The studies done during the pandemic on ivermectin were fraudulent. There was a lot of fraudulent, papers submitted to try to prove that it was deadly. So there was just a abject fraud in the scientific community going on. What's the number or the dataset that's most alarming to you? The disability numbers are just staggering, and, they really show a tight correlation to vaccine rollout and arise in disabilities. And the young people are still dying excessively around twenty percent.
Welcome to the Porter and Company Black Label podcast, your home for provocative insights that lead to lasting wealth. And here are your hosts, Porter Stansbury and Aaron Brabham. Alright, Porter. Here we are back again for the other Black Label show. And, of course, I've got Porter. Porter, I'd like to know your thoughts on coming back from my wedding.
And what did you think about Colombia for the first you've been in Medellin, but what did you think about Cartagena, and what did you think about that hotel? Well, listen. Your wedding was beautiful. Everyone was so kind, and the the hotel was, I one of the very finest I've been to in the world, and Cartagena was a lovely little town. So I had a great time, and I recommend it to anybody who's gonna be in South America to definitely check out Colombia.
I love Medellin, and I really like Cartagena too. But listen. Before we get into things here, I just wanna say, our Black Label shows haven't been very Black Label y lately. Right? We've It was because we gotten in too much trouble. It cost you a billion dollars. Nobody nobody's drinking any gin. Nobody's getting a little loose. They've been very professional. We need some Yeah. We cost yeah. We cost you a billion dollars, Porter. That's why. We got canceled. It was very expensive.
But but I still think we need more we need a little bit of black label y stuff. We need we need to talk about the the seedy underside of the financial world and the all the shenanigans that are going on. I mean, it's, you know, it's it's Davos this week. Yeah. Davos and the build Bilderbergs and all those meetings, they're, they're not looking so bullish these days, which might be bullish for humanity. Who knows? I I think I don't know. I think that's progress.
But, the other thing that I'm I'm so fascinated by right now is the people actually cheering for more taxes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're we'll we'll get into that later with our, with our interview, and let me go ahead and give the shout out. So today's guest is none other than Edward Dowd. He's the founding partner of finance technologies and author of cause unknown, the epidemic of sudden deaths in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two.
He also used to work at BlackRock as a portfolio manager, managing fourteen billion dollars. That was over thirteen years ago. But I'm excited to have him on. Yeah. And I want I wanna I wanna go ahead and get to that interview with Ed because he's an incredible guest for us to get. Thanks for doing that work. And I also just wanna summarize for people.
Ed was the leading intellectual who was first out of the gate, the very first person to publicly discount what the government was saying about COVID, and then he was the first person anywhere to carefully document the incredible rise in excess death in excess death and in, injuries, because of, we suspect, the COVID vaccine. So why don't we go ahead and bring Ed in?
Because I know he's gonna have an opinion about whether or not tariffs or taxes and whether or not it's a good idea to set up another agency of the federal government to collect still more taxes. I I mean, tariffs, but they're the same thing, people. You gotta understand. Yeah. For sure. Alright. Let's bring him on. Alright, Porter. Hey. You know, I've been talking about Edward Dowd for a long time, and I know you've known of him for a long time as well.
You guys have a ton in common because Ed actually used to have his pinned post on x about a dystopian movie. And, I believe Ed originally, wrote about that in March when the pandemic got started. And Porter, you wrote a famous, piece in April. So you guys were very early and on it, and I wanna welcome Ed to the show. Yeah. I do too. Ed, it's a it's a tremendous honor to meet you and to get to speak with you. I've been following your work for years.
Like like, Aaron mentions, I was a enormous COVID skeptic from the very beginning.
Just based on the data that I saw coming out of that cruise ship where the infection had run rampant, the navy ship where the infection had run rampant, and then all the wastewater testing that was going on in Europe where you had real, you know, you had real case, mortality versus population mortality numbers, and you could see that it it wasn't much more dangerous than the flu and everything was being grossly exaggerated probably for political reasons. But listen.
You're the expert in all this, so I'm gonna shut the heck up and ask you, when when did it first occur to you that what you were watching was science gone completely mad? Well, you know, I I was early to know about COVID because, you know, a lot of us on Wall Street, you know, we pride ourselves in getting information early. So I was living on Maui, still live on Maui.
And in January of, twenty twenty, before the public was aware, I was going to I went to Costco and I loaded up before the rush, about a month before. Then then then the the public was made aware of it. And so I was scared early, but then, like yourself, quickly turned on a dime when I realized that this was not a dangerous virus.
The other thing that occurred to me was in, October, November, and December on Maui in twenty nineteen, there was a bug, quote, unquote, bug going around, and it was COVID. And people people were getting laid out, but there were no there were no deaths. It was a nasty, virus, and and and people were floored by it. But no one was in fear because they weren't told to be in fear. And then and then and then a switch turned on, and then the fear, propaganda came. So I was very suspicious of that.
And then, early on, I saw censorship. Zero hedge was censored for, you know, saying there might might have been data function in January or I think February or March of twenty twenty. They wrote a famous, article about some university in in India that, you know, said that there that it looked like it was a manufactured virus. That was immediately censored. So the well, censorship immediately alarmed me. And then as time rolled on, you could tell, and I wrote my famous dystopian future tweet.
It seemed to me that they were gonna go for a vaccine. And one of the and as a financial guy, the big the big warning sign for me was in April, of, twenty twenty when on a Sunday of Meet the Press, James Bullard, Saint Louis former Saint Louis Fed president, is talking about how we're gonna restart the economy. And, he said the good news is we have new surveillance systems and we can issue immunity badges.
So I started thinking to myself, why is the Fed president talking about a mute what's going on? Like, it and then they've been they memory hold that because it was early before vaccines. A lot of us on on Twitter at the time pointed out how absurd that was. And then they stopped talking about it. And I remember saying vaccines are coming. That's the solution. And, people thought they called me a conspiracy theorist, then sure enough, a vaccine was the solution.
In hindsight, we learned they were suppressing early treatment protocols like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, And it was all about lockdown and wait for the vaccine solution. So something and then, you know, you you probably saw what I saw in twenty twenty. The messaging from global governments was all the same. And I said to myself, you know, being an analyst and Wall Street guy, when has the global government messaging ever been in unison? Never. So I just knew something was different.
Something was going on that seemed sketchy. And, you know you know, you and I in the finance world, we ever since the great financial crisis have been blowing a a blowing a a bubble, and we've been wondering when the you know, it was gonna be a a sovereign debt crisis. And in in in the fall twenty nineteen, there was, the beginnings of a coordinated global slowdown. There were repo markets going crazy, and it seemed to me that the whole thing was gonna unwind.
But then COVID came, and then we printed unprecedented amounts of, of federal debt money for COVID. And COVID was a war. COVID was warlike spending. And so it kinda you know, whether it was a planned event or, lucky happenstance for central bankers, it gave them an excuse to kick the can down the road. And here we are four years later. And, my team and I put out a report about a week and a half ago that's it's it's a paid product.
We're we're predicting a deep hold by recession be getting sometime in twenty five. It's it's just baking to the cake. I wanna get to the financial implications of kicking the can down the road in a minute. I have a couple of of science questions first before we get to the financial things, and I'm like I said, I'm I'm very grateful to get to talk with you. I think you've probably done more work of on these particular topics from a independent standpoint than anybody else.
And, we've all learned what happens when you trust the science. So I'm I'm glad to talk to someone who's in finance and, you know, isn't isn't wearing a lab coat because I feel like I'm gonna get a much more honest answer. But a simple question for you, which is why even now we are how many years away from all of this, why is there still a question in the scientific community be about whether or not ivermectin works? I you know, that that befuddles me.
I take ivermectin myself whenever I feel a little something coming on. And, then, you know, look. It it in twenty sixteen, there were glowing articles about it. I think it won the no Nobel Prize, and then then it then was demonized as horse pace. So it clearly, as time rolls on, more more more and more scientists are are are pointing to the fact that the study the studies done during the pandemic on ivermectin were fraudulent.
There was a lot of fraudulent, papers submitted to try to prove that it was deadly. So there was just a abject fraud in the scientific community going on. The peer review process, as we know, was a joke. You know, some of the papers we've written, we put on ResearchGate.
We're not asking for peer review because we know it's rigged, but, you know, our if if everything was normal, some of the work we've done on, you know, excess deaths and excess cancers and heart attacks and neurological problems could be submitted for peer review, but what's the point? But we we put it on research dates so the scientific community can cite our papers. Well, let's get to that next point.
What it you've done lots of different research, and you've come up with lots of different real numbers. What's the number or the dataset that's most alarming to you? Yeah. So, you know, we like to to look at datasets where there's lots and lots of population. And the we my my my colleagues, Carlos and Yuri, we think the best dataset that proves the case is the disabilities. Although everybody loves to talk about excess deaths because it's hyperbolic.
The disability numbers are just staggering, and, they really show a tight correlation to vaccine rollout and arise in disabilities. We got data we got the BLS showing the numbers in the US. They don't it's not granular. And then we have the UK, personal independent payment system, PIP, they call it, that goes more granular. It all started exploding in, twenty twenty one. And, the numbers are pretty stark, and and it's it's it it the correlations are just tight.
Sort of off topic, but a question I have, I'm I'm interested in the demographics, particularly in Russia. I have a I have a I have an instinct that living in a country where there isn't a history of the rule of law, where there's rampant alcoholism, where there's a declining birth rate, and where there's been a very land a very large land war in Asia is gonna be surprisingly bad, for the demographics.
Have you seen anything in your research that suggests that the injuries and the excess death rates from the COVID shots are materially different in different populations or materially different from different types of vaccines that were used? Well, we did look at Russia. We don't have the demographic, data, but we've looked at all sorts of different countries.
In in the US in particular, excess mortality, while down from its height of forty percent in twenty twenty one, for ages sixteen to sixty four. It's running between five and ten percent right now, and the young people are still dying excessively around twenty percent. So that's a problem. You know? Scott Davidson of One America famously said in January of twenty two on a a chamber conference a commerce call that a ten percent excess death rate is once in a two hundred year flood.
Forty percent was off the charts. So now we're we're we're coming on from off the charts to once in a two hundred year flood consistently. So and we haven't looked at fertility yet because fertility is, is noisier. Deaths are easy to predict. Death rates are stable and steady. So it's easy to it's easy to get a baseline, and then you can get statistical signals. In fertility, it's affected by, economics. So you need persistency of of down fertility rates before you can make a call.
So as we go through time, if the persistency of fertility continues to decline, stay well, then we got the twin, problem of low fertility excess deaths, which demographically is a disaster.
The good news the good and bad news is the US, is probably the best country out of, the, you know, China, Europe, and Japan, and Korea, you know, the major western economies because we, imported ten to fifteen million illegal aliens, to, you know, to kinda cover up some of the excess deaths we've been seeing here in the US. China has a big problem. They hit a demographic wall in twenty twenty, and you've seen what's going on with their economy. Japan is, entering another demographic death wave.
It's gonna accelerate. South Korea is terminal. We we have and and then, of course, Southern Europe is a disaster. So we got we got demographic problems all over the place, which is gonna be a problem long term.
I I think it's one of the most interesting intellectual things of my lifetime has been the number of people who were supposedly very smart and were certainly very wealthy, and I'm speaking particularly about Ted Turner and Warren Buffett, and the amount of money they have spent fighting the, quote, unquote, population bomb when the whole problem the entire time was following birth rates, not not not a, not an overpopulated earth.
But that's another hobby horse of mine that we can get to another time. I I've I've got really, two more questions for you. One is about insurance, and then the second one, I wanna get to the financial implications of kicking the can the can down the road of the enormous debt load that we have in the US economy. But, specifically, I've been concerned by the way, for the last twelve years or so, I have, my main area of financial research focus has been property and casualty insurance companies.
So I'm really familiar with the accounting and the, you know, the float growth and the policies of p and c firms. But I have always really ignored life insurance companies because, well, you know, every house doesn't burn down in a fire, but, everybody dies. So I I suspect that there are, there's more alpha to be gained by underwriting and property and casualty than there is in life. But, honestly, you may know more about it than I do. I just haven't ever gotten into life insurance.
But it occurs to me that if if you're anything like correct and the impact of disability and in increased death excess death, that the life insurance companies have the most exposure to those risks. And I just wonder, have you heard from any life insurance companies? Do you have any idea about which life insurer might be the most at risk? Or or, general, what's your feelings about the risks of excess death for life insurance companies?
So excess death first appeared in the group life part of their business. And to distinguish group life from whole life, group life are policies given to Fortune five hundred and midsize companies as a benefit. It's blanket insurance policy. It's not underwritten. What what that means is you don't go in for a medical exam because it's a great business because young people don't die.
So they figure out what the, you know, the the death rate is of someone that of an age group that doesn't really die, and they charge and make good money. What happened in in twenty one, twenty two was, a disaster. They didn't see it coming, and, they took losses. But it's a group life is a is is not as, big as whole life. Whole life is where the big policies are because the group life typically covers, one or two times your base salary, which is not a lot of money for insurance company.
The whole life policies is where they write, you know, a million to twenty million dollar life insurance policies for very wealthy people. And the the ones that were written before, twenty nine twenty twenty, they haven't taken losses on those because it's Byzantine Insurance accounting. Group Life is priced every one to three years. So they started to they took losses, then they raised prices. So they think it solved the problem, in that group.
Then in whole life, they have five year rolling long term mortality assumptions, which they haven't changed yet because they keep thinking that excess mortality is gonna normalize and that this was a onetime event. But, eventually, if excess mortality continues to run five to ten percent, they're gonna have to write down a whole a whole portion of the whole life business.
And so my suspicion is that's one of these insurance companies, I don't know which one is gonna give up the ghost and then then the others will follow suit. Swiss Re, a reinsurer, wrote a paper, a study, it came out about six months ago, where they said that they see excess mortality running five to ten percent, into the for the at least the next ten years. Wow. Now if you read the if you read the fine print, they blame COVID. They blame COVID, and they stay a solution to that is vaccine.
So, you know, they're they're, you know, they're missing the boat. But but at least at least their map confirms our map. We're not insurance guys. We're, you know, we're just we're finance guys coming up, you know, with real time excess mortality. They're projecting that it's gonna stay high. That's what they do for a living. So Swiss Re agrees with us, but but they don't, you know, they don't we don't agree on the cause.
Yeah. Okay. So I wanna get to my last question, which is a financial question. And, I'm you know, I may be the only person in America who remembers that the Smoot Hawley tariff wasn't the tariff that blew up the world. The Smoot Hawley tariff took average tariff rates from, like, forty percent to fifty percent and expanded the number of items that were covered under the tariff. But the tariff regime that blew up the world actually was implemented in nineteen twenty two.
That's when the federal government, in an effort to protect farmers, implemented forty percent tariffs across the board on on just about every single agricultural product and then some some others as well. And that works so well that the farmers had an enormous depression throughout the nineteen twenties because, of course, everyone stopped buying our exported agricultural products.
Meanwhile, every single body every single country retaliated, which meant that everything that the farmers needed to grow food got more expensive. The, the US farmer estimates that throughout the nineteen twenties, American farmers lost three hundred million dollars a year because of those tariffs. And, of course, they worked so well on the farmers that then, in nineteen thirty, they expanded them to the rest of the economy.
And just keep in mind, the nineteen twenties should have been the golden era of American exports. We were making four and a half million cars a year. Russia was making a thousand. Germany was making less than twenty thousand by nineteen twenty eight. Your Europe had been destroyed by World War one. They were flat on their backs, and they could not compete with us in a manufacturing standpoint. Just like today, of course, nobody can compete with us in terms of technology.
And so president Trump is determined he's gonna take this incredible American vitality, and he's gonna slap a twenty five percent tariff on it because everywhere it's worked, it's everywhere it's been implemented, it's failed. You know, it causes enormous economic dislocations. It destroys supply chains. It causes tremendous amounts of inflation. And I I'm not gonna bother with trying to explain all all the economic reasons about comparative advantage, about specialization.
Go read iPencil if you don't understand how economies work, but I know that you do. And I also know that you're very well aware that it's not really good for an economy to hold thirty five trillion dollars in federal debt. And even if you look at things like credit card debt, they're at they're at, you know, really very large levels, high interest rates. And as inflation goes higher, the impact of those rates as they move up will have a more and more of an economic impact.
And the weight of all that eventually has to cause a recession and has to cause a credit cycle. And you and I both saw the same thing in the fall of twenty nineteen, and we we covered it up by having basically the equivalent of World War two except for it was just in in COVID vaccines and lots more debt.
And now we're the the president is saying sincerely that on February first, we're gonna have a twenty five percent across the board tariff with our two largest trading partners, which is Canada and Mexico. And I just wonder, how does that not kick off an incredible deflation, and how does that not wreck the economy? And what in the world are his advisers thinking? Well, you know, I I I'm of the opinion that this is Trump Trump world where he's using his, art of the deal.
I don't think twenty five percent will stick for very long, but he's got he's got a whole host of problems beyond tariff, games. He, we let's go back to twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three. We were in the in the spring of twenty three. We have early cycle indicators. We have a great economic model.
My partner, Carlo, Carlos Allegri wrote a book economic cycles, debt, and demographics, and his his models were predicting a recession, at the end of twenty three, twenty four as were a lot of other economists, never never manifested, and, it we were wrong. So we were asking ourselves, have the laws of economic fundamentals changed or is there something else going on and we figured it out? Basically, Biden going the last two years, accelerated illegal immigration, which juiced the economy.
That was a big part part of the deficit spending, the NGOs. It it was a logistical operation to bring in ten to fifteen million people. Net legal migration is million a year. We've never seen anything like this. And there was unprecedented government spending. Yeah. That's what I was gonna point out. How can you have a nominal, recession when when when the government deficit is almost seven percent of GDP? So it it papered it over. It was it was a short term fix. It was crisis level.
We we did that kind of deficit spending during the great financial crisis. What was the crisis this time to get Biden reelected? So, you know, so the what Trump Trump's policies are gonna reverse all of this juice. So he doesn't even have to deport the illegals, but just halting it, second derivative, it's got and the economy capacity you know, if you look at traditional measures of the economy, household survey, forget the establishment, household survey,
PMI, capacity utilization. We're already in a recession. Although the headline numbers don't say that. The stock market hasn't discounted it yet. It will at some point. I had the theory that the stock market isn't what it used to be when you and I were doing it back in the day. It's it's ninety five percent passive and algos. When I was managing money during the great financial crisis, it was seventy five percent fundamental.
So I think a discount discounting mechanism for the stock market is off. That's why we have Well super high value valuation. To interrupt, but I I just wanna confirm what you're saying because, obviously, look at the concentration of the S and P index. And you understand that S and P is market weight. You understand it's driven by algos. And so the more that things get away from the fundamentals, the more overweight they'll top pick the top ten positions in the S and P will be.
And now I think we're at a point where forty percent of the index is made up of five stocks, which is more concentration than we've ever seen before, which also means it's a bigger bubble than we've ever seen before. Correct. And so when people say, oh, your call's wrong, I look at the stock market. I'm like, this what just wait. You know?
I can't I'm not gonna market time it, but when when when when this cracks and if and as, you know, bubbles like this when that blow this big, when it cracks, it goes fast. It doesn't go slow. The the dot com bubble went down fifty percent over two years. The the housing crisis, we had a huge fifty percent drawdown in in nine months. I don't this one could be super fast, but let's let's put that aside for for the moment. Can I interrupt you just one more thing about that point?
The other thing is that the larger the bubble blows, the longer the following bear market and duration will be as well. So if you look at Japan at the peak at eighty nine, they are trading at seventy times earnings, and they went on to have a twenty year bear market. Their market didn't bottom until o nine. Our market, of course, peaked in two thousand, and then we had almost a ten year bear market that didn't bottom until o nine as well.
And so I think that if you're looking at if you're looking at a a a CAPE ratio, cyclically adjusted PE now of thirty seven, the only time the stocks have ever been more expensive in the United States was at the tech bubble in two thousand, and, also, if you go back far enough, the railroad bubble in eighteen forty four. But in both of those cases, you had, you know, essentially a decade long bear market that followed. And you wanna talk about what is not in anybody's forecast right now at all.
No. Nobody sees what is black and white obvious to me and you, which is that these debt levels for corporations and for the federal government are not sustainable, and that any any kind of economic slowdown is gonna produce a really terrific, debt cycle where there's going to be a whole lot of bad debt that gets written off. So crazy outside pitch here, and you can tell me, you know, oh, forget about it. You're a crazy man.
But is there any percentage chance that the US defaults on some of its treasury obligations? I I don't I don't think so. So we're we're the the the dollar system is so ingrained globally. It reserve currencies die slowly. So I think the Biden administration did a good job of trying to kill it. That's why the BRICS emerged is so loud. You know, the the the the sanctions on Russia, the the deswifting them, and then actually stealing their, you know, their money to fund the Ukraine war.
That's why there's the bricks have emerged because, you know, I think these discussions had always been going on behind closed doors, but now they're just open about it. That's gonna take time because there's, you know, fit I think around eighteen trillion in, dollar denominated bonds. So anybody who immediately would try to get off the dollar would have a, a deflationary depression in their in their own economy. So it's a slow process.
Eighty eighty percent I think ninety percent of all FX transactions still have the dollar on the other side. You look at what Warren buff what Warren Buffett is telling you something. He's got the biggest cash flow he's ever had. Was he early? Sure. Was I early and Carlos early in our call? Or is that yes. But, you know, he's got four percent of the T bill market, more than the Fed, and he's getting paid, you know, four four point three percent.
He was getting paid five and a half percent just to sit in cash and wait. You know? He he knows what's coming, and, you know, it's it's been it's taken longer to manifest the top and the, the actual, you know, deflationary cycle, but, I think UST bills and cash are still gonna be fine. I I would I would I would hide there.
At some point, there's gonna be a great trade in, ten years in long bonds because everybody is on the everybody is so bearish, long interest rates right now that we know when we do get this recession that actually, you know, manifests in headline numbers and the stock market wobbles. The long bond in the ten year will will go down as the Fed chases the crisis down. Real interest rates are around two percent, so money's tight.
The Fed already, you know, took a hundred off, and they've already lowered interest rates a hundred basis points. You know, we've we think there's another hundred and fifty to two hundred to go. And then they'll do their their usual, shenanigans, you know, quantitative easing and nonsense. Have you noticed that with the huge cash, cash raise at Berkshire that Berkshire is now trading at, about five times its, enterprise value?
Yeah. So the e e v to EV to EBITDA is about five right now at, Berkshire stock, which is the cheapest I've ever seen it in my career. He's gonna Warren is gonna do what Warren does. You know, he'll come in, you know, at the bottom of all this, him will look you know, he's quiet right now. We'll be seeing the headlines. Warren Buffett is talking to Bank of America for preferred dividend convertible, whatever. Some deal that where he gives billions and debts basically owns the company.
Well, listen. That's that's it for me. Aaron, you are the, conspiracy theorist amongst us here. You've got you've got your shot at at Ed Dowd. What what have you got for him? I appreciate that. Yes, Ed. I am known as the conspiracy theorist in at Porter and Company. However, there is no theory because it was created by the s the CIA, first of all. So that's just to make us look kooky. Second of all, as you are well aware, just wait six months. All conspiracy theories become, conspiracy realism.
And, I don't wanna go down a bunch of rabbit holes, but I do have a question for you, Ed. You know, I know I know your background. You were with, the evil, the evil force of Black Rock back in the day, for a long time. I know that, one of the things that you said that you got really good at was spotting liars because you would meet with a lot of CEOs and you could see which ones were real and which ones were lying. So you kind of became, looking, a guy that's looking for signs.
Right? And now we see that with everybody. There's so many liars out there. And and then, you know, also know your background where you had a little bit of a depression and were on some pharmaceuticals and then you got really healthy and natural and, cleaned out. And I think that that's, that's fantastic. I think we're seeing a lot of that in this world.
And then you became very passionate about this process of, enlightening people and going against the grain, about the vaccines and also about the idea that, as we've discussed today, where there just has to be constant crisis after crisis in order for this, debt implosion to kinda be kicked down the road. Now that so many people have, joined your side, now that there are so many different podcasts and influencers and even x allows this discussion, what is your passion becoming now?
Because there are a lot of quote, unquote Ed Dowd's out there for the vaccine side, not tying in the finance. One time you had mentioned that you were really interested in starting a hedge fund and kind of helping people get into that hedge fund, understand how to protect and grow their their wealth because you see a system differently. What's your passion now? Because I can see somehow you gotta be pivoting away from talking conspiracy stuff to something that you truly love.
Well, let's talk about conspiracy stuff. Conspiracies Porter knows what I'm about to say. On Wall Street, we were always conspiracy theorists. You know? Enron was a great company. You were a conspiracy theorist to think that it was a fraud. So the I've I've I've sat in this world where, like, investors would tell me I'm insane, I'm kooky. So I just applied that to the world. So the term conspiracy theorist makes me lack. We're just early. That's all we are. You know, we're Wall Street guys.
We that we we you make money by being early and right and loud about it. And then when you're wrong, you have to admit it quickly and and and cut your losses. That's what that's the game of Wall Street. So our passion now is, obviously, we've done a lot of work on the vaccine research. We've kinda slowed that down, and we we continue to look for a seed investor for our hedge fund.
We came close, in the beginning of twenty four, but, honestly, the individual wanted to steal the company, so we walked away. They weren't as passionate about our view of the of the world. So we're look we're looking for a partner that kinda has the same view of the world, and wants to do good because we pledged in our pitch deck.
Whatever whatever money we make, the partners have agreed to, like, take fifty percent of our personal income and donate it to charities or, you know, something that does good in the world of product. So, you know, we're not gonna if the hedge fund is ever successful, we're not going to be you know, own a bunch of boats and boats. Please don't do that. Please don't do that. The world does not need more charity. The world needs the world needs more venture capital.
The need the world needs more good businesses. Oh my god. Do you do you have any idea how much money Ted Turner has lit on fire by giving it to charity or or more often? I I know that. I I talk to people about about, there was a actual, someone who made a lot of money and then spent in twenty years giving to charities, and they realized how much money they burned. All of them. Maybe I misspoke. Maybe I misspoke.
We're we're gonna do we're gonna invest in things that action change and charities charities that exist to fix the problem but never really fix it, we know what that model is. We wanna invest in things that are gonna actually fix a problem, maybe make money fixing. I think what we should do is start a home sorry. Start a fund for homeless people who wanna buy cigarettes. And we can donate all the money that we need to to donate to be good people and to have tax write offs.
We can we can say that we give billions to charity, but at least the money will get used by people doing something that they enjoy. And then we can own Philip Morris and collect the dividends. I mean, that way it won't it will not at least, it won't go to waste. By the way, I I I donated personally, I donated a quarter million dollars in two thousand five to, a local charity here in Baltimore. Aaron, what was it called? Homes for homeless people or something like that? Yeah. Something like that.
Homes for America. It's a it's a big national charity, and I I paid for one of the houses, and our employees went and did the demo and then helped do some of the carpentry and the lawn landscaping and blah blah blah. And we gave a house to this local Baltimore family. And I went back to see what it looked like a year later, and that's the last time we ever gave a penny to a charity. If you if you give poor people a house, what will they do to it? I absolutely agree.
You need you need to you need to be clever about how we incentivize people and giving free stuff to people that didn't earn it. We know what that looks like. That's called the US government welfare system. Yeah. And, and and it doesn't work out so well. No. And they're and listen. I I'm I'm being a little facetious. I have, of course, given to other charities. I've given a lot of money to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which has done great research on curing that disease.
I give a lot of money every year to the local, children's hospital. I'm, I'm basically the founding donor of Kevin Kisner's Children's Hospital in in Aiken, South Carolina. I don't want people to hear me and think I'm being completely sincere.
I just, when I see someone as smart and talented as you, talking about combining an important business endeavor, which your hedge fund would would bring a lot of value to a lot of investors and do a lot of good in the world and help allocate capital in a more rational way, and then just hearing that it hasn't happened because you've you've overlaid a charity mindset on top of it, I just think you're making a huge mistake.
Go out and make as much money as you can, and then do a good job giving away the wealth that you've earned as you see fit. And I'm sure if you do that, everyone will win. I maybe I misspoke. We it's not that the hedge fund would do it. It'd be our own personal profits. And so the head the hedge fund, it would be it'd be the partner's profits, not not not the actual hedge fund. The hedge won't won't be giving money to to any charity. It'd be our own personal decisions.
So that's that's a little bit I would like to be an investor, so please keep me in the loop. Yep. Yep. No. And so we, and also so we kinda shut down marketing of it because the you know, the uncertainty going into the election. No one was doing anything. Now we're seeing interest again.
We're having more discussions, and we just launched this echo US economic report that we're charging a thousand dollars for because it's it's it's for family offices, high net worth individuals, RIAs, you know, asset managers. So the, you know, this is not a report that's for the guy on Twitter. So we're we're we're we're charging. It's a it's an eighty five page report. It lays out how we think, this is gonna unfold.
It's very you know, it's it's it's it's it's great insight into what we think is gonna unfold. And, we also, provide an executive presentation and then a short video an hour long of Carlos and I going through the executive presentation. So I I don't I don't need any of that. I I already know you're a really good investor. But, I'll tell you also, I'm I'm launching a hedge fund as well, not to be competing with yours, but I have a very I think probably a very different approach.
But I'm I'm trying to, implement a permanent portfolio strategy, which is something that I learned from Harry Brown in the in the mid nineteen nineties just because I I think probably as you do, there's gonna be a large correction in financial asset prices. And I think that, you know, a fund that can make a six or eight percent return with very low volatility is gonna actually beat the market over the next four or six years. And by the way, let me tell you that pitch interests no one.
Nobody no one's getting excited about a hedge fund that's promising them eight percent a year with no volatility. But, that's that's what I that's what I wanna do primarily with my with with most of my money, but I would love to be an investor in your fund as well. So I'll have I'll have somebody follow-up with you to get me get me some documents, and and I'm happy to to pledge and make a commitment for when you get started. Yeah. That's great. I appreciate it.
But, you know, the bot the bottom line is we're passionate about, starting a firm. We're gonna continue the humanity project, which is the, you know, the demographic research, the, the vaccine injury, because that's gonna be important as we roll through economic cycles, this devastation is gonna impact. It doesn't you know, you can't trade demographics, but you can certainly, you know, assess out long term trends. Yeah. And Ed real fast. Sorry sorry to interrupt.
One of the key points I think that you had talked about in previous podcasts was disability. You know, it's one thing to look at the disability statistics go up, but you bring up a very good point. How many family members does that affect? Right? Because it's not just a disabled person. Now you need people to take care of that person as well. Plus, you've taken an income out of the household. I mean, that's that's a that's something that compounds.
Yeah. It's a productivity issue for the economy. It's gonna lower, product productivity in the economy for sure. That's why that's why the NATO round is a five five six. It's not designed to kill. It's designed to maim because a wounded soldier is harder on an army than a dead soldier. And the same Yeah. And the same thing, the same concept is, you know, someone wounded by a vaccine, all the things that Aaron just said and that, Ed, I know you researched. It's a very, very good point.
But lieutenant colonel Theresa Long, who was one of the DMED, whistleblowers who's retiring soon, she and I have talked, and she said that this reminds her of the v like you said, the Vietnam War where they wanted to injure the show the soldier up and kill them because, you know, that that that would, logistically involve five other people and bog down, the enemy. And she said, this is exactly what this vaccine's doing even though everyone talks about the excess deaths.
The amount of people who have been injured is the real problem. And she said, we wanna if this continues, we won't have a standing army in five years, you know, because of, recruitment issues. Those equipped who do wanna take the vaccine and all the disabled and those who are dying in the military. Well, I certainly didn't want to end up with no military because of vaccine injuries or any injuries, but I believe America would be a much better place without a standing armor standing army.
And I'm pretty sure all of our founding fathers wanted to prevent our country from ever having one. So maybe maybe there's some silver lining. I guess we have nuclear arsenals, so no one's gonna attack us. Right. We also have three hundred million legal firearms in United States and probably a hundred million avid hunters. We would be a very difficult country to conquer, kinda like Russia figured out when they tried to invade Ukraine.
And and I have one more, one more comment before, we let you go. And I know you were hot on this, and and I've seen x blow up on this. I think, you know, with with, getting Trump in, the one thing that patriots or Trump followers have hoped for, especially with RFK Jr, is to get to the bottom of this vaccine. He's still very proud and calls himself the the father of, operation warp speed. And we've all been disappointed, so we're hoping that RFK comes in and and evaluates this.
I mean, they're still mandating it for newborns, for god's sakes. Like, that's that's insane. Right? I mean, that's the most that's that's the most insane thing ever. So, you know, a couple days ago and this this will air in probably a week when we get it cut and, released. It was, Ellison on TV, showing us that he's got this, Stargate, and they wanna do five hundred billion into mRNA for cancers, which, obviously, if you look at the data from the COVID shot, cancers have exploded.
They call it turbo cancer, and it's everywhere. So it's problem reaction solution. So instead of Bill Gates this time, we've got another billionaire who is very well known for loving himself and not really loving humanity, pitching this idea of, hey. No problem. You just go to a doctor. You get diagnosed. We figure out and punch it into the AI, and we figure out what your your vaccine cancer shot looks like, and we give it to you on-site. And this is insane. This is literally insane.
It was the second day of Trump's, yeah, after inauguration, and this is what he rolls out. I would love your thoughts on that. Okay. So I've I I'm familiar with Larry Ellison. I was a software analyst, before I went to BlackRock. And when I was at BlackRock as a portfolio manager, I I was the the software analyst. Larry Ellison is a constant salesman. He built his business. He was he didn't have the best technology. He was the best salesman.
He he he would do constantly what we call slide where his competitor would come up with a product. He would then say, we have it, and it's better, but it was all slides. And then then they would tell the engineers, go right Oh, slide where? Yeah. So so so Larry Larry Allison gets up there. And first of all, your audience needs to know this. Stargate was started last year. It was they they've already broken ground. They got permitting. They have ten data centers.
And then they said, we couldn't have done this without you, mister president Trump. So that was a big oligarch kiss the ring, applied to his ego. And of the hundred billion they supposedly, committed last year, that's not fully funded because OpenAI has no money. SoftBank has cash flow problems. So that it's all smoke and mirrors. I mean, that's another four hundred billion of private investment. That was just classic Larry Ellison, Sam Altman tech hype nonsense.
And then Larry gets out there and says, we're gonna with them he he he doesn't read the room. He lives in a bubble. He probably hasn't the guy bought it, and he's talks about mRNA and individualized cancer vaccines. That is just so far in the realm of fantasy that it's it's beyond the pale. So that was that was a an absurd just PR stunt. Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, probably, you know, didn't know what Larry was Larry just said what Larry is gonna say.
So I'm not I'm I'm very hopeful that this is this was just a onetime turf error on their part. Makes Trump look like he's we'll see what Trump's gonna do with mRNA, but that was just that was the most redonkulous thing I've seen in a long time. I love it. I love it. Ed, you're the first guest. He used used the word redonkulous, which is one of my favorites. So That is one of your favorites. So listen. I I had such a great time talking to you. I really did.
You're the I think my favorite guest we've ever had. I I I loved watching you when when you would do appearances. I can't remember I saw them in X, or I saw them actually on on cable television. But I just loved how you always remained completely calm. You never reacted emotionally to any of this crazy propaganda that was going on all around you. You were like the calm in the storm. And I think you and I both know that is the single most important hallmark of any talented investor.
You always are calm. You're never emotional. So, anyways, just thank you so much for coming on. It was brilliant getting to talk with you, and I hope that, we can check-in with you again in time when some of these economic risks, materialize. We can have you back on for a couple minutes and just talk about where things are going because I think you and I see the world in remarkably similar ways.
Yeah. I think I think as we roll through the year, let's let me let's get back on here and discuss what's appearing that justifies our predictions in our report. I think I think it's gonna the cracks are gonna start appearing between now and March. And then by the fall, it should be apparent to everybody. And you know how this works, Porter. We've issued the report. Sales are going well, but they look slowed when it's too late, when people wanna find out what just happened.
That's how this works. Tell me about it. I'm in the publishing world, and I basically have to tell people what they wanna hear and then gently try to change their minds in the editorial to get them, you know, away from the bubble that I've already just sold them. But, you know, the the people in The Economist magazine are not dumb. They just have to sell magazines. And so that's where all that those covers come from. And, you know, then you you know the people who are writing them like, yeah.
I know it's ridiculous. But we it was the best selling that's the best selling magazine we did all year. So it's it's it's tough that way. It's tough, dealing with the realities of, the financial businesses and and financial publishing when you know that to be successful in the market, you have to be a contrarian. But it's very it's very hard to be a contrarian if you're popular. Exactly. But, well, we're we're being contrarian, and this thing will sell once we're right, but it'll be too late.
Yeah. That's right. Well, listen, Ed. Great great talking with you. Thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Porter. Thank you, Aaron. Great to be here. We appreciate it so much. Alright, Porter. I'd love to get your thoughts on Ed Dowd. Sound like, you guys have very similar financial minds, big themes. It's, really uncanny to me to put you with somebody, and you guys are almost saying the same thing. You know, I never read his memo.
I know it's a famous thing. It was on Twitter. I I just never saw it. But it would be really cool to go back and compare what I wrote. I think I wrote mine in April I think it was April twentieth twenty twenty and see what he wrote because we both came to the exact same conclusion, and I'm I'm sure we were using similar datasets to judge that. And I would just say, I think the hallmark of both of us is that we don't we don't let the media or anyone else do our thinking.
We you know, I'll I'll read the headline, and then I'm like, I wonder what the data says, or I wonder what the real facts are. And I wonder how many of the listeners can relate to this. Anytime in my entire life I've ever had first person knowledge of some event, and then I saw what the media wrote about it, it's laughable how incredibly wrong it always is. Like, it's whatever their version of the event was, it was nothing like actually being there whatsoever.
And I and I just think that I guess at some point in your life, you're like, I I read things all the time. Like, I wonder what really happened. And then when it comes to COVID, you know, I just I thought it was very important that we get the facts. And I thought it was funny how many smart people that I otherwise respect that just completely abandon their own thinking in that moment. They're just like, oh, well, the government said, and it's for the health. So it must be we have to do it.
And I'm like, That's just amazing. Is that it didn't take very much to convince everybody in America to lose their fucking minds. I mean, it was basically the world other than Africa because Africa had been experimented on by Bill Gates for so long, they just weren't having it. They literally are like, we're not doing any of that shot stuff.
But other than that, it was I mean, it was fascinating to watch from Columbia Porter because, I just never realized how people are so scared because that's what it is. Right? It was fear. Fear. And it just really blew me away to watch neighbor turn on neighbor for the silliest little things out there. But what a great psyop. I mean, wow. You know, whoever constructed that thing, they they they did a good job. They know what they're doing. It was a great interview.
I'm I'm so pleased to to talk with Ed, and it was a great, great podcast. Hope everybody liked it. Thanks for putting that together. I have, one last thing before we go, which is have you seen the equity markets in Colombia? Speaking of Colombia, they're blowing up. Yeah. They they yes. They are.
They really are. And I I think we should we should get somebody who really knows that market locally to come and, and talk about the best companies in Colombia and the opportunities for investors because I think Colombia is probably gonna be one of the best performing markets in the world this year. Yeah. You know what's even here's what's even more amazing about that, Porter, is we are still under the control of the only liberal president that's ever been elected, Petro.
And Petro is not good for business at all. No. But he's he's definitely on the way out. He's one hundred percent on the way out. We had recently, we had government government notarial and, mayoral elections. And it went so extreme conservative, he didn't get one single person that he recommended in the entire country in and everybody went against him, and it's being celebrated.
So imagine, if we could get somebody in that knows what they're doing and as strong as equities are looking in twenty twenty six, August of twenty twenty six, there will be a new president. And, Latin America goes the way of Latin America for the most part. So with Malay and Bukele and, the Colombians are are basically crying out saying we need one of those or a combination of those guys to come in. More law and order, and we need less taxes. Wow. Imagine that.
That'd be that'd be nice, wouldn't it? Well, listen, man. It was it was a great podcast. Thanks again for putting it together, and, enjoy being away from Baltimore. I know you guys are gonna be playing Sawgrass this weekend. I'm a little jelly. We are, but here's the thing. I don't even think you would come out for this because it's gonna be a high of fifty. Right now, Porter, literally Porter, I'm in Jacksonville. I got in my car this morning. It was thirty three.
It might be thirty eight outside. Did Jacksonville Jacksonville Jacksonville get snow this week? You know, it it didn't get snow, but, the peninsula got crushed. So that that left side, right over there by, Alabama and Louisiana got absolutely decimated with snow. But, we're ten inches of snow in Pensacola or something like that. That's a lot. Pensacola. That's global warming. Hammer. It's global warming for you. And also let me just give the, podcast, feedback.
Podcast feedback at porter and company research dot com. Podcast feedback at porter and company research dot com. Please let us know what you thought of the interview. Yep. We'd love to hear from you, and thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to the Porter and Company Black Label podcast with your hosts, Porter Stansbury and Aaron Brabham. We'll see you soon.