Why 2026 Could Change Everything

I already intro'd him, but I'll intro him one more time. Led a $3 billion capital investment at AAA, has his MBA from Chicago Booth School of Business, and also is a managing director at Fund Launch Partners. We actually have multiple— we work in the same office now. You're here with us. Pretty fun.

So nice.

Welcome on, Trent. Good to have you here.

Yeah, it's fun.

Yeah. Mic's working good. Feeling good? Good. All right, Trent, we're going to dive right in.

Let's do it.

The question for today is, how do you see 2026 and 2027 playing out? What are the biggest winners? What are the biggest losers? Where does your brain go? I mean, you've, you've thought about this, I'm sure, for many years. And it's fun to always come to the present moment. Everyone wants to ask the question, what's the crystal ball behind, you know, your brain right now? So walk us through, you can take it any direction you want.

There's a couple things that come to mind, and maybe I'll come back, I'll talk about AI second, but that I think is, everyone's talking about that. One of the other things that, um, I really think about a lot is how the market has evolved, particularly private markets. And the lack of liquidity. You see, you were talking earlier about the kind of standard, everybody from the Ivy League. It's a group of people that have all kind of received the same training and kind of got led into the secret of how to run private market businesses. Well, that groupthink has led people to invest in a certain way that has not done a good job of giving people their returns back. for the last 5 to 10 years. And it's really upset a lot of investors, big investors, as well as small investors. So, I think there's going to be a real opportunity for people in this kind of '26, '27 period, for people who think differently and know how to execute really interesting business plans that can return capital faster, because that's a real sensitivity in the market.

I totally agree. You see these— I mean, well, COVID was interesting. which made a lot of funds say, we're extending our timelines on liquidity, because there was no liquidity. And then you saw just markdowns happen. I mean, you saw, call it a recession or not, however definitions can get moved, but '22 and '23, even 2024, you saw quite a repricing of a lot of assets.

Yeah.

And so then these funds are going, well, so think of a, I'm going to name Sequoia or just any venture capital, these are large funds. We've already been in this for 7 or 8 years. The market's tipped a lot down. Let's wait another 2 years.

Yeah.

And so you have investors going, man, okay, it's already been— I was thinking it was going to be like 6 years. It's gone to 8, and now it's going to be pushed to 10. These previously— these private market funds are on a liquidity crunch. They got to exit at some point.

Yeah.

And maybe they're going to hit it just right right now. You see a lot of companies thinking about IPOing here, a lot of M&A activity at least heating up for 2026. So you're saying liquidity is going to be a big push and new managers that can offer liquidity. Those old investors are going, man, I guess that it kind of worked out, but it was 11 years in one of my Sequoia funds. I might want to go somewhere else that has a faster turn of capital.

Yeah. It's really fascinating. The trend we're seeing at Fund Launch Partners is there's a good number of managers who their strategies that have really been able to raise capital and resonate, are people that are focused on faster capital velocity and faster return. I look at— you talk about all those markdowns in my AAA portfolio on the private market side, which was about $2 billion of what I managed there. Our underwriting was highly focused on the speed to generate returns. How quick do we take the risk off by getting the money back? And when You had the flat time before COVID you had the bust from COVID you had the boom from COVID All 3 scenarios, really different market conditions, didn't affect our portfolio negatively because of that liquidity focus. So, it's a real good risk management tool.

Yeah. Now, walk me through just public markets. What do you think? Are we still going to see a historic rally, do you think? Do you think we're going to see an AI bubble pop? Do you think we're going to see Commodities take off? Like, I mean, we saw gold and silver have huge rallies last year. Is that going to continue? What do you think?

Yeah. Well, it's a very good question. In fact, you know, the $3 billion in capital at AAA is actually more like $4.5 billion because I did manage almost $2 billion in public equities and just under $1 billion in public debt. But to be honest, it's not my favorite thing. I'm definitely better at private markets. And so, it's really hard, I think, to predict what will happen in public markets. That's why I like private markets because there's more control. What I can say is there is growing uncertainty and people in public markets in particular tend to follow or move in groups. And you just don't make money moving in groups. Now, moving away from the group creates risk because maybe you underperform, but it's your only chance to really outperform.

Yeah. Interesting. We talked yesterday. Do you want to hit this for a second?

Oh yeah, let's do. I think this is fascinating.

This is kind of interesting. So the last few, well, weeks, even this week, this has come heavy to light. This is the Monroe Doctrine. Can you make it full screen, Briggs, just so I can read this? So to set the stage, Monroe Doctrine comes from President James Monroe. This is the idea that the Western Hemisphere belongs to America.

Yes.

And at the time it was European countries should stop colonizing America. Now we see this with Venezuela, with Cuba, Colombia, especially Greenland, and a lot of people have been citing this about Donald Trump saying the Monroe Doctrine is back. We're saying there's 2 hemispheres here. We dominate this hemisphere. Get out of this hemisphere if you are not local here. So that sets the stage a little bit. How do you think about all those deals going on? You can take it any direction you want.

Well, one thing to recall about this is Monroe was our 5th president. This policy or this practice is about as old as the United States, and Teddy Roosevelt actually leaned into it even more, and his doctrine, his approach to the Monroe Doctrine was we can interfere not just by keeping other, you know, countries, other powers out of the Americas, but we can actually go in and affect the political outcomes in Latin American countries, which, you know, is very different from maybe what we've seen in the last 30 years, Or 20 years, but not that different for the long history of the United States. And what it does is it creates a really interesting market dynamic as the world deglobalizes.

So what do you think happens here? I mean, we had officials at the White House yesterday talking about Greenland.

Yeah.

Obviously Venezuela. And I have a slide, I think later, I don't know if I have it here, but the thing I appreciate the most about the whole Venezuela thing, and this is from me being just an American, right? I'm sure other people have way different perspectives, but we've had previous airstrikes and wars and they always talk about all these ancillary things and they never talk about oil. And Trump just said, he's like, no, we're taking the oil.

Yeah.

Like you just, you gotta appreciate the transparency of how that, like I've never seen a politician so transparent about, yeah, we're taking the oil, we're sending in Chevron, BP, we are gonna drill this oil, we're gonna split the profits with Venezuela and ourselves, and we're gonna, now dominate the largest oil reserves on earth. I think actually I have a— maybe I'll pull that slide up here as you—

Yeah, let me speak to this as you do that and give you some perspective. I probably have a more unique perspective than most people because I did not grow up in the United States. I actually grew up in Latin America. In fact, my dad worked extensively in Venezuela. I spent a lot of years in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Also lived in Ecuador and Argentina, moved to the US as a teenager. This will hark back to, if you know the name Manuel Noriega, the US went in and he was a corrupt leader of a Central American country, and there was some involvement with drugs with him, and the US went in and basically extracted him, very similar to this. I was at a play in Ecuador with my family, and there started an impromptu rally of people—

Mm-hmm.

came up and it got a little scary. People were really upset. Very different from the reaction of the Venezuelan people and people around Latin America with this, you know, this kind of current run of it where the emotion was very, very positive. And I get a lot of input from my Latin American friends. They think this is a good thing because of how corrupt the government was there.

That's what I've heard as well. I mean, this is just anecdotally, but anyway, I know a number of people that have lived in Venezuela that live here now or other places, ecstatic about what's going on.

Yeah.

Here's my slide though, if you want to show this. This is just interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts. So from George Bush, we're protecting Kuwait, not chasing oil. We'll bring freedom to Iraq. We don't need the oil. We're invading Venezuela for oil. They stole our oil. Which I just— you gotta love the transparency. Uh, and then Trump actually tweeted about this, how many, you know, millions barrels of high-quality oil that they're going to be, you know, having the United States. They just straight up transparent. And this is one more slide on just oil reserves here. You see Saudi Arabia, and then Venezuela's oil at the top. This is crude oil reserves and then exports. Saudi Arabia is actually exporting quite a bit, and currently Venezuela is not doing much with it. A lot of opportunity. Yeah.

This is in my mind where going into the details really matters. You think about the oil markets, and we all just think, oh, a barrel of oil is a barrel of oil. That is absolutely not true. You think Middle Eastern oil and and in particular, West Texas light crude. That's the best stuff because it takes the least refining. Venezuela is known for probably the most difficult oil to refine. It's heavy, it's sticky, it's not liquid, it's kind of this goop. And it means that very high technology is needed to do it.

Mm-hmm.

As they— when they nationalized the US oil assets, It created a big problem because Venezuela internally did not have the technical expertise to really exploit those resources. So it really impoverished the country. And the US is one of only a handful of countries in the world that actually knows how, has the engineering expertise to leverage those massive oil reserves, which can benefit our country, but their country as well.

Yeah. And we'll, again, we'll see how it all plays out, but that seemingly is very, yeah, pretty interesting. I didn't know that about the, how hard it was to refine Venezuelan oil. Yeah.

Most refineries can't even take it. In fact, the US refining system in the Gulf Coast was built specifically to refine Venezuelan crude, and there are very few other refineries in the world that can do it.

Wow. Well, and this is more of an opinion. I believe this also sends massive signals to the rest of the world. Well, number one, it was Chinese military assets that defended Venezuela that didn't do much. So if you're a BRICS nation and you're buying Chinese military equipment, you go, oh crap, are these anti-missile defense systems— radar detection doesn't really work, at least it didn't work last weekend, and they took the president. So I think you're on high alert.

Yes.

Secondly, if Trump is negotiating with Russia, Russia's number one product is oil, and Europe buys a lot of oil from Russia. They tried to cut that off. There's Nord Stream 2 pipeline got blown up, etc. But Now Trump goes and negotiates and says, hey, Putin, we have one of the largest oil reserves on Earth, and we have Saudi Arabia as a more secure ally. They've done a few more deals since. So we have the 2 largest oil reserves on Earth together. We don't need you anymore. If we want to, we'll keep making this war just really hard for you, and also your entire economy will die.

Yes.

And also, we could flood the world with cheap oil. If we wanted to, we can just— we'll take dollar cost per barrel way down so that your economy dies, or you can come negotiate with us and end this war. I think there's a chance this is a huge negotiating piece that ends the Russia-Ukraine war in 2026.

It's a massive— I mean, you mentioned that as an opinion, and maybe there's some opinion mixed in there, but there's a lot of fact. The US is completely self-sufficient energy-wise now. which means it has the ability to do flooding of the market and change global economic landscape. You look at how it affected political speech and political posturing. The president of Colombia is the best example, I think, of this, where before we went into Venezuela, there was a lot of negative talk. As soon as things went down, all of a sudden the message was, let's work together.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, pretty, uh, yeah, we'll see how it plays out. But a huge thing that happened for the United States and Venezuela people.

Yes.

I think, and Latin America.

No, one of my, my favorite, favorite boss, the best boss I ever had was Venezuelan, and he would tell me stories of walking in the street there and like fleeing, like literally running for his life. Yeah, um, it was— and I'm excited for that to change.

Pretty interesting. I mean, since we're on this topic, let's hit one more, which is Greenland. Do you want to share my screen here? So A lot of talk around Greenland right now, Denmark and the EU pushing back. I saw a comedian a few nights ago, he was talking to a crowd and he's like, they shouldn't take Greenland. And he's like, what are you guys going to do? Write a strongly worded letter to the most powerful military on earth that they don't want it? And anyways, you can argue the ethics of this whole thing, but it looks like there's only about 35,000 people that live in Greenland.

Yeah.

A $5 billion purchase price gives each person a significant amount of money. If you did $50 billion, I think it's a million per person. Is that right? Did I do the math correctly? That's interesting to look at these maps. So wondering about strategic assets, Greenland is very close to Russia and all these other assets here. The world gets really close over the North Pole.

Yes, it does.

You can see shipping lanes here. This blue line is a proposed future transarctic shipping route as ice caps melt and shipping lanes open up and/or they create new shipping lanes. You can see here, but this is a very significant passageway. You can obviously tell from strategic assets, furthermore rare earth minerals. I wonder if a deal gets struck here. Any thoughts on Greenland?

Several. One is from a military perspective, I think that's probably the biggest driver of interest. I think there's an economic side too, when you think about rare earth metals and some discussion about that. But the Cold War was a long time ago, but I'm old enough to remember when the Berlin Wall Wall fell, and the missile launches—if you think about U.S. to Russia—those happen over the poles. And so Greenland is perfectly positioned to be defensive in a world where Russia is destabilized and control of these Cold War assets may not be as secure as we would like. The other thing is, this reminds me of the the Falkland Islands in Argentina, but in an adverse case where Argentina had. this asset really close to them, this island that they wanted to control, but it was controlled by a European power. And they ended up fighting a war against the British who controlled it. And it did not go well because British was the greater power. If it got to a situation like that, the world didn't care. No one but Argentina and the UK cared about that. And in this case, it'll probably be somewhat similar. I don't anticipate military. action, but if there was, this has the opposite outcome in my mind of the Falklands.

Yeah. I mean, I don't see it for— I think it's posturing a little bit. I don't see us going to war against NATO over Greenland. No way. But I do see some negotiation and some chips there. And we'll see how the things fall. Last, I guess, last one on just world things. Iran protests have been drastic, especially this week. I mean, last night they closed all the airspace over Iran. A lot of people thought there'd be— I made a post last night that there might be missile strikes. We'll see. You can see Trump's been posting about it. What's interesting about this whole thing as well, we've seen uprisings in places before, but when you see a currency collapse like what has happened the last 2 weeks, I mean, it's— what else do you do than protest and overthrow a government? You see, and I hope you can see this on the screen, but Iran's currency completely has collapsed. When that happens, it's— You're usually in the endgame.

Their banking system has collapsed, and I think that's driven the currency collapse. And this is a population that is very, very different from the historical Middle East. I actually, one of my classmates before I moved back to the US when I lived in Ecuador was Iranian. You know, this is a world that we really don't understand from the US perspective, but it was largely a Christian country, and it has a very, very different history than what we perceive. We lump it in with Saudi Arabia and Iraq. There's a reason why they don't get along with Iran. Yeah.

Well said. Tie this back for us. And we got to keep moving on here. So tie these, you see a lot of geopolitical events, action from the United States. How do you at least interpret that and then bring it back to markets, money, investment funds, et cetera?

Yeah. When I think about that from an asset management standpoint, as an investor, where would I put my capital? How would I manage my portfolios? I think about destabilization as a major ongoing factor, which will lead to regionalization. Since Bretton Woods and the end of World War II, we've had a very globalized economy with a single power kind of dictating how trade worked. And it looks like, especially with the posturing of the Trump administration, but just generally across the world, Regional economies are rising, and I think COVID really jump-started that because people saw that it's not good to manufacture all your components, all your inputs across seas where the supply chain is very extended. So anything that leverages that concept of building local infrastructure, local manufacturing, and it doesn't have to be high tech. You know, the the need for like plumbers and cement. Pouring cement and wiring electrical to build out these high-tech AI-driven manufacturing plants, that's going to capture a ton of the value.

Yeah. Deglobalization. I mean, let's actually share my screen for a second. I'll go back to this. We talked about this yesterday. You see these, a lot of investment in the United States right now. So for example, here's one. This is AWS is building a $10 billion plant in Mississippi. Which $10 billion is a lot of money. Now in the scope, sometimes we just graze over, oh, $10 billion or whatever. But that's a lot of money. I did a little research here. You can see how this affects Mississippi. Estimated cost, non-IT construction. So non, like very highly technical, is about $8.8 billion that'll hit this local economy in a pretty small town in Mississippi. Just what you talked about.

Yeah.

So you're seeing deglobalization, people onshoring to the United States.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, if I go back here right now, $9.6 trillion with a T, trillion dollars is committed to the United States. If, uh, you know, $9.6 trillion, this is just $10 billion of that, which is just a drop in the bucket. If I, I did a little math here, $10 billion is $0.01 trillion. We have $9.59 trillion left after this project. And to your point, if you or me launched an investment fund or had something and you were a— let's just not even say a fund. You just had a construction business in this area. There's $8.8 billion of work that needs to be done on this data center.

Just in that neighborhood.

Just in that neighborhood. Yes. Think about the other $9.59 trillion that needs to be invested over the next couple years.

Yeah. So people can do that systematically and consistently deploy capital into those opportunities. where an investor can say, hey, I know what this is going to do and how it's going to do it, I think you have a really good runway to build investment businesses.

Yeah, very well said. Let's— actually, I was going to share these slides with you, but I want your feedback on this. Okay. I have a few things. And by the way, Trent, by the way, I'm not that short. I am 5'11. Everyone's looking at the screen right now. Bridger, super short.

How tall are you? 6'2.

You're not 6'2. Yeah. Okay. Tell 'em you're 6'4. I look like I'm 5'4 right now.

Maybe I'm 6'2, 6'3.

So I'm 5'11 and a half, almost 6'. All right. I'm going to, I had some slides queued up and I wanted to just, this is more walking through a bear case, bull case for '26, '27 and just opine where you see fit. So share my slides here.

You're a bull, aren't you?

We'll see.

Okay.

We'll see how I play out, but yes. Bear case for '26. We've seen the Fear/Greed Index hit extreme fear or deep fear for a long time, last few months. I mean, this is October, November, even December hitting extreme fear. You saw people like Michael Burry putting famous shorts out, other things like this. Shiller PE ratio at a very high rate at 40 right now. Usually this is price-to-earnings ratio. So people, a lot of people point to this as like, hey, we are overpriced as a market, which is a very good point. Usually before, you know, dot-com bubble, you've got other eras things have collapsed when we've hit a high P/E Shiller ratio.

Can we comment on that just briefly? I agree that that's a very good indicator, but you also have to remember that the composition of benchmarks changes, and the S&P 500 is more service and more tech than it's ever been, and those tend to trade at higher ratios because they don't have these fixed assets that drag down their financial ratios. So, you know, there's a case to say, hey, that indicator doesn't mean what it used to mean.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, yes, well put. We'll keep moving here, but yes, very well put. A lot of people point to this, which this is the— and make this big for me, Briggs. This is the circle investment of all these AI companies. So you see, we could probably talk for an hour about this. We won't, but this is—

I was thinking about this last night.

Nvidia invests into OpenAI that then invests into Microsoft, which then invests into Nvidia. And you see this, these, and it makes all their evaluations go up because they announce these huge deals and it's really just circling money around. So people say, hey, this is a bubble. Any comment on this?

Yes, 2 comments, and I'll just make them really quick because I know we're moving here. But one, the whole idea that anything that says AI at the end wins is very similar to what happened in '98 to 2000, where anything that had an E or an I in front of it, anything that was internet won. And we saw that that didn't hold true. The argument against that is this picture of like the— but all the big boys are playing. And there I would point you to the GFC. where Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Washington Mutual all collapsed. And they were big boys. And all these financial companies were trading and building financial instruments that looked just like this picture to the point where even Goldman Sachs and Bank of America had to be bailed out by Warren Buffett.

So, do you then think we've got some frothiness here?

I think there's a big problem in this. I do. I think there's definitely going to be world-changing, decade-long improvements from AI, but I don't think it's as globalized. I think there's a lot of froth there that's going to have to work itself out.

Yeah, for sure. A lot of froth. The opposite opinion would say these are the most well-capitalized companies on earth. And with that though, they're not building mortgage bond pools. They're building the last invention humanity ever needs to create. which is AI, which is also needed for national defense. And China's doing the same thing. And so you see this imperative, you have the largest companies on Earth doing something that's the last invention humanity will ever need to create that is imperative for national defense of the United States. Now, is there frothiness? 100%. I go, wow, that's interesting.

It's so frontier that you don't know where the capital— you need years to figure out if the capital was in the right Yes. And that's, that's the argument against.

Yeah, much of that. Yeah, well put. We'll keep moving here. Um, bear cases again. This is the 35-year Fed funds rate. We are cutting rates currently. Usually you cut rates in a recession or during a recession. Uh, previous times, you can see these little gray bars here is during a recession. Really the last period was the '90s where we cut rates, didn't have a recession, had a new emerging technology, the internet coming out, personal computer. You actually— we went to a trade surplus under Clinton.

Yep.

There's a lot of— I like to look at the '90s as maybe there's a flash, you know, back to the future.

I have a little interesting insight on this one.

Yeah.

I sat down Sunday with a bond trader at one of the biggest bond trading houses in the world, and she was commenting on Trump's discussion of capping consumer credit card rates.

Yeah.

take on that was that shows you that even the government realizes that there is a problem in the credit markets and that if we don't address it, it will break. And that's a way of making debt more serviceable. So, I thought someone who's an expert is worried, maybe I should be too.

Yeah. No, 100%. Well, I've said this a couple of times too. Even though we're not in a recession, man, it sure feels— every business owner I talk to talks like we're in a recession. And one, I don't know if I have a number here, but We've just— one way to say it is we've had so much money printing. Yes, we didn't have a technical recession. The GDP still grew, but relative to inflation, you shrunk. And so there was this silent, quiet recession we almost had over since, I'll call it 2022 to 2024, that no one talks about.

We synthetically avoided it. And that means the technicals are still problematic.

Yes. I'm like, man, I think rate cuts are needed. I think we're in a quote unquote recession, even though GDP has been ballooning and being great and all these things that just, You know, when you talk to business owners, which we do every day, it doesn't feel like it.

Well, they feel the fundamentals.

Yep. On the Fed funds, and I know we're moving fast, we have a lot of data here. This is current prediction markets for where rates will fall this year. So we have a new Fed chair looking to come in in May. You can see the market pricing at a pretty, you know, cut down to about 3%. That's all they're really forecasting is a probability around 3% in the, you know, maybe June, July meetings. We'll see how that works going into it. We'll kind of see. There's a lot of uncertainty.

Very, very difficult.

They just got a grand, you know, a subpoena from Anyways, we could talk about that for an hour. All right. Bull case for 2026. Okay. That was more bearish stuff.

Yep.

Bull case for '26. We just printed a 4.3% GDP growth, 3.8% previous quarter. And then you can see the dip here and you can kind of see how we've done the last few years. Okay. 4.7%. A lot of people, some people put asterisks behind some of these anyways, which whatever party, the right or the left, will put an asterisk on anything. So Howard Ludnick, he references, he believes we're going to see a 5% GDP growth. In 2026. He's like, you're going to see a 5. He says, if we get rate cuts, we may see 6% GDP growth this year.

That's emerging economy type stuff.

Oh, 6% is at China at its peak with central planning all around it. And we were like, wow, that's crazy. 6% GDP.

Data that you're not sure you can believe.

Yes, 100%. I mean, to go down below, we just hit 4.3. Now, he mentioned in the video, he goes, we had to furlough a lot of employees. in December, which hurts GDP. So he goes, Q4 is not going to be good. He goes, by Q1, I think we could see a 5. Q2 for sure. If we get rate cuts, we'll see 6s by the end of— I mean, which is an absolute tsunami of economic growth in a country.

I mean, think about it this way. At least that's how I try to put it in perspective. This is an economy in the trillions of dollars. What would I do with 1% of that? 1% of trillions of dollars is a lot of capital, a lot of growth.

Well, and to see 6% in a single year, I mean, is unreal. So now this is, it's what's interesting as well. So I'm going to share a few charts. This is the trade deficit so far. I mean, they're seemingly doing the impossible right now. Now you can, people online scrutinize these numbers, scrutinize the numbers as you like, but I'm just saying, I'm just sharing the numbers. The numbers are this. We just printed a 4.3% GDP. Trade deficit has been cut in half this year. We're just over $25 billion. If you take this and we had this big spur here, but if you look at this average around, let's call it '65, I mean, we're down well over 50%, which is unheard of.

That's the deglobalization and the onshoring we were talking about.

Yes. Along with tariff revenues, you can see here. So we brought an extra $190 billion of tariff revenue, which obviously is scrutinized right now by the Supreme Court. We'll see if that upholds. We talked about Monroe Doctrine, this onshoring of re-coming back to America, all of this, And take rare earth minerals, take oil, all back to America. We already talked about these with Venezuela. Unemployment rate below expectations at 4.4%.

Yeah.

I mean, they are seemingly in their first 12 months defying gravity right now. I mean, they said they were going to do these things, and everyone's like, they're not going to do them, and they're actually doing them 10 months in, which is so crazy. Inflation has stayed, this is below expectations at 2.7%.

Yeah.

I mean, it's incredible. It's quite incredible to turn the economy. Any comments on this?

For me, the employment number is really the key. You lose your job and it takes you a second to get it back. And so that 4.4%, when you think about it, people that are— the actual people deployed, that's more like 2%. That's just crazy low, which means the economy is very productive.

Yes. And printing GDP. and keeping inflation low. So to summarize all these, to just go quickly here, America right now, what we are seeing, and if Howard Ludnick says in that video, and we'll just cue up the Cathie Wood video if you can next, talks about just what they've done in the first year. The numbers are showing it. Everyone says there's no way, and they just keep printing these good reports.

It's remarkable.

If you summarize this, we have a trade deficit cut in half, tariff revenue up $190 billion, unemployment at 4.4%, inflation at 2.7%, GDP to 4.3%. Could be 5 or 6 this year. We have control of the largest oil supply on earth in Venezuela. We have a new Fed chair coming in May, which is most likely going to cut rates significantly, which will help across the entire economy. We have 5 emerging technology platforms at one time, which Cathie Wood will share in just a second. And we have $9.8 trillion of investments committed to the United States, which Howard Ludnick in that video, he said, he's like, they have, like, some have started, but we— now he goes, now we're calling all of them and saying— Yep, it's go time. Rates are cutting this year. It's time to invest and build your plants. Like, it is go time right now. Now, this is quite a— so if you can't tell, I'm very bullish on America. I'm bullish on the markets. I'm very bullish. And you can see right here from all these things, I'm like, we have a tidal wave moving in this direction right now. Actually, do you have that Cathie Wood video ready? Is it working? Play that Cathie Wood video and then we'll go to this, hit this next one here. Now, Cathie Wood shared this video in the middle of, or actually early of last year. Uh, what she's saying now seems more probable. At the time seemed impossible. I shared this last on our last webinar. We'll share it one more time here. Can you cue it up and we'll let us know if the sound doesn't work in the chat?

We believe that real GDP growth is going to accelerate in the years ahead. We think in the next 5 years to 7%. If you're an economist, you think that's absolutely crazy. If you look at what happened around the turn of the last century, Telephone, electricity, internal combustion engine. We went from roughly half a percent per year of real GDP growth to 3% for the last 125 years. That's a fivefold increase. So 3-ish percent, this is a global real GDP growth number, to 7. That's, you know, we have 5 innovation platforms evolving with AI turbocharging all of them, robotics, Robotics, energy storage, AI, blockchain technology, and multi-omic sequencing. So we should see a much more rapid acceleration this time around than last time. We're being conservative when we say 7%.

So if you saw there from Cathie, again, this is a time she called for 7% GDP growth, which is crazy. And now we're almost seeing line of sight to 6%.

Yeah.

Which is also crazy. And she references, you know, this happened at the turn of the 1900s. We saw a 5x increase when we saw telephone, electricity, and combustion engine all come out at the time, and they converged on each other. She then mentions— sorry, she doesn't mention this. We had the internet personal computer, which was massive for the country.

Yes.

Right now, we don't have 1 or 2, we have 5 emerging technology platforms. These are the ones she points out: AI, robotics, energy storage, blockchain, and multi-atomic sequencing, all converging together. You can't have smart robots without AI, and you can't have good robots without good energy storage. And so you see how these converge together. You also have quantum computing, global fast internet, 3D printing, space travel, et cetera. A myriad of other things all converging at the same time, which are very disinflationary or deflationary to economies. We won't dive into that for a second, but— and then you see Howard Ludnick saying a similar thing. We have line of sight to 5%, even 6% GDP growth. I mean, when you couple these together, it is quite a story right now around productivity, around growth, et cetera. What do you take from that?

A few things. One, people see this. The biggest investors in the world, across the world, want to invest in the US for this very reason because the US is leading the charge. Two, when you have that many big things happening at once, the tide rises. So, that's somewhere where you jump in and on average, you're just going to win because the tide is rising. At the same time, it increases risk because those I think about it as 5 currents of water. When they hit each other, they're pushing each other and they're creating these whirlpools. And what you don't want to do is jump in blindly because maybe it's going to rise, the tide is going to rise, probably on average it will, but there are going to be a lot of things that get sucked to the bottom or hit the rocks. And so being thoughtful and strategic about why you think these things are going to win and leaning into those thoughtful ideas and positions is really where I think the future of investment funds and just businesses that change our economy are going to sit.

Well, that's why the title of this webinar talks about supercycles. I would call this a supercycle that we are, I think, currently in. We don't even recognize we're in it. Now, someone might be on here. Let me jump back and say, Bridger, let's see. Let me go back here. Right here. So, you're like, all these great things are lining up. And you're like, well, Bridger, yeah, I'm going to be contrarian. So sometimes natural people on things go, well, okay, Bridger and Trenton are saying this. I'm going to be contrarian and do the opposite of what Bridger's saying. I'm going to short this thing.

Yeah.

Which you can do if you'd like. What I'm telling you though, what I and maybe we are saying is contrarian. If you look right now, the markets have been in extreme fear or fear for most of last year.

Yeah.

Also, maybe every X reply guy is correct. That's a bubble. It's going to pop. It's all going to zero. Take crypto, for example, or any of these assets. Oh, it's going to be gone. That's the general consensus among the population. What I'm saying is it's actually hard. I went online to find quotes around the supercycle. There's very few. Most are calling for an AI bubble that's going to pop. You can see all these articles here about it's going to pop, it's going to be over, it's going to be— it's whatever. When I look at all these things, what I'm saying I believe is contrarian, actually.

Yeah.

This opinion that I'm sharing today is the contrarian opinion. I think we could be in a supercycle right now. There's only a few articles, but from very smart people talking about this supercycle. I love this. Crucially, once a supercycle starts, it takes a lot to put an end to it. This often requires either painful policy measures or demand side. Oh, sorry. I think let's go down here. Only a handful of investors are talking about, oh, where's my little thing about these supercycles? Let's see. Oh, maybe I, maybe I put it somewhere else. But talking about, there was an article that said all of the key elements are in place for a supercycle to happen right now, which I think is pretty interesting. We've already hit this a number of times. I was with Tony Robbins a few months ago, and we're way over time here, but thank you for staying on.

Of course, of course.

I know you got stuff to do. But he talked about seasons, recognizing the season you're in. And I remember we had this, we were just with about 20 of us in this room with Tony Robbins, and I kept thinking about this over and over, like, what season am I really in? And if I look at a 10 or a 15 or a 20-year time period, when I'm 70 years from now, when I'm old and gray, or maybe we have these bionic bodies, who knows? But I'll look back to the 2020s and be like, man, how did I miss that? It was so obvious. Yeah. We, a lot of people do that with the great financial crash or the internet. The internet's the big one.

Yeah. And I think that, and maybe this will be my parting comment, but, um, you, when you look at the internet, The public sentiment, the public talk was very similar to what it is today. It's a bubble, it's going to pop. And I do think there is an element of that. But guess what? We use the internet like second nature now. It was a winner. How it won, a lot of people got wrong, but that it wins, there is no doubt.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that's true with AI. And you will look back if you didn't lean into it and You'll say, man, I was there at the beginning and all these things that are second nature today weren't back then. I could have been a part of it. And if you didn't lean in, you'll have missed out.

That's a great dovetail into, I'm going to skip down here. How do I lean in? I have a slide here. At least I keep telling myself, don't be on the sidelines. Don't just watch this go by. If you can, right now I have, and I'll even share what I'm doing, and you can see these other founders that have all gone back to work. I won't go through each one of them. They're all fully back to work. These are people that could totally be retired. They are fully back at working all day to go with, and my dad taught me this last time, going with the wave. You mentioned this tidal wave, right? So, I sit here and go, how do I participate? I build a fund.

Yeah.

And we've done that with Faunce Partners. Let's build a— let's pool money together and let's invest in front of these waves and let the tide just push us. And yeah, let's be smart. Let's be prudent. Let's do the best we can to pick the exact thing. But also, a great market, man, is good tailwinds, I guess, is a good thing to have. So, if I go through me, I'm going to skip down. I built a crypto investment fund. I love crypto. I love blockchain. I thought, man, how do I do more of this? We built a full fund in crypto. I split returns with my investors 80/20. So, I have a $25 million fund. If we go to $100 million, me and Dan split 20% of that gain, and our investors are super happy, right? This is a— we would make $15 million if it goes from $25 to $100. That's a 4x in crypto, which— Sounds crazy. It's not that crazy in crypto.

No, no, no.

4x in crypto is not that crazy. We've done the same thing with Fund Launch Partners. We have made strategic bets in front of a lot of this wave. We're also building Fund Launch AI right now. We've hired a full development team. They're right behind this wall right here, building out to say, can we be in this market? And I don't want to miss this amazing moment. These don't happen every day. The last one was about 20 to 25 years ago. the internet. Any parting words? This comes to the end of my slides here for this part. But yeah, what would you finish on here?

Look, the world— I sat in these rooms. I sat on the advisory board of the largest real estate fund in the world. I sat next to all these people who are the Ivy League-trained investors. Honestly, and maybe it's not polite to say, But most of them don't think strategically, or they do, but they think strategically in the same way as everybody else. And that just means that they get market returns. There are so much opportunity to outperform. And the best investments I made in these multibillion-dollar portfolios at AAA, at Dow, were people that were very different in how they thought, that most of the time had nontraditional backgrounds. that allowed them to see the market in a way that others couldn't to their benefit. So, if you feel that, if you see that, don't be afraid because there is opportunity and there are people out there like me that are looking to invest in that.

Well put, Trenton. You guys can give Trenton some love. I know he stayed a little bit longer than anticipated, but great to have you on. Give Trenton some love in the chat. I don't know, give him an emoji. I don't know how we do it in the chat, but give him some love. Trenton, thank you so much for coming on today.

Of course. Of course.

Well done. Appreciate it. Yeah. Hope to have you in the future.

Yep. Thank you.