I’m an award-winning author, PBS documentarian, and cell-free futurist who’s been published in Esquire, The Guardian, Smithsonian, USA Today, HuffPost, and TIME Magazine. My goal is to be the most insightful writer on the Internet. Thanks for reading and subscribing. (Newsletter subscribers get a free ebook and my paywalled articles for free.)
My Top 15 Most-Viewed Medium Stories (updated regularly)
A revolutionary system for expanding your experience of time
“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” — Vicki Corona
Where were you when 9/11 happened?
When the planes crashed into the towers.
When American life changed forever.
Picture it.
Really remember it.
Can you believe that was twenty years ago this September?
Two decades.
Where did those 240 months… 1,043 weeks… 7,305 days go?
You know the saying:
Time flies.
Or as the horse-loving Spanish say: El tiempo corre.
Time runs.
Time runs even faster when every day looks the same.
Because the human brain doesn’t…
Entire industries will be wiped out by 2030
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. — Bill Gates
We’re at the start of an extremely bumpy road, my friends. As automation, AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and unaccountable multinational corporations invade the workforce and take over the global economy, we’re looking at a joblessness crisis on a scale never seen before in human history.
We don’t know the exact figures, but estimates suggest that automation could disrupt between 800 million and 2 billion jobs in the next ten years alone.
This will…
It’s time to calculate your personal inflation rate
In an age of rampant wealth inequality, GDP numbers are no longer helpful for guesstimating the average citizen’s income.
Who cares if a nation has a GDP of $22 trillion if most of it goes to the top?
Who cares if America’s GDP per capita is $68,309 when the average citizen earns half that amount?
It’s like saying me and Jeff Bezos have an average net worth of $95 billion.
Government inflation rates are equally useless
Inflation is how we define the rise in prices. …
Most people have zero clue how they actually work
I got my first and hopefully last bank mortgage when I was nineteen years old. Despite not having a full-time job, me and a teenage buddy pre-qualified to borrow up to $250,000. We bought a fourplex, renovated it, and flipped it for a modest profit.
We were lucky.
Most people have no idea how money actually works.
They definitely don’t understand how mortgages work.
We certainly didn’t at the time.
Most people assume that you go to the bank, borrow their money, and then pay it back with interest.
That’s just silly.
Hello everybody,
Welcome to Medium’s new personal finance publication! For those of you haven’t met me yet, my name is Jared A. Brock. I’m an author and filmmaker by day, and on the side, I run some publications on Medium including Surviving Tomorrow. Here are my top 15 articles of all time.
Currently, I’m a top Medium writer in Future, Finance, Politics, Economy, Life, Business, Investing, Culture, Money, and Economics. If any of those subjects interest you, please follow me on Medium so you don’t miss a thing. (You can also download my free ebook right now.)
Young people believe in a digital version of your delusion: cryptocurrency
I’m subscribed to about sixty different newsletters and every single day of the week — 365.25 days per year — I receive at least one email from a gold bug, always white, always male, always over the age of sixty, trying to convince me to buy some gold.
Their reasons are a (fairy) tale as old as time:
- It’s performed stupendously well against the U.S. dollar.
- It’s created a brilliant safe haven against inflation.
- It’s an unbelievable hedge against volatile stocks and bonds.
- It’s what made times “so great” pre-Nixon ditching the gold standard.
- People have been using it as…
What I’ve learned in my first year on Medium
Last night I was checking my Medium stats before bed and realized I was about to cross a major milestone in my writing career: At some point during the night, I would hit 1+ million views on Medium.
It’s been a good first year on the platform:
- 80,000 words published (that’s a book!)
- 94 articles published
- 1,000,000 views
- 308,000 reads
- 111,400 claps
- 16,500 fans
- 6,600 subscribers
- Currently a top writer in Politics, Finance, Future, Life, Culture, and Economy
Whether you’re just starting out on your writing journey, or you’ve got hundreds of articles and several books under your belt like…
Let that sink in for a minute
“There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.” — Warren Buffett
Earlier last week, ProPublica dropped an investigation that revealed — surprise, surprise — the wealthiest 25 Americans pay almost zero income tax compared to their net worth. We’re talking Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg; all the big names.
It’s an especially gutsy move when you remember that leaking tax returns is a federal crime.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and they say they got the data from an anonymous source — likely a…
It’s far worse than that
I attended a self-paced high school, which meant that, so long as my assignments were handed in on time, I rarely had to go to class. In fact, I skipped 56 days of my final semester, moved to another town, and got my real estate license.
I graduated from college before high school.
I bought a fourplex when I was nineteen, renovated it, and flipped it. I became a real estate broker the next year, and a mortgage broker after that. I’m what you might call house-obsessed.
But not in that HGTV need-to-constantly-move-and-renovate sort of way. More in the how-the-heck-is-everyone-supposed-to-afford-to-survive…
