Europe Energy Dependance on US, Black Rock Halts Withdrawls

war has broken out, coming up on a year. And since that, some very interesting things have happened on the energy crisis that's happened in Europe. And if you guys remember back 6 months ago, everyone was talking about Europe's going to be in this energy crisis come winter. And guess what? Here we are in the winter. Let's have some intellectual honesty back then, and we aren't seeing an energy crisis in Europe. So what actually happened? You saw a nuclear reactor blowing up that Russia had potentially bombed. We had the Nord Pipeline that was blown up that Russia. Everyone thinks Russia blew up that pipeline. We'll talk about that in a minute. We also today we're going to talk about energy. Where is energy coming from to Europe? And a lot of it's coming from the US of A. We're going to talk about energy exports in the United States. Additionally, we're talking about BlackRock halting withdrawals on their real estate fund in conjunction with Blackstone, who did this about a month ago with their REIT that's over $120 billion REIT that they're halting withdrawals as well. So today's episode, we're going to talk about all this. Welcome in. Say hi if you guys are on the live call. Say hello. Tell us where you're calling in from. Should be a fun little call. So with that, let me share my screen here for a second. So I'm gonna go boom. And let's— sorry for that. Bam, right here. Let's talk about energy dependence. So this is the Council on Foreign Relations. They actually kind of goes very in length about US and oil policy and everything that's happening. You can go read this article. Kind of interesting. But what's been interesting is it's kind of this trend of, you know, anywhere the U.S. strikes oil, we're gonna— we need to give them freedom. Freedom needs to come to this nation because of oil that's been struck there. We're gonna talk about Africa in just a second as well. So you can kind of read through all the timelines of oil and what's happened here. You know, this is the 2006-2008 skyrocketing oil prices, what happened there. Now, some brief summary on, you know, what happened and where things are at now. But you look right here, this is Bloomberg post this. The US is now sending the bulk of its export gas to Europe. OK, US has nearly sent three quarters of all its liquid liquefied natural gas. So LNG is what we'll kind of shorten as for this. So LNG to Europe for the first four months of 2022. Now this was published in on June 7th, 2022. I was trying to look up updates and I couldn't find a great article. But my understanding is almost a vast majority of the US's LNG is going to Europe right now, and Europe is now energy dependent on the United States, which is very interesting. Also, we're sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine to fight a pseudo-war with Russia, which is also very interesting. And so you kind of put this together and you're like, huh, you know, that was a pretty good trade for the United States. You send all this money to— and this war breaks out. We then start supplying money. All of a sudden, the Nord Pipeline blows up, which, by the way, everyone was— this is about 8 months ago. Everyone was talking about Russia supplied a lot of the gas, natural gas, and oil to all Poland, Germany, a bunch of the countries in Eastern Europe. And that come winter, these countries, because they're going to be in this energy crisis during the winter we're in right now, and filming this in January of 2023, That they will retreat and fall into the arms of Russia because they're so dependent on Russian energy. And what happens a few weeks later? All of a sudden, the Russian Nord Pipeline blows up and no one knows who did it. And everyone's pointing fingers and the whole Western world says Russia blew up the pipeline as a war effort. Why in the world would Russia blow up that pipeline? OK. If we're talking like a strategic move, why would you blow up your own pipeline You first off spent billions of dollars to create. It's a huge— I believe somebody can correct me on this. I want to say it's over 30% of Russian GDP is oil exports, but correct me if I'm wrong on there. Huge piece of your GDP, and it keeps these other countries dependent on you. Would Russia really blow up their own pipeline? And people are, what pipeline? I'm going to pull it up right here. Russian pipeline blows up. We're gonna pull up the article here. Um, explosion. I think they have, uh, some— it looks like some videos here. That's December 20th. So we have this. We'll go on this one right here. Gas pipeline explosion that killed 3. So pretty interesting. Another gas pipeline. This is— sorry, this is a different one. This is as of December 20th, just a couple weeks ago. There was another one, Nord. Let's say the Nord Pipeline explosion. Here we go. Look this one up. Actually, I didn't know about this one two weeks ago. So okay, doubling down now on my thesis live right here. If my internet will work. So this explosion killed three, and it's not going to interrupt Russian gas to gas to Europe. Pretty interesting. And then Nord Pipeline explodes. So let's just see. These people are investigating it, but there's no conclusive evidence right there. So there, it looks like they found explosive, just a combustion thing. This thing, it blew up under the under the water here. It's where it blew up. So this is trying to play me a cool ad from. Gosh, I hate— can a news website please? I guess that's why you pay. I don't pay for CNBC News or whatever. But this is where it blew up. This is about 6 months ago, blew up under the Baltic Sea. Now they're saying it's gross sabotage. So if you have Nord Pipeline, a major pipeline to Europe, you have another pipe. I guess it looks like a gas explosion happened. I'm not sure. I haven't read this one, but potentially, I don't know. All of this leads to though, The United States is now exporting liquefied natural gas at huge amounts to Europe. Man, what a win! What a what a just coincidence, a great coincidence that's happened because of this war is the U.S. is now we've got Europe energy dependent on the United States. Wow, what a great thing! And also, we're funding hundreds of billions of dollars to this war effort as well. Kind of. I don't know. Seems a little fishy to me. OK? Seems a little fishy. It seems to me like the U.S. blew up that pipeline and said, oopsies, it was probably Russia. But hey, guess what? We can sell you liquefied natural gas. It's funny. If you look back, I won't pull it. I don't have it pulled up here right now. But Trump in 20— I believe 2017 went and met with the U.N. leaders. And he mentioned that Germany needed to stop buying liquefied natural gas from Russia. You guys remember this? This is actually— Love or hate Trump, I thought he did an incredible job here. He says he's talking to NATO and he's like, "Hey, NATO, guess what? We're contributing way more than our percentage." Every every NATO country is supposed to put a percentage of their GDP towards NATO. The U.S. was doing like double their percentage than other companies or other countries. And Trump goes, "Hey guys, this has got to be fair. We we all got to put the same amount of GDP in." Oh, and also, NATO was formed. to stop the Soviet Union and now Russia. So Germany, why are you buying the bulk of your oil and liquefied natural gas from Russia? And Trump goes, Germany, I have— US has more natural gas and at cheaper prices than Russia. I will have tankers coming to Germany with liquefied natural gas in a matter of weeks, For a cheaper cost. Why won't you accept that deal? Why are you paying our enemy for gas? Why are you dependent on them? What's going on? And there's all these reports that the Prime Minister of Germany, I believe it was his son's company or his company was the company that does all the oil transports between Russia and Germany. It's this huge, it's like a multibillion-dollar collusion that happened. I think he stepped down as Prime Minister as well. Germany started to buy a little bit of natural gas, but now since the pipeline blew up, they literally blew the pipeline up. Ah, Germany, that's tough. I guess you gotta now buy oil from the United States. Okay. It's actually one of my, love him or hate him, it was one of my favorite moments of Trump's presidency was that right there. I think Trump did an incredible job negotiating with world leaders, Saudi Arabia, Middle East. He put up all these, and I'm not, don't, I don't wanna talk about Trump. I'm not like a, I voted for Trump in the last election. At least as of now, I'm not voting for him again. Moved on. I did like Trump though for that one thing, and I thought it was pretty interesting. And so now though, again, back to macroeconomics, we have this whole pseudo-war happening in Ukraine and independence from Europe, which is pretty interesting. Kind of cool. All right, let me go back here. Let's talk about the next topic, and then we can kind of circle these together. Next one here. So we talked about the oil. BlackRock, okay? BlackRock halts withdrawals from a $3.5 billion property fund, okay? Pretty interesting. This happened January 4th, came out a few days ago. Let me log in to subscribe to this. Oh, I'm not on Bloomberg. I'm on Wall Street Journal. Anyways, halting withdrawals. What that means as a fund perspective is you can invest. Now, it depends on the type of fund. I'm going to pull up actually Blackstone. Holds withdrawals. Let's pull this one up. So Blackstone held withdrawals on a lot larger fund, $120, I believe, $120 billion fund. We can see the number, right? Let's see if we pull it up here. It's a REIT they have. So REITs have relative liquidity. Now, again, they can still control what's going on. So withdrawals are if you invest in something, you can pull your capital out, withdraw your capital. Some of these funds— funds, some you can— you have zero withdrawals. Some funds like a REIT, you can have withdrawals in a certain time frame, maybe once a quarter or semi-annually you can get withdrawals. Depends on the REIT and how the REIT's set up. Um, REITs, they can even block withdrawals for a certain time period. So right here, this is their, um, COO of Blackstone. If you guys know who Blackstone is, largest asset managers on planet Earth. Um, they, uh, stopped all, um, from the $69 billion private REIT, the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, or Yeah. They had a ton of people request. Now what happens in especially a real estate fund, if a lot of your investors, you're a $69 billion REIT, let's say 10% request withdrawals, typically you don't have that much capital. Just, you don't have $6.9 billion just sitting on the sidelines. You have to now go sell properties. That's why it takes a little bit of time to get withdrawals. And what he's stating here, he comes down below, he goes, guys, we don't want retail investors reacting to markets, freaking out, and just selling at the low. That's a terrible strategy as an investor. And so they blocked redemptions, which is kind of interesting. That's what he is coming out and saying. We block redemptions because we don't want us to sell assets at the wrong time under pressure, which is what most bad investors do. And retail investors, I'm looking at me and you. Yeah. People like us, we're a little different though. We're better, right, than everybody else. But most, I mean, even good asset managers sometimes get scared or spooked or have debt obligations or whatever, and they sell their assets too early. So we don't do this. In exchange for their patience, investors have benefited though from 13% compounded returns for the last 6 years, which is pretty good, in my opinion. Now, it has downgraded the fund though, and their stock dropped. Now, after this interview, I think it jumped another 2 days, 2%. Trading on Thursday was pretty interesting. But you see this happen with Blackstone. You then also have BlackRock halting their withdrawals as well. Now, this could mean a couple of things. Number one, it's just like they don't wanna sell in the low. They don't wanna sell in the dip. The other thing though, it could signal is that, number one, investors are scared and they wanna pull their money out. But also, it's kinda like a run on the bank situation. They're testing these financial institutions, and these financial institutions may not have, probably don't have the liquidity And maybe the asset prices to even recoup the $69 billion, let's say all $69 billion got redeemed. Every single investor of the $69 billion pulled money out. Would Blackstone be able to sell their properties today for $69 billion? Yes or no? And if the answer's no, that means they're running at a deficit. It's kind of scary for a financial— that could bring a financial institution to its knees and kill it. I mean, take it out to the woodshed and just beat it. I mean, It's bad. And so now I don't think that's what's going on. I think they're just saying, hey, we don't want to sell right now. But it could be signs of cracks happening in an institution, in a type of institution like this. I'm curious on this live stream right now. I'm curious in the chat, what are your guys' thoughts on this year, 2023? Are we going to see every— almost everyone's predicting a recession. Are we gonna see no recession, a mild recession, a severe recession, or like a Great Depression? Curious. Curious your guys' thoughts. Type in the chat. I wanna see what you guys think. What kind of predictions do you have for this year? It's funny, I was talking to a number of the— actually, I was speaking on stage with Kevin O'Leary a couple months ago, and he mentioned he's just like, the contrarian in me Makes me not want to think we're going into recession. The fact that everybody's calling it, everyone you talk to, everyone is, oh yeah, we're headed to recession. Recession's coming. It's here. Interest rates have spiked. We're here. And, you know, he's like, the fact that everyone's calling it makes me think that it's not going to happen. And, you know, we actually had GDP grew in Q3. I have the Q4 reports come out for GDP. I'm not sure if they've come out yet. I think they come out this next week. Maybe even this week, if we grew or declined as a GDP. But there's a part of me that's like, now they're predicting a mild recession, right? That the interest rates are gonna be so high and the Fed is forecasting rates to— you saw that they changed to be flat for this, the next 12 months, which is coming back from their previous expectations. They were wanting to raise rates through 2023 and hold them through end of '23 into '24 and even maybe into '25. They would start, or end of '24 into '25, start lowering rates. And I personally think we're going to— if I'm going to say my— so I saw people comment here. I think we're going to be in a mild recession in the United States. I think we're going to be in a severe recession around the world. I think the United States will be the best of the world for the first 2 quarters of this year. Now, again, a recession, we could already be in a recession. A recession is defined as two quarters of negative GDP growth. The White House changed that. Sometimes you don't know recession until like halfway through because you're already in two quarters. Like two quarters of data have to come out, so it's at least six months and then a couple weeks, and then you can say, okay, we're in a recession. Six months have already gone by. Six months through, and maybe. another 6-month recession, let's just say. You're already half or even bear market. When a bear market happens, it's from the— it's 20% drop from the top. So you could— and then the whole thing becomes a bear market. Just so you're aware, when you look at history, that's what's happening. And so we could already be, you know, months into a recession right now, and it's not declared, but on the history books, it'll show we were months into a recession. 2022, for a lot of Cases, I think was a recession in a lot of cases. We had two quarters of negative GDP growth: Q1 and Q2. Q3, Q4, I haven't seen the numbers yet, but you have three out of four quarters of negative GDP growth. Let's just say they're all three are negative. Kind of like we could already be halfway through a recession right now. I I think so. Anyways, we'll see. Some people are saying serious recession, mild recession again. We you know who knows. But the, I just, the contrarian in me just thinks that the fact that everyone's calling it so, they're so sure, just makes me think it's going to be different than what they're calling. And I personally, if I'm gonna make a wild prediction, I think the Fed is going to lower rates in the middle of the year. I think by June, July, rates are going to lower. I think we're going to be in, we're going to see job growth decline. We're going to see a negative recession or negative GDP growth. And I think they're going to publish Hey, we beat inflation. The CPI number is a 12-month trailing number, just so everyone's aware. So, you know, the CPI that everyone tracks, like the CPI is 7.3 or it's 8.2, whatever the inflation has been, that's a 12-month trailing number. That's 12 months year over year. So we started all this quantitative tightening in June. I think by June, we're going to show Man, we've beaten inflation. This is awesome. Inflation's down to 4% or 3% or even 2%. And they, by the way, they can manipulate those numbers. Don't think I— go look at how they— the CPI is the most manipulated number ever. I could go for a whole podcast on this. I won't do it. But very interesting. I think by June though, I— and that's my crazy prediction for 2023. I'm probably wrong. But I think by June, I'm going to say middle of the year, summer, I think they're going to lower rates. That's my crazy. I think they're gonna, I think they're gonna lower a little bit and then they're gonna lower a little bit more because they cannot sustain high interest rates. I'm gonna pull up the rates. I'm gonna pull up Fed rates last 20 years. A little chart, but I don't know where it went. I'm just gonna re-Googled it. Here we go. So this is the Fed interest rates for the past 20 years. Give me a chart. Okay, wants me to get a trial. Come on. Ah, okay, well, it's not gonna show me. All right, I got a different one. Find me— let's go to Fred. There we go. All right, here we go, sharing my screen here. Okay, these are rates going back to 1955. All right, so you see our rates. This is Paul Volcker when he put rates super high, I mean, That's just crazy. Now, some people think like, oh, we're going to have Jerome Powell is going to be the Volcker. I mean, not even close. Okay? He is— they've said they're already going to flatline for 2023. That's their prediction, right? They've already come back. Now, the reason I say this, you had— we had a great financial crash right here. Rates have been pretty much zero for a decade. They raised rates a little bit, 2016, 2017, 2018. 2019, they then lower rates in 2019 3 times. Why would you lower rates 3 times in 2019? Why? Like, you had at this point, you had one of the best economies the United States had ever seen. Remember 2019? 2019 was the peak of like markets and everything. And just this is before all the money printing. But I'm saying as far as job growth, unemployment rates, I mean, economy was booming. Low gas. I mean, if you look back through the last couple of decades, I mean, that was the peak. If you can't raise, why would they lower rates in 2019? Why? If you can't raise, you should be raising rates in that environment. You lower rates when there's a recession, right? Like, that's usually what happens. See all the recessions here and stuff? Because you want quantitative easing. You want to have money and liquidity going to the markets. Why would you lower rates in 2019? And then COVID hits. That's this little gray line here. They put rates to zero when COVID hit. OK? And then COVID's here and they've slowly started to raise rates again. All right? If you can't raise rates in August, September of 2019, when can you raise rates? And the reason for this, I believe, is because of— this is a bigger picture— the U.S.'s influence on Earth with the world reserve currency. So I'm going to go a little bit deep with you guys. You guys OK if I go a little bit deep with you? Okay, world reserve currency. So the United States, obviously everyone knows, world reserve currency. And, um, you know, the 1945, you have the, um, you had the Bretton Woods Agreement. You then had Nixon in the '70s change us off the gold standard, which is right here, caused all this inflation. They pulled it back down, um, and we're here. People talk about the national debt. Yes, like if you have people talk online, man, the national debt's so crazy. We're in debt like $30 trillion. You can even go online like National Debt Counter Clock. I think that's what— National Debt Clock. And people are like, man, this gives me so much anxiety. Like, I can't believe that we're in so much debt. Guys, I think this is a good thing. I think it's a good thing. U.S. national debt at $31 trillion, I think is a— Isn't that crazy? I kind of think it's a good thing. Isn't that crazy that I think it's a good thing? Now let me tell you why. Now, I don't think this is good with like credit card debt and other stuff, but I think US debt is a good thing. Why? The US, the world reserve currency does not run like a business. Stop thinking like it as a business. It's not a business. Everyone, you got to have, you know, you got to have a budget. No, you don't. You're the world reserve currency. Your job, if you're the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve, by the way, is a private organization. It's an entity. It's a business ran by the 12 largest banks on Earth. It's a business. And the chairman is appointed by the president, but everybody else is just— they're just the head of the banks. That's who runs the Fed. And it's a private company. It's not a branch of the government, just so everyone's aware. The Fed is a private company. And the company has a product. The product is the U.S. dollar. And you want the world to use your product. And you want to have demand for your product. And it's— I believe it's the greatest product to ever be created. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement after World War II, the agreement with all the nations around the world, everyone's decimated, killed, navies are gone, Air Force, everything's blown up besides the United States. The United States had still had an intact Navy and military and everything else. And the U.S. came to all the newly formed United Nations. Guess what we said? We said, hey, we will be the world police. We will pay for a Navy and we will police all the waters around the entire world. All you have to do, we don't want to conquer. You don't want to take your land. We don't want to conquer Germany and those other countries. Keep all your land. Keep your— set up new governments, whatever you need to do. As long as you— any big, large business or oil transaction is traded in US dollars. That's all we want. And we'll pay for an army, a navy. We'll police the entire planet as long as you guys use the US dollar. That was the agreement. And nations were like, are you kidding me? That's the— this is the best deal we've ever— like, they don't want to conquer us. They don't want to— like, because most countries after a war are like that. Like, hey, we're going to be an imperial society. We're going to take over all this land. The US said, no, we'll just keep our land. You keep your land. Use the US dollar. What a brilliant move, by the way. And since then, the US dollar became the world reserve currency. That's why people always ask, why are we policing the world? It's because of the Bretton Woods Agreement. We agreed to do that for— in exchange for they would use the US dollar. And what that did was made the United States the most wealthiest nation on planet Earth because people used our product. We could print a trillion of them and people would murder, kill, steal, work 100 hours a week to get more U.S. dollars. OK? So fast forward now, we're in 2022, 2023. People are talking about currencies and the U.S. dollar is dead and it's going away and Crypto and the China and all this stuff. Like really? The U.S. actually has gained. The U.S. dollar has gained. We're at 20-year highs for the U.S. Chart here. Let's see. U.S. dollar versus yuan. I mean, we have decimated the yuan over the past year. Here's came up here. They had the war and then bam! Right here in November. Wait, this is it. Let me pull this. Well, I had another chart. Ah, here's the chart. So you can see U.S. rates. I mean, we're now at actually above the euro, which is like crazy. The euro has been just killed. The U.S. dollar is at, I mean, a really good spot, number one. Number two, if you have debt, OK? So Saudi Arabia, they own about a about a it's like eight hundred billion dollars of U.S. denominated debt. So back to the debt calculator. If you had a product, what do you want people to do? You want that product to be used in everyone's hands. So what do you do? You make debt. You get debt from other countries or you issue debt or receive debt. And guess what? It's domiciled in US dollars. So if, for example, if China wants to kill the US dollar, they're going to have to take about a trillion-dollar loss. Because they have a ton of debt owed to them in what currency? It's not owed in yuan. It's not owed in bitcoins. It's owed in US dollars. So they are incentivized because there's debt in all these, and all the debt is held in US dollars. It's not yuan. It's not rubles. It's not in bitcoins. It's in US dollars. And what you do is you flood the world with cheap debt. So back to this slide, the last 10 years, especially, we have flooded the world With really cheap debt at 0.12%, 0.09% interest rate. Yeah, take some debt. We'll flood the world with US dollar-denominated debt. And guess what it does? It makes these other nations have to use US dollars to pay back that debt. And what does it do? It makes supply and— or sorry, that's supply. It makes demand for those dollars. And guess what we can do? We can print right here during COVID $23 of all U.S. dollars ever created were created in this little timeline right here or whatever it is. It might be 40 now or whatever the number is. The number keeps changing, by the way. I don't— we don't actually know the number. And guess what happens? The U.S.— you print a huge amount. I mean, a quarter. I've heard up to reports of up to 40% of the entire money supply was printed in these 3 years. And guess what happens? The U.S. dollar hits 20-year highs. 20-year highs, not lows, And everyone's talking about inflation is 8% or 7%. And the CPI, they can— guys, they can manipulate that number, in my opinion. I think by June it's going to be, hey, we beat inflation. And guess what? The entire world is still using the U.S. dollar. U.S. dollar around the world is, I think, 69%, 68% to 69% of all trade done in the world is U.S. dollar. That's actually risen over the last decade. It's gone up higher. It was like 55%. Now it's over the 60%. 68, 69% of all trade in the world is used US dollar. Now, I know the Brexit, the BRICS nations, Brazil, China, Russia, they're trying to get off the US dollar. They're trying to convince Saudi Arabia. I know we've had other calls about this whole thing, but at least right now, having a flooding these nations with cheap debt, that's why I think the US cannot sustain high interest rates to be competitive, because otherwise, if you're, I don't know, Paraguay, Hey, I could get US dollar debt, or I could go get euro debt, or I can go get debt from another country with lower interest rates. So to be competitive, the US will have to put rates back down lower like they did for the last decade here to again flood the world with US-dominated debt, creating and creating demand for your product. Come on. Okay, come on, people. Stop. You got to start playing chess. Stop playing checkers. Everyone looks on TV. They're idiots. The Fed, the White House, they don't know what they're doing. Really? Now, I know they sound dumb, but they're playing a very smart game. You're blowing up pipelines. You're running a pseudo-war in Russia. And all of a sudden, Europe is now energy dependent on the United States. You're in all this national debt. I can't believe the debt. Oh, the debt ceiling. Oh, blah, blah. You're flooding the world with your product that has to be paid back in dollars, and they need to borrow and receive dollars. It creates demand for your product. It instills, it puts, ingrains the U.S. world reserve currency in those pockets. And by the way, if you don't want to use our reserve currency, that's fine. We'll just park an aircraft carrier outside your country and we'll put an embargo on your country. Or we won't protect you anymore. Like Saudi Arabia. Iran has tried to kill Saudi Arabia so many times. I'm sure Saudi Arabia, hey, if you don't want to use, you don't want to transactional oil, fine. We just won't protect you anymore. And we'll let Iran or whoever else just blow up all your stuff. I mean, Biden flew out to Saudi Arabia a few months ago and Xi Jinping just flew out to Saudi Arabia. It's pretty interesting. That's kind of my take. Any thoughts? I'm curious. But I don't think it's— I think it's pretty interesting. So when you're talking about interest rates, and by the way, when interest rates go down, I think the market's going to rally back like crazy because With interest rates low, if you lower interest rates, you can now borrow at cheaper rates and buy. You can have margin loans. You can buy more stock. You can have margin to buy real estate. All these asset prices go way up very quickly. They all— the market comes raging back because you have cheap debt. You can borrow and you can buy stuff and you can do stock. If you're an executive, I'm a CEO of a public company. I can borrow from the Fed at 2% and just buy my own stock. These are called stock buybacks. You can just buy your own stock. And guess what? The stock price goes up and I just pay back my debt with a little bit of the top of the stock price and bam, that's what happens. You have cheap debt. Now, where does this all end? Do we have a full debt cycle like Ray Dalio is going to talk about? Maybe. But I think that's when you're looking at it like a business. I think you got to look at the world reserve currency in this day and age, a true world reserve currency. I know I've read Ray Dalio's book a number of times. I think he's really sharp and amazing. I love the study, but also it's a little different than it is. I think it's different. I think the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, you didn't have a system where you could just create dollars on a computer system, and it's not fully adopted around the world. You had the largest military on planet Earth that can strike anywhere at any time, backed by nukes, and backed by huge aircraft carriers to block you. Anyways, I digress, but that's just my crazy thoughts. If you're looking at my crazy thoughts, that's my crazy thoughts for 2023. I think rates will fall in the middle of 2023, and I think the markets will come raging, raging back. I could see us in a decent recession the next 2 quarters, but I think the— now that might be immediate in equity markets. So stocks and cryptos will have an immediate jump. Real estate will take a little bit to come back, but because it's just usually delayed like 6 months. Anyways, crazy thoughts. If you guys want to use this as a timestamp, in 6 months come back, we'll see if I was right. Okay, all are awesome. Other question, I'm just taking questions here. Mild recession, serious recession, freezing sticky situations. Yeah, pretty wild. So I, as just as you know, I run a hedge fund right now. I run a crypto hedge fund. So we just raised this in June of last year, and we're still raising money actually. If you guys want to learn about it more, it's called the uglyunicornfund.com. You guys can go check it out. We're selling tickets to Fund Loss Live down below. We got Ed Mylett, Jim Rogers coming in May, 2,500 people coming. We have all these fund managers. We have people that run $100 million, even billion-dollar funds coming to Miami to teach and talk and share and talk about capital raising, economics, how funds work, how to build them, how to put them together. It's gonna be pretty fun. We got that going on. And so I'm running my fund right now. We do these lives and try to help you guys out. The reason somebody asked me, like a few thousand dollar course, if you're making millions, From all these two reasons, I believe that more people need to understand how funds work and run. People have ran funds for fifty years. Shit, they don't talk about it. They just yeah, I'll just go make all my millions and I'll just do nothing and I'll be quiet about it. And I um, if you guys heard my story, my dad runs a massive fund, forty billion dollar fund. He's now since retired and stuff, and he taught me all these things about fund. I launched a fund at twenty two. I pitched my dad for money. My dad said no. But he was a good mentor. He's a good advisor. He taught me all this cool stuff, and I was able to go raise my own capital. I've launched now three funds, and I said, "You know what? Regular people." My dad, by the way, he grew up in North Las Vegas, got C's and B's in high school, barely got into college, barely graduated college, was just an entrepreneur. He was not some slick talking Harvard whatever, like pretty grassroots guy. And you guys can go watch my whole story on another video. But all that, and I was like, "You know what? Regular people, people like us." Need to understand how this game is played. We need to understand what high finance is. And we can, guess what? We can do this. Like, it's not just reserved for the elites on Wall Street. That's why if you guys see our stuff, we have Wall Street, #WallStreetRebel. Like, we're the Wall Street rebels. We are the people that go out and say, you know what? Yeah, it's cool that they did all this cool stuff, but like, I can do it too. And we have now hundreds of funds that we've helped launch in our community. And it's crazy to see these funds. They're buying up restaurants. They're buying up They're investing into early-stage startups. They're doing energy deals. They're building solar farms. They're trading crypto. They're trading real estate. They're doing all this cool stuff. It's crazy. And it gives me so much fulfillment in life rather than just trading little dollars on a spreadsheet to make money. It gives me a lot of fulfillment doing videos and doing content. And now we have a company. I have 50 employees now with Fund Launch. This is our company. Like we sell, we have Black Cards, our community. People can join. We have lawyers that come in and build their fund for them. And it's pretty cool. Like, I truly feel like I'm on a mission to tell the world about investment funds, this kind of secret world that no one talks about. And I just, by the nature of nothing I did, but the nature of the family I was born into, I got a front row seat to see a massive deca-billion dollar fund be built. And I could learn from some of that and teach that to other people. And again, pitch my dad and not get any money. Still, my dad has never invested into any fund deal project I've ever done. Isn't that crazy? Never. But he's been a great mentor and great advisor. And he's in some of the— he comes on. He's actually going to speak at the event in Miami. Incredible speaker and stuff. But that's pretty cool. So if you're asking that question, that's why. Are you using ChatGPT to run in your funds or AI? I've tried. The last few weeks I've been playing with it. I've been trying to write like codes or scripts or give me models or give me research. So I like it for research. At least currently, it's at least because sometimes it won't give you financial advice. It won't, at least ChatGPT won't. So you have to train it to do certain things and to do research on certain topics or coins or products or stocks. So I've been working on it. I'm, I've, uh, 6 months from now, I'm hoping to be very, uh, I think, I think these AIs though are changing financial markets like crazy. It's pretty cool. All right. Anything, other questions? I'm live. What questions you guys got? Type them in the chat. Yeah, so the event, I think it's linked down below. You guys can join. It's funlaunchlive.com. By the way, ticket sales, we are on pace. We're already ahead of schedule to sell out this year, which is crazy. We sold out last year. This is where this picture comes from. That was last year. About a month before the event, so we're already ahead of schedule to sell out. Ticket prices are raising. I think every week or two weeks we're raising ticket prices all the way into the event. I think as of today, I think tickets are four hundred dollars. They by the time of the event, I think we're gonna be selling it for about a thousand to twelve hundred dollars a ticket. So they just they're gonna keep raising in price. That's how we do it. We don't ever do discounts. It's just our model is we're gonna we start low and we just slowly start selling tickets. Till the event sells out, and so right now I think they're gonna I think they're gonna raise in a week or so week or two anyways. Right now is the lowest time you're ever gonna have to buy these tickets. That's all I'm gonna say. So go buy tickets. They're gonna be amazing. We got Jim Rogers. He's the co-founder of the Soros funds. So George Soros and him co-founded these funds. This is the fund that did the quantum. This is the quantum fund on Wall Street. They broke the Bank of England. This famous he's one of the co-founders of this famous old Wall Street fund. Also got Ed Mylett. We've got another, a bunch of other fund managers that run $100 million and billion-dollar funds coming to speak and share all this cool stuff. And it's, uh, it's gonna be pretty fun. So I go grab tickets. You guys are amazing. Um, okay. Y'all are awesome. Thank you guys so much. See you next week. By the way, we're doing live calls, um, in our group and live here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday now. So tomorrow, Lingon's gonna go live on here with a client and student. So you guys can hop on the lives. We're gonna have to do interviews on here. If you want to be interviewed, by the way, message me or one of my team members and we can set up those interviews. If you're like a— if you already run a fund or in our group or whatever, we want to highlight students. We're also going to talk about deals. We're going to do like breakdowns and stuff. We're going to do— we're doing a lot of content. It's pretty fun. So hop on the lives. You guys are amazing. And you guys can subscribe or like this video below to make sure you're subscribed. You can get the notifications when we go live. You can ask questions, all that kind of stuff. So, okay. Y'all are awesome. See you guys later. Bye.