True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 451: Art of the Deal
Aired: 2025-04-14
Duration: 01:59:12


=== Confident Negotiations Ahead (02:09) ===

[00:00:00]  The president's made it clear he wants negotiations with China.
[00:00:05]  Have you had any conversations with your Chinese counterpart?
[00:00:09]  Has there been anything between you and the Chinese?
[00:00:14]  I think we've had soft, the way I would say it is soft entrees, you know, through intermediaries and those kind of comments.
[00:00:24]  But we all expect that the President of the United States and President Xi of China will work this out.
[00:00:31]  I am completely confident, as is he, that this will be worked out in a positive, thoughtful, and effective way for the United States of America.
[00:00:41]  I mean, Donald Trump has the ball.
[00:00:43]  I want him to have it.
[00:00:45]  He's the right person with it.
[00:00:46]  He knows how to play this game.
[00:00:48]  He knows how to deal with President Xi.
[00:00:51]  This is the right person for the right role.
[00:00:54]  And I am confident this is going to work out with China.
[00:00:57]  Yes, is it in a tough spot now?
[00:00:59]  Of course it is.
[00:01:00]  But that'll, you'll see.
[00:01:02]  All of that energy will sort of decline and we'll end up in a perfectly reasonable place with China.
[00:01:07]  I'm confident on it.
[00:01:36]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:39]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:43]  Wojoshi Truanan.
[00:01:46]  Hello.
[00:01:47]  Hello.
[00:01:48]  You're working on it.
[00:01:49]  It's good.
[00:01:50]  Yeah, I know.
[00:01:51]  My original plan was just to say some shit that sounded like that, and we could kind of put it in post once I finally learned Chinese.
[00:01:58]  But Liz said no.
[00:02:00]  Yeah, I vetoed that.
[00:02:01]  Understandably, but I think it could work.
[00:02:04]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:05]  Hello.
[00:02:07]  I'm ruined!

=== Vaping Wrap Saran (10:05) ===

[00:02:09]  I've lost everything.
[00:02:12]  What did you bet on?
[00:02:13]  Oh, doge coin.
[00:02:16]  Okay.
[00:02:16]  Apple.
[00:02:18]  What else?
[00:02:20]  In NVIDIA?
[00:02:23]  What else did I put my money in?
[00:02:26]  Ooh, Ford Motors.
[00:02:27]  The U.S. dollar.
[00:02:29]  Well, all my money is in dollars, dumbass.
[00:02:31]  Yeah, that's not true.
[00:02:32]  Actually, that's our first problem.
[00:02:34]  Some of my money's in Trump.
[00:02:36]  Whoa, how's Trump doing today?
[00:02:38]  You know, I get push notifications for Dogecoin and Trump coin like four or five times a day.
[00:02:44]  Doge is in the gutter, by the way.
[00:02:47]  Literally and figuratively.
[00:02:48]  No, look at this.
[00:02:49]  If I, this is ticker tape to me that would lead me to suicide.
[00:02:52]  Well, that's like, did you look at Bitcoin?
[00:02:55]  Don't make me look at Bitcoin.
[00:02:56]  Oh, no.
[00:02:57]  You know, everything's in that.
[00:02:58]  Bitcoin is going great.
[00:03:00]  Yeah.
[00:03:00]  I got that's why I had you look at it.
[00:03:02]  It's not it's not you know a couple months ago, but it's pretty good.
[00:03:06]  Yeah, it's been rallying.
[00:03:07]  Not to safe even my Trump, my Trump investment, though.
[00:03:11]  I want you to take a look at my Trump investment.
[00:03:13]  My Trump investment is not great.
[00:03:15]  Just killing me.
[00:03:16]  Yeah, not great.
[00:03:19]  I put everything in that.
[00:03:20]  Yeah, great.
[00:03:23]  I hope you got that fucking sniff in there.
[00:03:25]  Yeah.
[00:03:26]  Yeah.
[00:03:26]  Just did a bump, relapsed.
[00:03:28]  It's a fucking tough week.
[00:03:29]  It's been a tough week.
[00:03:30]  It's been a crazy week.
[00:03:31]  I've been fucking loving it.
[00:03:33]  You love it?
[00:03:34]  Yes.
[00:03:35]  I can't really tell what's going on.
[00:03:36]  It's crazy.
[00:03:38]  Craziness.
[00:03:39]  Things are happening.
[00:03:39]  Things are moving.
[00:03:41]  But this is when people.
[00:03:42]  I mean, it's all bad.
[00:03:43]  But man, I've been fucking, I can't get enough.
[00:03:48]  I'm so, I'm a sick, sick person.
[00:03:50]  I'm a sicko.
[00:03:52]  I will say, I've got a lot of stuff on a ship right now.
[00:03:56]  Just waiting.
[00:03:57]  It's at sea.
[00:03:58]  Yeah.
[00:03:59]  No, I meant waiting, like with a D.
[00:04:02]  Oh, waiting.
[00:04:03]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:04]  Well, it is.
[00:04:05]  Yeah, it is.
[00:04:05]  It is in there a little bit.
[00:04:07]  And I got to tell you right now, they need to lift these tariffs immediately.
[00:04:09]  I have so many spiders that I'm 40 right now.
[00:04:13]  Sorry, spiders?
[00:04:14]  Yeah, and they're from everywhere.
[00:04:16]  And so this is the problem: trying to like, if you have one, and I'm using Flexport for this, if you have one shipping container, because I just love that CEO so much.
[00:04:25]  I'm sick of his seeing his face.
[00:04:28]  If you have one container, but I have spiders from basically every country in there, what's the tariff?
[00:04:34]  On where it came from.
[00:04:36]  The last place it came from?
[00:04:38]  Okay, well, that's Australia.
[00:04:41]  Well, there you go.
[00:04:42]  I'm going to tell you, Los Angeles, you are in for one hell of an amazing early May when that motherfucker gets in because Long Beach will never be the same.
[00:04:50]  We're talking money today.
[00:04:51]  You know what they're doing now?
[00:04:53]  The companies, they're kind of like, there's these areas at ports where they can kind of hold merchandise to try to wait out the tariffs.
[00:05:04]  That's the business to get into.
[00:05:05]  That's like selling jeans to the gold miners.
[00:05:07]  You want to buy a lot next to the port of Long Beach.
[00:05:10]  No, it's literally in the port.
[00:05:12]  Oh, it's in the port.
[00:05:13]  Yeah.
[00:05:13]  They're like weird sort of like fake, they're like free.
[00:05:16]  I can't remember what they're called, but they're kind of like free trade holding zones where people are stat.
[00:05:21]  They're like, oh, because I can't, I don't know if I can pay.
[00:05:24]  I don't know what the tariff is, first of all, and how to pay it and if I should pay it because maybe it gets repealed in like two days or whatever.
[00:05:33]  You know what I mean?
[00:05:34]  So they're like putting them in these like little holding pens and kind of trying to wait it out.
[00:05:38]  I have a good job right now for anyone who wants one.
[00:05:41]  It's to basically make a fake tariff brokerage company or like not brokerage company, but like what's it called when you have like a guy that helps you.
[00:05:49]  They do this in building permitting and stuff.
[00:05:50]  Like you pay him and he kind of gets to the front of the line.
[00:05:53]  Like he knows how things work there.
[00:05:55]  You know what I'm talking about?
[00:05:56]  That sounds right.
[00:05:57]  There's a name for something like that.
[00:05:58]  I can't remember what it is, but do that for tariffs right now.
[00:06:00]  Just fucking use Grok or whatever.
[00:06:02]  Chat GPT.
[00:06:02]  Just try to sign up for the free mode on all of them so you can just like spread it out and just do that for like a couple of months and take a little off the top for everybody.
[00:06:10]  Be like, yeah, I'll help you navigate the like changing world of tariffs.
[00:06:13]  That's what all the dropshippers are going to get into.
[00:06:15]  Yes, yes.
[00:06:16]  It's all going to just become like these like secondary tariffs.
[00:06:19]  I would love that.
[00:06:20]  Like secondary tariff cottage industry that pops up.
[00:06:24]  Be like, check out my YouTube channel for how to navigate the tariff waters.
[00:06:29]  Yeah.
[00:06:29]  And right now, too, I think there's a good time to get into Mormons because they have hella kids and they like probably don't have that many laws there.
[00:06:35]  So what I'm saying now is a good time to get cheap labor on like 15-year-old Mormons.
[00:06:40]  And they could probably help you smuggle things in and out of Mexico.
[00:06:42]  Oh, because they all work with FBI.
[00:06:44]  Yeah.
[00:06:44]  And they've all got weird fucking shit going on in Ireland.
[00:06:48]  We've got what else, Brief?
[00:06:50]  What else, money-wise?
[00:06:51]  I don't know.
[00:06:52]  I'm in the fucking.
[00:06:54]  Just if you want to chat.
[00:06:56]  Is that an elf bar?
[00:06:57]  This is a Nex vape that I bought.
[00:07:00]  I'm quitting vaping, by the way.
[00:07:02]  Really?
[00:07:02]  Switching to Zen.
[00:07:05]  Okay.
[00:07:05]  She doesn't know how to react.
[00:07:07]  I think that that's step one, and I like that.
[00:07:10]  I might quit everything.
[00:07:12]  Okay.
[00:07:12]  I can't do the vape shit anymore.
[00:07:14]  No.
[00:07:14]  It sucks.
[00:07:15]  It's not great.
[00:07:16]  It's, yeah.
[00:07:17]  And the thrill of blowing it in people's faces in like crowded movie theaters or no, that's not pause.
[00:07:23]  Could be.
[00:07:24]  No, even if it was, it's not.
[00:07:27]  Sustained.
[00:07:27]  You're sustained.
[00:07:28]  Thank you.
[00:07:29]  Thank you very much.
[00:07:31]  It's just gone.
[00:07:32]  And so now my thing is maybe I should do what's the shit they do?
[00:07:35]  Fucking dip.
[00:07:37]  Imagine if I had the whole podcast, I was just fucking disgusting.
[00:07:41]  It would look like this herbamate.
[00:07:43]  Ew.
[00:07:43]  It's disgusting.
[00:07:44]  It is disgusting, dipping.
[00:07:47]  Vaping is disgusting too, but it doesn't have like the, like, there's no like.
[00:07:51]  I feel like we're culturally moving on from a lot of this stuff.
[00:07:54]  From vaping?
[00:07:55]  Just the whole.
[00:07:56]  Yeah.
[00:07:57]  Well, vaping is they tricked us into smoking robot cigarettes.
[00:08:00]  And I'm like.
[00:08:01]  I feel like this internet is not long for this world.
[00:08:06]  Well, once the tariffs, the China, I think China will ban it.
[00:08:10]  Well, no, no.
[00:08:10]  I think just like if the tariffs go through with China, there's no way that like, okay, maybe the Zins are made in America.
[00:08:15]  I have no idea.
[00:08:15]  I haven't looked it up.
[00:08:16]  There's no way the packaging for the Zins are made in America.
[00:08:19]  No, yeah, no, they're going to have to.
[00:08:21]  All the fabrication is going to change.
[00:08:24]  Everything's going to change.
[00:08:25]  We need to start doing like.
[00:08:26]  They'll just put them in little envelopes.
[00:08:27]  Do we make envelopes?
[00:08:29]  There's absolutely no way those envelopes that we have envelopes are.
[00:08:32]  What about like little crack bags?
[00:08:34]  Oh, stamp bags?
[00:08:35]  Yeah.
[00:08:35]  Well, the crack bags are plastic.
[00:08:37]  I've always bought, so every time I bought crack, it was wrapped in saran wrap.
[00:08:43]  Why don't they just wrap them in saran wrap?
[00:08:45]  There's no way that saran wraps are made in America.
[00:08:46]  Where is saran wrap made?
[00:08:48]  Where is saran wrap made?
[00:08:50]  Saran wrap is made in the United States.
[00:08:52]  See, look at that.
[00:08:54]  Wow.
[00:08:54]  Put them in a saran wrap.
[00:08:56]  Cow chemical company.
[00:08:57]  Oh, God.
[00:08:59]  It's like five layers of cancer then.
[00:09:01]  No, that's the whole plastics thing is fake, dude.
[00:09:04]  Oh, that's just the, yeah.
[00:09:05]  You can eat that.
[00:09:07]  Well, okay, yeah.
[00:09:09]  Straight to your brain.
[00:09:10]  No, I guess, uh, I guess they lost a huge market share.
[00:09:14]  I don't really know what's going on here, but I'm going to tell you, I bet that the saran wrap that I bought crack, it was not name-brand saran wrap.
[00:09:21]  It was probably.
[00:09:21]  No, I don't mean literally this internet, although whatever.
[00:09:24]  I just mean like stand, like the culture of Zen, everything and its like attendant sort of vibe.
[00:09:32]  I feel like cannot handle the macroeconomic shifts that are happening under our feet.
[00:09:37]  Do you think that's post-Zerp bro culture?
[00:09:41]  Look at you.
[00:09:41]  Look at me.
[00:09:42]  Look at you.
[00:09:42]  Do you have a sub stack?
[00:09:44]  It's post-serp bro culture, I think.
[00:09:46]  I do think that like it's probably gonna, because these people were parasites.
[00:09:51]  And the parasite.
[00:09:52]  They're all apparently we're all going back to the to the mill.
[00:09:57]  Okay.
[00:09:58]  Which they're reopening.
[00:09:59]  Okay.
[00:10:00]  I'll go back to the mill.
[00:10:01]  Foreman.
[00:10:03]  You know, owner.
[00:10:05]  Yeah, I'll go back to the mill.
[00:10:07]  You're fired.
[00:10:08]  Yeah.
[00:10:10]  Everyone, round up 6 a.m. for work.
[00:10:11]  You don't know if you're going to work today.
[00:10:13]  You, you, you, the rest of you, go home.
[00:10:18]  I would love to do that shit.
[00:10:20]  I'd be the boss.
[00:10:22]  Well, you'd have to work your way up.
[00:10:23]  No.
[00:10:24]  What would you do at the mill?
[00:10:27]  Obviously, HR.
[00:10:28]  I'm a woman.
[00:10:29]  HR.
[00:10:29]  HR.
[00:10:30]  You think that these things are changing?
[00:10:32]  This is what I love too.
[00:10:33]  Look, yeah, in tandem.
[00:10:35]  Absolutely.
[00:10:36]  No good cop.
[00:10:37]  You got to talk to Liz.
[00:10:38]  You got to talk to Liz.
[00:10:40]  The two genders.
[00:10:41]  Brayson Liz.
[00:10:42]  And they run everything.
[00:10:44]  What would you, I guess you'd be the only employee there?
[00:10:46]  I would grind.
[00:10:48]  You'd be at the grind set on the mill?
[00:10:49]  Yeah, I'd be on my grind.
[00:10:51]  Yeah, that's good.
[00:10:53]  We need that energy.
[00:10:53]  Textile manufacturing, I think, is coming back in a really big way.
[00:10:56]  I think Trump's going to change everything there.
[00:10:58]  Like quilting?
[00:10:59]  Things like that.
[00:11:00]  I don't really like fabrics and stuff.
[00:11:03]  I think MAGA hats.
[00:11:04]  Yeah, MAGA hats.
[00:11:06]  Textiles.
[00:11:06]  I think we're going to do a lot of metal smithing.
[00:11:08]  Oh, I love that.
[00:11:09]  Some wind chimes.
[00:11:10]  Wind chimes.
[00:11:11]  Yeah.
[00:11:11]  Yeah.
[00:11:12]  Kind of the tweaker.
[00:11:14]  What if we just have tweaker economy?
[00:11:17]  Well, listen, I'm not saying we should do this, but I'm saying we could do this.
[00:11:20]  And I'm fact morally opposed to this.
[00:11:22]  But I'm saying if you had less morals than me, you could do this.
[00:11:25]  Big old buses, a couple of electric batons, and some full armor.
[00:11:30]  You go around the Western United States, rounding up tweakers, shocking them, putting them in the bus.
[00:11:34]  You put those motherfuckers at some giant ass fucking facility out in, you know, outside in New Mexico or something.
[00:11:41]  We have manufacturing again.
[00:11:44]  Keep giving them a tweak.
[00:11:45]  Yeah, you have to keep giving them a tweak.
[00:11:47]  You can't.
[00:11:48]  You can't take it off.
[00:11:48]  It's Chrissy Flowing.
[00:11:50]  But I'm telling you, you get those guys out there because people don't think about it.
[00:11:53]  People think, oh, this guy's an unorthodox economist.
[00:11:55]  This guy, oh, he thinks a bit different.
[00:11:57]  Want something heterodox?
[00:11:58]  There is nobody.
[00:11:59]  I'm the most heterodox guy that there is.
[00:12:03]  I'm telling you, you round up the tweakers, you put them to work.
[00:12:08]  You can pay them in meth.
[00:12:09]  The whole thing's illegal anyway.
[00:12:10]  So who gives a fuck if you pay him?
[00:12:12]  Pay him in meth.
[00:12:12]  All crime is legal.
[00:12:13]  All crime is legal.

=== Deutsche Bank's Dollar Imbalance (13:19) ===

[00:12:15]  And then all of a sudden, bam, not only do you have iPhones, but actually, most of you, actually, I guess you would probably have Androids, but you are getting a lot of stuff that we've never even seen before.
[00:12:23]  They're inventing things.
[00:12:24]  Yeah.
[00:12:25]  But they won't ever do this.
[00:12:26]  Trump doesn't know.
[00:12:27]  Trump doesn't know anything about the economy.
[00:12:30]  Well, it's so fun that everything is breaking again because it's the perfect time to have Alexander Skaggs back on the show, making a triumphant return.
[00:12:43]  The people have been begging for it.
[00:12:46]  And so we got to give it to him.
[00:12:48]  And we're talking about everything and probably missed a bunch of stuff that has happened in the last two weeks, week and a half.
[00:12:58]  We recorded this on a Friday.
[00:12:59]  It's coming out on a Monday.
[00:13:00]  If everything goes back to normal over the weekend, don't fucking sue us.
[00:13:05]  And man, shit's getting fucking bad out there.
[00:13:10]  But I'm going to say go for it.
[00:13:22]  I just want to apologize to you ladies.
[00:13:26]  Well, yeah, I want to apologize to you ladies for what I'm about to say, but I have to say it.
[00:13:32]  Well, folks, crazy day here in the market.
[00:13:34]  And no, I'm not talking about those zigzags on your iPad.
[00:13:38]  The blondes market is surging with a 100% increase in studio.
[00:13:43]  Now, moving over to Broads, we have more than doubled our supply.
[00:13:48]  Investors in podcasts, traditionally a male-dominated consumer market, are feeling freaked.
[00:13:54]  But I say, damn the analysts.
[00:13:56]  I'm joined in my Boys Town studio by Liz Francak, economics professor of Bryn Mawr University and author of the book Money in Retrograde: Investing by Moonlight.
[00:14:06]  We're also joined by Alexandra Skaggs, host of A Dame's Bonds podcast and the Mademoiselle Marquette newsletter.
[00:14:14]  She's in studio with us as well.
[00:14:17]  I'm sorry.
[00:14:18]  I can't even.
[00:14:21]  The way you preface that off, Mike, was that it was going to be way more psychological.
[00:14:26]  I mean, you, I'm like, I can say, you'll put up.
[00:14:29]  There's a high tolerance.
[00:14:30]  That's true.
[00:14:30]  There's a high tolerance.
[00:14:31]  Yeah, we built that over the years.
[00:14:33]  Alex, I don't know.
[00:14:34]  I mean, she's like a real.
[00:14:35]  I don't want to say I do this all the time.
[00:14:38]  You're also a real lady, but she's, you know what I mean?
[00:14:40]  Like, you're like.
[00:14:41]  I also do cover finance.
[00:14:43]  You do.
[00:14:44]  Yes.
[00:14:45]  Well, I spend time around traders.
[00:14:47]  Real intro.
[00:14:49]  Well, that was the real intro, but here's the fake intro.
[00:14:51]  We're joined once again by Alex Skaggs.
[00:14:54]  The Trunon Finn Co., financial correspondent from the Financial Times, and actually now a contributor to the Financial Times, full-time.
[00:15:06]  You shouldn't get into this.
[00:15:08]  Oh, twice a month.
[00:15:09]  Twice a month contributor now to the Financial Times and launching today, although I guess this will be a few days later by the time this episode comes out, your sub stack, which you're calling The Hedge.
[00:15:21]  But it's really going to be the with two E's because the hedge was taken.
[00:15:27]  And I also, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:29]  The hedge, like, I want to bring some like Megan the stallion energy to it.
[00:15:34]  Um, I really like that.
[00:15:35]  I love her.
[00:15:36]  Love her.
[00:15:37]  Um, but but yeah, also the other ones were taken.
[00:15:40]  So we will link to it in the show notes.
[00:15:43]  We're so excited to have you, and we have you in person.
[00:15:45]  Thank you.
[00:15:45]  Yes, I'm really excited to be here.
[00:15:48]  I feel like we only have you on when things start to break.
[00:15:51]  Well, that's when it's fun.
[00:15:52]  Yes, that's when it's fun to talk about markets.
[00:15:54]  I will say I have been having a crazy amount of fun, which I feel bad about.
[00:15:59]  Yeah.
[00:15:59]  Just content, et cetera.
[00:16:00]  Terrible for the world or whatever that meme is.
[00:16:04]  But I have been up so early and up so late, just I can't take my eyes off these markets.
[00:16:17]  It's too much.
[00:16:18]  It's crazy.
[00:16:19]  Yeah, it really is crazy.
[00:16:21]  And so much of the stuff, I mean, we'll get into this, but so much of it is happening at night.
[00:16:26]  Yes.
[00:16:26]  Like, I mean, who is after hours?
[00:16:28]  Yeah.
[00:16:28]  Night markets, big in Asia.
[00:16:33]  True.
[00:16:33]  Night markets, and that's interesting.
[00:16:37]  That was supposed to be a joke about how it's daytime in Asia when things are going insane here, but I just couldn't make it work because I have not slept.
[00:16:45]  I have a question for you guys.
[00:16:48]  What's going on?
[00:16:50]  So I think the best way to attack that is to kind of go, we're going to do my favorite thing, which is go back in time.
[00:17:01]  Actually, before we go back in time to Liberation Day, which we didn't cover on the show, so it's good.
[00:17:07]  And we watched together, you and I.
[00:17:11]  This is, this came out today, and I think this is like a good framing for what we're going to talk about today.
[00:17:15]  This was a note from Deutsche Bank.
[00:17:17]  I can't remember which manager put this out.
[00:17:20]  So I do want to like caveat that with like, oh, it's Deutsche Bank.
[00:17:24]  So, you know, whatever.
[00:17:25]  But this is what they said.
[00:17:27]  The market is reassessing the structural attractiveness of the dollar as the world's global reserve currency and is undergoing a process of rapid de-dollarization.
[00:17:38]  Our concluding observation is that given the centrality of the dollar to the global financial system, there are likely to be many unpredictable consequences to the apocalypse shifts in capital flow allocation that have been unleashed.
[00:17:55]  Not great for Americans, potentially.
[00:18:00]  So to kind of like map out how we got here, like I said, let's go back to Liberation Day because so much has happened in this past, what, like week and a half, week and a half, kind of since Liberation Day, which I feel like now will be,
[00:18:15]  it has now entered, you know, Trump said that he wanted Liberation Day to be remembered in the history books, and it definitely will, but kind of alongside potentially other things like the layman moment and Black Monday and other big, you know, iconic financial disasters.
[00:18:38]  So Liberation Day, April 2nd, Frays, we watched this in your living room.
[00:18:44]  He rolls out the tariffs where we've got a LeBron, the decision moment finally.
[00:18:51]  Trump is up there and he's got his big poster.
[00:18:54]  And you know my ass is squinting.
[00:18:57]  Alex, I was right up against that motherfucker.
[00:18:59]  Took my both my iPads out.
[00:19:02]  And I'm leveraging.
[00:19:02]  I'm squinting.
[00:19:03]  I'm doing tariffs.
[00:19:04]  Fris, put on your glasses.
[00:19:05]  And you're like, no.
[00:19:05]  No, it's easier for me to see like this because it is when I'm up close to stuff.
[00:19:10]  I was confused by that when that happened because I was like, that's a lot of numbers.
[00:19:13]  And I am, I'm, as listeners to the show will know, I don't know much about things like this.
[00:19:19]  Liz loves stuff crap like this because she's heavily leveraged in the Oriental markets.
[00:19:24]  But I was like, this seems like a lot of tariffs on a lot of countries.
[00:19:27]  And people were obviously pointing out, and I'm sure everyone knows old news by now, some of these countries aren't really countries.
[00:19:33]  It's like the Penguin Islands and, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[00:19:37]  But I was like, wow, this is a pretty crazy list of shit.
[00:19:42]  Yeah.
[00:19:42]  I mean, it was an absurd rate of tariffs, much higher than anyone anticipated on each country.
[00:19:50]  And like you say, not some not countries, just some places.
[00:19:55]  Like territories.
[00:19:56]  Territories, islands.
[00:19:58]  Yeah.
[00:19:59]  Like, you know, in a way that gave a lot of people assumed that maybe they had pulled up a list from like something like Chat GPT because they corresponded so much with international domain registrations.
[00:20:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:20:12]  But that's like a separate point.
[00:20:14]  Anyway, each, but each tariff was meant to represent an imbalance in bilateral trade, right?
[00:20:20]  And so they were like, this corresponds.
[00:20:22]  And they, much later, the administration put forward a really insane and complicated and incoherent formula for how they kind of attacked that.
[00:20:34]  But the whole idea behind it was like, these are countries that are ripping us off.
[00:20:38]  And that's like something I want us to kind of unpack maybe later, the kind of messaging around that.
[00:20:43]  But, you know, for example, you had tariffs as high as like 46% on Vietnam, 49% on Cambodia.
[00:20:53]  And, you know, these, we were just talking about this before we started.
[00:20:56]  Like, these are relatively poor countries to the U.S., obviously, which means that we don't make a lot of stuff that would make sense to import to Vietnam or to import into Cambodia, especially because our manufacturing is centered around much like higher value add items that are much more expensive or much more capital intensive.
[00:21:18]  Right.
[00:21:19]  And so like, that's where a lot of the imbalance comes from, not necessarily this idea that countries are ripping us off.
[00:21:27]  Yeah, it's insane.
[00:21:28]  So like, I also had my like face up by the screen.
[00:21:32]  I like paused it because they didn't actually like put out a release or anything.
[00:21:36]  Yeah.
[00:21:36]  So they didn't say, they didn't publish a list until way later.
[00:21:41]  And they also didn't say what was behind it or like how they figured out the tariffs until way later.
[00:21:48]  And so a bunch of people on Twitter on like X ended up figuring out, they were like, isn't it just the trade deficit divided by like the total the total imports that we have?
[00:22:04]  And like that is insane.
[00:22:06]  And so when you said much later, they like put out the formula and it was just that, except they like tacked a couple of extra like weird letters on it.
[00:22:15]  Yeah, they were like Greek letters into it.
[00:22:17]  And I was like, am I going because it doesn't make sense?
[00:22:19]  I don't know that much about this stuff, but I'm like, there's no way that you need, first of all, Greek letters for this.
[00:22:26]  But second of all, I think this is just saying like what we all think it's saying, which is what you just said.
[00:22:32]  And I don't think I could repeat correctly, but it's like, they're just saying that like we, they, we, they're ripping us off.
[00:22:39]  Yeah.
[00:22:39]  And so a bunch of administration officials actually went out and said like this is meant to measure the trade imbalance.
[00:22:48]  And any trade imbalance means that they're cheating.
[00:22:52]  Which is crazy.
[00:22:53]  It is crazy for a lot of reasons.
[00:22:55]  I mean, one, two, is that like countries have development models that are export-led.
[00:23:02]  Right.
[00:23:03]  And that means that they boost investment into manufacturing goods to then export to Western consumers and especially the United States because the United States is the, what you could consider the consumer of last resort for the world.
[00:23:18]  Right.
[00:23:18]  And in exchange, we flood the world with dollars.
[00:23:22]  So like they want.
[00:23:23]  Yeah.
[00:23:24]  From what I understand, and again, I have a primitive understanding of this, right?
[00:23:27]  If you're like kind of a new country or whatever, right?
[00:23:29]  You know, your country, maybe it wasn't doing so good for a long time.
[00:23:33]  And you're like, we need to invest in industry.
[00:23:34]  You kind of want to make stuff that gets sent to like the first world or whatever, because they'll pay you in dollars.
[00:23:41]  And that's like a good thing to have because that currency is stronger than your own currency, probably, which maybe not is so, maybe not so great.
[00:23:47]  And maybe is even in some cases pegged to the dollar.
[00:23:52]  That's them ripping us off.
[00:23:54]  Well, that's the whole thing that really, I mean, you know, Trump keeps repeating this, and his lackeys keep repeating this idea that any kind of, it's this like very vulgar mercantilism.
[00:24:08]  I don't even want to call it like neo-mercantilism because it's literally like stuck in the 19th century or something.
[00:24:16]  It's like paleo-mercantilism.
[00:24:18]  Yeah, this idea that like any deficit is a loss and any surplus is a gain.
[00:24:25]  And it's like a very kind of vulgar, and that like if we are that we don't get anything back when we import.
[00:24:35]  Yeah, so the funny thing is that like these imbalances basically mean that the countries that are sending us stuff end up with a lot of dollars.
[00:24:43]  And so like where do they put their dollars?
[00:24:46]  They buy treasuries.
[00:24:47]  Right.
[00:24:48]  And so there's a really big global market for treasuries.
[00:24:53]  And that's where reserve managers keep their dollars because the dollar is, at least for now, still the currency of trade.
[00:25:01]  3.04 p.m. on Friday, April 11th.
[00:25:04]  That's still up for debate, actually, I'd say.
[00:25:07]  But as of last evening, it seems like it was still the reserve currency.
[00:25:14]  Yeah.
[00:25:16]  The other important thing to note about this is that a lot of American companies have moved a ton of production to other countries, right?
[00:25:28]  Out of America to other countries.
[00:25:30]  So like, or even out of China, right?

=== Out Of America (04:24) ===

[00:25:34]  That's usually the focus.
[00:25:35]  Like, oh, we, all of our companies left and they went to China, but they've even, especially since Trump won, moved a lot of their production out of China into countries like Vietnam or Indonesia.
[00:25:47]  Or why did I say Indonesia?
[00:25:49]  Indonesia.
[00:25:50]  I was like saying that because you said anyway, I'm going to go British.
[00:25:54]  You were already mispronouncing it before I started interrupting, by the way.
[00:25:59]  But, you know, this is something that I think, you know, Adam Toos brought up a really good point.
[00:26:04]  And he, you know, one of the like, it's been like a week of like three chart books a day.
[00:26:10]  I mean, who can keep up with them?
[00:26:11]  But he said something, he was talking about Nike, and he said Nike's workforce in Vietnam alone would place it just outside the top 10 U.S. states in manufacturing workforce, roughly on par with North Carolina or Wisconsin.
[00:26:25]  So imagine that manufacturing complex being hit by a 46% tariff.
[00:26:30]  And imagine that shock being repeated across firm after I added those.
[00:26:37]  Tuz didn't write that because he's much more elegant than I am.
[00:26:40]  But I think that like, this is all to say that both the kind of garish Trimpian rollout of this, the kind of chaotic nature, the incoherent messaging, all of it,
[00:26:55]  plus like the reality of what this would mean, which I think no one could even still get really a handle on because trying to do the math on like, wait, how much exactly would we all be paying?
[00:27:10]  And by we, let's say, companies, everyone flipped out.
[00:27:15]  Yes.
[00:27:16]  I mean, it was 20 percentage points of additional tariffs.
[00:27:21]  That's like, I mean, and that was, you know, in the initial rollout, that was like 20 percentage points.
[00:27:28]  That's like a 20% tax on every company.
[00:27:32]  Right.
[00:27:33]  And every, and like also us, because like companies aren't like, oh, I guess we'll just like take the losses this time.
[00:27:40]  Like, when does it companies don't do that?
[00:27:42]  Right.
[00:27:42]  They raise prices.
[00:27:44]  So it meant like, you know, everyone was trying to calculate, okay, how much is this going to hit inflation?
[00:27:50]  What is the hit to the consumer going to be?
[00:27:53]  What is that going to then into, like, what are those knockoff effects then in other asset markets?
[00:27:58]  What does that do to housing?
[00:28:00]  What does it do to, I mean, and then you kind of go up from there, right?
[00:28:03]  From let's go from the consumer up to then the, you know, households, then to firms, and then to like multinationals, right?
[00:28:12]  And it kind of like having all these different effects on each level of that.
[00:28:15]  And everyone trying to game it out because the other part of this was that it wasn't just that finished goods were getting tariffed.
[00:28:25]  It was also inputs into manufacturing in the United States.
[00:28:30]  So stuff that gets completed here, but then would be parts of stuff, whether that was like, let's say for housing, like lumber or, you know, whatever we get from Canada or partly finished parts from Mexico that then get assembled together in the U.S. for cars or whatever.
[00:28:50]  Like the two easy.
[00:28:51]  Yeah, famously, like most of the cars I think made here are like, actually a lot of the parts are constructed elsewhere and then they're just assembled here.
[00:28:59]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:29:00]  And so everyone was trying to do all of this insane math of like, wait a second, that too and this and that.
[00:29:06]  And so, I mean, suffice to say that, you know, they gave this rollout after market close because no one wanted to see immediately the reaction.
[00:29:19]  And then Thursday and Friday, Mr. Market was not happy.
[00:29:25]  There was complete chaos, no direction from the White House.
[00:29:33]  Trump was out golfing.
[00:29:35]  World leaders were flipping out.
[00:29:37]  The EU was like, are you fucking kidding me?
[00:29:40]  The Europeans couldn't, they couldn't make sense of what any of this was for and why.
[00:29:47]  And the White House was just sort of like, well, you got to figure it out.
[00:29:53]  This is to help the American worker or whatever the kind of messaging was.

=== Debt and Moneyness (06:42) ===

[00:29:58]  Which then brings us to the chaos of Monday of this past week, because this is when kind of maybe some more systemic shit started to break.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:09]  So stocks sold off a fuck ton, which I think is the technical analysis term last week.
[00:30:16]  And then coming into this week, it got worse.
[00:30:19]  And then eventually it moved into the bond market.
[00:30:24]  Yes.
[00:30:24]  So like the weird thing was stocks were down.
[00:30:27]  And normally when stocks are down, people are like, oh shit, let me buy treasuries.
[00:30:32]  Or like, you know, that's sort of the financial version.
[00:30:35]  Yeah.
[00:30:36]  Of like, you know, okay, let's like get gold bars and like bury it in the yard or whatever.
[00:30:40]  Like the financial market version of that is usually just treasuries.
[00:30:43]  Right.
[00:30:44]  So that was why like back in 2011, when they downgraded the US's debt rating, treasuries rallied because people were like, whoa, this is scary.
[00:30:54]  What am I going to do?
[00:30:55]  Buy treasuries, which is, again, really funny because they're saying that we're less credit worthy.
[00:31:01]  And so this time, stocks are down a lot.
[00:31:04]  The dollar is down a lot.
[00:31:06]  And treasury prices are down a lot and yields were up.
[00:31:10]  Spiking.
[00:31:11]  Yeah.
[00:31:12]  Sorry.
[00:31:13]  I got to interrupt.
[00:31:14]  What the fuck are you talking about?
[00:31:16]  So like, I'm, I mean, I'm, I, like, if I'm, I'm just taking the role of the listener here.
[00:31:22]  What does that mean that yields are spiking when the bonds are bonds are down?
[00:31:26]  I don't know.
[00:31:26]  I don't know.
[00:31:26]  I don't.
[00:31:27]  I love this.
[00:31:28]  Okay.
[00:31:29]  So it's, because, you know, in like every market story, they're like, yields and prices are inversely related.
[00:31:39]  Yes.
[00:31:41]  So this is, you know, very like academic sounding and very abstract, but these are also like interest rates that people pay.
[00:31:49]  So like when people are selling off a bond, that means that like the rate that the company would have to pay to borrow, and that is basically like a yield or like a rate is just like what the borrower has to pay to the lender.
[00:32:06]  And that, and it doesn't, there are like all different ways that you can do it.
[00:32:11]  It's not like, you know, the U.S. has to pay 5% tomorrow on 30-year bonds, unless, of course, there's an auction, which there was actually this week.
[00:32:22]  So that's probably a bad example.
[00:32:25]  But like if you're Nike and your bonds sold off, like everybody sold your bonds, they're like, we don't want to lend to them anymore because it's basically like a financialized loan, then the interest rate goes up basically.
[00:32:41]  So that's kind of what happened in the U.S. too, which is a really bad sign.
[00:32:45]  Because again, when stock markets are selling off, usually people want to own dollar assets and government bonds specifically because we're supposed to have no risk of default.
[00:33:00]  Right.
[00:33:01]  So this is like the classic, because I always give the advice is keep your money in money.
[00:33:05]  Right.
[00:33:06]  But this is like the money, putting your money in this kind of money became like a really safe bet to like, now this is also risky.
[00:33:14]  And so it's like the safe area is now scary as well.
[00:33:17]  Yeah.
[00:33:18]  Yeah.
[00:33:19]  I mean, the funny thing is that like there's an entire, there's like a bunch of academics who talk about the moneyness of treasury bonds.
[00:33:27]  This is a feel that I really feel like I get into.
[00:33:30]  This is really, there's a lot of moneyness around this.
[00:33:34]  Like some things are more money-like and some things are less, but they call it, they call it moneyness, which is funny.
[00:33:40]  And so treasuries are basically the closest thing you can get to dollars that isn't just a dollar.
[00:33:48]  It's like an IOU of a dollar.
[00:33:50]  Yeah.
[00:33:50]  And we haven't defaulted yet, I guess.
[00:33:55]  I mean, people are paying attention to, this is some fun gossip that's totally unsubstantiated.
[00:34:01]  Oh, God.
[00:34:02]  No, I encourage such things.
[00:34:04]  Yeah, let's all be able to do it.
[00:34:05]  And you should, by the way, by the way, Alex said this before we started recording, but I just want to keep in mind, this is all financial advice.
[00:34:11]  So whatever she says right now, take it to the, this is legal advice to take it to the bank.
[00:34:16]  Take it to the bank.
[00:34:17]  Yeah.
[00:34:18]  What's the substantiated rumor?
[00:34:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:20]  So I guess the UK at one point like repudiated some debt that the U.S. held.
[00:34:27]  And now like that's making its way around academic circles.
[00:34:31]  I don't know if it's making its way around Trump circles necessarily, but the fact that people are like, oh, wow.
[00:34:39]  Well, think about this time that the UK repudiated, that's a fun word, its debt is interesting and also maybe a little worrying Because I know he also said at one point, like, oh, well, there's some things we can do with treasuries.
[00:34:54]  He did say that.
[00:34:55]  He did.
[00:34:55]  Yeah.
[00:34:56]  Which is true.
[00:34:57]  And he also said, but I don't know if it was like him just doing his like his pattern or like in his like Biden maxing mode a little bit where he said something like, oh, Elon.
[00:35:13]  He said something a while back where he was like, oh, Elon says that like maybe some of our debt, it was like right after Elon went into the treasury and everyone was like flipping out because the doggy kids were like, were running loose through the treasury.
[00:35:28]  And he was like, oh, Elon says something funny, like that maybe our debt isn't what it says it is.
[00:35:36]  And I was like, siren, siren, siren.
[00:35:39]  But we just all kind of collectively moved on.
[00:35:42]  Yeah.
[00:35:42]  And the funny thing about that, like that was when I was still kind of optimistic about all of this.
[00:35:47]  And I thought that maybe they were just talking about the debt held by Social Security and the debt, like intra-governmental debt, which like people don't even really count because it's just saying like, I owe myself money.
[00:35:58]  Right.
[00:35:59]  Well, some people think it's real.
[00:36:01]  And those people are in charge of the government.
[00:36:05]  You can owe other parts of the government money.
[00:36:08]  I mean, that's kind of what a budget is.
[00:36:10]  I guess that's true, but just don't pay.
[00:36:13]  Isn't it your government your money?
[00:36:15]  Or you could just keep paying forever.
[00:36:18]  It also wouldn't have been a payment.
[00:36:19]  That's functional.
[00:36:20]  That's the Social Security.
[00:36:22]  Maybe we want to pay the Social Security.
[00:36:24]  I don't know.
[00:36:25]  I'm not in, you know, doge or whatever.
[00:36:27]  Yeah.
[00:36:29]  Oh, I see what you're saying.
[00:36:30]  I thought it's like they helped the GAOs FDA like 500 mil or something like that.
[00:36:35]  Okay, I see what you're saying.
[00:36:37]  Oh, yeah.
[00:36:38]  They should pay that.
[00:36:40]  Yeah, yeah.

=== Walter Bloomberg's Strange Tweet (15:42) ===

[00:36:41]  I mean, I do feel like we are going to see some.
[00:36:46]  You remember when Greece was like, actually, Germany, you owe us a bunch of money from World War II.
[00:36:53]  I feel, which actually I have said on this show and I've said in my private life as well, that that was a really good plan.
[00:37:00]  And they should have actually stuck with that.
[00:37:01]  And they should have actually done violence against Germany as a state.
[00:37:05]  Like, I think that Greece has an army, whatever, but, and they fucked up and look where they are now, dump.
[00:37:11]  But I love the place.
[00:37:13]  But, but I think we're going to see some that style plans coming out of the administration where it's like, you know, like you mentioned here, like, oh, well, Britain was just like, this debt is fake at one point.
[00:37:23]  I feel like that's going to happen.
[00:37:25]  That's it.
[00:37:25]  That's purely.
[00:37:26]  And everything's running on feelings now.
[00:37:28]  I know.
[00:37:29]  It's all vibes.
[00:37:32]  I think, like, I want to go back for one second to that last to last Monday or this, you know, a week from when this show comes out.
[00:37:41]  Because The day before the bond market broke, kind of, you know, there was a story that you wrote about, which is that there was a weird tweet sent off by Walter Bloomberg, our favorite account on X, the Everything app, which if you're not on X, I don't begrudge you, but Walter Bloomberg is a kind of like, what, anonymous news aggregator account?
[00:38:09]  Yeah.
[00:38:09]  Like breaking news feed.
[00:38:11]  Yeah.
[00:38:11]  And he tweeted something out that started to then pump the market completely.
[00:38:19]  Yeah, that was wild too.
[00:38:20]  Oh my God.
[00:38:22]  So Walter Bloomberg, who owns Bloomberg, the owner.
[00:38:28]  People think it's Michael, but it's really just a cousin.
[00:38:31]  Oh, Walter.
[00:38:33]  He tweeted, he, I don't even know if it's like one guy or if it's many guys or like many people.
[00:38:40]  Who knows?
[00:38:41]  Yeah, I think I'm getting zero hedge vibes, but like a little bit.
[00:38:45]  He's a little less ideological.
[00:38:47]  Yeah.
[00:38:47]  But if he starts really tweeting about, you know.
[00:38:50]  We'll have to see.
[00:38:51]  There's a guy in the picture.
[00:38:53]  Oh, yeah.
[00:38:54]  It's Walter Bloomberg.
[00:38:57]  But so he tweeted out.
[00:38:59]  He said he, it was like, you know, in the sort of Bloomberg terminal type style, you know, house style of like, Hassett, meaning talking about White House advisor, Hassett says, you know, Trump is considering a 90-day pause on tariffs except for China.
[00:39:18]  And it's crazy because so that was right before that came out.
[00:39:24]  The stock market started to move.
[00:39:26]  It was, it was, you know, completely dumping.
[00:39:29]  Stocks were dumping.
[00:39:30]  Everyone was freaking out.
[00:39:32]  And then I was watching it live on CNBC and I watched as the SP started to just like go parabolic, as they like to say.
[00:39:43]  And the hosts of CNBC were looking at and they're like, oh, what's the headline?
[00:39:47]  Like something is moving.
[00:39:49]  And then I, you know, I have my computer there because I got all my screens going.
[00:39:53]  And I see Walter Bloomberg's tweet.
[00:39:56]  And so I'm like kind of waiting for it all to make sense.
[00:40:00]  And the market completely responded to something before the news even broke, right?
[00:40:07]  Am I saying that correctly?
[00:40:08]  Yeah, no, that was, that was insane because it started moving.
[00:40:13]  Everyone was like, what was that headline?
[00:40:16]  And so I'll confess I have completely fallen down a rabbit hole on this.
[00:40:20]  It took me, that has taken up like a day and a half of my life.
[00:40:24]  And the earliest thing in public that anyone could point to is like, oh, well, Walter Bloomberg made up a headline about tariffs being paused on China or not on China, about tariffs being paused for 90 days, except for China.
[00:40:42]  And so no one could actually find, like, I think the administration themselves said later, like, oh, no, that was fake news.
[00:40:50]  Yes.
[00:40:50]  Nobody said anything like that.
[00:40:52]  We have no idea what you're talking about.
[00:40:53]  And then the market immediately crashed right back down to where it was.
[00:40:58]  And, but it's weird because like this is a, this is an account that just like copies and pastes tweets.
[00:41:04]  I always assumed it was coming from a terminal.
[00:41:07]  I thought it was a bot.
[00:41:08]  Yeah.
[00:41:10]  If I may interrupt, I use sometimes, you know, in the course of this show, I use PimEyes, you know, like the AI search tool.
[00:41:19]  And I got to be honest, I have found a lot of people's like, oh, damn, particularly one enemy who, you know, executive director of a large Zionist organization in the U.S. that I've been very focused on.
[00:41:32]  But for Walter Bloomberg, I've never seen anything like this.
[00:41:35]  Oh, man.
[00:41:36]  There's hundreds of identical Walter Bloombergs that come up as similar images and nothing else.
[00:41:43]  I mean, his profile picture, which appears to be a rather white-looking man in short hair.
[00:41:49]  You know, is this guy even real?
[00:41:51]  I don't think so.
[00:41:52]  Yeah.
[00:41:53]  I saw somewhere that he was like a, that it's a picture of an Eastern European guy who's a model or something.
[00:42:02]  Like it was, it was just some random picture.
[00:42:04]  Yeah.
[00:42:06]  Some random picture.
[00:42:07]  And so I still, yeah, I really, I kind of want to know like who's running it.
[00:42:12]  It says it's in Switzerland.
[00:42:14]  And that's kind of what we, yeah, what we know.
[00:42:18]  But it is weird again, because like, you know, if you're like a bot account that just tweets out things from the terminal, like why?
[00:42:27]  I don't know.
[00:42:28]  That would take like a lot of planning and a lot of time.
[00:42:31]  And also you can tell that when they came out and said that wasn't happening, he like quote tweeted it and was like, wait, what?
[00:42:38]  Yeah.
[00:42:38]  Like that's not, you would just disappear.
[00:42:40]  You were like, okay, let me.
[00:42:42]  Now, the reason we bring this up in this story, because we didn't mention that right before all this happened, you know, a lot of people went and looked back.
[00:42:52]  The volume of call options increased immediately.
[00:42:59]  Like so many people started piling in, buying like, you know, end of day expiry or long dated expiry call options on the SP.
[00:43:10]  And a lot of people made a lot of fucking money betting on the market to pop.
[00:43:15]  And then it did on a fake headline.
[00:43:18]  Yes.
[00:43:19]  And from the reporting that I did, I did find out that a bunch of bank trading desks were sending that headline around before Walter Bloomberg actually republished it.
[00:43:35]  So wait, he's getting, everyone hates this guy now.
[00:43:38]  No, Walter's fine.
[00:43:40]  It's just Walter's fault.
[00:43:41]  He's a Patsy.
[00:43:42]  Walter's a Patsy.
[00:43:44]  This is, this is, this is incredible to me because I really respect this guy for having a large online profile by basically just repeating headlines that other people do.
[00:43:52]  Yeah, I mean, it's a good hustle, I think.
[00:43:55]  Also, I don't know why, like, why doesn't Bloomberg just have like a Newswire headline?
[00:44:00]  And I actually kind of thought like maybe it was just a Newswire's like AI experiment gone wrong or something.
[00:44:08]  But the funny thing was that there was nothing that it could have come from because there was an interview on Fox with Kevin Hazett where they were like, oh, well, what about a 90-day pause?
[00:44:19]  Because that idea had been introduced by Bill Ackman in a tweet that morning, which he's had a week, man.
[00:44:30]  He's had a week.
[00:44:31]  He didn't even have to go crying on TV to get some respite.
[00:44:35]  Well, we haven't.
[00:44:36]  The market might have not reached the bottom yet.
[00:44:39]  It's been crazy for me looking at Bill Ackman stuff.
[00:44:42]  We talked about on the show before in other contexts.
[00:44:44]  But in this case, it's been crazy because I've sort of been sitting.
[00:44:47]  You know how when there's those big teddy bears and people sort of sit in their lap and like they wrap the teddy bears' arms around it, like a large oversized teddy bear?
[00:44:55]  I've been doing the teddy bear thing with Neri Oxman, his beautiful Israeli wife, kind of looking on the iPad, his tweets, and being like, this guy is out of his mind.
[00:45:05]  I got to tell you, I don't exist in, you know, I don't exist in the financial world, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[00:45:12]  Is this guy respected?
[00:45:13]  I mean, he seems like a total lunatic.
[00:45:15]  Oh, man.
[00:45:16]  Didn't he just like get in some fights with the like at supplements companies?
[00:45:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:21]  So he was a really, really loud, really aggressive short seller about Herbalife, which is funny because Herbalife was, by all appearances, a pyramid scheme.
[00:45:34]  But ruined Mikey Miles' life.
[00:45:36]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:45:38]  But when it was like regulators' turn to actually get themselves involved, the talk at the time was that they didn't want to do it really aggressively because then it would look like they were swayed by Bill Ackman.
[00:45:52]  And then it's like, so he was right, but he was so annoying that nobody wanted to make him right.
[00:46:00]  Totally toxic.
[00:46:01]  Yeah.
[00:46:02]  Toxic to the brand.
[00:46:03]  I mean, but his, his, to me, he has been like, him and Chimeth, you know, his last name, have been like, to me, the best examples of guys just really trying to run cover for whatever's going on and act like they know a thing or two, but also act like, you know, I'm analyzing this a little bit.
[00:46:20]  Right.
[00:46:21]  But the flip-flopping on the messaging, I mean, my God, these people, I mean, they make Elizabeth Warren look like, I'm trying to think of who did not flip-flop, Adolf Hitler.
[00:46:30]  And I just am, well, he, I don't know.
[00:46:34]  I mean, it depends.
[00:46:35]  No, he didn't really flip.
[00:46:36]  He was kind of the whole thing the whole time.
[00:46:38]  But yeah, these guys basically being like, what's happening now, you know, is a fucking travesty.
[00:46:47]  Well, not Chamith, but Bill Ackman's like, this is crazy.
[00:46:50]  We need to fucking arrest Peter Navarro.
[00:46:52]  We need to shoot Luttnick, blah, blah.
[00:46:54]  And then 10 hours later being like, Howard Luttnick is the kindest, bravest, most intelligent man I've ever met in my life.
[00:47:03]  Donald Trump is a genius.
[00:47:04]  This is all the art of the deal.
[00:47:06]  I know maybe he got the exit liquidity he needed because his dumbass was probably long since the election.
[00:47:11]  Yeah.
[00:47:12]  And also, I mean, the funny thing, like people talk about markets and stuff, like they're super, super scientific and everything's really regulated.
[00:47:21]  But it's like, I mean, even before all of this shit, which is insane, like I remember being on the wire seeing headlines about like Iran or something in like 2015 and having people be like, oh, it's moving the bond market.
[00:47:38]  But it was just some guy who was just like, oh, let's see.
[00:47:42]  Like, this looks really intense.
[00:47:43]  Let me send it around to everyone when really it was like not actually a story.
[00:47:48]  Yeah.
[00:47:48]  And somebody just had, somebody just needed some exit liquidity.
[00:47:52]  I mean, it's crazy to me because the markets, I mean, this is why I don't mess with them is they so, this is so chaotic and it's crazy.
[00:47:58]  And it doesn't seem to really, it just seems so parasitical in many ways.
[00:48:03]  It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
[00:48:04]  But I guess I'm wondering here, it's like, what the fuck?
[00:48:10]  I don't know.
[00:48:12]  Does anybody have any idea what's going on?
[00:48:14]  Because this is my kind of question.
[00:48:17]  Liz, I've asked you this probably 10,000 times this week.
[00:48:20]  Like, is there any coherent voice coming from the administration as of like last week?
[00:48:24]  You said that, you know, Trump was golfing Thursday, Friday, last week.
[00:48:28]  But like since Monday, like, what have they been saying?
[00:48:31]  What's been going on?
[00:48:33]  Well, there was a big, so if we, you know, it was when we saw the market reaction to the Walter Bloomberg fake tweet, everyone, you know, was so excited.
[00:48:43]  It was like the market was like waiting to know that everything that Trump said was not real.
[00:48:48]  Like it was like, okay, it's not going to be real.
[00:48:51]  We're going to roll it back.
[00:48:53]  Saner, someone, you know, saner heads have prevailed.
[00:48:56]  Someone has intervened, whether it's Besant, whether it's, I don't know why people think of Lutnik, I don't know, but like someone somewhere stopped the crazy.
[00:49:06]  And then when it was immediately walked back by the White House, everyone went back to freaking out.
[00:49:14]  And it was that night that the bond market started to break.
[00:49:18]  And it wasn't until the bond market started to break when yields started popping that we finally had some our first, like, I think you saw the first blink from Trump where he said he blamed it on.
[00:49:36]  Said that the bond market got the yips or was yipping.
[00:49:39]  I don't even exactly know what he meant.
[00:49:41]  Sort of like a term you'd use for your autistic son, he was like, It was yip, it was yipping, going yippee.
[00:49:46]  I was like, What?
[00:49:48]  I'd be doing shit like that.
[00:49:49]  But yeah, he said that it's yipping.
[00:49:52]  I read so many different newspaper articles about it.
[00:49:54]  I never heard it before.
[00:49:55]  And then he said he watched, he said, Jamie, he's like, Jamie told me that something had to get done.
[00:50:00]  Jamie, he didn't say it like that, but I love saying Jamie.
[00:50:04]  Jamie gotta go on.
[00:50:05]  He said, Chump, you gotta do something.
[00:50:07]  Yes, but it's also like, Jamie, first of all, Jamie Dimon went on.
[00:50:12]  I guess Jamie knows.
[00:50:13]  Jamie Diamond.
[00:50:14]  Knows how to fucking play this shit because you'd think that Jamie has a direct line to the White House, that there's just like the Jamie Diamond phone that's like separate from the one they use to call like the situation room or whatever.
[00:50:27]  And apparently not, because instead he went on like fucking Fox and Friends or whatever.
[00:50:32]  That's the phone, Liz.
[00:50:34]  I know what are you talking about?
[00:50:36]  That's like Fox and Friends and he's like, something needs to get done.
[00:50:42]  This is too crazy.
[00:50:45]  We can't handle what's going on in the bond market.
[00:50:48]  So I want to, one, why is that what caused Trump to blank?
[00:50:54]  And also, why did that happen in the bond markets?
[00:50:58]  So, I mean, that was kind of a sign of capital flight.
[00:51:01]  Yes.
[00:51:01]  Right.
[00:51:02]  Like, that's there's risk off, risk on, you know, whatever, like many things that can happen in markets.
[00:51:08]  But when it's capital flight like that, that means that like people are selling treasuries because they want to sell treasuries, not because they're like, oh, I want to buy a stock.
[00:51:18]  Right.
[00:51:18]  They're like, we don't want to have dollar investments right now.
[00:51:23]  And that's.
[00:51:24]  This is no longer a safe haven.
[00:51:25]  Yeah.
[00:51:26]  That is super.
[00:51:27]  I haven't really seen it happen.
[00:51:29]  I've seen it happen when like the market broke because a bunch of super leveraged hedge funds were like, you know, trading a ton.
[00:51:37]  And that is still happening a little bit, but this is like persistent and things aren't breaking in like a, in like a technological or like arbitrage or like structure.
[00:51:49]  I mean, they are breaking a little bit, but like having long-term treasuries sell off a ton like that is, I think, a pretty clear sign of capital flight.
[00:52:02]  And so, you know, whether it's from people in the U.S., whether it's from people abroad, which like a lot of this stuff did happen overnight, which is when, you know, foreign investors are trading.
[00:52:13]  And I think, you know, not just the sign of capital flight, but also because it actually affects interest rates and borrowing costs.

=== Capital Flight Signals (15:21) ===

[00:52:23]  So I feel like one thing people don't talk about a ton with Trump is that he like has a sort of instinctive real estate guys like, okay, higher interest rates, bad, lower interest rates, good.
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:35]  So like he really gets that and but like gets it not in like an intellectual way, but in just like a, he was a real estate guy.
[00:52:42]  Yeah.
[00:52:43]  Yeah.
[00:52:43]  Um and so he sees interest.
[00:52:47]  I mean, he sees treasury yields going up and he's like, oh shit, like, you know, the mortgages are tied to the 10-year treasury.
[00:52:55]  And so things get more expensive when like you could almost argue that a lot of the dumb stuff and a lot of the like, oh, it's, we're just going to have to go through a recession was almost a play to get rates down and to get the Fed to cut, which we'll see.
[00:53:14]  And so the market sort of reacting in that way, I think spooked him.
[00:53:19]  And it was also funny because again, this was like the White House advisors coming out and saying like, oh, well, this was always the plan.
[00:53:26]  No, this is not about the bond market.
[00:53:28]  And then they asked Trump himself and he was like, oh, I was watching the bond market.
[00:53:32]  Of course I was.
[00:53:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:53:33]  That's like the only thing you're doing.
[00:53:34]  I know.
[00:53:35]  It's so funny.
[00:53:36]  Yeah.
[00:53:36]  I mean, I think that was, you know, really interesting because, you know, then he comes out.
[00:53:40]  So he says that, oh, actually, the Walter Bloomberg tweet, that's real.
[00:53:44]  We're actually going to do Walter Bloomberg thing now.
[00:53:46]  And we are going to pause the tariffs, just 10% for everyone, except for China.
[00:53:51]  And now China's going to be 145%.
[00:53:53]  Right.
[00:53:54]  And I think the idea there was like, okay, that'll calm everything down.
[00:54:00]  And it did a little bit.
[00:54:01]  You saw rallies.
[00:54:03]  Maybe it's a little bit dead cap files, but you see some rallies in, you know, the SP, the NASDAQ, Dow, whatever.
[00:54:11]  And it didn't calm the bond markets.
[00:54:15]  Last night we were on a group chat.
[00:54:17]  We were all watching it.
[00:54:19]  I was like being crazed, just like, but suddenly a massive unwind started kind of happening and a massive sell-off.
[00:54:29]  And I don't know if it was last night or this or today when the 10-year yields hit the yippie point from prior this week.
[00:54:41]  And I think that like, you know, a lot of people rightly were assuming that this meant that China was that maybe China or other Asian companies and countries, sorry, well, companies and countries selling off their holdings in almost a like political move, right?
[00:55:04]  Both in a, in a, maybe in a way that they don't think that the U.S. is a safe haven anymore, but also in a kind of like political, you know, now we're going to weaponize our holdings against you, which people have been like, you know, many people have talked about for 10, 20, 30 years as possibility.
[00:55:26]  But one of the things that's been very interesting for me watching all of this is kind of like, because you mentioned that, yeah, the Fed, you know, everyone's kind of seeing what the Fed is going to do.
[00:55:37]  And I want to talk about that.
[00:55:38]  But like, because the bond market isn't breaking for like real structural reasons, it's not like, you know, the Fed came out today and they said that, okay, we'll jump in if we need to provide liquidity or if we need to help.
[00:55:53]  you know, in the, in a moment to like shore up liquidity and get things moving, we will be there.
[00:55:59]  Like, don't worry, we'll be there.
[00:56:01]  Daddy's here.
[00:56:03]  But this isn't breaking for that reason.
[00:56:06]  This is actually breaking for like political reasons, potentially.
[00:56:09]  And like economists who are so focused on these like technical aspects are not, are kind of like slow on the uptake with that reality.
[00:56:19]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  I think, I mean, it's taking a minute to sort of really figure out and like really, I think internalize.
[00:56:26]  Like it's a lot of the street, like Wall Street strategists and stuff, the guys who cover currencies, I think are really, they're not pulling any punches.
[00:56:37]  They're like, yeah, this is like nobody wants to have dollar assets right now because these guys fucked up so badly.
[00:56:44]  Like the funny thing was that like the reserve currency stuff, the like, oh, they're not going to sell their, their treasuries for political reasons.
[00:56:52]  Like that was all based on trade.
[00:56:54]  Yes.
[00:56:54]  That was like when you're explaining why it's not going to happen, you're like, well, the dollar is the, is the currency of trade.
[00:57:00]  Right.
[00:57:00]  And so they're like, oh, we're just going to go after trade.
[00:57:03]  But hey, we're the reserve currency.
[00:57:05]  And it's like, it doesn't work like that, guys.
[00:57:08]  It's kind of shooting yourself in the foot.
[00:57:10]  Yeah.
[00:57:10]  Well, you can have, you know, it's like we can have balanced trade or we can have the reserve currency be the dollar, but you can't have both.
[00:57:20]  And the administration chose balanced trade.
[00:57:22]  The question is, why?
[00:57:24]  And I want to talk about that.
[00:57:26]  But like, I do think, you know, who knows?
[00:57:31]  We'll find out.
[00:57:32]  And, you know, things will come to light sooner than probably the like three months when the actual deals get reported in the treasury market.
[00:57:40]  But like, you know, if it's the Japanese, if it's the, if it's China, if it's the Europeans, which I want to throw out there, the Europeans throwing, like, you know, selling a ton of treasuries, like there's been a massive capital flight out of the U.S., out of basically any American asset into Europe, you know, which I got to, you know, I've been quietly bullish on Europe.
[00:58:09]  And I will say, I'm going to say this because I know that our friends at the European Central Bank are listening.
[00:58:15]  They're big supporters of this show.
[00:58:16]  And I want to say this.
[00:58:18]  Invent the Eurobond.
[00:58:19]  Oh, man.
[00:58:20]  And you will leapfrog us so fast.
[00:58:23]  Invent the Eurobond out of spite.
[00:58:26]  Out of spite.
[00:58:28]  Take down JD Vance, that fucking sniveling piece of what?
[00:58:33]  He's a piece of what?
[00:58:35]  I don't like using this word, but I'll say it.
[00:58:38]  He's of mid-wittery.
[00:58:40]  The man is like he inhaled chat GPT version of economic and political theory.
[00:58:49]  My question, my question is, I have more questions about the tariffs, actually.
[00:58:55]  So maybe I'll pause on that.
[00:58:57]  But I do, my question for you, Liz, then is you're not thinking about, well, I actually, this is more of a statement than a question, but I'm going to phrase it like a question, Jeopardy style.
[00:59:07]  Do you remember when Trump was like, actually, we might not have any income tax and it's going to be all replaced by tariffs?
[00:59:14]  And so that was maybe part of the reasoning behind this.
[00:59:18]  I don't know what he's, I don't know what he thinks.
[00:59:21]  I mean, none of this makes any sense.
[00:59:23]  It doesn't make any sense.
[00:59:25]  The one thing that did make sense was that he was talking about having no capital gains tax.
[00:59:30]  Right.
[00:59:30]  Well, there's like any capital gains.
[00:59:32]  Capital gains tax.
[00:59:33]  That's fucking, that's really smart.
[00:59:36]  Yeah, I just, I'm, the whole thing's confusing to me because yeah, maybe we have the Japanese once again sneak attacking us with this bond market thing.
[00:59:45]  Could be the Europeans.
[00:59:46]  But what is it like, this is such a stupid question.
[00:59:50]  What does this mean?
[00:59:51]  Oh, no, it's a good question because it's so abstract.
[00:59:54]  To me, it's just like, this isn't, I don't understand.
[00:59:56]  What's this got to do with the price of eggs in Iowa?
[00:59:59]  It's going up, I think.
[01:00:01]  I don't want to hear anything more about eggs from you, ladies.
[01:00:04]  Yeah, I mean, the reserve status enables us to do a lot of things.
[01:00:11]  And we don't do a lot of things because of the internal domestic political realities.
[01:00:17]  And that's very different than what the reserve currency status in a theoretical kind of model enables us to do.
[01:00:27]  But it still does.
[01:00:29]  It allows us to run fiscal deficits.
[01:00:32]  It allows us to be the consumer of last resort.
[01:00:34]  It allows us to kind of, it undergirds the American empire, right?
[01:00:42]  And if we lose that status or when we lose that status, that all goes away.
[01:00:50]  And it also means that the ability to run deficits, to use that to kind of that the privilege of that, the exorbitant privilege, that goes away.
[01:01:04]  Yeah, I mean, you could argue that we have been using the reserve currency to buy cheap stuff and borrow at low rates to help support domestic consumption.
[01:01:19]  You know, like Americans, we like buy stuff.
[01:01:22]  Like one of my coworkers was talking about like, yeah, Americans are just fundamentally people who shop.
[01:01:29]  And like, oh, shit, now, now what?
[01:01:32]  You know, because like that was all sort of underpinned by us importing cheaper stuff and then having the people finance the people, the other countries finance their trade surpluses with us by buying treasuries.
[01:01:49]  Yes.
[01:01:49]  Yeah.
[01:01:50]  So like that, that's like, it's funny because like on one hand, it is super abstract, super global.
[01:01:55]  But then on the, you know, on the other, it's like stuff that we do.
[01:01:58]  Like, why do we have cheap flat screen TVs?
[01:02:02]  Because we, we import a lot and we buy a lot.
[01:02:04]  And that is all financed by these, you know, global financial markets that allow the U.S. again to like borrow at low cost and support domestic consumption and, you know, put policies in place that supports domestic consumption.
[01:02:21]  And it's not just flat screen.
[01:02:23]  I mean, yes, it's the flat screens.
[01:02:24]  It's the vapes.
[01:02:25]  It's the Stanley Cups and it's all this bullshit that we use, consume like ravenously, econically, absurdly.
[01:02:36]  But it's also cheap medical equipment.
[01:02:39]  It's also like cheap material for housing.
[01:02:42]  It's also like, it is like everything.
[01:02:45]  Well, yeah, coffee beans, bananas, which everyone said we couldn't have anyway.
[01:02:49]  But like, you know, it is, it's everything.
[01:02:53]  Right.
[01:02:53]  And so I think when we talk about, if we want to talk about it in non-abstract ways, what this means is it means a severe and sharp decline in American standards of living and future prospects.
[01:03:11]  Yeah.
[01:03:11]  And the funny thing is, like, there are ways to talk about trade imbalances in like a thoughtful way and talk about like, okay, well, you know, at what cost really globally are, you know, cheap flat screen TVs, right?
[01:03:27]  Like we don't want to keep half the world in poverty just so we can have cheap stuff, right?
[01:03:33]  But like, on the other hand, like the tariff implementation, first of all, like even the people who are talking about trade imbalances as a problem thoughtfully, like Michael Pettus, Matt Klein, like these guys, you know, they're doing it more thoughtfully.
[01:03:48]  Like even they are like, tariffs are not going to fix this.
[01:03:52]  And the implementation of this is so insane that that sort of it almost like delegitimizes the whole conversation, which is weird.
[01:04:03]  Because there is, you know, there's an interesting conversation somewhere to be had about it, but not like this.
[01:04:08]  I do want to talk about that because I think that gets us into some of the like larger political economy questions that you have, Brace.
[01:04:16]  Also, like Michael Pettis put out a thing in the FT, I don't know, ill-timed is the right word, but interestingly timed piece in the FT, basically arguing that the next step in order to sort of fix everything was capital controls and to stave off capital flight from the U.S. in order to eventually discipline.
[01:04:40]  I mean, that's it's a disciplining capital to invest and to stay in the United States.
[01:04:46]  And I wonder if you think that that's like on the table.
[01:04:49]  I mean, they were talking about, they were talking about capital controls.
[01:04:54]  I think Besant was talking about like, oh, why would we?
[01:04:58]  But they're, of course, talking about it in the context of China specifically.
[01:05:02]  Right.
[01:05:03]  So I don't know how widespread that would be.
[01:05:07]  Like, they might just be like, oh, you're not allowed to buy this thing or that, you know, these sorts of investments in China.
[01:05:17]  But it is, it's a really, and we know also that the people making policy are paying attention to petis, but they're just like asking chat GPT.
[01:05:26]  They're summer chat GPT version of trade wars or class wars.
[01:05:30]  Exactly.
[01:05:32]  And so, I mean, God knows.
[01:05:34]  When are they going to read the chat GPT version of Michael Hudson?
[01:05:39]  I do think, actually, funny enough, Adam Toos like posted a funny thing about Michael Hudson the other day.
[01:05:44]  I was thinking about emailing him back because he said he couldn't do it last time.
[01:05:46]  He was sick.
[01:05:48]  I think that like the gripe that I have is just that like, again, to like maybe repeat myself a little bit, is that like a lot of the political decisions that are internal to the U.S. are not the fault of the Chinese and are not the fault of the rest of the world.
[01:06:05]  Whereas I think vulgar petusism, if I can call it that, because I don't want to put this on him specifically, but like people interpreting his work, is that it's sort of like as an effect of the trade imbalance as a mechanism, like as a just, you know, the way that it's weighted, this then leads to inequality in the United States.
[01:06:28]  Whereas like a lot of that is coming from political decisions that are made that don't have that are not structurally linked or don't have to be structurally linked to like Chinese exports, right?
[01:06:44]  Yeah, and they were like pretty explicit in their book about the fact that the way to fix it is reducing like domestic imbalances and domestic concentration of power with the wealthy.
[01:06:58]  So they like say that outright, but here in America, they're like, oh, tax?
[01:07:02]  No, thank you.
[01:07:04]  So like they explicitly use the word redistribution.
[01:07:06]  They're like, well, instead of just engaging in like actual redistribution of wealth, These other countries have tried to, not other countries, the United States has tried to sort of, you know, continue or maintain standards of living by, you know, sort of creating these imbalances also ourselves, like through our choices with our policies.
[01:07:31]  So, you know, and of course, it's not just us, but the way that the system came about is sort of helping support a lot of the inequalities and the imbalances within the U.S.

=== Why America Can't Compete (15:22) ===

[01:07:44]  Yes.
[01:07:45]  It's just, it always seems like when these guys talk, and you hear it again from the Trump people, is the like the like causality always goes one way.
[01:07:52]  You know what I mean?
[01:07:53]  When it's just like, that's not the case.
[01:07:56]  And the way that they are acting now is like, okay, we're going to take this like vulgar pedicism and let's apply capital controls and we're going to discipline capital to stay in the United States to, because now everyone's going to want to invest here in commodity manufacturing to compete with low value ad goods with the rest of the world.
[01:08:24]  So I guess this is just like where I'm coming from here, right?
[01:08:27]  Because I'm a proponent of the reproletarianization of large sectors of the American economy, which will be not so pleasant for many people, but that's a long time off.
[01:08:37]  So I'm still pretty young.
[01:08:39]  But my question is, like a lot of this messaging I'm hearing about this stuff coming from the White House or attended to, you know, it's sort of like court supplicants has been like, you know what?
[01:08:52]  Forget Main Street.
[01:08:54]  Wait, no, forget Wall Street.
[01:08:56]  We're doing this shit for Main Street.
[01:08:59]  I don't know what they mean by that because how is 145% tariffs on Chinese goods going to help Main Street?
[01:09:07]  I understand, you know, you have JD Vance coming out and be like, we got to wean, we got to wean these pig Americans off of cheap Chinese goods, right?
[01:09:16]  But the thing is, you're not weaning them off with anything.
[01:09:18]  It's not like you're like, okay, we're titrating you with a slightly more expensive LGTV.
[01:09:23]  Okay, it's $100 more today.
[01:09:25]  It's $100 more tomorrow.
[01:09:27]  Like they're not doing this.
[01:09:28]  I mean, what they're doing is declaring like a full-on trade war with China and seemingly like wanting to decouple our economies completely.
[01:09:35]  It's not like they're like ramping up these sort of small tariffs that will like briefly, you know, increase or that will increase the price more and more and more, combined with like a host of other, you know, economic programs that they're doing to increase American, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[01:09:48]  That's not happening.
[01:09:48]  They're just like, actually, 145% tariffs on China.
[01:09:52]  What I just, I don't understand is that like, first of all, maybe this is moving too quickly into the political economy.
[01:09:59]  I will say one quick thing before we do that, that the hedge fund trade that is actually like making this worse is A trade betting on rolling back regulations on banks.
[01:10:17]  Yes.
[01:10:17]  So if they're like, this is for Main Street, not Wall Street, by the way, we know you guys were all betting on this deregulation thing.
[01:10:26]  And I mean, who knows?
[01:10:27]  Like, they might still do.
[01:10:28]  Of course.
[01:10:29]  That's me.
[01:10:30]  I mean, all this is also combined with not only deregulation of banks, but like a real push for deregulation on like labor.
[01:10:37]  Yeah.
[01:10:38]  Yeah.
[01:10:39]  Which is also.
[01:10:40]  Well, that's the only way that manufacturing could come back in that way.
[01:10:43]  Like that's the thing.
[01:10:44]  So I do want to say when we have these political conversations and when the elites, as like, you know, populists like to call them, when they say like, oh, deindustrialization, it did all this, da-da-da-da.
[01:10:57]  And they're always talking about some kind of vague sense of either, of like, you know, in the early 90s, the late 80s and the early 90s.
[01:11:05]  And, you know, us hollowing out certain manufacturing industries in the U.S. absolutely, of course, like decimated whole cities, whole towns, whole states.
[01:11:21]  You know, capital flight is violent.
[01:11:26]  You know, it really is.
[01:11:28]  However, like, we also need to keep in mind that like U.S. manufacturing, we are second in manufacturing in the world, right?
[01:11:35]  The U.S. is, what are we, like 13% of our economy or something?
[01:11:38]  13%, 14% of our economy is manufacturing.
[01:11:40]  What we do manufacture are, because we are a highly developed capitalist country, some say, you know, we manufacture high-value ad goods.
[01:11:53]  So we aren't, you know, as the capitalist system develops and more capital expenditure goes towards, you know, technology, you know, fixed capital expenditure, like less goes to labor, right?
[01:12:14]  This is what we know.
[01:12:15]  And so that's when we think about like the, we don't have a large share of manufacturing jobs, but we do have a large share of manufacturing.
[01:12:25]  And I just like, none of these conversations, not like that these guys are having like operate from that point because they're all trying to score populist political support, right?
[01:12:38]  And it just like really drives me crazy because it's like, wait, no, let's operate from a place of reality, right?
[01:12:43]  So you're telling me that we are going to close the fiscal deficit, that we are going to close the trade balance, right?
[01:12:54]  There's not going to be any more trillions in free imports.
[01:12:57]  There's not going to be cheap goods.
[01:13:00]  And so everything's going to go lower.
[01:13:02]  But Companies are going to want to invest in more expensive to them manufacturing because you'll be using less technology.
[01:13:16]  You'll be using less high tech and more labor, which is more expensive.
[01:13:22]  Like, what are we fucking talking about?
[01:13:24]  That doesn't like none of this doesn't add up.
[01:13:27]  It doesn't add up.
[01:13:28]  That's vibes.
[01:13:29]  It's, I mean, and it's, it's so funny, too.
[01:13:32]  I don't know if you saw the Trump quote where he was like, these guys just love coal mining.
[01:13:37]  Yeah.
[01:13:38]  I feel like that's his like mental model of like the psychological chauvinist like approach to manufacturing, which is like, put on the Haynes t-shirt and like get back to the axe grinding.
[01:13:50]  Here's your lunch pail.
[01:13:51]  I think, I think it really can be summed up in a lot of like, you ever see these sort of like Jack Pesobiac style like Twitter accounts will post like a picture of, I don't know, the fucking Santa Cruz beach boardwalk in 1987 and be like, this is what they took from me.
[01:14:06]  And like, or like, uh, or like, you know, some fucking, you know, house in Peoria from 1992 and be like, the Libs destroyed this.
[01:14:16]  I think like a lot of what you're seeing for a lot of these people is a complete disregard for the world as it is, right?
[01:14:24]  And for like how manufacturing exists in America.
[01:14:26]  And I say this as somebody with, you know, first-hand experience in small industrial firms in America where I worked in manufacturing.
[01:14:33]  I'm going to tell you this.
[01:14:36]  The plant coming back is a fucking dream.
[01:14:40]  You know what I mean?
[01:14:41]  Like it's going to be cheaper to make those fucking Nike shoes in Vietnam, even with 50% tariffs, which there aren't anymore.
[01:14:49]  But even if there were 50% tariffs, it's a lot easier to have those factories there and a lot cheaper to have them there than here in America.
[01:14:56]  I mean, it's just, it's a fucking joke, like you're saying.
[01:14:58]  Like there's not, what are these people talking about?
[01:15:01]  Like we're going to re-employ people making fucking, what are they going to make bookmarks in Florida?
[01:15:05]  Like, I'm sorry, this shit is not fucking happening with the way that the economy is structured.
[01:15:10]  But also, that's just not the way that you would have a factory in America.
[01:15:13]  We have way higher levels of automation, automation here than they have in a lot of other countries.
[01:15:20]  It's just like, and especially when you do like the cost benefit or whatever of like, you know, do we have 50 guys doing this or do we have one really expensive machine overseen by like five technicians doing this?
[01:15:33]  It's going to be cheaper to have those 50 guys for quite a while in fucking Vietnam or India.
[01:15:37]  And, you know, I'm not saying that's a, that's an amazing thing.
[01:15:40]  It's just the fucking way it is.
[01:15:42]  Like this is the economy that you and all your friends built.
[01:15:46]  And now you're saying that like, oh, these other people are ripping us off.
[01:15:50]  I'm sorry, you're Donald Trump.
[01:15:52]  Like you're Howard Luck.
[01:15:54]  It's also like, it's so fucking disgusting to hear America, like these like greasy, piggy Americans, like with like spittle coming out of their mouth, be like, the fucking third world is ripping us off.
[01:16:05]  I'm like, bitch, what do you think the money was for?
[01:16:08]  I mean, your stupid fucking cocksucker ass would, I'm telling you, you'd burn down City Hall if your fucking LG TV doubled in price.
[01:16:15]  These people are crazy.
[01:16:17]  Yes.
[01:16:17]  Okay.
[01:16:18]  If we had a much fairer world and economy, then all of the shit that you fuck, all of the disposable crap that you take for granted would be significantly more expensive.
[01:16:28]  That is not the economy that a lot of Americans are willing to put up with.
[01:16:32]  It is just, it is crazy to me.
[01:16:34]  And they're talking about China ripping us off or whatever.
[01:16:38]  I'm sorry, I don't know.
[01:16:39]  I don't remember China owning Apple fucking computers and forcing them to move their factory over there.
[01:16:45]  It's crazy to me.
[01:16:46]  And so what I see here is I see a lot of flailing going around.
[01:16:50]  I see Trump putting out this huge list of tariffs that we're going to do.
[01:16:57]  I honestly think that a lot of these guys did not know what was going on and kind of have to do this like post hoc rationalizations and narrativization to come up with, oh, we're doing this to like bring manufacturing back.
[01:17:10]  News flash, you fucking moron.
[01:17:12]  If you put like 150% tariffs on every country in the world, the companies will just wait you out rather than investing massive, massive, massive sums in building new factories in America because the next president who comes in when the economy is in the fucking sewer will be like, we're taking all the tariffs off.
[01:17:30]  Are you stupid?
[01:17:31]  And so now that they have to, now that they've pivoted a little bit away from that and be like, the whole world's ripping us off, the whole world's still ripping us off.
[01:17:38]  Now it's China.
[01:17:39]  Now these fucking evil Chinese are ripping us off.
[01:17:42]  And I think that this is, I think they're going to be forced a little bit by their own, excuse me, a lot of bit by their own hand into really like focusing a lot of this narrativization on China specifically.
[01:17:53]  And so I wouldn't be surprised if we see like, you know, remember all those like scare stories about the Chinese buying up all the farmland, right?
[01:18:01]  And you're going to see, I think I, I mean, again, this is a prediction.
[01:18:04]  I'm shooting from the hip here, but I got really big hips.
[01:18:08]  That was a weird, but yeah, I do, but I don't really.
[01:18:11]  But I think you're going to see a lot of people trying to bring in like the Chinese farmland, IP theft, spies, all this kind of shit into this to make it to try to salvage a narrative and kind of bring this up into where I think it really is, does look like it's heading, which is just like a next level of like Cold War stuff with China.
[01:18:33]  So I think, yes, I also think that like the thing that drives me crazy, what you're talking about, about the level of automation in our manufacturing, right?
[01:18:42]  So they want to compete.
[01:18:43]  Say you want to compete with China.
[01:18:45]  You know, Lutnik, this fucking moron, he's on, you know, CNBC last week or whatever, CNN.
[01:18:51]  He should be on fentanyl.
[01:18:53]  And he's talking, remember the fentanyl crisis?
[01:18:55]  What happened to that?
[01:18:57]  JD's mom did it all.
[01:18:59]  Fresh out, fresh out.
[01:19:01]  So, no, he was, you know, he's on there and he's talking about, like, yeah, we're going to bring back the iPhone factories.
[01:19:07]  We're going to make iPhones in America.
[01:19:09]  And the guy's like, I'm sorry, we're making iPhones in America.
[01:19:12]  Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
[01:19:13]  And he's like, don't worry about it.
[01:19:14]  Like, robots are going to do it.
[01:19:16]  And I'm like, wait a second.
[01:19:17]  So are we employing?
[01:19:20]  And he's like, we're employing robots.
[01:19:22]  Well, hold on.
[01:19:23]  So he's like, don't worry about it.
[01:19:25]  Robots are going to do it.
[01:19:26]  You're just going to manage the robots and you don't even need a college degree.
[01:19:30]  And I want to talk about this for a second because you absolutely do need a college degree to be a robotics engineer.
[01:19:37]  I'm just going to, I'm going to say I believe that that is true.
[01:19:40]  Also, at the same time that we're doing this, that we're supposedly increasing jobs in high value manufacturing and high automation manufacturing, we are also cutting all of our federal investments into science, into education, into all like research, all RD.
[01:20:01]  We are gutting, if we kick out all the Chinese students, then that's like a backdoor way to fucking bankrupt all of higher ed.
[01:20:08]  All of it.
[01:20:09]  All of it will be under.
[01:20:10]  60% of Columbia.
[01:20:12]  Yeah.
[01:20:13]  I mean, it's just, that's it.
[01:20:15]  So, you know, you have all of these things going at once where you're literally shrinking the, you know, setting aside whether or not the dollar is still the reserve currency, right?
[01:20:30]  I'm going to set that one aside for a second.
[01:20:32]  But if you are shrinking the capacity of the federal government to literally fund anything, then you are not also upskilling a workforce to be able to handle robotics engineering and, you know, safety and upkeep and manufacturing or to compete with the like high-skilled workforce that's developing in China and elsewhere.
[01:21:02]  Like it's just not happening, right?
[01:21:05]  And so then I, so I'm like, wait, how is any of this adding up?
[01:21:09]  And then you look at, you watch Jamie Dimon when he was on Fox and Friends.
[01:21:13]  And what he's saying is like, there's going to have to be investment because it's only, you know, the federal government is going to have to step in regardless of, you know, doggy plans or whatever.
[01:21:26]  And the only industrial like project then is in war manufacturing, is in defense manufacturing.
[01:21:34]  And that seems to be like where this is all leading.
[01:21:39]  So to your point about like, you know, we're in this like, you know, new next stage of this Cold War with China or whatever.
[01:21:46]  I'm like, we're speedrunning all of this, right?
[01:21:48]  Like we were in a trade war.
[01:21:49]  We're basically in a currency war now.
[01:21:50]  And the next step after currency war is real war.
[01:21:53]  And the sad fact of, we want to talk about U.S. capacity, war capacity.
[01:21:58]  If we're going to do whatever U.S. version of war communism is, we don't have any weapons to supply to Ukraine, let alone to force the Europeans to buy from us, which is apparently the plan, let alone to then use to attack China.
[01:22:20]  I mean, our planes don't fly.
[01:22:22]  Oh, yeah, Boeing.
[01:22:23]  I forgot about Boeing.
[01:22:24]  They fall out of the sky.
[01:22:25]  Right.
[01:22:26]  Oh, God.
[01:22:27]  So all of the kind of like, when we say we're bringing back manufacturing, like, what are we actually talking about?
[01:22:34]  Like, let's play this all out.
[01:22:36]  Because if it is that the only next step, like, this is my feeling is when I, now I'm just like going off script.
[01:22:43]  I'm just saying my own opinions.
[01:22:44]  Like, Trump.
[01:22:45]  The script?
[01:22:47]  No, but Trump, you know, the only way for Trump to save face at this point, first of all, he's going to take whatever deal is like given to him because he needs to walk this back.
[01:22:58]  And if he refuses it, like, even if, even if and when he walks back, whatever he does, I don't think it will calm anything.

=== Liz Truss vs. Gorbachev (06:54) ===

[01:23:07]  Like, we are so far past that I think the only thing that would calm the markets at this point was a coup.
[01:23:13]  Yeah.
[01:23:15]  A bond vigilante coup.
[01:23:17]  I mean, are the bondes real?
[01:23:21]  No, but like, that's the.
[01:23:23]  They are.
[01:23:24]  So it's really funny because I like, this drove me insane.
[01:23:28]  Like the bond vigilantes.
[01:23:30]  What's a bond vigilante?
[01:23:31]  I know.
[01:23:31]  Oh, yeah.
[01:23:31]  I should have talked about this.
[01:23:33]  They wear Batman outfits.
[01:23:35]  Yes.
[01:23:35]  They're the heroes.
[01:23:36]  Batman wouldn't fight James Bond.
[01:23:40]  That's the crossover, I mean.
[01:23:42]  Yeah, no, they're, so like, when investors are like, fuck no, that plan's not going to work.
[01:23:49]  And they sell your government bonds, like that's like bond vigilantism, which is funny because historically you hear it a lot with like, oh, we want a social program.
[01:23:59]  And they're like, oh, the bond vigilantes are going to come for you.
[01:24:03]  But this time, we just really did fuck it up so badly that global investors are like, yeah, no, I'm out.
[01:24:10]  So like that, that is bond vigilantism.
[01:24:13]  Like the Liz Truss, the UK budget fiasco a couple years ago.
[01:24:18]  I think that Liz Trust, that's our best case scenario is that we're Liz Truss at this moment because it's sort of like we're on a scale right now between Liz Truss and Gorbachev.
[01:24:29]  But the thing with Liz Truss is you can just be like, you can't be in charge anymore.
[01:24:33]  But you can't really do that with Trump unless, of course, you're like BlackRock with a machine gun.
[01:24:38]  Well, I was watching Larry Fink this morning and before we started recording, we're talking about this and you're saying like he's been a lot more direct than I think Jamie Dimon has, but, and, you know, maybe for different reasons.
[01:24:54]  But Larry Fink was basically like, yeah, if, you know, in the long, like, this is going to be tough.
[01:24:59]  This is going to be a recession, which, by the way, Trump was like, oof, when they were talking depression, I couldn't handle that.
[01:25:06]  But recession, okay, we can deal with that, which I do think lends credence to the sort of like often ridiculed sort of conspiracy theory about them trying to purposefully start a recession or try to front run a recession a little bit by kind of like control burning the economy.
[01:25:27]  But they may have literally just, I mean, it's now it might just be kind of out of control.
[01:25:32]  Yeah.
[01:25:33]  And I think that's the, that's the real concern, right?
[01:25:36]  Like, because if, and the funny thing is, like, again, Trump is a rates guy.
[01:25:40]  Like, he, he wants rates to go down.
[01:25:43]  And how do rates go down?
[01:25:44]  The Fed cuts because there's a recession.
[01:25:47]  So like, you know, you get some, and the funny, again, you know, conspiracy theory, whatever, like, if you have a downturn at the beginning of a term, all of a sudden people are like, oh, well, that last president caused the problem and this president fixed it.
[01:26:01]  So like you can see like a really, you know, not sophisticated, but obviously there's not much sophisticated thinking going on here.
[01:26:11]  You can see the logic of it.
[01:26:14]  And, you know, but again, but then again, you lose control of the situation and you decide to Brexit yourself and from the entire world and then like give everyone a chance to team up against you.
[01:26:29]  Right.
[01:26:29]  And then, yeah, and rates are up.
[01:26:32]  People don't want to own dollar assets right now.
[01:26:34]  And you kind of just fucked everything over.
[01:26:40]  I think the Brexiting thing is a good analogy here because that is kind of, and again, like, listen, I'm no expert, right?
[01:26:45]  I'm just a guy who watches the lines go up and I watch them go down.
[01:26:49]  But I'm telling you, it does seem like everybody's pretty pissed off at us right now.
[01:26:53]  And you got this Xi Jinping character going around.
[01:26:56]  I think he's in like Vietnam today, but you know, he's kind of like meet with everybody right now.
[01:27:02]  And I mean, just from my perspective, I just don't understand why, like, okay, say you are like, you know, one of these big firms or investors or whatever, like, and Trump does roll back a bunch of what he's doing.
[01:27:13]  He's already, you know, he already blinked once.
[01:27:15]  Say he blinks twice and comes with some deal with China, right?
[01:27:18]  Yeah.
[01:27:18]  This happened within the first, what is it, April?
[01:27:21]  He comes in.
[01:27:21]  He came in on January.
[01:27:22]  I mean, this is like the first three months of his presidency.
[01:27:25]  We've got three years and nine months left.
[01:27:29]  I mean, couldn't he, there's nothing stopping him from just doing this again or doing this in some crazier way right now.
[01:27:34]  And so I feel like you really, I mean, he, yes, he could de-escalate.
[01:27:39]  I think he will de-escalate, but maybe not.
[01:27:42]  But like, escalation, I mean, it could either come back and escalate to de-escalate.
[01:27:46]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:27:47]  What if he de-escalate?
[01:27:48]  If we and the Chinese, I love this.
[01:27:50]  They're like, we're not going to raise a tear thing.
[01:27:52]  We're like, this is, I think, I think they said, like, this has become a magnet.
[01:27:56]  Well, they're not wrong.
[01:27:57]  Yeah.
[01:27:58]  But I think that they've gone.
[01:27:59]  The other thing is, like, the U.S. is so, oh my God, we're so, I hate, I hate America.
[01:28:06]  No, like, no, it's an amazing.
[01:28:08]  No, like, we operate from this place of, to me, it reads as insecurity, right?
[01:28:13]  You see these guys up there with like either it's fans or Trump or any of the lackeys or whatever, the way they fucking talk to everybody.
[01:28:20]  And we've been doing this for decades and decades and decades, right?
[01:28:23]  But they think that the American empire is guaranteed through the barrel of the gun when really everyone was buying into it, right?
[01:28:33]  And they're finding out that people are just as happy to see themselves to the exit.
[01:28:39]  And this idea that you can kind of just like push everybody around and like hold a gun to the Europeans head and say, no, you're going to keep buying treasuries.
[01:28:49]  Oh, and you're going to buy our defense stocks.
[01:28:51]  Oh, and you're going to buy our LNG at the behest of your own development.
[01:28:57]  And you're seeing them say, fuck off.
[01:29:00]  And they're right too.
[01:29:01]  Like Christine Lagarde was, who's, you know, she's at the ECB.
[01:29:05]  She was on French radio last week, the biggest French radio station.
[01:29:09]  And she's like, I don't think Europeans should invest in treasuries, which is like, that has been a safe haven for retirement and pension for Europeans for decades.
[01:29:21]  Now, for her to say that means that like this is so far beyond whatever saving face they could get.
[01:29:30]  That, like the idea of this being we're doing this for another three years, nine months, like you say.
[01:29:36]  Like I would like to take that bet.
[01:29:40]  Yeah, I think they're gonna.
[01:29:42]  Some people are gonna have some ideas about how to address the political situation soon.
[01:29:50]  Like it's not gonna last.
[01:29:51]  You think there's gonna be a coup?
[01:29:53]  No, I'm not saying that, I don't.
[01:29:55]  I think that there's going to be more rustling and more ang.

=== Political Economy Redactions (04:13) ===

[01:30:01]  Look, you are seeing.
[01:30:02]  The thing is is that people are also really fucking scared, like you saw that I can't remember which bank it was, if it was at Goldman, or someone put out an investment note that was completely redacted.
[01:30:14]  Oh yeah, that was JP Morgan.
[01:30:15]  JP Morgan, what do you mean?
[01:30:17]  Like the entire?
[01:30:18]  So they did this guy did a call with a bunch of companies and he was like, well, I see you sentiment yeah, and he was like, well, I can't actually write what they said, so I'm gonna redact like half the note because they're so scared of pissing off the president.
[01:30:34]  We need a golden foyer.
[01:30:35]  Yeah, this is crazy.
[01:30:37]  Yeah no, I'll pull it up.
[01:30:38]  Yeah, you're right sorry.
[01:30:39]  Yeah, JP Morgan, this is what I said.
[01:30:42]  I believe the following issues are also negatively impacting CEO confidence in capital spending plans on the front lines.
[01:30:48]  So let's talk about them frankly.
[01:30:50]  Some of these items may be partially redacted due to beep.
[01:30:54]  We don't even know why they're redacted.
[01:30:56]  The White House issued a series of executive orders targeting beep solely due to prior employees of these firms.
[01:31:02]  Beep.
[01:31:04]  The orders call for a review to determine if the beep and employees of the firm should be strict.
[01:31:09]  I mean, it's just like, and it goes on.
[01:31:10]  Look at that.
[01:31:11]  That's about the law firms.
[01:31:13]  Yeah, but it goes on.
[01:31:14]  It's not even just like, you know, some targeted firms have leap creating the perception for CEOs.
[01:31:20]  I mean, it was pages and pages.
[01:31:22]  And my point being that like companies don't know how to do business in this environment.
[01:31:29]  Like these guys are fucking walking around like they're cowboys and everyone is fucking calling their bluff and they're right to.
[01:31:36]  They're absolutely right to, because these guys are educated on like fucking memes and working out their like what they're gonna their plans for, you know, upheaving the world economic system in fucking group chats.
[01:31:50]  Like these are not serious people.
[01:31:52]  I'm sorry like the US deserves to be punished for its complete deficit of like intellectual seriousness in the political class.
[01:32:03]  And the Democrats don't have anything either.
[01:32:05]  You see them go up there and they're like, well, actually tariffs aren't bad, but the way this was rolled out was really tricky and it's like what?
[01:32:14]  Well, I think, I think I I, I agree with that.
[01:32:16]  I do think that they are, as evidenced by some of the redactions there.
[01:32:20]  I do think there is some fear among whatever CEOs.
[01:32:24]  The law firm shit has been yeah, I think, really insane and almost like unprecedented, at least in as far as I can tell.
[01:32:32]  Oh, it's crazy um, but no, it's like McCarthy era.
[01:32:36]  I mean, it's like fucking crazy.
[01:32:38]  Yeah yeah, exactly the, but the.
[01:32:41]  Uh, it's Lib.
[01:32:42]  They're doing Lib Mccarthyism on fucking Kamala Harris's husband, it's.
[01:32:48]  But it's true they are.
[01:32:49]  It's crazy, it's true, this is so crazy, this is so like.
[01:32:53]  Once again, these people, everyone is so fucking.
[01:32:56]  Reality is so stupid.
[01:32:57]  But once again, i'm like dude, I wish there was a president who agreed with even like half of what I think.
[01:33:04]  Who is in there?
[01:33:04]  That could be making these guys redact Or shit like that.
[01:33:07]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:33:08]  But there isn't.
[01:33:11]  But maybe there is a certain president in the world who does maybe make you, if you release a Marvel movie, take out some maps that have Taiwan in a different place.
[01:33:20]  But anyways, which I, I mean, so that's, I guess, the equivalent.
[01:33:24]  But, but I'm just like, this is, this is, this is outrageous to me because I have some question with the political economy here.
[01:33:34]  One of which is, isn't Trump's base the guys who do A, Wall Street stonks, Wall Street Bets guys, B, people who do white-labeled supplements from China for like, and like C, guys who vape?
[01:33:49]  Because all of these things come like, I just, what effect is this like going to have on our industry?
[01:33:55]  Because like, okay, you're fucking elf bar, all, all vapes come from Shenzhen.
[01:34:00]  Like, and if you're thinking, oh, I've got Jewel, it's an American company, you are wrong.
[01:34:05]  The liquid is stirred in a big pot in Virginia, but the hardware is made in Shenzhen.
[01:34:12]  You know, fucking computer, like so much shit.

=== Drop Shippers' Dilemma (03:14) ===

[01:34:14]  Yes, there has been a lot of like, you know, companies moving like Apple, Nike, or whatever, moving shit to India and Vietnam.
[01:34:20]  But like all the cheap shit is still in fucking China and all the cheap shit that American drop shippers, which is Trump's number one constituency, I just am like, this is going to have really immediate, really crazy effects on a lot of people before any like promised, before a, the robot factory opens up in fucking Tucson with 16 employees and 900 robots.
[01:34:44]  I mean, the other thing to think about is like, you know, 2018, 2019, and then like really hitting its, you know, stride in 2020, there's a massive onboarding on like all social media in terms of like every person becoming a kind of small business on social media, whether that's through a ton of drop shipping.
[01:35:10]  Yeah.
[01:35:11]  Whether that's through like, you know, let a thousand Etsy stores blue.
[01:35:15]  Yes.
[01:35:15]  And a lot of that all coming from China, digital goods, like all of this stuff like is a massive, massive part of the kind of American economy in a weird way and this like underground, weird kind of American economy in the sense that like the tax structure, I always say this, but like this tax structure incentivizes your household to be a small business, right?
[01:35:38]  And people found a lot of ways to take advantage of that.
[01:35:42]  And especially with social media opening up literal like brand new marketplaces in order to do all of that business, a ton of people started doing business online, right?
[01:35:55]  All of that, like you say, goes away, right?
[01:35:58]  With all this.
[01:35:59]  It all becomes increasingly difficult, not just as like real companies, entrepreneurs making, you know, everything from like hair products to the viral pink sauce.
[01:36:10]  Sure, whatever.
[01:36:11]  You know what I mean?
[01:36:12]  Like, but also just like, like you're saying, the drop shippers, all of the kind of like pyramid schemes that are built off of the drop shippers.
[01:36:18]  The fucking, the fucking supplements, dude.
[01:36:20]  Yeah.
[01:36:21]  The supplement shit's real.
[01:36:23]  But like.
[01:36:23]  Galaxy gas.
[01:36:24]  There's so I, it's, it's impossible to like even kind of conceive of.
[01:36:28]  But then, you know, to your point about his like base, right?
[01:36:32]  You have like Dave Portnoy coming out and being like, this cannot stand, you know?
[01:36:36]  And once you've got Dave Portnoy, I mean, what's good for Dave Portnoy is good for America.
[01:36:44]  No, but it's true.
[01:36:44]  It's like if they can't, they can't shut down.
[01:36:46]  They're too afraid to shut down TikTok.
[01:36:49]  Yeah.
[01:36:49]  Whereas like, I think when the reality sets in for a lot of people running their businesses, they're going to be like, wait a second.
[01:36:56]  I'm sorry.
[01:36:56]  What?
[01:36:57]  Yeah.
[01:36:58]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[01:36:59]  And like, I don't know.
[01:37:01]  12 feet below said that, or five feet below said they can't do it anymore.
[01:37:05]  Five below.
[01:37:06]  I like five feet below.
[01:37:07]  I know I did my five below.
[01:37:09]  Five below.
[01:37:10]  Everything in the store is $5 or less.
[01:37:14]  It's like dollar stores.
[01:37:16]  Oh, but inflation dollar store?
[01:37:17]  No, they said they were shutting.
[01:37:19]  They were like, we would have to change to 12 and a half below because of what this would do to our price.
[01:37:26]  I've heard that's too much, actually.
[01:37:28]  I'm sorry.
[01:37:28]  I just got it.

=== Costco's Price Puzzle (07:40) ===

[01:37:29]  I just got an alert from my phone that says the stock market is up, had one of its best weeks since 2023.
[01:37:37]  We love that.
[01:37:37]  Dave Trader Donnie is back.
[01:37:39]  Yeah, big, big week for gambling.
[01:37:41]  What do you gotta do that mean?
[01:37:42]  So what that means is that it's a dead cap bounce and treasury yields still had their worst week since the 80s.
[01:37:52]  That's sad.
[01:37:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:37:55]  So try, so you know how like when stocks go down, it will, yeah.
[01:37:59]  When stocks go down, treasuries are supposed to go up.
[01:38:01]  Yeah, we've said that.
[01:38:02]  Treasury still went down, but like the yields went up because nothing can be simple in Bond Bland because they hate us.
[01:38:09]  And so like stocks are doing better, but not actually because they're still not, they still have, they're down a lot since Liberation Day or Liquidation Day, we could call it.
[01:38:24]  It's called Liberation Day.
[01:38:26]  Liquidation, we can call it, right?
[01:38:28]  Because everyone liquidated.
[01:38:29]  That'll be when I'm president.
[01:38:31]  That'll be what I'm president.
[01:38:33]  I think before we wrap this up, I have one.
[01:38:36]  I want to talk about gold.
[01:38:38]  Oh, just a little bit more.
[01:38:40]  Open my computer back up.
[01:38:41]  Open my computer back up and go into the buy.
[01:38:45]  Oh, God.
[01:38:46]  Because that is, despite the like stocks, you know, all of the volatility Causing people to make a little bit of money this week and a lot of people to lose money.
[01:38:59]  What I say is like, it's great that you're going to make money, but unfortunately, it's going to be in dollars.
[01:39:07]  Gold is people are rushing to gold.
[01:39:10]  Liz, I'm on bullionvault.com right now.
[01:39:13]  And I'm looking at the gold chart.
[01:39:15]  This is crazy.
[01:39:16]  Yeah.
[01:39:17]  Gold, and I've been saying on this podcast, have I not buy gold, the first kind of money that is that people really like?
[01:39:26]  The other kinds were like displaceholders.
[01:39:29]  Gold is going, look at gold.
[01:39:32]  Yeah, it's going crazy.
[01:39:37]  Here's my question.
[01:39:38]  I know that there's a lot of, you know, a lot of individuals are buying gold.
[01:39:42]  Everyone's heard the stories of Costco runs and or runs on Costco.
[01:39:50]  But there's also a lot of, which is, this is, it's very opaque and there's a lot of people devoted to like trying to read through all the mysteries of central banks moving gold around the world.
[01:40:03]  But a lot of gold is being imported into the United States.
[01:40:07]  Yeah.
[01:40:08]  I think some of that was tariff related.
[01:40:10]  So like they wanted to get ahead of tariffs.
[01:40:13]  I guess like the gold traders wanted to get ahead of tariffs just in case he tariffed gold.
[01:40:19]  Cause then like it's it's because it's a currency, but it's a currency technically and a product.
[01:40:25]  Like tariff the gold deposits.
[01:40:27]  Like Bitcoin.
[01:40:28]  Or the gold gold gold, like the like physical gold.
[01:40:31]  So like all of the gold coming to the U.S. came to try to get ahead of the tariffs.
[01:40:36]  I see.
[01:40:37]  And so actually the funny thing about that is that if they had done the tariffs on Switzerland based on early this year, Switzerland would have insane tariffs because we have an enormous trade deficit with them now because of the golds.
[01:40:53]  Because we like basically just imported a lot of gold bars from Switzerland to try to escape the tariffs.
[01:40:59]  Walter Bloomberg's safe for now.
[01:41:03]  It's insane.
[01:41:04]  I mean, and the funny thing is like we, it started, this whole thing started with like everyone saying, oh, this is just hedge funds unwinding.
[01:41:11]  That's why treasuries are selling off.
[01:41:13]  And then as of, yeah, the base, but the funny thing was, like, it wasn't even like everyone talks about the basis trade because it sounds complicated.
[01:41:20]  And that's what happened during COVID.
[01:41:22]  But this is literally just, not just, but like it's mostly the deregulation trade that got blown out.
[01:41:30]  So it's, you could say like the swap spread trade.
[01:41:34]  Yeah, the swap spreads were exploding.
[01:41:36]  Yeah.
[01:41:36]  So like that was the, that was the sort of like center of it within hedge fund land.
[01:41:41]  But that still didn't explain a lot of the like long-term treasuries selling off.
[01:41:46]  But but like that was what everyone was saying at the beginning.
[01:41:49]  Because I think people are still not prepared to talk about the political economy and the actual global implications of this.
[01:41:57]  The political choices that are being made rather than the sort of like so-called automatic economic ones that are shorn of any kind of ideological.
[01:42:09]  But I think now like people are starting to finally come around to like, oh, this is a real thing.
[01:42:14]  Like this is, you know, even if it's just that the U.S. looks less attractive than Europe, looks less attractive than Japan.
[01:42:22]  Like that has, I get it.
[01:42:26]  As a, but like as a, as a reserve currency, right?
[01:42:29]  Because it's like the dollar, the euro, the yen.
[01:42:32]  Like even if we look, you people like prefer the euro and the yen to the dollar, like that still has real and like big implications for the U.S., right?
[01:42:42]  That still means that mortgages are more expensive.
[01:42:45]  That still means that car loans are more expensive.
[01:42:48]  That still means that like everything, every type of borrowing costs more now.
[01:42:53]  Well, that's my question then, no, because if let's say things are getting so wild that the Fed does need to step in, if they want to come in to support the dollar, don't they need to raise rates?
[01:43:08]  Yeah, that's the EM playbook.
[01:43:11]  That's the, you know, you want to stop capital flight.
[01:43:14]  Yeah, emerging market playbook.
[01:43:15]  Oh, yeah, that's the emerging market playbook.
[01:43:17]  You want to stop capital flight.
[01:43:19]  You say, okay, well, you can earn a higher interest rate by staying here.
[01:43:24]  So then, and that's when the hype for inflation starts.
[01:43:27]  Yeah, that's a lot of the things get bad from there.
[01:43:32]  Well, hopefully when they do, you'll be back on.
[01:43:36]  I really don't.
[01:43:36]  You can't skip my favorite part.
[01:43:39]  Your classic substack little thing you do every week, the skaggle haggle.
[01:43:46]  That's the new name.
[01:43:48]  What's the buy?
[01:43:49]  What's the buy?
[01:43:50]  What's the buy right now?
[01:43:51]  This is coming out on Monday, April something, but you know, you'll get it.
[01:43:56]  It'll be Monday.
[01:43:57]  Yeah.
[01:44:00]  What are they buying?
[01:44:02]  That's a really good question.
[01:44:04]  Eggs.
[01:44:06]  No, I'm just going to buy eggs.
[01:44:07]  You can eat them.
[01:44:08]  It's very convenient.
[01:44:10]  Egg.
[01:44:10]  And you can freeze them for up to six months now.
[01:44:15]  Freeze my eggs.
[01:44:16]  Can you imagine?
[01:44:17]  Yeah, that's what I do.
[01:44:19]  You thaw them out for a couple of days.
[01:44:22]  Yeah, that's how I eat.
[01:44:24]  But maybe I shouldn't eat.
[01:44:25]  But why should you just like down the gullet?
[01:44:28]  Frozen egg?
[01:44:29]  You think that would work?
[01:44:30]  Shell on.
[01:44:31]  Frozen egg.
[01:44:32]  Shell stays on.
[01:44:32]  Let me tell you right now, good little low-cost dessert, freeze cherries.
[01:44:38]  Oh, yeah, that's great.
[01:44:39]  Keep your regular, too.
[01:44:41]  Okay.
[01:44:45]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:44:46]  What was your pick'em?
[01:44:47]  I pick them would be anything outside of the United States.
[01:44:52]  Yeah, but that's my, I'm, you know, you know me, I'm a pannikin.
[01:44:55]  Panikins hold steady.
[01:44:59]  That stupid fucking, my ears ring after I clap like that, but that's because I'm a good person.
[01:45:03]  Pannikins is so bad.
[01:45:04]  Pannikins.
[01:45:05]  What is that?
[01:45:06]  I'm saying it.
[01:45:07]  What is it?
[01:45:07]  Is it a Plan American?
[01:45:08]  It's a big type of beef jerky.

=== Pannikins Hold Steady (04:56) ===

[01:45:10]  It's like, it's like, it's like a baseball team.
[01:45:12]  I thought it was like, I can't still can't tell in the context they're using it, but they were calling people panickins.
[01:45:16]  Is that Republicans who weren't trusting the plan?
[01:45:19]  And like, they're like, you were, or is it just Americans who are panicking?
[01:45:23]  I think it's Americans who are panicking.
[01:45:25]  I don't even know what I'm supposed to.
[01:45:26]  I'm just like, you seem stupid.
[01:45:28]  In your own terms, you seem stupid because I'm not sure.
[01:45:32]  I am.
[01:45:33]  Part of the deal, baby.
[01:45:34]  I just, but what are we making a deal?
[01:45:36]  The whole thing has been like, they've been acting like there's this imminent, insane financial crisis, and America's about to declare bankruptcy since day one.
[01:45:44]  All the doggy stuff, all this stuff.
[01:45:46]  It's like, but I don't understand.
[01:45:47]  Because they believe their own bullshit.
[01:45:49]  They believe this stuff.
[01:45:50]  They believe the specter of the deficit.
[01:45:52]  They believe all that.
[01:45:53]  They believe the trade imbalance is an existential threat to America's future.
[01:46:02]  And they believe that the only way to get us out of whatever declinist narrative that they have bought into is through trade war, Currency war, real war.
[01:46:26]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for...
[01:46:28]  I don't know why I'm saying, ladies and gentlemen.
[01:46:30]  Well, ladies, thank you for joining us.
[01:46:32]  Alexander Skaggs, who you was launching a new sub stack.
[01:46:36]  Yeah, I mean, so like, I'm this economy.
[01:46:39]  In this economy, I said that in an up to upset.
[01:46:41]  In this economy.
[01:46:43]  Well, the funny thing is that, like, I am going part-time kind of like freelancey because I have two kids.
[01:46:50]  And it's like, they need time, you know, you got to spend time with them when they're little.
[01:46:54]  Trade school.
[01:46:55]  Yeah.
[01:46:56]  Can't wait.
[01:46:56]  Can't wait.
[01:46:57]  I've got to start them.
[01:46:59]  Gardening, chicken raising.
[01:47:02]  It's going to be really fun.
[01:47:03]  iPhone making.
[01:47:04]  One mine.
[01:47:04]  Yeah.
[01:47:05]  One mine.
[01:47:05]  The other one, you got to get them to be able to fix a watch.
[01:47:10]  Right.
[01:47:10]  Very small hands.
[01:47:11]  Yeah.
[01:47:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:47:13]  And if you don't feed them or you feed them in a fucked up way, they'll always be small.
[01:47:17]  And so that's like you keep one small and you make the other one really big.
[01:47:21]  Man, that's the hedge.
[01:47:22]  Yeah, that's the hedge.
[01:47:23]  And then also, it opens you up for some carnival touring.
[01:47:26]  Yeah.
[01:47:27]  Also, if you, in your capacity, as like, what it's it called when an adult has the thing over the child, like you can sign for them and shit.
[01:47:34]  What's it called?
[01:47:35]  Guardianship.
[01:47:37]  Parents.
[01:47:38]  Parental rights.
[01:47:38]  Your parental rights.
[01:47:40]  You make them, check this out.
[01:47:41]  It's kind of like intergovernmental lending.
[01:47:43]  You make them sign a contract with you.
[01:47:47]  You sign both sides of it.
[01:47:48]  They owe you like 20% forever.
[01:47:51]  Oh, man.
[01:47:52]  The child deficit.
[01:47:53]  Yeah, we love it.
[01:47:55]  I think the 20% is really like, you know, daycare.
[01:47:59]  Like, I pay that.
[01:48:00]  So I just am in a perpetual deficit.
[01:48:03]  But anyway, so I was like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to do less at work.
[01:48:07]  And then everything exploded.
[01:48:09]  Liberation Day happened.
[01:48:12]  So now I'm like, oh, well, shit, I have a lot of stuff to write.
[01:48:16]  Which, you know, it's exciting.
[01:48:18]  Like, you go through enough of these and like you can't feel interested in markets until the dollar is losing its reserve status.
[01:48:28]  So do you have enough information to insider trade?
[01:48:32]  Oh, my God.
[01:48:33]  No.
[01:48:34]  I mean, I don't, we're not allowed to trade.
[01:48:38]  So I've never traded.
[01:48:40]  I know.
[01:48:42]  All right.
[01:48:42]  Yeah.
[01:48:43]  She's winking like crazy.
[01:48:44]  She's rapidly blinking both eyes at me.
[01:48:47]  You've never traded?
[01:48:48]  No.
[01:48:49]  Oh, it's the best feeling in the world.
[01:48:51]  This is crazy.
[01:48:51]  This is like, don't knock it till you try it.
[01:48:53]  You write all these nasty things about these people and you've never done it.
[01:48:57]  It feels amazing.
[01:48:59]  Am I right?
[01:49:00]  I've been doing this shit with bonds for the past week and a half.
[01:49:03]  I've never felt any like it in my life.
[01:49:05]  Buy, sell, buy, sell.
[01:49:06]  Who gives a shit?
[01:49:07]  Wait, I have to.
[01:49:08]  So I will make one recommendation.
[01:49:10]  And everyone, that's buy the VIX.
[01:49:12]  There are like three people who will get that, and they're going to be really mad.
[01:49:16]  The VIX is an index that's not actually tradable.
[01:49:19]  Yeah, you can't buy it.
[01:49:21]  But it's gone up a lot.
[01:49:23]  So everyone is like, whoa, check this out.
[01:49:26]  It's going to the moon.
[01:49:28]  I don't know.
[01:49:29]  I'll buy it.
[01:49:30]  I can find finance humor.
[01:49:32]  I can find a way.
[01:49:33]  I love markets.
[01:49:34]  I love money.
[01:49:36]  And frankly, I love finance and things like that.
[01:49:39]  Gold, silver, bullion.
[01:49:41]  Would you say silver is a good choice right now?
[01:49:45]  Silver.
[01:49:47]  I would say yes, because it's close to gold.
[01:49:51]  Buy some gold.
[01:49:52]  Yeah.
[01:49:52]  I have a lot of gray hair, so I'm really bullish on silver.
[01:49:56]  Platinum, however, is still out of reach for many of us.
[01:49:58]  But hopefully prices will be driven down very soon because I plan on getting a lot of that and making this studio look very much nicer.

=== Things Feeling Turkish (08:30) ===

[01:50:06]  Alex, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:50:10]  And we'll link to the damn sub stack in the, what's it called when there's words under the podcast?
[01:50:16]  Show notes.
[01:50:17]  I demand Walter Bloomberg's head.
[01:50:31]  Walter Bloomberg, I'm that's that's the industry you got to get into.
[01:50:35]  Walter Bloomberg?
[01:50:36]  No, ladies and gentlemen, this is the economy now.
[01:50:38]  You are moving out from your apartment.
[01:50:40]  You are leaving Ridgewood.
[01:50:42]  You're moving to Switzerland because if you can, that's great.
[01:50:45]  No, You were moving to Mumbai.
[01:50:49]  You're moving to Nicaragua.
[01:50:50]  And you are doing an account like Walter Bloomberg's on Monetized X. You are doing that.
[01:50:55]  That's your job.
[01:50:56]  He's monetized.
[01:50:57]  Okay.
[01:50:58]  Does he do it for love of the game?
[01:51:00]  No, he's well, I think he does do it for love of the game, probably, honestly.
[01:51:03]  He just loves the news.
[01:51:05]  But I'm telling you right now, your job is to start basically a bot account that does news aggregation, and then you relocate to a country with it costs less to live there.
[01:51:20]  That's what you just got to do.
[01:51:21]  How many people do you think behind that account?
[01:51:24]  Two.
[01:51:25]  I bet it's just like some random Russian dudes or some shit.
[01:51:28]  Do you, if we're trying to think of, I was trying to think of like, at the end of the show, Alex mentioned the EM Spectre.
[01:51:39]  People were like, oh, the U.S. is acting or looking like an EM.
[01:51:44]  Emerging market.
[01:51:45]  Yeah.
[01:51:46]  I am feeling a bit Turkish lately.
[01:51:49]  And I'm curious what you think.
[01:51:51]  Things are feeling a bit Turkish.
[01:51:53]  I don't really know how to respond to that.
[01:51:55]  Are you feeling a bit Turkish lately?
[01:51:57]  And you're curious what I think.
[01:52:00]  What does that mean?
[01:52:00]  Are you going bald?
[01:52:02]  I'm saying, no, if I was going bald.
[01:52:04]  No, you don't go bald.
[01:52:05]  You've seen her face change.
[01:52:06]  She got like a millisecond of the most pissed off I've ever seen anyone in my life.
[01:52:10]  No, you get unbald in Turkey.
[01:52:13]  I know, but that's not a lot of people.
[01:52:15]  But that's first when you go there.
[01:52:17]  If you're feeling Turkish, it's because you've already debalded.
[01:52:20]  No, I'm feeling a bit turkey today, is what you say to your friends when you're like getting the transplant.
[01:52:28]  No, my point is, I feel like things are like the country is feeling Turkish.
[01:52:36]  It's reminding me of Turkey.
[01:52:37]  That's what I'm fucking saying.
[01:52:38]  Yeah, no, I see what you're saying.
[01:52:39]  God damn, Brace.
[01:52:41]  Yeah.
[01:52:42]  Okay.
[01:52:42]  I can see that.
[01:52:43]  Yeah, it does.
[01:52:44]  You've got like a...
[01:52:46]  First stop, Istanbul.
[01:52:48]  I can't do that.
[01:52:50]  I am.
[01:52:51]  Are you banned?
[01:52:52]  We're banned.
[01:52:53]  Yes, dude.
[01:52:53]  You can't go to Turkey.
[01:52:57]  But you can still do that.
[01:52:58]  The Ruling Party's newspaper has a picture of me and it says this guy is a terrorist from USA.
[01:53:04]  I can't go to Turkey.
[01:53:05]  Or Azerbaijan, I'm assuming.
[01:53:08]  But I'm good on all that.
[01:53:10]  You know what I'm going to do?
[01:53:12]  We're in Turkey is the same thing, anyways.
[01:53:13]  It's all great to me.
[01:53:15]  We're all Turkish to me.
[01:53:16]  Oh, we've talked about this.
[01:53:18]  We have, and we didn't really come to a conclusion.
[01:53:20]  We know that.
[01:53:20]  That's a fused culture in Cyprus.
[01:53:24]  Called Greek.
[01:53:27]  Greeks, we're sorry.
[01:53:28]  Don't listen.
[01:53:29]  I will say this, though.
[01:53:30]  Our plan, which we talked about briefly after recording like a week or two ago.
[01:53:34]  We did.
[01:53:34]  Yeah, but I'm putting this now.
[01:53:36]  Let me say the plan first.
[01:53:39]  But I'm putting this forward right now and I'm doing it on air so that we can be don't, first of all, don't steal this idea, but that we can be accountable because we're going to forget the second this episode ends.
[01:53:50]  We need to start uploading our podcasts in English, but in China.
[01:53:54]  And I did find that app.
[01:53:56]  Yeah, we do need to start reaching out.
[01:53:58]  We need to start reaching out because we need to start seeding the idea of the United States of China that we need to exactly.
[01:54:05]  And just like America, Chinese characteristics.
[01:54:08]  If we get big in China, that's kind of plan B, dude.
[01:54:13]  You know, we go there.
[01:54:15]  You have to get really big in China, though, just like ratio-wise.
[01:54:19]  Oh, I would get big in China.
[01:54:21]  Are you kidding me?
[01:54:22]  I know.
[01:54:22]  You love dumplings.
[01:54:23]  I would be a Portly merchant.
[01:54:25]  Easy.
[01:54:25]  I would, we'd go there.
[01:54:26]  We're like, yeah, we're moving the podcast to China.
[01:54:28]  The market's really big.
[01:54:29]  It's crazy.
[01:54:29]  We got in early.
[01:54:30]  I'm there.
[01:54:31]  I'm like, guys, I quit.
[01:54:32]  I'm doing import, export.
[01:54:33]  Sure.
[01:54:34]  I'm at like a basement office in Hong Kong.
[01:54:36]  You're wearing just like a really like retrograde Chinese style outfit.
[01:54:40]  Yeah.
[01:54:41]  Like the early 20th century.
[01:54:42]  I've got a rice picker hat on.
[01:54:44]  I've got like little pinch nails.
[01:54:46]  You're somehow like talking in an accent.
[01:54:49]  Yes, yes, yeah.
[01:54:50]  That makes no sense.
[01:54:51]  I've got like a bunch of like people kind of scurrying around with like large portfolios of papers near me.
[01:54:57]  And you guys come in and I angry.
[01:54:59]  I've been smoking opium.
[01:55:00]  Throw down my chopsticks.
[01:55:02]  I do would like to smoke opium.
[01:55:03]  I would like to smoke opium.
[01:55:04]  I throw down my chopstick.
[01:55:06]  What are you doing here?
[01:55:07]  You're just always holding chopsticks.
[01:55:10]  Yeah, I'm just doing everything with them too.
[01:55:12]  Adjusting the mic with chopsticks, putting my glasses down into the shoemer with chopsticks.
[01:55:17]  Cooling the shoer.
[01:55:20]  Someone in the comments was like, what does this mean?
[01:55:23]  And I just, you know.
[01:55:25]  Don't worry about it.
[01:55:28]  I do want to say, like, that's usually my attitude about a lot of things.
[01:55:31]  Like I said in the show, it's like, hey, don't worry about it.
[01:55:34]  I don't feel that way in this farm.
[01:55:36]  You feel like you should worry about it?
[01:55:38]  I do think that things are a bit out of control.
[01:55:41]  I don't really know how to worry about it.
[01:55:43]  You know?
[01:55:44]  I do love that attitude, which is sort of just like, what am I supposed to do?
[01:55:49]  I am a what, me, worry.
[01:55:50]  What?
[01:55:50]  Me worry?
[01:55:51]  Yeah.
[01:55:52]  You say that in a Chinese accent.
[01:55:54]  No, But I'm working my way up there, though.
[01:55:58]  Yeah.
[01:55:58]  Not to worrying?
[01:56:00]  Oh.
[01:56:00]  Yeah.
[01:56:01]  But I'm saying that I will ingratiate myself so much with our, you know, celestial brothers and sisters over there that they will not only will, not only will I be able to do the accent, Liz, they'll ask me to.
[01:56:15]  They'll ask me to.
[01:56:16]  But I've never done it before.
[01:56:18]  I see.
[01:56:18]  So you should be like, me, I can't.
[01:56:20]  I can't.
[01:56:21]  But if you insist.
[01:56:22]  I can't.
[01:56:22]  You'd have to teach me.
[01:56:24]  You have to teach me how to do it.
[01:56:27]  I love that.
[01:56:27]  Well, I was reading about, I was reading some stupid fucking thing about Trump and like someone making a bunch of excuses for what he was doing.
[01:56:34]  And they were like, well, you see, for Trump, this is a long-term, you know, he's not thinking about like the next year or next five years or 10 years.
[01:56:43]  He's thinking about the next hundred years.
[01:56:44]  I was like, oh, Trump thinks in century.
[01:56:46]  But dude, the Chinese thinking millennium, bro.
[01:56:50]  It's like.
[01:56:50]  Trump does not think in the century.
[01:56:52]  I saw Shenyun.
[01:56:54]  Yeah, Trump doesn't think it's century.
[01:56:55]  What the fuck are you doing?
[01:56:56]  Are you talking about?
[01:56:57]  Is Trump think?
[01:56:59]  I don't know.
[01:57:01]  Like, straight up, if I put that motherfucking MRI, what am I looking at?
[01:57:06]  A fucking fish filet sandwich.
[01:57:08]  Speaking of, I thought of a, this is something, if anyone out there has a lot of money, Chinese people who have a lot of investment in an industrial concern, if you're listening to this, this is for when our episodes get on there, on their platforms.
[01:57:20]  Chinese industrial leaders that are listening to this podcast, you know, in America, there's now a therapeutic technique that they're doing with people who have depression where they're putting magnets on your brain and trying to cure your depression.
[01:57:30]  It's kind of like woke after woke electroshock.
[01:57:34]  I would like to use magnets to induce depression in people.
[01:57:39]  So like reverse.
[01:57:41]  Reverse.
[01:57:41]  I would like to make sure I'm going to make it reverse the polls.
[01:57:43]  I would like, yes.
[01:57:44]  I would like to make a helmet that I can put on people I don't like and it gives them clinical depression.
[01:57:50]  Because if we can, it's not not, no, it's a helmet that gives you clinical depression, Liz.
[01:57:55]  It's not nice, but it's necessary.
[01:57:57]  Because there's a lot of shit we're going to have to be doing if we need to clean this country up.
[01:58:01]  Because I'm like, what if I didn't have, what if you no longer had to like fucking kill people, but you could just make them sad?
[01:58:08]  They do that in Andor.
[01:58:10]  They put a helmet on there that makes you depressed.
[01:58:13]  But that's what I'm saying.
[01:58:14]  I'm like, I want to like.
[01:58:16]  That means the U.S. government is probably pretty close to making that happen.
[01:58:18]  Probably.
[01:58:19]  That's just if Chinese industrial leaders, if you're hearing this.
[01:58:22]  Or if we finally open up the Presidio and get some real industrial policy in this.
[01:58:28]  Palmer Lucky?
[01:58:34]  Oh, God.

=== Helmet Of Sadness (00:35) ===

[01:58:36]  I'm going to go home.
[01:58:39]  I'm Liz.
[01:58:40]  My name's Brace.
[01:58:43]  And I love everybody.
[01:58:44]  I just want to make that clear.
[01:58:46]  I love everybody.
[01:58:47]  I'm Producer Young Chomsky.
[01:58:49]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:58:50]  We'll see you next time.
[01:58:51]  Bye-bye.
[01:59:10]  Come out.
[01:59:12]  Come in.