BIO: Dave Collum is a professor of Organic Chemistry at Cornell University who developed an interest in markets, which, in turn, led to an interest in geopolitics.

STORY: Dave talks about his 2022 Year in Review: All Roads Lead to Ukraine.

LEARNING: Never trust politicians and bureaucrats.

“The more the fact-checkers, the more likely the thing they’re checking is true.”

Dave Collum

Guest profile

Dave Collum is a professor of Organic Chemistry at Cornell University who developed an interest in markets, which, in turn, led to an interest in geopolitics. He enjoys the human folly of it all. He has a natural predilection for being contrarian, which makes him a “denier” on almost all hot topics.

2022 Year in Review: All Roads Lead to Ukraine

Given his interest in geopolitics, Dave has strong opinions about many things. For him, it’s a natural thing to go against everybody. Today, we’ll not talk about his worst investment ever but rather hear more about his 2022 Year in Review: All Roads Lead to Ukraine.

Every year, Dave writes an annual survey of what is happening in the world. The reviews started as a handful of pages for friends and family on a simple website, and then it just got bigger. One year he decided to do a serious job. Now every year has gotten bigger and bolder. Dave has a friend who’s binding all the views so he can sell them all on Amazon.

Every year, Dave writes about human folly. In his 2022 review, his primary focus was Ukraine. In his true controversial nature, he took the pro-Putin stance. Dave says he can easily make the case that NATO is bad.

Dave argues that Putin is making incredibly rational moves and believes that NATO could have stopped the war but chose not to. He gets pretty troubled to watch people become self-righteous about Ukraine while the US is no victim. Going back in history, Dave says the US has bombed more countries than Russia over the last 20 years. The government has also killed more people with military weapons in the previous 20 years. People want to talk about the Ukraine war while ignoring that the US gave weapons to the Saudis to bomb the Yemenis into oblivion. Or the fact that last year, the US bombed Syria three times to send a message to Tehran. In Dave’s opinion, that should be a war crime.

Dave predicts that the war in Ukraine will end soon. A Twitter poll he did shows that people are tired of the war and no longer support it. To end the war, the US must stop sending money and weapons to Ukraine.

Go to Peak Prosperity to read Dave’s full honest review.

Andrew’s takeaways

Andrew has three guiding principles:
Never trust politicians.
Never trust bureaucrats just like that. They’ve got to earn your trust.
The majority of people follow politics blindly.
Andrew believes that to really see a change in society, you’ve got to effect that change through the political system and apply that across all boards.

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Introduction

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