Hi Folks at Dead Nuts Money,
I would like to apply for the position of Senior Equity Research Analyst. I have worked around financial people for a large chunk of my career. I tended to look at them the way the my dog looks at me when I rebuild the engine on my snowmobile; I knew they were doing something that made them happy, I knew I loved them, but I had no real grasp of how it put food into my bowl.
And now I’m somewhat old, pushing toward the fulcrum of fifty, and success still eludes me. My truck is rusted and dented, there is a crowbar in the bed that I sometimes use to lever the door when I lock my keys in the cab.
Back before I devoted my life to science and invention, back before my Ph.D. in applied physics, back before my printing career, I sat in Paulie Steermaster’s office at the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t really give a rat’s ass if he hired me for the San Francisco bureau, I made good money running computers, which were fairly new at the time. I can’t remember anything about the interview, other than a sign behind his desk that said “There is no such thing as too many stories about Japan.” Japan could do no wrong back then.
He hired me and I shipped out the San Francisco, where I covered the nascent video game and internet industry for that gang of tequila-sucking degenerates. And I loved them, but financially, I didn’t know my ass from my elbow. I was a scientist even back then. (I found that if I wrote a story about someone who applied math to some kind of finance, that it would never get the spike.) It was all somewhat forgettable for me, but one thing stuck … Steermaster told my friend Cathy Glomar (who was one of the editors) something to the effect of “That Mike, he’s either going to become a millionaire, or he’s going to … “
And I never learned Steermaster’s alternative, I only knew the first part. Cathy told me “I’m not going to tell you the last part, it’s not so nice.”
So now, I’m not a millionaire, my truck is full of rust and dents, my inventions seem to meet a modicum of success, I’ve made a lot of money for others, little for myself. Clearly, I became the thing that Cathy couldn’t tell me. What was it? How bad could it have been?
A psychopath who builds and sells folding boats and backcountry sleds out of corrugated plastic? A common drunk? An applied physicist who can’t seem to catch a break? Something worse? A Fool?
I buy stocks, I’m pretty good at it, but I have no real idea how to buy anything for short-terms. I buy what seems cheap to me, even though I still don’t have clue how price-to-earning-ratios actually work. I recently sold my crypto to buy cruise line stocks, aircraft stocks and oil stocks, because I figure this COVID thing isn’t going to last forever. And I’ll probably sell them all to pay bills, with regret, but that’s the way I live. It sucks, but it’s reality, I’ve done it many times.
I’m still a scientist. I know how to extract rare earth elements from produced waters that are pulled from oil and gas wells, and geothermal bores. I knew how to make the REEs a functional co-product the same way the nuclear energy was a co-product of our quest to enrich uranium to win the Cold War. I know how to desalinate water with the sun. I know how to separate misshaped white blood cells from a leukemia patient so that they can survive the chemo without choking by an arterial roadblock made of dysfunctional cells. I know how to clean the PM 2.5 particles from a pollution stream with a proprietary dry scrubbing process. I know how to harmonically balance an advanced two-stroke engine so it’s locked into a single RPM so it can charge an EV more efficiently than any liquid fuel engine on the planet. And I know how to do all this stuff in full compliance with the rigor and immutable precision of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Entropy will eventually bring the planet to my way of seeing things. And if I’m lucky, and if I do my job right, it will save the lives of children in Haiti and Burkino Faso and Bangladesh, so that a few million children don’t have to die from diarrhea, or cholera, or malaria, or pneumonia, or air pollution.
All of this stuff means nothing in the quest to put food into my bowl though, because I still know nothing about finance.
I can speak to financial folks like a sumbitch, of course. I can help them see what has true long-lasting value in advanced industries, in the future … or actually, inthefuture.com. (I force my children to always follow the phrase “in the future’ with “dot com” because “that’s the only fucking thing of value that your old man owns, other than the 1975 Fiat in the garage.” And I nearly lost that beloved bit of property to one of Peter Mitsubishi’s interns, when he had me convinced they were going to use it for a podcast, but I saw through the ruse just in time, and luckily, that particular jewel in the crown of thorns is still mine.)
I can help other Fools make money, lots of it. It’s one of my skills. I might be able to keep their attention, that’s sort of a half-skill that I used to have. And I need the work … I need a new truck.
I didn’t proofread this. But given that you’ll likely never get back to me, please don’t get angry at me if I post this cover letter on SpaceForce7.com. I need to preserve these touchstones of my memory. They might mean something to my children someday.
Or not.