Dear Reader,
Welcome to our weekly mailbag edition of The Bleeding Edge. All week, you submitted your questions about the biggest trends in technology. Today, I’ll do my best to answer them.
If you have a question you’d like answered next week, be sure you submit it right here.
Let’s begin with a question on Health Nucleus…
My son may well have colon cancer. He is 45 with a wife and 5 great children. You went to a place in CA some time back and wrote about your experience. The health facility found your cancer.
I want to send my son there if or when the dr. says he is clear of the cancer. I want him to get checked very closely! I try to keep all of your updates, but that one I have not been able to find. I need the name of the health facility you went to and wrote about.
– Bill C.
Hi, Bill, and thank you for writing in. I’m so glad that you wrote in to ask. We’re always inundated with information, and it’s easy to forget even important bits of information.
My mother died far too young from colon cancer, and what I can say is that you really need to stay on top of it. Even though I’m still pretty young, I’ve been having a colonoscopy once every five years for the last two decades to ensure I can catch something early. I wish your son the best as he goes through this experience.
I’ve previously written several times about my visits to the Health Nucleus (which has now rebranded as Human Longevity – the name of the parent company). That’s the company in La Jolla, California, that hosts the world’s leading center for preventative medicine.
Initially, my interest was academic. But when I sat down with the doctors following a series of tests – bloodwork, a full-body MRI, a CT scan, an echocardiogram and electrocardiogram (EKG), and a bone densitometry scan – I learned something far different.
I had prostate cancer. The good news was that it was early… and at my follow-up appointment in 2021, I learned that my treatment plan was working.
Even better, in my most recent checkup this year, I saw continued progress. It’s small progress, but it’s in the right direction.
And with the support of the team at Human Longevity, I’ve been able to make this progress without surgery. I made some major changes in my nutrition, my fitness, therapy, and supplements, which have resulted in the reduction of the size of the cancerous tissue.
That’s the power of this kind of preventative medicine. We don’t have to wait until something goes completely wrong and it’s too late – we can take action to catch and fix problems early. It’s a proactive approach, rather than a reactive approach… That’s a big shift from how health care operates these days.
The program that I’m enrolled in is called the 100+ program. You can reach out on their website and register your interest. Feel free to tell them that Jeff Brown sent you, you’ll be treated very well.
It’s important to know that I’m a customer just like anyone else. I don’t receive any special treatment or discounts and have no formal business relationship with Human Longevity. So there’s no conflict of interest at all.
I just really believe in what Human Longevity is doing, and I have heard from so many Brownstone subscribers who have now benefited from Human Longevity, and in some cases, their visits literally saved their lives. That’s all the reward that I need, to hear stories like that.
Best wishes for the health of you and your family. What you’ll learn will be humbling, and it takes major sacrifices and effort to improve our health; but the information is empowering – and if employed correctly, it gives us a new lease on life.
Thanks to the team at Human Longevity, I haven’t felt this good and energetic for at least 20 years.
Next, a reader wants to know more about China buying U.S. land…
Hey, Jeff. Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about China buying American farmland. Usually close to military installations. Do we know if they are also buying real estate close to the sights of new semiconductor factories? It would fit China’s insatiable desire to spy. Do you know anything related to this? Thanks,
– Diane O.
Hi, Diane, and thank you for writing in.
This is a story that’s been getting some traction lately, primarily due to the news in early July that Fufeng Group, a Chinese food manufacturer, was buying 300 acres in North Dakota to set up a corn milling plant.
This may seem innocuous on the surface. But one detail raised a few eyebrows…
The land in question is only 20 minutes – around 12 miles – from Grand Forks Air Force Base… And that is raising security concerns. The base is host to some of our most sensitive military drone technology and a new space networking center.
The Air Force hasn’t yet stated an official position on the purchase, but one of its officers circulated a memo questioning the risks of electronic surveillance – primarily through passive data collection that would be difficult to detect.
And that potential threat has brought political opposition out in force…
Senators Kevin Cramer, Mark Warner, and Marco Rubio have all spoken out against the deal.
The story spurred senators Tammy Baldwin and Chuck Grassley to introduce legislation to require the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to publish real-time disclosures of land acquisition by foreign companies and people.
And senators Tom Cotton and Tommy Tuberville went even further by introducing an act that would outlaw Chinese Communist Party members from buying land in the U.S.
To be very clear, this is a serious national security threat… And this threat is not just limited to the U.S. market.
China, through its entities and citizens, has been aggressively purchasing land in Southeast Asia, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other jurisdictions for the last couple of decades. Sometimes the interest may be for military and intelligence as suggested above, and other times it may be for agricultural reasons… or even to access clean water – which has been a main driver for purchases on the island of Hokkaido in Japan.
But to put things in context, as of December 2020 (the most recent data), less than 3% of U.S. farmland was owned by foreign entities or individuals. And Canadians make up nearly a third of foreign landowners. Chinese investors, on the other hand, only own a tiny 0.04% of U.S. farmland.
China is a clear and present danger, but I would argue that there is an even larger threat to the U.S., and other countries around the world: The World Economic Forum (WEF).
The WEF and its graduates over the last 20 years have been supplanted in influential positions in governments around the world.
They are making very concerted efforts to push out farmers and acquire control of more agricultural land, with an ultimate goal to control the food supply. If they can control the food supply, they can control the population.
These radically socialist/communist initiatives – that believe in depopulation, population control, reduction of personal freedoms and privacy, shifting society away from meat to a more heavily plant/insect diet, and “owning nothing and being happy” – are pure evil and they must be stopped.
On a brighter note, as for your question about proximity to semiconductor plants, I don’t see that as much of a threat at all. There really isn’t a strategic benefit to doing so.
The reason is that China already has a chokehold over the semiconductor industry today. If it wants to squeeze, it can, and it knows exactly what to do.
I’ve already predicted within the next year that China will make its move to formalize control over Taiwan. Once that happens, China will have control over Taiwan’s entire semiconductor industry, including TSMC, the largest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturing company on Earth.
China also has a dominance in the extraction and processing of rare earth metals, and as we reviewed yesterday in The Bleeding Edge, processes the majority of the metals required for elective vehicle batteries as well.
I believe that within the next two years, China will have amassed enough control and power to bring the world’s supply chains for any kind of electronics manufacturing to a halt within a matter of two or three months. It will be able to do it at will, which is a frightening prospect.
That’s why it is so critical for the U.S. and other countries to rapidly decentralize their manufacturing base and entire supply chains as quickly as possible. Economic policies need to be implemented for national resilience and energy independence, not politics. Otherwise, the outcome will be devastating for everyone.
Let’s conclude with a question about crypto estate planning…
Hi Jeff, thank you for your discussion around hardware wallets and cold storage devices. Can you please discuss estate planning with respect to these devices? Do you store private key details in a will? If so, how do you ensure unscrupulous lawyers don’t run off with your tokens? Regards,
– Steve K.
Hi, Steve. As cryptocurrency becomes more common among investors, more and more people are going to be wondering about this exact question.
I’m glad you asked… And I’m more than happy to address it in general terms. Please note that I can’t give individual advice, and if investors have specific questions, I recommend seeking out an estate planning lawyer with experience in the crypto space.
I doubt that they’ll take offense to your question. It’s a logical one, and I’m certain that they’ve been asked in so many different ways “how can I be sure that I can trust you and your firm when I’m dead?”
That said, here are some guidelines that may be useful…
First, we should communicate clearly in our estate planning the kind of wallet we are holding our cryptocurrencies in. A USB thumb drive, a phone, a hard drive, or a specialized storage device could serve as a crypto wallet. So we want to make sure our heirs know what to look for… and don’t accidentally throw it out while cleaning the house.
Second, while we must keep our private keys private during our lifetimes, we need to set up a way to communicate our keys with our heir(s) after our passing. If our private keys are lost, the cryptocurrency is gone, and there will be no way for our heirs to recover our tokens.
One solution could be as simple as a letter with instructions kept in a safety deposit box. Note that this will need to be a document outside of our last will and testament. We can inform our heirs to access a safe deposit box after our death that holds the keys and any other important items… Or those instructions can be contained within the will itself.
There are also “deadman switches” that we can arrange ahead of time that will automatically transfer our coins if we don’t check in by a predetermined time.
And the industry is currently working on methods of “secure key sharing,” which could create additional options in the future.
Additionally, there are other considerations we should keep in mind…
Putting our crypto into a trust can also give us more control over how our assets are handled after our passing, which may make it attractive to some. If we’d rather our heirs continue to hold – rather than immediately liquidate – our digital assets, for example, we can set up instructions to that effect.
However, if we are using any kind of trustee, we should be prepared to address other hurdles. Depending on the specific situation, some trustees are required to maintain diversity in our assets… which may be difficult given the natural volatility in the cryptocurrency space. This can also require them to have some level of information about our crypto accounts.
Another consideration is to consult a good tax accountant or tax attorney in order to understand the tax implications of inheriting crypto earnings, especially if our heirs plan to sell our digital assets.
It’s very smart to be thinking ahead like that.
That’s all we have time for this week. If you have a question for a future mailbag, you can send it to me right here.
Have a great weekend.
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
