Speaker 1This is the Commodity Culture Podcast, where we interview prominent investors, fund managers, analysts, and company CEOs to give you an edge when it comes to investing in the commodity space. Ed Dowd, great to have you back on the show. Now, I want to talk about the broad market as we often kick off our conversations there. There have been some reports out recently claiming it's at the most expensive valuation in history, surpassing the GFC and dot-com bubble before both of those bubbles burst. And you wrote last week on your sub stack, strip out the AI-related spending and what does US growth look like? Not pretty. The stock market's concentration in a handful of AI-adjacent names has reached levels that would have been called reckless in any prior cycle. So clearly, the lights are flashing red. The alarms are blaring, but people aren't running for the exits yet. Have we reached peak complacency at this point?
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm not going to call the market top. Who knows? But we wrote a piece in 2025 looking at the valuations. They were absurd a year ago. They've gotten even more absurd. And we wrote then, and we stand by it, is that historically, when you look at these valuations, 10-year forward returns are 0%, including dividends. So it implies a massive drop. A massive drawdown sometime between now and then. Look, when semiconductors are 19% of the S&P 500 as an industry, they're very cyclical. They always have been. They have tremendous bubble moves, parabolic moves in times of new technologies, like they did in the dot-com era. And they just had a parabolic move into June. They've pulled back a little bit. Some people think it's over. We don't know yet. We don't have the structure to say that the bubble's burst. But there's definitely more and more people questioning this. And people think, oh, bubbles don't end if people are questioning. That's not true. I remember during the dot-com time, there were plenty of people questioning that bubble. During the housing bubble, there were plenty of people talking about that. And all of those seven, I was at BlackRock, our fixed income people were beside themselves watching the fixed income market starting to have issues. The stock market shrugged that off until December of 07. And there were clear warning signs for about a year. And I feel like we're in the same kind of thing. People are going to continue to pretend everything's fine. But there's more and more people joining the party saying that there's something very wrong. The valuations are absurd. The concentration's absurd. It's become more expensive than it was even a year ago. And the concentration is even more absurd. I don't think we've ever seen tech at this weighting. So, you know, look, it seems to be that all the eggs are in one basket. It's AI. And it all relies on two companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, that don't make money.
Speaker 1Yeah. And of course, it could keep going higher. That's always the, you know, people like to pile on. Oh, these people are just doomers. It's like, you just look at these valuation levels by so many metrics. It's absolutely absurd historically. And of course, the market can remain irrational for longer than most people are expecting. Now, perhaps a sign of this irrationality is the NVIDIA AI factory Compute now becoming an investable asset class. This company has signed MOUs with six major financial institutions, including BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and others, to mobilize over $500 billion in third-party capital in a bid to accelerate AI build-outs through investments in Compute, likening it to toll roads. This feels insane to me. This feels absurd. This feels crazy. Am I missing something here? Is this the new investable asset class investors should be taking a look at?
Speaker 2Well, they certainly want to propose that. And let's remember, what NVIDIA came out with last week was an MOU, Memorandum of Understanding. I think people are forgetting, we've had these kinds of bombastic announcements before. In January of last year, we had Stargate, $500 billion announced. It hasn't been funded. So we've had these $500 billion things talked about before, and they're MOUs, these announcements. Whenever you see MOU, it's not a contract, and it seems like it just will get forgotten about. So it's an MOU. They certainly do want to create an investable asset class. And Ross Hendricks, who I follow on X, and he's a good investor, he coined the term, they're going to come up with a collateralized chip obligation, which I think they might. You can't make this up, a CCO. So that's where we are, a collateralized chip obligation.
Speaker 1Now, another area of the market you've been sounding the alarm on is the real estate market as well. And according to Redfin, the number of U.S. homebuyers has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded. How are you interpreting this latest data, and how bad could it get for real estate in the U.S.?
Speaker 2Well, so we came out with a thesis last year. The real estate market was in trouble. We had the graph that was just described by Redfin, homes for sale versus homes sold. The gap has even gotten bigger, and that's what Redfin is pointing out. It's a gap that usually those two time series track each other, but it looks like an alligator jaw at the moment. So there's a buyer's strike. Houses are not affordable. So there's no activity in the real estate market. There's already been some degradation in prices in the south. South, west, and south-east near the border due to the immigration. So prices are coming down there. In the northeast and other parts of California, there's still pockets of price increases, but eventually that will weaken as well. What we have is basically an affordability problem. And, you know, homes, we think, we've done the math, we think homes are 30% overpriced. So, you know, there hasn't been a. Like waterfall yet in pricing that comes by the time that happens in the news that media is talking about it, the crisis is basically almost over. So it's a slow rolling crisis. We don't think it's we're on record in our research reports and our real estate reports saying we don't think it's going to be as bad as the great financial crisis, at least in the real estate sector. We have others. We have an AI bubble and a China problem, but just in housing, we don't think it goes systemic. So we're not we're not doom and gloomers. And actually, we think. If we do get a reset in prices, you know, they'll be the losers, which are the boomers. Mostly 60% of the homes for sale are from people over over 50 or 60. I believe it'll be great. It'll be great for the millennials and those looking to buy homes, and that'll create the seeds of a recovery on the other side. So there's always there's always, you know, there'll be there'll be a problem of your recession if this is handled properly and not, you know, they don't keep kicking the can down the road. This this will end up being a good thing, you know, for for years to come on the other side of it.
Speaker 1One question I didn't have prepared, but a recent news item that's come top of mind. Well, firstly, I'd like to ask about potential government buying to prop up the stock market because the Trump administration looks at the stock market as like the main barometer of economic health. You can add Pam Bondi shouting about the Dow when being questioned about Epstein. That's how seriously the administration seems to take it. They've taken a stake in. Intel, they've taken a stake in some other publicly traded companies. Do you think that they could continue to take stakes in public companies moving forward, potentially Nvidia, et cetera, in an attempt to hold up the broad market and be able to point to that number and say everything's doing great?
Speaker 2Yeah, look, the amount of money they're investing is not enough to hold up the market. It's more of a sentiment indicator. It gives people confidence that things are OK when the market finally does. It gives people confidence that things are going to break. There's really no force on Earth that can stop it. We've seen this before. We don't have the structure in the S&P 500 that indicated anything is a problem yet. And you won't really know you're in a bear market. And it'll take weeks to know whether or not we're in a bear market. So calling a top is a fool's errand and shorting the market is stupid. That's why I've always recommended people just to raise cash in their portfolio and wait for better prices. So they can jawbone. All they want. And it's been quite effective. The war, right before the war, the markets were rolling over. Private credit was a problem. And people were focusing on the fundamentals. And people forget the 10-year yield dropped below 4% right before the war. The war happened. Price of oil, we got a little mini oil shock. That temporarily affected the inflation CPI numbers. And then Trump had the ability to kind of control. The headlines on the market. He could propose war over the weekend and then say there's a deal coming on Monday. And if you look at what happened in this most recent rally, after the wipeout of the AI guru, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but that fund that got wiped out a couple of weeks ago, Besson came out and said there was going to be a deal imminently. And the market ripped on that and there's been no deal. So this market is very thinly traded. There's not a lot of, you know, It's being pushed by these headlines and the algos. And eventually, the bad fundamentals will show up in the earnings. The earnings of the tech companies is circular. Their earnings are going up because they're depreciating their capex on extended schedules. They're investing in each other. So a lot of Google's and Microsoft's good earnings last quarter came from their investment in Anthropic going up. So it's all predicated on the continued well-being of OpenAI and Anthropic. And Anthropic wants to go IPO this September, OpenAI push it off till next year. And, you know, once the S1s get filed, we'll get a look at the books. And, of course, these companies are going to try to make their revenue look as good as possible. And they're doing all the tricks they can to make it look like they're growing gangbusters.
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Speaker 2Yeah, I put out a post on that and it's Banana Republic stuff. So, you know, the. The true diehard Maga people came in and flamed me and said, I don't like capitalism. Look, the test for this is simple. If he wasn't president, would anybody pay a hundred grand for his true social posts? No, they wouldn't to have access before everybody else. So it's a it's an abuse of the office. People say, well, he's not the one running the company. True. I mean, he's not, but he certainly could get on the phone and say, guys, knock it off. So. I mean, it just it just looks bad and it gives so much ammo to his opposition. I mean, it's it's and people on Wall Street are kind of disgusted. A lot of his former supporters on Wall Street are just scratching their heads. So it's it's it's stuff like this that does not inspire confidence.
Speaker 1And your thoughts on how Trump's posts are moving the market, because it seems strange to me that he could announce for the 30th time or whatever, that there's a peace deal on the table. And that the broad market could go up once again. Surely this isn't just retail institutional investors who believe what the president is saying, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, look, look, the market, like you said, can remain rational for for a while. And right now the markets are focused on news war headlines. Eventually, the fundamentals come to bear fruit here. And if you look at the rest of the S&P 500, there's been a, you know, most like I said, the concentration has gotten to the point where the only thing working is the stock market. I mean, there's been a, you know, most like I said, the concentration is getting to the point where the only thing working is the stock market. The only thing working is the AI trade. And once that breaks, then the whole market breaks. And, you know, is that going to happen this week? Is it going to happen in January? Is it going to happen in February? Is it going to happen in September? Don't know. But when it goes, it's going to go fast and hard. And I don't want to be anywhere near that when it goes. And again, if you just have patience and a timeline longer than a week, and especially for people who don't, you know, participate in the markets every day. And they have their retirement accounts, and they don't watch them because they're busy doing other things. They're not investors. You know, again, having an ample amount of cash in your portfolio to sidestep this disaster can really give you a lot of dry powder when the cheap prices come. Warren Buffett, like us, we were a couple of years early. Warren Buffett as well. He's 40% cash. David Tepper, a couple of weeks ago, announced he's 40% cash. Don't know if he still is. He might have dipped in on the blow-up in the AI bubble temporarily. And Paul Tudor Jones is telling people to kind of stay away from the S&P 500 based on valuations. So you have a lot of professionals who have a time horizon longer than a week that have been doing this a long time and have patience. And patience is alpha. A lot of people don't have patience. We have this, like, immediate, you know, if you make a call, you have to be right in, like, the next minute. Calls, that's not how the investing world works.
Speaker 1Yeah, very well said. And I think social media has unfortunately pushed people into paying too much attention to day-to-day price action and taking it as some sort of actionable data. Unless you're a day trader and, like, 99% of people cannot successfully day trade, you don't need to watch the ticker every day and draw conclusions. Now, it seems like one of the trades that runs contrary to all the nonsense you've been pointing out here is gold. And I would venture. I would venture to say it seems to be acting as an honest unit of account amidst all of this financial chicanery and ballooning government debt and deficits. Would you agree? And how do you see the gold market positioned right now? Because we've seen it kind of consolidate post, you know, it dropped significantly following all-time highs. It fell after the war kicked off. It's been consolidating sideways. Seems like it could be breaking out here. Again, we're focused on the long term. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are there on gold.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't want to get into the short term. I'm on record saying after the blow-off top in January that it was not the end. It was not the blow-off top and the end of gold. And I said gold and silver, mostly gold, would consolidate sideways. And then, you know, we're targeting 10,000 by 2030 because of what's going on in the global sovereign debt crisis. And gold is consolidating. It's looking, it's acting a little better now. Again, like you said, we're not into the short term. But, you know, the deficit certainly doesn't seem to be slowing under Donald Trump. They keep announcing, you know, increasingly the military budget 500 billion or, you know, I think it's a trillion. They want a one and a half trillion. So there doesn't seem to be any slowing down in the deficit. And what's going on in Japan as well? Gold is, like you said, is nobody else's liability. And my contention is, is that this global sovereign debt crisis is going to be a big deal. The release valve always was going to be a currency somewhere and a central bank having to make the Hobbesian choice between saving the global financial markets or saving their own economy. And that's exactly where Japan is right now.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's a great segue because I was going to ask about Japan next. You wrote about recently in your sub stack about the U.S. intervening in the yen markets in a bid to stop Japan from dumping its U.S. treasuries. You wrote the Fed. EOJ and Treasury are walking a tightrope. So walk us through your analysis. How likely are they to fall off the tightrope? And what could the implications be if they do?
Speaker 2Well, long term, it's been shown that interventions, you know, while in the short term, which could be months or a year, can work. But ultimately, they fail. And, you know, Soros and Bess and Druckenmiller famously bet against the British pound and made a lot of money. When that finally broke. So what they're trying to do is. So what's going on in Japan is they should be raising their interest rates way higher than they are now. They can't because that could destabilize the yen carry trade, which would have implications across the global financial markets. However, when the Fed intervenes and causes the yen to go down too quickly. No, I mean, reverse that. The yen to appreciate too quickly, which is what they did. Then you can cause the yen carrying trade to implode that way. What they need for the Japanese yen is stability. But there's a mismatch between the interest rates in the U.S. and the interest rates in Japan. And they have been loathe to raise them. They tried to raise rates in July of 24. That caused some wobbling. Then they did some interventions. and see if we can then then that caused a little kerfuffle in the Asian equity markets and almost spread to the U.S. So it's a tightrope. So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. And the key for them is stability. As long as there's stability and it trades in a range, everything's fine. But if it strengthens too quickly, you get a delevering. If it weakens too fast, you have other problems. So this is the sovereign debt crisis finally come home to roost. It was always going to be expressed in the currency. That's the release valve, and Japan is front and center
Speaker 1on that. What do you make of Scott Besson so far in terms of the job he's done as Treasury Secretary? A lot of criticism obviously thrown his way. From my perspective, all of the people involved in that world, the political elite, so to speak, are horribly beyond corrupt, especially at this point in time. And, you know, famously they captured him having written on a pad and paper that he wanted to buy Japanese yen, which is pretty funny. I've seen many of his interviews. I've seen him talk about policies. He's talking now about we're going to bypass the Strait of Hormuz by building underground pipelines. I mean, it seems ridiculous on its face. I wonder what your thoughts are on Besson and the job he's done so far.
Speaker 2Well, it's a tough job. I mean, when the administration first announced what their plan was, it was awesome. So, you know, they were going to try to reduce the deficit to 3% of GDP from its current 6% to 8% that we've had since Biden and still under Trump. That was going to be a good move. It would bring yields down. They were going to get rid of fraud. They were going to drill, baby, drill. And they were going to try to grow the economy by deregulating. And that was Besson's plan. The war has screwed everything up. And look, that wasn't Besson's decision. And so you know, I wouldn't want his job. I mean, you know, when you're in these positions, let's say I was Treasury Secretary. I can't come out and say what I'm saying now about the economy because that would scare people. You just can't. But my job as an outside observer is to read between the lines. And he's saying what he has to say. And it's, you know, the press secretary just left because I think she got tired of like holding water for the Trump. Every press secretary under these administrations doesn't matter. Biden, Obama, Bush, they all leave because they can't handle how much nonsense they have to say. Yeah, it's completely
Speaker 1insane. Some of the stuff they have to say. It's literally their job to lie and say insane things and they have no choice in the matter. So, yeah, it is awful. Let's talk about Hormuz and the potential closure of the Strait of Bab el-Mandab as well, because there was, of course, talk that this is going to lead to famines. It's going to lead to a shutdown of the global economy. You know, food shortages, all of massive inflation, all of these types of things. And what we've certainly seen an impact so far, it hasn't been as severe as people were predicting. Do you just think this is a lagging effect that will eventually start impacting the West moving forward? Or do you think supply chains are more versatile than people expected and they've been able to adapt to the situation?
Speaker 2You know, I guess there was an analysis done that I thought was pretty good about what China did. China kind of saved everybody's butt, apparently. They stopped importing oil and started drawing down their own SPRs, so they didn't put pressure on the markets. Which, you know, honestly that helped out Trump. But they also were, you know, were helping themselves out, because if we go into it, if the U.S. goes into a massive recession, China's already in a problem. That only exacerbates their problem, because even though there's tariffs and all this, they still sell goods to Europe, then Europe slaps on their stuff and they sell it to us. So there's been ways that China's been getting around that. So if we go into a recession, it's going to be bad for the factory of the world. So that's why I think we haven't seen these shortages show up yet, but we're seeing, you know, a lot of smart people, smarter than myself in the energy complex, are pointing out the binary spreads. That's why gas prices haven't been coming down. So we have a refining capacity problem, not an oil problem at the moment, and we'll see what happens as we roll through time. But, you know, there's always lives to these things. I mean, we had the oil really kind of peaked out in May, and headline inflation peaked out in May. It's going to be coming lower. But we saw that retail sales kind of had a bad month last month. So that's kind of the tax working its way through the system. And, you know, it was a mini shock, and it's created demand destruction, and people are cutting back, and people are not happy. And the poll numbers for Trump and the GOP are not good at the moment.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, the cost of living crisis is obviously something that I think we need to touch on, because the cost of groceries, rent, many goods and services, it's starting to get out of reach of even the middle class, you know, without having to make major sacrifices, lower living standards, a bitter pill to swallow, obviously, which could explain the poll numbers you're talking about. Now, it's easy to say, tighten your purse strings, but at some point, as we watch inflation move upwards, it becomes less and less realistic for most families out there. And, of course, one of the end results of this has been the rise of socialism, the rise of people like Zoran Mamdami, basically, people who offer you free stuff. And most people don't understand that the government is causing this problem, so they shout, why doesn't the government do something about this problem? And then you get socialists pop up, and even more people looking towards communism as a potential solution, because it hasn't been done right yet, supposedly. I mean, is there any way to solve this cost of living crisis without a deflationary bust at this point?
Speaker 2Unfortunately, no. The problem, so, look, we were going into in 2019, we were going into a global growth slowdown, and then, you know, miraculously, in quotes, COVID comes along and gave the governments and the central banks of the world the excuse to basically spend like there was a war, and the war was COVID. I mean, the unprecedented money printing and then spending by the governments, there's two things. You print the money, but the money needs to get into the system. The government took the money the Fed printed and handed it out. And that caused, that was really what caused the inflation. The inflation was born under Trump in 2020 and the Fed. And there's always a lag in monetary policy. It showed up 18 months later in 2021 under Biden. And then the Fed raised rates. And we're stuck with those permanent, I mean, even though inflation are, we have inflation coming down on our models and core inflation, and there'll be a deflationary scare. But the cumulative price hikes are not going back to where they were. The rate of growth in inflation may be slowing, but we're not going back to pre-COVID. And unfortunately, wages haven't kept pace. And that's why people feel poor. And, you know, we have, then we had the immigration problem, which Trump has, you know, did close down the border, but we still, the mass, the mass deportations haven't happened. We have the HB1 visa problem. So there seems to be a wage problem in the U.S. And the only game in town is AI. And that only helps a very few selected group of people, some construction workers on the data centers and mostly VC. And, uh, people investing in AI stocks and chip makers. It's not, it's not, you know, when the, when the housing, when the housing market rolls over as it is, that's 20% of the economy. The economy is just not going to do well, and it's, and it's not doing well. And the truth of the economy will be discovered soon enough.
Speaker 1AI data centers. What do you think the end game is there? Because there's talk, of course, that AI is the next big thing. It's going to replace all of these different jobs, but the profits don't seem to be there at the moment. Basically at this point, AI are chatbots, which are extraordinarily useful. I use them all the time. Um, but they are not a cash cow, so to speak, especially with the amount of money that these companies are spending. Some people more conspiratorial minded point to the fact that perhaps everything is about mass surveillance. And that's the reason we're seeing all these AI bill notes and the reason why we're seeing the government get behind them as well. Wondering what your thoughts are there.
Speaker 2Yeah. So that, that, that's a theory that has some, uh, meritocracy. I'm friends with Catherine Austin Fitz. That's her theory. And I've spoken with her and I said, look, you know, you may be right. Uh, I'm evidence-based. There's certainly a case to be made because there seems to be this unprecedented push, uh, to build these as fast as they can, even though the math doesn't make sense. And more and more people are pointing that out. Um, I would become, uh, more, uh, suspicious if we have the bus that I think is coming, there'll be a, um, a resetting evaluations and there'll be some bankruptcies. If the government comes in and people think the government's going to bail out and they're not going to bail out AI, they're not going to like, uh, go to Congress and say, we need to raise three, 4 trillion to bail out, uh, data centers. That's not going to happen. What the, what, what I would become suspicious is that the government steps in and, uh, takes ownership of some of these, uh, assets at pennies on the dollar. Then the, the, the, the, the surveillance digital prison thesis, it's right there
Speaker 1our faces. Private credit, yet another area of the market showing signs of distress after several private credit funds gated withdrawals. We're seeing private credit fund management running for the exits with three CEOs resigning in an eight-week period. You posted about this on X. How big is that portion of the private credit market currently under stress? And how close are we, in your opinion, to a complete meltdown in the sector?
Speaker 2Yeah, so here's the thing about private credit. It doesn't trade. It's opaque. They mark their own books. So you have to look for signposts of what's going on. The beginning of the private credit was began in the fall of 2025, when first brands went bankrupt, Tricolor Auto, and people started to question, hold on, how did that slip by you guys? Oh, and then there were a couple, BlackRock marked one of its positions from 100 cents on the dollar. Zero a month later. So people started asking questions. What's going on here? So people started asking for their money back. Then the gates went up. And then Q2 came along. More people asked for their money at an accelerating pace. The gates remained. And so what we have now is an outflow problem. And so the question is, are they still getting inflows? And so look, any kind of credit mechanism is going to change. needs constant flow and the flows are shutting down and the losses are accumulating. PIMCO said we're in the part of the credit cycle where we're going to get a default cycle. And that's because the real economy underneath is copying it. First brands went belly up because they were servicing aftermarket auto parts. And that's Joe Sixpack. So Joe Sixpack wasn't doing well. And Tricolor Auto was to immigrants. So these loans and these portfolios to these industrial companies or roll-ups like dentist offices or veterinary offices, they're coming under pressure because Joe Sixpack's cash flows are going the wrong way. So I can't tell you when it's going to blow up. But certainly, for a guy like me who's into pattern recognition, when you start to see CEOs of these private companies, they're going to blow up. But certainly, for a guy like me who's into pattern recognition, when you start to see there's, you know, the junk bond market at least traded publicly. So you knew what was going on. You could see spreads widening. This is opaque. But what we do know is flows are going the wrong way and people are leaving. It doesn't, it doesn't bode well.
Speaker 1Now in the Substack article, I referenced at the start of the show, talking about the AI bubble, you wrote about the bizarre backstory of the wife of the Anthropic CEO who once pitched a quote, revolutionary porn company. I don't know what that means to Jeffrey Epstein. This seems insane. It's kind of part and parcel though, with all of this kind of what appears to be moral degradation going on in the political class, pretty much around the world. Perhaps America appears to be the epicenter of it, because that's where everybody's focused at the moment. Can you speak to this moral decay, the bizarre story of the Anthropic CEO's wife and just how we got here?
Speaker 2Yeah, I started a Substack about it. A dad beyond the narrative. And I wrote on, it was a Thursday night. I'm going through my Twitter feed and I see this bizarro story that Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, apparently had a wife no one knew about. The internet had scrubbed her, clotted even scrubbed her. And this, this story came from a Wall Street Journal reporter, not Reddit, not 4chan, not, not, not you or me. And I was like, what? And then I read it and I was like, what? And then it got even more weird. She, she was a networker. She had dated Eric Schmidt, introduced Dario to him. He was one of the first investors in, in Anthropic, 124 million. And then she also, at the same time, was, was, she's in the Epstein files. She apparently pitched a revolutionary porn company to Jeffrey Epstein after he had already been convicted. So So, and, and, and we also come to find out that, like, she's the sounding board for the CEO of Anthropic, Dario. So I find it just bizarre that, you know, this is going to be one of the biggest IPOs ever recorded in September. We don't even know the CEO has a wife. There's an Epstein connection. I mean, you can't make this up. I mean, if I was writing a movie, I wrote this myself, I was writing a movie script. I couldn't even come up with this. I mean, and the moral decay, you know, look, I did a lot of work on COVID and what happened then. The institutions have been captured. There's been this like slow roll moral decay. Wall Street is rife with people that are just there to make money. It's become very transactional. And, you know, if you're looking at what the private equity, private credit guys are doing, they bought insurance companies to stuff their crappy bonds into. That doesn't sound very ethical, but all they care about is making their fees. And they figured that the, this will be bailed out eventually by some one else. I mean, this is where we are. People only caring about themselves, not thinking about ethics at all. And clearly, you know, Dario married a woman who doesn't have, you know, what I would consider to be highly ethical at all. And she's the sounding board for this guy. And Gavin Baker, who is a bull on AI, and I know him, he's a good guy. And, you know, I'm not going to disparage him at all. He made a lot of money for his funds. He heard a rumor that Dario, thinks that, you know, at the end of the day, there'll be one company, one private company, anthropic, and then governments. So that's kind of bizarre. You know, so we got a guy that's a megalomaniac telling us that we're not going to have jobs. His wife pitched a firm corn company to, I mean, what are we, what's going on? I mean, it's just, it's laughable at this point. It is laughable.
Speaker 1And you've met, you've mentioned, COVID a few times. I definitely can't let you go before getting your take on Fauci testifying or lack of testifying before the Senate committee. And the fact that he's now, I mean, they've now found him in contempt of court. Supposedly there's going to, there's some states who are potentially going to prosecute him. Do you think we eventually see Anthony Fauci behind bars, or is this just a dog and pony show to distract everybody from what's going on in the economy?
Speaker 2You know, Jesse, I would hope there'd be some justice, but, you know, the cynicism is so rife amongst people like you and me and others that it wouldn't surprise me that nothing happens. I'd like to say that I'd like to be wrong here, but the good news is the Overton window seems to be shifting. More and more people are finding out what really went down. There's a tremendous amount of, you know, discovery being made by Ron Johnson. He's now got, you know, texts saying the FDA knew there were adverse events and people were dying and he decided to cover it up. So, you know, this is slowly, you know, changing the hearts and minds of many. I mean, it's 2026. I mean, it's, it's, I can't believe we're still, you know, talking about this. If you had, you know, asked me when I was in the thick of it, doing the data that we were doing, I would have told you, oh, this, this will be cleaned up by 24, 25. I was wrong.
Speaker 1Finally, final question based on everything we've discussed today. How would you approach portfolio construction in our current market environment? Not giving financial advice, but you're, you've been a fund manager for BlackRock in the past. If you were to start a new Ed Dowd fund today, would you be all in cash or how, how, how would you allocate your capital?
Speaker 2Well, look for the, for the, for the typical person, let's just start there, you know, just raise some, whatever, whatever's comfortable for you, raise some cash in your portfolio, uh, so you can take advantage of, of, of, of cheaper prices. If I was running a hedge fund, I would, uh, I wouldn't be shorting the S and P I wouldn't be playing it. And I'd be, uh, cash gold and looking to, uh, get long, uh, longer duration treasuries. I'd already probably be long them and add to positions when they, uh, get weak, like they did recently with the, with the yield scare, because what, when this breaks and we, and, and, and the truth comes out, it's going to go from people worrying about inflation to worrying about growth and deflation. And the fed will be turning on a pivot and lowering interest rates super fast. We're not there yet. When it happens, it'll, it'll, it'll blow people's minds. how quickly it goes on, because if you've looked at every rate hike cycle, plateauing cycle, then lowering of interest rates, the equity markets have not done well when we're lowering interest rates fast. And that's where we're in the part of the cycle where we started lowering rates. We're still hitting new all time highs. Once once once this talk of Fed rate hikes goes away and the true economic growth comes to bear. And that's what, you know, when the bubble finally gives up some ghosts, it'll be fast and quick and you won't you won't have time to position yourself.
Speaker 1We've discussed your sub stack today beyond the narrative. Why don't you walk us through the proposition there and why people should subscribe and anywhere else you'd like to direct people who can follow your work online?
Speaker 2Yeah, I started this sub stack about eight weeks ago to talk about, you know, finance, COVID, politics, culture and, you know, my mindset as we healthy mindset as we go through this. And my goal is when I'm when I'm talking about these subjects, I want to write a piece that's 800 to 1200 words max. I'm not going to flood your inbox every day. I'm looking to post once or twice a week. The premium stuff, if you if you want to pay my unscripted thoughts, things I'm not going to share in public and other. Other types of premium stuff. It's I'm trying to educate people and I'm trying to speak in a way that, you know, wonky finance people aren't the only ones that understand what I'm saying. And I think I've so far done a pretty good job of trying. I don't say that I dumb it down, but I try to make it as crystal clear as I can. And a lot of these pieces I ended up I wrote too much. Then I had to like, you know, edit a lot of it because I was just talking too much. And some of the stuff it was, it would fly over. But I was I was a look at what I'm writing and I say to myself, what would an average person understand what I just said? So that's that's that's what I'm writing and I'm gearing in. And also the anthropic piece is just me just having fun and how ridiculous this is. And finance technologies.
Speaker 1Could you talk about that, too?
Speaker 2Yeah. Finance technologies with the pH. We have a lot of economic research for sale. U.S. Economic Report, China Report. China's a disaster. My partner just updated all all of our dashboards on China. It's getting worse. That's one of the three risks. We've got an air bubble housing problem. China is going to cause problems in Asia, which will come back to us. You can buy all those research reports at finance technologies dot com with a pH instead of an F. I have a personal website at Dow dot com as well.
Speaker 1Great. I'll put links to all of that. The beyond the narrative sub stack finance technologies at Dow dot com. Your ex. I recommend people follow you there. And as always, fantastic conversation. Thank you for coming on the show, Jesse.
Speaker 2Thanks for having me on again.
Speaker 1Great. Thank you for joining us today on Commodity Culture. Earn up to a four percent annual yield on your physical gold paid in gold ounces through monetary metals. Go to monetary dash metals dot com slash commodity to find out how to put your gold to work for you. Link is in the show notes below.
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