No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Inflation, Automation, and Empire Hangovers with Sean Ring
In this wide-ranging discussion, Sean Ring provides a global perspective on markets, geopolitics, and the intersections between politics and economics. The conversation spans Sean's experiences living abroad—from London to Asia to Italy—while offering critical insights into U.S. markets and global capital flows. Key themes include the inevitability of automation, the challenges of global supply chains, and the geopolitical implications of U.S. tariffs, China, Russia, and Europe.
Sean argues that while the United States remains the most viable market for investment, global economic and political shifts are creating unprecedented opportunities and risks. He critiques the Federal Reserve's mismanagement, inflation reporting, and the fallout of poorly executed policies, while highlighting Trump's cabinet picks and policy impact on markets. Other topics explored include AI, the Belt and Road Initiative, immigration, and the erosion of legacy media's influence in favor of platforms like X.
Sean brings an engaging, contrarian view, emphasizing the importance of understanding macro trends, challenging assumptions, and adopting a globally informed perspective to navigate today's interconnected markets.
The Rude Awakening
Sean Ring on X
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
In Italy we had ADSL. This is many years ago, right, it was just poor internet. My wife's working from the home, the house over there, and we're in a mafia-controlled area in Consol de Principe, which was pretty interesting. And back then people didn't have the internet right, they didn't have Facebook, they didn't have anything like that, they didn't have computers in their houses.
Sean Ring:So my first question to you about the internet use over there you tell me you're using Starlink, which we had to use yesterday because our internet went down here in Virginia Beach. What's it like living in Italy for you? I love it. I wish I knew the language. I'm still not fluent. My son is completely fluent in bilingual now and he's only seven and it's really annoying. He's done so well. He loves it. He's just. He's culturally italian too, even though his mom's not philip.
Sean Ring:His mom's philip, though so it's uh, it's really kind of funny how he's doing this and uh, you know he eats rice on pain of death. You know he's like can I have spaghetti please? Here's some rice, you know? Uh, funny, my wife speaks conversationally. Now she goes to class. I've been lazy about it, but I don't have a driver's license here and I can't take the test in English.
Ponch:I don't think any Italian has a driver's license, by the way.
Sean Ring:They drive like they don't, that's for sure. I got caught. I got fined like 3,000 euros 3,500 euros because I got caught. I got fined like 3,000 euros 3,500 euros because I got caught without a license. Basically, if I get caught again, it would be like 10 grand. I'm like I'll do the test, but it's only in Italian, French and German. They don't do it in English. I have no idea why, but I am the safest driver on these roads. I'm just too old to drive like these maniacs do.
Ponch:It's, it's, it's there's a, there's a heuristic that we talk about for Italians and how they drive. It's a hopefully I get it right Match speed, avoid collision and avoid eye contact.
Sean Ring:That's that's about right. That sounds like like, like a good set of rules. Yeah, I definitely don't make eye contact. You never know. But up here in the north we're a bit more civilized. You know it's very, you know it's much more like actually people look like me. They don't look like your normal. You know southern, you know kind of greasy black hair hanging down, big brown eyes. That's down in Naples and in Sicily Very different up here.
Ponch:Yeah, I have a daughter heading out there next summer and she's been looking at a lot of Da Vinci's work and I think she's going to Florence too, so she's going to look at all the sacred geometry stuff that we've been looking at on the podcast. Actually, it's going to be kind of neat looking at Vitruvian man and the Last Supper and things like that. So pretty exciting times, time to be alive, looking back and trying to understand if there's any code in that. But anyway, hey, thanks for the introduction. It was fantastic. It's good to know somebody in Italy and struggle like that. So I'm going to flip it back to Mark and get us airborne.
Mosse:Yeah, welcome Sean. You know your, your rude awakening is the the best thing that winds up in my inbox daily, because it is a take on markets and geopolitics and everything else that most nobody's talking about, and I always find it fascinating and you know, we've been friends for some time, so it's good to have you on and introduce you to our community that we're always trying to get to have different perspectives and you have certainly, in your career, have taken many, many different perspectives to in fact, extricate yourself from these United States.
Sean Ring:It's funny.
Sean Ring:I mean you know, like I never really I don't think we ever talked about this, but I didn't mean to do all that Like it's one of those things where I think everyone's heard that story about steve jobs and he went to read college and he hated, dropped out but they took the calligraphy course just because he wanted to take calligraphy calligraphy course and years later that wound up being the fonts on on the new apple computers. You know and, by the way, I'm not comparing myself to steve jobs anyway, but you just can't tell things going forward. It's only kind of in review that you see what happened.
Sean Ring:So when I left the states um and I've just passed 25 years this october that I haven't lived in america um, I initially left because I partied my ass off at villanova and it was the 90s, thank God. So I snuck in the back door of Lehman Brothers rest in peace and got a job there and thought, god, new York sucks Like my whole life growing up in New Jersey. I'd see that skyline and be one day that's going to be mine. And I got there and I'm like, oh God, I hate these people, it's awful. So when I had a chance to go to London, I jumped at it, and the reason why I wanted to go abroad for a couple of years was because I only graduated with like a three up, so I was like you know what if I want to go to Harvard Business School and get into a top MBA program.
Sean Ring:I need to do something on my CV that nobody else does, so I'll go to England. I'll be back in two years Now. What I didn't realize is that London was candy land for alcoholics. So you know, there's a pub every two feet. Everyone goes out every night. You know, my dad was home after work every night and just watched television. I thought, god, how boring. I want to get married. These guys in england are like, yeah, let's go out and have a beer. I'm like, dude, it's monday. Like, yeah, okay, finally, just so what I was like okay, that ends in y if your wife doesn't give a shit, I've got no friends here anyway, let's go.
Sean Ring:You know it's and it was. It was amazing. But then you know, I fell in love with england. This is before england went completely bad shit. Um, love the place, absolutely love.
Sean Ring:Living in london was the happiest londoner in the world when I got my british passport. I yes, I'm like part of the club. Oh my God, this is great and I had full intention of coming back. The reason why I didn't kind of come back my parents moved down to Texas and I went to check Texas out and please, I know a lot of military people are from Texas and are probably listening to this and I mean no offense, but the strip of I-35 between San Antonio and Boston is New Jersey, with cactuses Like it, just like that's where they live. They live in Sibylosa.
Sean Ring:I was like no, and I wound up going to Singapore because I was like, oh well, let's check out Asia, that'll last two years, met my wife there. You knowinos think that singapore is valhalla, so I wound up getting stuck there for an extra five years after I wanted to leave. So I was there for six in total and then I took a job in hong kong because you know train anymore. As a freelancer, I thought I'll go back inside a bank Stupid. That was Credit Suisse, my old bank. So I always joke around. Now when I start class I go at the risk of my credibility. I started my career with Lehman Brothers and ended it at Credit Suisse, which is not the most glowing thing you can say about oneself. So we were in Hong Kong for three and a half years.
Sean Ring:My son was born in hong kong and then I was like listen, my wife hated hong kong. I didn't like it. It was very expensive, we lived in a really small apartment, we had the kid. I'm like let's go to the philippines for three and a half years. Well, and, by the way, that was always supposed to be two years. So so this whole asia thing that was supposed to be two years stretched out into 13 years.
Sean Ring:And then, because the Filipino passport is absolutely useless and the British wouldn't let us back into England, because my wife has a non-EEA passport, which means like if you're outside the European economic area, the hoops you've got to jump through to get back in the country legally. It's just ridiculous when you're a freelancer. But, like you know, I said to my mother. I'm like you know, ma, we eat pasta every Sunday. Is there any way that we have somehow like a year to figure it out? But we got, we did, and it was a loophole in Italian law that luckily we slipped through because my great-grandfather, who had immigrated from Italy, did not become an Italian an American citizen, pardon me until after my grandfather was born. So technically he was Italian. Then my grandfather was Italian, my mother was Italian, I'm Italian, he was Italian. Then my grandfather was Italian, my mother was Italian, I'm Italian. So my mother, my son and me all got our Italian passport and said well, great, let's do Italy.
Mosse:And that's how we wound up here. So you look at the world from a very different perspective than many. Just because you've been around so much, and from an American standpoint, you actually relinquished your citizenship. Now I got rid of it.
Sean Ring:Yeah, I, you know, and that was. I'm going to be completely honest with you here. That wasn't nearly as tough a decision as I thought it would be, like I remember having like I was in a hotel, because what they do is so basically, I got married July 3rd 2011. I said to my wife the week before the wedding I go. Listen, you know, if you want to marry an American because you want to get to America, tell me now and we'll part as friends, you know. But if you don't care, I am literally going to the embassy this week. We got married on Sunday. I go. I'm going this week and I'm giving it up because if I don't, our kid is going. You know, any children we have. We didn't realize it was going to take so long to have children. I go, but any kid will automatically get lumped with this. And at the time they went crazy on FATCA. They were like I'm sure you've heard the term accidental Americans, Like you know, you'd have like two Taiwanese people go over to Silicon Valley, you know, fall in love, they drop a kid, they move back to Taiwan and this kid is an American because he's born in America. He doesn't speak English, you know just was an infant, and the IRS set up offices all over Asia to go knock on those doors and go you owe us either 10 years of income tax or we would just take 5% of your assets. And by that point I realized I was never going to move back. So I was like you know what? It's just better not to have it at all. Wow Also and this is really funny In 2009, I'll never forget this as long as I live my first year in Singapore.
Sean Ring:Obviously the crash had happened, so everyone had a terrible year, especially if you were training should happen. So everyone had a terrible year, especially if you were training. And the singapore government uh, said listen, don't pay us any taxes. The max tax rate in singapore that year was eight percent. They're like give us eight percent so we keep the government running and then take your money and spend it everywhere else.
Sean Ring:But because I had my, my american passport at that time, I had to pay my eight percent, which was great, take it, Thanks for letting me live here. And then, when I did my American taxes, I had to top it up. I had to pay a shitload extra because, had I lived in the States, my effective tax rate would have been something like 25%. So I wound up owing the American government a shitload of money, and by that point I had been in the country for like 12 years. So I was like you know, it's time to. You know, we need to get rid of this. And I couldn't open it's so hard to open bank accounts if you're there unless you're working for companies.
Sean Ring:You know, like you got to fill out the FATCA forms. You got to, and that's the pain in the ass. It's not necessarily the tax that hurts so much, it's the. You got to fill out what are called FBAR forms. So every bank account you have around on the planet you got to report to the IRS, which is ridiculous in my opinion and like most legislation, like they're aiming for the guys who have like 300 million bucks but they always miss and it's the middle class that gets it. So at that point you saw like the middle class, the upper middle class people who could afford it, would move back to the States, and there were loads of people just left going. We actually can't afford to move back to America, so we're going to stay here, but it just a ridiculous situation was created because of all this. They just laid off. They'd get so much more tax revenue.
Sean Ring:No one's ever going to have Art Laffer or something like that.
Mosse:So you're on the outside, looking in at the United States and us that are over here. You know there's a lot going on and there's CEOs getting whacked here in the city. There's Trump getting elected for his non-consecutive term. There's all kinds of stuff going on. So you write about this stuff daily. Why don't you give us what's on your radar right now that you're looking at from the outside, looking in? That's going to help us shape our own observations, decisions and actions as we're learning about what's going on in the world.
Sean Ring:It's funny, it's a great question. It's like what do you do with this? And the one thing I've learned, because I've just I haven't just traveled, I've lived in six different places, like for multi years, so I've had to learn the tax system, I've had to learn real estate, you know, and just actually, this is the first house I've ever run, so it's it's kind of funny. Like I you know, I huge I always call that my million dollar mistake, not buying an apartment in london, but like I live in a flat that was like a one bedroom flat and I'm like this is 165 000 pounds. There's about 200 000 bucks a time. I'm like, for what? What are you paying for? I didn't quite get the inflation and how they print money and how you make money. Anyway, that apartment now is probably worth half a million pounds. It's just ridiculous.
Sean Ring:But anyway, yeah, I learned different real estate, different tax, different everything, because I didn't, as an expat, get those juicy relocation packages. I always got hired as a local, which is dumb. Like you got to learn how to negotiate better, which I made that one of my missions in life and I do that much better now. But yeah, as a 24-year-old kid, I'm like just let me go to England, it'll be great. You know, not like how much is this actually going to cost? Because if you cost that it's stupid to do. You know again, if you're looking at like you're trying to project that forward, to make very different decisions. But I think Americans have to get used to the fact that their government is like every other government, you know, and the state OK, the big state, and not necessarily just you know the laws and everything. The people who are running the place are running it for themselves, are running it for themselves, and what America is kind of to me suffering from premature empire hangover, which is you know if you lived in England you know what empire hangover is?
Sean Ring:Oh, I'm very sorry. Oh, my God, you know, oh, we were terrible, you know, oh, the empire. So you've got that going on a little bit.
Sean Ring:You know America self-hating, which I never understood, and I grew up in the 80s and man in the 80s in New Jersey. It was amazing. I'm sure your experiences were similar. I love growing up there. I have no regrets about my childhood whatsoever, it was just awesome. But the place is very different now and you know it's gotten it.
Sean Ring:I know where I picked this up, to to in like the language used on television shows. You know like, for instance, I was just watching television so someone in an American accent said I'll get that straight away. And I just went straight away, like that's British English, like when the hell did that accent? Like I always said right away. Where you know, we'll do that right away, not straight away. Everything's kind of mixing together. You've got to get more global in your outlook. With that said, the only place you want to invest is in the United States. That's another thing. That's ridiculous. It's like, hey, listen, we're a global world, we got it, you got to be everywhere. But right, this second, and this may change in a year or two, a year or two, but man, if you're playing with any other market besides the United States, you're not making it.
Ponch:Is it because? Is that? Because? Is that because our market, our, our economy sucks less than everybody else's right now?
Sean Ring:economy sucks less than everybody else's right now. It's not just that it sucks less, it's that it sucks the capital from everybody else into the country. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen and you know, for me, you know, if you're, you know, and Moosh, you know this, you know you read Austrian economics and you get into that. It's just gloom and doom. The world's going to fall apart. You know, people forget that. Mesa said listen, there's gonna be a boom before the bust. Yeah, everyone's like oh god, I, you know, if you, if you listen to doug casey, doug casey, every says libertarians are poor as church mice and it cracks me up because most of them are, uh, because they're just miserable. They don't want to stick their money in anything.
Sean Ring:But the fact of the matter is like if you haven't been in the US markets for the past 10, 15 years, like since March of 2009,. Maybe you entered a little bit later because hey, no, one times the bottom, perfectly, but if you haven't been in, you have just gotten killed, like if you were in Europe. What a waste being over here. I mean, you know, the British have been moaning about not being in the eurozone forever and, quite frankly, I, you know, I still, even though I live in the EU. I love Italy, I do not love the EU. I can't see the euro lasted all that much longer. It's toilet paper. It's a contrived currency. American economists were warning about this ages ago. You know, listen, you're making shit up here guys, and it is made up shit and it's crazy. So I think you know kind of tangentially here. You know, if AFD get in Germany, like I think the european project will change massively. It'll go back to be in a free trade area, um, and and the regulations will start coming off.
Sean Ring:But like investing in europe's crazy investing in china you've got you know ridiculous volatility and do you really know the companies in china? And when you know the chinese government could just go hey, listen, all you, your education providers online, can't do that anymore. The stocks go to zero. Are you really going to take that risk? It's very difficult to invest anywhere else besides the United States. So you want to invest in the United States, but you've got to keep your head up above the parapet a bit and just go. What is going on everywhere else? And how can I take advantage of that? Like geo-arbitrage, like, can I buy stuff elsewhere that's cheaper than I've got here in the States.
Sean Ring:Now again, for the States it's a middle-class paradise. You know, the whole point of America or it used to be the whole point of America was, you know, being in the middle class is great because you can go and at least afford a whole bunch of shit, even if you don't need it. That's starting to change now. You know that that's very different. Like I, you know, my dad was a truck driver, my mom was a receptionist, but I had everything when I was a kid. I mean, they also overcharged their credit cards, but that's another story. You know, but I, I look at prices down. Um, you know, but I, I look at prices down and I'm like how the hell can anyone afford anything over there? Uh, I went to, I was in New York. You know, I got two hot dogs in Times Square and a Coke and it was 2150. And I'm like, if I bite out of this, is my hair going to grow back, like what the fuck is in this hot dog that is 2150 nowadays. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's nuts.
Ponch:So, you know, CPI just came out, though like 45 minutes ago on today. No big shock. There we're still above the 2% rate that the Fed's targeting, and it's just kind of funny that that's a rate or percentage that they're targeting Any thoughts on. You know, there's what the administration reports is inflation and there's what we experience. Or to equate that to something, there's work is imagined and there's what we experience. Or to equate that to something, there's work is imagined and there's work is actually done. So, um, why? Why can't 730 economists at the fed get these things right? What's what's wrong with them?
Sean Ring:they that? Because the, the, the monometricians at the fed map the rate all the time and it's just it. It's big math. It's impossible, first of all, to calculate that when you've got you know 80,000 goods in a basket and then you go, oh well, these goods are too expensive. Let's pull that out Like as if someone's going to go, yeah, I'll eat spam instead of a you know steak. Obviously, food is not a great example there, because they pull that out.
Sean Ring:But you know, I think they get the hedonics wrong all the time and again that works for the government, because then you get to tell everybody hey, listen, you know inflation is coming down but, as you saw in the election, people don't care about the rate of inflation, they care about cumulative price, which you know, and I wrote about that in a rude like Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal wrote this excellent article. I mean, it's one of those times where I read the journal and go, what the fuck am I paying for? But it was like you know, it's not, it's not the economy, it's you. And that, literally, was the title of the article. And you know he basically goes listen, you know, inflation was 10 percent, now it's 5%. The Fed's doing its job, shut up, and I'm sitting there going, dude. Ok, let's take a good. Two years ago that cost $1. From negative 2 to negative 1, it goes from $1 to $1.10. From $1.10 to now it still went up 5%, even though the rate went from 10% to 5%. Now that could cost $1.16. Nobody's sitting there going, bravo, people are going. That thing is 16% more expensive than it was two years ago and that, ultimately, is what killed Kamala.
Sean Ring:That was the big election issue. And when you get the rural vote out and thank Joe Rogan for that, holy shit, because this election was white men, hispanic men and Catholics and I know there's a lot of overlap there just taking the cities out to the woodshed, beating the crap out of you. It's just the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Like Trump, a divorcee who says nothing's better than grade A, p-u-s-s-y, you know, won the Catholic vote 58 to 42. Like what you know, white men obviously was going to do good with white men, but he lost the South Texas border region. Could you imagine coming over that border and then going oh, I really like it here, I'm going to vote Republican. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Sean Ring:So now the Democrat strategy of taking the big blue cities and having the Texas border region to go. That's enough. You could win Texas now with that. That's gone, and they are never going to get that border back. That's going to turn into a rabid version of South Florida. They are going to be crazy Republicans there for a generation.
Sean Ring:It but basically Orange County and every inland county in California. Trump won by anything between 15 and 30 points, like not even close, and I've said this for years. You know, ann Coulter wrote that book on the browning of America, but what she and I think a lot of people forget is that, yeah, you could flood California with a bunch of Mexicans, but sooner or later they're going to remember they were Catholic, they hate abortion, they're going to have 50 kids. Okay, we've seen this before. We called them Italians. It just happened in the Northeast, though, and I reckon California, which is historically Republican you know, any time before 1980, they voted Republican. Once they flip back to Republican red, they will never vote Democrat again. That is just gone for like centuries.
Ponch:Sean, here's something for you. A lot of folks push back in politics, mixing politics with markets, but can you explain the importance of politics and markets?
Sean Ring:Oh my God. Nowadays, I mean, it starts with the Fed, which is quasi-political. It's supposed to be independent. It's not. And if you look at Jay Powell, he could have been so good. I look at him and I'm like he could have been a contender. He was so positioned he should have cut, and just by 25 bps. He should have done that in June. He was miles before the election.
Sean Ring:They knew that inflation was tamping down. He wanted one or two more months of data. The problem is, when you are just driven by data, you're always looking backwards. You're not imagining what could go forward and what he should have done. He's taken the risk cut 25 bips. He would have goosed the market. We would have a much better summer, I think, um. And he would have been out like no. And honestly, if I were him at the meeting, I would have said markets, here's your 25 BIP cut. I don't want to hear a fucking thing out of you until December, when this election is blown out of the way. I don't want to know anything. Alright, you got your 25 BIP cuts. We're going to have a meeting. I'm going to say hi and bye in the press conference for the next couple of meetings and we're out.
Sean Ring:He blew it in June, he blew it again in July and then he comes when the market's at practically all-time highs, like something's wrong in the plumbing, like we don't know what that. I don't know what it is yet. I don't know what's going to cause the next crisis. But when you've got a Fed chair who basically shits the bed like that for no reason, like something's wrong. And I was looking through the fixed income market, usually the fixed income markets tell the equity markets what's wrong. They're not. I mean, if you look at like US Treasuries, german, german bonds are doing much better now, but UK gilts like they'll fall out of bed. No one wants to own this stuff anymore. But I don't know what else. What's going to cause it? I wish I did.
Mosse:I wish I knew. Do you think it could be what you wrote about the other day with how Trump could treat the bricks? You know how he could institute all the tariffs and things like that, do you think?
Sean Ring:I mean, like it's really funny because, you know, most libertarians are and I don't really I don't like calling myself a libertarian, because there are too many left libertarians now, but we're usually unadulterated free traders. Too many left libertarians now, but we're usually unadulterated free traders. And the problem is, you know, when Ricardo formulated his theory, one of his assumptions was you're going to have equal movements of people across borders, which you clearly don't have. 11 million people have flooded through the borders and that's kind of a massive problem. It's very unequal and it does put people out of work that need to till the land. You know, to do stuff like Jordan Peterson talks about this. He said listen, if you got a sub 83 IQ, there's nothing you could do, that you would screw up. So those people which is 25% of the American population, by the way okay, like those people need something to work, like tilling lands, basically what they can do, and that's great. But when you get a whole bunch of people, you know, with the immigration issue, taking those jobs for even cheaper, it's it's it's a big, big issue.
Sean Ring:I mean, there are so many, you know cause, just getting back to the political thing, like Kamala lost on inflation, which she was never going to not lose, ok, and I actually that was one of my more prescient pieces in the morning reckoning I wrote like inflation is going to kill her, and it did. That was the number one issue. The number two issue was the border, because they just let people in hoping they vote Democrat Again failed strategy, clearly in South Texas, but who knows where the rest of them are. I wrote an article six months ago called the Terrorist Attacks of 2025. I can't imagine countries not sending their Mexican-looking people over that border and just spying the shit out of the United States. In case of the joint, who knows who came over, like you know. No, no medical vetting, no IDs, just come on in. You know it's a huge issue.
Sean Ring:And the third thing she lost on transgender, because luckily everyone's waking up to what horror that is for children. And really it's the kids stuff I don't think most people mind. When adults, you know, let's not say lose their minds or whatever. They want to switch, fine. But when you start putting that in children's curriculum, you know parents just start getting awfully fashy. They move straight past conservatism into let's go start, you know, knocking heads together, into let's go start knocking heads together. And those were the three big things that shifted the election. And again the top one is the economy. And again going back to that initial point, like the politics, if you're not aware what's going on in politics, you're handicapped in a way in investing because so much of the politics seeps into the markets. And I write that in a room I go listen. I know some people are like I ain't writing politics, you're pro-Trump and you're very right wing. It's like dude if you don't understand this stuff no-transcript.
Mosse:Give us your perspectives on that. I don't know if you saw Nicholas Taleb's Nassim Taleb's tweet. That skin was back in the game. You also had a graphic yeah Right, you had a graphic too on your article about how you know they're the. They're significantly the leader in denials of.
Sean Ring:Yeah, I mean you know the whole point of insurance. You're essentially you're writing call options all day long. I mean, that's what insurance is? You just write in call options and you know the reason I'm like I don't write. You know, nessie Flipp also, funnily enough, says he never sells options, he never goes short options because you never know that one day when you get wiped out, I don't either because of him, you know. But insurers, you know, listen, you're writing calls all day. You rarely get called um. When united gets called, a third of the time they don't accept it. You know they basically go, just kidding but hold on a second sean.
Ponch:This is important because when you sell a position, you have an obligation right right allegedly yeah, unless you're the insurance companies. Okay, and that's important because when we're talking to options here, you're obligate, you have an obligation to follow up on that right and if you're saying that they're essentially writing options, they're obligated to back that up.
Sean Ring:They seem to be doing is denying it every possible way to pay out. You know, I mean a third of claims going on. You know, going denied like that's, that's a chunk, that's, that's not a little bit. That's a lot of people getting hurt. Now that in no way justifies that. That, yeah, but I don't want, I don't want to do that. But it is a couple huge things come out of this. One is the telep point of skin of the game and I wrote that.
Sean Ring:You know, literally the day it came out, I went listen when you're making decisions. Now you've got something to think about. Besides, you know, can I get away with this? It's like, can I get away with this with my head, you know, and that that's a very different kind of question. Um, I think it'll lead to a lot of copycat cases, because this kid, who's a pen grad, supposed to be super intelligent to me, he wanted to get caught, like he wanted to make a statement, and a lot of people commit crimes, especially when they think they're, you know, an insurance company. So pause on that point. An insurance company was responsible.
Mosse:Pause on that point. So another guest of ours, john Robb, just posted on X with a picture of Luigi it's the only I forget his last name and he has a quote from this guy. John Robb put this up 30 minutes ago, it says, to save you a lengthy investigation. I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial Some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patients. I do apologize for any strife of traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.
Sean Ring:Yeah, wow, you know, and I had read that earlier and you know again, he can't be the only one who feels that way and that's why I think there could be a lot of copycat cases, and I think also, but it goes back to the telep point that skin's in the game.
Sean Ring:Skin is back in the game, it's really funny, because when you get caught and when you've got a government, you know who basically goes. Hey, listen, you know it's free markets. We're of here, you as CEO, and the CEOs let's face it all the Democrat donors and they donate to both sides, let's be honest. But all the people who are calling for defunding police, that have money, that are now CEOs, are going. I think we need big police now. So I think that's going to be one big thing In this interim between.
Sean Ring:We get big hard policing, like Giuliani-era New York City, which was frigging Disneyland. Like I worked on Wall Street when Rudy was mayor, never worried about anything. The city was clean, there were no criminals around. Easy, yeah, easy peasy. I could get as drunk as I want I want, whether I was in Greenwich Village or Midtown, upper East Side, upper West Side didn't matter. I was going to get poured into a cab and I'd get home safely. That's not how it works today. Programs I'm like I feel bad for you guys. I'm like this is an absolute disgrace. In the late 90s it was gorgeous.
Sean Ring:And in the interim between the shift back, as the pendulum shifts back, you're going to have a wide open window to start knocking people's heads off and I said, you know I got in trouble for this in my mailbag, but I'm like you know, I can't believe this shit hasn't happened before. That was my one inescapable conclusion that you know, how is this the first? And guys like you know and again, I don't want to put out a Deadpool or a Hit List or anything like that, I don't want to see this happening. But guys like Jamie Dimon, you know who is the king banker of the world, and if you're walking around New York City without a baseball cap on your head's sticking up, I would advise against that, like you know, because someone now has got to look at this kid and go. You know what he's right, but I don't want to get caught. So I'm going to be much better about this and I'm going to, you know, I'll make my ghost gun, I'll make the freaking silencer. That works, you know. So don't have to. You know, mess it up, uh, and I'm gonna get out of here and no one is gonna have a clue what's going on.
Sean Ring:Okay, and that, and honestly, I think if that kid really wanted to get away with it and really didn't want his grandma up in heaven to know he got revenge uh, perceived revenge at least. Um, he would have been not now to the. You know pennsylvania, he could have been anywhere in the world. They wouldn't have had a clue. New york the nypd had no idea who he was until he started flirting with that girl, um, at the hotel desk, apparently because she was a little hottie typical italian, let's be honest. But yeah, like they wouldn't have a damn clue where he was or what he was doing.
Mosse:So do you see another? Another thing you're kind of on this topic of a disparity, of like the the haves and the have-nots. You know you talked just in the last week about, uh, the parting of the president's son and drawing a that's.
Sean Ring:That's the I mean. Honestly, you knew it was coming and I'll be completely honest, if it were my kid, I'd have parted the pages. I would have saved everyone trouble because Biden wasn't going to get elected anymore. Even if George Clooney, of all people, didn't unhorse Joe Biden by writing that idiotic op-ed in the LA Times, which he now seriously regrets, biden Biden would have lost anyway. I would have been like you know what, don't bother with these court cases, I'm just going to pardon him anyway. In fact, I'll pardon him right now.
Sean Ring:I can't believe that because apparently, pardons go through a process with the DOJ. They're not supposed to be supercilious or, you know, fatuous pardons. I can't believe that. They just went yeah, fine, like that's okay, because he's your kid. I would have expected much more pushback, but as a father oh God, I honestly I'm of the don't attempt me Frodo type of person with power. Like because if you stuck me in that Oval Office, like there's going to be shit that's blowing up, like that's why I need to be in a nice house in the middle of the countryside, not without any power.
Mosse:Well, you know you also write a lot about geopolitics, so, and a lot on Syria lately. What are you seeing from the global end? What's the view on that topic from Europe?
Sean Ring:Dude, I'll tell you I didn't see Syria coming. I wish I had that kind of panoramic view about everything, because I was looking at Russia and Ukraine. Russia is winning in ukraine. Okay, russia's or russianic missiles? We don't have an answer for those things. And irish nick I don't know why it's, it's hazeltree, I don't know why they they named it that should have. Should have come up with something a bit tougher, but that those missiles are MIRVs squared. So basically, you know six MIRVs, multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles with six on top of them that are smart bombs, essentially, like they don't just drop ballistically like American MIRVs, they are guided Like what are you going to do against that? And a missile that fired off a missile that that travels at three kilometers a second. There is no answer for it.
Sean Ring:And I think Trump and a lot of people who are in the administration, deep state went holy shit, like those things are real, they are hypersonic, they are 36 warheads a pop, we're fought. Ok, we need to get out of this gracefully. And I think what happened I this is peppy escobar was one of the first people to talk about it. A lot of other people, uh, kind of followed up on it. It seems the the the most sensible thing for me is that Assad stupidly got caught sleeping and the states just went.
Sean Ring:You know what we need to get out of Ukraine? We need to give it back to Russia. How about we just take Syria out of Russia? Russia really shouldn't be there anyway. They only want a warm water poured out of it. That's pretty much all of what Russia's got. Get port out of it. That's pretty much all of what Russia's got. Get them out of there. Give them Ukraine as a nice little. Thank you very much.
Sean Ring:Here's your consolation prize we're going to get the Qatari pipeline built now instead of the Iranian one. Instead of the Iranian one, israel gets to expand its footprint, shall we say a bit. So you've satisfied not just AIPAC, not just Israel, but AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson's widow, who gave you 100 million bucks, who basically should just shut up for the next four years. And I mean this has got trump and trump's people's fingerprints all over it. This is, this is a, a art of the deal type thing, where deep state knew he was going to come into clean house, so they said let's get ahead of this thing. I think it's an absolute fucking masterstroke. It's an evil masterstroke. It's terrible because Ukraine is going to wind up with 500,000 dead people that didn't need to be dead at all and Boris Johnson's got blood on his hands, some amounts of it stopping that peace deal and they've lost pretty much the entire southeast of the country.
Ponch:And don't forget about Hunter Biden in this again right.
Sean Ring:And Hunter Biden, who now you know it all goes away. You know it goes on. Ukraine now is going to go into oblivion and again the Ukrainian Americans in Chicago must be sitting there going what the you know it's horrendous for them. I feel terrible for them. I've been right for you. Sanctions don't work. They just strengthened Russia and Ukraine was dead. They had no way of winning this. You've just got to understand that. Your country just happens to border Russia's country. Nothing's going to change that ever. You've got to make some sort of peace with them. You've got to deal with them somehow.
Sean Ring:And of course, the converse situation is would you let Canada and Mexico do anything like what Ukraine was doing? The answer is, of course not, and the Mexicans and Canadians know better than to even try something like that. So we overextended massively, massively. We should never have been there, and Barack Obama said that years ago himself. You know I was the worst president ever. You know Ukraine is not our sphere of influence, nothing to do with us. Yeah, there's a shitload of you know material in the ground there and natural resources, but ultimately, you know, that's now Russia's. I think they'll pretty much get everything eased into Niagara, whether it's official or not, and everything west of it will be a rough state for Europe, the EU, to deal with. Just another problem for Europe to deal with.
Ponch:So two things timeline on this, and what effect will that have on the markets? I mean, this is a significant change in the last couple of weeks actually.
Sean Ring:Oh well, gold rallied massively and again, this is something I wish I could tell you. I understand every goddamn market move that's out there, but I was expecting the markets to rally a bit more, because to me, this is a resolution. You're going to get your pie. It's going to take a while to build that pipeline and Europe's going to have to import extremely expensive US liquefied natural gas for the next couple of years until that pipeline is built. Because, again, europe, again.
Sean Ring:It depends on how you view this for the EU. The EU wins the quotes there because they get a pipeline that is not from Russia. If you're a European elite, you're happy about that. If you're a European middle class dude like me, I'm like dude. Can we just turn on Nord Stream again Like it was really great? And as long as we don't mess with the Russians, they're not going to shut it off. They can shut off a pipeline to Ukraine because Ukraine's being stupid and not paying market price for natural gas. Germans are going to pay full market price and build really cool stuff with that energy, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. I think Russia is permanently going to turn East anyway. So, as the Europeans, you get a nice new pipeline. It's just going to take a while. So they look like winners Do you think so?
Mosse:if Russia turns East and is doing more with China, do you think that Trump's going to be able to have some kind of a diplomatic rapprochement with them? Do you think that we're going to be able to get along?
Sean Ring:I here's what I think about that. I think the United States has realized what a gobsmacking error it made. Pushing Russia into China's arms Like that just was dumb, you know. And to me, if you, michael Pillsbury wrote a great book called the Hundred Year Marathon, and that is about how the mandarins got it all wrong. The American State Department, people who were China experts, including Henry Kissinger, who stupidly basically gave China our technology in 1970. The reason why China could do what it could do now is because America gave them a whole bunch of shit in the 70ies that they figured out by the eighties and were able to produce by the nineties. And Pillsbury was like we're, we're getting killed here. We made a massive mistake.
Sean Ring:The Soviets, you know, after the sign of the sign of Soviet split, you know, the Russians were like you cannot trust that. Okay, you, you, you cannot trust that. Ok, we need to have some sort of rapprochement here. You know, don't, don't side with the Chinese, but we were so anti-Russian, for whatever reason, we gave China what we could. China's like, thank you very much, you know. Great, but we're going to deal with who we want to deal with and we're going to do what we want because we've got 1.5 billion people, we totally outman you, we do whatever we want. Because we've got 1.5 billion people, like we totally outman you, we can do whatever we want.
Sean Ring:And then, of course, the containment strategy came in, where you got the first island chain and basically the US Navy suffocating the Chinese. The Chinese went. You know what? We can't go buy water. We've never been particularly good as a Navy anyway, you know, save for Zheng he and his voyages way back when. So let's build a railroad to Lisbon instead, and that's where the Belt and Road Initiative comes in. So you basically bound Russia and China together due to very poor American foreign policy, just shit.
Mosse:What's your assessment of the Belt Road now, because it kind of goes through where you are so.
Sean Ring:Jesus, you know, you know honestly love the damn thing you know, and again.
Sean Ring:You know china and italy have had a unique relationship since the days of marco polo, you know. So I I don't have any trouble, like when we crack up. We got we've got loads of sushi restaurants here run by chinese people and not japanese people. It just absolutely makes me feel myself uh, just because the Chinese just know what they're doing, they're just a smart people, so I don't mind that they're around. It's not a oh shit. The Chinese are moving and nobody cares about those immigrants because they just go to work for like 23 out of 24 hours and pay tax. I mean, it gives a shit. America has a sorry. Why I say America? The US government has a very big problem with that happening because and it's rightfully so Europe essentially is the Western Peninsula of Asia. It's just the way it is. And if you get Russia and China together and Germany was a, we'll call it Germany or, better yet, the blue banana of Europe, if you've never heard that term, that's pretty much London through Germany down to northern Italy.
Sean Ring:That's where most of the population is and most of the industry is in Europe, with German, british and even Italian and Swiss engineering expertise, and you get them to sell that stuff to the Chinese middle class, you know.
Mosse:America's Lights out. Yeah, it's not.
Sean Ring:America's never going to be. America's the most blessed country in the world. It's got insane amount of natural resources and it's got something nowhere else that has the Mississippi River. That cuts transportation costs in the country by 50%, because you ship everything into New Orleans and then you ship it up the river and then you could just go like that. You don't have to drive from New York to California necessarily, so it makes things simply cheaper. The thing about Europe we got beautiful rivers here, but none of them connect to each other.
Sean Ring:It's a pain in the ass to get stuff around. Plus, you've got the Alps right in the middle of the place, and then you've got the Carpathians in Eastern Europe, so you've got the mountains in the most inopportune places and the Pyrenees, of course, as well. So America is never going to be poor or completely obsolete. It just won't be that big player in global affairs anymore. And that obsolete and it just won't be that big player in global affairs anymore. Um, and that is what the us government, I think rightly fears. But at the same time, it is inevitable when you basically provide a framework where the world is, for better or worse, at peace pretty much since 1945. Yes, there's been a crazy amount of warfare in there, but they've been isolated in pockets. Everybody else just got better, like like when people, you know and most people don't say this to me, but if people assume like, oh, you're in Europe, you're like behind, like dude.
Sean Ring:No, especially this part of Europe, it's gorgeous. The roads are completely paved, the food is beyond compare, especially health wise, because you know America's food chain has a lot of problems. Now, you know, the education system is amazing. You know, I sent my kid to private school, you know, but it's it's awesome that you know health care. You know even. You know and again, I'm not a believer in free health care or anything like that but you know, what's great here is that even if you want to pay cash, it's way cheaper than you would pay cash for in America. So you know Asia now most of the population of the world is on that side. They have built up amazing stuff, like you know. If you've been to Shanghai, you know Manhattan fits in Shanghai's back pocket. Like Manhattan is nothing compared to Shanghai anymore. Nothing, literally tiny little bit. So I don't think a lot of Americans are quite aware of that. Like how much everyone's caught up now. Still, most of the free capital in the world flows back to the States.
Mosse:How about looking down south from Europe, down in Africa, connected to China? What are you seeing down there?
Sean Ring:from Europe down in Africa, connected to China. What are you seeing down there? It's still a massive risk to invest anywhere on that continent. I mean, south Africa is a disaster. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
Sean Ring:You kind of hope that BRICS would save it. I just don't see that happening. I mean, if you look at Zimbabwe, zimbabwe used to be called Rhodesia but it had white minority rule and the Brits, who went totally communist, didn't like that. So they threw out Ian Smith and gave the country to Mugabe and in 30 years the country was in tatters. That's probably going to be South Africa's fate, unfortunately, even though I love South Africa.
Sean Ring:I went there for the World Cup. It's an amazing place. But you know, geopolitically they are a mess. The north I've been to. I love North Africa, but the problem with North Africa is that it's a desert. You know there's not much you can do with it. You know Tunisia was great. They had their color revolution. Morocco is great. They seem to be probably the most stable. That's because they're up at the corner. No one can bother them, which is great for them.
Sean Ring:Egypt just cannot manage itself as a country. You know they're building that new capital. They're hoping that kind of takes the pressure away from Cairo. But you know you basically got one river that feeds an entire country. You're going to have you know density issues. River that feeds an entire country, you're gonna have. You know density issues. And then you know sub-saharan africa. Besides, you know absence. You know what I was talking about with south africa and stuff. You know congo's a mess nigeria I've been to. I had to teach class in nigeria. You know sweeping under the car for bombs still got to worry about that. Well, I literally drove a four by four down into a pothole and up out of a pothole on a software Like it's just, there's no infrastructure there.
Sean Ring:Yet they haven't sorted that out and I think, funnily enough, the French leaving that part of Africa. Well, they made a great deal because the French basically through the CFA Frank, which was their currency, you know, basically own like for better, for lack of a better word. There's some really amazing videos on that. But but because the bank, the france, held all of africa's gold and then basically loaned them money against that gold. Crazy situation. Um, you know, they they were. They were down for a while. That's why all this stuff in burkina faso and moali's happening, because they just want the French out.
Sean Ring:But with that said, they invited the Russians in and after the let's face it the black guy America gave Russia and Syria. I'm not sure Africa is going to be looking at Russia going. You're the guys that are going to protect us, and so Russia. Really, this was really the first big wrong footed move for Putin since the beginning of the war. Like I think they didn't prosecute the war smartly in the beginning. They too thought that Ukraine would roll over for him in the first couple days. It didn't happen. This is probably the biggest mistake since then.
Mosse:Let's steer back to US markets. So you've had a lot to say about Trump's cabinet picks. Talk to us about Treasury, because you've written about that.
Sean Ring:Well, scott Bessett like yeah, and again, this is the thing, like man it's. You know, scott Bessett seemed to be like the kind of guy I would love to have a beer with. You know cause? He's worked for Soros. He's worked for Jim Chanos, the famed short seller, which to me is even more interesting, so he knows when something's crappy and when it needs to be taken apart. He seems to me to be a strong dollar guy. So Trump getting him in makes sense to me just from overall. I think he's a smart guy. I don't think he's business as usual. I think Elon was incorrect on that. I think he's a very, very smart pick. You actually don't have a banker in there. You've got a fund manager in there at the Treasury, which I think is cool.
Sean Ring:But how Donald Trump reconciles I want low rates and I want the dollar down so we could get our trade balance back with the Treasury secretary, who's going to push back against that? I'm not sure Besson's going to last that long. And again, that has nothing to do with personalities. Those are clear policy differences. Now, besson backed Trump to the hilt, so I don't know what those internal conversations look like. I'd love to hear how they reconcile those positions? Because Besson is anti-Fed. I mean, he's that close to Ron Paul, he hates the Fed, he thinks the Fed's a mess, and he's right. So how do you reconcile that? I don't know what that's going to look like. The bigger problem for me with Trump's tariff policy is not just that if you look at every study which I don't trust every study but if you look at what, like, the National Bureau of Economic Research has come up with, you know China didn't pay a dime for those tariffs. They passed on all the costs to Americans.
Mosse:So you know, if Talk, break that down a little bit, break that down more.
Sean Ring:Well, you know, trump's theory is that, all right, I'm going to slap you with tariffs. So if something costs in America 50 dollars, you know China is going to have to bet. Let's say it's 100 percent tariff, China is going to have to sell that for one hundred dollars and basically, where that 50 dollar loss is going to be selling $50 loss. Essentially, if you're selling it for nothing, china would probably do that for a little while to keep its labor force employed. But sooner or later they'd figure out how to get out of that. The interesting thing is China needs the US market. Okay, why is that? Because if you and again I'm not sure the exact numbers, but let's say the US economy is 20% of the world's economy, 70% of the US economy is 20% of the world's economy. 70% of the US economy is consumption, that means 14% of the world's economy depends on Americans buying stuff straight away. You know just very simple math. That may not be exact, but you have to have Americans buying stuff.
Sean Ring:So Trump's idea is you know foreign exporters, you know, into the United States, are just going to eat some shit to level the playing field. Okay, so now you've got that. Then you've got his policy of telling other countries they've got to buy more of America's manufactured goods. We've got to work on this awful trade imbalance allegedly but I don't think Donald's thought this through and the reason why is OK, let's take this example we buy oil from Saudi Arabia, which we don't really buy that much anymore. We're nowhere near their biggest customer anymore. But let's say we buy oil from Saudi Arabia and they've got that. We handed them a billion dollars. All right, those dollars have to find their way back into the United States.
Sean Ring:Now how do sovereign wealth funds do that? Whether it's Saudi's PIF or Adia from Abu Dhabi or Dubai Investment Authority, they take those dollars and they either buy US stocks, us bonds or US real estate. Those are the things they buy. I've done some work for those guys. Their portfolios are mainly US real estate. It's like okay, donald, no problem, you could tell these guys they have to buy more stuff, but if they're buying more stuff, they're buying less financial assets. So I can see and Besson, I don't think would have any problem with this you know, if that's the case, you're going to really feel some market pain, maybe not next year, but in a couple of years, when those funds start, or at least stop going into US real estate stock assets. I'm not sure what's going to hold up the market after that, so it's yeah, yeah.
Mosse:I mean a lot of. I don't know how it's going's. Uh, yeah, it's. Yeah, I mean a lot of. I don't know how that's gonna pan out. I know, I know here in manhattan there's quite a few empty buildings because they're the properties, be they residential or commercial, or just savings accounts for, uh, china, maybe russia, countries with with less stable banking systems than ours well, I, you.
Sean Ring:it's a great point because I lived in London for 10 years and I never realized how many people are apartments in New York as well. That's, I think, become more recent. But if you look at London like, nobody English owns anything in London, again, that's an exaggeration, of course. But all the prime properties are owned by billionaire Russian oligarchs or used to be, anyway Used to be Russian oligarchs, oil sheiks or property magnates from abroad, or big entrepreneurs from abroad, like ArcelorMittal's CEO you know like, yeah, he's got a house in, you know, right next to Kensington Palace. That's worth something like 250 million bucks. You know just some insane amount of money. You look at London. You look at Vancouver.
Sean Ring:Vancouver is one of those cities that's utterly unaffordable for regular Canadians. Auckland, new Zealand Like who the fuck goes to Auckland, right? Practically unaffordable for Kiwis. Sydney and Melbourne Stupidly unaffordable. Now, those were the main cities. In fact, there's a great blog I used to read while I was living in Hong Kong called Hong Coover, about the Canadian real estate market. So that's where they used to kind of launder their money through. But now it's New York, seattle and it moves around. Toronto got a lot of that. Now, if that foreign buying just dries up.
Sean Ring:You know we could be looking at years of hurt and pain. And New York City. You know I was shocked when I found out you moved to New York City. Like you know, people forget after the Roman Empire collapsed. And this is a ridiculously, you know, ridiculously. You know .0001% example. But when the Roman Empire collapsed, rome's population went from 1 million to 50,000. So that's a 95% population reduction. Now I'm not saying that's going to happen in New York, but I do think James Altucher was right. Jerry Seinfeld is wrong. Cities change. You knowinfeld is wrong. Cities change. People move around and with the internet, with Elon Starlink, you can live in northwest bumblefuck Italy and still do your job.
Mosse:So people are going to get like, as long as you can earn that inflated New York wage and live in a low inflation spot, that to me is the ultimate geo-arbitrage. So just kind of sticking around New York. One of the things in the news lately the longshoremen want to strike because there's automation at stake in a lot of the ports and things. What are you seeing from AI and automation having an effect on global supply chains and things like that? Because this interview I saw the other day the guy was flat out like if you automate, we're going to start a strike, disrupt whatever. It seems like automation would make things a lot smoother listen.
Sean Ring:The reason why we have standard shipping containers around the world is because the long shoremen historically robbed every fucking thing they could get their hands on. Okay, it was an absolute is that the slippage in that industry was insane. So now basically everything's locked up and they just move stuff around. Now I I love blue collar. My dad was a truck driver. He used to go to the pier all the time and pick shit up off the ships. But you can't fight the technology, nor do you want to. Now I can see why the head of the Longshoremen Union, whose name escapes me at the moment, wants to, because he makes a million bucks a year. But that is inevitable.
Sean Ring:However, with that said, you never know what's going to throw. You know, as the British say, a spanner in the works, you know a wrench in the cranks. You know it's, you know you look at the Houthis. The Houthis are like this decade's version of the small pirates, like they just launched like twenty thousand dollar drones and just blow up barges and tankers. You know that are trying to enter the Red Sea. I mean Egypt. Funnily enough, another point about Egypt. I mean they're losing $9.8 billion a year in transit fees through the Suez Canal because the Houthis basically shut the thing down, like with fucking drones, like come on, like when was that ever going to happen?
Sean Ring:So I you know the march towards greater technology, greater automation, isn't inevitable. I mean, the stuff I do chat gpt is, it's nothing compared to what they could do. But you know, I basically have three researchers working for me now that I'm a bank, because they're inside the machine and you know that kind of stuff. I feel bad for people who are going to lose their jobs. Like it's an issue and we need to be sensitive about that, cognizant of it, and try to help out as much as we can. But they're going to need new jobs and especially with supply chain stuff, because we've seen how the supply chain has inflated prices and that just costs an incumbent that, amongst other things, his job.
Sean Ring:So it's enormously important and politicians are looking at it and if you look at Mark Andresen when he was talking to Joe Rogan, he's like you know they basically want to control the whole AI Because, like honestly, if everything goes and I'm not saying AI is going to take over the world I don't believe in Skynet, I don't think we're anywhere near that. Like we're basically on decision trees still Okay. But with that said, do you really need a government overseeing every facet of your life if you've got AI? The answer is no, like it's just flat out no, you just don't need them anymore. I'm not saying you don't need them for anything originally designed for, like protect the citizenry, close the borders down when you need to, and provide me, you know, some sort of fair trials. You know if we have a justice system, you know that's it. You know the stuff that the government's wound up sticking its fingers in is just ridiculous now.
Mosse:So when you see things like Elon saying that you know we're the media ridiculous now. So when you see things like Elon saying that you know we're the media. And what's interesting, you wrote the other day about how Tucker Carlson is actually doing the job of US diplomats by having a reach out to the Soviet foreign minister. And I don't know if you saw the comments of the I forget who it was, but they're at the National Press Club. They're basically saying, like you're not the media, it seems like they're at the National Press Club. They're basically saying like you're not the media, like it seems like they're delusional, like Rome is burning around them. The legacy media industry has been completely replaced and it's still just on. It's just like the coyote effect, right, like Coyote Red has run off the cliff. It just hasn't looked down yet before it falls.
Sean Ring:You know Upton Sinclair paraphrase what he said. He said you know it's? It's hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it, and their paycheck right now this is uh, oh, paul. Tudor jones, the great hedge fund manager, uh, had an interview. I forgot, oh god, I forgot who he's talking to. I think he was on cbc. He's brilliant, though, um and I. He said we're in a k-fab right now and I had never heard the term. He had never heard the term.
Sean Ring:But k-fab is that agreement between two parties that, yeah, this is fake, but we're gonna ignore it, like professional wrestling. Like we know your shit's fake and you know that, we know it's fake, but we don't care. We're gonna play people who are a part of the sherlock home society. They play the game, they they pretend sherlock was real. They talk about the cases as if they just happened around them, like it's just, it's kabuki theater, essentially, and that's, that's what we're in right now. And the press has to be like that, because who cares what they say? You're right.
Sean Ring:Like I watched, funnily enough, when I was in new york for the election. I was teaching for a couple days and I was up all night jet lag watching, like waiting for michigan and wisconsin to come in, like come on um and and I'm just like I can't believe I'm flipping between nbc, nbc and uh, I refuse CNN. I think I had NBC, nbc and CBS on. I was flipping through it. I'm like this is the first time I've watched these idiots in years and did I give a shit about what they were saying? No, I just wanted to see the numbers pop up.
Sean Ring:What they say is utterly irrelevant now, and I think Elon's right X has become the town square and he's done a great service. Although everyone thinks that he's poisoned the waters, I think the complete opposite. I think he's cleaning the air by buying it and letting people, even with distasteful views, say stuff. I mean we wouldn't know anything without that. We'd all be in the dark. You know, if we didn't have X and, believe me, they're all watching X now the other thing that cracks me up is that you know podcasts, like you know Gen Z and the Homelanders, whatever they call themselves, that's where they get most of their news. You know they're not watching television anymore, so it's especially network news. You know it's. You know they're not watching television anymore, so it's um, especially network news. So it's a completely new paradigm. They don't know how to to to confront it. The only thing, of course, that the networks have done well on the internet is figuring out advertising. Um, that's it. After that, they're crap punch.
Mosse:What do you think of my good friend sean ring this?
Ponch:is. Here's what I'm thinking how can we get you on weekly, you know twice a month, whatever just to have this conversation, because this is awesome oh, thank you.
Sean Ring:Yeah, no, I'm. I'm free a lot of the time.
Mosse:I would love to do so if you guys want to do, we've been doing things on x live where we can have you join us on X Live.
Ponch:Yeah, this is the type of conversation that is. It's not an academic conversation, it's a hey, wake up and smell what's going on. Here's what happened, not the feed that you were getting on. You know, you got to take a vaccine, you got to do this, you got to do that. It's not an attitude and belief, it's looking at what and it is a perspective. Right, so we're talking about what's happening with the Fed. It's a perspective. It doesn't mean that's the truth, but people need to hear this because and something else you brought up I want to follow up on, and that is the this market.
Ponch:You know we're out all time highs today. You know gold's at all time. I believe crypto is close to it, right, everything. You know inflation is pretty damn high. Blah, blah, blah. We got everything at. A lot of people look at that as, hey, this is the end of the world, it's going to. You know market's going to implode. Well, yeah, but maybe not right now. Right, and you brought that up earlier. So we we've been looking at a lot of things saying, hey, this is not what. You know, I'm not a trained economist. I have an economic background and I think it's safe as Mark. But when we look at how things work. You know it matters to, it shouldn't matter to folks Challenge assumptions.
Ponch:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sean Ring:So let me tell you about a very recent mistake. I dumped all my stocks when Powell cut 50 bips, which was a mistake I'm like I wish I didn't do that. We are now in another everything rally and the important thing about this is not to dump everything before it stops and it takes again. Like I said, I just made that mistake. I stopped making that mistake for a very long time. I've ridden this whole rally pretty much up until October. I'm now back in. I'm totally long on the miners now, so I'm fully invested.
Sean Ring:I've got one biotech pick just because the chart looks good. Not because I particularly believe in the company, but particularly with gold. With gold, I think gold is going to take off because whatever the Donald does, it looks inflationary. The only way it's going to get deflationary is by accident and that means it's going to be a big dump in the market. But I don't know when that's going to be. We might be a year or two away from that, believe it or not. I said that last year. In fact I looked over my predictions that I did for Paradigm last night and I said we would have a $2,500 gold price. I was a month off on the timing, but I said it would happen before the election and that we would hit 5,600 DSP right around the election.
Sean Ring:I was very close on both of them so I was very happy about that. But you know now that Donald's in, you know the rally in the Russell should surprise nobody it happened the first time because he's going to slash regulation please.
Sean Ring:Jeff Bezos was just talking to. What's his face? Is it Aaron? No, it's not Aaron Sorkin, that's the right one. The other one, andrew Aaron Sorkin. That's the right one. The other one, andrew Ross Sorkin. At a CNBC conference, and you know, bezos is like I want to help Trump cut regulation. If he's real about that and he's got his stuff organized and he said unlike his first administration, I will help him do that. So even Jeff Bezos is kind of bullish that way. So great on the Russell stocks, because most of them lose money and that's when we're going to see a turning point. Watch the Russell first, okay. And if you want to get even more granular, the Russell growth stocks, the ones that actually tend to move well with the markets, which I think is IWG, it's not the IWM the whole muscle.
Sean Ring:Yet when that starts rolling over, that's when you start going okay, maybe, maybe this is going to start ending. You position yourself around that and you wait for confirmation signals. But that's a pretty good way to tell if we're going to be in trouble or not. But we're not right now and you've got to participate. You know, gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Okay, you know, in terms of this market, because I do think when we shit the bed and we will eventually Don't know when and again, I'm not a doom monger anymore.
Sean Ring:I'm not a much happy person now that I'm not a doom monger. I'm a much happier person now that I'm not a doom monger. But when it does happen, I do think we could see a repeat of the 1929-1931 scenario, where everyone still talks about the 29 crash Like holy, that market crash in 29,. That was terrible. But if you look at a chart and you go from 1929 to 1932, that crash was the little tip of the iceberg. On top, the damage was 1931. That was the worst stock market in history. We lost another 40% and the only other time that I get a recent memory where anything like that's happened was the NASDAQ crash where, yeah, february 2000,. March 2000,. March 1st 2000 was the top, but it took three years for that to stop rolling down and the NASDAQ went from 5,000 to 1,100 by that point. So you know, once it starts rolling over, it could keep rolling over for a while and then after that it's all about. Well, when do I get back in? What's the signal to turn bullish again?
Ponch:Yeah, so I got another thing for you, sean the buy and hold idea that our grandparents or our parents liked. I tried to explain on that. Hey look, man, these companies. The company lifecycle is short. It's not going to stick around forever, this type of idea where people want to buy something and hold on to it forever. What are your thoughts on that?
Sean Ring:If you pick the right companies, you can. One of the things that I wish I did earlier was look at good companies that pay dividends that grow over a long time. If you go to marketbeatcom, which I'm not affiliated with at all, you know they have the dividend aristocrats, the dividend kings and the dividend I forgot what the other ones are but you know basically companies that have, for 10, 25, and 50 years, increased their dividends and those are a good place to look if you want long-term holdings, because I think we get very bad advice when we're young. I don't think you should be investing in tech when you're 21. That is stupid and stocks are too damn expensive anyway.
Sean Ring:Get a decently priced company with like a 4% div yield so it's down a little bit and just let those dividends accumulate for the first 10 years and then you'll have a nice pot. And once you get to a hundred grand, then you could start playing around in biotech and tech and stuff that may take off, you know. But I think that the key thing is you know everyone says the first million is the hardest to make, but Charlie Munger rightly said like, once you get to 100 grand and you can mess around with that you're going to be fine Like you won't believe how fast your money starts growing and that was true for me. I think it's true for pretty much everybody. It's just the mathematics take over after that, as long as you don't make terrible picks at the wrong time.
Ponch:Yeah, hey. One last question for me 24-hour markets. We're looking at that in 2025. You want to talk about this some other time? You got time right now.
Sean Ring:Oh, I've got time, dude, I'm Listen. I was a futures broker in London while I it's funny I got that job while I was at grad school. While I it's funny I got that job while I was at grad school. And, yeah, I served my time at London Business School, the Hallowd Halls, and I became a futures broker. The one thing that was a pain in the ass was I'd have to be in the office at 630 in the morning to receive the orders from Sydney and Tokyo and to put them in my machine. So I had them they were still working and we literally it was a follow the sun thing and then at the end of the day I'd have mine to New York. At the end of the day I'd hand it back to Tokyo and Sydney.
Sean Ring:So 24-hour markets make sense to me. The reason why the quants want them is because it's easier to bottle them. So you know, if you're looking at continuous versus discrete mathematics and again, I'm not a mathematician, but I know too many geeks you know it's just way easier for your models to start working properly when you've got continuous pricing rather than having all these breaks. So that's another reason for it. I'm not sure what's going to happen. It depends on liquidity. You know where is the liquidity going to go in most of the world if you've got 24 hour markets. And again, if Americans can start trading China, australia, new Zealand, how would an inflow of American capital affect those markets? I think that's a more interesting question than the other way around, because I think we just America Sorry, I have to use, you know, perpetually subcapital. So I don't think it's going to be a massive change, other than a lot of people sleeping less because they've got blue light in their phone and they're at bed hoping their wives don't see them doing it, you know. And they're trading. But you know I like more liquidity the better. You know it's OK. And again, you know you're going to have to watch gap risk. You know people who are going to be looking for stops are going to trigger them at the most inopportune times. So you're going to, we're going to have a lot of flash crashes, I think, and a lot of those instances, until they figure out how to prohibit them or the people who start those avalanches figure out that it's not the best thing in the world.
Sean Ring:Quick, quick story when I was a futures broker, I used to cover Druckenmiller's fund, duquesne and one of their guys. I didn't cover him, I never met him, unfortunately, but one of his guys, who was working his system, called me up. It's literally I think it was like 6.20 in the morning. I just got in the office I'm like what do you want? You know, pick it up, and he goes sell 2,000 US 10-year futures at market. And you know 2,000 US 10-year futures at market. And there's nothing on the screen. At that time I said to the guy I don't want to go and say his name. I said nobody's here, I go, it's 1 o'clock in the morning, you're retired, he goes just sell 2,000, goddammit. And I went okay, 2,000, market. And basically, if you look at market microstructure, you've got the offer and then you've got the offers as they go higher and the bids as they go lower and when you hit that bid hard, you're basically hitting every branch of the ugly tree on the way down. So my order sank the US Treasury market by one point, one full point, not by one thirty-second, one full point. And then, of course, at seven o'clock, when everybody else got in, my dealer board lit up like a Christmas tree.
Sean Ring:What happened? And I had to make up some bullshit. I was like institutional selling out of New York. I couldn't go. Oh yeah, some crazy person is trying to start an avalanche here. You can't say that, especially when it's your client. Later in that day my boss came in and said did you tell anyone what you did? I go, fuck off. I'm like you know, I didn't say it. I didn't even put it on the chat board, I didn't even write out what happened. I know the game, don't worry about it. It turned out that it was a four thousand lot order. He gave me half and the guy from merrill half. But of course, being at merrill, they fucked it up and told everybody what happened and that guy got fired in the afternoon. But you know, some people will. The point of that story, sorry, is that some people will try to create ugliness and set off a bunch of stops in the middle of the night to scare the shit out of the market.
Ponch:Can governments do that? Can you use it? If it's warfare, can, uh, could that be considered a form of warfare?
Sean Ring:dude. I to me, yeah, that's what they're doing all fucking day long. But the thing is, if you're china, are you really gonna try to tank the uS market? You've got to be fucking nuts. I mean the market, you know, like my colleague Enrique Betia lovely guy, he goes I'm bullish 90% of the time because the market goes up 90% of the time. That's what happens when you've got a central bank. You ever saw the 1978 Superman movie with Christopher Reeves holding up the earth? Like that's what the Fed's doing right now. So you know they're not, they're not going to tank anything like that.
Sean Ring:If you look at, like the balances of the futures markets, like Belgium has something like 300 billion in futures contracts outstanding, all that is is basically everybody's positions aggregated in Europe. Clear. You know so before they, before they start trading. So you know it's, it's. It can be a form of warfare, and I'm sure our guys do. Look at what happens when Mr Slammy wakes up in a bad mood to the silver price. I mean, don't tell me that's not manipulated, that's absolutely manipulated. That's just internal warfare. That's just the Fed and their minions against the rest of us.
Mosse:But, yeah, absolutely so, Sean, we'll put a pin in this one for now, because we're gonna have, we're gonna have you come back and we're gonna go live. Um, I would challenge everybody listening. If you've heard stuff that, like you found like off-putting or crazy or insane or, uh, you disagree with, even more reason to sign up for sean's uh, rude awakening. Because you know punch and I talk about this all the time if you're not challenging your assumptions, if you're not testing your beliefs, if you're not putting this, all you know you're, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. It's going to misshape your, your observations, your decisions, your actions and what you learn as reality unfolds. So, uh, we're going to send people to rootawakeninginfo. Anything else we should be reading or following from your lens.
Sean Ring:I occasionally post on X. I'm at Shawnee Chaos, but that's more tangential If you want my real views, and it's every day, and it's me writing, by the way, so that's my main job in between GMTG gigs. It's therootawakeninginfo.
Mosse:Well, it's great to be your friend because a lot of times you know when I read it I can send you a text and be like dude.
Sean Ring:That was awesome I think like something like markets too.
Mosse:Like you know, that could be very uh, serious or, you know, very numbers driven. It's always good to have your uh, your, your character and uh and you certainly are a character uh to have you have your take on it. Uh, because it's always good to have your uh, your, your character and uh and you certainly are a character uh to have you have your take on it. Uh, because it's certainly entertaining. You can take some sometimes some of the dry subjects you have, even get really exciting and funny.
Sean Ring:So thank you. It's very kind of you, mate. I, I, I, I very much appreciate it and thank you for having me on. You guys are you're doing yeoman's work here. Uh, I love your VUCA and your UDA and all that stuff that I've never heard of before and it's just. It's amazing because I think you know, one of the things I prided myself on my whole life is you want to be that person that doesn't fold when the clock is ticking, and I think what you guys do is provide a system to make yourself better at things when the clock is ticking, and I think what you guys do is provide a system to make yourself better at things when the clock is ticking. So I very much appreciate that.
Mosse:Well, it's a mission every day, so hang with us. We're going to close the recording, but we want to thank you for coming on and ciao.
