Right? I feel like it's you're paying your tuition of, of learning from the mistakes, so it makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

I started, uh, working investor relations cold for a company that I-- a startup that I was, you know, nominally invested in, but I loved, and I was obsessed with the company, and I reached out to management, and they, uh, brought me on as a IR person there.

It was a very small company.

We had, like, 30 employees.

Uh, so I was doing IR and also, like, working in the plant, it was an industrial company, at the same time.

And through that process, started to get my first glimpse at the world of, like, public reporting and securities lawyers and all the things that go into filings.

But, um, you know, what are you making of the AI trade right now? I'm imagining it's sort of more in the BS, uh, camp on your end, but would love to hear kind of how you're viewing it, seeing it, what are the important things to pay attention to, and yeah, would love to get a sense, your sense there.

Chris, what was your main point that you wanted to get across with the note you put out today?

Yeah, that's a good way to do things because I wr- So I wrote that piece this morning, and it was prompted by reading a Wall Street Journal article that just kind of explained that over the last seven years, I think it was, that the top, uh, 0.1% had doubled their wealth, um, and now control something like $28 trillion.

And the more important thing isn't that...

You know, the, the most important thing is how quickly the ultra-rich and the rich are pulling away from the middle and lower class.

Now, listen, I'm a capitalist, okay? I'm not, I don't believe that the government or anybody should be, you know, providing for anybody.

I believe that for the most part it's a dog-eat-dog world, and, you know, if you wanna make money, you should get out there and hustle and build your empire from the ground up.

But unfortunately, you know, right now the markets and everything here in the US exist in this, in this like snow globe.

Yeah.

Again, where was your awareness to those? How able were you to look into self and to notice whether any one of those arrows was most important, where wisdom would take you to if you were able to bring something helpful to yourself at that moment?

Yeah, I love it.

I think to riff off your idea of shame as a bubble that sort of holds us in threat, the way I was thinking about it was that it became a double bind too, in a way, that I felt like the one thing that might get me out of it was some sort of steps towards reconnection.

How can I approach reconnection? My other half, and I don't know, maybe even repair a bit what some of the...

I wasn't terrible, let me just say that, but I'm suddenly having a shame experience again.

I like to approach and reconnect, but the shame...

That was what I needed, but the shame...

Yeah, so, like, what's the big-picture view for you today? And as you know, Chris, you can take all the time you need to set the table.

I think we're still pretty much in the same spot right now.

I mean, when we last talked, the Fed was still stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I think they're there now, although we did get that one inflation reading last week that made it look as though prices were starting to come down.

But when you look at a year-over-year basis, inflation is still well above the Fed's target.

It's been there for over 60 months.

Kevin Warsh coming in and appointing five task forces and saying that he's going to...

So going back to just like the market setup and maybe more of like the makeup of the market, what is your assessment there? Like, yeah, maybe like let's just kind of dive in on like what is your kind of assessment of the market today, maybe diagnose like the health of it and contextualize that to like what we've seen in the past.

Yeah

... and why I wanted to talk to you.

Because we're not far off.

Right now as it stands, things are ridiculous.

The valuation here is ridiculous.

You're paying $2 trillion 100 times sales for a company that's not turning a profit.

I don't care what your fucking projection is for 2030, 2040, 2050, the, the amount of progress, underlying progress this company would have to make to catch up to its valuation right now is ridiculous.

Corporatism, crony capitalism, yeah

Mm-hmm

... for various mental health ailments.

And so naturally I just see, hey, here you have a whole class of drugs that I know are, you know, relatively safe in a clinical setting, that have the opportunity to tackle innumerable amounts of mental health challenges, not the least of which are, you know, depression, anxiety, PTSD, all these things.

Um, of course there are certain indications where they should not be used, things in people with schizophrenia and, and the likes.

I'm not a doctor.

But, um, I think that they are all going to have tremendous efficacy.

The clinical trials, the phase two trials, and a couple of the phase three trials out now, um, or even ones that had come out last year or the year before, all looked, uh, positive.

Yeah.

From your perspective, just how bad are things? Is it, is it really all that bad, or like most things in life, is there more nuance at play?

Well, I mean, how bad are things or how bad do they look? Because they don't look that bad, right? Like n- nominal price of the stock market continues to go higher.

The valuations, I mean, we've come off a little bit here, but we're pretty much as stretched in terms of valuations as we've ever been historically.

You know, I, I don't know if the question is, uh...

There, it- things are bad in the sense that the way things look aren't the way that things are, and that's the story we're kind of seeing in private credit right now.

You got a whole sector full of mismarked books and level three accounting that needs to be adjusted and is starting to be adjusted.

And as that's happening, you're seeing people rush for the exits in concert together, and you're seeing redemptions getting gated and, you know, bigger and bigger.

... are you seeing opportunity this year?