, and none of them really share my point of view on things.
But they're respectful of it now, not just because of the fact that I'm successful at doing it, but because I know I speak with a kind of both empathy or the way they, they see the world and the authority to be able to try and explain it. And even if it's in terms that they don't quite grok, right?
That they are seeing the world differently. I've had multiple conversations now in the last couple of months with people that I would have written off as not, not listening.
And they're, and then you dig a little deeper and you realize, oh no, they're feeling the same things I am or that many of us are, but they're feeling it from a different point of view.
Right. Which is a very encouraging and really changed, you know, it really gave me, I'll just use the word energy at the beginning of the podcast and the one that really gave me a kind of energy and hope that I just not seeing say even six months ago.
So something is changing and I don't know if it's going to be enough to reach critical mass, but it may not have to reach critical mass. It may only have to be 10% of the population.
Well, it's not only people, you're going to get that tipping point is as Malcolm Gladwell calls it, right?
And to your point, to your particular question, Tom, I don't, I don't think that this has ever been more important to be able to have some type of an alternative media to be able to be exposed to different ideas.
You know, doing the show has opened my eyes to so many different things. For example, at the beginning of the, the Ukraine Russia conflict, I had Luke Romanan who again superstar in our world of kind of economics macro economics, all that stuff.
And I have the privilege of having a little bit of his time and I have this conversation with him, start reading through the YouTube comments and I have a guy, a listener of ours from Russia that commented, you know, everything that you guys have been talking about, no cash in the ATMs, no gold available, all of this stuff has now actually happened.
I would love to talk to talk about it. So I have this entire, I spent four hours talking to this guy over two different conversations, about 45 minutes of, so of which was recorded.
And it completely opened my eyes to the amount of propaganda that we actually see in the West versus, you know, what Russia is, what Russia does to their people, all of this stuff.
So, you know, there's one piece of the puzzle. Then, you know, you read a book about how climate change statistics are actually arrived upon and how that, how that science all works.
And then, you know, we have again, the issue that has been so that has affected everything within the last.
Oh, you mean the pandemic and all that, you can talk around like this is not going on YouTube. So I care. All right. I just want to make sure. Yeah. And I understand you're trying to talk around it. I care about this pandemic. You're talking about COVID and you're talking about the vaccines and all that.
Go for it. Yeah. So, so we have, you know, we had on one side of the aisle, we had this, this issue of, yeah, something's not quite right here. And now, you know, I think two weeks ago, Pfizer just came out and said, yeah, no, they're, they actually admit of, of how much more.
Of how much myocarditis, for example, that the vaccines start causing. Right. And that's exactly, you know, to your point that that I think.
There, we are starting to get to this critical mass of people that are starting to wake up and realize how much propaganda and unfortunately bullshit that we have been exposed to.
And then we're only going to drive more traffic and more learning towards channels like ours because people are starting to, to wake up to this, this idea that.
You know, there is a narrative. There is an agenda that is being applied at that point. I'm not saying that everybody in this space is 100% right.
They're not saying that that in some ways doesn't hurt, but at the end of the day, the best ideas are going to win out. The best ideas in this space, no matter what.
And thankfully, we have this medium to be able to discuss these things to actually shine a light on all of these different issues and figure out what the actual bottom of the barrel truth is.
And I think that that is the most useful thing that we could possibly have right now, stifling speech, censoring any idea whether you agree with it or not is the absolute opposite idea that we should be presenting to the world.
It's not going to hurt you to be exposed to something that you disagree with. You should be able to, you know, remove your ego and say, this is not going to hurt me.
I have to consider it and move forward in in in the world through that through that lens of saying, I don't have to make a decision right now.
But I should try to take a handful of different opinions into consideration, not just the ones that make me feel fuzzy and warm.
Yeah, no, it's because it's the ones that make you feel unfuzzy and cold that are probably the ones that are the most valuable because those are the ones that.
Yeah, I was going to say that kind of comes back into the idea of taking personal responsibility and which doesn't which the confidence to take that responsibility doesn't come without having tested yourself having pushed yourself to make your own decisions for whatever direction you're going to take.
Yeah, it's incredibly important like you, you know, they call it steel manning or an argument, right? That's another way of the inside of kind of classical speaking.
But a classical argumentation, but you know, you do want to go through and question all of your assumptions about how you think the world operates and certainly the way other people process the same information is none of us process the same information the same way.
I mean, this is just don't.
And because you've got that all of that history and you've got all of that, all of that all that emotional armor and the scar tissue and this and that everything goes along with it.
And and you know, I say it all the time and it in many ways it is the ethos of this podcast is which is a lies are expensive than the true cells itself.
And by, you know, by thinking about it in those terms, I could talk about it energetically or monetarily or, you know, emotionally that phrase encompasses all those, I all those idioms, all those different facets to around how expensive.
How expensive a lie is and how the truth doesn't have to doesn't you don't have to be sold the truth there it is right in front of you it is truth.
And again, and but at the same time, you know, there's the other side of that, which is there's this fundamental difference in truth and understanding right to go back to one of my favorite, you know, my favorite quotes of all time from Babylon five understanding is the three ads stored.
My side your side in the truth right so understanding is a negotiation and a mechanism by which to get to the truth by seeing things from another person's point of view and being empathetic to whatever it is that has gotten them to that point so for example, you can have deep vile.
And then you can have a revolution at the at what happened on October 7th, you know, by Hamas in Israel.
But you can also understand how it got to that moment where the guys that did what they did did would be capable of doing what they did.
And excuse what they did in any way, man, shape or form, but understanding does not necessarily lead to, you know, acceptance.
I mean other than, yep, it happened.
You don't have to like it and you don't have to say and you don't have to say it shouldn't it's not evil and it shouldn't be, you know, this shouldn't be retribution in some way, man, shape or form.
It's a matter of you have to ask yourself then to step back as an outside observer and go, what caused someone to get to that point.
And then what can we do to get around to make sure that that moment that that those actions don't occur again?
And when you start to see the world from the perspective of, oh no, that's what somebody wanted to happen.
That's the question, you know, or that's the, the, the, the question, but that's the perspective that makes you unfuzzy and cold in a way that now leads you into another series of questions and why it's so important that we cannot shut down, as you said, very eloquently.
We can't shut down speech. We can't shut down the conversation.
And, and watching people attempt to shut down the conversation tells you that they have another agenda that is far beyond the original event itself and the inciting incident for whatever it is that we're discussing.
And that's the thing we have to be always mindful of and trying to make, you know, trying to navigate the, you know, first the emotion and then, you know, the, the downstream effects of all this.
Again, you brought that up earlier and that's the, that's the one thing that is incredibly important is that nothing exists in a vacuum.
There is no one of the, one of the faults of scientific training is that you can set boundary conditions to a problem.
Let X equal this blah blah blah blah and then solve for, you know, the equation for force equals mass times acceleration. This is how physics is taught, right?
I use the joke, you know, consider a spherical cow with the whole sphere. If you've never looked, if you don't know what I'm talking about, look up the spherical cow joke on the Wikipedia, they haven't ruined that entry by the way with a bunch of left this bullshit.
And you understand that you can construct an argument that fits that you set the boundary conditions around that problem in order to arrive at your predetermined conclusions.
People will do this for you all the time. You have to reject that and you have to go, no, no, this doesn't exist in a vacuum.
They were antecedents and they were antecedents and they were antecedents and that the boundary conditions you've set to the problem, of course you're going to restrict that conclusion, but that's those are the wrong boundary conditions to have placed around this problem.
So you have to be very, so this is one of the, this is it's both a fault and a strength of that kind of training of that kind of intellectual training because you can, I immediately had, you can do it yourself.
And, you know, we only want to talk about this in order to get people to leave them down the primarose path of whatever it is that you want them to think or when you approach, when you see somebody doing that, you can blow it apart immediately.
And that's, and that's again a part of this process of trying to not teach people to think differently because that sounds incredibly obnoxious or hebristic or whatever.
But to introduce them to the idea of, look, look at the process from this perspective and you're leaving that out and you're leaving that out, I'm not trying to get you know, I'm not trying trying to ensure that we're all looking at it from all facets.
And then we might actually find ourselves with a final conclusion that is a lot less comfortable than we thought we were, than we thought we had originally.
I mean, all of that, I think, a good portion of that point you just made comes back to the idea of being able to have a nuanced discussion.
And that is something that I think that podcasting and this long form content is really, really valuable at doing is being able to discuss all of the nuances of these situations, you know, not just Ukraine, good, Russia, bad.
There are always nuances and steps to, as you put it, steps to why these situations have unfolded the way they did.
And that is incredibly important to, to be able to talk about, to be able to understand because it leaves you with the ability to point out where the bullshit in the narrative is.
Because if you have taken the time to listen to the, to the nuances of the situation, it, it, it paints you with a picture that is much more colorful than just black and white, X good, Y bad.
Right. And that's why we all have to like remind ourselves that Twitter is performance performance, are not information.
Tom, thank you. This was lovely. This was wonderful. This is exactly what I was hoping to, to draw out of you. So in your first, I will give you an A plus for your first interview on the other side of the mic.
I'm glad to have done this and I'm moreover, I'm just glad to have caught up because you and I haven't spoken since I was up in Edmonton in June. So that was just nice to do.
And that is not a dig that you haven't gotten me on your show recently either by the way. That's just, you know, I'm glad to have gotten back to you. And I'm glad to, to also be able to give you the platform to talk about why it is that you do what you do and why you do it the way you do it.
And I think that from that perspective alone, you know, Palis A's gold radio is my CTV folks.
Well, I appreciate that very much, Tom. And I'm always love love catching up with you. The one thing I think before we do wrap up, I would definitely acknowledge is that, you know, I, I don't do this by myself.
I think that both the guy that started the show calling Catelle has provided me with really the opportunity to have been able to do this. And, and I see it very much as a team effort between my editor Ryan and I on a daily basis.
And then on a much more macro basis, what, what Colin, let's say, had the, the vision of providing to the market of a free educational platform that is focused on gold and to some degree energy as well.
And, and doing holding myself to the standard of doing a minimum of let's say three shows a week, if not more.
It forces me to branch out and explore different ideas, but they all, they're all very valuable and important to understand in the world that we're facing here today.
And, you know, as another, as another counterpoint and nod to you, Tom, as I said, this is my first interview on the other side of the mic. And I wouldn't, I didn't, I didn't take that decision lightly either.
Thank you. Appreciate that. That means a lot. Tom, you too, Tom, take care.
Well, that about wrap it up for episode 159 of the Gold Goats and Guns podcast. I want to thank Tom Bauder X for his time. And for being guinea pig and giving me the opportunity to interview him for the first time.
I think it's, I think Tom's story and his perspective on podcasting and, and the, the call to action. You know, we all go through it a certain point in our lives. I think it's really important. And when I, again, when I heard Tom talk about this when we met personally up in Edmonton, it just struck me as something that was worthy of everyone's time.
I hope you enjoyed it. So as always, you can follow me up my work at the tomelowango.me or gold goats and guns.com. You can follow me on Twitter at TFL 1728 where the very worst version of me will show up on a daily basis. I guarantee it, as well as you can sign up for the Patreon and Patreon slash Gold Goats and guns where you can sign up for the bi-weekly market reports and parvig blogs or end or the monthly Gold Goats and Guns investment newsletter where we take a retail investors approach to portfolio management.
To try and make sense of all this stuff as well, you can follow Tom's work over at Palisades Gold Radio. You can find it at palisadesradio.ca. You can also find it on YouTube and every, about every other podcast app you can possibly think of. So with that said, I'm out. You guys be well and you take care. Talk soon. And keep your stick on the ice.
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