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Setting out from Philadelphia, our second stop is Delaware.

No rush on the road.

Allen is a hardcore Buffett disciple.

Following that playbook, he bought into Apple, and he’s made a fortune this year.

James, on the other hand, believes buying Apple doesn't hold a candle to buying gold...

Truth be told, I used to be an out-and-out fan of Buffett and Munger, too. When I first started dollar-cost averaging, a friend suggested I include gold in my portfolio. I turned him down flat—purely out of blind faith in Buffett.

Gold yields zero cash flow, so why on earth would anyone hold it?

Over the past couple of years, gold has been on a relentless tear. People keep asking Buffett about it, but his stance has remained crystal clear. He won’t touch it, and he hates repeating himself. His logic is dead simple: gold produces no tangible value; you’re just hoping the next guy will take it off your hands at a higher price. At its core, it’s a game of musical chairs, whereas they choose to bet on advanced productive forces.

James once floated a theory: investment titans almost always rely on leverage.

Hit gold with 2x leverage, and you get Buffett.

Later on, I began analyzing gold not from that angle, but through the lens of excessive money printing. Over the past twenty years, gold has been heavily suppressed as an asset class, but the lid is blowing off now. Down the road, gold is bound to surge beyond everyone’s wildest imagination.

I picked up a little bit.

These past two days on the road, both Allen and James have been adding to their gold positions.

I’ve stayed put, sticking strictly to the plan.

Here is why I haven’t budged:

First, I already hold some gold—mainly through Nasdaq ETFs paired with a biotech hedge fund.

Second, James is phenomenal. Whether in business or pure logic, his chops are tangible and sharp as a tack. His deductions are seamless. I ran his theses through Anthropic one by one, and sure enough, they held up completely. His ability to deconstruct complex systems is world-class.

Even so, I can’t shake the thought: if these angles are so obvious to us, wouldn’t Buffett and Munger have figured them out ages ago? Besides, capital markets are driven by expectations, and those expectations are instantly priced in. If gold were truly such an open-and-shut certainty, it would already be sitting at stratospheric highs right now—it wouldn't be waiting for the future.

Thinking about gold later, I went a layer deeper.

The lethal power of James’s thesis doesn't lie in predicting that gold will rise; it lies in anchoring gold to a grander macro narrative: reckless money printing, debt monetization, and the systematic debasement of fiat currency. At this specific juncture in time, that narrative is almost impossible to refute. Sovereign debt across the globe has ballooned to the point where it can only be inflated away. Rate hikes hit a wall, quantitative tightening can’t stick, and in the end, central banks will almost certainly revert to the familiar drug of the printing press. If that premise holds, gold isn't merely a safe haven—it is the ultimate short on the fiat monetary system.

Yet therein lies the rub: the logic flows too seamlessly. It’s smooth to the point of discomfort.

Capital markets obey a brutal law: the more airtight and intuitive a thesis seems, the more aggressively it gets front-run. The monster run gold has had these past two years is already pricing that very narrative in. Pushing chips into the pot today doesn't mean you’re betting that “gold will go up”; you’re betting that “gold will go up far more than anyone can possibly fathom”—a far more extreme proposition. The difference between the two is the margin of safety.

Buffett refuses to touch gold, citing on the surface that “it produces no cash flow.” But the deeper truth is that he flatly rejects entering a game without an anchor. Gold’s intrinsic value doesn't spring from earnings, dividends, or discounted future cash flows; it relies purely on consensus. And consensus is a fickle beast—faith on the way up, a stampede on the way down. You never know whose hands will be holding the grenade when the music stops.

James likes to say that 2x leverage on gold makes a Buffett, but the inverse rings just as true: Buffett is Buffett precisely because he never leveraged up on an asset backed by zero cash flow.

I brought this up with Allen later: "Have you ever stopped to wonder—if gold were truly as guaranteed as James makes it out to be, why haven’t the sharpest minds on the planet, the sovereign wealth funds, the pensions, the university endowments, gone all-in on it?" It’s not that they’re blind to monetary debasement; it’s that their liabilities are long-term and demand real cash flows. They have to match those liabilities with cash-generating assets, not a lump of metal priced entirely on collective belief.

Allen paused for a moment before replying, "Maybe that’s the dividing line between institutions and retail. Retail bets on direction; institutions have to solve for duration."

"Exactly," I said. "So my sitting tight isn't because I reject James's logic. It’s because my personal model simply doesn't treat gold as an active variable. I hold the Nasdaq because I believe in the secular growth of advanced productive forces. I allocate to gold ETFs and biotech to blunt Nasdaq drawdowns. In my book, gold is an insurance policy, not an offensive weapon. If I start treating gold as a weapon and ramp up the position, I’m tacitly admitting that the Nasdaq thesis is inferior to gold. That would mean tearing down my entire dollar-cost averaging framework and starting from scratch."

That framework took me seven or eight long years to forge through countless bouts of self-doubt and grit. I’m not about to dismantle it just because I ran into someone on the road with an airtight pitch.

No matter how immaculate James's logic is, it belongs to him. Clumsy as my resolve might be, it belongs to me.

Investing ultimately isn't about who predicts best; it’s about who can sit tight. People who spot the trend are a dime a dozen; people who can actually hold through the storm are vanishingly rare.

For me right now, it feels like wrestling with two masters.

Who is my real North Star?

Last night, I kept thinking: even if James thinks Apple isn't worth touching, Allen won’t rebalance. Allen is profoundly convinced that Buffett is right. He made that point himself—holding Apple is partly a trial to see if Buffett is truly infallible, holding the line when no one else sees the light...

That kind of learning curve is the right one.

If you believe, go all the way.

It’s just like I always write: Buffett manages hundreds of billions, while we don't even have a single hundred million to our names. When looking at the exact same play, Buffett looking at us is like watching a bunch of fools.

The catch is, fools tend to brim with self-assurance. Take Buffett advising a portfolio split fifty-fifty between Apple and BYD.

Do we believe him?

We do.

Would we actually do it?

Not a chance in hell.

In fact, we’d probably convince ourselves he’s finally lost his touch this time.

Fast forward a decade, and he’ll almost certainly be proven right again. By then, the only thing left for us to do is kick ourselves in regret...

Our other travel companion, Chenmo, has also been loading up on gold, and with a pretty heavy weighting. He follows a permabull influencer who dishes out even wilder rhetoric, screaming that physical gold is heading straight to 6,000.

So naturally, our walkie-talkies have been crackling with gold debates the entire drive.

The day we left Philly, I felt a flicker of doubt.

I genuinely toyed with adding some.

Then I caught myself: how did I make it this far in the first place?

Pure, stubborn discipline.

Think about it: across these seven or eight years of methodical investing, how many market gurus have crossed my path? Everyone has advice to offer. If I jumped at every hot tip, my portfolio would have mutated a thousand times over by now.

Discipline is a double-edged sword.

On one side, you can hold through the noise and stay true to your convictions.

On the other, you inevitably close the door on some genuinely great advice.

The real trap to dodge is pure empiricism. Like what I told Allen: why do you run half low-volatility dividends and half Nasdaq? Because dividends plus the Nasdaq have gone up for the last twenty years.

At its core, that’s just another flavor of backward-looking empiricism.

It’s just like piling into real estate back in 2019 because, for the preceding two decades, jumping in at literally any point was the winning trade—where the higher the leverage, the better; zero-down if you could swing it.

And then what happened?

You always have to confront the uncomfortable question: what happens if the tape doesn't follow our script? Just because things played out one way historically doesn't mean they’ll hold up tomorrow. What if prices bleed out in a ten-year grind?

Everyone loves quoting "be greedy when others are fearful."

Take property right now. Fear is everywhere. Do you dare to be greedy?

Stocks and real estate are two sides of the same coin.

Years ago, I connected with countless property influencers. Today, virtually all of them have gone dark. They either blew up, or they blew up twice over. The ones who managed to pivot only proved they had solid risk management. Steven told me the other day that among his circle of real estate investors, he’s the lone survivor. The rest got wiped out entirely—one, sometimes two generations of accumulated family wealth erased overnight.

Is there anyone left who still keeps the faith?

So far, I’ve only met one: Taylor Lee out in Los Angeles. A woman with a truly global property portfolio. Her conviction hasn't wavered. We touched on the intersection of investing and faith the other day; I kicked off the thought, saying that you have to elevate investing to the plane of religious faith—like believing in God—or you’ll never hold your ground.

Just as I told Allen yesterday: look at our drive from Philly to LA. Everyone we meet along the way has their own rationale. After all, anyone sitting on an eight-figure portfolio has built their own logic, their own cash-flowing enterprise, and their own unshakable value system.

When they lay it out for you, it is intoxicatingly easy to get swayed.

So why do I rarely budge?

Because I listen, appreciate the merits, and run it through my own analytical engine, but I don't necessarily adopt their conclusion. If my targets are settled and my framework is proven, tweaking things on a whim is no different from day trading.

Because I have an anchor.

I told Allen, "Do you have any idea how brutal it was to sit tight for seven or eight years? You’ve only been riding with me for a couple of days. You have no clue how many people have tried to school me along the way."

Staying put is terrifyingly hard.

Especially when heavy hitters with overwhelming presence try to lecture you—like a few years back when Steven gave me an exhaustive sermon on equity-bond rebalancing...

Yesterday, I asked Allen, "How many nine-figure holders do you have among your followers? Flag them separately, visit them, or set up one-on-ones." If someone can hold a hundred million unencumbered, it means zero bad debt and a rock-solid underlying business. These folks operate on a different tier than typical paper millionaires. If they allocate a hundred million to equities, they probably have another hundred million parked in real estate, and another chunk elsewhere.

Allen said he currently has three or four.

Three or four is a great start.

In real life, people of that caliber rarely cross your orbit.

Now that we’re in Delaware, we’re in no rush to press on.

Delaware is a fascinating beast.

More than half of the Fortune 500 are incorporated right here, including juggernauts like Google, Amazon, and Tesla. It’s a tiny state with fewer than a million residents, so why is corporate America so obsessed with putting down paper roots here?

First, the legal infrastructure is unmatched. Delaware has a dedicated Court of Chancery, presided over by seasoned corporate law jurists. The case law is dense, predictable, and clean. Drafting contracts or structuring equity becomes frictionless; you don’t have to navigate fragmented state-level ambiguities because Delaware provides the gold standard.

Second, the tax environment is extraordinarily lenient. Delaware doesn't levy corporate income tax on companies that don't operate within the state. A company can incorporate here, run its business across the country, and legally sidestep an enormous tax burden.

Third, privacy is bulletproof. Beneficial ownership and shareholder registries don't have to be aired publicly—a massive perk for founders and private funds alike.

Fourth, incorporation is lightning fast. File online, get it stamped within days, and pay nominal fees.

Allen owns an entity here. He noted that when Chinese enterprises seek a US listing, nearly all of them slide a Delaware shell into their corporate stack. It’s not about dodging taxes; it’s about institutional compliance and putting institutional capital at ease. Delaware corporate law offers the most robust shareholder protections on the planet.

Taylor Lee frames it well: Delaware is fundamentally running a lucrative business selling legal certainty and privacy. The marginal cost to produce it is practically zero, yet global corporations happily foot the bill.

I asked him, "Is there a downside?"

"Plenty," he said. "If you actually end up litigating in Delaware, the burn rate is astronomical—the legal retainers will make your eyes bleed. But most companies never intend to see the inside of a courtroom; they just want a safe harbor."

When the conversation turned to Chinese tech listings, Allen rattled them off effortlessly.

Alibaba, Baidu, JD, NetEase, PDD, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto—virtually every Chinese ADR that tapped US capital markets built its corporate zenith upon a Delaware entity. It’s not that they had an affection for the place; the rules left them zero choice. Skip Delaware, and Wall Street investors shut the door, because Delaware's standard of shareholder rights is the undisputed lingua franca of global capital markets.

Even the unlisted giants, like ByteDance and Shein, parked their entities in Delaware when architecting their cross-border structures early on. Shein later moved its headquarters to Singapore, but its primary US operating entity still sits comfortably in Delaware.

Go further back to the pioneers—Sohu, Sina, Ctrip—the cohort that braved the Nasdaq around 2000. They relied on Delaware structures too. More than two decades have elapsed, and the playbook hasn't fundamentally shifted. What does that prove? It proves this isn't a temporary loophole; it is battle-tested institutional infrastructure.

Allen dropped a line that hit like a hammer: "When Chinese companies list in the US, on the surface they’re raising capital; at their core, they’re renting credibility." You aren't leasing commercial real estate; you’re leasing the reputational collateral stamped by Delaware's legal framework.

Taylor Lee chimed in, "Delaware doesn't profit off taxes; it profits off trust. And once trust hardens into an institution, it becomes the most expensive asset on earth."

These thoughts have been turning over in my head the last couple of days. Having broken bread with so many heavy hitters along this journey, I realize that at our age, sightseeing should take a back seat. What haven’t we already seen? The focus belongs on the people and the primary tier-one hubs—drifting through major cities, immersing ourselves in sharper minds and denser energy.

Recognizing that shift is a leap forward in itself.

Most people never graduate past the sightseeing phase their whole lives. They stay wide-eyed at every landmark because they’ve never been anywhere. Why are senior tour groups packing every highway?

Because they spent an entire lifetime punching the clock and never saw the world.

That’s not us.

We burned through that itch when we were young.

We road-tripped across America in our twenties.

Mention any city or region now, and our minds instantly bring up its exact coordinates, its cultural fabric, its geography, and its history. The map has long been fully unlocked.

Along the way, Allen and I were bantering back and forth. He’s sharp and funny; he takes a jab at me, I take one right back.

He confessed that the first time he ever set foot outside his home province was in 2014, just heading to Hengshui—right next door to Heze, his hometown.

We’re the exact same age.

Back in 2014, my passport was already thick with stamps from all over the world.

So why did he push so passionately for James to experience the Pacific Crest Trail and the Nevada expanse? Because that was the farthest journey he had ever undertaken in his life, and he couldn't wait to share it.

Allen’s rate of self-iteration is unnerving. On this road trip, he digs deep into every single town and territory we cross. Give him a few years, and he’ll have the entire map decoded. He spent fifteen years turning wrenches on an assembly line from age sixteen to thirty; if not for that detour, the guy would be flat-out untouchable.

On the road, Allen kept asking me, "Aside from Aurora, who else in LA is worth sitting down with?"

"Vincent, without question," I told him.

"And right behind him, Leo and his crew."

They’re all soccer buddies.

Allen and I play together, too. I anchor the midfield; he holds down the back line. By now, he orchestrates the attack effortlessly. Why is soccer easier to pick up than basketball? Because in amateur matches like ours, it’s all about off-the-ball runs and clean passes. It’s straightforward. If I step onto the pitch with a midfielder’s mindset, I can fold into a game within a week.

Aurora plays with us as well, also slotting into midfield.

She’s a stunner—a quintessential bohemian creative who plays tennis, plays soccer, snowboards, and travels constantly. Scroll through her Douyin feed, and you’d mistake her for an A-list celebrity...

I originally pulled her into the road trip group chat because Diana had committed to coming to the States, and we needed another girl in the mix.

I asked who was game.

Aurora raised her hand immediately.

When Diana backed out, that meant Aurora couldn't join the drive either.

Even so, we didn't kick her out of the chat. After all, our route cuts right through Los Angeles, and we’re banking on her playing host for food and lodging. I ran the numbers for her this morning—roughly five grand out of pocket.

She’s loaded, so she won't bat an eye.

If she were working a regular nine-to-five, that bill would sting for weeks.

Running down the roster: for tech icons, Vincent makes the cut; Leo and his circle cover cross-border e-commerce; and Taylor Lee is indispensable on the macro investment side. Coincidentally, Taylor Lee and Vincent live in the very same gated community. Then there’s the public sector crowd—people I got to know back when I was working in LA. A few of them have climbed into seriously high-ranking roles; a couple of years ago, one even tracked me down in Delaware just to catch up.

Aurora sorted out the restaurant reservations.

We knocked out a match on the pitch.

Then we talked straight through midnight...

That’s the dispatch for now.

Still in Delaware today.

Allen turned to me and said, "Anderson, the further down this road we get, the clearer it hits me: all our lives, we’re just hunting for our own safe harbor.

Some pin it on the balance in a brokerage account; some pin it on external validation; others tie it to a relationship, a skyline, or a status symbol.

But the only thing that actually holds under pressure isn't the moving pieces out in the world; it’s the quiet set of unchanged principles sitting inside your chest.

Markets turn, cycles swing, people arrive and depart, tides rush in and retreat.

The only territory you can genuinely defend is what you believe, what you hold, and why you refuse to flinch.

Beyond the noise, beyond the fear and greed, the only thing that compounds is conviction."

Taylor Lee dropped an observation that’s been ringing in my ears ever since. She said Delaware doesn't trade in taxes; it trades in trust—and once trust crystallizes into an institution, it is the most valuable moat on earth. The exact same rule governs investing: the moment portfolio discipline hardens into faith, you’ve built your deepest moat.

James said, "Whether gold runs to 6,000, I have no clue. What I do know is, if I abandon my ground just because someone tells me it’s going to fly, then these seven or eight years of holding were completely in vain."

Back on the road