Good morning. Have you ever taken a pause and considered the events and the learnings and the forks in the road in your life that have constructed and built your current worldview?

Many of the followers of this platform have seen my online PowerPoint presentations about the human

predicament. Today, I'd like to have a different way of unpacking the human predicament,

which is going through 10 first principle core learnings that I had over the last 30 years that formed my

current worldview. Sure, there's lots of little things I've learned, like the Seneca effect,

which is that things collapse much faster than they grow. And the rule of 70, you divide

a growth rate into 70. And the answer is the number of 70, you divide a growth rate into 70.

And the answer is the number of years it takes to double.

Like at 10, it takes seven years to double.

At one, it takes 70 years to double, et cetera.

Lots of those little dynamics.

But what I'd like to talk about today is really fundamental learnings that over

time really developed and shaped my worldview. These are in no particular order, but I'm going to

start kind of at the beginning where I started to shed my Gilligan's Island and Donkey Kong and Wall Street exterior and widen my boundary with how I viewed the world. Until my late 20s, I was pretty much a normal Midwest guy born into the upswing of what ended up being a straight line human economic growth of the 20th century.

I liked girls and traveling and money and status and food.

I still like food. And all the things. In New York City one year, my apartment was a 20,000 square

foot loft where I handed out business cards to people on the street, selectively, to come

to my weekend parties.

It wasn't quite Wolf on Wall Street, but perhaps coyote.

One of my clients back in the day at Solomon Brothers started trading oil.

And in my own blessing and curse sort of way, I endeavor to understand

what it was we were actually buying and selling. And as I learned, I became more and more surprised

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