You’ll Never Work Again If This Works (Again)

In 2008, I begged my publishers not to publish my book.

It was called The Forever Portfolio.

The idea was simple: find the unstoppable trends and quietly buy the companies riding those waves. Not to get rich overnight. Not to beat hedge funds.

Just to never worry again.

It was optimistic and people hated me for it. No one wants to be optimistic during a full-blown meltdown.

I knew this and begged my publisher to wait to publish it. They didn’t listen. I sold like 40 copies that year.

But now, in 2025, those 40 people who bought the book are probably pretty glad they did.

The book named 11 stocks I predicted would become the market’s next leaders.

Google... Meta... Starbucks... Costco… and more.

The stocks in The Forever Portfolio have since seen peak gains as high as 2,314%... 3,767%... even 14,961%.

Life-changing returns. And it was all thanks to the unique position we were in in 2008.

Here’s what else I predicted back then.

Chapter 2: “Computer viruses will live forever.” In 2008, bots were this weird underground threat. Today? Malware is AI-generated, decentralized, and sold as a service. Your phone is already infected. An estimated 50% of the internet is bots. BOTS!

Chapter 3: “Inoculate your portfolio against a global pandemic.” Yeah. That happened. Twelve years later. The world shut down, the markets cracked, and suddenly people were Googling “how to buy Moderna stock” from their basement office-slash-toilet.

Chapter 4: “Diamonds, chocolate, and Botox will always sell.” I mean, look around. We’re on Ozempic and flexing at Barry’s Bootcamp while impulse-buying $18 chocolate bars made with “ancestral cacao.” Luxury didn’t die—it got direct-to-consumer and charged you for shipping.

Chapter 6: “Tattoo removal will become a billion-dollar industry.” It has. Because regret is a feature, not a bug. Also, sleeves don’t pair well with child custody hearings.

Chapter 9: “There’s no known cure.” For Alzheimer’s. For obesity. For digital addiction. I wasn’t trying to scare anyone. I was just trying to say: the world doesn’t usually fix things—it manages them. Investing in the management and the potential for a cure is where the asymmetrical bets are.

I could keep going.

I wrote about the long-term health effects of urbanization and the economics of crime. I even wrote an entire chapter about death.

You want a forever portfolio? You better own a company that sells caskets. I mentioned one stock, Service Corporation International (SCI), by name.

$10,000 in SCI in 2008 would be worth $219,718. If you reinvested the dividends? ~$275,000.

Either way, you would’ve clobbered the S&P 500.

But here’s the thing I didn’t get right.

Forever Portfolio 2.0

Back then, I wanted to build a portfolio that let you sleep at night. Now I want to build a portfolio that lets you wake up excited.

So I’m doing a full update. Not a sequel. Not a new book. (Yet.)

Just a living, breathing, real-world look at what the next 15 years will actually demand—from your money, your time, and your sanity.

The trends are still there—stronger than ever. Aging. Autonomy. Digital identity. Fear. Safety. Faith. The same forces that shaped the last 20 years will shape the next 50.

But I want to show you where those trends are going.

Not as a guru. As a guy who once (or twice) lost everything and spent six months Googling, “Can stress actually kill me?” (It can.)

The first Forever Portfolio was a survival plan. This one is a permission slip.

To live better. Invest simpler. And finally stop checking your phone during weddings.

While things haven’t gotten nearly as bad as they were 17 years ago…

Thanks to the recent market volatility, we’re sitting on a rare second chance to make the same kind of gains.