November 15, 2024 • 25 mins
Here's What the Trump Economy Looks Like with John LeFevre
Buck Sexton is joined by political strategist and author John LeFevre for an in-depth discussion on the current economic landscape. John explores the challenges facing the markets, including real estate struggles, inflation, and the optimism surrounding stocks and crypto. As Trump prepares to return to office amid a looming financial crisis, they examine the balance of headwinds and tailwinds and the potential for a market reset. John and Buck reflect on the impact of figures like Elon Musk, plus the risks posed by the national debt.
Buck Sexton is joined by political strategist and author John LeFevre for an in-depth discussion on the current economic landscape. John explores the challenges facing the markets, including real estate struggles, inflation, and the optimism surrounding stocks and crypto. As Trump prepares to return to office amid a looming financial crisis, they examine the balance of headwinds and tailwinds and the potential for a market reset. John and Buck reflect on the impact of figures like Elon Musk, plus the risks posed by the national debt.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to the Buck Sexton Show podcast, make sure
you subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey guys, welcome to Buck Brief. First time on the show.
John lefev is with us now. He is a best
selling author of Straight to Hell. He's a former Wall
Street insider. I think anybody who works on Wall Street
when they go into media, John is considered an insider.
So there you go. And the man behind the Goldman
Sachs Elevator Twitter account, which I'm gonna tell you John,
(00:42):
I started in media out of the CIA in twenty eleven,
Goldman Sachs elevat and I was a New York City kid.
I grew up in the city. All my friends worked
in finance. My dad worked on Wall Street. So Goldman
Sachs Elevator original account was I think one of the
first like five Twitter accounts that I actually followed. So
here we are, many years later. How did you come
(01:04):
up with it?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah? So the short version is I was in Hong
Kong working in banking, and we post crisis, we'd set
up a capital markets advisory firm, kind of a hybrid
between advisory trading, private equity and traditional capital markets, you know, fundraising,
(01:26):
whether it's bonds or loans or anything between. So it
was a nimble, flexible boutique that operated across Asia and Europe.
And I left in two thousand and ten to join
Golden Sachs. They gave me an offer I effectively couldn't
refuse to run their Asia syndicate business. And a month
(01:48):
into my gardening leave, which is the period that you
have to sit out of markets if you possess material
market sensitive non public information. You're not allowed to work
if you go from one bank to another. So I
was in the middle of my three month gardening leave
when the firm that I left sued me for breach
of contract, citing the non compete clause that we had,
(02:08):
so that effectively prevents hid me from joining Golden and
so I spent the next year traveling around Asia and
just drinking and having fun. And this was peak occupied
Wall Street. So I one day I was just sitting
in a bar with some friends and I said, Man,
these people hate us, and they have no idea if
(02:30):
they really knew in terms of the racism and the
classism and the sexism and the corruption and the deviance
they would they have no clue, And so it started
as a joke and it just kind of took off,
and I kept with it because at the time I
was looking to leave the industry was this. You know,
(02:50):
I'd worked in New York and London and Hong Kong
and Singapore and was kind of sick of it. And
when I got into the business, I got in because
of the book Liar's Poker. And when I started, I
looked around. I said, Man, this work isn't that hard.
These people aren't that smart, but yet they define themselves
as human being by the fact that they worked for
(03:12):
Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Ank or JP
Morgan or whatever. It's kind of pathetic. And so I'd
always wanted to write a book, so cynically I had
had kept track of my stories throughout my career. And
then once the Twitter account took off, I thought, well,
I'm not a writer, but I can use this platform
(03:33):
and this following to get exposure, you know, with the
ultimate goal of publishing a book, which is why effectively
I grew the account up until you know, publishing my
book and then gradually let it die. Over the subsequent
years that followed, just because you know, I figured there's
only so much you can say about it, so I
(03:55):
just kind of hung you know, retired the account a
couple of years ago.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
What was the ethos or the you know, what were
the organizing principles of Goldman Sachs GS elevator Twitter account?
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Well, effectively, the basic premise, right was just things overheard
in the elevator at Goldman Sacks. But it was never
meant to be taken literally, So it was just a
It was a fictional character that I think people could
relate to, and it illuminated a culture. So it didn't
(04:28):
just represent Goldman Sacks. It represented, you know, everybody in
that sphere, everyone that people hated.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, I can nind of jump in really quickly because
I covered Occupy Wall Street for the Blaze. People forget
that the banksters. There was this period of time for
a couple of years where the banksters were like this
public enemy number one. I mean, you know, like the
big investment banks and all this stuff, which is actually
kind of insane, but anyway, that was what happened.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, I mean, you know, we had family members getting
chased out of dentist's offices because they were overheard saying
that they were, you know, using the Goldman Sachs company
insurance to pay for their kids' dental care. I mean,
that's how much Animal was towards towards bankers at the time.
It was. It was a wild time.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
And then I want to get into your book and
all that, but actually I'm going to bring us into
the current moment here in a second with as somebody
who knows how the markets work, how the street works,
I want you to tell me what you expect. Here
we are. It's November twenty twenty four. Trump's going to
be president, He's got the House, he's got the Senate.
What do you think happens in the markets? But hold
on one second, Jummer to come back to that, because
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four safe today. All right, John, the Trump economy starting
starting in January. What does it look like in the
(06:40):
markets and why why do you think things are gonna
head in one direction or another?
Speaker 1 (06:45):
I think that is such a difficult question because you know,
if you look at what we are being handed with
the property market, with rates, with inflation, that's not going away.
I mean, an alternative outcome would have been a generational disaster.
(07:06):
So it's it's hard to then kind of recalibrate to
look at where we are are now. But having said that, obviously,
you know, optimism is up, Crypto is up, equities are up,
even though a lot of that that growth is kind
of concentrated in you know, a handful of stocks. So
it's hard to be bearish. But at the same time,
(07:28):
I think a lot of that sentiment is priced in,
and I think the underlying fundamentals in other areas are
perhaps going to present some some headwinds that will be
pretty difficult, right especially on the real estate side, where
you know, morg rates aren't aren't going to come down.
Housing is dysfunctional, the commercial lending space is dysfunctional. So
(07:52):
the question is how do you balance those headwinds with
the tailwinds we're going to get, particularly from Dose, which
is going to be so radically transformational as probably the
most impactful, profound initiative any of us have ever seen
or will ever see in our lifetime, that is so
(08:15):
far beyond comprehension that you know, I guess when I
balance all of those forces, you can't help but be
bullish because you have to go long, you have to
go along elon. But there's gonna be a lot of pain, right,
you know, when you take when you look at how
reliant Kamala's administration in terms of GDP growth, in terms
of employment growth has been on the government sector, on
(08:38):
people having multiple jobs, on illegal right. If you take
those components out of the GDP component and out of
the employment sector, there is obviously room for a lot
of pain. So I think it's very challenging. I think
it's very difficult to have a view. But by and large,
(09:00):
I think the best advice anybody can take at this
point is do not bet against Elon.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, I feel that way in general. I mean, I'm
I'm somebody who always says, you know, don't meet your
heroes and don't be a fan of anyone. I can't
help but kind of be a fan of Elon. I
find what he's doing in the space realm in Tesla
buying X, which I don't know if you had this
experience at all, John, I mean during COVID, I was
very very vocal early on, I mean among the earliest
(09:26):
about how stupid lockdowns were and how masks are preposterous,
and I was getting I got throttled, I got suspended,
I got demonetized on YouTube, I got shut down on
you I mean, it's just like a constant now that
Elon has just created one big public square where people
get exchange ideas. I mean, I feel like I'm forever grateful,
(09:47):
but I feel like the Elon effect the economy will
be strong. That all said, what you're identifying is, as
far as I can see, it are structural long term risks, right,
long term problems. Thirty six trillion in debt is thirty
six trillion in debt. It doesn't matter who the president is.
That starts to be a scary number. And I'm wondering,
(10:07):
is there anything that you're looking for? No matter there
are some things that no matter what Trump does. I
think they are the concerns that something bad could happen.
There could be kind of a reset. There's the intentional
pain to get us where we need to be in
the economy. But then there's also the wheels start to
come off the bus just because they've been coming off
for the last you know, fifteen years. What do you
think what would worry you in the markets? Like what
(10:30):
would be the warning signs that you'd see You'd go,
oh god, this is about to get ugly.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
That's very I think the trigger would be a major
correction in inequity markets, because if you think about the
fact that you know the average baby boomer and from
a technical perspective, you know, the housing market has been
relatively resilient because of where people have in terms of
(10:58):
mortgages paid off or locked in low mortgages, so there
hasn't been a need for somebody to necessarily sell their house.
But if you know baby boomers who have eighty percent
of their net worth in the value of their primary residence,
you know, if you see cracks emerging the equity markets,
(11:19):
then it could compel us to finally test the housing
market in a way that we haven't been able to
do in the last couple of years because of that
market dislocation of where rates have been and the inability
for a new body, so you really haven't a had
you've had kind of market dislocation, right, So if you
see a correction in equity markets, it could force selling
(11:42):
in the housing market, which would cause I think a
catastrophic snowball effect across the entire system, which would impact
you know, rates move down a little bit, housing crashes,
the economy stumbles, employment stalls, and then at that point,
you know, inflation will remain persistent, so you know they're
(12:04):
not going to keep cutting rates, and even if they do,
it hasn't really necessarily made a difference. So they did
a fifty basis point great cut six weeks ago, and
mortgage rates are up a basis point, So you know
the toolbox at the Federal Reserve will have, especially in
a Trump economy, I think, are going to be quite challenging.
(12:25):
So I think, in simple terms, what would scare me
the most would be a significant equity market sellof. And
again that's also a reflection of optimism, right, because what
do I mean? There's no better prop or investor sentiment
perhaps than equity markets. Right, And if you look at
(12:47):
on a forward looking basis the valuations, people are increasingly optimistic.
So when that changes, I think it's a reflection of
both the risks we have from a technical perspective, but
also with respect to a shift in terms of people's optimism.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
We're going to come back here with John Lefev, the
author of Straight to Hell and the founder of the
Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter account, which was one
of my early It was like I set up my
Twitter account, I followed like you and Colter. I still
remember it was like the first ten follows. I didn't
eve know what Twitter was. I came out of the CIA,
couldn't I need even have social media? And I get
(13:28):
this job working at the Blaze. They're like, you need
a Twitter account. I'm like what and no idea anyway,
but I liked I saw some of the things. I
like some people I followed. Anyway, here we are now.
That was Oh my god, dude, I'm getting old. That
was almost fifteen years ago. So it's been a while. Yeah,
we're talking about the economy. We're talking about structural issues. Look,
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(13:50):
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All right, John, what do you think we learned from
this election, the Trump Kamala showdown, and how do you
think it affects the country going forward? You know, big,
(14:58):
big stuff, But I want to know what you think.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I mean. I think that the key thing for me
is just kind of almost socially. I have found that, Yeah,
it's almost hard to articulate. But anybody I think who
is now not a Trump supporter is either dumb or duped.
(15:23):
So if you look at like the evolution of Elon
saying he was going to be a political or even
left leaning, and then look at say Bill Ackman or
David Stack, Bill Perkins, any of these guys that have
kind of moved over. You know, if you spend an
hour with somebody talking about Charlottesville, talking about Russia, date
(15:46):
talking about the fact that our own intelligence agencies tried
to frame the sitting president of the United States, Fortreese,
it and it's all provable, and they come out of
that not realizing that they were duped or at least
the last eight years and obviously longer, and they can't
(16:11):
comprehend this. Then again, we live in separate world, and
so I think the takeaway from me that gives me
hope is that there are so many Elons out there.
There's so many Blackman's out there, There's so many people.
You know, basically, anybody with an IQ above one oh
five has and should have woken up to the realities. So,
(16:34):
you know, you alluded to your COVID experience a few
minutes ago. You know, if that happened again, we wouldn't
go through what we went through because people have really
really woken up. And so I think culturally that has
been the fundamental shift, and we are effectively a different culture.
I mean, you know, just a year and a half
(16:56):
ago we were talking about clotting gay at Harvard. Now
that seems completely absurd. And you know, Scientific American obviously
the the editor in chief resigned today. You know, these
are cultural changes that wouldn't happen, right. And they did
a survey about a month ago and they asked if
(17:21):
people It's a very simple question. It was like, do
you believe Donald Trump endorsed white supremacists in Charlottesville? And
you know, of conservatives, they it was fifteen percent said yes.
Of independence it was kind of thirty five percent yes,
(17:41):
and anybody to the left it was seventy five to
eighty percent still said yes one month ago. And this
is a hoax that had been disproven for years. And
that's just kind of a singular example, and that is
the progression we're seeing. And if you had taken that
poll a year ago or two years ago, the numbers
(18:02):
would have been even more significant. So if you've kind
of fast forward to where we're going to be in
January of next year, year, I've even found just in
terms of what I've seen in the last week. There
are people that I know who voted for Kamala Harris
and you can look at like Pete Hegseth or Matt
Gates and and that's obviously kind of going to stir
(18:24):
things up. But putting that aside, I've seen people that
voted proudly for Kamala come out and say, you know what,
I was wrong. I still didn't get it, and now
I get it. So for me, it's that cultural shift
that is really going to keep trending in the right
direction for us.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Do you feel like there's been a big change in
terms of going back to your your Wall Street roots
here for a second? Do you feel like the era
of Wall Street is the place where all the Ivy
League kids are just shoving each other out of the
way to try to break down the door? Is that over?
Is that really going on still? I mean, I'm kind
(19:03):
of an old man now and I don't have any
kids who are college age, but it seems to me
that everybody wants to either you know, start the next
big tech thing or be an Instagram influencer.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Well, sadly it's probably influencer, right, but the allure of
going to Wall Street, I think died I don't know,
probably ten fifteen years ago, and I'm probably the wrong
person to ask, because cynically, I think it's really a
profession that people get into because they're obviously smart, but
(19:35):
they're not quite sure what they want to do, or
they don't have the balls to go out and take
a risk. So it's a good place to go. Sit somewhere,
get paid relatively well, get well trained, get that stamp
of approval, and then down the line, reconsider what it
is that you really want to do. And it's prestigious
and so you you know, worst case scenario, if you
(19:56):
stick it out for twenty years, you can retire at
the age of forty five and be well respected in society.
That has changed over the last fifteen years, and I
think it's going to continue to change, and in fact,
I think it was yesterday there was a conversation with
Elon and Vivek basically saying they want Doze to be
the place where the young smart graduates want to work,
(20:20):
where they want to spend eighty one hundred hours a week,
probably not getting paid Wall Street money, but they will
get the experience and they will have the cachet and
prestige and the network effect whereby after that time they
can do everything. So I think you're right. So it's
going to be tech and it's going to be dozed.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
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IFCJ with With Doge on my mind here, I think
one of the big stories of the twenty twenty four
(21:21):
election that will get more attention going forward as people
think about this stuff. I'm not saying no one's noticed.
A lot of people have noticed it, but you know,
Trump is just such a force of nature that all
eyes and attention go to him. The change of X
as a free speech platform, I think has dramatically affected
(21:43):
the entire media landscape because they can't get away with
the same crap they could before because they can't count.
And people say, oh, well, Facebook and YouTube there's still
you know, communists, and they are like, they're very left
wing and absolute as so the Facebook has actually been
getting a little bit better. YouTube is horrible. Google is
a bigger threat to your freedom than TikTok. I tell
people this all the time, but they've had to at
(22:04):
least take account of there's one place you can get free.
You can actually see the original video, you know, like,
are they cheap fakes or is Biden actually a dementia
riddled old man. We all know the answer to that now,
but that I think X played a large role in that.
And you mentioned the Silicon Valley guys, some of these
big guys. It's really hard to say that Trump is
like the representative of like white nationalist hillbilly's or something,
(22:27):
which was very much the twenty sixteen media narrative about it.
When the richest guy in the world and a bunch
of the richest guys in the world who do stuff
that requires a tremendous amount of brain power and entrepreneurialism
are like, this guy is obviously the choice. So I
feel like that was actually a big part of the
Trump move in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
It wasn't a big part, it was the only part.
Without Questions, Without Elon buying Twitter, we wouldn't have any
of this full stop end of store.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
There we go, John, What are you up to next?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Ah? Well, I am a kind of project based right
so I look at from a private ectory perspective different projects,
and so I've got a few projects right now. Something
in the in the media landscape, which is almost like
a post election to your point, a response or adjustment
(23:24):
to the fact that you will see the complete and
utter annihilation of the traditional media landscape. And in a
world where there are already too many substacks and too
many podcasts and too many newsletters. I think there is
an AI curation solution to that, so effectively, it's a
(23:46):
it's a curation media tech play, which would take me
a long time to explain. I think My other main
project is a solid state battery company that is looking
We're looking to reduce everyone's exposure and reliance on China,
so we manufacture solid state batteries and we are looking
(24:12):
very soon to announce the manufacturing facility being built in
the United States, which will be a massive, massive project.
And so you know, think of a drone battery, or
a phone battery or even currently a car battery. You know,
they're they're lithium ion. So this is solid state, which
is more stable, it doesn't degrade, it lasts longer, and
(24:37):
it's it's fully recyclable. So it's it's the next evolution
in battery technology, which I think there are a few
companies that have been have been working on it. We're
confident now that we're moving into the manufacturing phase there
and our main focus is reducing the reliance on China,
which up until now, you know, forget everything that Elon
(24:59):
is doing, because obviously they're doing a tremendous amount, but
they're not in the solid state battery space. But we
will be looking to build a facility in uh somewhere
in the United States, which we cannot announ up at
this point.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Very cool, Uno it'll be a deal, very cool looked
at it. Look forward to hear more about it, and
hopefully we get a drink down in South Florida sometime John,
thanks for hanging out. Good to see you.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Absolutely
You're listening to the Buck Sexton Show podcast, make sure
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Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey guys, welcome to Buck Brief. First time on the show.
John lefev is with us now. He is a best
selling author of Straight to Hell. He's a former Wall
Street insider. I think anybody who works on Wall Street
when they go into media, John is considered an insider.
So there you go. And the man behind the Goldman
Sachs Elevator Twitter account, which I'm gonna tell you John,
(00:42):
I started in media out of the CIA in twenty eleven,
Goldman Sachs elevat and I was a New York City kid.
I grew up in the city. All my friends worked
in finance. My dad worked on Wall Street. So Goldman
Sachs Elevator original account was I think one of the
first like five Twitter accounts that I actually followed. So
here we are, many years later. How did you come
(01:04):
up with it?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah? So the short version is I was in Hong
Kong working in banking, and we post crisis, we'd set
up a capital markets advisory firm, kind of a hybrid
between advisory trading, private equity and traditional capital markets, you know, fundraising,
(01:26):
whether it's bonds or loans or anything between. So it
was a nimble, flexible boutique that operated across Asia and Europe.
And I left in two thousand and ten to join
Golden Sachs. They gave me an offer I effectively couldn't
refuse to run their Asia syndicate business. And a month
(01:48):
into my gardening leave, which is the period that you
have to sit out of markets if you possess material
market sensitive non public information. You're not allowed to work
if you go from one bank to another. So I
was in the middle of my three month gardening leave
when the firm that I left sued me for breach
of contract, citing the non compete clause that we had,
(02:08):
so that effectively prevents hid me from joining Golden and
so I spent the next year traveling around Asia and
just drinking and having fun. And this was peak occupied
Wall Street. So I one day I was just sitting
in a bar with some friends and I said, Man,
these people hate us, and they have no idea if
(02:30):
they really knew in terms of the racism and the
classism and the sexism and the corruption and the deviance
they would they have no clue, And so it started
as a joke and it just kind of took off,
and I kept with it because at the time I
was looking to leave the industry was this. You know,
(02:50):
I'd worked in New York and London and Hong Kong
and Singapore and was kind of sick of it. And
when I got into the business, I got in because
of the book Liar's Poker. And when I started, I
looked around. I said, Man, this work isn't that hard.
These people aren't that smart, but yet they define themselves
as human being by the fact that they worked for
(03:12):
Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Ank or JP
Morgan or whatever. It's kind of pathetic. And so I'd
always wanted to write a book, so cynically I had
had kept track of my stories throughout my career. And
then once the Twitter account took off, I thought, well,
I'm not a writer, but I can use this platform
(03:33):
and this following to get exposure, you know, with the
ultimate goal of publishing a book, which is why effectively
I grew the account up until you know, publishing my
book and then gradually let it die. Over the subsequent
years that followed, just because you know, I figured there's
only so much you can say about it, so I
(03:55):
just kind of hung you know, retired the account a
couple of years ago.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
What was the ethos or the you know, what were
the organizing principles of Goldman Sachs GS elevator Twitter account?
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Well, effectively, the basic premise, right was just things overheard
in the elevator at Goldman Sacks. But it was never
meant to be taken literally, So it was just a
It was a fictional character that I think people could
relate to, and it illuminated a culture. So it didn't
(04:28):
just represent Goldman Sacks. It represented, you know, everybody in
that sphere, everyone that people hated.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, I can nind of jump in really quickly because
I covered Occupy Wall Street for the Blaze. People forget
that the banksters. There was this period of time for
a couple of years where the banksters were like this
public enemy number one. I mean, you know, like the
big investment banks and all this stuff, which is actually
kind of insane, but anyway, that was what happened.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, I mean, you know, we had family members getting
chased out of dentist's offices because they were overheard saying
that they were, you know, using the Goldman Sachs company
insurance to pay for their kids' dental care. I mean,
that's how much Animal was towards towards bankers at the time.
It was. It was a wild time.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
And then I want to get into your book and
all that, but actually I'm going to bring us into
the current moment here in a second with as somebody
who knows how the markets work, how the street works,
I want you to tell me what you expect. Here
we are. It's November twenty twenty four. Trump's going to
be president, He's got the House, he's got the Senate.
What do you think happens in the markets? But hold
on one second, Jummer to come back to that, because
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four safe today. All right, John, the Trump economy starting
starting in January. What does it look like in the
(06:40):
markets and why why do you think things are gonna
head in one direction or another?
Speaker 1 (06:45):
I think that is such a difficult question because you know,
if you look at what we are being handed with
the property market, with rates, with inflation, that's not going away.
I mean, an alternative outcome would have been a generational disaster.
(07:06):
So it's it's hard to then kind of recalibrate to
look at where we are are now. But having said that, obviously,
you know, optimism is up, Crypto is up, equities are up,
even though a lot of that that growth is kind
of concentrated in you know, a handful of stocks. So
it's hard to be bearish. But at the same time,
(07:28):
I think a lot of that sentiment is priced in,
and I think the underlying fundamentals in other areas are
perhaps going to present some some headwinds that will be
pretty difficult, right especially on the real estate side, where
you know, morg rates aren't aren't going to come down.
Housing is dysfunctional, the commercial lending space is dysfunctional. So
(07:52):
the question is how do you balance those headwinds with
the tailwinds we're going to get, particularly from Dose, which
is going to be so radically transformational as probably the
most impactful, profound initiative any of us have ever seen
or will ever see in our lifetime, that is so
(08:15):
far beyond comprehension that you know, I guess when I
balance all of those forces, you can't help but be
bullish because you have to go long, you have to
go along elon. But there's gonna be a lot of pain, right,
you know, when you take when you look at how
reliant Kamala's administration in terms of GDP growth, in terms
of employment growth has been on the government sector, on
(08:38):
people having multiple jobs, on illegal right. If you take
those components out of the GDP component and out of
the employment sector, there is obviously room for a lot
of pain. So I think it's very challenging. I think
it's very difficult to have a view. But by and large,
(09:00):
I think the best advice anybody can take at this
point is do not bet against Elon.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, I feel that way in general. I mean, I'm
I'm somebody who always says, you know, don't meet your
heroes and don't be a fan of anyone. I can't
help but kind of be a fan of Elon. I
find what he's doing in the space realm in Tesla
buying X, which I don't know if you had this
experience at all, John, I mean during COVID, I was
very very vocal early on, I mean among the earliest
(09:26):
about how stupid lockdowns were and how masks are preposterous,
and I was getting I got throttled, I got suspended,
I got demonetized on YouTube, I got shut down on
you I mean, it's just like a constant now that
Elon has just created one big public square where people
get exchange ideas. I mean, I feel like I'm forever grateful,
(09:47):
but I feel like the Elon effect the economy will
be strong. That all said, what you're identifying is, as
far as I can see, it are structural long term risks, right,
long term problems. Thirty six trillion in debt is thirty
six trillion in debt. It doesn't matter who the president is.
That starts to be a scary number. And I'm wondering,
(10:07):
is there anything that you're looking for? No matter there
are some things that no matter what Trump does. I
think they are the concerns that something bad could happen.
There could be kind of a reset. There's the intentional
pain to get us where we need to be in
the economy. But then there's also the wheels start to
come off the bus just because they've been coming off
for the last you know, fifteen years. What do you
think what would worry you in the markets? Like what
(10:30):
would be the warning signs that you'd see You'd go,
oh god, this is about to get ugly.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
That's very I think the trigger would be a major
correction in inequity markets, because if you think about the
fact that you know the average baby boomer and from
a technical perspective, you know, the housing market has been
relatively resilient because of where people have in terms of
(10:58):
mortgages paid off or locked in low mortgages, so there
hasn't been a need for somebody to necessarily sell their house.
But if you know baby boomers who have eighty percent
of their net worth in the value of their primary residence,
you know, if you see cracks emerging the equity markets,
(11:19):
then it could compel us to finally test the housing
market in a way that we haven't been able to
do in the last couple of years because of that
market dislocation of where rates have been and the inability
for a new body, so you really haven't a had
you've had kind of market dislocation, right, So if you
see a correction in equity markets, it could force selling
(11:42):
in the housing market, which would cause I think a
catastrophic snowball effect across the entire system, which would impact
you know, rates move down a little bit, housing crashes,
the economy stumbles, employment stalls, and then at that point,
you know, inflation will remain persistent, so you know they're
(12:04):
not going to keep cutting rates, and even if they do,
it hasn't really necessarily made a difference. So they did
a fifty basis point great cut six weeks ago, and
mortgage rates are up a basis point, So you know
the toolbox at the Federal Reserve will have, especially in
a Trump economy, I think, are going to be quite challenging.
(12:25):
So I think, in simple terms, what would scare me
the most would be a significant equity market sellof. And
again that's also a reflection of optimism, right, because what
do I mean? There's no better prop or investor sentiment
perhaps than equity markets. Right, And if you look at
(12:47):
on a forward looking basis the valuations, people are increasingly optimistic.
So when that changes, I think it's a reflection of
both the risks we have from a technical perspective, but
also with respect to a shift in terms of people's optimism.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
We're going to come back here with John Lefev, the
author of Straight to Hell and the founder of the
Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter account, which was one
of my early It was like I set up my
Twitter account, I followed like you and Colter. I still
remember it was like the first ten follows. I didn't
eve know what Twitter was. I came out of the CIA,
couldn't I need even have social media? And I get
(13:28):
this job working at the Blaze. They're like, you need
a Twitter account. I'm like what and no idea anyway,
but I liked I saw some of the things. I
like some people I followed. Anyway, here we are now.
That was Oh my god, dude, I'm getting old. That
was almost fifteen years ago. So it's been a while. Yeah,
we're talking about the economy. We're talking about structural issues. Look,
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(13:50):
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All right, John, what do you think we learned from
this election, the Trump Kamala showdown, and how do you
think it affects the country going forward? You know, big,
(14:58):
big stuff, But I want to know what you think.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I mean. I think that the key thing for me
is just kind of almost socially. I have found that, Yeah,
it's almost hard to articulate. But anybody I think who
is now not a Trump supporter is either dumb or duped.
(15:23):
So if you look at like the evolution of Elon
saying he was going to be a political or even
left leaning, and then look at say Bill Ackman or
David Stack, Bill Perkins, any of these guys that have
kind of moved over. You know, if you spend an
hour with somebody talking about Charlottesville, talking about Russia, date
(15:46):
talking about the fact that our own intelligence agencies tried
to frame the sitting president of the United States, Fortreese,
it and it's all provable, and they come out of
that not realizing that they were duped or at least
the last eight years and obviously longer, and they can't
(16:11):
comprehend this. Then again, we live in separate world, and
so I think the takeaway from me that gives me
hope is that there are so many Elons out there.
There's so many Blackman's out there, There's so many people.
You know, basically, anybody with an IQ above one oh
five has and should have woken up to the realities. So,
(16:34):
you know, you alluded to your COVID experience a few
minutes ago. You know, if that happened again, we wouldn't
go through what we went through because people have really
really woken up. And so I think culturally that has
been the fundamental shift, and we are effectively a different culture.
I mean, you know, just a year and a half
(16:56):
ago we were talking about clotting gay at Harvard. Now
that seems completely absurd. And you know, Scientific American obviously
the the editor in chief resigned today. You know, these
are cultural changes that wouldn't happen, right. And they did
a survey about a month ago and they asked if
(17:21):
people It's a very simple question. It was like, do
you believe Donald Trump endorsed white supremacists in Charlottesville? And
you know, of conservatives, they it was fifteen percent said yes.
Of independence it was kind of thirty five percent yes,
(17:41):
and anybody to the left it was seventy five to
eighty percent still said yes one month ago. And this
is a hoax that had been disproven for years. And
that's just kind of a singular example, and that is
the progression we're seeing. And if you had taken that
poll a year ago or two years ago, the numbers
(18:02):
would have been even more significant. So if you've kind
of fast forward to where we're going to be in
January of next year, year, I've even found just in
terms of what I've seen in the last week. There
are people that I know who voted for Kamala Harris
and you can look at like Pete Hegseth or Matt
Gates and and that's obviously kind of going to stir
(18:24):
things up. But putting that aside, I've seen people that
voted proudly for Kamala come out and say, you know what,
I was wrong. I still didn't get it, and now
I get it. So for me, it's that cultural shift
that is really going to keep trending in the right
direction for us.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Do you feel like there's been a big change in
terms of going back to your your Wall Street roots
here for a second? Do you feel like the era
of Wall Street is the place where all the Ivy
League kids are just shoving each other out of the
way to try to break down the door? Is that over?
Is that really going on still? I mean, I'm kind
(19:03):
of an old man now and I don't have any
kids who are college age, but it seems to me
that everybody wants to either you know, start the next
big tech thing or be an Instagram influencer.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Well, sadly it's probably influencer, right, but the allure of
going to Wall Street, I think died I don't know,
probably ten fifteen years ago, and I'm probably the wrong
person to ask, because cynically, I think it's really a
profession that people get into because they're obviously smart, but
(19:35):
they're not quite sure what they want to do, or
they don't have the balls to go out and take
a risk. So it's a good place to go. Sit somewhere,
get paid relatively well, get well trained, get that stamp
of approval, and then down the line, reconsider what it
is that you really want to do. And it's prestigious
and so you you know, worst case scenario, if you
(19:56):
stick it out for twenty years, you can retire at
the age of forty five and be well respected in society.
That has changed over the last fifteen years, and I
think it's going to continue to change, and in fact,
I think it was yesterday there was a conversation with
Elon and Vivek basically saying they want Doze to be
the place where the young smart graduates want to work,
(20:20):
where they want to spend eighty one hundred hours a week,
probably not getting paid Wall Street money, but they will
get the experience and they will have the cachet and
prestige and the network effect whereby after that time they
can do everything. So I think you're right. So it's
going to be tech and it's going to be dozed.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
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IFCJ with With Doge on my mind here, I think
one of the big stories of the twenty twenty four
(21:21):
election that will get more attention going forward as people
think about this stuff. I'm not saying no one's noticed.
A lot of people have noticed it, but you know,
Trump is just such a force of nature that all
eyes and attention go to him. The change of X
as a free speech platform, I think has dramatically affected
(21:43):
the entire media landscape because they can't get away with
the same crap they could before because they can't count.
And people say, oh, well, Facebook and YouTube there's still
you know, communists, and they are like, they're very left
wing and absolute as so the Facebook has actually been
getting a little bit better. YouTube is horrible. Google is
a bigger threat to your freedom than TikTok. I tell
people this all the time, but they've had to at
(22:04):
least take account of there's one place you can get free.
You can actually see the original video, you know, like,
are they cheap fakes or is Biden actually a dementia
riddled old man. We all know the answer to that now,
but that I think X played a large role in that.
And you mentioned the Silicon Valley guys, some of these
big guys. It's really hard to say that Trump is
like the representative of like white nationalist hillbilly's or something,
(22:27):
which was very much the twenty sixteen media narrative about it.
When the richest guy in the world and a bunch
of the richest guys in the world who do stuff
that requires a tremendous amount of brain power and entrepreneurialism
are like, this guy is obviously the choice. So I
feel like that was actually a big part of the
Trump move in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
It wasn't a big part, it was the only part.
Without Questions, Without Elon buying Twitter, we wouldn't have any
of this full stop end of store.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
There we go, John, What are you up to next?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Ah? Well, I am a kind of project based right
so I look at from a private ectory perspective different projects,
and so I've got a few projects right now. Something
in the in the media landscape, which is almost like
a post election to your point, a response or adjustment
(23:24):
to the fact that you will see the complete and
utter annihilation of the traditional media landscape. And in a
world where there are already too many substacks and too
many podcasts and too many newsletters. I think there is
an AI curation solution to that, so effectively, it's a
(23:46):
it's a curation media tech play, which would take me
a long time to explain. I think My other main
project is a solid state battery company that is looking
We're looking to reduce everyone's exposure and reliance on China,
so we manufacture solid state batteries and we are looking
(24:12):
very soon to announce the manufacturing facility being built in
the United States, which will be a massive, massive project.
And so you know, think of a drone battery, or
a phone battery or even currently a car battery. You know,
they're they're lithium ion. So this is solid state, which
is more stable, it doesn't degrade, it lasts longer, and
(24:37):
it's it's fully recyclable. So it's it's the next evolution
in battery technology, which I think there are a few
companies that have been have been working on it. We're
confident now that we're moving into the manufacturing phase there
and our main focus is reducing the reliance on China,
which up until now, you know, forget everything that Elon
(24:59):
is doing, because obviously they're doing a tremendous amount, but
they're not in the solid state battery space. But we
will be looking to build a facility in uh somewhere
in the United States, which we cannot announ up at
this point.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Very cool, Uno it'll be a deal, very cool looked
at it. Look forward to hear more about it, and
hopefully we get a drink down in South Florida sometime John,
thanks for hanging out. Good to see you.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Absolutely
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