I've been open that I'm not trying to play an economist—"I'm a tattooed former bartender… not an economist"—but I've spent twenty years watching cycles, incentives, and policy. What I see now looks like the early innings of something real.

As I said in the interview, it looks like "we're in inning two of nine of a real recession," and it has that "end of empire" feel—not because I want drama, but because the evidence is finally lining up.

I talked through how I got the timing wrong in the past. When the Fed started hiking, I expected an almost immediate implosion under the weight of "positive real rates on the biggest bubble in history." I didn't account for just how much post-COVID liquidity and savings were sloshing around the system, or how slow monetary lags can be.

Two years on, the things I thought would show up are showing up: subprime auto lenders blowing up, a Miami luxury developer going bankrupt, "AAA-rated distress in commercial real estate" getting marked down to pennies, freight and heavy-truck sales slowing, and delinquencies rising across credit cards, personal loans, and now student loans.

I noted that the hard data matters, but so does psychology; when the jobs numbers crack, it gives the public a simple, shared story that the economy is slowing, and once sentiment flips, deleveraging feeds on itself.

From there, I laid out the sequence I think is most likely. At some point we get a sharp, SVB-style break—maybe in commercial real estate, maybe in crypto, maybe somewhere we're not looking—that forces the Fed to move.

"Most of the time you see market bottoms after the Fed has already started cutting," and I don't think this time is different. If the long end refuses to cooperate with big deficits and rising debt service, yield-curve control is the next logical trick. That's just monetization by another name. Saving the day in market terms risks breaking things in price-stability terms; the path of least resistance is another wave of inflation.

We also dug into why the stock market can look fine while the foundation erodes. Passive flows and the "Magnificent Seven" have rewired the plumbing.