82. Inflation, Oil and Markets: What You Need to Know Right Now

If there's anything that I am, it's petrified of cash because inflation is the fear that we have

last year and now it's really kind of showing itself once again. It doesn't matter how well

things are going. There's always something lurking. What happens if you deregulate everything inside

of a retirement account or you're going to have people hurting their money that's supposed

take care of them during their retirement years.

Welcome to X-Pat Wealth, a Plan First Wealth podcast dedicated to helping ambitious

ex-patriots in America and Americans overseas thrive. I'm your host Richard Taylor

and Plan First Wealth is the business I founded and run today and we work with successful

ex-patriots, immigrants and internationally-minded Americans to make the most

opportunity and avoid the ex-patlan minds. First, a quick disclaimer. While Plan First Wealth

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are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of Plan First Wealth.

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notified every time we drop a new episode and so much more. Let's get back to this week's show.

Welcome back to another episode of macroaggressions from X-Pat Wealth. This is the show where I bring

my The Man the Myth, the legend that is Brian Dunhill on the show to talk about everything that's

going on in the world and the world to rights, fix all the problems. Do we have enough time to go

over all of that? Well, we'll pick our battles. It's been the craziest quarter and we just need

a coin. What's Trump going to say today? We'll just focus on and solve the big issues. That's

what the world needs right now. Perfect. Perfect. You're giving me the line of being the genie and

you get three wishes. You get three questions today, right? Well, we're actually going to do something

a little bit different because normally we're trying to look out into the future based on what's

going on, but we're recording this slightly early because Brian is, well, right now, where are you

in Spain? Palamos in Spain. Very nice. All right, for some. But next week you're in Brazil.

We get to talk to the beautiful American club out there about the new book that has become out.

If you haven't checked it out, please do. We call it Borderless Living. Available on Amazon.

So, Brian's in Brazil next week. So, we recorded this a little bit earlier and we thought we would,

we thought it would make it more of a Q1 review. It's been looking to always a hell of a quarter,

but Jesus, this has been a hell of a quarter. And we thought it'd be a good opportunity to take stock

because the way things are changing right now, when this comes out on the 16th, this is the second

of April, when this comes out on the 16th of April, God knows what's going to have happened,

what the situation is going to be. So, we're going to cast our minds back the last three months and

and, you know, play therapist and try and work through our, we're through up fears for now horror.

And what we think, what makes my sense out of it.

The beauty is, thankfully, the, the Donald likes to do a little window dressing and help

us out this last week to have a little bit of a recovery. Whether that was to do with window

dressing, you know, to window dressing. That's old news. That was yesterday. Then he gave a speech

and everything fell out, fell out better again. I can't keep up, honestly, man. Weeks, months,

years, all happening in a minute. I can't keep up. But do you remember, do you,

and it's a long time ago, three months, do you remember how bullish everyone started the year?

And as we will talk about, you and I are not especially bearish going forward, but just,

do you remember how, how confident everyone was, companies wrote company, the economies robust,

companies are doing well, IPOs, rates are going to go down. You know, even Jamie Diamond,

New York's, America, the world's premieres manager was sounding cautiously optimistic.

Just so you know, Richard, you are the most optimistic Brit that I know.

That's 10 years in America, actually, it's a great time.

You've turned in, you've been baptized in the American waters, and I love that.

But you're spot on. We started the year completely optimistic about all of things global,

especially with the devaluation of the US dollar. And here by the end of the first quarter,

we're reverting to essentially going back to a strong dollar, i.e. a flight to safety in the dollar.

And the best positions in our portfolios, as we talked about last month, are commodities.

We're on not a fear of the stock market falling apart. We're more on a fear of inflation

taking over, which is one thing that I don't understand why short-term US

treasuries and money markets are just growing so significantly in assets. Because if there's

anything that I am, it's petrified of cash because inflation is the fear that we have last year.

And now it's really kind of showing itself once again. Inflation really is rooted out from

CPI because essentially it doesn't take into effect oil prices, but oil prices affect just about

everything. And all we've been talking about for the last four weeks is oil prices going up.

For oil prices are going up, we'd expect the prices of just about everything else to start to

develop. Everything else. Everything gets to us via trucks pretty much. And so just that part of it,

I was reading all this thing to some of the day that's talking about, I think there's a big aluminium

plant out in the Middle East somewhere. And apparently that's going to, that's been hit. And that's

likely to cause the cost of cans to go up significantly, which means our beer is going to get more

expensive. Everything. Unless we buy draft beer and then they recycle that's big old kegs, but

yes, I don't buy cans of it. I buy bottles of Madeleine. So I feel completely safe from all the

impacts of this of this disaster. Wait, wasn't it last year that Modello and Constellation

Brands became the best selling beer above Budweiser? It was last year or the year before. No,

it was. It was after the Bud like did something that was too woke. I can't remember what it was.

It wasn't too woke. It was like support of transgender rights or something. And everyone,

the Maga crowd boy-cotted Bud like. Now, I find that absolutely ridiculous, obvious reasons.

However, the price of beer going up or something else? No, no, I feel strongly about what I'm about

to say. I feel very strongly. Bud like is an appalling beer. Madeleine is a great beer. So whilst I

find out that the reasons for the switch, absolutely ridiculous and stupid, the fact that Madeleine

is the top of that, the top now, I think the world is a better place for that. I will not deny that,

but I'm going to go the next step. First of all, as a Belgian-born individual, if it doesn't have

12% in there, it's not a real beer. Second of all, there shouldn't be just one beer on top. I think

variety of beers, depending on season, what you're eating, just like wines. You would never say

this is my only wine. Did you hear about the, and I forget the name of the restaurant,

but the restaurant that became number one in the world from number 50 in the world. How they did

it? No. So the chef took his entire crew down to what was rated the best restaurant in the world.

The one in Copenhagen? Yeah, where the guy beat all his employees. I don't know if I'm supposed to

say that, but I think you have trouble with that. I can't scratch that up because Richard enjoyed

it too much. So essentially, you went down there and they all came up with, oh, we'd like tell they

did their napkins. We liked how they did their own try this, that and the other. And he said, what

didn't you like? They found two things. Their coffee was just average. And the beer list basically was,

here is your, whatever it was, a Heineken and we have Heineken on top. As beer lovers, whenever you

go to a fancy restaurant, basically, you get no choice. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm visibly offended.

I'm, you know, a Heineken at a top restaurant. Come on. And, but that's very typical of any of the

Michelin stars. So essentially, he brought in a beer sommelier and a coffee sommelier. And the

beer sommelier essentially built a pairing menu. If you're ordering this type of food, go ahead with

this. So essentially, he paired those up and the variety made them the best rated restaurant in the

world. And I tend to think that's why I won't say I drink this one type of beer. I want variety for

different meals, different seasons, etc. Okay. Okay. So I'm the marketing person. How do we,

now you've dropped, well, now you've dropped like critical nugget for Q1.

I mean, the folks at home, the folks at home, that was what they needed to know about Q1. That's

that, that changes everything. We need more beer. Okay. We needed more beer. We can agree on that.

We can agree on that.

End of the day, commodities have gone up in a significant way. Our position for commodities is

through first trust, FTGC. That's not me promoting their, their fund. You can look up what's in

our portfolios at any given time. They're up 24% year to date. We bought it as a barbell strategy

against our fixed income, just in case inflation came into place because Trump has a ton of policies.

We weren't expecting him to invade Iran and do so. Now, like we were talking about oil prices

really affect everything else. When it comes to pesticides, most all of them are reflected on,

on, on the price of, of oil. And so essentially we can expect all commodities to go up when it comes

down to whether it be coffee, wine, you know, barley, any of the things that go into all of your

favorite drinkable items. The surprising thing is we've had this huge harvest of potatoes this

last year. And I didn't even know there is a publication called My Potato Daily News

where we can get our daily potato prices. So the one commodity that might not go up are potatoes.

And that will be our savior, you know. Lots of fritz next year, next year's text.

You know what, I feel better already. Thank goodness we had this meeting today.

Stop worrying. We have lots of potatoes. You know, I actually think there's,

there's just, if we just step back a second, I actually think there's like a really,

there's a valuable lesson here. And that is the point I was making before, January and early February.

The, everyone was super bullish, everyone was super confident. Yes, there was some

signs of stress in the economy, right? Do the work, the job creation isn't great.

Jobs aren't, there's not massive layoffs, but job creation is slowed. And that's a concern for

people. But in general, people, for the reasons I mentioned before, people were pretty, pretty

bullish. And it reminds me of going into 2023. If you remember, 2022, horrible year,

stocks down, bonds down, inflation through the roof, everyone, myself included, went into 2023,

predicting a recession. And it didn't materialize. And it said the market took off, it took off

23, it took off 24, took off 25, with a little wobble for the tariffs. And with the kind of,

the inverse was this case this year. And I, I do remember, I did, you know, I'm going to pat

myself on the back here, although I've got no way of proving it or evidencing it. But I do

remember thinking, hmm, the fact that everyone is so bullish right now, it's always, it's a

contrarian indicator almost. And the fact that we're having this wobble right now, now this wobble

could be a lot worse, it could get a lot worse. And it's entirely man-made or manufactured.

But I think it's just an important lesson that it doesn't matter how well things are going.

It really doesn't matter what we think about the economy or companies or earnings, which

are all doing great. There's always something lurking. There's always something that's going to

happen, whether it's 9.11 or whether it's tariffs or whether it's inflation going crazy in 2020,

2021, there's always something lurking around the corner.

You know, it's, it's amazing that you can take a Brit out of the UK, but you're always going

to go back to those old quotes from, from millen, events, dear boy events.

Yeah, that's what I was doing. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly. Thank you for, thank you.

That's exactly what it's like. Thank you for producing it correctly. You know, I just hear it with

the British. It's, it's what we always have to be concerned about. We, we don't know what's

going to dislodge things, but events are what we need to be paying attention, paying attention to,

and that's, that's what's going on right now. But what we've noticed is not a huge disruption

to the overall stock market. There's parts of the stock market that are getting hit harder than

others, but the S&P 500 is only down 5%. This isn't even defined as a correction, right? Emerging

markets are getting hit harder because the dollars going up, not because those companies are doing

worse. So am I am I starting to not add to allocations in emerging markets? Absolutely.

But essentially in our action plan, we know everybody is playing the same game. Be careful of

inflation. That's where essentially commodities shop up, energy stocks have shot up, value stocks

are up and growth stocks are down. So if we go back to the 70s, like we were talking about last

last month, during the 70s, growth stocks were hideous, value stocks were fine. So we were basically

saying if we get 10% inflation, we want to have 50% in value stocks, 25 and commodities, 25%

in energy stocks. That's the composition of the S&P 500 was 25% energy stocks. And that saves us

from the heightened inflation over 10%. So that's all that happened this last month. People didn't

freak out about the stock market. They freaked out about inflation. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to

regret asking you this. It's a second of April because I'll go on tangent. No, no, no, no. Because

we're going to be proved wrong, we're going to be wrong basically. But it's a second of April

now. This is going to go out on the 16th. So much is going to happen in those two weeks.

What do you think do you think was going to be in this? It's hard to say because it looks to me

like Trump wants to exit this. He wants to pull his taco. But it looks to me like Iran doesn't have

the concessions to protect themselves to be able to do so. And that means this could be elongated

to any time frame. Iran's figured out that they don't need an autonomous. They essentially

have one of the most important pathways, one of the three most important pathways in the world.

And therefore they can hold that hostage anytime they want. And now they're talking about

levying a toll on every single boat that wants to go through the street. That's fascinating

to where they might find new revenue streams for being attacked. So I tend to think this could

go any way shape or form. If we just recorded this on April 1st, we could have just said,

hey, that was an April Fool's joke that we predicted that. So I'm going to go with the more

wavy, it could go either way. And the one thing that we want to pay attention to is where oil

prices go from here. Where other commodity prices go from here because typically prices go up

faster than they go down. And where that becomes extremely important is a lot of the facilities

that have been attacked will take three to five years to get back online. If that takes three to

five years, we could have elevated prices for a longer period of time, no matter how Iran plays

out. And we need to set ourselves up for that. I don't know if you saw the article in the economist

about how Cuba has become the fastest play into renewable energy because of being cut off from

Venezuela oil. The rest of us have to take note, okay, energy prices are that much higher.

Can we make a pivot towards renewable energy or other forms of energy instead of just absorbing

it and pushing it back out? Yeah, I think this is absolutely going to lead to

so renewables taking a bit of the culture, the attitude towards renewables seems to have taken

a turn in recent years. And I think this is going to absolutely pull the spotlight back on it

because it just shows how vulnerable, not the US. US is insulated from it a little bit more

because of the shale and fracking revolution. But still it's not immune from it, though. And the

gas prices are rising here as we talked about when gas prices rise in America, people get very,

very upset. And prices are rising, growth is getting more expensive. This is really unpopular.

I just think it's really unpopular. I just going to get much more unpopular very quickly.

It's disaster for the Republicans, for the midterms, which I don't think many people are crying

about at this point in time when you look at Trump's popularity ratings. But at the end of the day,

it's how they're going to react in the next couple of months to try to use that in some way,

shape or form. And that we have to shrug our shoulders and say, let's, let's see how that

plays out. I'm excited to announce that expat wealth has its first sponsor, the Global Financial

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I've learned a ton. It's a genuine community of internationally minded folk doing their best

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area you're looking to get into, check out the GFPI at www.gfp.institute. You will be glad you did

and I hope to see you there soon. One of the things we're going to say right was

periods like this never let a good crisis go to waste and this is an opportunity to tax loss

harvest. Absolutely. So do you want to just tell the folks what we mean by that?

So tax harvesting is that opportunity for Richard Knight to say to any of our clients,

hey we've lost money, hey this is great news, we can go ahead and try to make sure we can

minimize future taxes. So anytime we have a loss on the US side of things, we can go ahead and sell

it and we can harbor those losses to offset gains. For any time in the future we can take $3,000

against our US earned income and we can pass for it as much of that as we want for as long as we

want. So a great opportunity to clean up our portfolios at different times and move it in

incremental ways. In a lot of foreign countries we're able to do this in different ways so you have

to look at how it works with your double taxation treaty if you have to pay your taxes first in

a foreign country and naturally you're going to have to look at it in that currency whether that

be in euros or GBP. So don't always just think about it in the American way but it does apply in

other countries in those ways. We've been tax harvesting significantly and because of the

duration of this I think of our portfolio as kind of our starting 11 for our football team

and then we have our kind of second team and now we're already on our 13 because we're having

a tax harvest the tax harvest positions because it's continued to go down. I don't see that as a

problem because you have to stay out for 30 days that we'll get back to some of the original

positions that we would like and there's enough positions to to root out there and that's giving

us the opportunity to get out some of those growth stocks and get into some of our good

blend positions that have a little bit more growth and a little bit more value. I'm sorry,

a little less growth. No, no, no, that was perfect. I have a great real life example of this from

last year. So this wasn't, you're I think you're talking more there about this direct indexing.

So there's two ways to tax our harvesting. Well, there's more than two ways but

you can do what direct indexing or which is where you will hold lots of individual stocks,

gives you loads more opportunity for tax our harvesting and we do that but we also do it on a

smaller scale with just with ETFs and last year we had a client and we should allow us to do it

for smaller clients as well. People have got less invested. Last year just before the Liberation day

fun, three or four months before that, we'd invested some money for a client, not a huge amount

but enough that this client was nervous about investing it and then what two, three months later

we had Liberation day market fell off a cliff, went down like 20% at one point and this client

messaged me saying, shut it out, shut just, you know, shut, we've all had many of these messages

over our careers and we were like, no, you absolutely shouldn't and he didn't to his credit and then

we had our review much later in the year, October and November time and by that point he was well

up because if everyone remembers the market created and then it took off again. I'm not saying

that will happen this time but it could and when we met with him he was well up on where he'd

been when he emailed us, he was well up on where he was when he invested and we could see we had

just over 20,000 dollars of harvested losses to carry forward to offset against future gains.

So he put that crisis to very good use. It's magical in those types of ways

and what I'll remind you is we have a lot of data to be able to pull and in the last 100 years

anytime the America has gone to war with another country, it's only ever taken maximum six months

for the stock market to get back to profitability. Really? So don't think the wars are not profitable,

wars are extremely profitable because typically we take on debt to go ahead and pay for the war

and we put them into productive use in some way, shape or force, form. When I say productive use,

I'm not saying tanks or the productive use, I'm saying essentially it is cheap because debt is

cheaper. We're all grown up. Help me take my foot, yeah, help me take my foot out of my mouth as

no, no, but that's that's to where essentially we shouldn't be panicking about this

from a stock market vantage point. We should be looking at it as how should we be changing the

reflection of our portfolio and in the meantime taking advantage of those tax harvesting opportunities.

You know, the famous, what's the famous phrase, right?

So, bear sounds smart, bulls will make you money. Yeah, as in it's easy to have a problem

to have a solution, it's easy to the negative, it's easy to see why things won't work,

but ultimately history is shown as time and time again that it pays to be positive,

it pays to be optimistic about the future, that no matter what's going on in the world,

what does it Nick Murray says? Other than love, human ingenuity is the most powerful force in the

world. IE for since the dawn of time humans have got up woke up and strive to do more, achieve more,

succeed more for them and their families and yet there are exceptions to that, but by in general

that is that is human nature and companies, real businesses are the best manifestation of that.

The best way of the best way of harnessing human ingenuity and I think America is the best,

it is the best example, certainly modern times of that ingenuity being harnessed in an economy.

So, I'm not enjoying what's happening right now, I think so much of this is just complete

your own goals, but the opportunities will arise and I'm cautiously optimistic.

Absolutely. I think of it as we're in gym class as long as we show up, we'll get an A

and 70% of the time the market's up just by showing up. So, Peter Lynch, I think he said it

brilliantly which was the problem with trying to sell out of the market and buy back into the

market is you have to be right to win to sell and win to buy. And the best of traders are only

right, what was it, 60% of the time on each which basically means 60 times, 60 comes out to 36%

of the time. So, if you're one of the best traders, you're right, 36% of the time, but if we're just

average and we just own in the markets, we're right 70% of the time, which would you rather

be right 70% of the time or it'd be the best of the best to be right 36% of the time.

Just before we go, I sent you a couple of articles before. I covered this last time,

the time before, we talked about this brewing, I don't know if I want to call it a crisis,

but the negativity surrounding private credit or alternatives in general, right? The

last couple of years has been a, I think we've got a gold rush, it's been a gold rush

into alternatives and private credit has kind of led the charge on that. And we're seeing it have a

real wobble. And one of the main players, Cliff Water, has apparently been hit with 14% redemption

requests. So I just wanted to see what you're making of all this. It's a classic run on the back.

If there wasn't a problem before this, it's now a problem because everybody wants to get out

before they're stuck with it. You know, when Jamie Dimon describes it as there are going to be

many more cockroaches in here, we know that we're going to have defaults. But when you're going

into private credit, it's like going into high yield bonds. When we're buying high yield bonds,

how we look at the portfolio is what is going to be the percentage of defaults, not what are

yield going to be, but what's going to be the percentage of defaults. And these private credit

deals, it's got to be the same type of thing. Most of the individuals inside of them don't understand

that. That, hey, a few cockroaches, that's like, if you buy some real estate, you have some cockroaches.

And that, this is classic. Why? For the vast majority of retail, this is inappropriate.

It's just classic. The first sign of the first sign of any negativity and 14% requests on a fund

where they know there's only 5% can be honored. I mean, they actually honored a bit more, but legally,

they only have to want to 5% like this. You can just say to people who are in the face to people

about the risks and the profile and the restrictions. But when the rubber meets the road,

some of my smartest clients, what they're contacting us about is when do you think we should be buying

these stocks of the companies that are managing these? Because these are smart guys. And there's

going to be huge money to be made on the losses of the backside. So we're keeping an eye on that.

And I think everybody else should be as well. These are not horrible companies. And yet they're

they're being traded as if they should be going towards bankruptcy. So as the expression goes,

never try to catch a falling knife. But once it's the ground, pick it up and then go ahead and run with it.

Well, maybe not run with it. But you know, go ahead and get back to, get back to cooking,

clean it off, et cetera. That's what we're looking at is where is it going to hit the bottom

so that we can go ahead and pick that up, clean it off and go ahead and run with it. And these

companies will do great because there is a great market there. But it just got oversaturated

with the wrong clients. And you know, they're going to be stuck in there for a period of time.

These companies are killers. You know, they are the usual aries, you know, your carliels,

your Apollo's. They are. They're killers. Yeah. They're very successful. Cliffwater.

And then I also sent you apparently the Department of Labor has just green-lighted private alternatives,

private assets, even cryptocurrency to be available in employers' time. It counts like 401k's.

So I feel I know what your opinion is on this. But I thought I just, what's your take on that?

Well, you know, you can try to protect people from their own selves, but sometimes they'll go

blow themselves up, et cetera. I'd say most people, this is a great opportunity for them to have

a bigger open gambit, expect huge problems in the next 5-10 years from individuals hurting

themselves on their retirement accounts. It's a terrible idea. And we can't be surprised that

all of a sudden we built up all these rules. The SEC came along and saved ourselves from having

another great depression because we had two exotic products. We had too much margin. We had too

much debt in the markets. Now, you know, eight years later and we're going right back towards that

same center of how can we overlever ourselves? You know, why do I not like cryptocurrencies?

Well, it's because without the regulation, people could go ahead and lever them up into huge amounts.

And all of a sudden, you have all the problems that brought about the great depression in a new

currency that has no basis. So now, what happens if you deregulate everything inside of a retirement

account? Well, you're going to have people hurting their money that's supposed to take care of

them during during their retirement years. On the one hand, I guess you could say, yeah, well,

this is a long, any investment in private assets is a long-term play. Crypto, not so much,

but but real assets, private assets, long-term play and what's longer than retirement accounts.

So I can, I guess I understand that argument, but just let's call this what it is. It's

excellent liquidity for the institutional and mega wealthy already in there. And that's all

these small retail investors just going to be left holding the, holding the bag. It's going to be

I think it's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. And so unnecessary if you have,

if you have Richard's net worth, you can have some private equity, you can have some private debt

because you have enough money and everything else to take care of your retirement. But if you need

that a new attire stream and it's an average size account, what's the average IRA in the States?

I can't remember. It's like four, five hundred thousand. It's not large. So, so all of a sudden,

the amount that you need in there to create a regular income is the majority of the portfolio.

You don't have room for, yeah, for these things. Potentially the traffic.

Well, yeah, I was going to have them when these things get gated all blow up. And then someone

leaves a job and wants to move. Therefore, I one came to an IRA. I want to start drawing down.

They can't because it's all tied up. I can't even imagine. I've experienced, coming from the

offshore world, I've experienced some of this. We pick up portfolios where someone's been

dropped into some God-awful student accommodation fund or some like ground rent nonsense.

It's inevitably blown up. It's just a horror show, a Byzantine horror show. And

doing that writ large to, it's just going to be, it's not going to be good. I don't think.

If all of a sudden you look at the S&P 500 and it's going to give us 10 and a half percent

per annum for close to a century. If all of a sudden you're saying 10 and a half percent is not

enough money, maybe we should be really leaning on being too greedy. And the two things that drive

the market are fear and greed. So if people are getting too greedy, they're going to go out and

get themselves slaughtered. Brian, you've just, I have said this, do you know what, one million

compounded at 10 percent is in 30 years. It's 17 and a half million dollars. The fact that you can

you can harness a 10 percent, what has something that's historically delivered 10 percent a year

for almost no costs, no messing around, no difficulties. And it can do that, lift left and

challenge. I can't comprehend why a professional trader's yes, but why people feel the need to

trade because you're taking all this risk for what, what extra return are you hoping to achieve?

And what are you actually more likely to achieve, which is a lower rate of return, when all you

need to do is plug it into US.market to generate 10 cents a year, which compounded over 30 years

is live changing. Why are we searching for so much more?

It's, you can't win if you don't play. It's the lottery fallacy. I want to be that guy that did

so much better. It doesn't sound great at the bar when you say, I've invested all my money in

the S&P 500. But to me, that is the safe way to go. You get the free lunch of diversification,

you get the free lunch of low fees, and essentially great growth over the course of time without

risking blowing it all up or massively underperforming. Absolutely. All for zero effort.

I just, it blows my mind that how much effort. I listen to all the investing podcasts,

you know, all the big ones, and they're great, but they're all really, they're all like

trading entertainment. But that's hugely popular, and it tells me that people are, and I see

on Reddit as well a lot, people are actively trading, and I just don't get why when I can get 10%

on average a year, just by buying an S&P 500. I want more diversification that, but it's just

my mind boggles. What are we trying to, what are, it's all for what, and at what risk?

Well, but there's exceptions to that rule. There's, you know, Congressman that have all this

inside of information and can trade on it. There's the Trump administration that can go ahead and

invest before a war is launched, et cetera, et cetera. So there are groups that I can understand

why they'd be trading. Yes, I can. I just, I'm glad you brought that. I just got canceled

from the podcast forever. I'm glad you brought that up. That is absolutely despicable. What,

what is happening on CalChi and Polymarket and, and the apparently Hegseth tried to buy into a

defense fund before the war was rejected. That's how we know about it, which it's, it is awful.

I mean, talk about undermining trust. And I know both sides guilty of this. I know this is not

unique. It's like all things. It's magnified and taken to the, it's times 100 under this

administration, but it's disgusting and they need to do something about it. I can promise you

at some point in time, most of them wind up in jail just like the first Trump term, but we have to

wait until we get some, but it's a wider problem. It's not just, it's not just a policy.

Absolutely. They need to stop it. Yeah. The Democrats are just, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

It's, they're not going to vote for it until, essentially, you've got a total change over in

power. Yeah. Okay. Right. Well, now we've put the world to rights yet again. Anything else we

need to add or we, we don't let you get back to your, we talked about potatoes. We talked about

beer. We talked about all the important things, right? Next time we need to have a potato on a beer.

We need to, we need to, we need to some chips and beers. I would, yeah, that sounds great, mate.

Honestly, I'd love to do that. So you, you're in Spain. You're about to sail across to France.

Everyone, it sounds pretty damn cool. We're going across the Gulf to Leon, which is, um, can be quite

hectic. So, um, I'll pop up in the beer on the other side. Okay. Well, good luck. Godspeed.

What's the, what's the sailing terminology for that? Is there a sailing bon voyage?

Oh, well, that'd be the French one. No, but that's, that's just in general. Okay.

I'm standing by it. All right. Bon voyage. Happy sailing to you.

Okay, Ryan. Well, isn't, have a good journey. Have, uh, and have fun in Brazil and do some good work

and I'll see you next time. Looking forward to it. Thanks, Richard. All right. Bye-bye.

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