TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #152: Ben Hunt

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Ben Hunt, founder of Epsilon Theory, to discuss: - How institutions have failed us across the board in the wake of coronavirus - Why we need to burn it the f*ck down - How we can create grass roots movements to turn away from our failing institutions - Ben's work with frontlineheroes.com - Why we probably won't have a 'V' shaped recovery - much more Follow Ben on Twitter Check out Frontline Heroes Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Sup freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. The immense pleasure of sitting back down with Ben Hunt from Epsilon Theory. If you freaks remember last summer, Ben and I sat down with James O'Byrne, had a nice conversation. It was a pretty controversial conversation because Ben is a bit skeptical of the chances that Bitcoin will succeed in the face of strong governments. This episode we really didn't focus on Bitcoin that much. We talked about it at the end and I'm happy to report, At least in my mind, he seems a bit more receptive to the idea of Bitcoin and the people behind it, more importantly. This episode, we wanted to focus on something that Ben's been covering quite extensively throughout this year as coronavirus has swept the world, and that is the failing of the institutions that we're supposed to trust across the board,

whether it be the World Health Organization, the federal government, hospital administrators, go down the line. There's been immense failure across the board. We really didn't focus on how these institutions failed and when they did, but we more wanted to focus on how individuals could turn away from these institutions and enact grassroots movements to basically fend for themselves and build up their local communities and the global communities that they're also a part of without the need for these institutions. We also talked about an initiative that Ben

and his cohorts at Epsilon Theory are running in Frontline Heroes. So we're going to get into that, how Frontline Heroes is helping get, is a grassroots movement to help get protective gear to the doctors and nurses who are on the front lines treating people with the coronavirus. This episode of Tales from the Crypt

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square as always make sure you use the code stacking sats when you download the app that's one word, S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S, stacking sats, you're going to get $10, and $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owl's Lacrosse. That's Owl's Lacrosse. Use the code stacking sats, download the cash app today, and I hope you enjoyed this quick rep with Ben Hunt. We did 45 minutes and thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I know Ben may not agree with all Bitcoiners, but I think he's doing some great things in this world.

And I think the burn it the fuck down mentality is one that more people need to have. It's time to start walking away from these institutions that are failing us. Enjoy. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here on a Friday afternoon during the quarantine life, sitting down with somebody who's been on the podcast before. It was a very popular episode, very controversial. I don't think we're going to be talking too much about Bitcoin this episode.

We may touch on it towards the end, but I'd like to reintroduce you freaks to Ben Hunt. Ben, welcome to the podcast. Great to be here, Marty. Thanks for having me back. Well, thanks for coming on. I know the response to the last episode was, again, like I said, very controversial. But again, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I did too, Marty.

I did too. And I think you got a hard time for not giving me a harder time about views on Bitcoin and the like. So happy to revisit some of that if you need to get some punches in. But I really enjoyed that conversation, and it just reaffirmed for me what I appreciate so much about, and I'm not saying this to be patronizing, and I apologize if it comes up that way, the community that you're in. because I think there is an energy and an optimism and a spirit that we need more than ever as we try to reshape our world with the COVID-19 crisis. Yeah, I'll save the punches for the end. But I think this is, I mean, the reason I brought you on today is because I think you've been doing

a great job of calling out just the the blatant and widespread hypocrisy across the board from institutions that people have come to expect that they can trust whether it be the cdc the world health organization i mean i don't think many people trusted the chinese communist party up to this point but it's completely obvious that you shouldn't down to i mean just the way our government here in the united states has reacted on all levels um hospital administrators, how they prepared and have been reacting. It's just, like I said before we hit record, it's very disheartening to see how every single one of these institutions seems to have failed. It's crazy, right? It is disheartening. I'll give you that, because what we're seeing

is not just a litany of errors and mistakes, although certainly that's there too. What we're seeing, in my view, is a litany of betrayals. And I don't use that word lightly, but I mean that all of these institutions that we have charged with protecting the common good, they've betrayed that. Their words, what they say they're going to do, have been, again my view in almost no circumstances matched by what they've actually done and it requires I think sadly an event of this magnitude a real world event of this magnitude where we have refrigerator trucks in New York City to keep the bodies it requires an event of this magnitude to give the lie to the stories and to reveal again i'll use this word the betrayals of

really almost almost every institution i can point to yeah so who should we go after first how so how this that's another reason i brought you on because you've been uh telling people to prepare for this pretty early on before the alarms were being sounded and that's the crazy thing is twitter as it is on twitter are are the people who are sounding the alarms first and that's to me it's it's it's been incredibly uh incredibly fascinating to watch like the initial underreaction and now as more data is coming in we're becoming more aware of who's acutely affected by covet 19 um an argument to be made that maybe now there's an overreaction just as a response to the initial underreaction too yeah i i think the way

i'd like to think about it and this is i think played out in some of the the notes we've written most recently on epsilon theory i'll i'll approach it from two respects the first respect is that And while I'm in violent agreement that it is so disheartening to see these betrayals of our institutions, the ones who have told us that they are looking out for the common good, I am similarly overwhelmed with a positive reaction to the generosity of spirit, to the willingness to show empathy and help that we see from just ordinary people, citizens all over the world. and you know we wrote a note it's about a month or so ago where we said rather optimistically that we thought this would be use of a phrase from Winston Churchill when he was talking about World War II our finest hour and what I mean by that is not that it's going to be the finest hour from our institutions or our government or our universities or or any power structure we can

point to. But I do believe that it will be and is our finest hour as citizens, as human beings rising to this challenge to see the world with clear eyes and full hearts. So I think that's one effective way to approach this in a in a light that shows us a way forward right and that allows us to imagine what what are the foundations for something better to come out of it so that that's one way to approach it the other way I think is useful to approach this is that if we think about all the systems that failed us all the institutions that betrayed us I think it is important to think of them as a system right not as an isolated incident not as a an isolated incident

oh well this institution they're sure they're sure are bad guys let's let's Let's throw those bums out. And where I see this playing out, and I suspect will play out much more prominently in the months to come, is that our reaction to this will be channeled as a referendum on the vote that we're going to have in November.

Right, that either, oh, Trump did a great job or Trump did a terrible job. and that all this can be fixed depending on whether we vote Trump out or vote Trump back in for another four years. And my strongest possible view is that, yes, Donald Trump and the White House betrayed us. They are one of the institutions that betrayed us.

My personal view is that he's been one of the three or four worst presidents in the in the history of the republic which is um you know that's that's that's pretty rare company but i think it would be such a tremendous mistake and frankly a tremendous waste of the challenge that's been put in front of us if we think that the solution to the institutional betrayal to the system of institutional betrayal that we've seen is something that can be resolved in an election, in a vote, right? It is much deeper than that, and it requires a commitment that goes so far beyond this kind of faux political participation response of a vote and a certain election. That's why I'm so happy to come back on your podcast,

Marty, because I know that so much of your audience understands exactly what I mean when I say that there is an institutional system here that has been revealed as a betrayer. I think that there is a far more widespread view that there is a system of betrayal here. And, you know, I think this really is the challenge we have to rise to, to go beyond just, oh, we're going to vote for this clown or that clown in November. But how can we take steps of action that can change that system? So, you know, to burn it the fuck down, as I like to call it, both from the inside and from beneath, you know, what's the most effective approach to do that so so those are the the two ways i think that are are constructive to to talk

about this as opposed to kind of just going through okay here's the litany of betrayals and errors that we've experienced but to instead talk about all right the positive outcome of this is that we are seeing a groundswell of of popular recognition and then popular action on a grassroots level and the second i think constructive way to talk about this is what is our strategy for changing the system of you know the high-functioning sociopaths and the political entrepreneurs who who dominate these these these institutions that again have betrayed us i completely agree i would love to take the conversation down those paths and i and yeah there's not going to be a referendum during the election choices we have right now are pretty

pretty i mean it's just one of the it's crazy how uh like how much change people have wanted over the last two decades particularly the last 12 years particularly it's obama first came to office and we're just getting fed the same terrible choices and and now we have people sitting at home quarantined and i i think the positive outcomes that you described are coming because people just have more time to think and it's becoming like you said glaringly obvious that these these people who are supposed to have control don't have control at all and people are seeking alternatives and um how are how are people going to react to this is is going to be very interesting to see how that plays out and i'm hoping i had chuck marone uh the author of

strong towns and the host of a podcast by the same name on a month ago right before the market started crashing and i'm hoping uh that people sort of turn that way uh towards a more bottom up revolution where they're really depending on their neighbors and their local community over over these these institutions that failed them well i i think that is such an important part of it and and i i like the strong towns guys a lot you know had them into our office to to talk about you know their mission and it's one that i i i support i do also believe that you know it's one of a million different ways that you can find your pack you know your community your organization and then take action, right?

Because it doesn't require that sort of geography, the town layout, although that's absolutely a vital means in some areas we're doing that. But, you know, this is something that in the densest urban area, right, megalopolis, you can still find your pack. You can still find ways to do, right, to take action that doesn't require the permission of a government or an institution, that doesn't require you being organized or led from above, but is simply something that you can do right now.

and I think you're right that staying at home and really having the time and being forced to have the time to open your eyes and see both the inequity as well as the inefficiency of the top-down measures that are coming at us and to see, I think, so much more urgently the things that can be done

in whatever community you're in from a bottom-up level, that really is a place where I think we can make great strides. One of the ways I think that we can think about this is this decision-making approach called mini-max regret that I think is a good way to think about, you know, how one makes these decisions about where to spend your your your where to risk your time and money your and and frankly i think where that ends up for me at least is trying to support the people like the doctors nurses emergency responders on the front lines of this crisis you know who are in fact risking their lives because you know one thing that this this

It's become very clear to me from looking at every community's experience with this, whether it's starting in Wuhan, China, whether it's looking at the early experiences in northern Italy, going over to Spain, whether it's looking at the experiences here in the United States, is that the outcome, the disaster outcome occurs when your health care workers, when they fall to this crisis. And if you apply this decision-making strategy of minimizing your maximum regret, what every maximum regret scenario has in this crisis is for your health care system to be overwhelmed, for it to fall. And so what I've been focused on in terms of my grassroots bottom-up effort has not been to, okay, well, how can I support the healthcare system? I can't make ventilators, right?

I can't take a crash course in, you know, intubation and get accredited to go work in an ER somewhere. But what I can do, and I think what we can all do, is try to arm our healthcare workers and emergency responders with that personal protective equipment, the supplies, like the face masks, like the isolation gowns and the like, that really serves as armor for them. So, you know, that's the effort that I've been particularly focused on myself, but I think there are so many other efforts that anyone, wherever they are, can participate in with an eye towards, you know, helping to support the people who are really at the most risk in this war, right? Whether it is the health care workers, whether it's the actual working men and women who've been really laid off and really are hurting from this economic shutdown. These are where I think we from a bottom up grassroots level should be spending our attention right now. And then once we've won this war, then we can go on to, again, you know, burning down these institutions that have betrayed us and create something better in their stead. I completely agree. So what are the logistics of your efforts to get the PPE to the- So it's an interesting question, right? Because part of the sociopathic oligarchy that's let us down this path for the last 40 years,

the part and parcel of that has been the offshoring of manufacturing outside of the United States and over to China. so that the actual supplies that we need to arm our health care workers, you know, the marginal supply here is all made over in China. And that's fine, except for when you have a situation like you do today where it becomes almost impossible to maintain the supply chains and it becomes so difficult to participate in the supply chains without either driving up the price of this equipment even more than it's already been driven up.

Because every country is now going to China and saying, we want what you've got, let us buy it. At the same time, then, you've also got a lot of, I'll call it quality control issues, because if I'm a Chinese manufacturer, you've got to imagine, well, of course, I'm going to shift my production facility over to making these fake N95 masks,

because I'm going to forge this FDA certificate. And, you know, I could have sold this for 25 cents, you know, three months ago. And today I'm going to get $5 for it. So our goal here was first to find a partner who could help us on the ground in China. And it's similarly to find a way of participating in this market without competing with the federal government and with these state emergency authorities. Because what was also important,

and I'm talking about what we're not doing, we don't want to compete with these federal and state agencies, but we also can't wait for these federal and state authorities, right? I mean, as much as we have a trickle-down economy when it comes to money, when it comes to, you know, Congress will bail out Boeing with $50 billion

and, you know, the Fed will put a $2 trillion facility in place to bail out, you know, asset managers and bond issuers, right? That trickle-down economy is matched only by the trickle-down economy that you see in health care, right? Where FEMA will get, oh, we'll get a million masks in, and then they'll put it in a warehouse, and they'll send 100,000 masks to, you know, one hospital system warehouse, and it never trickles down. Just like the money never trickles down to that waiter or truck driver who gets laid off in this crisis, in the same way these masks, this PPE, it never trickles down to the nurses, the doctors, the EMTs who are working a shift in your city or your town. It never trickles down to them. So we weren't going to wait for that, but we also didn't want to try to compete for these million mask orders.

So what we constructed, I'll call it like a, I like to refer to it as like an underground railroad of PPE, where we worked with the employees of a Fortune 50 company. Actually, it was Intel. I'll give them a little plug here. This was not an Intel corporate initiative. Frankly, you know, we look at this and Intel corporate people took one look at the Epsilon Theory website and they said, well, no, we can't partner with you.

It wasn't, you know, let's say, you know, corporate friendly at that level. Do you want to burn us down? Exactly, exactly, right? But this was all done on the personal time, the personal pocketbook of Intel employees. not just here in the United States, but Chinese citizens who work for Intel in mainland China, right? They were the ones who were actually going out

and, again, on their own time and their own money. We've reimbursed them, of course, but they would go out and buy this equipment personally, package it together, mail it over here to us. We would then repackage it. We put out the word to try to get doctors, nurses, emergency responders, let us know if you are in urgent need of PPE. We can't get you 10,000 masks, right?

But we can absolutely get you 100 masks. We can get you 200 masks, right? Which then you can hand out to your team and bypass this trickle down economy that we have set up not just in you know money but also in the equipment that's necessary to keep these health care workers alive so it's it's this grassroots bottom-up effort it's just individuals it's like pure capitalism right it's just it's it's it's it's just purely individuals coming together and organizing to do this. So it's, again, I can't tell you how gratifying it is

to see both the willingness of people all over the world to step up and participate, but also to donate money, to put out the word on this. So, you know, we've been doing this for like three weeks or so now, and we've raised over $800,000. we've distributed as of today over 30,000 N95 masks all in packets of 50, 100, 200 directly into the hands of doctors and nurses and emergency responders you know we'll send it to their house because you get a lot of cases where you know if you send it to the hospital you know

the hospital may say oh well you know what's that doing here so it's it's crazy what you have to do to get around the system but it's also equally crazy and and even more so gratifying to see how people step up and really participate like this to get the job done i i completely agree and i think you'll be happy to hear that something like this uh very similar to the the process you just described happened within the bitcoin community too in new york um actually my co-host matt odell helped organize it there was a bitcoiner in china who had um access to uh a lot of a few thousand masks and coordinated uh with bitcoiners in the states in new york particularly um to get mask over here and it was funny it was funny the hurdles that um had to be talked through i wasn't

as integral in the process as matt maddow was and some other new york bitcoiners due to the fact that i was down here in south jersey but um things to take into consideration like you can't have an order over 10 000 because the fda would have stopped at the border and and and try to like confiscate it and and uh make sure that the masks were up to snuff um but it is funny that that's what it took and so people bought masks individually and then wound up donating them or getting them straight to nurses and doctors as well. So it's incredible to see that this is happening, not just what you guys are doing, but outside of it as well.

Well, so that doesn't surprise me at all, that effort that you guys made. It's another reason why I wanted to come on your show again. Let me kind of give the quick blurb for the website and the like we've got for our effort, because this is an ongoing effort, we get out about between 2,000 and 3,000 masks a day all over the country to people who need it. So the website is Frontline Heroes USA. It's all one word, FrontlineHeroesUSA.org. And if you want to donate money, we can do that there.

But as important, if you are a healthcare worker, an emergency responder, or you know someone who is, we've got the form online there. Let us know who you are. Like I say, we can't get a bulk order to a hospital system. We can absolutely get 100, 200 masks to a team, to a doctor, to a nurse, to an EMT, to a fire department who needs that stuff right now. so frontline heroes usa.org go check it out freaks so these grassroots grassroots efforts are popping up now and so eventually hopefully this this virus blows over and the dust settles and we're looking around at the emperors wearing no clothes what do you think happens like do you do you think revolution is in the air right now do you think like an occupy wall street type of anger comes back to that extent or hopefully larger yeah this is going to kind of get to i think kind of our original bitcoin conversation marty because i i don't think that a protest i don't think marching for something i don't think voting for someone i don't think that that that

changes the system. It doesn't change the hearts and minds of participants. You know, I'll describe kind of what I'm trying to do with Epsilon Theory. It's different from what I know you're trying to achieve with Bitcoin. I think I know that we're allies in this, but it's a different path so what what i want to do and this is why we named our company second foundation partners is that i i really do think that there is an opportunity to use what we call the narrative machine to both measure and identify the narratives that are that we are inundated with Many of them are anti-Bitcoin narratives, right? It's the narrative of Wall Street.

It's the narrative of the White House, whoever's in the White House, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat. It's the narrative of these institutions who, again, I think have revealed themselves as having betrayed us and our interest during this crisis. I think there's an opportunity

not only to identify and measure these narratives, but also increasingly to create our own narratives that both jam, if you find that kind of signals, you know, to jam the signal of these narratives that are being distributed today, but also to put out our own narrative, which is not an answer. And it won't be, oh, the answer is Bitcoin or the answer is, you know, vote for whoever or vote, you know, march for this.

I really think that the narrative that we can establish is one of reciprocity and empathy. It is a narrative of rejecting the maximization decision-making mythology that is put at us constantly and replacing it with this narrative of resilience, of grassroots, bottom-up efforts to promote local, and I really do mean local local reciprocity and empathy and cooperation I do believe that is the right strategy for again I'm going to say sort of burning these institutions not from above not in some protest of pitchforks and torches but burning them out from within by over time replacing the people who participate in these institutions with people who ascribe to the to the values that I know you ascribe to and that I do as well but also burning them down from below by by really creating entirely alternative

economies that don't necessarily operate at scale except I'll say kind of epistemically you know in terms of having a community that you know exists and you can communicate with but I really do think that that's kind of the bottom-up approach of really ignoring and separating from these institutions rather than trying to march on them or to replace you know one sociopathic leader with another sociopath and burn it all down by walking away um there's a huge part of that yeah yeah and And so there was an instance in California, an example of this localism starting that really gave me encouragement, too, talking about PPE. When they shut down the local gyms in this county, the guy who ran the local gym actually started making just bar sets for individuals that he would then deliver to their houses so they could work out at home. And that one little action started inciting sort of a feedback loop of a new supply chain where the linen producer in the town saw him doing that and decided to repurpose his factory to make PPE for people, people who wanted to get masks and couldn't do so.

So the linen factory turned into a mask factory. And then from there, you just had the local economy sort of supporting itself and buying goods from each other and supporting each other and keeping economic activity going on as much as possible during these tough times. That is a great example of what I mean by our finest hour. I mean, it really is these communities coming together. and i'm i'm i'm certain that it that it happens at scale right the reason i wanted to happen for this bottom-up effort marty is that for a long time i did think right that it was possible to have a defining moment a defining top-down moment of call it rebellion call it you know the emperor has you, whatever you want to call it. And I got to tell you, it was really Jeffrey Epstein

that disabused me of that notion. And I don't know whether he was killed or whether he committed suicide. And I say that I don't know because I don't care. I really don't care. The fact that he did die in custody at the jail. You know, the note I wrote on this was like from the godfather when, you know, Vito Corleone, you know, says to the five families, he's trying to get Michael, his son, back from Italy. He says, look, I'm a superstitious man, and, you know, I'll forgive anything, but, you know, if Michael, you know, God forbid, you know, he gets arrested, and, you know, he hangs himself in his jail cell, right, I'm going to blame some of the people in this room because it doesn't matter if it's an accident, right, or if it was intentional. It really

doesn't matter, right? That can't happen in a non-corrupt state. It just can't, right? And yet it did. So I'm blaming the people in that room, that room of the corrupt state, the room of violence and power against children, you know, with impunity. And what Epstein, that event hit me like a ton of bricks was, you know, the system, and again, I'm talking about the system not not a not an election not a trial you know not the collapse of this particular company like aig in 2008 the system is never going to collapse or be changed on a single point of failure it's never going to happen on a single point of failure it requires points of failure at scale, points of failure at scale. And, you know, my personal view, right, is that

the medium of money is the wrong place to achieve those points of failure at scale, right, which is our old debate here. But I do think that we're on the same page here, that we're both looking for places to create points of failure with the current system at scale, and that if you can achieve that then I do think we can make real change in the world I agree and I will

push back that I do think it's an important tool to go after and I think Bitcoin gives power back to the common man so that's a trope I've been not a trope, a saying I've been falling back on repeating throughout this crisis is the common man is just beginning the short end of the

stick, you're a blue collar worker who just wants to to live his life work do hard work provide for his family uh come home and enjoy the fruits of his labor and i think the money the monetary system i'm pretty sure i'm pretty certain of it though it doesn't allow him to do that he's got to chase for yield he's got to go out uh and he's not allowed to say he's can try to save money but due to the inflationary policies that exist and her current monetary policy, he's not able to. His purchasing power is destroyed over the course of his lifetime.

It's forcing both parents into the workforce and then destroying the family life to some regard. The divorce rate's at all-time highs. Money stress is a very big stress, one of the biggest stress-inducers in the world. So giving the common man the ability to take back his ability to save and accumulate capital over time and then do that in a currency that's completely disconnected

from the traditional financial system and do that on his own, take possession of it on his own and not have the ability to have that, can be confiscated, which is very hard to do so. I think that's powerful. I don't think it's a panacea. Like you said, you got to find these points within the system that can be attacked.

And I do think money is a very important one to attack. And I think Bitcoin is succeeding in doing that. And I think a lot of people are beginning to question, particularly after the bailouts. I mean, you tweeted out the bailout set-aside clause, the Fed set-aside clause that assured that the executives are going to be able to get their bonuses this year. Yeah, bank executives, right? It's just, I mean, it's unbelievable, right? It's happening in plain sight. I just

it really is I think you know we are arguing from the same side of the table I think it's an argument about tactics rather than strategy and I see us

as allies in this for sure and so it's not I think worth going you know too far down the allies arguing about this tactic versus that tactic because it's a big world and the ability to fight this war on multiple fronts

I think is only a positive thing. No, I agree. And I do think the increased anger and the increased knowledge, more importantly, if 2008 wasn't obvious that people were getting screwed, now it's blatantly obvious. People are sitting at home. They get $1,200 worth of Trump bucks while the Boeings and the bank executives and the hedge funds get trillions of dollars and are basically rewarded for their undue risk that was in the first place incentivized by the federal banking system.

You know, Marty, I think what's going to be really interesting, and you're asking the question about what comes next, right? What we've seen over the past 11 years now, and certainly it's accelerated over the last three years, is this disjuncture, this gulf between what I'll call real world and market world, the real economy and the market economy. So to the point where, you know, the stock market, we're off, you know, after today, we'll be off like, I don't know, 11% from our all-time high, something like that. You know, nothing, essentially nothing, right? And when you look at, you know, high-yield debt and other debt instruments, it's, you know, less than 10% off, less than 10% off. I saw where, you know, a lot of the big private equity funds have given their investors their marks on their portfolio as of March 31st and we won. And I saw, for example, a Goldman Sachs private equity book. They wrote it down by 3%, 2.9%.

I mean, the question is going to be, can you maintain this gulf between what's happening in the real world and the pain that's occurring in the real economy with the support and the lack of pain in the market economy? market. That, to me, is going to be the story of the next six months. And I'll give you two ways this can go. One way this can go is a continuation of what we've seen to date, which is that the, I'll call it the conflict between market world and re-world is sublimated. It's focused on the election in November, right? Where everyone says, oh, we can fix it if we vote Trump out, right? Or, oh, we can keep the good times rolling if we vote Trump in. That's one way it can go.

That would be just such an enormous tragedy if that's the way it goes. But I think there's a real possibility that is the way it goes. There's another path this could go, though, and I want to take you back to 2008. Because in March, mid-March of 2008, Bear Stearns went from, its stock price went from $95, I think, in its peak, kind of in February to a price of $2 when it was, you know, the Fed kind of took it out in the middle of the street and shot it in the head. And then they gave the carcass to J.P. Morgan for $5 a share. That happened at the end of March.

And the market came roaring back in April and May, just like we're seeing today, To the point where by kind of mid-May, the market was almost all the way back to its peak at its all-time high. And the argument was, the argument was, oh, systemic risk is off the table. That was the line you heard repeated over and over again after Bear Stearns was eliminated, right? Subprime is contained. Yes, subprime is contained. Systemic risk is off the table. It was just this one bad actor of Bear Stearns,

and we took care of that, so all is well. But then, of course, the rot, just the sheer inequity of this enormous asset class called residential mortgage-backed securities, of course that risk was not limited just to Bear Stewards. It permeated the financial system. And as that became clear in the summer of 2008, market world

that reacted with the great fall and crisis that we remember of the great financial crisis. So I don't know. It's going to be really interesting to see over the next six months because I think that similar thing, that Bear Stearns moment of 2008, is in a sense happening again today.

When the market is coming back, they're saying, oh, you know, we're going to have this treatment or that treatment. You know, we've got the Fed's going to support us. all going to be fine it's contained right and we'll see we'll see because my my view is that the the damage that's been done to the real economy into the real world with real people is so much more pronounced and ubiquitous than market world believes it is and and i think that's really going to tell the tale whether we're seeing a repeat of 2008 or whether we're

to see more of what we've seen over the last 11 years where this crisis is just pushed down onto who are you voting for for president and the system remains the same that that's what i think we have to be watching i agree i i'm very skeptical that we will uh we will see a v-shaped recovery i mean it's just you can't shut down the economy and expect it to bounce back right away this is again a complex system that is basically an organism and you just don't turn a switch and turn it back on i think that'll become glaringly obvious in the next few months and i think the screen grab of kramer on cnbc a day unemployment hits number had 16 million americans and in the background i think the the ticker line was 6.5 million americans filed for unemployment and in

the background you have the dal second best day in history yeah yeah yeah it's a it's a i think that will be uh an image that that it goes down in history as as a juxtaposition that really described the the disconnection of the day right on brother right on well i know you only have 45 minutes it flew by um it's always a pleasure sitting down and chatting with you keep fighting the good fight um thank you marty you too you too and frontline heroes usa.org for us and uh i'll keep looking to uh listen to tales from the crypt this is great yeah you should spin up a bitcoin while i'll send you some bitcoin um let's do this yeah yeah all right um i hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend thanks marty peace and love freaks