I spent the week on a jury in a domestic violence case. For three days, the prosecution inundated us with evidence - victim testimony, forensic nurse testimony, police officer testimony, audio from a security camera, as well as police and medical professionals from the defendant’s previous domestic violence convictions.

The defense attorney, with no real alternatives, relied on random distractions. “Why did the hospital intake form say the defendant weighs 190 when his driver’s license says 270?” “She had 5 minutes alone with the security camera footage, how do we know she didn’t monkey with it?” “The dictation software the doctor used made some typos, how do we know any of it is true?” They flew in an “expert” (read: mercenary) from Kansas who testified that the forensic nurse took the evidentiary photos in an unusual order. That was the entire case. The defendant never testified and they never disputed any of the core assertions.

Imagine my shock and horror when we got into the deliberation room, and the first vote was 5 guilty, 5 not guilty, 2 not sure. The vote was roughly split by age - us old-timers voted guilty, and the twentysomethings voted not guilty. It took us 8 hours to convince the young folks that the victim was not a Keyser Soze-level mastermind who had manipulated everyone and everything to frame the defendant for his 6th domestic violence charge.

I’ve thought about nothing else since, and here is where I land: if you are young, and your entire life has been spent bathing in Twitter and TikTok and Snapchat and Memes and AI deepfakes…it’s not surprising you might have trouble separating signal from noise, or truth from nonsense. How would you know how to do that? And it is only getting harder! I went from anger towards them to something more akin to pity and/or fear.

As Benjamin Graham famously said, in the short run the markets are a voting machine. I will remember this experience the next time I see MicroStrategy or GameStop and think “that makes no sense.” Most of the voters in those things are not like me, and whether it makes sense or not doesn’t actually matter.

It’s also true that age and experience doesn’t immunize any of us from the same challenges. Our species evolved to trust our senses to process reality. That’s not good enough anymore.

So with that in mind, here are my “big picture” beliefs. I find these things act as a useful anchor when I am sifting through the noise to build durable investment portfolios:

1. The world we have lived through is not the world we are entering. For a generation, we had disinflationary growth achieved through cooperation and globalization. That is reversing quickly.

2. For the last 25 years, growth in the developed world was largely accomplished by shuffling electrons and didn’t rely on physical stuff, and the physical stuff that it did need was adequately or over supplied. That is changing as militaries, supply chains, energy and mining infrastructure, and data centers get built from scratch.

3. Because of 1 and 2, in the medium term it will be better to be an owner - of businesses and real assets - than a lender being paid back in nominal dollars.

4. AI is a unique development in the history of our species, and no one has any clue what the ultimate impacts will be. That means that the ability to change your mind is as valuable as it gets, favoring liquid vs illiquid assets.

5. Dominant US companies juiced earnings by expanding global market share and leveraging a lack of competition into fat margins. AI and protectionism are likely to eat into both tailwinds.

6. Governments don’t want vulnerabilities that can be leveraged against them, and that includes reliance on the USD.

For all of those reasons, our clients with a long-term investment horizon are positioned to be globally diversified, liquid, and overweight real assets. And we hold on to that approach, regardless of the latest tweet, “news” story, or distraction.