Recession, Aliens, Market Crash and forward looking Economics

Forward-looking economics for the next year to 18 months. What we are seeing with all the data that we're gathering now. A lot of you guys know we have a bunch of fund managers that we help and teach and coach. It's really cool for me. I get to hear the inside scoop of all these investment funds and what they are seeing in the venture capital space, in the private equity space, in the forex space, in the hedge fund space, in the crypto space. And it's fun to bring all those together in today's call. That's the plan. We're going to walk through all these things and what's happening. So let's first start out with the pending. I'm gonna call it the pending recession, current recession that we're in now. To have a recession, you have to have two quarters of economic decline. We have already had one, and we are very quickly headed to a second one right now. So and then what they do is they backtrack to day one of that recession. We are already in a recession, in my opinion. Rates they've raised. Obviously, this is rate hikes have come, but this was a bubble all along. I don't think rate hikes was the thing that popped the bubble. I think we knew this all along was happening. They mentioned back in October, Jerome Powell mentioned that we're going to start raising rates. They did it 50 basis points. They're going to do it again here. Now, the market is trying to price in 7 or 8 rate hikes at 50 basis points apiece. So that would put us at 3.5% to 4%, maybe above 4%, 4.5%, depending on what they do. So the market right now is trying to price that in. So let's just look at live feed ticker right here. So let me turn this on. Bam! You guys can see. Where are we at? Where? Oh no! Where'd it go? Did it crash on me? Hold on. Give me a second. Okay, we're gonna pull up. Ah, there we are. Okay. Bam! We're back. I'm gonna share my screen. Here we are. Okay, let's go to just just top of funnel here. All right, top of line. Now S&P 500 this morning, I woke up to a ton of conversations. Wall Street Journal, all these. News outlets posting the S&P 500 had the futures markets were tricking way down. We were looking to head and officially into a bear market. We're already in correction market. A bear market is a 20% drop. We are right at that range right now with the S&P 500 today as one day. I mean, it started, opened, it actually opened, came up higher, then dropped, and then now it's come up higher and still kind of just for the day down, you know, just kind of sitting almost equal right now. So NASDAQ a little bit positive, Dow a little bit positive. It keeps just bouncing. We've had a pretty volatile day in the markets. But that does not take away from the last— let's just go last year, the decline we've seen peaking around December, January, and just the continual sell-off we have right now leading into end of Q2 here into Q3. It's not looking pretty. Now, we've all seen this, said this forever. There's a pending recession, pending, you know, all this stuff. And we have had— I'm coming back to this one. Let's go like this. There we go. You know, pending recession, all this kind of stuff that we've seen. And we knew it was coming, right? We knew this was happening. So let's talk through some of these markets. Obviously, broad market tech stocks have been just decimated the last few weeks. Now, how might— let's get to a little bit deeper economics. The reason this is different right now, some people say, well, that's the tech stocks. It doesn't affect, you know, still we have a strong economy. Jerome Powell gets up and says, we have a strong, you know, consumer savings has never been higher. Okay? Consumer spending, consumer credit jumped $40 billion last month. Last month, $40 billion increase in consumer credit. It's because first off, people have their lifestyle. They've been comfortable through COVID. And they want to keep that lifestyle. Hey, we'll just increase credit. We'll just use our credit cards we have and keep spending. So that's, you know, they use these economic triggers. They're not seeing the underlying thing that the credit amount is going up, okay? Which is right now is the worst time ever to add debt to your balance sheet, in my opinion. Now we have increasing inflation. Obviously, that's the Fed keeps coming out and says, we're going to try to taper inflation back. Now Jerome Powell had an interesting interview yesterday. Wall Street Journal interviewed him. Very interesting interview. Jerome Powell says, A lot of different things, and he actually he admitted they got something wrong. He admitted back during COVID they they put rates down to zero. They did that in I think it was 14 days. It was one and a half percent. They put it to zero in 14 days. Okay, just unreal. They then thought we saw inflation coming. Goes the he goes the initial and on his and his quote they're asking a reporter asked him the question. He says with about inflation and should have should the Fed have done something different? He says well hindsight's 20/20. We acted at the time, and obviously every chairman of the Fed always is perfect and never ever makes a mistake. And even former chairmen don't go and say, man, they made a mistake. But this time they said they made a mistake. They said, we should have started raising rates earlier. He says, and because what happened in 2021, so last year we had inflation spike, but then it came down. Inflation actually dropped. The CPI dropped a little bit. They said, hey, maybe it's transitory. That's where that reinforced the transitory argument. Then by October of last year, that's when the inflation numbers really started ticking up. It started July, August, September. By October, it was like, we're too late. Jerome Powell admitted that. He said, we were too late. We were too late to make that decision to then lower— excuse me, increase rates. Now, they made an announcement, we're going to increase rates end of November, December, in that range. They just did it. It took them 4 months. Anyways, if you saw a mistake, you said, let's change it. And you still, you waited 6 months before you dropped rates in 14 days. Now I understand COVID was a big situation. People were reacting. And maybe they didn't want to be a reactive central bank. But still, if you saw that big of a problem, anyways, I think they're too late. And he admitted, I think we were too late on this. But he resolved his thing. He said, we're going to get inflation back to 2%. That's their goal right now. The Fed said, that is our goal, to get inflation back to 2%. And And so we're going to do that. And interesting enough, they, you know, they are doing that right now. And he gave an analogy. He gave an analogy of a rocky landing. He said it might be a rocky landing now. So we're landing a plane. Yeah, it might be a little rocky on the way down, but at least we land the plane. It's landed. And anyways, it's kind of an interesting analogy. We'll see how rocky that landing is and if they can even land it right now. But that's what we're seeing. So going into right now, let me share my screen again. With everybody. And I need to get more monitors here, but we keep changing our studio. So right here, and people online, I pulled up mortgage rates. Okay? So mortgage rates right now, this is on a $300,000 house with a 20% down payment. 30-year fixed, 5.8% with great credit in Utah. This is in Utah where I'm at right now. 5.8%. Okay? With 20% down. $300,000 loan amount. Okay? If we tick that up a little bit, still 5.8%. Most people cannot afford— that would be, you know, a $100,000 down payment on a $500,000. That's a medium home price in Utah right now is about $450,000, $500,000. It'd be about a $100,000 down payment. Very few people have a $100,000 down payment, especially at 5.8%. So it was interesting. So the last few weeks, I've actually, I'm in the market. We had put an offer on a house. We had another. I'm always trying to buy real estate. And we've seen, even in the last month, inventory has skyrocketed on the market. I actually can't believe how quickly this is— the response has been to rate hikes. We've seen a huge amount of inventory. Houses are finally sitting on the market for, you know, 3, 4, 5 weeks. We've been in a red-hot real estate market, especially in Utah. Houses are just flying off the shelf, you know, just crazy, crazy offers. Now it's a little more normal. Houses are sitting on the market for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks. Since then, I think that's going to get worse and worse. People that say, and even I hear some Fed people and Biden people say, and let's talk about Biden for a second. Now, I'm not one to criticize presidents. I think it's a dumb way to live life. But the blatant, just conversation they're having around inflation is unmatched. First off, inflation was transitory, and now inflation's Putin's fault. Hey, this is all Putin's fault. Now that happened about 2 months ago, everyone kind of was like, yeah, not really. Inflation's not Putin's fault. This is the policies you guys have made in Washington, not just Biden, but the whole Congress, all the spending, all that kind of stuff. And now there's tweets from the White House coming out blaming greedy corporations that are gouging prices and taking advantage of inflation numbers. Obviously, these people don't know economics, or they're obviously just trying to play politics. They're trying to blame it on somebody else. When in reality, the problem's themselves. And they don't want to point. They don't want to look themselves in the mirror and say, man, the problem's us. And so anyways, that's that's what we're seeing right from the White House. And it's it's really exciting. So you saw a few entrepreneurs clap back House and the Biden administration. Elon Musk obviously put a storm of tweets out and and about inflation and saying this is not going to solve. Essentially, their plan was hey, we should increase corporate taxes. The White House put this out yesterday or two days ago. The way to solve inflation is we need to tax the rich and give more to the poor, which if you know anything about economics, is actually, it's not just bad, it's double bad. That would be a double worse way. That would actually worsen the problem even further. And actually, you saw Jeff Bezos, a very big Democrat, Jeff Bezos for a long time been a huge Democrat, clap back hard at the White House on this. And essentially said, guys, if you raise right now, You have corporations that don't have labor because of— anyways, we can go into the whole labor shortage thing. And that's a whole conversation around politics as well. Huge labor shortage. We've given out free money. Okay? We've inflated products. And that's the demand of these products has gone up. Now, what happens if you tax corporations and you give that money to the poor people? Right? What do they do? They go spend it. There's a reason they're poor. They spend. And I will unapologetically just say, you know, the old quote is true. If you took all the money in the world, and you redistributed it equally, in not a very long time, it would be back in the same pockets. People talk about the— and yes, there are things that tip the balances for sure, and there's policies for sure, but it usually comes down to people's mindsets. The mindset of a consumer, I would call them a poor person, someone below the median average, typically is to spend. They're not traditionally savers. They're not traditionally investors. Whether that's— a lot of times it's an education problem, other things. So you tax the rich, You tax these greedy corporations like the White House is saying. You give it to the poor people. What are they going to do? They're going to go spend. And what does that put? It puts demand even higher on these products that are already scarce. And what happens? Those products then get bid up. It's not corporations being greedy. It is economics. If there's 100 people trying to buy one popsicle, that popsicle by definition goes up. It's supply and demand. It's not— no one controls it. They call it the invisible hand of economics. No one controls house prices. They just get— there's more money, so they get bid up. That's how inflation works. So when you tax the rich, what happens? Number one, it gives more demand for scarce products, which puts inflation even higher. Secondly, it takes money away from corporations that they could have invested that money into R&D, into development, into making their company and products more efficient. That's deflation. Companies are always investing to make their products more efficient, get supply chain down to make it cheaper because there's a— in a competitive market. Now, this does not work in a monopoly, but in a competitive market, right? They're all engineering and doing stuff and trying to become more efficient to bring prices down. The first rule of capitalism is that excess margin will be competed away. So any excess margin will always be competed away. That takes away their ability to compete that excess margin away. So it makes prices even higher. Okay? So it double-ups inflation, that policy. And it's interesting that whether they, either they don't understand that, or it just sounds really nice for politicians to say, yeah, let's tax the greedy rich and let's give money to the poor. And that wins votes from the people who are poor. You have a midterm election coming up this November. And I mean, the Democrats are running just wild right now. Currently, it looks like the Republican Party is going to just smash the Democrats in the midterms. Anyways, we'll see what political parties do, but anyways, it's very interesting. It's interesting that the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell even commented that they— sorry, the former chairman of the Fed mentioned that a lot of his stuff was, he has to make political statements. They have to do political statements. Now, Let me get backtrack from this a little bit. So we have the Fed, Jerome Powell. People consistently say, I hear this online every day, man, they're such idiots. The Fed, they don't know what they're doing. These guys are idiots. They're stupid. And I kind of alluded to that. If you were listening to me, you probably would think that I'm thinking that. These people are not idiots. They are very smart people. They know what they're doing. Okay? They know exactly what they're doing. They have the most, really, you're saying Jerome Powell's an idiot. He's got access to hundreds and even maybe thousands of epic data points that all flow to him from all across the world. He's probably the most powerful man in the world, right? Jerome Powell. And he's an idiot. He doesn't know what he's doing. I could do better, me on a YouTube channel. I don't think you're right. And the analogy is this. This got shared at Funnel Launch Live and I thought it was a great analogy. He goes, it's the analogy of the dumb waiter. The analogy is this. Okay? So we all work, all of us work at a restaurant. Okay? And there's one waiter that we know is just, he's just an idiot. He's bad at math. And every time, you know, a customer gives him a $20, he always gives the wrong change. You know? So he's got a $20. He's supposed to give like back a, you know, $10.25. And he always just messes it up. He's just bad at math. He always is messing up dollars and cents. We all know that. And we always say, oh man. And let's say that's me. Bridger, Bridger's an idiot. He's just bad at math. Right? And now after that, this goes on for a year or 2, we then decide to do an audit on Bridger, on me. Let's audit Bridger, his last 100 transactions with customers. Let's see how off he was with his change. We do this audit. We expect, if he's really bad at math, half of the change should be in the favor of the customer, and the other half of the change should be in favor of Bridger. We do the whole audit, and we come back and, huh, it's interesting. When Bridger does the change, and every time he messes up, 95% of the time, the change is in favor of Bridger. Interesting, huh? You know, we thought it would be 50/50, but half, you know, we did the audit, and 95% of the time, he does the change, and it's in favor of Bridger. Bridger gets to keep a few extra pennies or dollars. Is Bridger the idiot, or is everyone working at the shop an idiot for believing that I'm bad at math. Right? And over years or decades or whatever, I'm collecting little snippets and stuff. And I just convinced everybody I'm bad at math. Oh, Bridger's just bad at math. And every time I get the change, I'm doing the math differently so I can take off pennies from the table. Does that make sense? It's actually, this actually is a true story. There was a guy at McDonald's. He messed up everyone's order by like exactly 4 pennies. And he would put it in his pocket. He made something like $10,000 to $15,000 over the course of a year doing that. And then they caught him and they, I I don't know what they did, put him in jail or whatever, but crazy, right? People say, man, the Fed is an idiot. They don't know what they're doing. These guys know what they're doing. Now, they might say one thing and do something else, 100%. I don't argue with that at all. These guys say one thing, they do something else, or they have something behind the scenes happening that we don't know about, but these people are not idiots. Do not call them idiots. These are the smartest, most powerful people on planet Earth. They're not idiots. Okay? Now they might tell you something. They might sound like idiots when they go on CNBC, but that's all part of the plan. And now, Bridger, why do you say that? So interesting. 2019. Okay? Now let's talk more about rates and where I see the future economic outlook of where rates are at. Right now, everyone's trying to price in 3.5% to 4% interest rates. Right now, we just raised another 50 basis points. So Let me give you a few points and what I think is happening. Again, I'm trying to predict what the Fed and what they will do. Again, I use probabilities. I don't know. I'm not good at a crystal ball, but this is mine if you guys are okay hearing it. Okay? So first off, in 2018, the Fed met together and they said, hey, we're going to raise rates 3 times in 2019. Okay? This is end of 2018. Everyone says, great. That sounds awesome. They go out and 90 days later, and now remember, end of 2018 to 2019 was one of the best economies the United States have ever seen. We had the lowest unemployment. Businesses were booming. Economic productivity was off the charts. This is all pre-COVID. This was fantastic. Literally like one of the best economies the world's ever seen. The Fed says, yes, this is great. We're going to— this is a time to raise rates, obviously, right? They announced they're going to raise rates 3 times. 90 days later, they go, whoops, we made a mistake. We're actually going to lower rates 3 times in 2019. Okay? So they lower rates 3 times in 2019. They go through and lower and lower, and they get down, and then COVID hits in 2020, and then they put rates to zero, right? And then it's been zero for a while, and now they're starting to raise them again. At the same time, so the end of 2019, me and my dad were looking at this. We read a report. There was $13 trillion, $13 trillion trading at zero or negative rates around the world. Bonds or corporate debt, whatever it was, zero or negative rates, a negative interest rate. Okay? And people were buying these, not just in a little amount. $13 trillion were being traded at zero or negative rates. This is back in 2019. This is pre-COVID. What does that tell you? Tells you that money and people always talk about the U.S. dollar, right? Being inflated crazy. Yes, yes, it is. But every other country is way worse than us. So Bank of England, for instance, Bank of England just put their rates to 1%. That's the highest they've been in 13 years. 13 years. The Bank of England put their rates to 1%, the highest it's been in 13 years. Okay? Like people are, you know, it's the example of we're like the tallest midget at the circus. Right? Like it's like, yeah, we're bad, but everyone else is just as bad. You look at inflation across the world, it is even crazier than the United States. We have other countries that are 12%, 13%, 15% inflation right now, reported inflation. You know, the US is at, we just reported like just over 8%. Right? It is Absolutely crazy. Okay? So people talk about the US dollar's dead. Let's talk US dollar for a second. The dollar's dead. No one will like the dollar. The Fed has made the greatest product on planet Earth. It's the US dollar. The greatest export of the United States is US dollars. They export them like crazy, right? We print trillions of them and people work 90 hours a week. They kill people. They murder. They steal for what? US dollars. It's the greatest product ever invented known to man. Additionally, we have made debt. Okay? So we print our own dollars. We then get debt from other countries. And guess what? They have to pay that money back. Guess what in? Not euros, not yen. They pay it back in US dollars. What does that give us? That gives us huge amounts of demand for US dollars. Okay? So people always talk about the national debt's crazy. It's all in US dollars. Okay? They have to pay it back in our currency. Additionally, since Bretton Woods after World War II, all the United Nations got together and they set a treaty. The US was pretty much the only government on planet Earth to have a navy. You know, everyone was decimated after World War II. We said, hey, we have a navy. It's expensive to have a navy. How about this? We, the United States, will patrol the entire world. We'll be the world police and we'll keep waterways open. All you have to do is agree to trade with us and agree to use the U.S. dollar. And every country said, really? You'll pay the billions of dollars to do this? They said, we'll do it happily. Just have open trade routes with us and then use the U.S. dollars. And all these countries said, yeah, where do we sign up? That sounds amazing. Let's sign up. That'll be awesome. And we started, we went on the, that's when they call it the US Empire began after World War II. Currently, if you do any large business transaction on planet Earth, you have to do it in US dollars. If you're in Spain and doing a big business transaction to Brazil, it has to use US dollars through the SWIFT system. Okay? The SWIFT system does this. It changes those out, puts them into US dollars. The petrodollar, right? Large oil transactions all are done in US dollars. Okay? So it's happened for years. Again, it gives demand for US dollars. It's the greatest product on planet Earth. The Fed's real job, it's not to help the economy, inflation. That's all secondary. The job of the Fed is to protect its greatest export, which is US dollars. The Fed has to protect US dollars. That's their job. Now, curbing inflation, that's part of that job. Helping a strong economy, I said, that's all part of that job. But their core job is to protect the US dollar. So recently, I made a video a few weeks ago. We've had reports China is trying to get off the US dollar with oil. They talked to Saudi Arabia, said, hey, we want to buy oil in yuan. That is massive news. I talked about this a few weeks ago. Other countries trying to threaten the US dollar's dominance on planet Earth. I believe The U.S. would go to war over that. That's how important it is to protect the dollar. Now, obviously, China and Russia, those are they want to get off that system. They hate this system. They hate using U.S. dollars. Why do I have to? My currency isn't good enough. I've got to use U.S. dollars to go buy, you know, a billion dollars of oil out of Saudi Arabia. This is terrible. Obviously, they're going to threaten that and push back on that. I believe. This is— you see the economic plays around the Russia-Ukraine situation. OK? Number 1, US took Russia off the SWIFT system. That's where SWIFT has become popular the last few weeks, right? People, everyone knows the SWIFT system all of a sudden, and it decimated the ruble. The Western world said, we're not going to trade with you anymore. This Bretton Woods deal we've had since World War II, we're going to take that away. We're going to see how you like that. Decimated the Russian economy. I personally think this was a play to show China. China looks like they were days away from invading Taiwan, it looked like, in my opinion. Now, I lived in Taiwan for 2 years. I love Taiwan. It's an amazing spot. China was very, very close to, I believe, invading Taiwan. In my opinion, this is me just armchair geopolitics, let's slap Russia as hard as we possibly can economically to show China, hey, if you want to invade Taiwan and do all these other things, We can do the same thing. We'll shut you off from the rest of the world. Exports is one of your biggest things in China's economy. We hold that much power economically. And typically, Ray Dalio, you know, his World Changing Order book talks about this a ton, is typically there's economic wars long before there are physical and real wars. Usually a country gets economically squeezed long before it ever goes to war. You look at Japan. Japan, the reason they entered World War II like they did They were economically squeezed. They couldn't get imports. I mean, there was a lot because they're an island nation. They didn't have all this stuff. And they said, we need to expand our nation. A lot of times, anyways, this happens. You usually have economic wars long before physical wars. And a lot of times economic wars happen just as a result of that and actually resolves before guns are ever fired, actually resolves conflicts. I mean, we saw the trade war with Trump, right? That was inevitable. I don't care the politician or the place. It's funny. I listened to a— there's a guy named Peter Zeihan. Fantastic. I love his books. Write his name down. He wrote a book called The Accidental Superpower. Now, this book was recommended to me by a good mentor of mine. This guy's worth probably half a billion dollars. He said, Bridger, he sat me down for like 20 minutes. He told me, explained this book to me. He says, you have to read this book. This guy's a macroeconomist. He goes through geography and why superpowers act the way they do. So The Accidental Superpower was written I think in 2013. Half of the book is on old superpowers, how superpowers were in the past. And the other half of the book is on his predictions for the next superpowers. He predicts essentially a trade war with China. He says it's inevitable. I don't care who the politician is, whatever. We are going to enter a trade war with China. And because of the economic strains in the U.S. anyways, he positions the U.S. really well. Peter Zeihan is his name for people in the chat. He has a new book dropping. He had another book drop called Disunited Nations, kind of an updated version of his book in 2020. I love that book. And he's dropping another book in 3 or 4 weeks here on kind of updated stuff. He's anyways an incredible economist that I follow, really cool guy. But anyways, he mentioned this whole construct, right, of economic wars long before there's physical wars. So we're seeing this economic push right now. Now, how does this all play into crypto? Where's my crypto people at? Say what's up in the chat. All my crypto people. Okay, let's talk about crypto for a second. Crypto is taking a massive fall. Now, we just launched a crypto fund. Okay? Our crypto fund is— we actually were calling capital right now into our fund, and we've done very, very well. We raised a bunch of money, and we're excited to deploy. Perfect time to deploy. And actually, we've been holding off. All my partners were like, we are going to see a huge correction in crypto. They were predicting, you know, about $27,000 Bitcoin. We are there right now. And that now we can go lower and go higher. I'm not telling you to buy or not buy, but Not financial advice, but really cool time. Now, last week, we saw depegging of Luna, UST, and we saw Tether actually get a little depegged. 2 algorithmic stablecoins, just so you guys are aware, those are different than just normal stablecoins, but algorithmic stablecoins. That whole thing was wild, by the way. Now, if you guys saw, it's not confirmed, but it looks like Citadel and BlackRock is the 2 alleged people. We don't know, but it was a big group. Came in and went to Do Kwon. Do Kwon, this is algorithmic stablecoin, so he has a treasury behind his stablecoin. They were traditionally buying Bitcoins and other types of products like that to back their stablecoin pegged at $1. They came in and said, hey, they borrowed a bunch of Bitcoins. The alleged— I'll give you the numbers. The alleged amount is 100,000 Bitcoins they borrowed. They then went to Do Kwon and said, hey, we'll sell you 25,000 Bitcoins at a discount. We need to get these off our balance sheet. Can you buy them? Let's say they're trading at $36,000. We'll sell them to you for $34,000. Do Kwon says, awesome. At the same time, they went and bought up a lot of UST. They used their other borrowed amount of Bitcoins to buy UST. Do Kwon says, great. Yeah, I'll buy some. The moment he bought, he has to take liquidity out of his treasury to go buy these Bitcoins. The moment he buys these Bitcoins, Whoever it was, Citadel, BlackRock, maybe we don't know the person, but that's alleged who it was, dumps all the positions. They dumped all of UST and all of Bitcoin at the same time, dropping both of them, depegging UST, and then causing a flurry of investors to downsell that market, all while they had a large short position on Luna and Anchor Protocol. Crazy. That is Wall Street, like, crazy story. Now, I don't know if that's 100% true. That's the alleged. Again, we don't. We have no one's confirmed that story. We have. We do have confirmations, though, of those bitcoins being borrowed and dumped to Doquan. We don't know who did it, but it was a coordinated attack on UST, which is just wild. Okay, that's big boy. That's big boy stuff right there. By the way, this is very similar to George Soros and the Bank of England. Have you guys ever heard that story? George Soros did a similar thing to the Bank of England. He essentially took out a huge position, went to the Bank of England, devalued their currency, and made $4 billion over a weekend doing that. You go look it up. It's called George Soros versus the Bank of England. It's back in the '90s. Crazy story. Anyway, it's pretty fun. So crypto right now, obviously, we've seen Bitcoin, I think right now is trading around $29,000, $30,000. Obviously, there's no resistance around $30,000. It's been dipping well below. We had a flash crash down to $27,000. I think even 20. I think even touched 26. So just wild. Okay. You know, I could see crypto going even further down, right? Which is okay. I if you're a believer in blockchain technology, and now right now we have what's called the Gartner hype cycle. Have you guys? I'm gonna share my screen right now and share this with you guys. Gartner hype cycle. This is where we're at with NFTs, with everything. Okay. Let me pull it up here. Perfect. There we go. So this is the Gartner hype cycle, and this is just me pulling this up on the old— there you go. Can you guys see that? Okay. So right here, we have what they call technology trigger. Sorry for people on this call. You guys won't see it, but you can follow my hands. Technology trigger. Okay? You have this cool thing like NFTs or crypto. They call this the hype cycle. So it gets hyped up. NFTs are in this right now. It gets hyped up like crazy. And then what they call is the peak of inflated expectations. What happens next is what they— it's down this downward slope into what they call the trough of disillusionment. NFTs are going through this right now. Right? It's being pulled away. Man, what even are NFTs? Why did we ever buy these? Why did we think these were so cool? Right? And then what happens? It hits a trough of disillusionment, and then it comes back up to, they call it the slope of enlightenment where actually, okay, this is good technology, but Then it comes to what they call the plateau of productivity. We saw this with the dot-com bubble. 1990s, we had this, anything around the internet with a dot-com name was just like crazy, right? Took off, crazy stuff. There was a peak. We had the dot-com bubble. It went down. And then we had, okay, you know what? The internet is actually a good technology. There's good stuff. We just need to find, you know, 90% of those companies went away, but the 10% that stayed were actually really good. And what led to the plateau of productivity. This long-term, it's like, oh, the internet's actually really cool. Okay? This happened with cell phones. It's happened, I mean, computers. I mean, it's happened with every single new, let's call it technology that's come out. Huge hype, drop, and then plateau of productivity. NFTs are seeing this right now. So I believe, I still, I'm a believer in NFTs long-term, utility-based NFTs, NFTs that make sense. They're not just backed by random crap with a picture of a dog on a coin on it, right? Same thing happened with the dot-com bubble. There's actually a lot of incredible companies that were built out of a crash. We had companies— PayPal was built out of the dot-com bubble crash. Facebook had, you know, out of the Great Recession— sorry, it was built out of the dot-com crash and then the Great Recession happened and that spurred it on to huge growth, right? A lot of amazing companies, Uber was built out of a crash, come out of market crashes, market corrections. So Don't put yourself away. Don't say, oh man, I can never do crypto. I can never do this. We are hitting a great time to get into smart plays that— and think, this is the way I think about it. I want to invest in things that will hit that plateau of productivity, coins that have, or projects that have utility behind them. Let me give you a few examples. So for instance, there's a coin last year. It did us— excuse me, a blockchain with a coin on top of it, But the blockchain helped manage Walmart's supply chain. They saved Walmart something like $250 million last year on supply chain. Their blockchain would track products from China moving across the sea and everything. Anyways, it saved them about $250 million. That's a utility-based coin. Same with NFTs, okay? NFTs, instead of just buying art NFTs, there's actually utility NFTs. Imagine a game where you have A video game where there's 100 fire swords, okay? And these fire swords are awesome and they're amazing. Let's say you own one of these fire swords. So you buy a fire sword, and now I can rent that fire sword out. So if you want to borrow this, maybe there's a big boss in this game that you want to beat, you can pay me half of an Ethereum, and I'll rent you the sword for 3 days. And you go fight everything. You do have this sword. And then after 3 days, it comes back to me because it's mine. There's only 100 of them. scarce. Okay? Utility NFTs are really cool. And I personally, I, in our fund at least, for any type of project we get into, we want to see 3 things. Number 1, a doxxed team. We can see their founders. We know their history. Number 2, a clear roadmap. You got to see a very clear roadmap on what's happening with them, what's happened in the past, and what's happening in the future. And then number 3 is utility. It's got to have some real-world utility to it. It's got to have something behind it that makes Actual sense as a blockchain being built. It's not just hype or whatever. Back on the docs team too, it's got to be a team. They've got LinkedIn. They've got families. They've got they're not just anonymous bros out of Russia that you know you never heard of. They've got to have some type of utility on there. Does that kind of make sense? So that's in the crypto market right now. That's what we're seeing now. What I okay let's sorry I'm giving you all these economic data points to kind of kind of summarize here and then we can answer questions. I can stand for whatever and answer questions. Right now, we are in a recession. We already are in a recession. Well, it'll be officially announced next month or end of, let's see, end of June, or sorry, into early July. It'll be announced we're in a recession, but we're already in a recession. You need 2 quarters of economic decline. We already have one. We're in a second one right now, okay? Usually, the stock market is a very frontward-facing reaction to changes. Actually, sometimes it's a predictor, in some cases, not always, of what's going to happen usually 6 to 8 months right now. Because right now, most of us don't feel the effects of a recession. We're like, oh, things are fine. I think everything's good. We're good. What happens right now, a stock market could trigger this. So let's just, let me just walk you through the effects of a stock market crash that we're seeing right now. We are about to enter a bear market in the stock market. Okay? Almost a 20% drop. There's all these groups that have taken margin out on their their positions. So if I had $1 million of stock, I could borrow $500,000, $600,000. What do I do? I borrow that amount and I go buy real estate or I go buy a car or I go buy something else. Okay? When the stock market crashes, I get put into a margin call. I've got to pay that back or I've got to sell stock. Okay? What does this do? This makes me, I don't want to buy more real estate. I don't want to buy more cars. I don't want to buy anything else. Okay? Or it puts me into default. on those things. Now I don't have enough capital to pay my mortgage or repair things. Additionally, you have rising rates. So if I have adjustable-rate mortgages, my monthly payment went from $3,000 a month to $3,500 a month or $4,000 a month. And people that are on the margin start to default and foreclosures happen. Okay? Additionally, companies that were borrowing capital at free amounts to do R&D, to pay employees, they have debt. All of a sudden, those debts are now higher. Okay? This is the long-term debt cycle that gets paid back. Those debts either have to be repaid. And what does that do? It makes companies shrink their balance sheet. It makes them fire more employees. It makes them do less R&D, less production. It makes a less productive a society and it makes everyone pull back. Okay? And this trickles down to every job, every sector, everywhere. And right now, we have the most interlaced economy we've ever had on planet Earth. In the past, we've had disjointed things. Like the real estate market and the stock market weren't connected. Today, they are very connected because of the ease that you can get. You can have a house. We got a bunch of equity on it. Let's pull equity off that house and go invest in the stock market and vice versa. Okay? They are tied together. Additionally, people are doing that to put into consumer spending. Obviously slower. Slows down drastically. This doesn't happen right away, right? Right now, we are seeing the early effects of this, and I believe we're going to trickle into this. And some are saying— now, when I say recession, this doesn't mean the Great Recession. We've had recessions. We have recessions all the time. It's not a big deal. This could be a mild recession. It could be— I've seen some people online saying this is going to be the biggest, greatest, where, I mean, we're going to hit like a Great Depression level. I've seen some people say that. Some people are like, hey, it's going to flatline, whatever. I don't know the answer to that, where we'll be, but we are definitely headed into economic slowdown. Now, 2 things might happen. Number one, we just have slower economic decline, and this could— raising rates could taper inflation. They are— the Fed is pulling back starting June at about— is it— I think it's $60 or $80. Correct me on the chat. I think it's— I think it's $60. I'll just say the lower number, $60 billion a month. They are slowing on buybacks. So they're actually going to take $60 billion a month out of the market. Okay, through their bond markets. Okay, it's one of the levers the Fed can pull. They're going to take that away. That's going to slow down the velocity of money, and this just everything slows down. Now the worst case scenario looking forward is this. Now if we have okay, we had high inflation. Awesome. Not awesome, but we we hope we slow down our economy. Hopefully it slows down inflation. The worst scenario is though is we hit stagflation. Stagflation is a slowing economy, which we already have, but still rising inflation. Now, if the Biden administration does what they want to do and they tax corporations, like I mentioned like 5 minutes ago, they tax corporations, they give that money to spenders who go spend and put demand even higher, that puts inflation even higher, and corporations have less money to spend on R&D to deflate products, it doubles inflation. That would cause economic slowdown and even higher inflation, which would be stagflation. Stagflation is one of the worst scenarios an economy can be in. If the Biden administration did that, I mean, it would be ultra stagflation. I mean, it would be— so imagine you're making less money every month, but gas prices are even going higher. They're $6, they're $7, they're $8, they're $9 a gallon. Groceries are jumping, right? That's the that's a world of stagflation. Very bad. So obviously the Fed right now they they they're raising raising rates hopefully to taper back inflation. They're pulling money off the table to slow this down again. Jerome Powell said, "Hey, we're gonna land the plane, but it might be a very rocky landing on the way down." Okay. Now what does this mean for us? Okay. So I mentioned these are economic data data points, and I anyways I'm an armchair economist. I'm not an official economist. I just like here. I just love studying this. I think it's so interesting. To study and look into. And it kind of shows you the future. You can kind of have probabilities around the future. What does this mean for us right now? Us as fund managers. I got the fund manager shirt on here from Fund Launch Live. Volatility like this benefits smart money managers. Right now, and maybe not today, but the next few months is the time to not get emotional. It's not the time to say, oh man, I'm losing my shirt. I'm getting emotional. It becomes usually the time to buy, to get into positions or markets. I heard a bunch of VC guys, we were talking and they were saying, we are so excited. We are optimistic because now we can do deals. All these VC deals, capital's almost stopped in the VC markets. Discounts happening, 30% to even 60% discounts on previous rounds. So if you raised a round at a $30 million valuation, all of a sudden you're at, you know, let's call it half of that. You're at a $15 million valuation all of a sudden. And all of a sudden, good investors can get in and get good deals and scoop up good opportunities. Okay? And so that's what we're seeing right now. And that's what can happen. So don't let this get to your soul. Look at products. This is discounted. Look at it as like a discount. Hopefully, you have enough dry powder. Again, what I'm going to say though is get your house in order. I've been saying this for months. You should always have your house in order. But if you are in higher leverage positions, Right? Obviously, you're going to feel those effects in the stock market. But if you're in a higher-levered position in real estate, we have not felt the real estate effects so far. I believe we're going to see at least a flattening, if not a slowdown in real estate. That's my probability is what I think. I think it's more probable we'll see a slowdown than an uptick. Right? Now it depends on the market. It depends on everything that's going on. But that's what I see. I would say get your house in order. Make sure you have enough capital and capital reserves to make good bets. right now when things are cheap, when things are ready to go. This is where it's funny, if you read any investing book, they talk about this, right? If you make smart plays over the next 12 months, you won't even have to make plays the next decade, right? There's this one fund manager, he's like, man, I don't do— he goes, people think I'm lazy or whatever. I don't do anything in these up crazy markets. And then when a down market happens, I work my butt off. I work 12 hours a day for a couple months. I make sure every deal is in place. I place all my capital. Then I just wait. You saw this happen with COVID right? COVID was a great example. Market took like a 40% downward spike. A lot of these lazy investors oftentimes beat the smart, hyperactive investors. They said, hey, this is a great time to buy. These are good companies. They have good revenue reports. I've wanted to get into this company for a while. All of a sudden, I got a 40% discount, 40% sale. I'm getting in, right? So anyways, pretty interesting. Okay, let's take questions here. Thoughts on China equities? Let's talk about the China dollar. People, I have a bunch of questions here. People asking me from you know Ray Dalio's book. Let's talk about that for a second. World Changing Order, fantastic book. He alludes the whole time that there is a reset happening. And actually, let's talk about the Fed made the craziest tweet yesterday. Okay, so I'm gonna pull this tweet right now. The craziest tweet I've ever seen from the Federal Reserve official Twitter account came yesterday. Let me pull it up here in a second. But first off, Ray Dalio's book talks about the rise and fall of a world reserve currency. And he says they last about 70 years. We had the Dutch Empire. We then had the British Empire. Now we're in the US Empire of currency. What happens during this lifecycle? And right now, we are about 70 years, 70, 80 years after World War II. And what happens is you have an inflation of a currency. You have a wealth gap divide. You have political unrest. And then there's usually a turning. If you read the book, The Fourth Turning, it talks about a turning where you move into a— whether— and Ray Dalio alludes to a new world reserve currency. Now in the book, he alludes to China being— and there's a rising superpower. That's obviously China. He goes, the rising power is China. He kind of alludes that the Chinese currency would take over. But he doesn't say it. He doesn't say this in the book. He just alludes to it. I personally just don't see that happening. Who wants to use the yuan? Who wants to have the world reserve currency controlled by Communist China? Think about the Western world, right? That currency that's been pegged to the dollar, it's been manipulated, it's been changed. They do crazy stuff. Who wants to use that as the world reserve currency? I don't know, as far as the majority of countries on planet Earth, nobody. Okay? So what will that change be? Okay? Here's a few probabilities. I'm actually going to pull this tweet right here. Let me pull it up. So, okay, here we go. In my opinion, either the Fed will try to do a— they're obviously going to try to hold onto the dollar for as long as they can. Okay? They have been talking about a digital reserve currency for a long time. And I mean, people have speculated on this, all that kind of stuff. They posted this yesterday. Okay, I'm going to share my screen. Here it is. Federal Reserve. Okay, they go, what is a central bank digital currency, CBDC? For more information, visit thefederalreserve.gov. Okay, they have a full post about it. It's a 3-part post. Let me show the thread here. Okay, while the Federal Reserve has made no decision on whether to pursue or implement a central bank digital currency, We have been exploring the potential benefits and risks of CBDCs from a variety of angles. They posted this on Twitter yesterday. Okay? Biden put out an executive order 2 months ago about signaling that we are going to research and look into doing a central bank digital currency, essentially having a Fed-backed Bitcoin or dollar, whatever it is. I believe this is, again, this is my predictions. I don't know if it's going to happen, but it is way too juicy to not have a central bank digital currency. I mean, if you're a central bank out there, you need a central bank digital currency. Right? Like think about the power you have. You can tax every transaction that happens in an economy, every transaction. And you can also, you can help with, you know, there's drug smuggling and trafficking. Most of that stuff is done in cash. People think it's happening on Bitcoin. And for sure, it sometimes does, but that's all traceable. You have a blockchain that tells you transactions. Cash is just cash. You can take cash and go do other stuff. It's one of the most private things you have is cash. As a central bank, you have so much control over tax revenue, controlling bad actors, and also, I mean, so anyways, they can control it, and there's a lot of things they could do. Also though, think about how scary this would be. If you're supposed to be locked down, okay, you're supposed to quarantine like they had us in COVID, and they said, hey, and let's say you have a digital wallet, you get paid on that digital wallet, You buy stuff on that digital wallet. It's all virtual right on your phone. And they say, hey, Bridger, you're supposed to quarantine. Your digital wallet does not work outside of a 2-mile radius of your home or a 5-mile radius of your home. They can just shut you off. If you are on the FBI's most wanted list, they can just shut you off. Right? If you're whatever, they can just shut you off from all capital forever. I mean, pretty crazy. Now, China already has a digital currency. Dubai has looked at it. Bank of England has already signaled that they're going to move towards a digital currency. It is too juicy not to do. A digital currency is too— it's inevitable. It is inevitable. My prediction is that the Fed, they're trying to taper inflation. We got dollar, all this stuff. They're going to have a global reset If you want to call it a currency reset to a US digital dollar. I just think it's too juicy not to. You have the 70-year cycle. I think they're going to try to reset the world reserve currency through, and they're going to reset the SWIFT system and reset everything through a digital currency. Why do I think that? A few things. Number one, Ripple, okay? XRP. XRP came out, I think, in 2017, one of the best blockchains ever created, so efficient, it would allow large transactions to happen all over the world in split-second time. It essentially replaced the SWIFT system, and what happens when you threaten the greatest export the Federal Reserve ever has? You get put into court and litigation. Ripple has been in litigation for years and years and years, and I see every day I see you guys posting, man, Ripple is gonna just two more months and there I think it's gonna end. Ripple's gonna hit a dollar. Like, dude, they're not they're not releasing Ripple until they have. Their own version of it set up. Now, I think the Fed could just buy Ripple and just buy it. Just get it over with. Buy Ripple. Take their technology. Let's use it or copy them and bring their whole staff and build your own. Um, and, uh, anyways, I— it is happening. I, I've got really close friends at huge, um, tech companies in Silicon Valley on their board and everything like that, uh, signaling to me that the Fed has approached them and asked them to help develop the technology behind doing this, which is kind of cool. I think it's inevitable. I think it's happening now. I don't know the timeline. I don't know when that's going to happen anyways, but I think that would be the reset of the dollar into a digital currency. Now, the Fed is going to fight tooth and nail to keep the US dollar as the world reserve currency. They may succeed, they may not, but I think a crypto-based currency, whether it's the US dollar type of Fed coin or it's another coin, I think is inevitable to become the world reserve currency. So anyways, kind of interesting. That's my probabilities. I'm playing probabilities. Central bankers, it is too juicy not to do. I just do not see them staying with the current system over the next decade. I just don't see it happening. Now, what happens to crypto when that happens? All these major banks and players have all signaled they want to get into crypto, right? You've seen Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse have all signaled, we want to get into crypto. Our clients want to get into crypto, but they haven't done anything yet. Right? I believe they are waiting for the Federal Reserve currency, whatever you want to call it, to happen, and all of a sudden, it legitimizes cryptocurrencies. Now, you can go even a layer deeper that people have said, hey, the reason that Tether and these other stablecoins are getting depegged, it's the Fed trying to show the market, hey, don't trust other stablecoins, but trust our stablecoin whenever we announce it. Okay? And do that. Anyways, and I believe that'll bring it mainstream. All these institutions that have pent-up capital will flow into crypto. And when that happens, all boats rise like crazy in the crypto markets. Again, that's my probability of crypto. Right now, crypto's only like, what is it? $1.2 trillion? It's small. Crypto's less than the size of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. It's less than all those companies. Gold is like $11, $12 trillion. Crypto is $1.2 trillion. All of crypto. We are still, you guys are, we are still very, very early in crypto. It's unreal. And by the way, this is not to plug, but that's why we started a crypto fund. So we started a crypto fund. We are calling capital right now. We do, we have one more call tomorrow that we're doing for crypto. If you guys want to come on that call, it's a private Zoom call. We're going to walk through the fund, how it works, how the whole fund works. If you head over to my Instagram, Bridger_Pennington, there's like 100 fake accounts, but Bridger_Pennington, just send me a DM. Hey, I want to come to that. I want to come to that call. And we'll send you the link. You got to like register for it, and you can come on. It's 9:30 AM Mountain Standard Time. So it's 11:30 AM Eastern. We're going to do a call for about 45 minutes, and you guys can hear what our fund is, how we're doing, all that kind of stuff. So anyways, I think that's going to happen. I think it's too juicy not to do. Bridger, no way the Fed would do that. They've done it before. They did this. The US government did this back in 1934. They outlawed gold bullion. Gold bullion, gold bars were outlawed. You had to, they had like 18 months or 2 years, you had to come in and turn in your gold bar, and they would give you US dollar cash, you know, their currency in replace of it. There was a spot price. It was after that time period, it was illegal to hold gold bars, gold bullion. Now you could have like a gold watch or a gold necklace, but actually gold bullion, Illegal. They outlawed it. I think a similar thing could happen here very soon. Okay? Yeah. Let's look at some other questions here. You guys have got me on just tangents today. It's been pretty fun. Okay. Yeah, dude. It's people— yeah, I thank you for this comment, M Sway. People want to seem smart by repeating that US dollar has no value. US dollar's got lots of value right now. Because look at the markets. Guess what people are doing? When they sell out of the market, what are they doing? They're not buying. Gold is almost flat. It's gone up a little bit. Silver's almost flat. It was even down last week. What are they doing? They're hoarding dollars. U.S. dollar is alive and well, people. Now down the road, it can change, all that stuff. But right now, everyone's like, the U.S. dollar's dead. Then why do you keep buying it? People are selling equities and buying the U.S. dollar. That's what they're doing right now in trillions of dollars. And then they're taking that dollar and they're repaying debt all back in US dollars. It's all, I mean, it's still alive and well. Do you think China will dethrone the US as a global superpower? Again, I think it would come to a major economic war or major, major just world war before that happened. China has risen. And maybe, again, Totally could happen. I think there would be a lot of bloodshed before that happened. I don't think people, I don't think countries, other countries will willingly go just sign up to be with China. It's not like they're this white knight, golden, amazing country called China that everyone wants to flow to. I think most countries, or maybe they don't like the United States, but they hate China way worse. Right? It's like, again, we're the tallest midget at the circus, but we're still the tallest. Right? We're bad, but everyone else is just as bad. Top, top of the morning. What's up? Okay, let's look on here. The Fed will 100% do it, I believe. By the way, the Fed is a private organization. Do you guys know that? It's a private entity. It's not government. The Fed is a private entity run by the 12 largest banks on planet Earth. And now the chairman of the Fed is nominated by the president and confirmed by Congress, but Besides that, it is a private company held by the 12 largest banks on planet Earth. Okay? Again, think about the great— that's the greatest business model ever. Right? It's like, hey, we're going to start a company, us. All right. Here, we're going to start a company and we're going to print money for the world reserve currency. Like think about a better business model than that, man. That is like, I mean, Rockefellers, you know, you look at the, excuse me, the Rothschilds, they have the similar concept. I mean, that's the greatest business model ever is like, let's create the world reserve currency and print money for them. That's our job. Let's print the money. That's pretty cool. Okay. Do you think the Fed will get into NFTs? You know, I have no idea. I think it's too far out. I think they'll start with a digital currency. I think NFTs, people are like, NFT everything. Like it's, I think I like the idea of NFTs. I hate like the craze around NFTs though. Again, I think we're in that trough of, we're going to head into that trough of disillusionment right now. And we'll have plateau of productivity. I think utility-based NFTs are fantastic. Hey, I'm at a country club membership. I have an NFT to prove that I'm in a country club membership. Or I got a season pass to Six Flags and I have an NFT that shows me that. That's more utility-based. Ownership-based, just random art, art NFTs, I think are— yes, Bored Ape Yacht Club has done a great job and all these other ones that like they've made it like a Rolex, like it's a status thing. But 99% of those projects have no value at all. Just by being there and having cool art, there's no value. I think we're going to hit this trough of disillusionment. But then we'll hit a plateau of productivity. Sure, eventually I think they can get into it. Kind of like the internet. For sure, eventually they'll get into it. But I think it'll be a long time. Yeah. Like the social credit system. Yeah. If you guys don't know what that is, that's pretty interesting where they can, they literally have facial ID. This is right now in China. They have facial ID. They track you. If you jaywalk, if you do something wrong in society, they can deduct your credit score. And even, they can even stop you from using public. You can't use the, you can't ride the train anymore. You can't get a loan anymore. I mean they can literally, it's like a social credit score done by facial ID on everybody. And don't think the U.S. doesn't have that. So just so you guys are aware, I came back from Mexico. It's like 6 months ago. No, it was a year and a half ago I came back from Mexico. Flew in. coming through customs. We walk up to the counter, me and my wife. And the guy goes, hi, Bridger. Hi, Lauren. And we go, hello. Do we know each other? Like, and he goes, oh no. No. I just, can I see your IDs? And I'm like, I go, hold on. How'd you know who we were? And he goes, oh, we have facial ID everywhere. We know you guys. I was like, huh? This is at San Francisco Airport, SFO, coming through customs back in the United States. They had facial ID on me. They knew my face. I don't know, man. I don't know if I ever gave them my face, but it's right here. It's probably on YouTube, man. They came and grabbed it from YouTube and put it on their systems. Freaking YouTube, man. Yeah. Okay. Cool. The Federal Reserve are owned by the 12 families that created it. Yes. On Jekyll Island, which are the 12 largest banks. And they appoint members to go and be there. Okay. All right. That's my rant for today. You guys are awesome. If you guys want to learn, some people, if you want to come over to my Instagram and want to join that call tomorrow morning, we're going to walk through our entire crypto fund, how it's set up, how— this is our final call we're doing. We're not doing any more calls. It's the final call we're doing. Minimum investment is $500,000 into our fund. To join our fund. Now we have had a few family and friend spots open up at like $100,000 or $250,000, but for outside people, it's a it's $500,000 minimum commitment. Just you guys are aware. So don't show up. You know, anyways, we're we're a big boy hedge fund. So okay, y'all are amazing. Have a great day. Let me know what you guys think on all this kind of stuff. I think it's fun to study. We yeah, we got an interesting time. It's a it's a time to. To get into economics, into markets right now. If you make good plays over the next 6 months, man, you are set up for a long time. This is when the money is made. Study and then anyways, that's why I keep a sharp eye on what's going on because you can make a boatload of cash if you do it right. Right? Okay. Y'all are awesome.