You can buy a lot of things with money some buy things, others buy security, and freedom
Joined November 2015
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Brian Smith retweeted
I failed 21 SAS selection.
One hundred and twenty men started. Four finished. I was not one of them.
I do not tell that story to be humble. I tell it because of what happened next, which nobody ever asks about.
I went home. I was 19 years old and I had failed at the one thing I had told everyone I was going to do. There is a particular silence that follows that. Friends are kind. Family are careful. And you sit in your childhood bedroom and understand that the failure is now a fact about you.
Six months later I went back and did the whole thing again.
Passed the second time.
Here is what I actually learned, and it is not what people expect. It was not about grit. It was not about wanting it more. It was that the first attempt was not wasted, it was the reconnaissance. I knew where the ground broke you. I knew what the third day felt like. I was not braver the second time, I was better informed.
Most people treat a failure as a verdict.
It is data.
The only real failure is the one you refuse to go back and look at.
Brian Smith retweeted
В 1994 году США, Россия и Украина подписали соглашение об отказе Украины от ядерного оружия. Украина отдала 4 400 ядерных боеголовок. Взамен США и Россия гарантировали Украине «независимость и существующие границы».
Спустя 30 лет один гарант напал, а другой требует капитуляции
Brian Smith retweeted
Walmart's systematic pricing violations overcharge shoppers
Walmart whistleblower is inside Walmart for ten minutes and finds twenty products where the price per ounce does not match the total
Brian Smith retweeted
I honestly didn't believe this when a buddy told me they were live streaming an execution......
I am pro-death penalty.
Justice matters. Consequences matter.
But live-streaming an execution isn’t justice, it’s a dark spectacle.
Turning a man’s death into content for the bloodthirsty is evil.
Imagine if this continues.
Soon it'll be "This execution is Sponsored by Pfizer" as the masses cheer....... how dark. Weird. Reminds me of Rome before its fall.
This is kind of thing societies do right before they stop recognizing themselves.
What do you actually gain by watching someone die on camera? Nothing good.
Desensitization. Entertainment of the worst kind. A culture that cheers the footage is already farther gone than it cares to admit.
Guard your mind.
BREAKING: The Pentagon says it will livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. apnews.com/article/fort-hood…
Brian Smith retweeted
I'm a cardiologist. Dave Goldberg passed a treadmill EKG. Five months later he was dead at 47.
His cholesterol wasn't scary. His stress test looked fine. His arteries were already full of plaque nobody had looked at.
That's the story behind the CT trailer @altcap parked at the All-In Summit this week, scanning attendees and calling a $100 calcium scan "the mammogram for the heart."
Why this is going viral right now:
Because it's the perfect storm. A billionaire investor, not a doctor, parked a Siemens CT scanner in a truck at a tech conference and ran ~33 people through it in a day. A tragic story everyone remembers (Sheryl Sandberg's husband, the book Option B). A number anyone can understand (a score of 0 vs 400). A price anyone can afford ($100). And a villain: the cholesterol test your doctor keeps ordering that "missed it."
Then the replies filled with people saying "I got a score of 600, they found two blocked arteries, I never had a symptom." Nothing spreads faster than a survivor story with a number attached.
Plus a business model that sounds like a movement: employers pay $200, the extra $100 funds a free scan for someone in a low-income neighborhood. Medicare coverage is the stated goal, maybe by end of this year.
Here's what he's right about, and where I'd slow him down.
Heart disease kills ~800,000 Americans a year. Breast cancer kills ~40,000. We do 40 million mammograms and about 1 million calcium scans. That ratio is insane.
Half of heart attack patients have "normal" cholesterol. Cholesterol tells you the risk of building plaque. A calcium scan tells you if the plaque is already there.
The scan is 10 minutes, no needle, no dye. About 1 mSv of radiation. A mammogram is 0.4. You absorb ~3 a year just living on Earth. One scan is nothing. Scanning everyone every few years for decades is a different conversation.
Score of zero? Your near-term risk is genuinely low. Score of 400? Something is happening in your arteries whether you feel it or not. In the uncertain middle, a high score vs a zero can mean a 7-fold difference in 10-year risk.
In my own practice, I've seen a calcium score change more lives than almost any lab result. People who "felt great" and were walking around with a time bomb.
Where I'd slow him down:
The guidelines don't say "scan America." They say use it in adults 40 to 75 with borderline-to-intermediate risk, when the result would change whether you start a statin. The USPSTF still calls the evidence for population screening insufficient. A 2026 Northwestern study in JAMA found it adds only modestly to a good risk calculator for most people.
Calcium is the scar, not the fire. Soft plaque, the kind that actually ruptures, doesn't show up. A zero in a 38-year-old is not a hall pass.
Statins can make your score go UP as plaque hardens and stabilizes. So you can't use repeat scans as a "is my treatment working" meter. I have to explain this to scared patients every week.
A high score can trigger the cascade: stress test, CT angiogram, cath, stents. In someone with no symptoms, stents often don't beat medication and lifestyle on hard outcomes. They add bleeding risk, a year of blood thinners, and complications. Incidental lung nodules show up. Anxiety shows up. Bills show up.
And there's still no trial showing that scanning everyone saves lives. The "50,000 lives, $20 billion" math is a projection built on mammogram-scale volume, not a result.
My honest take after 25 years:
If you're 40 to 75, have family history, high Lp(a), South Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry, or your doctor is on the fence about a statin, this is one of the highest-ROI $100 in medicine. Get it.
The scan is a flashlight. It's not the cure. The cure is still what it always was: apoB down, blood pressure down, sleep, movement, no cigarettes.
Don't die of something preventable. And don't let a good test become a bad national product before the evidence exists.
Get the data. Then argue with your cardiologist...
Brian Smith retweeted
Imagine a chef employed at a restaurant that charges $100 for a hamburger.
One day he gets sick of his institution ripping off customers, so he goes across the street and opens a shop with $5 hamburgers.
Now the hamburger loving people are better off. Competition drives down prices and increases quality.
The original restaurant, angry over the lost business, gets a law passed that bans chefs from owning restaurants.
Everyone would recognize this as a corrupt, protectionist law.
And yet, in healthcare, with skyrocketing costs, we still outlaw physician owned hospitals.
ICYMI: Congress put a spotlight on physician-owned hospitals today.
During a House Judiciary Committee field hearing on competition in health care, Brian Miller, MD, MBA, MPH, highlighted the federal restrictions that prevent new POHs from participating in Medicare and existing facilities from expanding.
His testimony cited 30 years of research showing that POHs can deliver higher-quality care, and called on policymakers to reconsider federal policies that restrict physician-led competition. 👏
The AANS and CNS have long advocated for removing these barriers and expanding opportunities for POHs.
🎥 Watch the hearing: judiciary.house.gov/committe…
@physicianhosp @DrBrian4Health @spinesection @
Brian Smith retweeted
Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No. In fact, it could make things a whole lot worse.
Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx
Brian Smith retweeted
I posted my net worth trajectory before to show it’s NEVER a straight line. I blew up my finances multiple times.
‘75 - sperm/egg produce a spawn
‘98 - done w/college $0 net worth
‘99 - $25K (got job w W2 job with Terminix. Put all the cash I had in Yahoo, Juniper, Worldcom other tech stocks)
‘00 - $40K ——> $5K (tech bubble)
‘01 - $15K ——-> $3K (9/11 market crash). Told myself I’ll never touch stocks again.
‘02 - $10K (out of stocks, bought condo in Bonita Springs, FL to live in)
‘03 - $25K NW
‘04 - $50K NW (sold condo, made $30K on it, got married, bought small starter house to live in plus a rental prop in South Florida)
‘05 - $70K NW (bought another rental and went ALL in). Thought I was some real estate mogul.
‘06 - $300K (rentals 🚀 , started EBay biz flipping toys)
‘07 - $400K
‘08 - $250K (cracks in real estate market. Values start to drop.)
‘09 - $25K (lost rentals to foreclosure. Had to give banks a check for negotiated amount for DIL)
Found out what a 1099-C was.
‘10 - $75K - (Various job promotions, side hustle EBay doing well)
‘11 - $120K
‘12 - $140K
‘13 - $200K - (started buying “dividend” type stocks, but Oil and Gas MLP’s, chasing yield)
‘14 - $150K - (lost $150K in MLP’s, sold with massive carryover loss. eBay —-> Amazon, takes off)
‘15 - $600K (More corporate promotions/stock grants/Amazon crushing it)
‘16 - $1.3 million (W2/Stock grants/Amazon all doing well)
‘17 - $650K - divorce 🤷♂️ (1/2 net worth wiped out with stroke of a pen)
‘18 - $800K - Corporate $ & Amazon still chugging along
‘19 - $1.1 mil - Corp good/Amazon doing really well
‘20 - $1.4 mil - Demoted at Corp (20% pay cut/Amazon doing well/bought 1 STR in smokies then Covid hit. Thought “oh crap here we go again…I suck at real estate”. Then it took off. Decided to buy more. Went ALL IN on STR’s in Gatlinburg because I needed to get out of rat race of W2. Met a guy in Pigeon Forge and we started building cabins as well.
‘21 - $3 mil - Still at W2/Amazon huge now/STR’s cranking/Building construction doing well. Quit corporate at year end. Had 2X w2 pay with other ventures.
‘22 - $4 mil - Building development/Land/sold all STR’s (except 1…strike while the iron is hot) for major profit. Bought CAT Machines to clear my own lots/land but it morphed into excavation company. Bought $BTC & $ETH
‘23 - $6 mil. Started going all in on new construction and building indoor pool cabins. Bought lots of land near Gatlinburg.
‘24 - $8 mil. Still building indoor pool cabins and selling at completion.
‘25 - $12 mil. Same playbook. No need to change and reinvent wheel. Build a few cabins per year at $160/sq foot and sell at $350/sq foot. 700 acres in total land bought near Gatlinburg.
‘26 - Between $17-20 mil NW. Sold last two of my new build pool cabins in March. Done with those. Now focusing on building my retreat center.
As you can see, I went “All in” multiple times. Most of the times, they blew up in my face, but at the end of the day, you only need ONE to hit.
Everyone told me I was crazy to go all in at the Smokies in 2020, but the numbers worked and I jumped in head first, in spite of my 2008 debacle. Had I not got ALL IN that time, my financial picture would look much different today.
Almost every wealthy person I know has blown up at least once.
Concentrated bets are why they got rich. Concentrated bets are also why they blew up. Same mechanism.
You don't build real wealth spreading thin. You build it going all in on one thing. And that same concentration that creates the upside creates the downside too.
So you win big. You think it's a lot because you've never had money before. Then you lose it because you were concentrated.
But now you actually know what you're doing. You come back, win bigger, and hedge smarter because you felt what the downside feels like.
I've really only lost it all twice and each time was a higher low. Kinda how it works if you're paying attention.
Brian Smith retweeted
Never sign up to a gym with your real credit card, always generate one of those burner cards like on Wise/Revolut/Privacy Dot Com etc
same goes for any shady business
feels so good just opening the app and clicking "Delete card" without speaking to anyone or filling out a form
Brian Smith retweeted
A study with almost 74,000 subjects ages 50-85.
Conclusion:
-The wealthiest Americans had approximately the same survival rates as the poorest people in Europe.
Wealth helps enormously within the United States, but even high wealth does not completely overcome the US–European mortality disadvantage.
Wealthy Americans presumably have much greater ability to buy excellent medical care, better housing, healthier food, gyms, preventive testing and so forth. Yet their survival remained roughly comparable to the poorest group in Northern/Western Europe.
The study doesn’t provide direct answers to why this happens. However, maybe wealth cannot outperform lifestyle, strong social safety net, great food around friends and family, lower stress, walking significantly more everyday to your bakery (yes, believe it or not, Europeans are big on bread), local food stores, coffee shops, affording to retire when it is time without worrying about paying bills especially when you get sick…
As both an American and European citizen, I believe it may be time for Americans to recalibrate how we think about longevity.
We are increasingly chasing the latest intervention such as rapamycin, peptides, cold plunges, red-light therapy…hoping that targeting a single enzyme or metabolic pathway will move the needle.
As a systems physiologist, I struggle with that view. Human physiology is not a collection of isolated pathways. Trillions of cells communicate across metabolic, vascular, endocrine, immune and neurological systems. Health emerges from their integration.
Perhaps longevity is less about hacking individual pathways and more about creating the environment in which the whole organism can thrive.
Brian Smith retweeted
Mao Zedong killed roughly 45 million people between 1958 and 1962, and the backyard steel furnace campaign sits at the center of that catastrophe as a textbook case of central planning consuming itself alive.
The logic of the Great Leap Forward went like this: if the Soviet Union industrialized through state-directed production, China would do it faster and bigger. Mao ordered peasants across every province to smelt steel in small furnaces built on collective land. Party officials set output quotas with no reference to actual resources, actual skills, or actual demand. Farmers melted down their own plows, woks, and door hinges to hit the numbers. They stripped hillsides bare for fuel. What came out of those furnaces was overwhelmingly pig iron so brittle it had zero industrial use. The quotas got reported as fulfilled, the statistics traveled up the command chain, and Beijing celebrated a triumph that existed only on paper.
You have to understand what those farmers were abandoning to stand at furnaces all day. The 1958 harvest was, by most estimates, actually decent. But with the rural labor force diverted to smelting operations, crops rotted in the fields unharvested. Free market economists call this opportunity cost: every hour a farmer spent producing worthless slag was an hour not spent producing food. The price system, had anyone been allowed to use it, would have made this tradeoff immediately visible. Prices signal scarcity. Planners just issue directives and wait for reality to disobey them.
Local officials faced execution or labor camps for reporting shortfalls, so they reported surpluses. Beijing then exported grain abroad, partly to service debts to the Soviet Union, partly to project an image of socialist success, even as provinces like Anhui and Sichuan descended into mass starvation. The state had monopolized food distribution, so when the numbers were wrong, there was no private market, no informal trade network, no alternative channel to move grain to the dying. The apparatus designed to feed people became the mechanism that starved them.
This is what the elimination of private property and price signals actually produces in practice: 45 million corpses and a generation of Chinese children who grew up stunted by famine.
Brian Smith retweeted
The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital.
I played soccer for 20+ years.
Grassroots.
Academy.
D1 college.
Pursued professionally after.
And I’ll say the quiet part out loud:
The US soccer infrastructure is broken.
In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement.
For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal:
Get recruited.
Get a scholarship.
Play college soccer.
But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path.
From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival.
Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France.
That player has likely been in a professional environment for years.
Training daily.
Playing meaningful matches year-round.
Competing against grown professionals.
Getting thousands more touches.
Learning how to solve the game under pressure.
The gap is massive.
And it shows.
American players are usually athletic.
They are usually fit.
They usually compete hard.
But at the highest levels, that is not enough.
The biggest difference is technical comfort.
We do not move the ball like Spain.
We do not combine like Argentina.
We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood.
That comes down to volume.
Volume of touches.
Volume of street soccer.
Volume of futsal.
Volume of unstructured play.
Volume of high-level training environments.
Volume of meaningful games.
In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23.
Parents spend thousands.
Clubs charge thousands.
Travel teams fly all over the country.
Showcases become the product.
Recruiting becomes the scoreboard.
But the return on invested capital is poor.
We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment.
That is a broken operating model.
And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer.
You inspect the system.
The US has talent.
The US has athletes.
The US has money.
The US has facilities.
But the foundation is wrong.
We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system.
Those are not the same thing.
Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources.
I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer.
I’m saying it because I lived it.
And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.
Brian Smith retweeted
This is my struggle with the government control.
We have a minor example of it here at our Catholic school.
The water that we receive and pay for is filtered by the city. The city we operate out of requires us to rent a meter that measures how much water we consume so that they know how to bill us. They recently increase the cost of renting the meter we are required to have by almost 300%.
Next, the State of Michigan declared that all water fountains in schools have to have filtrated units.
Ugh.
It was a shockingly expensive thing to do but step-by-step we have replaced and are replacing every water fountain with these large filtered units.
To be clear, the water was already filtered at the city level, but rules are rules so we have to put in these.
On top of that, the government wants verification so we have to pay inspection fees every year for the people who come in and test our water to be sure that the water the city purified and that we purify afterward is pure enough.
These are not small fees.
I asked if they could look at the test results of our water before we pay all this money to put in filtered water fountains and no, we can’t.
It doesn’t matter that our water is already purified: the state made a rule
They forces a nonprofit to spend an obscene amount of money and then added to it an expensive fee of people coming in and conducting tests.
And don’t even get me started on the scam of all of the rules and inspections around elevators.
We are a small nonprofit school & Parish that commits 10% of our collection to taking care of the poor and our area. For tuition, we eat 1/3 of the cost to educate so has to make it easier for people to afford the school.
Every year, it gets harder because the State of Michigan adds more rules and more layers of bureaucracy and more fees on us.
Every. Year.
More rules, more inspections.
People who have never run a business or a nonprofit their entire life make these rules in their little bubbles with absolutely no thought of the damage it does.
One day it’s gonna put us under and then they’re gonna have to feed the people we feed and they’re going to do it the same way they did water fountains and elevators:
Maximum cost.
Minimum good.
Results defined by unintended consequences.
There's no freeze on property tax.
There's no freeze on the wages paid to landscapers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, flooring installers.
There's no freeze on the cost of lumber, copper, baseboard, quarter rounds, flashing, siding, window treatments.
There's no freeze on the wages paid to janitors or porters.
There's no freeze on utilities -- on electric, gas, water, sewer (building-paid utilities in hallways, lobbies, maintenance corridors; most buildings pay water and sewer for tenants).
There are currently 57,421 units sitting vacant in NYC because it's more cost-effective to leave them empty than it is to rent them out.
If you're wondering: "How that could be possible? Wouldn't making anything be better than making nothing?" -- the answer is no, because of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.
The HSTPA mandated a certain level of renovation for a vacant unit, but did not allow landlords to raise the rent enough to be able to recoup those costs.
If a long-term tenant moves out after decades, the apartment often requires $50,000 to $100,000 in lead abatement, new wiring, plumbing, and structural renovations.
Because the law heavily restricts how much of that cost can be passed to the next tenant.
The HSPTA eliminated the "vacancy bonus" (which allowed automatic 20% rent increases when a tenant left) and heavily capped Individual Apartment Improvements (IAIs).
This means landlords who want a renovation loan would be rejected by a bank, because the landlord would not be able to show that they could repay that loan.
Landlords who pay out-of-pocket would end up losing money, underperforming even what they could get by putting their money in a U.S. Treasury or gov't bond.
Therefore, it's more cost-effective to just leave the unit vacant.
That's why we have 57,421 vacant units across New York right now.
That number is about to get much worse.
Brian Smith retweeted
There's no freeze on property tax.
There's no freeze on the wages paid to landscapers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, flooring installers.
There's no freeze on the cost of lumber, copper, baseboard, quarter rounds, flashing, siding, window treatments.
There's no freeze on the wages paid to janitors or porters.
There's no freeze on utilities -- on electric, gas, water, sewer (building-paid utilities in hallways, lobbies, maintenance corridors; most buildings pay water and sewer for tenants).
There are currently 57,421 units sitting vacant in NYC because it's more cost-effective to leave them empty than it is to rent them out.
If you're wondering: "How that could be possible? Wouldn't making anything be better than making nothing?" -- the answer is no, because of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.
The HSTPA mandated a certain level of renovation for a vacant unit, but did not allow landlords to raise the rent enough to be able to recoup those costs.
If a long-term tenant moves out after decades, the apartment often requires $50,000 to $100,000 in lead abatement, new wiring, plumbing, and structural renovations.
Because the law heavily restricts how much of that cost can be passed to the next tenant.
The HSPTA eliminated the "vacancy bonus" (which allowed automatic 20% rent increases when a tenant left) and heavily capped Individual Apartment Improvements (IAIs).
This means landlords who want a renovation loan would be rejected by a bank, because the landlord would not be able to show that they could repay that loan.
Landlords who pay out-of-pocket would end up losing money, underperforming even what they could get by putting their money in a U.S. Treasury or gov't bond.
Therefore, it's more cost-effective to just leave the unit vacant.
That's why we have 57,421 vacant units across New York right now.
That number is about to get much worse.
Brian Smith retweeted
Story time… About 6 months ago I was hunting for items to flip at the local thrift store. I came across a ton of these brand new Disney puzzles selling for $5 each. There were probably 200 of them total on the shelf. Looked them up and they were selling for around $20-$25 each online. Next thing I know I am hauling 2 carts full of puzzles to the register with a lot of people looking at me strangely 😂. The lady at the register lets me buy them at $4 each for a total of $450 for 113 puzzles. Fast-forward a couple of months and I haven’t sold a single puzzle 🥲 However, my 14-year-old son had been trying to raise money for his humanitarian trip this summer. He needed to make about $3000. All of our boys have done these trips and we have made each of them earn every penny because we feel like they value it more that way. We came up with the idea to load up the wagon and sell these puzzles door-to-door with a description of his humanitarian trip and a QR code for my wife’s Venmo. $15 each puzzle or two for $25. Like a champ, my boy went to door-to-door over several neighborhoods and raised over $2000 toward his trip. So many people supported him and were super generous with tips, etc. What I thought was going to be a total bust of a purchase, turned into becoming an amazing opportunity for him to work hard to pay for nearly his entire trip. Needless to say, I’m a very proud dad and very glad to be rid of those puzzles!
Brian Smith retweeted
The great American roadtrip…I think every young guy needs to do one. It's our rite of passage.
When I was 24 I was celebrating my first sober year and previous year’s business success.
So I decided to spend 6 weeks riding my motorcycle across the country by myself.
I started in San Francisco, went all over Colorado, then Tennessee, onto North Carolina.
On the way home Texas, Arizona, New Mexico.
I stayed in motels, couch surfed, and camped. And met so many people. The entire trip cost maybe $2000 (or less).
The entire trip took 45 days and was 9000 miles.
Some highlights:
- I got pulled over by a cop when I was unknowingly going 90 MPH for miles. He saw my grandfather's photograph in my saddlebag (he was a cop, we had just met in Oklahoma and he gave me his photo, so I kept it so I could see it while driving) the officer let me go with a warning and said "it pays to have a pig in the family."
- Stayed at the famous “clown motel” in Las Vegas.
- Tons of random convos with people at gas stations
- Using a couch surfing app and meeting people from all walks of life
The trip changed my life.
It sounds corny, but wandering around the country has a cool way of showing that your life defaults - like how you live, where you live, how you respond to things – those are choices you make. And being on the road, by yourself, meeting different types of people…makes you realize that.
Plus, I met my wife a week after I got back and was able to impress her with cool stories.
So if you’re reading this and you’re in your early 20s, do it.
___
Some of the best pics below