Keep It Wild
The high cost of comfort
Alligator farming is big business.
I learned all about it last week during an extended layover at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS). Out of eight Delta flights in seven days, six were delayed. That’s still better than Spirit Air customers did last week.
The unexpected and uncontrollable delays gave me time to catch up on a large reading backlog. In this case, the most recent issue of Florida Trend. If you’re unfamiliar, the periodical covers just about every business current event in the state.
Plus, conspicuously reading Florida Trend in places like New York, Los Angeles, or Austin in this case, stirs up the locals. They seem to hate Florida, which I find amusing.
Florida is after all the third most populous state. As a property owner, I should keep up with things. Today, it’s the alligator industry.
Farmed alligators are worth ~$262/each. About ~70% of that is the hide, evidently.
There’s only about ~6lbs of edible meat at ~$12.50/lb…tail and hands only.
Buyers, mostly the fashion industry, only want “clean” hides. Meaning, free of scrapes and battle wounds. These are after all, ferocious reptiles.
The ~20 gator farms spread across Florida harvest ~26,000 of these beasts each year. The problem is, farmed gators don’t reproduce.
Lost Their Edge
They apparently lose their libido on the farm. That’s according to the journalist charged with looking into this for the magazine.
It seems weird. Gators are fierce animals. They’re aggressive, resilient, and sort of an apex predator in the Florida Everglades…which is the big leagues of predation.
Somehow, they just lose their edge. It might be the reliable sound of the farmer heading to the fence with hundreds of pounds of raw chicken, every morning, like clockwork. Of course, until the one day they get muzzled and loaded into the truck before being turned into a wallet some Parisian banker gives his girlfriend… surely the creatures don’t have that much foresight.
This lack of desire creates a business continuity problem for the farmer. In fact, alligator farmers have to buy wild eggs to keep the operation going.
Last year, they bought ~175,000 of these wild eggs. About ~a third of those came from public land, fetching ~$5/ea. The rest from private land at a market rate of ~$2/ea.
So, the next time a surly barista wants a $2 gratuity for handing you a mediocre drip coffee, compare that to what Florida swamp people do for $2.
Dangerously Comfy
There’s something seductive about comfort. As an idea.
In my 20s, I had several friends who got no-show jobs with family businesses. I envied this… it seemed ideal. Now they look sickly. They’re also boring. As if they’ve lost their edge. Maybe that’s how the wild gators feel about their farmed cousins.
And while there’s no sense in intentionally making things uncomfortable, there is a middle ground. It’s giving up the idea that there’s some level of comfort where you’d be better off.
It’s mostly a mindset. We buy into fear, and behave accordingly.
The problem is, everyone validates this. We sort of give each other permission to live in this fear-induced obsession with unattainable comfort. Nobody warns you about the downside of this unexamined belief.
It’s an ideology. There are two pieces to it. People fear change, and want things to improve. It’s a Double Bind.
Loving Change
Don’t worry, TTL hasn’t gone philosophically soft. Quite the opposite. We’re killing it with two of our newer positions, which seemed risky at first.
Plus, we’re about to ease out of two gold miners, with long-term gains from being in before the 2026 surge. More on that later…
The thing about change is, it’s the touchstone of positive improvement. If nothing changed, we’d be feudal serfs waiting to die for our overlords. And we’re a long way from that…
Awareness of how this works is ~90% of the battle. Merely reading this essay puts you at the right side of the bell curve. It’s what a good newsletter should do…
There are two types of newsletter readers. The one who only skims looking for some sort of cheat code for life… some hack to get ahead and override years of poor execution. That reader falls away quickly, blaming the editor for his or her problems, only to move on and do it again with the next situation.
The second is far more successful. They see the newsletter as a link to a person with unusual wiring. A person who’ll do things they themselves might find intriguing, but unwilling to do.
That person benefits from constant, long-term exposure to new ways of seeing things… In alligator terms, they keep their libido without introducing the perils of the Everglades.
Think of it like watching someone else test a parachute… The newsletter writer goes where you wisely don’t. In this case, to the Food Court at The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV.
Las Vegas is my second least favorite city. I can’t remember the first, but it’s probably somewhere in Massachusetts.
I dislike Las Vegas so much I organize my activities to minimize time in the city. On this trip, ~27 hours got the job done. The Food Court meeting was about ~45 minutes of that ~27 hours.
I bought a box of Bitcoin Trading Cards from a guy named A.G. The Alchemist for ~$1,200. He’s a Bitcoin collectible enthusiast. He’s also a sort of expert on these matters.
You might be tempted here to discard this as not investment-related… there is after all a gentleman with a neon yellow tank top in the background with a discarded Amazon box filled with his trading card collection…
That guy, who hauled his encased, cherished cards to this godforsaken slop hall hoping to trade with A.G. The Alchemist…is in for a rude awakening.
Selling to The Alchemist is trickier than trying to sell overpriced options to Stanley Druckenmiller. Forget about it.
The thing is, I went to Las Vegas for the 2026 Bitcoin Conference… and it told me everything I need to know about the Bitcoin market.
Sentiment Testing
Before we get to A.G., and his story of being “puddled” by a malicious party goer which capped off his personal party era… there’s a value to physically being in a place concentrated with experts. You can sense things…
These two pictures are of the exact same place in The Venetian Hotel Conference Center, which is larger than an international airport.
The first is from 2025, last year’s this time at the same event, at the exact same time. As you can see, the place was packed.
Plus, (you can revisit the issue here) the scene was wild. DJs, models, the Winklevoss Twins, an F1 car, proselytizers handing out salvation pamphlets, people with more money than sense, the First Kids of the U.S.A., it was a zoo.
This year… significantly less of all that.
It’s not like there was nobody there… it’s still a big conference. But the tone and feel was way different.
For instance, notice the old curtain trick long used by conference promoters to hide the fact they didn’t fill up the exhibit hall.
It just wasn’t the same… and it’s why I gave A.G. The Alchemist $1,200 for a box of Bitcoin trading cards.
The Value of Unusual Data
To be clear, I have exactly zero interest in trading cards, Bitcoin or otherwise.
What you should know, if you’re new here, is that I sort of walk through decades of life as an intellectual outcast. I accept it at this point… I realize what I do makes extremely ideological people uncomfortable. They have to lash out to validate their conviction. It’s why newsletter writing became my only viable career path in the late 2000s.
A.G. The Alchemist told me these particular Bitcoin trading cards were on their fourth iteration (fourth unique series). Like Bitcoin, there are a limited number of cards. He pretty much knows how many of each there are, or the implied rarity. This is like talking to some guy who knows every beet-producing farm in the Midwest by heart and what the weather will be next week over the them… He is the market.
And by the way, when he got “puddled” by his party friend, that was an estimated 75 hits of acid which he said “stopped time” and gave him answers to some of life’s bigger questions. I mean, that’s a wild ride.
So, instead of buying a pack of cards for $50, or no cards at all, I bought a whole box of unopened packs for $1,200.
The Alchemist agreed to meet me in person when Bitcoin crosses $100,000. He’ll do a “box slam” with me which is collector lingo for cutting open all the packs, identifying the rarity of each card, and advising on which to send off for grading.
From decades of rare gold coin collecting… I know what this means, and won’t be surprised if I turn a significant profit sufficient to pay for the whole exercise…and then some.
Watch For the Triple
I wrote a book about gold at a time when gold was not very popular. Priced below ~$1,500/oz during composition.
Gold went to ~$5,600 this year and unsolicited haters from the gold community lashed out when I didn’t agree it would keep going. In fact, it seemed like it maybe overshot a little.
Sure, I like gold, and I’m thrilled to own some, but it’s not a religion. People want a preacher… for their own reasons.
The hallmark of profitable investing is avoiding membership to an idea. You hear about conviction all the time… you’ve got to bleed for your ideas. But people die in that mindset. If you die, you’re out of the game. It works the same way with money.
The trick is to hold conviction loosely. Avoid the tempting belief that this or that idea will change your life. Your life doesn’t need changing… only your thinking does.
Similar to the gold people, the Bitcoin people don’t like me either. I don’t care much about the Bitcoin economy, orange freedom, or any of that stuff. The lingo sort of annoys me. Almost as much as hearing gold people talk all giddy about societal collapse… it’s too much.
For reference, here’s the current value of Bitcoin versus gold, and a few other things:
U.S. listed stocks $75.5 trillion
U.S. Treasury Debt $39 trillion
Gold $32.6 trillion
Space X IPO $2 trillion (est.)
Bitcoin $1.63 trillion
Here’s what’s wild… Bitcoin has a finite supply. A huge portion of that is lost. You can’t recover the stuff… meaning, the market of available supply can’t grow.
Even the gold supply grows. Some people fear advanced satellite technology might someday unlock new gold deposits… it’s a real concern.
Stocks have limitless supply growth. You just print as many shares as people will buy. Treasuries have some limits… the whole maintain belief in the system thing keeps a governor on it.
Bitcoin out of all those is the only one that literally can’t grow. Plus, we’re charging full speed into total digital control. Every keystroke monitored, every eye movement tracked by spy tech cameras on the phones people can’t dislodge from their corn syrup-covered fingers… The masses love it.
There might come a day when they discover enthusiasm for permanence on a blockchain. For the unique exchange of ownership without a counterparty. They might want to own a slice of that more than the limitless share certificates or other assets with prices out of proportion to value.
Bitcoin at ~$250,000 gives it a value of ~$5 trillion…which does not seem crazy.
The Trust bought some in late 2023 and kept it up since… As with gold, it seems like a sensible footer in the foundation. Time will tell…
While the ideologues attack anything new or different, like luddites setting fire to books, the more you get away from them, the crazier they look.
You’re only as good as your next decision. You can’t make that until you survey the available options. If you stay comfortable, avoiding any variables, you limit your field of view.
Meanwhile, we need to live… while we can. And the best way I know to do that is to hit the road and learn something.
Get Busy Living
The Waldorf Astoria is part of the Las Vegas CityCenter complex. Google says it cost ~$8.5 billion to construct in 2009. Around ~$13.5 billion in modern dollars. And they didn’t put an espresso machine in the place.
I told Santiago he should be ashamed to serve that overpriced sludge. Also, Nespresso is not espresso. It’s highly-processed before being packed in an aluminum canister somewhere very far from here, then pierced with the push of a button and extracted with steam.
The Waldorf charges $8 for a drip coffee and it’s worse than the Bunn-O-Matic glass pot sitting in the tire shop waiting area. There’s also an obligatory ~9% tax, ~20% gratuity, added to the $8. Plus, the daily “Resort Fee.” That city is what I imagine prison feeling like. It’s soulless…vapid.
It’s why I took care of business as fast as possible and got myself on another delayed Delta flight to JFK departing just after midnight. I’m more comfortable in a city with a pulse.
Moments after springing out of seat 10F into JFK 4, deep into reviewing set two of the 6th night of Phish at the Las Vegas Sphere, I heard my name. It sort of pulled me out of a self-induced hypnotic focus.
The reward was the best hug I’ve had in years. Coming from a top-tier cornea replacement surgeon, I mean like who The White House would hire to do it… when it really mattered.
This doctor is also a genius, and a woman of insatiable intellectual curiosity. If you don’t already know… organically curious people end up being the most interesting to know... These moments, hugs or human connection like this, these are the ones you don’t want to miss…
But people do miss them… they get themselves so rigid, they can’t see anything but their increasingly hardcore beliefs. They feel a false comfort from this.
You can stop doing it anytime you’re ready. Let’s practice.
Avoid Stereotypes
Phish played 9 shows at The Sphere Las Vegas, which by the way is public, as Sphere Entertainment Co (SPHR). Have a look at that stock chart…
9 shows means 18 sets at roughly ~80 minutes each and 9 ~20-minute encores. That’s ~27hrs of stage time with not one song repeated. To me, that’s fascinating.
Yet I did not attend any of the shows. I have contempt prior to investigation for Phish at The Sphere.
For starters, I am not into altered states of consciousness. I have experimented with this in the past, willingly, unlike A.G. who was unwillingly puddled. Yet for me, I’m quite happy walking at my own pace.
My friend, expert hitting partner, and all-around gem of a guy Mr. Pieralisi from the racquet club says I have a “twinkle in the eye” most of the time which people commonly mistake for a hallucinogenic tell.
I’m fine with it… and once after giving a speech at a $1,200/ticket financial conference, an attendee told me he loved the speech, and asked if I was on mushrooms. What?
No, I’m not on mushrooms, and be careful with assumptions. I’d presented a gold kilo bar to the audience like show and tell. In the following ~18 months gold nearly tripled… pay attention.
I don’t expect any more than 1% of you to ever even listen to a Phish song, ever click the website link to the Bitcoin trading cards, attend even one of the nine ATP Masters 1000 tournaments, or hand-grind your own coffee in a purportedly 5-Star hotel while the staff looks on in confused horror.
But I do expect you to absorb the exposure to someone who lives an odd life steered almost exclusively by curiosity. It’s learning for the sake of it, for the fun of it.
When you label it, when you judge it, you miss the benefits. It might make you feel some false safety, like you’ve got this or that figured out and you’re just sure of it… but new information is not a threat to you. It’s an advantage.
Change is constant. Change is your ticket to a better life. Get on that plane, even if the pressurization equipment fails and they make you wait three hours for “replacement equipment.” Take that trip… you’ll know more when you get back.
The Bull Is Loose
I also don’t expect you to follow TTL into every trade. Merely seeing the logic behind the decisions might be more beneficial to your financial journey than any one action. After all, you are in charge of your journey.
The wisest TTL subscribers read only for the Postscript, after the signature… and we’ve got another good one today. But before we get to that, it’s profit time.
In late February, we introduced a controversial new pick. Two actually…
The first was a Bitcoin miner, overrun by a value investing activist shareholder. That new holder forced the ideological “miners” to pivot from the coin-minting business. Sure, keep the ~19,000-coin hoard, can’t hurt. But lease out the mining facility to data companies or hyperscalers.
For reference… we discussed the company’s long-term power supply agreements, paired with finished facilities, and modest to low debt profile. Well… it’s happening. See the chart below.
And remember, we ideally want to own things that move over a ~4-8 quarter period. Something that shoots up in a week is no use to us. Maybe you have a corporate structure as a professional trader, where short term gains are capitalized… some people have that. We don’t. And the short-term rate is ~40% when you calculate all the surcharges Obama successfully tacked on to the already rapacious ~36%. Whatever your effective rate is… the long-term capital gain rate is likely a lot lower.
Also, I’m so sick of people forcing you to say, “I’m not an accountant” etc. whenever they talk about tax. No kidding? You mean, TTL isn’t an accounting advisory service? It’s also not an auto mechanic, or dentist, or anything.
But check out this stock chart, seriously, and the Trust got lucky because in dealing with the 2025 tax bill we had to limit the size of new positions, and this baby lingered down to almost ~12/sh in late March.
It hit ~$23/sh this morning….and we got the full position in the teens.