Brandon Cattle and Liz dissect Ghislaine Maxwell’s June 28 sentencing, where her team pushes for 51–63 months despite Epstein ties and a $24B+ fortune, mocking her "victim" framing while citing death threats and IRA hit lists. Meanwhile, crypto collapses—Bitcoin drops 65% since November, Celsius freezes withdrawals, and 3AC founders vanish amid $2T losses—mirroring traditional finance’s leverage traps. Gold is hyped as a hedge against recession, ECB instability, and sovereign debt crises in Spain/Greece, with hosts shilling coins while joking about a "Goldbug" revolution. The episode blends legal absurdity, market chaos, and gold fever into a critique of systemic fragility. [Automatically generated summary]
I feel like you probably have a like full manifesto that you need to unleash.
Everyone thought the Belgian program was going to be like centered around some sort of revolutionary posture towards the America Kakuka and government, but it turns out it's the war on your oldest and most, I don't know, undefeated foe, the FDA.
I hate the FDA.
I food and drugs administration.
Okay, wonderful.
But what it sounds like, it's like such an unassuming name, but what they actually do is they worm their way into every crack of American life and prevent you from living free.
I'm 32 years old.
I like a good, I like a good chuff of smoke every now and then.
I like to knock back a dart every 30 to 35 minutes.
You like to chuff, Bruce?
I'm chuffing.
Yeah.
I'm puffing smoke out like a damn dragon.
And I wake up this morning, I see that, you know, you know how I woke up this morning too, Liz?
Easily?
Thunder.
Oh.
Thunder at six in the morning.
Was there lightning?
There was indeed.
My room was filled with a white light and then my bed shook.
I'm not joking.
Well, you know, thunder means lightning.
Yes.
Well, I got up and I look at my phone and I have a push notification from Smoke Talk.
And they're telling me that Joe Biden's, Brandon's FDA, is moving to ban not only jewel pods or jewel in general.
But jewel brand pods, let's be clear.
Yes.
All the other ones are too strangely shaped.
No, they're too, they're too short.
I saw one was called Views.
Views.
I can't do that.
Views?
I can't do that.
Vooze.
Vooz, I think.
Vooze or Vuse?
I don't know.
I've never pronounced it because I've never purchased it.
Is it supposed to be like fuse or muse?
They're British.
I don't know.
Vooze.
But they're also lowering the tobacco content of regular cigarettes.
Yeah.
So that to like non-addictive levels.
Yeah.
Which is ridiculous.
First of all, I'm still going to keep smoking.
I just, I am addicted to cigarettes.
I don't care if you put a non-addictive amount of nicotine in it.
I am addicted to looking cool, which is why I started smoking at age 13.
Oh my God.
Because I looked cool.
Now I'm, granted, I can't walk up stairs without coughing so hard that I vomit.
I've been impotent since legally since I could have sex.
My skin is, well, I would say scaly.
It does resemble that of a dragon.
It's like if the insides were on the outside.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I ooze, you know, like my shit shit comes out of my pores.
You know, they're big.
They're big.
They're like volcanoes, you know, kind of just magma coming out of them.
And that's because of cigarettes.
And you know what?
This is because, this is because these fucking pod people are in charge of our government.
They don't know what it's like to feel, to breathe.
Well, I don't really know what it's like to breathe either, but to like to go outside, fucking put one of them bad boys, you know, marb light in your fucking mouth, lad at the old Fuego, hear a little crackle at the end of that stick, see the little smoke rising off of it, and try to drag, but you start coughing midway through, and then just do it again and again and again and again all day.
They don't know what it's like.
Yeah, you gotta quit smoking.
R.I.P. Joe Camel.
Let's talk about, this is bullshit, man.
I knew it's a fucking slippery slope.
Once they banned a camel just for wearing a leather jacket, that was a great moment in Camel history.
Yeah.
The animal, not the brand.
That was really the first, like, I mean, he was really a westernized Camel.
They really did well with the merch end of their label, didn't they?
Camel.
Remember, they had the, you know, you would like get little like, well, I don't know.
I mean, I wasn't of age when this was a huge thing, but there would be like coupons that you would get with cigarettes or cartons, and then you like mail them in, and then you get a leather jacket with a camel on the back, which seems like a pretty good deal.
I mean, except for all the smoking that you have to do to get the, I just think they should bring coupons back for mail them in and get something.
Like the condom thing.
Yeah, totally.
Well, my thing is, Liz, it's, I really want to correct you real quick there.
You actually don't have to smoke those cigarettes.
You actually get to smoke those cigarettes, which is a luxury the rest of the world is afforded.
But unfortunately, Americans will not be given that right anymore because they've put us out in the gutters.
They've put us out.
You can't even, you can't even, you can't light up a stogie in a fucking bar anymore without everyone being like, why are you smoking in here?
It's weird that you do that.
It's just, yeah.
Let freedom ring, baby.
Let freedom ring.
My name is actually check this one.
Yeah.
My name is Brandon Cattle.
That's awful.
Did I tell you I saw an Let's Go Brandon flag in real life in the old California?
Yeah, that's sick.
Truanon Token Debut00:03:08
It was very colorful.
And I have to say very large.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Liz.
Hi.
My name is Yuri K. Weir, and we are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky.
And the podcast is called Truanon.
Hello.
Hello.
I actually, I'll be real, I am, I am shaken by the news.
I know.
You were very upset.
In fact, I mean, you texted it to the group, which was very cute.
Quite early, too.
I was, I was, I'm not joking that there was thunder at like 6 a.m. and it was just staying sunny.
You sprung into action when you saw the push notification from what was it?
Smokey bodybuilder forum?
No, it's smokytreats.org.
It's an advocacy website that I'm involved with with a bunch of a diverse group of stakeholders.
I love to smoke, okay?
I had to fucking, they made me quit heroin.
They made me quit methamphetamine.
They made me quit drinking liquor.
I can't get sex because of the way that I look and act.
What am I supposed to do?
Gambling is people get mad at me for.
Oh my God.
I smoke.
It's okay to smoke.
You're going to make me fucking relapse, Brandon.
I got a spike in my arm.
It's because of you.
But yeah, no, I've been up all day because of thunder.
And that's why I'm froggy.
We are doing it too for today.
Yeah.
We've got some news on one of our favorite condemned prisoners.
Man, Woman in the Iron Mask.
They should really, they should put an iron mask on Ghillain.
And then we're going to be talking a bit a little bit about one of our favorite things, a new coin that we're shilling.
Yeah, finally.
We're finally ready.
I think this is actually the best time to debut our token, our Truanon token.
A lot of people think when a market downturns, it's like, oh, no, it's going down.
What it's actually doing, the part that's not like a big line up is actually an opening for a door.
And you open the door and you get into this.
You might smell fear.
We smell opportunity.
So we are, we are, we are putting, call us Bugs Bunny in a dress because we are taking fully loaded AR-15s with hollow point bullets and we are hunting Elmer Fudd.
Oh my God.
And anybody who does not think that they are going to get us rich from buying our coin.
But before we get into that, we got to talk about our main bitch, Ghelaine Maxwell.
She is finally, it's been months now.
We've been waiting for this since the end of the trial back in January, R.I.P., some of the best, you know, great time in our podcasting lives, I think.
She's finally getting sentenced.
Yes, she is.
Legal Troubles Ahead00:03:50
Call her a damn book.
Call her a summer read because she's getting sentenced June 28th.
Fuck, dude.
That was really good.
That was really rough.
That didn't make sense.
No, that's made.
It definitely made sense.
Let us know in the comments if that made sense or not.
Actually, just let us know if it made sense.
If it didn't, hold your peace and we'll settle it that way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My first question here is, and this is a question that we asked quite a lot during the trial itself, is how is Sarah Kellen still free?
It's ridiculous that Ghelene Maxwell has not only had her trial, is being sentenced, and there seems to be absolutely no movement on arresting somebody who seems like they did very similar, if not almost exactly the same crimes as Ghelane herself.
Yeah.
During the trial, everyone was speculating that she had made a deal with the feds, that she, or, you know, that she was maybe going to testify, all these things.
None of that happened.
No one had any information saying that she had made any deal with the government.
And by all accounts, I don't know.
It's all very weird.
Very, very mysterious.
Well, there is a pre-sentence investigation report that the government has compiled.
And they come in and actually recommend some serious time for old Ghelane Maxwell.
And so basically, the big news here is Ghelane's team has responded with their own little recommendations and their own little like a folio, I suppose.
Yeah, it's not just their recommend or counter recommendations, but it's like, here's our counterman recommendations.
And here's some people we think you might be interested in hearing from.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm going to go ahead and say that it's a bit of a tranche.
It's a bit of a tranche.
Well, it's one, it's two documents, but there are quite a lot of different kinds of documents.
It's a tranche in the soul of the document.
Yeah, it's got the soul of one.
So her team is arguing that her sentence should be between 51 and 63 months.
That is four and a half years to five and a quarter years.
Which is not a lot of time.
No.
Rather than the currently recommended 24 to 30 years that the pre-sentence investigation report recommends.
So this is where we get into some legal trouble.
And by legal trouble, I mean I encountered a legal problem that I don't know the answer to.
Interesting.
Okay.
So her team is saying that the reason they're recommending such a drastically shorter amount of time than the government is because of some legal business involving the sentencing guidelines from 2003 being different than the sentencing guidelines from 2004 and afterwards.
And because they're arguing that the crimes were committed prior to the new sentencing guidelines.
See, that just doesn't, that's so, that doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I have no idea.
That's the thing.
I was like, I tried to look it up and I was like, you know what?
It's not really germane because I bet that they are not going to get what they're asking for.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess you kind of got to like, you know, shoot for the moon.
Or wait, shoot for the stars, hit the moon, whatever.
Isn't that a thing?
Anyway.
But it just seems like it makes no sense.
Like, oh, when the, when she committed her crime, the sentence was this.
So therefore, you have to stick to that.
It's like, but that doesn't make any sense because she was found guilty last year.
Exactly.
And so, yeah, I don't, I mean, I have, I have no idea the actual legality of that argument.
Judging from, using a little bit of history here, judging from Ghelane's team's just sort of resounding lack of success in any sort of most, almost all of their legal maneuverings during and before and after the trial.
Ms. Maxwell's Credible Threat00:14:55
Yes.
Yes.
I have a feeling that the pre-sentence investigation report is going to be upheld by the government.
So Ghelane's team actually submits an accompanying document sort of laying out the case in a lot less legal language, really kind of laying the blame on Epstein, obviously talking in sort of the very similar language to the way they've talked before, just like, you know, she is being tried for a man's crimes.
You know, like Epstein died because the DOJ and the BOP, the Bureau of Prisons, were not able to actually like, you know, take his case home.
And so, you know, Ghelane is basically feeling a man's shoes right here.
And this is, of course, the same exact stuff that we've been hearing from them since the beginning of the trial was not successful at any other point.
Doubt it'll be successful now.
Yeah.
So they actually say the government now has a huge hole to fill.
Epstein's empty chair, which of course brings to mind a certain empty chair representing Barack Obama that was yelled at by Clint Eastwood.
So the document also really harps on the media for calling Ghelane Maxwell a bad person and adding to the public uproar.
Now, Liz, could you actually read this next part out loud?
Absolutely.
At dawn on July 2nd, 2020, personally, just as an aside, I remember the day very well.
A team of more than a dozen FBI agents arrested Ms. Maxwell at the New Hampshire home where she had taken refuge after Epstein's death to escape the upsurge of highly intrusive media coverage that had engulfed her and her family.
She had relocated alone, separating from her family to safeguard her husband and two young stepchildren and to secure the personal safety of her family and herself.
At that time, Miss Maxwell was the target of numerous death threats and threats of violence and was being hunted by the press.
One media outlet even offered a $10,000 bounty for information on her whereabouts.
Tragically, this experience was not new for Miss Maxwell.
Decades earlier, when Miss Maxwell was just a child and her father was a member of parliament, UK authorities found a hit list of potential kidnapping/slash assassination targets in a safe house used by the Irish Republican Army.
Miss Maxwell's name was first on the list.
Okay, wait, hold up.
What?
This is entirely new information in the this is this has never been revealed before, but apparently, Ghelane Maxwell's lawyers, I mean, not apparently, they are, I mean, they are literally here proclaiming that she was first on the IRA hit list.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, well, is it fantastic?
Because they didn't really do it.
Yeah, but you know, I mean, if, look, if anyone had any qualms about what side to be on there, yeah.
Well, I know, and it, you know, it would, they, of course, did kill Lord Monbatten or Mount Batten, however the fuck you pronounce his name, but he, of course, himself, a very famous and very well-connected pedophile.
And so it wouldn't be too out of their modus operandi to also perhaps have assassinated Mademoiselle Ghelane Maxwell.
I really wish the pre-pedo assassination.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Pre-COG.
Yeah, They knew that it was coming.
So the document also mentions how difficult it was for her in her pre-trial detention and during the trial.
Now, this is something we've heard over and over again.
She's being kept by herself.
Oh, you know, her eye makeup has to do her own makeup and like, you know, she's so, she's like under threat and all these kind of things.
But we do hear for the first time that she is the subject of another more recent and possibly non-Irish credible death threat from a fellow inmate.
Liz, will you do the honors here?
Just recently, Ms. Maxwell was the target of a credible death threat from a fellow inmate.
On information and belief, one of the female inmates in Ms. Maxwell's housing unit told at least three other inmates that she had been offered money to murder Ms. Maxwell and that she planned to strangle her in her sleep.
The inmate who made the threat had moved to the shoe, presumably to protect Ms. Maxwell.
This incident reflects the brutal reality that there are numerous prison inmates who would not hesitate to kill Ms. Maxwell, whether for money, fame, or simple, quote, street cred.
Ms. Maxwell has effectively traded the stress of flashlight checks every 15 minutes in the middle of the night while in isolation for the equivalent stress of having to sleep with one eye open for as long as she is housed with other inmates.
Ms. Maxwell will have to live with this threat every day that she is housed in the MDC and every day that she is incarcerated in the prison where she is designated.
Okay, so there's a kind of a few things to unpack here.
And so let's get this knapsack out and start examining some privileges here.
Maxwell has been bitching since day one that she was basically under protective custody, essentially under kind of an unofficial suicide watch where she was woken up or not even woken up necessarily, but they shined a flashlight in on her and checked on her in the middle of the night.
Right, right.
Every 15 minutes.
And the isolation that she experienced was a big talking point from her lawyers during much of the pretrial process.
And of course, during the trial.
Her family, too.
They were running, screaming to the press about it.
Now that she's in gen pop, or as you on the outside call it, general population, and is housed with other inmates, she's like, this is simply too dangerous for me.
She wants it both ways.
I mean, I do think the idea that someone would kill Ghelaine Maxwell for street cred is very funny.
Yes.
But I mean, I mean, obviously, notoriously, pedophiles don't do very well in prison.
Yes.
Although, do you think that that stands for lady pedophiles, which is one, rare bird?
Two, like, I just feel like the dynamics of lady prison and what kind of like hits that get done in that situation and the kind of like hierarchies and power struggles are a bit different.
Yeah, I can imagine too.
You know, obviously, I am much less familiar with the dynamics of women's jails than I am with men's jails, which I'm by no means an expert on.
I do find it interesting that she says she was offered money to kill Ghelane Maxwell.
Because, I mean, granted, you got to keep in mind that this is from Ghelane Maxwell's lawyers, right?
And so whether, you know, whether this is exaggerated or fabricated entirely, who knows?
But if we're taking this at face value, who's offering her money?
Well, and how much?
Yeah, because I mean, you could just write to like random women at the fucking MDC and be like, give you 75 bucks to take this lady out.
Yeah, I mean, here we go.
True non-social experiment.
You should go down there every weekend.
See, you know, see how much you could get someone to take it for.
Okay.
You know?
Are you doing a bounty, Liz?
No bounty, nothing official.
I'm just saying, you know, it's a little, you know, we're running a little experiment, a little social experiment.
Okay.
Well, we want Ghelane Maxwell alive.
Yeah, absolutely.
We don't want anyone to take you up on it.
We just want to see if they would.
It's like kind of trying to get a sense of the market.
That's what I'm trying to, you know, we're trying to do a little price discovery here.
Gotcha.
Understand.
Yeah, we're seeing what the market will bear for Ghelane Maxwell's assassination.
But I mean, obviously that leaves open the question, is somebody with some influence or a position of power offering this woman money to kill Ghelane Maxwell?
It seems, I mean, who knows?
You know, obviously, if this lady goes around blabbing about it and bragging about it, she does not seem to be the kind of consummate professional that you would expect from a, you know, a hit of the kind that you would probably be imagining in that case.
Yeah, totally.
But again, who knows?
I have a feeling that when Ghelane actually does get to regular prison, that she'll probably be put kind of like sequestered away from the general population of inmates there, because a lot of the times that's what happens to people who are convicted of sex crimes against children.
Yeah, I'll say too, just, I mean, this could also just be a person trying to get attention and then Ghillain's lawyers really capitalizing on it.
I got to say, none of this smells like our old classico friend, Mr. Tortellini.
Exactly.
Tortellini was a total fucking code of silence, right?
Yeah, absolute pro, a pros pro.
And so the document, though, goes on to quote the pre-sentence recommendation report.
And Liz, could you actually once more use your sonorous voice to walk us through this?
Absolutely.
Regarding a sentencing recommendation, probation has identified several mitigating factors.
Maxwell is 61 years old.
And a guideline sentence may be tantamount to lifetime term of imprisonment.
You know, it's the idea.
The defendant has a reported history of philanthropy, charitable work, and helping others, namely her work with the Clinton Global Initiative, the Terramar Project, her use of EMT skills to help others, and her tutoring of inmates at the MDC.
We further acknowledge that Maxwell is not solely responsible for the horrendous and irreparable damage caused by the decade.
Interesting.
I really would like to know who, you know, who's being tutored by Ghillain and what in.
It would be fantastic.
She's apparently, so she says, tutoring inmates for their GEDs, Which is, if you're listening if you're out of, if you're, if this is like six months from now and you're out of jail and Ghelain Maxwell tutored you through your GED, please hit the D right into the podcast.
Yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, great Clinton Global Initiative front and center there.
And that is from the government, by the way.
And so there's also an attempted biography of Ghelane.
It's notable just how much of it, I mean, really.
the vast majority of it, even beyond her early years, really revolves around abuse by Robert Maxwell.
I mean, they talk about him hitting her, smashing really her hand with a hammer for tacking up a poster of a pony on her wall, which made me feel really bad for her.
And which, I mean, I could absolutely see happening before I realized like, oh, well, that's, of course, what they're trying to do is they're trying to sort of elicit that kind of like pitiful emotion from you.
And they talk about his horrible family meals, which we've discussed on the podcast where he sort of berates the children.
And it also describes how her father died in, quote, suspicious circumstances and the shattering of the family after that.
There are zero descriptions of her years with Epstein, like not even a mention.
In fact, which I think this is notable, the section ending with her father's death in 1991 ends with the line, Ghulaine was left to fend for herself.
Now, they say this is because obviously the Epstein stuff was discussed in court and they don't want to prejudice whoever, you know, because they have appeals coming up.
But it is, it is really funny because a very large chunk of this woman's life is totally missing.
And so the narrative resumes 12 years later in 2003 in the sort of life after Epstein section.
Liz, can you talk about her relationship with Ted here?
In 2003, Miss Maxwell began a seven-year romantic relationship with Theodore, aka Ted Waite.
Ted Waite.
I'm sorry.
I just have to say Ted Waite as a name is so confusing to me because I just really want to call him Tom Waits, but it's Ted Waite, no S, double T.
It's like, yeah.
I got to be honest too, even though he is pretty much everything I despise, billionaire, founded a technology company, was really planning, looks like planning on being married to Glene Maxwell.
I still find that less annoying than Tom Waits.
Okay, sorry.
Ted Waite, a seven-year romantic relationship and developed a strong and loving bond with his four children.
Oop, okay, siren alert.
Weeu, wee oo.
Ranging in age from six to 12.
Her relationship with Wait was on track for marriage, yikes, and gave her what she had always hoped for and wanted most.
The opportunity for a loving, stable family life and the chance to become a stepmother to Wait's children.
But her hopes were destroyed, as was so much of her life, by her previous association with Epstein.
Well, reaping, sowing.
Exactly.
A Miami lawyer named Scott W. Rothstein.
Okay, listen.
You don't have to put his last name.
You could just say a Miami lawyer named Scott attempted to blackmail Wait to keep Miss Maxwell's name out of civil lawsuits related to Epstein that his law firm was planning to file.
Interesting.
Ms. Maxwell's relationship with Wait could not survive the blackmail threats, and it ended soon afterwards.
So, a couple things there.
Number one, seven years is a long time with no rock on the finger.
Yeah, woof.
Uh-huh.
Especially at that advanced age.
That's tough.
That's tough.
He's dating you for seven years, you know, like year five.
Like, hey, maybe we should get married at some point.
The blackmail part has been hinted at before and sort of talked around.
I, nobody knows the details of this.
I mean, obviously, most of this comes from Ghelane's team, but Rothstein actually was convicted of a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme a few years later.
So, not a great guy.
Types of Vessels00:02:58
Oh, my God.
I got to say, like, I mean, seven years, no ring, and your relationship doesn't survive blackmail threats from a guy who's convicted of a Ponzi scheme.
Like, not on solid ground.
Yeah, I mean, like, I've been like in a two-month relationship that like survived us like doing a hit and run and stuff.
Like, it's all good.
Oh, my God.
That's not true.
You don't know what we hit or what we ran from.
But I mean, she certainly was with him for seven years because they attended Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding together and later took a yacht trip with her.
Which is, by the way, any listeners out there, bounty.
Here's a bounty.
If you get anywhere with the ability to ask Chelsea Clinton a question, please ask her about her yacht trip with Ghelane Maxwell.
Because as far as I know, nobody's ever put the question to her.
So in an effort to make Ghislaine sound even better, of course, they list her many skills.
They once again mention she's an EMT, which, okay, what emergency medicine is fucking Ghelane Maxwell doing?
Like, it boggles the mind.
She's also a submersible, aka submarine pilot, and they call her a banker, which is okay.
Again, I get what you're doing there.
Submersible?
Yeah.
Is that a UK term?
Fucking like Harry Potter-ass sounding name for submarine.
I'm sure.
I'm sure that like submarine to actually call something a submarine, it's like got some specific whatever.
Is it like the Xerox of submersibles?
Well, you know how like a ship and a boat are different because of size?
You know?
No, I didn't know that actually.
Let me just say that's that's why they call me dinghy.
But yeah, so it could be, well, they are different.
I mean, that's like that.
Anyways, I can explain to you after the show, but the ships and boats are two different things.
Basically, is a ship a type of boat or is a boat a type of ship?
You know what?
I don't really know how to answer technical questions like that.
They're both a type of vessel.
Interesting.
Okay.
I like how you got around that.
And she also partnered with the Cleveland Clinic to establish a telemedicine platform to enable people in remote areas to access quality medical treatment.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had not heard about that before.
And of course, they mention her involvement in the Clinton Global Initiative and the Terramar Project, which I got to say, for the amount of ink that Terramar Project gets in this letter, literally, what did they do?
No, it was nothing.
She did a TED Talk and then she had a website.
Exactly.
Flippity Gibbet Socialite00:05:25
And she like, you know, through gallows.
Yeah.
She got to speak at the UN.
I guess in that sense, it actually is a very successful nonprofit organization.
Yeah, honestly.
On their own definition.
Head and shoulders above many other ones.
Of course, rounding this out, we have letters from friends.
So I found the beginning of this really funny.
Liz, would you do the honors here?
Accompanying letters from family and remaining friends, most having cut ties due to fear of association and the lure of, quote, cancel culture, attest to Ghulain's character.
Each offers a first-person narrative of some aspect of her life in sharp contrast to her characterization as a villain, rich heiress, and vapid socialite.
I mean, kind of definitionally, she is a villain.
You know, like, I mean, hurting kids is kind of one of the top most villainous things you could do.
She was a rich heiress.
I mean, still is, I guess.
I don't know, vapid.
I don't know if she's vapid.
You know, I haven't spoken to her, but she's definitely a socialite.
I don't think that she's characterized at all as vapid.
I think actually completely the opposite.
She's characterized as like very cunning and manipulative and so intelligent that she was able to, you know, get into these high places and do all these terrible things to people of a completely, completely different class of her from her.
Do you think that they should have focused on that and been like, she is characterized as crafty, manipulative, and cunning when all she was was a woman out to get what she wanted?
No, they should have been like, actually, she's a really stupid bitch.
She couldn't have done any of this.
Yeah, yeah.
That is, that is actually a really good defense is to just have your lawyer call you too dumb to like, there's no way he could have fired the gun.
He doesn't understand how the mechanism works.
Like he doesn't.
And like, you know, have him hand you a cell phone.
You start pressing the camera on it or something.
Yeah.
So her brother, and in fact, two of her rare siblings, Philip and Anne Maxwell, I think her two oldest siblings.
Two rare Maxwells.
Very rare Maxwells.
Basically two people who have been totally absent from the public eye, essentially since the 90s.
They wrote a letter, a joint letter, describing Ghelane as having not exhibited any perverse behaviors before Epstein and after she escaped his grip.
So I think it's worth noting, as we have before in the podcast, worth noting again that Anne is a former Montessori teacher turned hypnotherapist, which is just a couple of the like, that's basically the same job to me.
But has rarely been seen in the public eye.
Philip is a writer, or he's always described as a writer.
I don't know what Philip Maxwell's writing.
He's still working on it.
He'll get it out there.
You leave him.
You leave Philadelphia.
Yeah.
He's doing his novel.
He's like, it's about when I was 25 in Bushwick and all the kind of like the loves that I had and it's like the kind of crazy stuff that near brushes with death sometimes.
Hey, man, you don't need to be published to be a writer.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
That's true.
Yeah.
You just need to write, write anything.
They really echo Ghelane's lawyer's rhetoric that Ghelane was vulnerable and taken advantage of by Epstein and painting her as really just another one of his victims.
Yeah, this is from Christine, actually, who is, I say, like, mid-rare.
Mid-rare.
Yeah.
Mid-rare Maxwell.
She's no Isabel.
No Isabel.
Isabel is everywhere or was everywhere.
And this is what she wrote.
We live in a world where malicious envy of people seem to have wealth and perceived, quote, undeserved social position in life is perfect fodder for selling newspapers and filling social media platforms with gaudy, single-faceted views.
Ghelain had money because she worked very hard to earn it.
Her positions demanded hard, diligent work, great intelligence, great management skills, great ability to get on well with people from all walks of life, artistic creativity, and caring about others.
Her work was a far cry from the flippity gibbet socialite label citation, please, that the media has decided to cast on her every time they reference her.
Flippity gibbet.
Well, I never.
So flippity gibbet, flippity, flippity, flippity gibbet is actually had been referenced by Ghelane's team several.
I think she was called a flippity gibbet socialite at some point.
By who?
I don't, I'm sure, the Daily Mail or something.
And they really just like, I think they latched onto that.
That seems like the most hurtful thing anyone's ever.
That's like the we've 100% called her like a dumb fucking bitch, like ho bag, stupid fucking cunt or whatever.
Yeah, you're gonna go with flippity gibbet.
Well, I gotta say, to a certain kind of white English woman, flippity gibbet is basically worse than whatever slur is going through your mind right now.
If you say flippity gibbet at a garden party near the Thames, I mean, you'll be run out of there on a fucking lawn.
Tarts and Vickers party.
Flippity Gibbet Socialite00:04:34
Yeah, exactly.
If you're at the Queen's Head pub in Knightsbridge and you fucking flip a flippity gibbet?
Yeah.
Oh, Jibby will flip.
If you, yeah, if it's listen, if you tell, if you tell one of the nags at the horse race and you're, you know, you're there in your, your garden hat and your son umbrella and you're like, fucking a lot of flippity gibbets around here.
Someone will, I shit you not, probably strike you dead with a rapier, pierce you through the heart.
So various other friends write in, including a psychologist who's living in, I think, Santa Cruz.
It's, I looked into this guy like a little bit yesterday.
He has not been really mentioned anywhere else.
Seems just like a psychologist whose dad knew Robert Maxwell.
And a former member of Taramar's board.
Other family members write in saying the usual kind of stuff that she's hardworking.
She had a hard father.
She had a hard life.
Oh, such a poor girl.
Harriet Jagger, a former fashion editor with Vogue and L and a fashion consultant, wrote in describing Ghelane as a real peach who wouldn't hurt a little fly.
And of course, Jeff Roth, the archivist at the New York Times, who's apparently a cousin and apparently attended the entire trial, wrote a letter in support as well.
Yeah, so there was a bit of a thread back and forth about this guy.
Friend of the show, Gumby, I think, was on this.
Because this was like profiled that Jeff Roth.
Yeah, so he's an archivist at the New York Times.
Did you see him there at the trial?
No, so no, I didn't, frankly.
And I was, I mean, you and I were definitely, everyone was on the lookout for people who were related to her or who were so entourage.
And there was a family row for almost the entirety of the trial.
Really, the three, two or three people that would be up there, it'd be like Kevin Maxwell, Isabel Maxwell, and Leia Safian.
Yes, Leia Safian from, of course, astute listeners will remember, LeBlast Fitness.
If you can clap it, you can dance it.
It's true.
And of course, we would see these people about Cafe Lorenzo, having a cuppa, having a cuppa, as they say in England.
But really, I saw nobody that I really kind of couldn't place as either like a family member or friend or like a member of the press near them.
Now, other, I mean, Kate Bricklett from the Daily Beast is saying that she did see him there and that he attended almost every day of the trial and pre-trial stuff.
I, of course, I mean, I don't disbelieve her or anything.
I just really, I had no idea that he was there.
And his name, I got to say, we talked with people every day of the trial.
Never came up a single time.
Yeah.
Really like hiding in plain sight.
And also, if you look up this guy and look at a picture of him, I mean, it makes sense.
It kind of blends in.
Yeah, he does.
He does.
He's what we in the mercenary business call the gray man.
And of course, he's working at the gray lady and the, as an archivist.
And, you know, he's not exactly an unknown quantity there, too.
I think he's actually, you know, not a big deal at the paper necessarily, but there's been some a lot written about him.
I believe he was featured in a documentary about the New York Times.
And it's interesting that he gave a shit enough not only to attend, take a leave of absence for the trial, but to actually put his name in print and really stake his reputation on this stuff.
So to wrap this up, sentencing recommendation, of course, the defense is recommending, you know, considerably less time than the government is.
They're saying that she's not a danger to the community and a sentence of a short while would be sufficient to deter her.
I'm not taking that over again, from committing crimes in the future.
They also do make the point, which is not a bad point, that Weinstein received a 23-year sentence, which is actually lower than the lower end of the recommended sentence for Ghelaine Maxwell.
But I also don't care.
Yeah.
I mean, I wish I could go back in time and see that little family and Jeff Roth too back in Cafe Lorenzo, which I dearly miss.
Major Bitcoin Wallet Dumps00:14:24
Of course.
And I'd call them all flippity-jibits.
To their face.
Frace, do you still have your, what is it, cold wallet, hot wallet?
What do you have?
I got every kind of wallet you want, baby.
I, um, yeah.
Yeah, do we have to talk about this?
Because it's, there's like a lot of, there's a lot of balls in the air at this point.
I do have keys to wallets.
Two hot wallets, to cold wallets, to medium, just like kind of warm wallets.
Room temperature wallets.
Room temperature wallets.
I got them from, I got sub-zero wallets and I got searing wallets.
Unfortunately, none of those wallets have anything that's worth any money.
Yeah, they certainly don't anymore because in case, I mean, hopefully our listeners haven't experienced any of this, but pretty much all and everything in crypto is crashing and has been on the downturn for quite some time.
I think it was just a couple of days ago, June 18th, there was like a real sudden collapse in Bitcoin.
It fell like $1,000 in about 10 minutes.
I think it hit, it dipped down to $18,850, which is its lowest level since like December 2020.
I think it gained, it went back up to like 18,679.
So it fell about 9% in 24 hours, which actually when you pull back, it's had about a 65% drop in value since last fall.
Really bad year.
So this would cap off about a week and a half, I'd say two weeks of what we could call panic selling in the entire crypto zone.
I mean, I will give Bitcoin credit for this.
You know, for a currency that is, you know, what it is, being over 18 seems like it would be a real struggle for it.
And I'm actually really proud of the progress that it's made.
It's like, the thing is, is that it's funny because we just, we did that crypto episode with Jacob like kind of right around all of this started collapsing.
It's been like in all of crypto has basically been melting down since, I don't know when we recorded that episode, but it's like mid-April, I think.
So like a month or two, there's, you know, you know, like we said, Bitcoin, it's down like 45% on the year.
It now costs more to mine Bitcoin than to buy it, which feels like a big ru-ro.
And the just the whole, the whole crypto market has been just annihilated.
It's fallen below.
It's $1 trillion market cap, which that sounds like, what does that mean?
But it like, literally, like last November, this whole thing was allegedly worth $3 trillion.
That's how much has been wiped out in basically like six months.
When was the Super Bowl?
January.
Was it February or January this year?
I can't remember, but it's always the end of January, first week, second week of February.
Do you remember that was basically every ad for the Super Bowl was just like, buy crypto.
Oh, it was February 13th.
Invest in crypto, you know, crypto, crypto, crypto.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Every single, remember, it was like Tom Brady, Steph Curry, LeBron, every single person with fame and fortune, shilling a bunch of crap to get like normal people to lose all their money.
I got to tell you, I hope that you did not follow Steph Curry, the worst basketball player of all times.
Okay, you got to.
Okay, we got to take that over.
That's not, we're not doing that on this, on this podcast.
Not now.
Not when he's got four rings.
Not when he best player in the world.
Okay.
Well, he owes some of his fans, like me, who was a fan, who put in quite a lot of money from me and Liz's joint account into crypto because things have taken a significant downturn turn even since February.
Yeah, I think that there are some questions about how all this got started.
And it's a little unclear.
There was, I mean, we talked about this, I think, privately, not on the episode.
Whoops, sorry about that.
But there was what kind of seemed to kick all this off was a huge downswing in the old NFT market.
Oh, yeah.
Which no one could see coming out of nowhere.
I think that surprised everyone.
And then about a month ago, there was this spectacular implosion of the entire Terraform ecosystem, which includes its token Luna, maybe some people heard of, and one of the associated stablecoins, which was actually at the time one of the largest stable coins, UST.
And it seems to be like that seems to be the locus of maybe like where some of this contagion began to spread, like to spread out of.
I think the Luna thing, I mean, that was pretty big, like regular news.
Like it sort of escaped the crypto sphere because that was just such a spectacular like implosion that sort of seemed like maybe, you know, obviously the founder Doquan knew a thing or two about.
And it just seemed like massive financial fraud.
And that I think kind of got a lot of people thinking, like, this is maybe a riskier space than even I had sort of like guessed at.
Yeah.
And that was one of the, I mean, the, the first, not the first, well, not the first, but one of the biggest instances of major, major stablecoin, which again, stable means stable, coin means coin in crypto language, um, depegging from a dollar, right?
Which, and for a significant amount of time in crypto time.
So it was like for a day, it was, it was bouncing, you know, down, up and down off the dollar.
And a lot of people could not understand why this was happening because, again, stable means stable and coin means coin.
Um, now there is just recently the Celsius, which is a crypto lending platform, a pretty major platform, they announced that they were pausing withdrawals, basically freezing a bunch of customer wallets and not letting anyone take out their coins,
which I want to put big quotation marks around there because I think to being precise about who owns what in the crypto sphere, even when you're, when you're using these platforms is a little bit tricky unless you want to really comb through those user agreements.
Well, I mean, I think that's the thing with Celsius, though, because it's not your coins that when you quote like, I mean, Celsius' whole thing was like, they're the unbank.
Like, when you put your money in Celsius, or you, excuse me, you put your coin in Celsius, it's supposed to earn interest and pretty crazy rates, like much, much better than regular banks.
But what you're actually doing is, of course, allowing them to just loan out your crypto.
So what you're actually doing according to their own terms, because they're not a bank, is you're actually just literally loaning Celsius all of your crypto.
Yeah.
And then you're not getting it back.
You're not getting it back.
It's funny.
There's been a lot of people, mostly like what you call maxis, crypto maxis, our most hated maxi and a bunch of shills that are basically trying to like volcoke through this whole thing, saying that crypto is like, you know, it's like always this volatile and like we've all been here before and oh, it's always up and down, up and down.
But I do think even among some crypto people that like believe this crap, there's a very like, oh, this hits different kind of vibe to what's happening.
Like it, there's something here that feels broken.
You know, we said the stablecoin's depegging.
That's huge.
There's these massive waves of kind of deleveraging, a bunch of liquidations.
All of that is pretty unusual, even for like big volatile drops in the crypto market that we've seen in the past.
And it feels like there is in general, let's say, a real like feeling of the end of the euphoria that has marked the past, I don't know what, since, let's say since COVID, February 2020, the kind of like euphoria in the market, but even since before then, right?
And there's kind of now we're seeing kind of everyone trying to run for those casino doors, trying to get out and facing this kind of tsunami of fear.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this is like, I can't stress enough that almost every single time I look at any kind of crypto-related business, even really like some of the largest.
I mean, we did an episode about Tether, for God's sake.
I mean, that's one of the biggest scams in this space.
Like even some of the largest businesses, it's like they are all, all, all.
And I cannot stress this enough.
They are all fucking scams.
Like in one way or the other, all of these things, like it's like, you know, I mean, some of these are huge, major, major players in this, in this industry.
And it's like, they, they, it's, they literally just, I mean, it's just, it's such an incredible, massive, like, it's a robbery, essentially.
Yeah.
And so like anytime like you're putting money in any of these things, you're, you're gambling in more way than more ways than one because you're not only gambling on the market, you're gambling that the people in charge of the company that you're doing business with or lending your coins with or whatever, that they're not going to just fucking rob you in the middle of the night and then play it off as, I mean, God knows what.
It's just really astounding.
Yeah.
And there's people, I mean, you read these, like, if you go on these Reddits, I mean, the real, the Luna Reddit was really bad when that happened.
If you look at some of these other crypto forums, I mean, people are posting about losing their life savings.
They're unable to access their kids' college money, which, you know, you can be an asshole and say, like, well, you're an adult.
You shouldn't have done that.
You shouldn't have done that.
But I mean, it's not that simple.
Like, I'm sorry, it's just not that simple when there's all of this crap out there.
There was a story today, which this is like, talk about Unholy Alliance.
Like, there is a story, there was a story today about this QAnon influencer racket that was basically getting Telegram followers to invest in fraudulent crypto tokens.
I mean, they, they scammed their followers into collectively losing like a couple, like millions and millions of dollars.
Yeah.
They were like crossing.
This was in Telegram, which the development and proliferation of Telegram, by the way, there's probably an episode there because it's a totally fascinating.
It's almost like, I don't know if it's bigger, but it's kind of a different beast than WhatsApp, I would say.
Absolutely.
But like there was this crossing on Telegram, a couple of these channels of like QAnon knowledge drops mixed with like actual news content.
So it felt like real breaking news, mixed with other stuff that was like kind of like clickbaity news stories, like disclosed TV, like breaking news headlines kind of style, mixed with then like investment advice and them saying like, oh, we know Elon Musk, we know Donald Trump, we know JFK Jr.
It's QAnon.
And then also like a carefully and well-executed Ponzi scream across multiple Telegram channels that were all like coordinating with each other.
Smart to do.
I mean, it's a it's a kind of a captive audience because Q people just consume this content over and over and over, you know, all day long.
And they are some of the most gullible people on planet Earth.
So, yeah, it had more than 300,000 subscribers across the various channels, and they were kind of all in on this one scam.
And yeah, I mean, it's lost a lot of people, a lot of money.
One person who was caught up in this lost more than $100,000 and killed themselves.
Wow.
There you go.
So, in return, you know, a good question then to ask is, well, what are these crypto companies doing?
Well, they're doing a couple of things.
This is how they're responding.
One, they're laying off a bunch of people.
Yes, yes.
And, you know, thankfully, like, again, you know, true and on, we always buy the dip.
And so we have hired about 200 former Coinbase employees.
And it's been great.
You know, my, I have never had my body hair plucked so well, so well by the fine fingers of a 23-year-old man recently graduated from college in computer sciences who was laid off after six months of work and now lives underneath my bed.
Gemini, the Winkle, the Vinkel Voss firm, they've, they're laying off 10%.
You mentioned Coinbase.
They're cutting 18%.
Crypto.com laid off 5%.
And then this company, BlockFi, I don't know if you heard of them, they laid off 20%.
I mean, who knows if I've heard of BlockFi?
They're all named BlockFi.
Well, I was reading it and I was like, wait, BlockFi, which one is that?
And then I looked it up and then I'm just going to read you this quote because this literally made, like, I just like stopped after I read this.
We started BlockFi nearly five years ago with an idea for one retail product, the crypto-backed loan.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
Secondly, you know what else the companies are doing?
They're, they're going, I mean, of course, Classico style, never let a crisis go to waste.
There's now an ETF that you can invest in to short Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's going down.
Might as well start an ETF, B-I-T-I, BIDI.
I don't know.
They launched that.
So now, perfect, you can short it.
That's so we should do that, right?
I'm not, there's no investment advice in this podcast.
But there is some investment advice in this podcast, which is Liz.
So you're saying we should short Bitcoin?
And then finally, in the last kind of move, the counter move that more nimble companies are taking in, you know, the wake of this garnage, that they're just choosing to run away.
Rising Inflation and Market Reactions00:14:37
Okay, that's a classic strategy that works in most areas of life.
Yeah.
This is the story of 3AC, Three Arrows Capital.
I don't know if you've heard of them.
They're like very like, I would say highly influential multi-billion, well, were a multi-billion dollar hedge fund.
They focused on crypto.
Their co-founders, Ju Su and Kyle Davies, they've just now gone missing.
Well, to be clear, they're just like not necessarily gone missing as then they've been like kidnapped and killed.
No, not in a romantic way.
Like, lose their babies by buy loser babies ran away.
So, what happened with them?
Well, so they, it looks like their firm, which they got a lot of press for basically making these real big bets that pay off real crazy.
And they don't say that like that.
Okay, that's an absolutely viable strategy to make money.
That is what betting is.
Yeah.
Well, they're basically leveraged out everywhere, which makes sense because they were famous, like I said, for pulling these insane returns, like the kind of returns that you can only make when you're making insane bets by leveraging up insane amounts to achieve insane returns.
And it's true, like all that is well and good.
I mean, no, it's not, but okay, argument's sake until one little bet goes south and then you get margin called.
Oh, you don't want they made a whole movie about that.
You know, you don't want that to happen.
Well, it looks like that's what happened to our buddies at 3ac.
And it's funny because usually when a margin call happens in like the real world, not crypto world, it goes like this: the, you know, the bank calls you and it's like bring, bring, bring, bring.
Hello?
Hey, I'm the bank, and you borrowed money from me to buy some stock, but that stock went down in price.
And so now I need you to post a little bit more collateral, or I'm going to sell the stock from under you to pay off the loan.
Okay, I think, I think you have the wrong number.
Yeah, okay, but most people in real life, they just post more collateral to keep the stock, right?
Because they still want, they want to continue on with their bet that it will eventually go up in price.
But this is not how it works in crypto land, which is a fun little thing about crypto.
Because remember how everyone is like, it's so great.
It's decentralized.
We've got all those smart contracts.
It's all controlled by robots, which means freedom for everyone, right?
It's not like that.
So in crypto, when you borrow to buy some crypto, right?
Which is leverage, you borrow a stable coin to do so.
If you get margin called, meaning that the value of the token that you're betting on, like what goes down, and this is crypto world, you don't actually have a broker that calls you up to be like, bring, bring, hey, we need you to post more collateral, blah, blah, blah.
What we just went through, because all of this is done by algorithm robots, right?
And so rather than getting a call and talking to a real person, there's just a set price that triggers a robot to simply start selling the underlying asset at the price that's set to pay off the loan automatically.
Does that make sense?
It does, but that I don't know why would you do that?
Well, this was the whole promise of freedom from, I don't know what, like social ties.
I don't really understand.
Look.
I don't buy into the whole thing, but this has basically screwed a lot of people.
Do you remember our episode about Archegos?
I do.
Bill Huang.
Yes.
We talked about Bill Huang and how he had built up those positions like so large in certain equities that that's what like started alarming people, right?
Like he had his, it's like the positions themselves started to have their own grab like gravitational pull where because he was purchasing such large percentages, like his positions were so large, they started to kind of push the prices of the underlying equities themselves even higher, which then made his positions even better.
So he would buy more in the stock.
And it kind of like created that, you know, that push price cycle, right?
Yeah.
So he was borrowing a lot of money to like do that.
You need a lot, a lot of money to buy, you know, buy out big positions.
And the bigger the position, the more push they have on the underlying equity price, right?
So one of the problems that our friend Bill ran into is that as he had a large, like as he had larger and larger stakes in his portfolio or in these like single equities, right?
The risk exposure grew.
So if the equity, like just in the realm of possibility, if the equity were ever to tank, his exposure was much more because of the size of his position.
Makes sense.
And so if his exposure was big, then the people who were lending him the money, aka that leverage to buy those huge positions, their risk exposure grew as well.
And so they called it Bill and they're like, okay, now that your exposure is so big, we need you to post more collateral because this is a riskier and riskier position.
Yeah.
And that's when troubles kind of started for Bill.
So if we jump back into crypto land, like the huangs of the crypto world are called whales.
And if you imagine like a whale is borrowing mass amounts of stable coins to then take a large position in a token, if that token falls, again, that's the underlying asset, then the robo algorithm will start liquidating the whale position regardless of whether or not the whale wants to pony up more leverage or not.
That's how the smart contract works.
It just starts.
It just goes.
It's triggered.
So, what happens then if a whale position, like a massive position, gets liquidated?
That market then gets flooded, which overwhelms liquidity, which pushes the prices down further, which pushes them possibly down close to zero.
So, what you get is when these whales have to liquidate or when they get their shit called and they got to fucking they basically flood the market with coins.
That can essentially set off a trade reaction, excuse me, a chain reaction, but also a trade reaction in some ways.
And so, like big, big firms falling actually has this big ripple effect on everybody else.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, if we take it back to 3AC, it seems like this is what happened with them, right?
And it's not exactly clear how much money 3AC was playing around with.
There's the FT quotes someone close to the fund, they were estimating between $4 billion and $10 billion, which that's like quite a range of money.
But that, even that range is indicative of how little people know about how much money is really getting thrown around in here in the crypto world.
I mean, one of their big bets was Luna.
And that's the, you know, that's the token that was part of the Terraform ecosystem that went to zero or close to zero, whatever, basically zero when UST imploded back in May.
And so, they should have listened to the Belden rule of crypto, which is never invest in anything or always invest in everything that has a name that has to do with the moon.
Yeah.
That is a good rule.
It is a good one.
It's literally never failed.
Basically, I mean, now no one has been able to get in contact with these guys, including some of their business partners, one of whom wrote a really incredible thread on Twitter about it.
For his part, Zhu Su, he tweeted out this.
This is the only thing anyone has heard from either of these guys.
We are in the process of communicating with relevant parties and fully committed to working this out, which that is a great, that sounds great.
You always want that to be your last communication.
I love to hear we're working this out.
That's, yeah.
But it's, I mean, it's a wild time.
You know, everything, it's not just crypto.
It kind of feels like everything right now is kind of breaking.
Yes.
I mean, my God, everything's so expensive.
Everything is so expensive.
Stocks are breaking.
Bonds are great, breaking.
Crypto is breaking.
Housing's tanking.
Consumer confidence is tanking.
Inflation is up.
Gas is up.
Weird shit going on at BOJ.
Terrible, terrible, possibly catastrophic stuff going on at the ECB.
I mean, it just like the list goes on.
And it seems like summer's going to, we were talking about this the other day.
Summers, this summer is going to be pretty interesting.
Maybe some rough waters.
I got to be honest with you.
I regret purchasing Gravedigger.
Now, I know I told you I was making a lifestyle change and I was going to be the great guy who drives Gravedigger from now on.
I bought it, was really excited.
$7 a gallon now.
Oh my God.
Brandon's helping.
Brandon's not doing shit to help.
Defense Production Act, we could have used that six months ago.
I've missed three rallies because of that.
It's ridiculous.
No, but it is crazy.
I mean, everything costs a lot of money and it's going to just keep getting worse, it looks like.
Yeah, it's interesting.
You know, the papers kind of go back and forth for a second because kind of based on if the market like jumps back up, jumps, comes down, and they say whether or not we're in a bear market.
I think everyone has pretty much decided that this is a bear market, regardless of the precise definitions.
I was looking into stuff.
I was seeing kind of how long in the past, what they call bear markets have lasted.
And since 1950, the average length of a bear market, which means that, by the way, that's to hit the bottom before it starts rallying back up.
So the bottom, bottom.
But the average length has been 11 months, with the median being about 7.2 months.
So, and that includes like kind of again, average about a 24 to 30 percent drop in the SP to hit the bottom.
A full recovery obviously would take much longer.
So if we're thinking that it's just starting now, boy, we got, we've got quite a ride, quite a ride out there for the next, you know, who knows, between eight and 10 months at least.
Basically, until the end of Brandon's life.
And it's not just in stock markets.
You know, like we said, the central banks, like across the globe, they can't seem to get a handle on this stuff either.
I mentioned the ECB.
They held an emergency meeting.
There's like a brewing sovereign debt crisis that's like within Spain, Greece, Italy.
These are like heavily indebted countries.
That's particularly worrisome.
The ECB doesn't seem to really know what to do.
And in the U.S., I mean, look, the Fed just announced they'd be raising their rates 75 base points.
They also know, I mean, they let everyone know that more interest rates hikes are coming.
To kind of like just, you know, whatever, summarize that the central bank rates, for those who don't know, the federal fund rate, that sets the floor for interest rates for banks, corporations, households.
And then those like interest rates get raised in kind kind of based on the rise or the fall in the federal fund rate.
The idea there for the central bank is they're trying to control inflation, which is, like you said, continuing to rise.
And that's also aiding the market tanking, right?
because higher rates make fixed assets more attractive because you get better yields on safer bets if people move out of the market.
You get a lot of, you know, people are deleveraging, trying to get out of these, all these risky inflated assets.
And so you have this kind of wave of mass deleveraging and unwinding of positions happening.
And then on top of it, kind of rising inflation.
And there's really only so much the central bank can do to attack it.
They can like sort of discipline the stock market and try to like tamp down the out of control asset inflation or the more like decadent companies that are there in the U.S., you know, but that has its own ramifications, right?
It's layoffs, wage decreases, a bunch of companies go under.
We've got recession.
You know, you have mortgage rates jumping.
And, you know, it's, it's, so there's all these kind of trade-offs and none of it really looks good.
No, no.
And I think that the general kind of vibe, I guess, I'm getting from the government and from the Fed is that workers have had it too good for too long.
Yeah, absolutely.
Which makes no sense because wages still, even with that bump post-COVID that everyone loved to talk about, they still have not kept up with inflation.
Of course.
Like historically are not in line with inflation.
And now jobless claims are starting to rise.
Right.
And the sad thing is, and you know, inflation is not really caused by moves in the central bank.
And this is what's frustrating.
I mean, it, you know, that's sort of like secondary.
And Jay Powell today basically even said as much.
Like he said that all these Fed moves, you know, they can try to do as much as they, you know, as much as they can to kind of, you know, tamp down demand, but it will have no effect on the commodity crises that are continuing to brew and get more and more volatile in, you know, particularly in energy and also in food, which no one really wants to talk about, but that's on the horizon.
And so like none of this is going to get under control without inducing a recession, which basically everyone agrees is like already on the table, already happening as we are speaking.
Now, Liz, if I do recall from my history lessons, there is one thing that if you put all your money into it, there's a finite amount on earth.
It doesn't, you know, it's got a steady, it stays steady.
That's right.
I can see you shaking your head right now because why didn't you think of this?
Rise of the Gold Bug00:04:08
It's called gold.
I knew you were going.
Frankly, one of the most precious metals there is, malleable and soft, yet hard and strong in the market.
Gold to me, and specifically the gold that I am myself just taking ad money to shill on this podcast and I'm not sharing with the other two because of course I am paid in gold and they don't approve of that.
Gold coins to me are some of the most precious kind of coins that you can get.
You know, big, like, kind of like wooden box of them that you might find at the end of a cave, perhaps in the bowels of a ship.
To me, there's no better feeling than opening up like a, you know, a velvet satchel and finding like six or seven coins in there, enough to buy a sword, even.
And so, Liz, like you're saying, like, the economy is tanking.
Things are getting worse in basically every conceivable way, but only one thing is getting more and more beautiful as each day passes.
That's right.
That's gold.
I feel like you're going to have to introduce a new character now.
Like, now that Coindexter has to like now kind of mature into something else or go back to the famous, like, kind of maybe famous early iteration of Coindexter, which is Goldbug.
The Goldbug.
Well, Goldbug is Coindexter's cousin.
And they don't always get a lot.
I mean, they're both after the same thing, which is a villa somewhere in Central America.
But Goldbug is, I gotta, I gotta, I'll get him on the horn soon enough.
But Goldbug is, I think he's coming back in a big way.
I have gold fever.
I've had basically, I mean, I don't really like to talk about stuff like this on the show sometimes, but like, you know, I had a bunch of family members die from gold fever in my life.
Like, it hurt.
Like, it fucks me up to talk about, but that only makes me more focused.
Like, I'm in the hills.
I'm in gold country.
I'm mining.
I'm in the river.
I got the pan.
I feel like we are going to actually, like, I feel like we will see the rise of the gold bug character again.
Like, I feel it coming, like, in the same way that the, like, the coin guy.
Like, return trad types will just end up ushering in some kind of like variation on the Ron Paul revolution or whatever.
With, I don't know, who cares, DeSantis or whoever it is.
It's going to, like, we're going to get a kind of like gold bug, like community-driven thing that'll somehow be even weirder and stupider than its earliest iterations.
Well, you know, I'm looking it up now on my Android, and it seems like Coindexter's Goldbug cousin is actually now a he writes sub stacks about how hot the Queen of England is under the name of Gentius Goldbug.
I mean, this is incredible stuff here.
I gotta look into this, but I gotta tell you, it makes sense that Goldbug likes the queen because, of course, what's the crown made out of?
Oh my god, gold.
So, as they ban jewels, gold is back.
And that you just start smoking gold, dude.
I would if I could.
I've told you about my idea for uh non-alcoholic uh goldschlager, just water with gold in it.
That was like a thing.
Remember when like gold on food was a thing that people rocks.
This rocks, it's like a business insider video, like two-minute video of like, oh, they poured gold on a fucking like a burger with that's way too much cheese.
Gold Dreams and Dangers00:01:15
Um, I've never been interested in that.
I don't want to eat gold, I want to be surrounded in a palace made of gold.
Sure, so call me back when that's happening.
Yeah, until then, I'm Liz.
My name is Mo Pussy, and our producer's name Young Child.
Yes, well, I have here a list of names in front of me that I had written down at uh the roost a couple of months ago that I just found in a bag.
And so, uh, that's one of the ones you wrote.
You thought that was so good you had to write that down.
There's some I can't say on here, uh, but yeah, I thought Mo Pussy was really good.
Dan D. Vauercum that's not good Gabe, Gabe Abe, uh, Gabe Abe, the Vietnamese one, fuck Wu Man.
Oh, I don't like that one, um, and of course, Robin Oldman.
That's so sad, yeah.
Well, there's some other much sadder ones on there, but unfortunately, I don't think that people would appreciate them.