Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

David Day asks You are given exactly one year to spend at any point in history. Your objective is to make 2025 Gary Arndt the most powerful person in the world. We’re talking political power, economic power, cultural influence, military might, etc. Your basic necessities are covered so you can focus on your objective. Where —and when— do you go? What’s your plan?

For starters, if you go back too far, I’m not sure it will do anything for you. If I want power in the year 2025, going back to a period where no one today was alive wouldn’t do anything.

The last two presidents of the United States were public figures in the 1970s, so I couldn’t go back further than that. The only thing that I think going back in time would help with is money. Military and political power are intertwined today. In any democracy, any elected position is temporary.

So, the only thing I think traveling back in time would do is allow me to make a ton of money.

How would I do that? With the power of hindsight, you can do quite a bit. The big question is what resources I’d have going back in time?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument I have nothing and I can beg, work, or scrounge my way to $1,000 in a few weeks.

I’d travel back to the year 2015, in particular about June 1, 2015.

There is a reason for this. I’d take the $1000 and bet it on various trifectas or exactas at horse tracks I assume I’m going back in time without any books, so I only have what I can store in my head. I can remember a handful of bets, so I should be able to turn $1000 into a million dollars on one or two bets.

I would then take the $1,000,000 and bet on Leicester City to win the English Premier League. This is why the date is important. Leicester City were 5000-1 odds to win at the start of the season.I don’t know of any major sports champions in recent history who were such long shots.A million-dollar bet on a major sports league is uncommon, but not that crazy.

That one million dollars would then be turned into five billion by May 7th, 2016.

I’d then take the five billion dollars and buy Bitcoin, which was at $458 on this date.

Today, that Bitcoin would have increased in value 251-fold and would have a value of $1.2 trillion, making me the richest person on Earth. The only problem with this theory is that I might be completely disrupting the Bitcoin market by putting that much into it. If that was the case, I’d scale down the investment and put the rest into Nvidia stock, which has gone up about 180-fold since May 2016.

It is most certainly possible to make investments that would do better; however, those investments would require volumes of knowledge of the trades or bets to make. This is a very simple strategy that could easily be memorized if I were to go back in time. When I was teleported back to the present on May 31st, I’d have my wealth waiting for me.

With that, I could, in theory, fund armies, buy politicians, or do whatever I want.