January 31, 2025 • 53 mins
Guest: Edward Dowd
Welcome to the Porter & Co. Black Label Podcast – a provocative, no-holds-barred space where Porter and Aaron talk about markets, politics, and life with a series of very special guests.
This month’s special guest is Edward Dowd – founding member of Phinance Technologies. You can learn more about Edward here.
Show highlights include:
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Deep dive into the Covid data…
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The truth about Ivermectin…
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The real numbers that are alarming to Edward…
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Here is where the life insurance industry is exposed…
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A timely history lesson from Porter…
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Edward noticed this about Warren Buffett’s holdings…
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Aaron and Edward tackle conspiracy theories…
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Porter’s big idea for charity…
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And much more…
Click here to listen to the full podcast now. And grab your free reports at https://porterspodcast.com.
And be sure to follow us on X at https://x.com/Porter_and_Co and https://x.com/porterstansb.
To your success,
Porter & Co.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The studies done during the pandemicon ivermectin were fraudulent.
(00:03):
There was a lot of fraudulent,
papers submitted to try toprove that it was deadly.
So there was just a abjectfraud in the scientific
community going on.
What's the number or the dataset
that's most alarming to you?
The disability numbersare just staggering, and,
they really show a tightcorrelation to vaccine rollout
(00:24):
and arise in disabilities.
And the young people are still dyingexcessively around twenty percent.
Welcome to the Porter andCompany Black Label podcast,
your home for provocative insightsthat lead to lasting wealth.
And here are your hosts, PorterStansbury and Aaron Brabham.
Alright, Porter.
(00:44):
Here we are back again forthe other Black Label show.
And, of course, I've got Porter.
Porter, I'd like to know your thoughtson coming back from my wedding.
And what did you think aboutColombia for the first you've
been in Medellin, but whatdid you think about Cartagena,
and what did you thinkabout that hotel?
Well, listen. Yourwedding was beautiful.
Everyone was so kind,and the the hotel was,
I one of the very finestI've been to in the world,
(01:06):
and Cartagena was alovely little town.
So I had a great time,
and I recommend it to anybodywho's gonna be in South America
to definitelycheck out Colombia.
I love Medellin, and I reallylike Cartagena too. But listen.
Before we get into thingshere, I just wanna say,
our Black Label shows haven'tbeen very Black Label y lately.
Right?
We've It was because wegotten in too much trouble.
It cost you a billion dollars.
(01:28):
Nobody nobody'sdrinking any gin.
Nobody's getting a little loose.
They've been very professional.
We need some Yeah.
We cost yeah. We cost youa billion dollars, Porter.
That's why.
We got canceled. Itwas very expensive.
But but I still think we needmore we need a little bit of
black label y stuff.
We need we need to talk aboutthe the seedy underside of the
(01:49):
financial world and the all theshenanigans that are going on.
I mean, it's, you know,it's it's Davos this week.
Yeah.
Davos and the build Bilderbergsand all those meetings,
they're, they're not lookingso bullish these days,
which might bebullish for humanity.
Who knows?
I I think I don't know.I think that's progress.
But, the other thing that I'm I'mso fascinated by right now is the
(02:12):
people actuallycheering for more taxes.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, we're we'll we'llget into that later with our,
with our interview, and let mego ahead and give the shout out.
So today's guest is noneother than Edward Dowd.
He's the founding partner offinance technologies and author
of cause unknown,
the epidemic of sudden deaths in twentytwenty one and twenty twenty two.
(02:33):
He also used to work atBlackRock as a portfolio
manager, managingfourteen billion dollars.
That was overthirteen years ago.
But I'm excited to have him on.
Yeah.
And I want I wanna I wanna goahead and get to that interview
with Ed because he's anincredible guest for us to get.
Thanks for doing that work.
And I also just wannasummarize for people.
Ed was the leading intellectualwho was first out of the gate,
(02:58):
the very firstperson to publicly
discount what the governmentwas saying about COVID,
and then he was the firstperson anywhere to carefully
document the incredible risein excess death in excess death
and in, injuries,
because of, we suspect,the COVID vaccine.
(03:18):
So why don't we goahead and bring Ed in?
Because I know he's gonna havean opinion about whether or not
tariffs or taxes and whether ornot it's a good idea to set up
another agency of the federalgovernment to collect still more taxes.
I I mean, tariffs, but they'rethe same thing, people.
You gotta understand.
Yeah. For sure. Alright.Let's bring him on.
(03:40):
Alright, Porter. Hey.
You know, I've been talkingabout Edward Dowd for a long
time, and I know you've knownof him for a long time as well.
You guys have a ton in commonbecause Ed actually used to
have his pinned post on xabout a dystopian movie.
And, I believe Ed originally,
wrote about that in Marchwhen the pandemic got started.
(04:00):
And Porter, you wrote afamous, piece in April.
So you guys werevery early and on it,
and I wanna welcomeEd to the show.
Yeah.
I do too.
Ed, it's a it's a tremendous honor tomeet you and to get to speak with you.
I've been followingyour work for years.
Like like, Aaron mentions,
I was a enormous COVID skepticfrom the very beginning.
Just based on the data thatI saw coming out of that cruise
(04:23):
ship where the infectionhad run rampant,
the navy ship where theinfection had run rampant,
and then all the wastewatertesting that was going on in
Europe where you had real,you know, you had real case,
mortality versus populationmortality numbers,
and you could see that it itwasn't much more dangerous than
the flu and everything wasbeing grossly exaggerated
probably for political reasons.
(04:43):
But listen.
You're the expert in all this,
so I'm gonna shut theheck up and ask you,
when when did it first occurto you that what you were watching
was science gone completely mad?
Well, you know,
I I was early to know aboutCOVID because, you know,
a lot of us on WallStreet, you know,
(05:03):
we pride ourselves ingetting information early.
So I was living on Maui,still live on Maui.
And in Januaryof, twenty twenty,
before the public was aware,
I was going to I went to Costcoand I loaded up before the
rush, about a month before.
Then then then the thepublic was made aware of it.
And so I was scared early,but then, like yourself,
(05:25):
quickly turned on a dime whenI realized that this was not a
dangerous virus.
The other thing that occurredto me was in, October,
November, and December onMaui in twenty nineteen,
there was a bug, quote,unquote, bug going around,
and it was COVID.
And people peoplewere getting laid out,
but there were nothere were no deaths.
(05:47):
It was a nasty, virus,
and and and peoplewere floored by it.
But no one was in fear becausethey weren't told to be in fear.
And then and then andthen a switch turned on,
and then the fear,propaganda came.
So I was verysuspicious of that.
And then,
early on, I saw censorship.
Zero hedge wascensored for, you know,
saying there might might havebeen data function in January
(06:08):
or I think February orMarch of twenty twenty.
They wrote a famous,
article about some universityin in India that, you know,
said that there that it lookedlike it was a manufactured virus.
That was immediately censored.
So the well,censorship immediately alarmed me.
And then as time rolledon, you could tell,
and I wrote my famousdystopian future tweet.
(06:30):
It seemed to me that theywere gonna go for a vaccine.
And one of the andas a financial guy,
the big the big warningsign for me was in April,
of, twenty twenty when ona Sunday of Meet the Press,
James Bullard, Saint Louisformer Saint Louis Fed president,
is talking about howwe're gonna restart the economy.
(06:51):
And, he said the good news iswe have new surveillance systems
and we can issueimmunity badges.
So I started thinking to myself,
why is the Fed president talkingabout a mute what's going on?
Like, it and then they've been theymemory hold that because it was
early before vaccines.
A lot of us on on Twitter at thetime pointed out how absurd that was.
(07:11):
And then they stoppedtalking about it.
And I remember sayingvaccines are coming.
That's the solution.
And, people thought they calledme a conspiracy theorist,
then sure enough, avaccine was the solution.
In hindsight, we learned theywere suppressing early treatment
protocols like ivermectin,hydroxychloroquine,
And it was all about lockdown andwait for the vaccine solution.
(07:32):
So something and then, you know,
you you probably saw whatI saw in twenty twenty.
The messaging from globalgovernments was all the same.
And I said to myself, you know,
being an analystand Wall Street guy,
when has the global governmentmessaging ever been in unison?
Never.
So I just knewsomething was different.
Something was going onthat seemed sketchy.
(07:54):
And, you know you know, youand I in the finance world,
we ever since the greatfinancial crisis have been
blowing a a blowing a a bubble,
and we've been wonderingwhen the you know,
it was gonna be a asovereign debt crisis.
And in in in thefall twenty nineteen,
there was, the beginnings ofa coordinated global slowdown.
There were repomarkets going crazy,
(08:15):
and it seemed to me that thewhole thing was gonna unwind.
But then COVID came,
and then we printedunprecedented amounts of,
of federal debt money for COVID.
And COVID was a war. COVIDwas warlike spending.
And so it kinda you know,
whether it was aplanned event or,
lucky happenstancefor central bankers,
(08:35):
it gave them an excuse tokick the can down the road.
And here we arefour years later.
And, my team and I put out areport about a week and a half ago
that's it's it's a paid product.
We're we're predicting a deephold by recession be getting
sometime in twenty five.
It's it's justbaking to the cake.
I wanna get to the financialimplications of kicking the can
down the road in a minute.
(08:57):
I have a couple of ofscience questions first before we get
to the financial things,and I'm like I said,
I'm I'm very gratefulto get to talk with you.
I think you've probablydone more work of on these
particular topics from a independentstandpoint than anybody else.
And, we've all learned whathappens when you trust the science.
So I'm I'm glad to talk to someonewho's in finance and, you know,
(09:19):
isn't isn't wearing a lab coatbecause 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 yearsaway from all of this,
why is there still a questionin the scientific community be
about whether or notivermectin works?
(09:41):
I you know, thatthat befuddles me.
I take ivermectin myselfwhenever I feel a little
something coming on.
And, then, you know, look.
It it in twenty sixteen, therewere glowing articles about it.
I think it won theno Nobel Prize,
and then then it then wasdemonized as horse pace.
So it clearly,
(10:02):
as time rolls on,
more more more and morescientists are are are pointing
to the fact that the studythe studies done during the
pandemic on ivermectinwere fraudulent.
There was a lot of fraudulent,
papers submitted to try toprove that it was deadly.
So there was just a abjectfraud in the scientific
community going on.
The peer review process,as we know, was a joke.
(10:22):
You know, some of thepapers we've written,
we put on ResearchGate.
We're not asking for peerreview because we know it's
rigged, but, you know, ourif if everything was normal,
some of the work we'vedone on, you know,
excess deaths and excesscancers and heart attacks and
neurological problems couldbe submitted for peer review,
but what's the point?
But we we put it on researchdates so the scientific
(10:43):
community can cite our papers.
Well, let's get tothat next point.
What it you've done lotsof different research,
and you've come up with lotsof 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 wherethere's lots and lots of population.
(11:05):
And the we my my mycolleagues, Carlos and Yuri,
we think the best dataset thatproves the case is the disabilities.
Although everybody lovesto talk about excess deaths
because it's hyperbolic.
The disability numbersare just staggering, and,
they really show a tightcorrelation to vaccine rollout
and arise in disabilities.
(11:26):
We got data we got the BLSshowing the numbers in the US.
They don't it's not granular.
And then we have the UK,
personal independent paymentsystem, PIP, they call it,
that goes more granular.
It all started explodingin, twenty twenty one.
And, the numbersare pretty stark,
and and it's it's it it thecorrelations are just tight.
(11:49):
Sort of off topic,but a question I have,
I'm I'm interestedin the demographics,
particularly in Russia.
I have a I have a Ihave an instinct that
living in a country where thereisn't a history of the rule of
law, where there'srampant alcoholism,
where there's adeclining birth rate,
(12:10):
and where there's been a veryland a very large land war in
Asia is gonna besurprisingly bad,
for the demographics.
Have you seen anything in yourresearch that suggests that the
injuries and the excessdeath rates from the COVID
shots are materiallydifferent in
(12:31):
different populations ormaterially different from
different types ofvaccines that were used?
Well, we did look at Russia.
We don't have thedemographic, data,
but we've looked at allsorts of different countries.
In in the US in particular,excess mortality,
while down from its height offorty percent in twenty twenty
(12:52):
one, for ages sixteento sixty four.
It's running between fiveand ten percent right now,
and the young people are still dyingexcessively around twenty percent.
So that's a problem. You know?
Scott Davidson of One Americafamously said in January of
twenty two on a a chamberconference a commerce call that
(13:15):
a ten percent excess death rate isonce in a two hundred year flood.
Forty percent wasoff the charts.
So now we're we're we're comingon from off the charts to once
in a two hundred yearflood consistently.
So and we haven't looked atfertility yet because fertility
is, is noisier.
Deaths are easy to predict.
Death rates arestable and steady.
(13:36):
So it's easy to it'seasy to get a baseline,
and then you can get statistical
signals.
In fertility, it'saffected by, economics.
So you need persistency of ofdown fertility rates before you
can make a call.
So as we go through time,
if the persistency offertility continues to decline,
stay well, then we got the twin,
(13:58):
problem of lowfertility excess deaths,
which demographicallyis a disaster.
The good news the goodand bad news is the US,
is probably the best countryout of, the, you know, China,
Europe, and Japan,and Korea, you know,
the major westerneconomies because we,
imported ten tofifteen million illegal
(14:19):
aliens, to, you know,
to kinda cover up some of theexcess deaths we've been seeing
here in the US.
China has a big problem.
They hit a demographicwall in twenty twenty,
and you've seen what'sgoing on with their economy.
Japan is, entering anotherdemographic death wave.
It's gonna accelerate.
South Korea is terminal.
We we have and andthen, of course,
(14:40):
Southern Europe is a disaster.
So we got we gotdemographic problems all over the place,
which is gonna be aproblem long term.
I I think it's one of the mostinteresting intellectual things
of my lifetime has been
the number of people who weresupposedly very smart and were
certainly very wealthy,
(15:00):
and I'm speaking particularlyabout Ted Turner and Warren
Buffett, and the amount ofmoney they have spent fighting
the, quote, unquote,
population bomb when thewhole problem the entire time
was following birthrates, not not not a,
not an overpopulated earth.
But that's another hobby horse ofmine that we can get to another time.
(15:21):
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 financialimplications of kicking the can
the can down the road of theenormous debt load that we have
in the US economy.
But, specifically,I've been concerned
by the way, for the lasttwelve years or so, I have,
my main area of financialresearch focus has been
(15:43):
property and casualtyinsurance companies.
So I'm really familiar withthe accounting and the,
you know, the float growth andthe policies of p and c firms.
But I have always reallyignored life insurance
companies because,well, you know,
every house doesn't burn downin a fire, but, everybody dies.
So I I suspect that there are,
(16:05):
there's more alpha to be gainedby underwriting and property
and casualty thanthere is in life.
But, honestly, you may knowmore about it than I do.
I just haven't ever gotteninto life insurance.
But it occurs to me that if ifyou're anything like correct
and the impact of disability andin increased death excess death,
that the life insurancecompanies have the most
(16:26):
exposure to those risks.
And I just wonder,
have you heard from anylife insurance companies?
Do you have any idea about which lifeinsurer might be the most at risk?
Or or, general,
what's your feelings about therisks of excess death for life
insurance companies?
So excess death first appeared in thegroup life part of their business.
(16:48):
And to distinguish grouplife from whole life,
group life are policies givento Fortune five hundred and
midsize companies as a benefit.
It's blanket insurancepolicy. It's not underwritten.
What what that means is youdon't go in for a medical exam
because it's a great businessbecause young people don't die.
So they figure outwhat the, you know,
the the death rate is ofsomeone that of an age group
(17:10):
that doesn't really die, andthey 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 ais is not as, big as whole life.
Whole life is where the bigpolicies are because the group
life typically covers,one or two times your base
(17:33):
salary, which is not a lot ofmoney for insurance company.
The whole life policies iswhere they write, you know,
a million to twenty milliondollar life insurance policies
for very wealthy people.
And the the ones thatwere written before,
twenty nine twenty twenty,
they haven't taken losseson those because it's Byzantine
Insurance accounting.
(17:54):
Group Life is pricedevery one to three years.
So they started tothey took losses,
then they raised prices.
So they think it solvedthe problem, in that group.
Then in whole life,
they have five year rollinglong term mortality assumptions,
which they haven't changed yetbecause they keep thinking that
excess mortality is gonna normalizeand that this was a onetime event.
(18:19):
But, eventually,
if excess mortality continuesto run five to ten percent,
they're gonna have to writedown a whole a whole portion of
the whole life business.
And so my suspicion is that'sone of these insurance companies,
I don't know which one is gonnagive up the ghost and then then
the others will follow suit.
Swiss Re, a reinsurer,wrote a paper, a study,
(18:40):
it came out aboutsix months ago,
where they said that they see excessmortality running five to ten percent,
into the for the atleast the next ten years.
Wow.
Now if you read the ifyou read the fine print,
they blame COVID.
They blame COVID, and they staya solution to that is vaccine.
So, you know, they'rethey're, you know,
they're missing the boat.
(19:02):
But but at least at leasttheir map confirms our map.
We're not insurance guys.
We're, you know, we're justwe're finance guys coming up,
you know, with realtime excess mortality.
They're projecting thatit's gonna stay high.
That's what theydo for a living.
So Swiss Re agrees with us,
but but they don't, you know,
they don't we don'tagree on the cause.
(19:24):
Yeah. Okay.
So I wanna get tomy last question,
which is a financial question.
And,
I'm you know, I may be the only
person in America who remembersthat the Smoot Hawley tariff
wasn't the tariff thatblew up the world.
The Smoot Hawley tariff tookaverage tariff rates from, like,
forty percent to fifty percentand expanded the number of
(19:45):
items that were coveredunder the tariff.
But the tariff regime thatblew up the world actually was
implemented innineteen twenty two.
That's when thefederal government,
in an effort to protect farmers,
implemented forty percenttariffs across the board on on
just about every singleagricultural product and then
some some others as well.
And that works so well thatthe farmers had an enormous
(20:07):
depression throughout the nineteentwenties because, of course,
everyone stopped buying ourexported agricultural products.
Meanwhile, every single bodyevery single country retaliated,
which meant that everythingthat the farmers needed to grow
food got more expensive.
The, the US farmer estimates thatthroughout the nineteen twenties,
American farmers lost threehundred million dollars a year
(20:30):
because of those tariffs.
And, of course, they worked sowell on the farmers that then,
in nineteen thirty,
they expanded them tothe rest of the economy.
And just keep in mind,
the nineteen twenties shouldhave been the golden era of
American exports.
We were making four and ahalf million cars a year.
Russia was making a thousand.
(20:50):
Germany was making less than twentythousand by nineteen twenty eight.
Your Europe had beendestroyed by World War one.
They were flat on their backs,
and they could not compete withus in a manufacturing standpoint.
Just like today, of course,
nobody can compete withus in terms of technology.
And so president Trump isdetermined he's gonna take this
incredible American vitality,
and he's gonna slap a twentyfive percent tariff on it
(21:12):
because everywhere it's worked,
it's everywhere it'sbeen implemented, it's failed.
You know, it causes enormouseconomic dislocations.
It destroys supply chains.
It causes tremendousamounts of inflation.
And I I'm not gonna bother withtrying to explain all all the
economic reasonsabout comparative advantage,
about specialization.
Go read iPencil if you don'tunderstand how economies work,
(21:34):
but I know that you do.
And I also know that you'revery well aware that it's not
really good for an economyto hold thirty five trillion
dollars in federal debt.
And even if you look atthings like credit card debt,
they're at they're at, you know,
really very large levels,high interest rates.
And as inflation goes higher,
(21:55):
the impact of those rates asthey move up will have a more
and more of an economic impact.
And the weight of all thateventually has to cause a
recession and has tocause a credit cycle.
And you and I both saw the samething in the fall of twenty nineteen,
and we we covered it up byhaving basically the equivalent
of World War two except for itwas just in in COVID vaccines
(22:16):
and lots more debt.
And now we're the the presidentis saying sincerely that
on February first,
we're gonna have a twenty fivepercent across the board tariff
with our two largesttrading partners,
which is Canada and Mexico.
And I just wonder, how doesthat not kick off an incredible
deflation, and how doesthat not wreck the economy?
(22:38):
And what in the world arehis advisers thinking?
Well, you know, I I I'm ofthe opinion that this is Trump
Trump world where he'susing his, art of the deal.
I don't think twenty fivepercent will stick for very long,
but he's got he's got a wholehost of problems beyond tariff,
games.
He, we let's go back to twenty
(23:00):
twenty two, twenty twenty three.
We were in the in thespring of twenty three.
We have early cycle indicators.We have a great economic model.
My partner, Carlo, CarlosAllegri wrote a book economic
cycles, debt, and demographics,
and his his modelswere predicting a recession,
at the end of twenty three,
twenty four as were alot of other economists,
(23:20):
never never manifested, and,
it we were wrong.
So we were asking ourselves,
have the laws of economicfundamentals changed or is
there something else goingon and we figured it out?
Basically, Biden goingthe last two years,
accelerated illegal immigration,which juiced the economy.
(23:41):
That was a big part part ofthe deficit spending, the NGOs.
It it was a logisticaloperation to bring in ten to
fifteen million people.
Net legal migrationis million a year.
We've never seenanything like this.
And there was unprecedentedgovernment spending.
Yeah. That's what Iwas gonna point out.
How can you have a nominal,
recession when whenwhen the government
deficit is almostseven percent of GDP?
(24:03):
So it it papered it over. Itwas it was a short term fix.
It was crisis level.
We we did that kind of deficitspending during the great
financial crisis.
What was the crisis thistime to get Biden reelected?
So, you know, so the what Trump
Trump's policies are gonnareverse all of this juice.
So he doesn't even haveto deport the illegals,
(24:25):
but just halting it,second derivative,
it's got and the economycapacity you know,
if you look at traditionalmeasures of the economy,
household survey, forgetthe establishment,
household survey,
PMI, capacity utilization.We're already in a recession.
Although the headlinenumbers don't say that.
The stock market hasn'tdiscounted it yet.
(24:47):
It will at some point.
I had the theory that the stockmarket isn't what it used to be
when you and I weredoing it back in the day.
It's it's ninety fivepercent passive and algos.
When I was managing moneyduring the great financial
crisis, it was seventyfive percent fundamental.
So I thinka discount discounting mechanism
for the stock market is off.
That's why we have Wellsuper high value valuation.
(25:10):
To interrupt, but I I just wannaconfirm what you're saying because,
obviously, look at theconcentration of the S and P index.
And you understand thatS and P is market weight.
You understand it'sdriven by algos.
And so the more that thingsget away from the fundamentals,
the more overweight they'll toppick the top ten positions in
the S and P will be.
And now I think we're at apoint where forty percent of
(25:31):
the index is madeup of five stocks,
which is more concentrationthan we've ever seen before,
which also means it's a biggerbubble 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 notgonna market time it,
but when when when when thiscracks and if and as, you know,
bubbles like this when that blow thisbig, when it cracks, it goes fast.
(25:55):
It doesn't go slow.
The the dot com bubble went downfifty percent over two years.
The the housing crisis,
we had a huge fiftypercent drawdown in in nine months.
I don't this onecould be super fast,
but let's let's put thataside for for the moment.
Can I interrupt you justone more thing about that point?
The other thing is that thelarger the bubble blows,
the longer the following bearmarket and duration will be as well.
(26:18):
So if you look at Japan atthe peak at eighty nine,
they are trading atseventy times earnings,
and they went on to havea twenty year bear market.
Their market didn'tbottom until o nine.
Our market, of course,peaked in two thousand,
and then we had almost aten year bear market that didn't
bottom until o nine as well.
And so I think that ifyou're looking at if
(26:41):
you're looking ata a a CAPE ratio,
cyclically adjusted PEnow of thirty seven,
the only time the stocks haveever been more expensive in the
United States was at the techbubble in two thousand, and,
also, if you go back far enough,
the railroad bubble ineighteen forty four.
But in both of thosecases, you had, you know,
essentially a decade longbear market that followed.
(27:02):
And you wanna talk about whatis not in anybody's forecast
right now at all.
No.
Nobody sees what is black andwhite obvious to me and you,
which is that these debt levelsfor corporations and for the
federal governmentare not sustainable,
and that any any kind ofeconomic slowdown is gonna
produce a really terrific,
(27:25):
debt cycle where there's goingto 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 anypercentage chance
that the US defaults on someof its treasury obligations?
I I don't I don't think so.
So we're we're the the the dollarsystem is so ingrained globally.
(27:48):
It reserve currenciesdie slowly.
So I think the Bidenadministration did a good job
of trying to kill it.
That's why the BRICSemerged is so loud.
You know, the the thethe sanctions on Russia,
the the deswifting them, andthen actually stealing their,
you know, their moneyto fund the Ukraine war.
That's why there's the brickshave emerged because, you know,
(28:11):
I think these discussions hadalways been going on behind
closed doors, but nowthey're just open about it.
That's gonna take timebecause there's, you know,
fit I think aroundeighteen trillion
in, dollar denominated bonds.
So anybody who immediately would tryto get off the dollar would have a,
a deflationary depression intheir in their own economy.
So it's a slow process.
(28:32):
Eighty eighty percent I thinkninety percent of all FX
transactions still have thedollar on the other side.
You look at what Warren buff whatWarren Buffett is telling you something.
He's got the biggest cash flowhe's ever had. Was he early?
Sure. Was I early andCarlos early in our call?
Or is that yes.
But, you know, he's got fourpercent of the T bill market,
(28:52):
more than the Fed, and he'sgetting paid, you know,
four four point three percent.
He was getting paid five anda half percent just to sit in
cash and wait.
You know?
He he knows what'scoming, and, you know,
it's it's been it's takenlonger to manifest the top and
the, the actual, you know,deflationary cycle, but,
I think UST bills and cashare still gonna be fine.
(29:15):
I I would I wouldI would hide there.
At some point, there'sgonna be a great trade in,
ten years in long bonds because everybodyis on the everybody is so bearish,
long interest rates right nowthat we know when we do get
this recession thatactually, you know,
manifests in headline numbersand the stock market wobbles.
(29:37):
The long bond in the ten yearwill will go down as the Fed
chases the crisis down.
Real interest rates are aroundtwo percent, so money's tight.
The Fed already, youknow, took a hundred off,
and they've already lowered interestrates a hundred basis points.
You know, we've we think there'sanother hundred and fifty to two
hundred to go.
And then they'll do theirtheir usual, shenanigans,
(29:59):
you know, quantitativeeasing and nonsense.
Have you noticed thatwith the huge cash,
cash raise at Berkshire thatBerkshire is now trading at,
about five times its,enterprise value?
Yeah.
So the e e v to EV to EBITDA is aboutfive right now at, Berkshire stock,
(30:20):
which is the cheapest I'veever seen it in my career.
He's gonna Warren isgonna do what Warren does.
You know, he'llcome 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 talkingto Bank of America
for preferreddividend convertible, whatever.
Some deal that where he givesbillions and debts basically
(30:42):
owns the company.
Well, listen. That'sthat's it for me.
Aaron, you are the, conspiracytheorist amongst us here.
You've got you've gotyour shot at at Ed Dowd.
What what have you got for him?
I appreciate that. Yes, Ed.
I am known as the conspiracytheorist in at Porter and
Company.
However, there is no theory because it wascreated by the s the CIA, first of all.
(31:04):
So that's just tomake us look kooky.
Second of all, as you are wellaware, just wait six months.
All conspiracy theoriesbecome, conspiracy realism.
And, I don't wanna go downa bunch of rabbit holes,
but I do have aquestion for you, Ed.
You know, I know Iknow your background.
You were with, the evil,
the evil force of BlackRock back in the day,
(31:24):
for a long time.
I know that, one of the things that yousaid that you got really good at was
spotting liars because youwould meet with a lot of CEOs
and you could see which ones werereal and which ones were lying.
So you kind of became, looking,
a guy that's looking for signs.
Right? And now we seethat with everybody.
There's so many liars out there.
(31:45):
And and then, you know,
also know your backgroundwhere you had a little bit of a
depression and were on somepharmaceuticals and then you
got really healthy andnatural and, cleaned out.
And I think that that's,that's fantastic.
I think we're seeing alot of that in this world.
And then you became verypassionate about this process
of, enlightening people andgoing against the grain,
(32:06):
about the vaccines andalso about the idea that,
as we've discussed today,
where there just has to be constantcrisis after crisis in order for this,
debt implosion to kindabe kicked down the road.
Now that so many peoplehave, joined your side,
now that there are so manydifferent podcasts and
(32:26):
influencers and even xallows this discussion,
what is your passionbecoming now?
Because there area lot of quote,
unquote Ed Dowd's outthere for the vaccine side,
not tying in the finance.
One time you had mentionedthat you were really interested
in starting a hedge fund andkind of helping people get into
that hedge fund, understand howto protect and grow their their
(32:49):
wealth because you seea system differently.
What's your passion now?
Because I can see somehow yougotta be pivoting away from
talking conspiracy stuff tosomething that you truly love.
Well, let's talk aboutconspiracy stuff.
Conspiracies Porter knowswhat I'm about to say.
On Wall Street, we were alwaysconspiracy theorists. You know?
(33:10):
Enron was a great company.
You were a conspiracy theoristto think that it was a fraud.
So the I've I've I've satin this world where, like,
investors would tell meI'm insane, I'm kooky.
So I just appliedthat to the world.
So the term conspiracytheorist makes me lack.
We're just early.That's all we are.
You know, we'reWall Street guys.
We that we we you make money by beingearly and right and loud about it.
(33:34):
And then when you're wrong,
you have to admit it quicklyand and and cut your losses.
That's what that's thegame of Wall Street.
So our passionnow is, obviously,
we've done a lot of workon the vaccine research.
We've kinda slowed that down,
and we we continue to look for aseed investor for our hedge fund.
We came close, in thebeginning of twenty
(33:55):
four, but, honestly,
the individual wanted to stealthe company, so we walked away.
They weren't as passionate aboutour view of the of the world.
So we're look we're looking fora partner that kinda has the
same view of the world,
and wants to do good becausewe pledged in our pitch deck.
Whatever whatever money we make,
(34:16):
the partners haveagreed to, like,
take fifty percent of ourpersonal income and donate it
to charities or, you know,
something that does goodin the world of product.
So, you know, we're not gonna ifthe 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 notneed more charity.
(34:37):
The world needs the worldneeds more venture capital.
The need the world needsmore good businesses.
Oh my god.
Do you do you have any idea howmuch money Ted Turner has lit
on fire by giving it tocharity 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 moneyand then spent in twenty years
(34:58):
giving to charities,
and they realized howmuch money they burned.
All of them.
Maybe I misspoke.
Maybe I misspoke.
We're we're gonna do we'regonna invest in things that
action change and charitiescharities that exist
to fix the problem butnever really fix it,
we know what that model is.
We wanna invest in thingsthat are gonna actually fix a
(35:18):
problem, maybemake money fixing.
I think what we shoulddo is start a home sorry.
Start a fund for homelesspeople who wanna buy cigarettes.
And we can donate all the moneythat we need to to donate to be
good people and tohave tax write offs.
We can we can say that wegive billions to charity,
but at least the money will get used bypeople doing something that they enjoy.
And then we can own PhilipMorris and collect the dividends.
(35:41):
I mean, that way it won'tit will not at least,
it won't go to waste.
By the way, I I Idonated personally,
I donated a quarter milliondollars in two thousand five
to, a local charityhere in Baltimore.
Aaron, what was it called?
Homes for homeless peopleor something like that?
Yeah. Something like that.
Homes for America.
It's a it's a bignational charity,
(36:02):
and I I paid forone of the houses,
and our employees went and didthe demo and then helped do
some of the carpentry and the lawnlandscaping and blah blah blah.
And we gave a house to thislocal Baltimore family.
And I went back to see whatit looked like a year later,
and that's the last time weever gave a penny to a charity.
If you if you givepoor people a house,
what will they do to it?
(36:23):
I absolutely agree.
You need you need to you needto be clever about how we
incentivize people and giving freestuff to people that didn't earn it.
We know what that looks like.
That's called the USgovernment welfare system.
Yeah.
And, and and it doesn'twork out so well.
No. And they're and listen.
I I'm I'm being alittle facetious.
I have, of course, givento other charities.
(36:44):
I've given a lot of money tothe Cystic Fibrosis Foundation,
which has done great researchon curing that disease.
I give a lot of moneyevery year to the local,
children's hospital.
I'm, I'm basically the foundingdonor of Kevin Kisner's
Children's Hospital inin Aiken, South Carolina.
I don't want people to hear me andthink I'm being completely sincere.
I just, when I see someoneas smart and talented as you,
(37:08):
talking about combining animportant business endeavor,
which your hedge fund wouldwould bring a lot of value to a
lot of investors and do a lotof good in the world and help
allocate capital ina more rational way,
and then just hearing that ithasn't happened because you've
you've overlaid a charitymindset on top of it,
I just think you'remaking a huge mistake.
Go out and make asmuch money as you can,
(37:29):
and then do a good job givingaway the wealth that you've
earned as you see fit.
And I'm sure if you dothat, everyone will win.
I maybe I misspoke.
We it's not that thehedge fund would do it.
It'd be our ownpersonal profits.
And so the head the hedge fund,
it would be it'd bethe partner's profits,
not not not theactual hedge fund.
The hedge won't won't begiving money to to any charity.
(37:52):
It'd be our ownpersonal decisions.
So that's that's a little bitI would like to be an investor,
so please keep me in the loop.
Yep. Yep. No.
And so we, and also so we kinda shutdown marketing of it because the you
know, the uncertaintygoing into the election.
No one was doing anything.
Now we're seeing interest again.
We're having more discussions,
and we just launched this echoUS economic report that we're
(38:13):
charging a thousand dollarsfor because it's it's it's for
family offices, high net worthindividuals, RIAs, you know,
asset managers.
So the, you know, this is nota report that's for the guy on
Twitter. So we're we'rewe're we're charging.
It's a it's an eightyfive page report.
It lays out how we think,this is gonna unfold.
(38:34):
It's very you know,
it's it's it's it's it's great insightinto what we think is gonna unfold.
And, we also,
provide an executivepresentation and then a short
video an hour long of Carlosand I going through the
executive presentation.
So I I don't I don'tneed any of that.
I I already know you'rea really good investor.
But, I'll tell you also,
I'm I'm launching ahedge fund as well,
(38:55):
not to be competing with yours,
but I have a very I think probablya very different approach.
But I'm I'm trying to,
implement a permanentportfolio strategy,
which is something that Ilearned from Harry Brown in the
in the mid nineteen nineties justbecause I I think probably as you do,
there's gonna be a large correctionin financial asset prices.
And I think that, you know,
a fund that can make a six oreight percent return with very
(39:19):
low volatility is gonnaactually beat the market over
the next four or six years.
And by the way, let me tell youthat pitch interests no one.
Nobody no one's getting excitedabout a hedge fund that's
promising them eight percenta year with no volatility.
But, that's that's what I that'swhat I wanna do primarily with
my with with most of my money,
(39:39):
but I would love to be aninvestor in your fund as well.
So I'll have I'll have somebodyfollow-up with you to get me
get me some documents,
and and I'm happy to to pledge and makea commitment for when you get started.
Yeah. That's great.I appreciate it.
But, you know, the bot the bottom line iswe're passionate about, starting a firm.
We're gonna continue thehumanity project, which is the,
(39:59):
you know, the demographicresearch, the,
the vaccine injury,
because that's gonna beimportant as we roll through
economic cycles, thisdevastation is gonna impact.
It doesn't you know, youcan'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 thinkthat you had talked about in
(40:20):
previous podcastswas disability.
You know, it's one thing to lookat the disability statistics go up,
but you bring upa very good point.
How many family membersdoes that affect? Right?
Because it's not justa disabled person.
Now you need people to takecare of that person as well.
Plus, you've taken anincome out of the household.
I mean, that's that's a that'ssomething that compounds.
(40:42):
Yeah. It's a productivityissue for the economy.
It's gonna lower,
product productivity inthe economy for sure.
That's why that's why theNATO round is a five five six.
It's not designed to kill.
It's designed to maim because awounded soldier is harder on an
army than a dead soldier.
And the same Yeah.
And the same thing, thesame concept is, you know,
(41:02):
someone wounded by a vaccine,
all the things that Aaronjust said and that, Ed,
I know you researched. It'sa very, very good point.
But lieutenant colonel Theresa Long,who was one of the DMED,
whistleblowers who's retiringsoon, she and I have talked,
and she said that this remindsher of the v like you said,
the Vietnam War where theywanted to injure the show the
(41:22):
soldier up and killthem because, you know,
that that that would,
logistically involve five otherpeople and bog down, the enemy.
And she said, this is exactly whatthis vaccine's doing even though
everyone talks aboutthe excess deaths.
The amount of people who havebeen injured is the real problem.
And she said, we wannaif this continues,
(41:43):
we won't have a standingarmy in five years, you know,
because of, recruitment issues.
Those equipped who do wannatake the vaccine and all the
disabled and those whoare dying in the military.
Well, I certainly didn't want toend up with no military because of
vaccine injuriesor any injuries,
but I believe America would bea much better place without a
standing armor standing army.
(42:04):
And I'm pretty sure all ofour founding fathers wanted to
prevent our countryfrom ever having one.
So maybe maybe there'ssome silver lining.
I guess we havenuclear arsenals,
so no one's gonna attack us.
Right.
We also have three hundredmillion legal firearms in
United States and probably ahundred million avid hunters.
We would be a very difficultcountry to conquer,
kinda like Russia figuredout when they tried to invade
(42:26):
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 seenx blow up on this.
I think, you know, with with,
getting Trump in,
the one thing that patriots orTrump followers have hoped for,
especially with RFK Jr,
is to get to thebottom of this vaccine.
He's still very proud and callshimself the the father of,
(42:49):
operation warp speed.
And we've all been disappointed,
so we're hoping that RFK comesin and and evaluates this.
I mean, they're still mandatingit for newborns, for god's sakes.
Like, that's that'sinsane. Right?
I mean, that's the most that'sthat's the most insane thing ever.
So, you know,
a couple days ago and this thiswill air in probably a week
when we get itcut and, released.
(43:11):
It was, Ellison on TV,
showing us that he'sgot this, Stargate,
and they wanna do fivehundred billion into mRNA for cancers,
which, obviously, if you lookat the data from the COVID
shot, cancers have exploded.
They call it turbo cancer,and it's everywhere.
So it's problemreaction solution.
(43:31):
So instead of BillGates this time,
we've got another billionairewho is very well known for
loving himself and notreally loving humanity,
pitching this idea of, hey.
No problem. Youjust go to a doctor.
You get diagnosed.
We figure out andpunch it into the AI,
and we figure out what youryour vaccine cancer shot looks
(43:52):
like, and we giveit to you on-site.
And this is insane. Thisis literally insane.
It was the secondday of Trump's,
yeah, after inauguration, andthis is what he rolls out.
I would love yourthoughts on that.
Okay. So I've I I'mfamiliar with Larry Ellison.
I was a software analyst,before I went to BlackRock.
And when I was at BlackRockas a portfolio manager,
(44:14):
I I was the thesoftware analyst.
Larry Ellison is aconstant salesman.
He built his business.
He was he didn't havethe best technology.
He was the best salesman.
He he he would do constantlywhat we call slide where his
competitor would comeup with a product.
He would then say, wehave it, and it's better,
(44:35):
but it was all slides.
And then then they would tell theengineers, go right Oh, slide where?
Yeah. So so so Larry LarryAllison gets up there.
And first of all, youraudience needs to know this.
Stargate was started last year.
It was they they'vealready broken ground.
They got permitting. Theyhave ten data centers.
And then they said, we couldn'thave done this without you,
(44:55):
mister president Trump.
So that was a bigoligarch kiss the ring,
applied to his ego.
And of the hundredbillion they supposedly,
committed last year,
that's not fully fundedbecause OpenAI has no money.
SoftBank has cash flow problems.
So that it's allsmoke and mirrors.
I mean, that's another four hundredbillion of private investment.
(45:17):
That was just classicLarry Ellison,
Sam Altman tech hype nonsense.
And then Larry getsout there and says,
we're gonna with them he hehe doesn't read the room.
He lives in a bubble.
He probably hasn'tthe guy bought it,
and he's talks about mRNA andindividualized cancer vaccines.
That is just so far inthe realm of fantasy
(45:40):
that it's it's beyond the pale.
So that was that was a an absurd
just PR stunt.
Susie Wiles, the chief ofstaff, probably, you know,
didn't know what Larry was Larryjust said what Larry is gonna say.
So I'm not I'm I'm very hopefulthat this is this was just a onetime
turf error on their part.
(46:01):
Makes Trump look like he's we'llsee what Trump's gonna do with mRNA,
but that was just that was themost redonkulous thing I've
seen in a long time.
I love it. I love it. Ed,you're the first guest.
He used used theword redonkulous,
which is one of my favorites.
So That is one ofyour favorites.
So listen. I I had such agreat time talking to you.
I really did.
(46:22):
You're the I think myfavorite guest we've ever had.
I I I loved watching you whenwhen you would do appearances.
I can't rememberI saw them in X,
or I saw them actuallyon on cable television.
But I just loved how you alwaysremained completely calm.
You never reacted emotionallyto any of this crazy propaganda
(46:42):
that was going onall around you.
You were like thecalm in the storm.
And I think you and I bothknow that is the single most
important hallmark ofany talented investor.
You always are calm.You're never emotional.
So, anyways, just thankyou so much for coming on.
It was brilliant getting totalk with you, and I hope that,
we can check-in with you againin time when some of these
(47:04):
economic risks, materialize.
We can have you back on for acouple minutes and just talk
about where things are goingbecause I think you and I see
the world in remarkablysimilar ways.
Yeah.
I think I think as weroll through the year,
let's let me let's get backon here and discuss what's
appearing that justifies ourpredictions in our report.
I think I think it's gonnathe cracks are gonna start
(47:26):
appearing between now and March.
And then by the fall, it shouldbe apparent to everybody.
And you know howthis works, Porter.
We've issued the report.
Sales are going well, but theylook slowed when it's too late,
when people wanna findout what just happened.
That's how this works.
Tell me about it.
I'm in the publishing world,
and I basically have to tellpeople what they wanna hear and
then gently try to change their mindsin the editorial to get them, you know,
(47:49):
away from the bubble thatI've already just sold them.
But, you know, the the people inThe Economist magazine are not dumb.
They just have tosell magazines.
And so that's where allthat those covers come from.
And, you know, then you you know thepeople who are writing them like, yeah.
I know it's ridiculous.
But we it was the best sellingthat's the best selling
magazine we did all year.
So it's it's it'stough that way.
(48:10):
It's tough, dealingwith the realities of,
the financial businesses andand financial publishing when
you know that to besuccessful in the market,
you have to be a contrarian.
But
it's very it's very hard to bea contrarian if you're popular.
Exactly.
But, well, we're we'rebeing contrarian,
and this thing willsell once we're right,
but it'll be too late.
(48:31):
Yeah. That's right.Well, listen, Ed.
Great great talking with you.
Thanks so much for yourtime today. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Porter. Thankyou, Aaron. Great to be here.
We appreciate it so much.
Alright, Porter. I'd love toget your thoughts on Ed Dowd.
Sound like, you guys have verysimilar financial minds, big themes.
It's, really uncannyto me to put you
(48:53):
with somebody, and you guys arealmost saying the same thing.
You know, I never read his memo.
I know it's a famousthing. It was on Twitter.
I I just never saw it.
But it would be really cool togo back and compare what I wrote.
I think I wrote mine in AprilI think it was April twentieth
twenty twenty and see what hewrote because we both came to
(49:14):
the exact same conclusion,
and I'm I'm sure we were usingsimilar datasets to judge that.
And I would just say,
I think the hallmark of bothof us is that we don't we don't
let the media or anyoneelse do our thinking.
We you know, I'll I'll read theheadline, and then I'm like,
I wonder what the data says,
or I wonder whatthe real facts are.
And I wonder how many of thelisteners can relate to this.
(49:37):
Anytime in my entire life I'veever had first person knowledge
of some event, and thenI saw what the media
wrote about it, it'slaughable how incredibly
wrong it always is.
Like, it's whatever theirversion of the event was,
it was nothing like actuallybeing there whatsoever.
And I and I just think thatI guess at some point in your
(50:00):
life, you're like, I Iread things all the time.
Like, I wonder whatreally happened.
And then when it comesto COVID, you know,
I just I thought it was veryimportant that we get the facts.
And I thought it was funnyhow many smart people that I
otherwise respect thatjust completely abandon
their own thinkingin that moment.
They're just like, oh,well, the government said,
and it's for the health.
(50:20):
So it must be we have to do it.
And I'm like,That's just amazing.
Is that it didn't take verymuch to convince everybody in
America to losetheir fucking minds.
I mean, it was basically theworld other than Africa because
Africa had been experimentedon by Bill Gates for so long,
they just weren't having it.
They literally are like,
we're not doing anyof that shot stuff.
But other thanthat, it was I mean,
(50:42):
it was fascinating to watchfrom Columbia Porter because,
I just never realized howpeople are so scared because
that's what it is.
Right? It was fear. Fear.
And it just really blew meaway to watch neighbor turn on
neighbor for the silliestlittle things out there.
But what a greatpsyop. I mean, wow.
You know, whoeverconstructed that thing,
(51:03):
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 withEd, and it was a great, great podcast.
Hope everybody liked it. Thanksfor putting that together.
I have, one lastthing before we go,
which is have you seen theequity markets in Colombia?
Speaking of Colombia,they're blowing up.
Yeah. They they yes. They are.
They really are.
(51:23):
And I I think we should weshould get somebody who really
knows that marketlocally to come and,
and talk about the bestcompanies in Colombia and the
opportunities for investors becauseI think Colombia is
probably gonna be one of the bestperforming markets in the world this year.
Yeah.
You know what's even here's what'seven more amazing about that, Porter,
is we are still under thecontrol of the only liberal
(51:44):
president that's everbeen elected, Petro.
And Petro is not goodfor business at all.
No. But he's he'sdefinitely on the way out.
He's one hundredpercent on the way out.
We had recently, we hadgovernment government notarial
and, mayoral elections.
And it went soextreme conservative,
he didn't get one single personthat he recommended in the
(52:06):
entire country in andeverybody went against him,
and it's being celebrated.
So imagine,
if we could get somebody inthat knows what they're doing
and as strong as equitiesare looking in twenty twenty
six, August oftwenty twenty six,
there will be a new president.
And, Latin America goes the way ofLatin America for the most part.
(52:26):
So with Malay and Bukele and,
the Colombians are arebasically crying out saying we
need one of those or a combinationof 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 puttingit together, and,
enjoy being away from Baltimore.
(52:47):
I know you guys are gonna beplaying Sawgrass this weekend.
I'm a little jelly.
We are, but here's the thing.
I don't even think you wouldcome out for this because it's
gonna be a high of fifty.
Right now, Porter, literallyPorter, I'm in Jacksonville.
I got in my car thismorning. It was thirty three.
It might be thirtyeight outside.
Did Jacksonville JacksonvilleJacksonville get snow this week?
You know, it itdidn't get snow, but,
(53:08):
the peninsula got crushed.
So that that left side,right over there by,
Alabama and Louisiana gotabsolutely decimated with snow.
But, we're ten inches of snow inPensacola 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 givethe, podcast, feedback.
(53:28):
Podcast feedback at porterand company research dot com.
Podcast feedback at porterand company research dot com.
Please let us know what youthought of the interview.
Yep. We'd love to hear fromyou, and thanks for listening.
Thank you for listening tothe Porter and Company Black Label
podcast with your hosts, PorterStansbury and Aaron Brabham.
We'll see you soon.
The studies done during the pandemicon ivermectin were fraudulent.
(00:03):
There was a lot of fraudulent,
papers submitted to try toprove that it was deadly.
So there was just a abjectfraud in the scientific
community going on.
What's the number or the dataset
that's most alarming to you?
The disability numbersare just staggering, and,
they really show a tightcorrelation to vaccine rollout
(00:24):
and arise in disabilities.
And the young people are still dyingexcessively around twenty percent.
Welcome to the Porter andCompany Black Label podcast,
your home for provocative insightsthat lead to lasting wealth.
And here are your hosts, PorterStansbury and Aaron Brabham.
Alright, Porter.
(00:44):
Here we are back again forthe other Black Label show.
And, of course, I've got Porter.
Porter, I'd like to know your thoughtson coming back from my wedding.
And what did you think aboutColombia for the first you've
been in Medellin, but whatdid you think about Cartagena,
and what did you thinkabout that hotel?
Well, listen. Yourwedding was beautiful.
Everyone was so kind,and the the hotel was,
I one of the very finestI've been to in the world,
(01:06):
and Cartagena was alovely little town.
So I had a great time,
and I recommend it to anybodywho's gonna be in South America
to definitelycheck out Colombia.
I love Medellin, and I reallylike Cartagena too. But listen.
Before we get into thingshere, I just wanna say,
our Black Label shows haven'tbeen very Black Label y lately.
Right?
We've It was because wegotten in too much trouble.
It cost you a billion dollars.
(01:28):
Nobody nobody'sdrinking any gin.
Nobody's getting a little loose.
They've been very professional.
We need some Yeah.
We cost yeah. We cost youa billion dollars, Porter.
That's why.
We got canceled. Itwas very expensive.
But but I still think we needmore we need a little bit of
black label y stuff.
We need we need to talk aboutthe the seedy underside of the
(01:49):
financial world and the all theshenanigans that are going on.
I mean, it's, you know,it's it's Davos this week.
Yeah.
Davos and the build Bilderbergsand all those meetings,
they're, they're not lookingso bullish these days,
which might bebullish for humanity.
Who knows?
I I think I don't know.I think that's progress.
But, the other thing that I'm I'mso fascinated by right now is the
(02:12):
people actuallycheering for more taxes.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, we're we'll we'llget into that later with our,
with our interview, and let mego ahead and give the shout out.
So today's guest is noneother than Edward Dowd.
He's the founding partner offinance technologies and author
of cause unknown,
the epidemic of sudden deaths in twentytwenty one and twenty twenty two.
(02:33):
He also used to work atBlackRock as a portfolio
manager, managingfourteen billion dollars.
That was overthirteen years ago.
But I'm excited to have him on.
Yeah.
And I want I wanna I wanna goahead and get to that interview
with Ed because he's anincredible guest for us to get.
Thanks for doing that work.
And I also just wannasummarize for people.
Ed was the leading intellectualwho was first out of the gate,
(02:58):
the very firstperson to publicly
discount what the governmentwas saying about COVID,
and then he was the firstperson anywhere to carefully
document the incredible risein excess death in excess death
and in, injuries,
because of, we suspect,the COVID vaccine.
(03:18):
So why don't we goahead and bring Ed in?
Because I know he's gonna havean opinion about whether or not
tariffs or taxes and whether ornot it's a good idea to set up
another agency of the federalgovernment to collect still more taxes.
I I mean, tariffs, but they'rethe same thing, people.
You gotta understand.
Yeah. For sure. Alright.Let's bring him on.
(03:40):
Alright, Porter. Hey.
You know, I've been talkingabout Edward Dowd for a long
time, and I know you've knownof him for a long time as well.
You guys have a ton in commonbecause Ed actually used to
have his pinned post on xabout a dystopian movie.
And, I believe Ed originally,
wrote about that in Marchwhen the pandemic got started.
(04:00):
And Porter, you wrote afamous, piece in April.
So you guys werevery early and on it,
and I wanna welcomeEd to the show.
Yeah.
I do too.
Ed, it's a it's a tremendous honor tomeet you and to get to speak with you.
I've been followingyour work for years.
Like like, Aaron mentions,
I was a enormous COVID skepticfrom the very beginning.
Just based on the data thatI saw coming out of that cruise
(04:23):
ship where the infectionhad run rampant,
the navy ship where theinfection had run rampant,
and then all the wastewatertesting that was going on in
Europe where you had real,you know, you had real case,
mortality versus populationmortality numbers,
and you could see that it itwasn't much more dangerous than
the flu and everything wasbeing grossly exaggerated
probably for political reasons.
(04:43):
But listen.
You're the expert in all this,
so I'm gonna shut theheck up and ask you,
when when did it first occurto you that what you were watching
was science gone completely mad?
Well, you know,
I I was early to know aboutCOVID because, you know,
a lot of us on WallStreet, you know,
(05:03):
we pride ourselves ingetting information early.
So I was living on Maui,still live on Maui.
And in Januaryof, twenty twenty,
before the public was aware,
I was going to I went to Costcoand I loaded up before the
rush, about a month before.
Then then then the thepublic was made aware of it.
And so I was scared early,but then, like yourself,
(05:25):
quickly turned on a dime whenI realized that this was not a
dangerous virus.
The other thing that occurredto me was in, October,
November, and December onMaui in twenty nineteen,
there was a bug, quote,unquote, bug going around,
and it was COVID.
And people peoplewere getting laid out,
but there were nothere were no deaths.
(05:47):
It was a nasty, virus,
and and and peoplewere floored by it.
But no one was in fear becausethey weren't told to be in fear.
And then and then andthen a switch turned on,
and then the fear,propaganda came.
So I was verysuspicious of that.
And then,
early on, I saw censorship.
Zero hedge wascensored for, you know,
saying there might might havebeen data function in January
(06:08):
or I think February orMarch of twenty twenty.
They wrote a famous,
article about some universityin in India that, you know,
said that there that it lookedlike it was a manufactured virus.
That was immediately censored.
So the well,censorship immediately alarmed me.
And then as time rolledon, you could tell,
and I wrote my famousdystopian future tweet.
(06:30):
It seemed to me that theywere gonna go for a vaccine.
And one of the andas a financial guy,
the big the big warningsign for me was in April,
of, twenty twenty when ona Sunday of Meet the Press,
James Bullard, Saint Louisformer Saint Louis Fed president,
is talking about howwe're gonna restart the economy.
(06:51):
And, he said the good news iswe have new surveillance systems
and we can issueimmunity badges.
So I started thinking to myself,
why is the Fed president talkingabout a mute what's going on?
Like, it and then they've been theymemory hold that because it was
early before vaccines.
A lot of us on on Twitter at thetime pointed out how absurd that was.
(07:11):
And then they stoppedtalking about it.
And I remember sayingvaccines are coming.
That's the solution.
And, people thought they calledme a conspiracy theorist,
then sure enough, avaccine was the solution.
In hindsight, we learned theywere suppressing early treatment
protocols like ivermectin,hydroxychloroquine,
And it was all about lockdown andwait for the vaccine solution.
(07:32):
So something and then, you know,
you you probably saw whatI saw in twenty twenty.
The messaging from globalgovernments was all the same.
And I said to myself, you know,
being an analystand Wall Street guy,
when has the global governmentmessaging ever been in unison?
Never.
So I just knewsomething was different.
Something was going onthat seemed sketchy.
(07:54):
And, you know you know, youand I in the finance world,
we ever since the greatfinancial crisis have been
blowing a a blowing a a bubble,
and we've been wonderingwhen the you know,
it was gonna be a asovereign debt crisis.
And in in in thefall twenty nineteen,
there was, the beginnings ofa coordinated global slowdown.
There were repomarkets going crazy,
(08:15):
and it seemed to me that thewhole thing was gonna unwind.
But then COVID came,
and then we printedunprecedented amounts of,
of federal debt money for COVID.
And COVID was a war. COVIDwas warlike spending.
And so it kinda you know,
whether it was aplanned event or,
lucky happenstancefor central bankers,
(08:35):
it gave them an excuse tokick the can down the road.
And here we arefour years later.
And, my team and I put out areport about a week and a half ago
that's it's it's a paid product.
We're we're predicting a deephold by recession be getting
sometime in twenty five.
It's it's justbaking to the cake.
I wanna get to the financialimplications of kicking the can
down the road in a minute.
(08:57):
I have a couple of ofscience questions first before we get
to the financial things,and I'm like I said,
I'm I'm very gratefulto get to talk with you.
I think you've probablydone more work of on these
particular topics from a independentstandpoint than anybody else.
And, we've all learned whathappens when you trust the science.
So I'm I'm glad to talk to someonewho's in finance and, you know,
(09:19):
isn't isn't wearing a lab coatbecause 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 yearsaway from all of this,
why is there still a questionin the scientific community be
about whether or notivermectin works?
(09:41):
I you know, thatthat befuddles me.
I take ivermectin myselfwhenever I feel a little
something coming on.
And, then, you know, look.
It it in twenty sixteen, therewere glowing articles about it.
I think it won theno Nobel Prize,
and then then it then wasdemonized as horse pace.
So it clearly,
(10:02):
as time rolls on,
more more more and morescientists are are are pointing
to the fact that the studythe studies done during the
pandemic on ivermectinwere fraudulent.
There was a lot of fraudulent,
papers submitted to try toprove that it was deadly.
So there was just a abjectfraud in the scientific
community going on.
The peer review process,as we know, was a joke.
(10:22):
You know, some of thepapers we've written,
we put on ResearchGate.
We're not asking for peerreview because we know it's
rigged, but, you know, ourif if everything was normal,
some of the work we'vedone on, you know,
excess deaths and excesscancers and heart attacks and
neurological problems couldbe submitted for peer review,
but what's the point?
But we we put it on researchdates so the scientific
(10:43):
community can cite our papers.
Well, let's get tothat next point.
What it you've done lotsof different research,
and you've come up with lotsof 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 wherethere's lots and lots of population.
(11:05):
And the we my my mycolleagues, Carlos and Yuri,
we think the best dataset thatproves the case is the disabilities.
Although everybody lovesto talk about excess deaths
because it's hyperbolic.
The disability numbersare just staggering, and,
they really show a tightcorrelation to vaccine rollout
and arise in disabilities.
(11:26):
We got data we got the BLSshowing the numbers in the US.
They don't it's not granular.
And then we have the UK,
personal independent paymentsystem, PIP, they call it,
that goes more granular.
It all started explodingin, twenty twenty one.
And, the numbersare pretty stark,
and and it's it's it it thecorrelations are just tight.
(11:49):
Sort of off topic,but a question I have,
I'm I'm interestedin the demographics,
particularly in Russia.
I have a I have a Ihave an instinct that
living in a country where thereisn't a history of the rule of
law, where there'srampant alcoholism,
where there's adeclining birth rate,
(12:10):
and where there's been a veryland a very large land war in
Asia is gonna besurprisingly bad,
for the demographics.
Have you seen anything in yourresearch that suggests that the
injuries and the excessdeath rates from the COVID
shots are materiallydifferent in
(12:31):
different populations ormaterially different from
different types ofvaccines that were used?
Well, we did look at Russia.
We don't have thedemographic, data,
but we've looked at allsorts of different countries.
In in the US in particular,excess mortality,
while down from its height offorty percent in twenty twenty
(12:52):
one, for ages sixteento sixty four.
It's running between fiveand ten percent right now,
and the young people are still dyingexcessively around twenty percent.
So that's a problem. You know?
Scott Davidson of One Americafamously said in January of
twenty two on a a chamberconference a commerce call that
(13:15):
a ten percent excess death rate isonce in a two hundred year flood.
Forty percent wasoff the charts.
So now we're we're we're comingon from off the charts to once
in a two hundred yearflood consistently.
So and we haven't looked atfertility yet because fertility
is, is noisier.
Deaths are easy to predict.
Death rates arestable and steady.
(13:36):
So it's easy to it'seasy to get a baseline,
and then you can get statistical
signals.
In fertility, it'saffected by, economics.
So you need persistency of ofdown fertility rates before you
can make a call.
So as we go through time,
if the persistency offertility continues to decline,
stay well, then we got the twin,
(13:58):
problem of lowfertility excess deaths,
which demographicallyis a disaster.
The good news the goodand bad news is the US,
is probably the best countryout of, the, you know, China,
Europe, and Japan,and Korea, you know,
the major westerneconomies because we,
imported ten tofifteen million illegal
(14:19):
aliens, to, you know,
to kinda cover up some of theexcess deaths we've been seeing
here in the US.
China has a big problem.
They hit a demographicwall in twenty twenty,
and you've seen what'sgoing on with their economy.
Japan is, entering anotherdemographic death wave.
It's gonna accelerate.
South Korea is terminal.
We we have and andthen, of course,
(14:40):
Southern Europe is a disaster.
So we got we gotdemographic problems all over the place,
which is gonna be aproblem long term.
I I think it's one of the mostinteresting intellectual things
of my lifetime has been
the number of people who weresupposedly very smart and were
certainly very wealthy,
(15:00):
and I'm speaking particularlyabout Ted Turner and Warren
Buffett, and the amount ofmoney they have spent fighting
the, quote, unquote,
population bomb when thewhole problem the entire time
was following birthrates, not not not a,
not an overpopulated earth.
But that's another hobby horse ofmine that we can get to another time.
(15:21):
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 financialimplications of kicking the can
the can down the road of theenormous debt load that we have
in the US economy.
But, specifically,I've been concerned
by the way, for the lasttwelve years or so, I have,
my main area of financialresearch focus has been
(15:43):
property and casualtyinsurance companies.
So I'm really familiar withthe accounting and the,
you know, the float growth andthe policies of p and c firms.
But I have always reallyignored life insurance
companies because,well, you know,
every house doesn't burn downin a fire, but, everybody dies.
So I I suspect that there are,
(16:05):
there's more alpha to be gainedby underwriting and property
and casualty thanthere is in life.
But, honestly, you may knowmore about it than I do.
I just haven't ever gotteninto life insurance.
But it occurs to me that if ifyou're anything like correct
and the impact of disability andin increased death excess death,
that the life insurancecompanies have the most
(16:26):
exposure to those risks.
And I just wonder,
have you heard from anylife insurance companies?
Do you have any idea about which lifeinsurer might be the most at risk?
Or or, general,
what's your feelings about therisks of excess death for life
insurance companies?
So excess death first appeared in thegroup life part of their business.
(16:48):
And to distinguish grouplife from whole life,
group life are policies givento Fortune five hundred and
midsize companies as a benefit.
It's blanket insurancepolicy. It's not underwritten.
What what that means is youdon't go in for a medical exam
because it's a great businessbecause young people don't die.
So they figure outwhat the, you know,
the the death rate is ofsomeone that of an age group
(17:10):
that doesn't really die, andthey 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 ais is not as, big as whole life.
Whole life is where the bigpolicies are because the group
life typically covers,one or two times your base
(17:33):
salary, which is not a lot ofmoney for insurance company.
The whole life policies iswhere they write, you know,
a million to twenty milliondollar life insurance policies
for very wealthy people.
And the the ones thatwere written before,
twenty nine twenty twenty,
they haven't taken losseson those because it's Byzantine
Insurance accounting.
(17:54):
Group Life is pricedevery one to three years.
So they started tothey took losses,
then they raised prices.
So they think it solvedthe problem, in that group.
Then in whole life,
they have five year rollinglong term mortality assumptions,
which they haven't changed yetbecause they keep thinking that
excess mortality is gonna normalizeand that this was a onetime event.
(18:19):
But, eventually,
if excess mortality continuesto run five to ten percent,
they're gonna have to writedown a whole a whole portion of
the whole life business.
And so my suspicion is that'sone of these insurance companies,
I don't know which one is gonnagive up the ghost and then then
the others will follow suit.
Swiss Re, a reinsurer,wrote a paper, a study,
(18:40):
it came out aboutsix months ago,
where they said that they see excessmortality running five to ten percent,
into the for the atleast the next ten years.
Wow.
Now if you read the ifyou read the fine print,
they blame COVID.
They blame COVID, and they staya solution to that is vaccine.
So, you know, they'rethey're, you know,
they're missing the boat.
(19:02):
But but at least at leasttheir map confirms our map.
We're not insurance guys.
We're, you know, we're justwe're finance guys coming up,
you know, with realtime excess mortality.
They're projecting thatit's gonna stay high.
That's what theydo for a living.
So Swiss Re agrees with us,
but but they don't, you know,
they don't we don'tagree on the cause.
(19:24):
Yeah. Okay.
So I wanna get tomy last question,
which is a financial question.
And,
I'm you know, I may be the only
person in America who remembersthat the Smoot Hawley tariff
wasn't the tariff thatblew up the world.
The Smoot Hawley tariff tookaverage tariff rates from, like,
forty percent to fifty percentand expanded the number of
(19:45):
items that were coveredunder the tariff.
But the tariff regime thatblew up the world actually was
implemented innineteen twenty two.
That's when thefederal government,
in an effort to protect farmers,
implemented forty percenttariffs across the board on on
just about every singleagricultural product and then
some some others as well.
And that works so well thatthe farmers had an enormous
(20:07):
depression throughout the nineteentwenties because, of course,
everyone stopped buying ourexported agricultural products.
Meanwhile, every single bodyevery single country retaliated,
which meant that everythingthat the farmers needed to grow
food got more expensive.
The, the US farmer estimates thatthroughout the nineteen twenties,
American farmers lost threehundred million dollars a year
(20:30):
because of those tariffs.
And, of course, they worked sowell on the farmers that then,
in nineteen thirty,
they expanded them tothe rest of the economy.
And just keep in mind,
the nineteen twenties shouldhave been the golden era of
American exports.
We were making four and ahalf million cars a year.
Russia was making a thousand.
(20:50):
Germany was making less than twentythousand by nineteen twenty eight.
Your Europe had beendestroyed by World War one.
They were flat on their backs,
and they could not compete withus in a manufacturing standpoint.
Just like today, of course,
nobody can compete withus in terms of technology.
And so president Trump isdetermined he's gonna take this
incredible American vitality,
and he's gonna slap a twentyfive percent tariff on it
(21:12):
because everywhere it's worked,
it's everywhere it'sbeen implemented, it's failed.
You know, it causes enormouseconomic dislocations.
It destroys supply chains.
It causes tremendousamounts of inflation.
And I I'm not gonna bother withtrying to explain all all the
economic reasonsabout comparative advantage,
about specialization.
Go read iPencil if you don'tunderstand how economies work,
(21:34):
but I know that you do.
And I also know that you'revery well aware that it's not
really good for an economyto hold thirty five trillion
dollars in federal debt.
And even if you look atthings like credit card debt,
they're at they're at, you know,
really very large levels,high interest rates.
And as inflation goes higher,
(21:55):
the impact of those rates asthey move up will have a more
and more of an economic impact.
And the weight of all thateventually has to cause a
recession and has tocause a credit cycle.
And you and I both saw the samething in the fall of twenty nineteen,
and we we covered it up byhaving basically the equivalent
of World War two except for itwas just in in COVID vaccines
(22:16):
and lots more debt.
And now we're the the presidentis saying sincerely that
on February first,
we're gonna have a twenty fivepercent across the board tariff
with our two largesttrading partners,
which is Canada and Mexico.
And I just wonder, how doesthat not kick off an incredible
deflation, and how doesthat not wreck the economy?
(22:38):
And what in the world arehis advisers thinking?
Well, you know, I I I'm ofthe opinion that this is Trump
Trump world where he'susing his, art of the deal.
I don't think twenty fivepercent will stick for very long,
but he's got he's got a wholehost of problems beyond tariff,
games.
He, we let's go back to twenty
(23:00):
twenty two, twenty twenty three.
We were in the in thespring of twenty three.
We have early cycle indicators.We have a great economic model.
My partner, Carlo, CarlosAllegri wrote a book economic
cycles, debt, and demographics,
and his his modelswere predicting a recession,
at the end of twenty three,
twenty four as were alot of other economists,
(23:20):
never never manifested, and,
it we were wrong.
So we were asking ourselves,
have the laws of economicfundamentals changed or is
there something else goingon and we figured it out?
Basically, Biden goingthe last two years,
accelerated illegal immigration,which juiced the economy.
(23:41):
That was a big part part ofthe deficit spending, the NGOs.
It it was a logisticaloperation to bring in ten to
fifteen million people.
Net legal migrationis million a year.
We've never seenanything like this.
And there was unprecedentedgovernment spending.
Yeah. That's what Iwas gonna point out.
How can you have a nominal,
recession when whenwhen the government
deficit is almostseven percent of GDP?
(24:03):
So it it papered it over. Itwas it was a short term fix.
It was crisis level.
We we did that kind of deficitspending during the great
financial crisis.
What was the crisis thistime to get Biden reelected?
So, you know, so the what Trump
Trump's policies are gonnareverse all of this juice.
So he doesn't even haveto deport the illegals,
(24:25):
but just halting it,second derivative,
it's got and the economycapacity you know,
if you look at traditionalmeasures of the economy,
household survey, forgetthe establishment,
household survey,
PMI, capacity utilization.We're already in a recession.
Although the headlinenumbers don't say that.
The stock market hasn'tdiscounted it yet.
(24:47):
It will at some point.
I had the theory that the stockmarket isn't what it used to be
when you and I weredoing it back in the day.
It's it's ninety fivepercent passive and algos.
When I was managing moneyduring the great financial
crisis, it was seventyfive percent fundamental.
So I thinka discount discounting mechanism
for the stock market is off.
That's why we have Wellsuper high value valuation.
(25:10):
To interrupt, but I I just wannaconfirm what you're saying because,
obviously, look at theconcentration of the S and P index.
And you understand thatS and P is market weight.
You understand it'sdriven by algos.
And so the more that thingsget away from the fundamentals,
the more overweight they'll toppick the top ten positions in
the S and P will be.
And now I think we're at apoint where forty percent of
(25:31):
the index is madeup of five stocks,
which is more concentrationthan we've ever seen before,
which also means it's a biggerbubble 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 notgonna market time it,
but when when when when thiscracks and if and as, you know,
bubbles like this when that blow thisbig, when it cracks, it goes fast.
(25:55):
It doesn't go slow.
The the dot com bubble went downfifty percent over two years.
The the housing crisis,
we had a huge fiftypercent drawdown in in nine months.
I don't this onecould be super fast,
but let's let's put thataside for for the moment.
Can I interrupt you justone more thing about that point?
The other thing is that thelarger the bubble blows,
the longer the following bearmarket and duration will be as well.
(26:18):
So if you look at Japan atthe peak at eighty nine,
they are trading atseventy times earnings,
and they went on to havea twenty year bear market.
Their market didn'tbottom until o nine.
Our market, of course,peaked in two thousand,
and then we had almost aten year bear market that didn't
bottom until o nine as well.
And so I think that ifyou're looking at if
(26:41):
you're looking ata a a CAPE ratio,
cyclically adjusted PEnow of thirty seven,
the only time the stocks haveever been more expensive in the
United States was at the techbubble in two thousand, and,
also, if you go back far enough,
the railroad bubble ineighteen forty four.
But in both of thosecases, you had, you know,
essentially a decade longbear market that followed.
(27:02):
And you wanna talk about whatis not in anybody's forecast
right now at all.
No.
Nobody sees what is black andwhite obvious to me and you,
which is that these debt levelsfor corporations and for the
federal governmentare not sustainable,
and that any any kind ofeconomic slowdown is gonna
produce a really terrific,
(27:25):
debt cycle where there's goingto 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 anypercentage chance
that the US defaults on someof its treasury obligations?
I I don't I don't think so.
So we're we're the the the dollarsystem is so ingrained globally.
(27:48):
It reserve currenciesdie slowly.
So I think the Bidenadministration did a good job
of trying to kill it.
That's why the BRICSemerged is so loud.
You know, the the thethe sanctions on Russia,
the the deswifting them, andthen actually stealing their,
you know, their moneyto fund the Ukraine war.
That's why there's the brickshave emerged because, you know,
(28:11):
I think these discussions hadalways been going on behind
closed doors, but nowthey're just open about it.
That's gonna take timebecause there's, you know,
fit I think aroundeighteen trillion
in, dollar denominated bonds.
So anybody who immediately would tryto get off the dollar would have a,
a deflationary depression intheir in their own economy.
So it's a slow process.
(28:32):
Eighty eighty percent I thinkninety percent of all FX
transactions still have thedollar on the other side.
You look at what Warren buff whatWarren Buffett is telling you something.
He's got the biggest cash flowhe's ever had. Was he early?
Sure. Was I early andCarlos early in our call?
Or is that yes.
But, you know, he's got fourpercent of the T bill market,
(28:52):
more than the Fed, and he'sgetting paid, you know,
four four point three percent.
He was getting paid five anda half percent just to sit in
cash and wait.
You know?
He he knows what'scoming, and, you know,
it's it's been it's takenlonger to manifest the top and
the, the actual, you know,deflationary cycle, but,
I think UST bills and cashare still gonna be fine.
(29:15):
I I would I wouldI would hide there.
At some point, there'sgonna be a great trade in,
ten years in long bonds because everybodyis on the everybody is so bearish,
long interest rates right nowthat we know when we do get
this recession thatactually, you know,
manifests in headline numbersand the stock market wobbles.
(29:37):
The long bond in the ten yearwill will go down as the Fed
chases the crisis down.
Real interest rates are aroundtwo percent, so money's tight.
The Fed already, youknow, took a hundred off,
and they've already lowered interestrates a hundred basis points.
You know, we've we think there'sanother hundred and fifty to two
hundred to go.
And then they'll do theirtheir usual, shenanigans,
(29:59):
you know, quantitativeeasing and nonsense.
Have you noticed thatwith the huge cash,
cash raise at Berkshire thatBerkshire is now trading at,
about five times its,enterprise value?
Yeah.
So the e e v to EV to EBITDA is aboutfive right now at, Berkshire stock,
(30:20):
which is the cheapest I'veever seen it in my career.
He's gonna Warren isgonna do what Warren does.
You know, he'llcome 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 talkingto Bank of America
for preferreddividend convertible, whatever.
Some deal that where he givesbillions and debts basically
(30:42):
owns the company.
Well, listen. That'sthat's it for me.
Aaron, you are the, conspiracytheorist amongst us here.
You've got you've gotyour shot at at Ed Dowd.
What what have you got for him?
I appreciate that. Yes, Ed.
I am known as the conspiracytheorist in at Porter and
Company.
However, there is no theory because it wascreated by the s the CIA, first of all.
(31:04):
So that's just tomake us look kooky.
Second of all, as you are wellaware, just wait six months.
All conspiracy theoriesbecome, conspiracy realism.
And, I don't wanna go downa bunch of rabbit holes,
but I do have aquestion for you, Ed.
You know, I know Iknow your background.
You were with, the evil,
the evil force of BlackRock back in the day,
(31:24):
for a long time.
I know that, one of the things that yousaid that you got really good at was
spotting liars because youwould meet with a lot of CEOs
and you could see which ones werereal and which ones were lying.
So you kind of became, looking,
a guy that's looking for signs.
Right? And now we seethat with everybody.
There's so many liars out there.
(31:45):
And and then, you know,
also know your backgroundwhere you had a little bit of a
depression and were on somepharmaceuticals and then you
got really healthy andnatural and, cleaned out.
And I think that that's,that's fantastic.
I think we're seeing alot of that in this world.
And then you became verypassionate about this process
of, enlightening people andgoing against the grain,
(32:06):
about the vaccines andalso about the idea that,
as we've discussed today,
where there just has to be constantcrisis after crisis in order for this,
debt implosion to kindabe kicked down the road.
Now that so many peoplehave, joined your side,
now that there are so manydifferent podcasts and
(32:26):
influencers and even xallows this discussion,
what is your passionbecoming now?
Because there area lot of quote,
unquote Ed Dowd's outthere for the vaccine side,
not tying in the finance.
One time you had mentionedthat you were really interested
in starting a hedge fund andkind of helping people get into
that hedge fund, understand howto protect and grow their their
(32:49):
wealth because you seea system differently.
What's your passion now?
Because I can see somehow yougotta be pivoting away from
talking conspiracy stuff tosomething that you truly love.
Well, let's talk aboutconspiracy stuff.
Conspiracies Porter knowswhat I'm about to say.
On Wall Street, we were alwaysconspiracy theorists. You know?
(33:10):
Enron was a great company.
You were a conspiracy theoristto think that it was a fraud.
So the I've I've I've satin this world where, like,
investors would tell meI'm insane, I'm kooky.
So I just appliedthat to the world.
So the term conspiracytheorist makes me lack.
We're just early.That's all we are.
You know, we'reWall Street guys.
We that we we you make money by beingearly and right and loud about it.
(33:34):
And then when you're wrong,
you have to admit it quicklyand and and cut your losses.
That's what that's thegame of Wall Street.
So our passionnow is, obviously,
we've done a lot of workon the vaccine research.
We've kinda slowed that down,
and we we continue to look for aseed investor for our hedge fund.
We came close, in thebeginning of twenty
(33:55):
four, but, honestly,
the individual wanted to stealthe company, so we walked away.
They weren't as passionate aboutour view of the of the world.
So we're look we're looking fora partner that kinda has the
same view of the world,
and wants to do good becausewe pledged in our pitch deck.
Whatever whatever money we make,
(34:16):
the partners haveagreed to, like,
take fifty percent of ourpersonal income and donate it
to charities or, you know,
something that does goodin the world of product.
So, you know, we're not gonna ifthe 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 notneed more charity.
(34:37):
The world needs the worldneeds more venture capital.
The need the world needsmore good businesses.
Oh my god.
Do you do you have any idea howmuch money Ted Turner has lit
on fire by giving it tocharity 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 moneyand then spent in twenty years
(34:58):
giving to charities,
and they realized howmuch money they burned.
All of them.
Maybe I misspoke.
Maybe I misspoke.
We're we're gonna do we'regonna invest in things that
action change and charitiescharities that exist
to fix the problem butnever really fix it,
we know what that model is.
We wanna invest in thingsthat are gonna actually fix a
(35:18):
problem, maybemake money fixing.
I think what we shoulddo is start a home sorry.
Start a fund for homelesspeople who wanna buy cigarettes.
And we can donate all the moneythat we need to to donate to be
good people and tohave tax write offs.
We can we can say that wegive billions to charity,
but at least the money will get used bypeople doing something that they enjoy.
And then we can own PhilipMorris and collect the dividends.
(35:41):
I mean, that way it won'tit will not at least,
it won't go to waste.
By the way, I I Idonated personally,
I donated a quarter milliondollars in two thousand five
to, a local charityhere in Baltimore.
Aaron, what was it called?
Homes for homeless peopleor something like that?
Yeah. Something like that.
Homes for America.
It's a it's a bignational charity,
(36:02):
and I I paid forone of the houses,
and our employees went and didthe demo and then helped do
some of the carpentry and the lawnlandscaping and blah blah blah.
And we gave a house to thislocal Baltimore family.
And I went back to see whatit looked like a year later,
and that's the last time weever gave a penny to a charity.
If you if you givepoor people a house,
what will they do to it?
(36:23):
I absolutely agree.
You need you need to you needto be clever about how we
incentivize people and giving freestuff to people that didn't earn it.
We know what that looks like.
That's called the USgovernment welfare system.
Yeah.
And, and and it doesn'twork out so well.
No. And they're and listen.
I I'm I'm being alittle facetious.
I have, of course, givento other charities.
(36:44):
I've given a lot of money tothe Cystic Fibrosis Foundation,
which has done great researchon curing that disease.
I give a lot of moneyevery year to the local,
children's hospital.
I'm, I'm basically the foundingdonor of Kevin Kisner's
Children's Hospital inin Aiken, South Carolina.
I don't want people to hear me andthink I'm being completely sincere.
I just, when I see someoneas smart and talented as you,
(37:08):
talking about combining animportant business endeavor,
which your hedge fund wouldwould bring a lot of value to a
lot of investors and do a lotof good in the world and help
allocate capital ina more rational way,
and then just hearing that ithasn't happened because you've
you've overlaid a charitymindset on top of it,
I just think you'remaking a huge mistake.
Go out and make asmuch money as you can,
(37:29):
and then do a good job givingaway the wealth that you've
earned as you see fit.
And I'm sure if you dothat, everyone will win.
I maybe I misspoke.
We it's not that thehedge fund would do it.
It'd be our ownpersonal profits.
And so the head the hedge fund,
it would be it'd bethe partner's profits,
not not not theactual hedge fund.
The hedge won't won't begiving money to to any charity.
(37:52):
It'd be our ownpersonal decisions.
So that's that's a little bitI would like to be an investor,
so please keep me in the loop.
Yep. Yep. No.
And so we, and also so we kinda shutdown marketing of it because the you
know, the uncertaintygoing into the election.
No one was doing anything.
Now we're seeing interest again.
We're having more discussions,
and we just launched this echoUS economic report that we're
(38:13):
charging a thousand dollarsfor because it's it's it's for
family offices, high net worthindividuals, RIAs, you know,
asset managers.
So the, you know, this is nota report that's for the guy on
Twitter. So we're we'rewe're we're charging.
It's a it's an eightyfive page report.
It lays out how we think,this is gonna unfold.
(38:34):
It's very you know,
it's it's it's it's it's great insightinto what we think is gonna unfold.
And, we also,
provide an executivepresentation and then a short
video an hour long of Carlosand I going through the
executive presentation.
So I I don't I don'tneed any of that.
I I already know you'rea really good investor.
But, I'll tell you also,
I'm I'm launching ahedge fund as well,
(38:55):
not to be competing with yours,
but I have a very I think probablya very different approach.
But I'm I'm trying to,
implement a permanentportfolio strategy,
which is something that Ilearned from Harry Brown in the
in the mid nineteen nineties justbecause I I think probably as you do,
there's gonna be a large correctionin financial asset prices.
And I think that, you know,
a fund that can make a six oreight percent return with very
(39:19):
low volatility is gonnaactually beat the market over
the next four or six years.
And by the way, let me tell youthat pitch interests no one.
Nobody no one's getting excitedabout a hedge fund that's
promising them eight percenta year with no volatility.
But, that's that's what I that'swhat I wanna do primarily with
my with with most of my money,
(39:39):
but I would love to be aninvestor in your fund as well.
So I'll have I'll have somebodyfollow-up with you to get me
get me some documents,
and and I'm happy to to pledge and makea commitment for when you get started.
Yeah. That's great.I appreciate it.
But, you know, the bot the bottom line iswe're passionate about, starting a firm.
We're gonna continue thehumanity project, which is the,
(39:59):
you know, the demographicresearch, the,
the vaccine injury,
because that's gonna beimportant as we roll through
economic cycles, thisdevastation is gonna impact.
It doesn't you know, youcan'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 thinkthat you had talked about in
(40:20):
previous podcastswas disability.
You know, it's one thing to lookat the disability statistics go up,
but you bring upa very good point.
How many family membersdoes that affect? Right?
Because it's not justa disabled person.
Now you need people to takecare of that person as well.
Plus, you've taken anincome out of the household.
I mean, that's that's a that'ssomething that compounds.
(40:42):
Yeah. It's a productivityissue for the economy.
It's gonna lower,
product productivity inthe economy for sure.
That's why that's why theNATO round is a five five six.
It's not designed to kill.
It's designed to maim because awounded soldier is harder on an
army than a dead soldier.
And the same Yeah.
And the same thing, thesame concept is, you know,
(41:02):
someone wounded by a vaccine,
all the things that Aaronjust said and that, Ed,
I know you researched. It'sa very, very good point.
But lieutenant colonel Theresa Long,who was one of the DMED,
whistleblowers who's retiringsoon, she and I have talked,
and she said that this remindsher of the v like you said,
the Vietnam War where theywanted to injure the show the
(41:22):
soldier up and killthem because, you know,
that that that would,
logistically involve five otherpeople and bog down, the enemy.
And she said, this is exactly whatthis vaccine's doing even though
everyone talks aboutthe excess deaths.
The amount of people who havebeen injured is the real problem.
And she said, we wannaif this continues,
(41:43):
we won't have a standingarmy in five years, you know,
because of, recruitment issues.
Those equipped who do wannatake the vaccine and all the
disabled and those whoare dying in the military.
Well, I certainly didn't want toend up with no military because of
vaccine injuriesor any injuries,
but I believe America would bea much better place without a
standing armor standing army.
(42:04):
And I'm pretty sure all ofour founding fathers wanted to
prevent our countryfrom ever having one.
So maybe maybe there'ssome silver lining.
I guess we havenuclear arsenals,
so no one's gonna attack us.
Right.
We also have three hundredmillion legal firearms in
United States and probably ahundred million avid hunters.
We would be a very difficultcountry to conquer,
kinda like Russia figuredout when they tried to invade
(42:26):
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 seenx blow up on this.
I think, you know, with with,
getting Trump in,
the one thing that patriots orTrump followers have hoped for,
especially with RFK Jr,
is to get to thebottom of this vaccine.
He's still very proud and callshimself the the father of,
(42:49):
operation warp speed.
And we've all been disappointed,
so we're hoping that RFK comesin and and evaluates this.
I mean, they're still mandatingit for newborns, for god's sakes.
Like, that's that'sinsane. Right?
I mean, that's the most that'sthat's the most insane thing ever.
So, you know,
a couple days ago and this thiswill air in probably a week
when we get itcut and, released.
(43:11):
It was, Ellison on TV,
showing us that he'sgot this, Stargate,
and they wanna do fivehundred billion into mRNA for cancers,
which, obviously, if you lookat the data from the COVID
shot, cancers have exploded.
They call it turbo cancer,and it's everywhere.
So it's problemreaction solution.
(43:31):
So instead of BillGates this time,
we've got another billionairewho is very well known for
loving himself and notreally loving humanity,
pitching this idea of, hey.
No problem. Youjust go to a doctor.
You get diagnosed.
We figure out andpunch it into the AI,
and we figure out what youryour vaccine cancer shot looks
(43:52):
like, and we giveit to you on-site.
And this is insane. Thisis literally insane.
It was the secondday of Trump's,
yeah, after inauguration, andthis is what he rolls out.
I would love yourthoughts on that.
Okay. So I've I I'mfamiliar with Larry Ellison.
I was a software analyst,before I went to BlackRock.
And when I was at BlackRockas a portfolio manager,
(44:14):
I I was the thesoftware analyst.
Larry Ellison is aconstant salesman.
He built his business.
He was he didn't havethe best technology.
He was the best salesman.
He he he would do constantlywhat we call slide where his
competitor would comeup with a product.
He would then say, wehave it, and it's better,
(44:35):
but it was all slides.
And then then they would tell theengineers, go right Oh, slide where?
Yeah. So so so Larry LarryAllison gets up there.
And first of all, youraudience needs to know this.
Stargate was started last year.
It was they they'vealready broken ground.
They got permitting. Theyhave ten data centers.
And then they said, we couldn'thave done this without you,
(44:55):
mister president Trump.
So that was a bigoligarch kiss the ring,
applied to his ego.
And of the hundredbillion they supposedly,
committed last year,
that's not fully fundedbecause OpenAI has no money.
SoftBank has cash flow problems.
So that it's allsmoke and mirrors.
I mean, that's another four hundredbillion of private investment.
(45:17):
That was just classicLarry Ellison,
Sam Altman tech hype nonsense.
And then Larry getsout there and says,
we're gonna with them he hehe doesn't read the room.
He lives in a bubble.
He probably hasn'tthe guy bought it,
and he's talks about mRNA andindividualized cancer vaccines.
That is just so far inthe realm of fantasy
(45:40):
that it's it's beyond the pale.
So that was that was a an absurd
just PR stunt.
Susie Wiles, the chief ofstaff, probably, you know,
didn't know what Larry was Larryjust said what Larry is gonna say.
So I'm not I'm I'm very hopefulthat this is this was just a onetime
turf error on their part.
(46:01):
Makes Trump look like he's we'llsee what Trump's gonna do with mRNA,
but that was just that was themost redonkulous thing I've
seen in a long time.
I love it. I love it. Ed,you're the first guest.
He used used theword redonkulous,
which is one of my favorites.
So That is one ofyour favorites.
So listen. I I had such agreat time talking to you.
I really did.
(46:22):
You're the I think myfavorite guest we've ever had.
I I I loved watching you whenwhen you would do appearances.
I can't rememberI saw them in X,
or I saw them actuallyon on cable television.
But I just loved how you alwaysremained completely calm.
You never reacted emotionallyto any of this crazy propaganda
(46:42):
that was going onall around you.
You were like thecalm in the storm.
And I think you and I bothknow that is the single most
important hallmark ofany talented investor.
You always are calm.You're never emotional.
So, anyways, just thankyou so much for coming on.
It was brilliant getting totalk with you, and I hope that,
we can check-in with you againin time when some of these
(47:04):
economic risks, materialize.
We can have you back on for acouple minutes and just talk
about where things are goingbecause I think you and I see
the world in remarkablysimilar ways.
Yeah.
I think I think as weroll through the year,
let's let me let's get backon here and discuss what's
appearing that justifies ourpredictions in our report.
I think I think it's gonnathe cracks are gonna start
(47:26):
appearing between now and March.
And then by the fall, it shouldbe apparent to everybody.
And you know howthis works, Porter.
We've issued the report.
Sales are going well, but theylook slowed when it's too late,
when people wanna findout what just happened.
That's how this works.
Tell me about it.
I'm in the publishing world,
and I basically have to tellpeople what they wanna hear and
then gently try to change their mindsin the editorial to get them, you know,
(47:49):
away from the bubble thatI've already just sold them.
But, you know, the the people inThe Economist magazine are not dumb.
They just have tosell magazines.
And so that's where allthat those covers come from.
And, you know, then you you know thepeople who are writing them like, yeah.
I know it's ridiculous.
But we it was the best sellingthat's the best selling
magazine we did all year.
So it's it's it'stough that way.
(48:10):
It's tough, dealingwith the realities of,
the financial businesses andand financial publishing when
you know that to besuccessful in the market,
you have to be a contrarian.
But
it's very it's very hard to bea contrarian if you're popular.
Exactly.
But, well, we're we'rebeing contrarian,
and this thing willsell once we're right,
but it'll be too late.
(48:31):
Yeah. That's right.Well, listen, Ed.
Great great talking with you.
Thanks so much for yourtime today. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Porter. Thankyou, Aaron. Great to be here.
We appreciate it so much.
Alright, Porter. I'd love toget your thoughts on Ed Dowd.
Sound like, you guys have verysimilar financial minds, big themes.
It's, really uncannyto me to put you
(48:53):
with somebody, and you guys arealmost saying the same thing.
You know, I never read his memo.
I know it's a famousthing. It was on Twitter.
I I just never saw it.
But it would be really cool togo back and compare what I wrote.
I think I wrote mine in AprilI think it was April twentieth
twenty twenty and see what hewrote because we both came to
(49:14):
the exact same conclusion,
and I'm I'm sure we were usingsimilar datasets to judge that.
And I would just say,
I think the hallmark of bothof us is that we don't we don't
let the media or anyoneelse do our thinking.
We you know, I'll I'll read theheadline, and then I'm like,
I wonder what the data says,
or I wonder whatthe real facts are.
And I wonder how many of thelisteners can relate to this.
(49:37):
Anytime in my entire life I'veever had first person knowledge
of some event, and thenI saw what the media
wrote about it, it'slaughable how incredibly
wrong it always is.
Like, it's whatever theirversion of the event was,
it was nothing like actuallybeing there whatsoever.
And I and I just think thatI guess at some point in your
(50:00):
life, you're like, I Iread things all the time.
Like, I wonder whatreally happened.
And then when it comesto COVID, you know,
I just I thought it was veryimportant that we get the facts.
And I thought it was funnyhow many smart people that I
otherwise respect thatjust completely abandon
their own thinkingin that moment.
They're just like, oh,well, the government said,
and it's for the health.
(50:20):
So it must be we have to do it.
And I'm like,That's just amazing.
Is that it didn't take verymuch to convince everybody in
America to losetheir fucking minds.
I mean, it was basically theworld other than Africa because
Africa had been experimentedon by Bill Gates for so long,
they just weren't having it.
They literally are like,
we're not doing anyof that shot stuff.
But other thanthat, it was I mean,
(50:42):
it was fascinating to watchfrom Columbia Porter because,
I just never realized howpeople are so scared because
that's what it is.
Right? It was fear. Fear.
And it just really blew meaway to watch neighbor turn on
neighbor for the silliestlittle things out there.
But what a greatpsyop. I mean, wow.
You know, whoeverconstructed that thing,
(51:03):
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 withEd, and it was a great, great podcast.
Hope everybody liked it. Thanksfor putting that together.
I have, one lastthing before we go,
which is have you seen theequity markets in Colombia?
Speaking of Colombia,they're blowing up.
Yeah. They they yes. They are.
They really are.
(51:23):
And I I think we should weshould get somebody who really
knows that marketlocally to come and,
and talk about the bestcompanies in Colombia and the
opportunities for investors becauseI think Colombia is
probably gonna be one of the bestperforming markets in the world this year.
Yeah.
You know what's even here's what'seven more amazing about that, Porter,
is we are still under thecontrol of the only liberal
(51:44):
president that's everbeen elected, Petro.
And Petro is not goodfor business at all.
No. But he's he'sdefinitely on the way out.
He's one hundredpercent on the way out.
We had recently, we hadgovernment government notarial
and, mayoral elections.
And it went soextreme conservative,
he didn't get one single personthat he recommended in the
(52:06):
entire country in andeverybody went against him,
and it's being celebrated.
So imagine,
if we could get somebody inthat knows what they're doing
and as strong as equitiesare looking in twenty twenty
six, August oftwenty twenty six,
there will be a new president.
And, Latin America goes the way ofLatin America for the most part.
(52:26):
So with Malay and Bukele and,
the Colombians are arebasically crying out saying we
need one of those or a combinationof 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 puttingit together, and,
enjoy being away from Baltimore.
(52:47):
I know you guys are gonna beplaying Sawgrass this weekend.
I'm a little jelly.
We are, but here's the thing.
I don't even think you wouldcome out for this because it's
gonna be a high of fifty.
Right now, Porter, literallyPorter, I'm in Jacksonville.
I got in my car thismorning. It was thirty three.
It might be thirtyeight outside.
Did Jacksonville JacksonvilleJacksonville get snow this week?
You know, it itdidn't get snow, but,
(53:08):
the peninsula got crushed.
So that that left side,right over there by,
Alabama and Louisiana gotabsolutely decimated with snow.
But, we're ten inches of snow inPensacola 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 givethe, podcast, feedback.
(53:28):
Podcast feedback at porterand company research dot com.
Podcast feedback at porterand company research dot com.
Please let us know what youthought of the interview.
Yep. We'd love to hear fromyou, and thanks for listening.
Thank you for listening tothe Porter and Company Black Label
podcast with your hosts, PorterStansbury and Aaron Brabham.
We'll see you soon.
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