This is Trend Following Radio, where great thinking comes alive.

Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, bestselling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings.

I am your host, Michael Covel.

Not filtered, raw, honest.

That's my passion.

My guest today is Simon Black, an investor, entrepreneur, and founder of sovereign man.

Even if you don't immediately recognize Simon's name, I guarantee you you have read his writing.

Simon has a travel perspective, and that perspective has given him unique insights on freedom,

making money, keeping more of it, and protecting it from the government.

Whatever government that might be, Simon has great insights on how to keep more of your hard-earned capital.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Simon Black.

Simon, for those people not familiar with you, and I think they've probably seen your writing

or seen something that you've been involved with, maybe they didn't know it was you exactly,

they see the name sovereign man. I want to know your start. How did you, and define yourself, define

the sovereign man, but what was your start? How did you go down this, this path?

It actually started with my background in the military. I went to, I went to West Point and,

and graduated. I was commissioned as an Army intelligence officer. This was four of 15, 16 years ago,

and I was, my unit, I was stationed in Middle Middle East basically right around the time that George W. Bush was

insisting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Basically it became it became abundantly clear that that was a total fabrication that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and I knew that

going into, basically going into the invasion of Iraq. And I just sent me down this path

where I realized sort of everything that I had been brought up to believe was bullshit,

...