Kevin Bae: Let me turn that It's been too long. I fucked up the
intro. format is the card cast?
Hello, it's Kevin Bae and fucking things up once again. So
I just looked, it's been about a month since I tried to throw
together a podcast. I didn't even realize it was that long.
Now, I know everybody says all the podcasters say, consistency
is the key. I find it extremely difficult to do this on a weekly
basis. I don't know why I think it's mostly because I said, I
don't know why. And then I'm going to give you a reason.
That's ridiculous. But in any case, I think the biggest
problem I have is that I end up talking to my wife or somebody
else. And I blow my wide there. So then I've already got it out
of my head. So then I don't need to talk about it anywhere else.
It's already out of my head. You know, maybe what I need to do is
do this earlier earlier in the day. So the thoughts are still
there. And they're not they're not out because once I express
them someplace, I just have no need to express them anywhere
else. That's why the blog exists. You know, bae.c
m, by the way, K E V I N B as i boy A E.com that, you know,
y blog exists strictly for me to get crap out of my head.
nd I've been doing it for a long time. And I've blown up that b
og so many times. I've had Ke in Bae calm since the 90s. T
e late 90s I believe it is. I rink coffee while I do this,
y the way. And that Scott Adams his is not coffee with Kevin
ae . I just happen to drink coffee while I ramble on becau
e my throat gets dry. And then start my voice starts to crack
up. And it's like really sever vocal fry. So, yeah, I do I fin
it extremely difficult to do th s on a weekly basis. And you k
ow what? I think strictly becau e I'm, you know, I need to be am
ed up to do this. I don't think I'm very good at trying to put s
mething together and then do it later on. Like what I was doing
for the first, I think it was 1 17 episodes. I don't even remem
er what episode this one is, b the way, today's Septe
ber 20.
So what I was doing for those first, I don't know, 1516
episodes, because I was just basically recap my blog. And it
was fine, I suppose, you know, I would just kind of read what I
posted. Maybe I would add in extra extra shit every now and
again. Because then, you know, maybe some new thoughts would
come by. I was also trying to do it on YouTube. So this is
nowhere live right now this is I'm not doing any video at this
more at this point. For this episode, I may do it again. I
don't know. I'm trying I'm really just trying to figure
this out. Because I kind of enjoyed doing it. Once done.
It's just the act of actually doing it as a problem. I don't
know how podcasters who have done this for years. Sorry, I'm
touching this microphone like crazy today. I really don't know
how they do this for years. On on a regular basis. See I am I
retired from my job a couple of years ago. I was working for my
family. And I left that gig. And so now I'm just kind of doing
whatever I feel like and Maybe Maybe if I was still working
every day on a normal normal job that I'm so busy doing that,
that then I don't have to, you know, I'm not talking to anybody
really about politics or news or anything like that. And it would
just kind of come out of me and you know, but I was I was still
blogging then. I don't know, this is such a such a disjointed
ramble. But I think what I'm going to try to do maybe is to
discuss or talk about things, it's not really a discussion,
because it's one sided. But maybe just talk about things
that aren't on the blog. And shit that just comes to mind.
So, you know, that's why I'm almost sounded like I was like,
I had Tourette's. But maybe that's why I need to do it
earlier in the day, before I start getting wrapped up in a
whole bunch of stuff. You know, cuz what I do normally during
the day is I'm you know, I'm blogging throughout the day,
just kind of catching up a new, they just keep the Wall Street
Journal open, I keep Twitter open, you know, and I follow
certain people on Twitter so I can get some, some news. And
then, you know, I'm monitoring and working, my investments, you
know, that's where I get my income from. And I blog on my
blog for that. And I also podcast for that, that one's
easier to do, because that when I can recap what happened during
the week, and go over what happened in in my various
portfolios. But then I'm also doing other shit that I just
feel like doing like this, this year, is our first full year in
Georgia, after moving from Chicago, and there's a lot of
stuff to do in the house. So I was busy all the time, putting
up shelves, you know, kind of customizing this house to how we
like to live. You know, I also built a couple of raised beds in
the backyard. So I could grow garden, I had a big garden back
in Chicago. Oh, this stuff takes time plus, you know, doing
little repairs and stuff to this house. Things that the previous
owner didn't do or should have done, you know, I'm busy doing
stuff like that, like this house is on a hill, we're at the we're
actually at the bottom of a hill in a cul de sac. But there's a
steep drop off behind us. And it's another you know, we're at
the I would say mid level part of the hill. So when the rain
comes in all goes straight downhill and into a creek that's
about 60 yards or so from my fence line. So there's a there's
a two story deck. It's not a double deck, but there, there's
a deck that comes out from the kitchen and then you go down
some stairs and it leads to a concrete patio with some doors
that come out the basement. So underneath that deck, when it
rains, it gets wet all underneath the deck. And water
splashes up to the door and you get you know, there's a problem
there where you because it's so humid here in Georgia, it never
dries out really. So much water ends up by the door that
you get some rotting wood. So what I did was one of the
projects I did this summer, is I sort of put a ceiling on that
deck that diverts the water into a gutter and the gutter takes
the water and takes it away and I did I did a decent job not not
a great job but a job. Something that does what it's supposed to
do not perfect, but it does largely what it's supposed to
do. You know, so when I when I go through my morning ritual,
and I'm coming up to my home office, and what I do is I look
at the news, see how it's affecting my portfolios. You
know, maybe I'll blog some news stories on on my financial blog.
That's called chasing the yield.com by the way. And I
might do that for a couple of hours just perusing the news,
doing some blogs, maybe blogs, news stories as well on Kevin
Bade calm and then maybe 11 o'clock depending you know it's
a little bit different, but somewhere around 11 o'clock. You
know, I might go refresh my coffee. I might depending on
what I'm doing. For dinner, I might start prepping, prepping
stuff for dinner. I really get to position this microphone
better. Um, you know, or do some of the various, you know,
projects that I've got going or maybe we go out and, and go
somewhere, I don't know. But I find it you know, if I don't,
maybe if I, if I can't get this podcast done, at some point in
those first couple of hours, I lose total track of time. And by
the time I get back here, it's like, you know, might be four or
five o'clock in the afternoon. And then I just got nothing left
to say like right now it's 6pm 6pm Eastern time. And I was
even now just struggling whether or not I should do this. But
it's been over a month, and I do have some people that listen,
nobody that has sent me any money at which by the way you
can, if you enjoyed any of the stuff I did before, or you're
like this random stream of consciousness consciousness now.
There are donate links on my website. And as well, you can
send fractions of bitcoins and some satoshis my way by using a
one of the new podcast apps that are value for value enabled, so
this is a podcasting 2.0 compatible podcast. It's
probably one of the least listened to podcasting 2.0
compatible podcasts out there today. That's my claim to fame.
But if you if you listen with one of those apps, you can
stream cryptocurrency to me in the form of satoshis. And
anything you send would be shocking.
So aside, aside from the stock market that was driving me
insane today looked like it was gonna go down almost 3%. And it
kind of clawed its way back to maybe one and a half percent. We
had the news about from the wall street journal about Xi Jinping.
And his aim to rein in Chinese capitalism as if there was
Chinese capitalism to begin with. If anything, it was a very
soft socialist version of capitalism. where anybody who
was paying attention knew or should have known that you can't
confidently do business with a communist nation. And, you know,
since the Clinton administration, the Chinese have
rapidly advanced their technology. They've grown
rapidly wealthy, all at the expense of the American
taxpayer. Now, mind you, we're not you know, the America or I
should say, the American public, not necessarily the taxpayer.
Now we've received goods for our money. But we've given a lot of
way. We made China the manufacturing center of the
world. They don't just manufacture bullshit, either.
It's not just t shirts and shoes. You know, they're
manufacturing, high technology, high technology that we allowed
them to manufacture that could have gone anywhere, could have
stayed here in the US if the governments of the United
States, you know, I'm talking about the states and the federal
government, in particular states like California, Washington,
Oregon, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, you know,
all up and down, you know, basically the coasts, the
coasts, and, you know, Illinois, they would get their heads out
of their ass and get rid of things like the minimum wage
that just ruins American competitiveness. Now, of course,
it sounds cold hearted, get rid of the minimum wage, because
everybody talks about the fucking minimum wage, as if it's
some quote unquote, living wage. And that has no definition of
living wage has no definition whatsoever. Your your, you know,
there are some people that could live comfortably on 10 grand a
year and there are others that I have no clue how to squeeze that
much out out of their out of their dollar. And not only that,
but you have different standards of living in different states.
It's a, you know, I came from Illinois to move to Georgia, the
cost of living in Illinois is enormous compared to here.
You know, I left, I left a pretty decent income behind to
come to Georgia, you know, I'm making probably about a third of
what I was making, I'm getting a regular paycheck from my family,
working in the family business. I'm probably making about a
third of what I was making before. And my expenses, you
know, haven't dropped by two thirds, is not that cheap to
live here. But it's a lot cheaper I can, I can easily get
by the amount of money that I'm making now. For example, the
house that we purchased in North, the far north eastern
suburbs of Atlanta, about 30 miles or so
it was almost $200,000 less expensive than the house we sold
in Illinois. The property taxes are 1/3 of what my property
taxes were in Illinois. So we were able to move here mail, buy
a house and do a whole bunch of renovations, and still have a
sizable chunk of cash leftover, the house here is bigger, the
lot size is bigger. But all the expenses are less. And that was
my primary reason for moving is I wanted to lower my fixed
expenses, my fixed costs, because my wife likes to travel.
So the whole concept was, we would save a ton of money, we
would be able to travel a couple times a year, you know, she
likes to go to Europe. And you know, just kind of bounce around
a little bit, you know, we even are toying around with the idea
of maybe in five years or so we sell off everything, and just
go, you know, live a year here live a year there and just kind
of bounce around.
Somehow I'm looking at my computer right now somehow I
went to my cost of living from talking about Jian, ping and
reining in the Chinese capitalists. I have no idea how
I went from that, that to that went from one to the other how
the train of thought goes from China, to my property taxes.
Anyway, back back to Shishun Ping.
You know, we transfer to an enormous amount of wealth, not
just in money, but in technology and brain power over to the
Chinese is a huge mistake, they couldn't even launch a rocket
they couldn't get rockets off the ground until, as I remember
it, President Clinton allowed some vital technology to be sent
over there to be shared. So microprocessors. You know, I
mean, they were stealing stuff to begin with. But then when we
started actually manufacturing things over there of high
technology, you know, where supposedly we control the
manufacturing process and all the intellectual property.
You're teaching people how to fucking make things. So when you
teach them how to make it, they're not gonna need your
fucking technology anymore because you gave it to them. It
made zero sense that you're gonna make that kind of a deal
with a communist nation, a closed off communist communist
nation, where while they, you know, they have make believe
capitalism there. They can take and they can control any aspect
of their economy. And the things that that produce goods, they
can take control of it at the drop of a hat. Look what
happened to Hong Kong. Hong Kong, went from a free country,
a UK colony to now basically a prisoner of China. They're not
free anymore. They're free to To say anything, they're not free
to do anything, whatever China says goes and China is just
fleecing them. And they they've done that since they took over
from the UK. But here's the bonus. And it's the way I see
the world. Because I am, you know, I'm 54, I'll be 55 this
year. Officials, you know, to me, 55 is the official senior
citizen age because you can get into a 55 and up Senior Living
housing complex, where I can I can be with all the other gray
haired people playing tennis. But I'm old enough to remember
the Soviet Union. And I remember what Venezuela used to be like,
I've never been there. But I'm talking about just reading about
it in the news. And it is well known throughout the history of
the world, that socialism and communism does not work. In
fact, it kills people, it kills millions of people. And that's
not what is being taught in the United States today. What is
being taught here is that socialism is some kind of
utopian equity farm, where everybody's made equal, nobody
starved. But that's bullshit. That's all bullshit. And maybe
we'll be able to watch it. I don't know. You know, it took it
took, what 30 years for China to crawl out of its out of its
economic hole. You know, everybody, they their entire
country was poverty stricken. And through the economic trade
with the United States, a great deal of their population has
been able to crawl out. And you know, we talk all the time
about, at least in the news about Chinese factories,
underpaying workers, overworking them, where they're committing
suicide and jumping off of buildings. But I tell you that
there's no shortage of people wanting those jobs. That's why
they've been able to be so successful. minimum wages, I
mean, shit there. They pay people, whatever, whatever is
the going rate, that part for them is capitalism. If they if
they start clamping down on that, suddenly, not so many
people are going to be wanting to go over there and work. So if
Xi Jinping does a true socialist crackdown on that country and
starts taking actual control of these companies, you know,
nationalizing them now they haven't done it yet, but they're
they're tightening the reins. Are you looking at what happened
here in the United States during COVID, when the federal
government declared eviction moratoriums, foreclosure
moratoriums, they had to pump out trillions of dollars to keep
everybody afloat.
In order to utilize that mean that socialism and communism
there, they de facto nationalize residential real estate. They
didn't do it with commercial real estate, they only did it
with residential real estate. And the entire, that entire part
is on the verge or was on the verge of collapse. Because they
weren't allowing homeowners who rent out rooms, they weren't
allowing real estate companies to kick people out. But yet they
still had to pay mortgages, they still had to pay property taxes,
and then you had the foreclosure moratorium that didn't apply to
commercial properties that didn't apply to people who are
renting out their properties that only apply to actual
homeowners. And when a homeowner has a mortgage, they don't
actually own their home. It's owned by the bank. So the banks,
which have a horrible track record, sometimes have I mean,
just look at the 2008 financial collapse that was all caused by
low quality mortgages being traded by banks, but you know,
they were being bundled together and being sold off and traded.
And then when people couldn't pay them, you know, and we're
defaulting, it was just the House of Cards. This is what the
US government is doing it if we would stop that. Free everybody
up. We wouldn't have to worry about China at all. You know,
maybe we could do some more investments in Some Southeast
Asian countries that aren't communist. Maybe we could, you
know, maybe help out South America and I know South America
has its own history and its own problem with socialism,
communism, and into an antagonism towards the United
States. But I think our energies are best focused in our own
hemisphere, in our side of the world. You know, we're maybe we
can make people more free down south where they're more open to
this, this style of government. And it's here.
Those are my thoughts for today. Oh, by the way, I fucked this
all up. I got a podcast rig. It's called the Patrick before
and my SD card was full. So like an idiot, I wouldn't formatted
it instead of just going and getting rid of the recording
shows that I had on there. And so my intro music got wiped out,
I gotta redo it. So I had to open it up on my computer, and
play it through there instead, so that's why I got to set up
now. That's why I'm stalling because I got I can't just push
a button now. I gotta go fix that. Anyway, that's all I had
for today. That's all I got. We'll see what happens. The next
time I record. And there's nothing god dammit. You know
why? Because I screwed this up. So I I've got it muted. So hold
on. Let's try this again. Now, that's all I've got.