Mad Hedge Technology Letter
July 22, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE EV CONUNDRUM)
(TSLA), (RIVN), (TOYOTA)
Posts
Sometimes tech trends start and stop and then start again.
It certainly feels that way for the EV industry when the Chairman of Toyota Akio Toyoda threw a damp towel on the progress of EVs taking over the world.
The Japanese Chairman told the world that he thought EVs would never account for more than a third of the market and that consumers should not be forced to buy them.
These ideas definitely go against the grain of the liberal democratic order.
Listen to the bureaucrats in Brussels and the left-wing establishment in Washington and it almost seems as if they want to ban oil and gas products.
Of course, the ban is certainly hyperbole, but the green movement towards lithium battery-powered cars has become quite political and partisan.
Akio Toyoda, chairman of the world’s biggest carmaker by sales, said that electric vehicles (EVs) should not be developed to the exclusion of other technologies such as the hybrid and hydrogen-powered cars that his company has focused on.
He said he believed battery EVs will only secure a maximum of 30% of the market – less than double their current share in the UK – with the remaining 70% taken by fuel cell EVs, hybrids, and hydrogen cars.
Mr. Toyoda argued that electric cars’ appeal is limited because one billion people in the world still live without electricity, while they are also expensive and need charging infrastructure to operate.
The chairman also pointed to Toyota’s recent announcement that it was working on a new combustion engine, saying it was important to give engine factory workers a role in the green transition.
Koji Sato, the car maker’s chief executive, last year promised Toyota would sell 1.5 million battery EVs a year by 2026, and 3.5 million by 2030.
Tesla, the world’s biggest EV producer on an annual basis, reported 1.8 million deliveries last year.
Mr. Toyoda’s two cents come after electric car sales have slowed in the Western world slowed in 2024.
I am of the notion that in the short term, all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked by the EV buyers.
To find the next incremental buyer, it won’t be impossible, but that same type of excitement won’t exist.
The truth is that many consumers are still tied to the combustible engine.
On a recent trip to Japan, almost no local drove an EV and I witnessed almost no charging points.
If one of the biggest economies in the world isn’t convinced, then there is still a lot of work to do and I don’t believe that the Japanese will give up gas-powered engines so quickly.
In the short term, the demand weakness in EVs bodes ill for EV stocks like Tesla or Rivian.
Throw in the fact that EVs aren’t cheap and the cost of living crisis is forcing consumers to migrate to necessities which unfortunately doesn’t include a brand new Tesla.
Stay away from EV stocks in the short term and pile into the AI narrative.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
July 15, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(AI AND IMPROVED WORKFORCE EFFICIENCY IS HERE TO STAY)
(TSLA)
Students hoping to become bankers shouldn’t study finance, they should dive into AI programming.
This is the big takeaway from how investment banks are run these days.
Gone are the moments when finance degrees were the hottest commodity, now it is all about generative AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, a report by investment bank Goldman Sachs says.
It could replace a quarter of work tasks in the US and Europe but may also mean new jobs and a productivity boom.
And it could eventually increase the total annual value of goods and services produced globally by 7%.
Generative AI, able to create content indistinguishable from human work, is "a major advancement", the report says.
Silicon Valley is keen to promote investment in AI not only in the United States but in a way that will ultimately drive productivity gains across the global economy.
The report notes AI's impact will vary across different sectors - 46% of tasks in administrative and 44% in legal professions could be automated but only 6% in construction and 4% in maintenance, it says.
Journalists will therefore face more competition, which would drive down wages unless we see a very significant increase in the demand for such work.
Consider the introduction of GPS technology and platforms like Uber (UBER). Suddenly, knowing all the streets in London had much less value - and so incumbent drivers experienced large wage cuts in response, of around 10% according to our research.
The result was lower wages, not fewer drivers.
Over the next few years, generative AI is likely to have similar effects on a broader set of creative tasks.
According to research cited by the report, 60% of workers are in occupations that did not exist in 1940.
However, other research suggests technological change since the 1980s has displaced workers faster than it has created jobs.
Nobody understands how the technology will evolve or how firms will integrate it into how they work.
Lower wages and higher output are a perfect recipe for higher technology share prices and that is exactly what we will get.
Currently, we are experiencing a mild pullback from the AI mania, but that is simply because it got too far ahead of its skis.
I am quite impressed by the price action in a stock like Tesla (TSLA) which executed a major cut to their global workforce to trim costs.
The staff cut of 10% could result in exactly what I mentioned in more output for less pay, but in terms of hiring more workers, they have decided to force less workers to do more.
This type of management decision increases efficiency because it forces workers to work smarter.
It’s certain they will be a major investor in AI chips to outfit their EV cars, and much of this corporate tech business is a feedback loops involving synergies with businesses overlapping.
Tech as a whole is not in trouble, but individual companies will find an imbalanced treatment of their stock.
The AI pixie dust is still strong as many readers bought the shallow dip in Nvidia.
I do believe in the AI hype, and a lot of the price action is skewed toward just a handful of AI stocks.
My advice is to buy AI stocks on the dip and this increased efficiency will certainly filter down into the top and bottom lines.
Global Market Comments
July 15, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or SEA CHANGE), (BB RATED BANKS LOANS), and (RESCUING THE USS POTOMAC),
(TLT), (JNK), (SLRN), (BRLN), (BKLN), (FFRHX), (WES), (CCI), (GLD), (DE), (BRK/B), (TSLA), (NVDA).
I believe there was a major sea change in the markets last week, which has taken the economy from inflation to deflation. All asset classes performed as they should, with some extreme moves. It is now time to focus on the 493 of the S&P 500 and let the Magnificent Seven take a long-needed rest.
Not only does this pave the way for a Fed interest rate cut in September, but several more to follow. This opens the floodgates for the (TLT) to rise above $100 by yearend, and maybe even to $110. Remember the old high for bonds is $166. Higher beta fixed-income plays will rise much more.
Stocks will keep rising but with different leadership from dozens of interest-sensitive sectors, including real estate, their suppliers, industrials, precious metals, financials, energy, and outright value plays long left in the doghouse. If you can’t grasp these new trends, your portfolio will be out to sea shortly. An S&P 500 of 6,000 looks like a pretty safe bet by yearend.
That brings to the fore investment in fixed-income securities. There are two ways to make money on a fixed income. Coupon interest rates are still at historically high levels. And as rates fall, fixed-income prices rise, opening the door to capital gains, which could reach 10%-20% in the coming year.
The fixed-income market at $100 trillion is double the size of the stock market. And there are many more bond listings than stock ones. So the number of possible investments is almost endless. I shall give you a brief overview of some of the more interesting subsectors.
US Government bonds – are the gold standard with a guaranteed return. But you pay for the extra security with lower rates; the current ten-year US Treasury bond yield is 4.20%, much lower than the present 90-day T-bill of 5.21%. The easiest way to buy these is through the (TLT). The 30-year government bond should be avoided as the extra 0.14% in yield doesn’t adequately compensate you for the extra 20 years of risk
Junk Bonds – Also known as “high yield” bonds have always been misnamed. The default rates never remotely approached the levels that justified their high yields, not even during the financial crisis, as my old friend former junk bond king Michael Milliken has amply proven. The (JNK) is currently yielding 6.59% and has the potential for larger capital gains than government bonds.
Master Limited Partnerships – These are partnerships granted generous tax benefits with the goal of producing oil. They issue annual Form K-1’s to include with your tax return. Dividends are deferred until the MLP’s investment reaches the end of its useful life, which can be decades. MLPs used to be a huge industry with dozens of listed companies.
When the price of oil went to negative numbers during the pandemic, most of them got wiped out. Because of this rocky past, there are a handful of large, well-capitalized MLPs with extremely high yields. One is Western Midstream Partners (WES) with a 9.20% yield. Energy Transfer Partners (ET) pay a 7.96% yield.
These yields will remain safe as long as oil prices are stable or rising, as I expect in a long-term global economic recovery. Take oil back to zero again in another pandemic and these returns will get turned on their head.
With the normalizing of interest rates, it's time to normalize investment strategies as well. That means bringing back the old 60/40 strategy where one half of the portfolio ensures the other, with a modern twist. You can put 60% of your assets in stocks, with half on technology and half on domestic cyclicals.
The other 40% should be allocated to some mix of the above fixed-income investments guaranteeing annual high returns. It is not a bad strategy for mature investors, especially if they would rather be on a golf course instead of spending all day in front of a screen picking bottoms and tops for stocks, like Millennials.
Here’s where to get a Safe 8.48% Yield, BB-rated bank loans, which will soar in value with even just one quarter-point rate cut. BB bank loans are very low risk, and they have a spread that’s about 290 basis points above the overnight Fed rate. How does one buy such an animal? The actual bank loans themselves are made by lending institutions to companies. These loans aren’t made accessible to individual investors who want to make a play for yield. Rather, large institutional investors snap them up and add them to their fixed-income portfolios. The top ticker symbols are (SLRN), (BRLN), (BKLN), and (FFRHX). Check them out.
So far in July, we are up +2.17%. My 2024 year-to-date performance is at +22.19%. The S&P 500 (SPY) is up +17.40% so far in 2024. My trailing one-year return reached +37.07.
That brings my 16-year total return to +698.82%. My average annualized return has recovered to +51.44%.
I used the blockbuster CPI Report last week to jump off my 100% cash position and piled on six new positions. Those included interest rate-sensitive longs in (CCI), (GLD), (DE), (BRK/B), and shorts in big tech leaders (TSLA) and (NVDA).
Some 63 of my 70 round trips were profitable in 2023. Some 35 of 44 trades have been profitable so far in 2024, and several of those losses were really break-even.
Nonfarm Payroll Report Comes in Weak for June at 206,000. The Headline Unemployment rate rose to a three-year high at 4.1%. All interest rate plays rocketed as a September interest rate comes back on the table. If the Fed doesn’t cut soon, we are going into recession. Buy (TLT) on dips.
Fed Governor Jay Powell Warns of Recession Risks if interest rate cuts don’t take place soon, spiking all markets. Powell is showing his cards for the next few Fed Meetings. Buy all interest rates plays like (TLT), (JNK), (NLY), and (CCI).
CPI comes in Negative. The writing is not only on the wall right now, it’s blasting us with great neon lights. That was the message this morning from the Consumer Price Index, which this morning delivered a gob-smacking 0.1% DECLINE in June. We are now in deflation and the YOY inflation rate is now down to only 3.0%. As a result, a Fed interest rate cut of 25 basis points is now a certainty in September and more will follow. All falling interest rate plays in the stock market are in play. Rising rate plays could be the trade for the rest of 2024.
PPI Rises 0.2%, with Wholesale Prices coming in as expected. The producer price index is now up 2.6% year over year. The inflation pictures goes back to mixed. Stocks rallied with big tech recovering about half of yesterday’s losses.
Consumer Sentiment at a Three-Year Low at 66.0%, down from 68.5 as the economic slide continues, according to the University of Michigan. It’s another pre-recession indicator.
Bank Earnings Beat and the stocks are rising in expectation of falling interest rates, with (JPM), (BAC), and (C) reporting. Wells Fargo (WFC) Bombed again. Buy banks on dips which have been on a tear all day.
Tesla Delays Robotaxi Day, past its original August 8 target to probably October, tanking the shares by 11%. The date propelled the massive 50% rally in the hares over the past month. Musk is always overly aggressive on his targets. Sell calls against existing (TSLA) stock positions.
Apple Expects 10% Rise in iPhone Shipments in 2024, after a bumpy 2023, counting on AI features to fuel demand for the iPhone 16. Apple is now the newly discovered AI stock. Buy (AAPL) on dips.
My Ten-Year View
When we come out the other side of the recession, we will be perfectly poised to launch into my new American Golden Age or the next Roaring Twenties. The economy decarbonizing and technology hyper accelerating, creating enormous investment opportunities. The Dow Average will rise by 800% to 240,000 or more in the coming decade. The new America will be far more efficient and profitable than the old.
Dow 240,000 here we come!
On Monday, July 15 at 9:30 AM EST, Feder Governor Jay Powell speaks. He has lately been leaning dovish.
On Tuesday, July 16 at 9:30 AM, Retail Sales are published.
On Wednesday, July 17 at 9:30 AM, Building Permits are out.
On Thursday, July 18 at 8:30 AM, the Weekly Jobless Claims are announced.
On Friday, July 19 at 2:00 PM, the Baker Hughes Rig Count is printed.
As for me, I usually get a request to fund some charity about once a day. I ignore them because they usually enrich the fundraisers more than the potential beneficiaries. But one request seemed to hit all my soft spots at once.
Would I be interested in financing the refit of the USS Potomac (AG-25), Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential yacht?
I had just sold my oil and gas business for an outrageous profit and had some free time on my hands so I said, “Hell Yes,” but only if I get to drive. The trick was to raise the necessary $5 million without it costing me any money.
To say that the Potomac had fallen on hard times was an understatement.
When Roosevelt entered the White House in 1932, he inherited the presidential yacht of Herbert Hoover, the USS Sequoia. But the Sequoia was entirely made of wood, which Roosevelt had a lifelong fear of. When he was a young child, he nearly perished when a wooden ship caught fire and sank, he was passed to a lifeboat by a devoted nanny.
Roosevelt settled on the 165-foot USS Electra, launched from the Manitowoc Shipyard in Wisconsin, whose lines he greatly admired. The government had ordered 34 of these cutters to fight rum runners across the Great Lakes during Prohibition. Deliveries began just as the ban on alcohol ended.
Some $60,000 was poured into the ship to bring it up to presidential standards and it was made wheelchair accessible with an elevator, which FDR operated himself with ropes. The ship became the “floating White House,” and numerous political deals were hammered out on its decks. Some noted guests included King George VI of England, Queen Elizabeth, and Winston Churchill.
During WWII Roosevelt hosted his weekly “fireside chats” on the ship’s short-wave radio. The concern was that the Germans would attempt to block transmissions if the broadcast came from the White House.
After Roosevelt’s death, the Potomac was decommissioned and sold off by Harry Truman, who favored the much more substantial 243-foot USS Williamsburg. The Potomac became a Dept of Fisheries enforcement boat until 1960 and then was used as a ferry to Puerto Rico until 1962.
An attempt was made to sail it through the Panama Canal to the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, but it broke down on the way in Long Beach, CA. In 1964 Elvis Presley bought the Potomac so it could be auctioned off to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It sold for $65,000. It then disappeared from maritime registration in 1970. At one point, there was an attempt to turn it into a floating disco.
In 1980, a US Coast Guard cutter spotted a suspicious radar return 20 miles off the coast of San Francisco. It turned out to be the Potomac loaded to the gunnels with bales of illicit marijuana from Mexico. The Coast Guard seized the ship and towed it to the Treasure Island naval base under the Bay Bridge. By now, the 50-year-old ship was leaking badly. The marijuana bales soaked up the seawater and the ship became so heavy it sank at its moorings.
Then a long rescue effort began. Not wanting to get blamed for the sinking of a presidential yacht on its watch, the Navy raised the Potomac at its own expense, about $10 million, putting its heavy lift crane to use. It was then sold to the City of Oakland, CA for a paltry $15,000.
The troubled ship was placed on a barge and floated upriver to Stockton, CA, which had a large but underutilized unionized maritime repair business. The government subsidies started raining down from the skies and a down to the rivets restoration began. Two rebuilt WWII tugboat engines replaced the old, exhausted ones. A nationwide search was launched to recover artifacts from FDR’s time on the ship. The Potomac returned to the seas in 1993.
I came on the scene in 2007 when the ship was due for a second refit. The foundation that now owned the ship needed $5 million. So, I did a deal with National Public Radio for free advertising in exchange for a few hundred dinner cruise tickets. NPR then held a contest to auction off tickets and kept the cash (what was the name of FDR’s dog? Fala!).
I also negotiated landing rights at the Pier One San Francisco Ferry Terminal, which involved negotiating with a half dozen unions, unheard of in San Francisco maritime circles. Every cruise sold out over two years, selling 2,500 tickets. To keep everyone well-lubricated, I became the largest Bay Area buyer of wine for those years. I still have a free T-shirt from every winery in Napa Valley.
It turned out to be the most successful fundraiser in the history of NPR and the Potomac. We easily got the $5 million and then some. The ship received a new coat of white paint, new rigging, modern navigation gear, and more period artifacts. I obtained my captain’s license and learned how to command a former Coast Guard cutter.
It was a win-win-win.
I was trained by a retired US Navy nuclear submarine commander, who was a real expert at navigating a now thin-hulled 73-year-old ship in San Francisco’s crowded bay waters. We were only licensed to cruise up to the Golden Gate Bridge and not beyond, as the ship was so old.
The inaugural cruise was the social event of the year in San Francisco with everyone wearing period Depression-era dress. It was attended by FDR’s grandson, James Roosevelt III, a Bay area attorney who was a dead ringer for his grandfather. I mercilessly grilled him for unpublished historical anecdotes. A handful of still-living Roosevelt cabinet members also came, as well as many WWII veterans.
As we approached the Golden Gate Bridge, some poor soul jumped off and the Coast Guard asked us to perform search and rescue until they could get a ship on station. Nobody was ever found. It certainly made for an eventful first cruise.
Of the original 34 cutters constructed, only four remain. The other three make up the Circle Line tour boats that sail around Manhattan several times a day.
Last summer, I boarded the Potomac for the first time in 14 years for a pleasant afternoon cruise with some guests from Australia. Some of the older crew recognized me and saluted. In the cabin, I noticed a brass urn oddly out of place. It contained the ashes of the sub-commander who had trained me all those years ago.
Good Luck and Good Trading,
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Captain Thomas at the Helm
Global Market Comments
July 11, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(JULY 10 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(TSLA), (NVDA), (COPX), (CMG), (TLT), (TBT)
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the July 10 Mad Hedge Fund Trader Global Strategy Webinar, broadcast from Incline Village NV.
Q: Is the Fed waiting too long to cut interest rates?
A: Yes, they are. We are on a recession track if the Fed doesn’t move soon. In other words, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t daylight—it’s an oncoming train. So, I think a September rate cut is a certainty. They want to see tomorrow’s data and make sure it’s cool. They need several months of really cool inflation data to justify the first rate cut and we probably are going to get that, so next update is tomorrow with the latest CPI number is crucial. Everybody’s sitting on their hands until then.
Q: When will NVIDIA (NVDA) hit a $4 trillion market valuation?
A: By the end of the year. We’re currently at $3.3 trillion, so another $700 billion is nothing for NVIDIA—you could do that in a day if you really wanted to. But give it until the end of the year, just to be conservative. The fact is, they have a global monopoly on the highest-priced product that everybody in the world has to buy or go out of business. It’s not a bad place to be—it’s kind of like where John D. Rockefeller was in the oil industry around 1900.
Q: What do you think about copper (COPX)? Should I maintain my longs?
A: Yes, all we need is further proof of falling interest rates and the entire commodities/precious metals sectors will take off like a rocket. So just sit with your positions. I put out a piece yesterday on copper. All that shines is not Copper, and it’s not dead it’s just resting, like the proverbial John Cleese parrot.
Q: Do you think a 10% stock market correction is likely before the election?
A: No, the most we’ve been able to get this year is 4% or 5% pullbacks, but not much more. We have a world with a cash glut that is underinvested in the face of a global monetary easing. Investors have been net sellers of stocks all of last year, so we were ripe for a meltup, which has, in fact, happened every day so far in July. So no, my S&P 500 target of 6,000 for the end of the year is starting to look too conservative given the moves that we’ve made lately. I’m very positive about that.
Q: Is the real estate market about to crash?
A: Well, the Florida housing collapse that is being driven by the insurance industry feeing that state. Insurance companies don’t like the hurricane risk going forward, which can cost tens of billions of dollars per event. Nobody there can get insurance anymore unless they pay outrageous amounts of money. Some people are only buying fire insurance to save money and skipping the storm insurance and rolling the dice, hoping the storms hit somewhere else in Florida. The fact is, you can’t get a home mortgage without insurance. Banks aren't willing to take the environmental risk of a house without insurance. No insurance means no bank loans, which means the market shrinks to a cash-only market. And there is a cash-only market in Florida, but it’s not at the $500,000 level, it’s more at the $50 million level. So that is a problem unique to Florida. Could it spread to other areas? Yes. Texas is having another energy crisis, as it has twice every year, ever since the power system was privatized there. No reserves for emergencies, no contingency, nothing that costs money basically. And then California definitely has a wildfire problem, although we’ve been getting off pretty light last year and this year. But the insurance companies don’t think like that. They are the classic 20/20 hindsight type companies.
Q: What’s the impact of the election on the market?
A: Zero. But it will defer buying until after the election. So if you have a 50/50 split on polls, uncertainty is at a maximum. People don’t like investing in uncertainty, they like sure things. After the election, you can expect a massive melt-up in the market no matter who wins because the uncertainty will be gone, and tech stocks will lead once again.
Q: What should I do with Nvidia (NVDA)?
A: I put out a report on this on Monday. You keep your long and write calls against them. And you can get quite a lot of money for just the August calls. I think the August $140 calls were selling for $3.50—they’re higher than that now, so you could even go out to August $145, and just keep doing that every month. If Nvidia takes off and you get taken out of your stock, you’re selling it essentially at $143.50. So that is an excellent trade—a lot of the big institutions are doing that now.
Q: Tesla's (TSLA) been on a big rally for the past month; do you expect it to continue?
A: I expect it to take a break, but the long-term uptrend is now back for good, for lots of different reasons. The immediate headline reason was because the Chinese government allowed the buying of Teslas for the first time—they are made in China after all. Second, they had a good earnings beat, so this caused a massive short-covering rally. The shorts got crushed by Tesla once again, as they have been consistently doing for the last 15 years, really. I saw a number of cumulative losses on short positions on Tesla stock since inception: $100 billion. Most of those losses were incurred by oil companies trying to put Tesla out of business.
Q: What do you call a substantial dip?
A: It’s different for every stock—for some it’s 2%, for others like Tesla or Nvidia it’s 20%. It depends on the volatility of the stock; you just have to look at the charts and make your own call.
Q: What do you think for the next earnings season?
A: It’ll be great for technology stocks and not so great for domestics as their businesses cool off.
Q: Is there anything Europe and American EV producers can do to compete against the Chinese at these lower prices?
A: Yes: keep quality high, therefore profits high, therefore profit margins high. That was the Japanese strategy in the US from the 1980s onwards, and it was hugely successful. You can cede the money-losing part—the low-end part of the market, to the Chinese. The quality of the Chinese EVs is terrible, they start to fall apart after four years, and I learned this from several Chinese EV drivers in Ecuador where they have a substantial market share already. But at $15,000 plus the shipping, you don’t make a lot of money in EVs.
Q: Is it a good time to buy put LEAPS on the ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT)?
A: Yes, especially if you’re willing to do an at-the-money and bet that the interest rates stay here or lower for the next year. You’d probably get a 100% return on that, but why bother? Because on the TBT itself, you have a much wider trading spread than the (TLT), therefore the dealing costs are higher. You might as well just go and do the long (TLT) LEAP instead.
Q: Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) stock has been really successful for the last five years, but it just dropped 20%, should I get in?
A: It’s a very low-margin business—I avoid those. There’s not a lot of meat in the burrito business. It doesn’t have the key elements of success. (Not just Chipotle, but with the whole industry.) It's not like you’re designing 96 stock microprocessors.
Q: Are AI stocks overhyped at this point?
A: Absolutely yes, but they can stay overhyped for another three or four years, so I think we're just at the beginning of a very long-term run. And the people who have been involved so far are making the biggest money in their lives.
To watch a replay of this webinar with all the charts, bells, whistles, and classic rock music, just log in to www.madhedgefundtrader.com , go to MY ACCOUNT, click on GLOBAL TRADING DISPATCH, then WEBINARS, and all the webinars from the last 12 years are there in all their glory.
Good Luck and Stay Healthy
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader
Global Market Comments
July 10, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(DINNER WITH DAVID POGUE),
(TSLA)
The last public event I attended before the pandemic hit was a dinner with David Pogue, the Science and Technology writer for the New York Times. It was a night well spent.
David believes that climate change is no longer an “if”, or a “maybe” but a certainty. The sooner we start adapting our lives to it, the better.
The bottom line is that a big piece of the world is about to become unhabitable by humans, possibly as much as the 20% around the equator. The loss of life could be huge.
Raise sea levels by 20 feet and you lose all the coastal cities of China, a large part of the US East Coast, and most of Florida. The US government will have to end flood insurance or go bankrupt. It is already tearing down oceanfront homes that have filed two or three federal claims. Private insurers have already gone this route.
Many species of fish, animals, and birds have been migrating north and south for decades. Indeed, tropical game fish, like mahi mahi, have been showing up along the California coast in recent years, to the delight of local fishermen.
There has been a massive migration of hummingbirds north to Oregon. Global warming could be halted in decades. But to return to pre-1970 levels would be a century-long project. Ironically, the Coronavirus started on that work right after we met, bringing the global economy to a grinding halt and dramatically shrinking the population. US lifespans shrank in 2020 for the first time in 100 years, by one full year.
We spent a lot of time at Mad Hedge Fund Trader talking about future technologies. It will be a huge net job creator over time, but the disruptions to existing industries will be enormous. Steel workers don’t morph into computer programmers easily, although I’ve seen some of the younger ones do it with enthusiasm.
When I told him I was one of the first Tesla (TSLA) buyers 13 years ago and my name still stood on the factory wall, he reached out to shake my hand and say “Thank you.” He was shocked when I told him most commercial pilots can’t safely fly a plane without a functioning autopilot.
I met David on what was certainly the worst-timed book tour in the history of the soon-to-be published How to Pre- pare for Climate Change. There he offers highly practical advice on preparing for an era of extreme weather events, possible famines and floods, and other climate-caused chaos. Click here for the Amazon link.
The 60-year-old Ohio native has an unusual eclectic background not unlike my own. He graduated from Yale with a degree in music, summa cum laude. He went on to become an itinerant Broadway producer. It was probably his desire for a steady paycheck that drove him into writing, taking a 12-year job at Macworld magazine, of which I was a steady reader.
David published the first Mac for Dummies book in 1988. He went on to write six more of the original “Dummies” books, including those for iBooks, Opera, Classical Music, and Magic. He became the personal technology correspondent for the New York Times in 2000.
David has hosted the Nova TV series for PBS and programs for the Science and Discovery channels. A five-time Emmy winner for his stories on CBS Sunday Morning, Pogue has been at the forefront of new and emerging tech trends for decades. There you can hugely benefit from his annual Christmas technology gift tips.
To learn more about David Pogue, please visit his website at https://davidpogue.com .
