#1306 Stefan Rust | Inflation Is Wrong — Here is Proof

Stefan Rust is the Founder of Truflation, it’s an alternative economic measurement platform using new data to better measure inflation. In this conversation, we talk about the problems with the current CPI measurement from the government, what Truflation is doing differently, how they are collecting data, personalized inflation, global opportunities, and more. ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to ⁠us.espres.so/pomp⁠. They have a brand new offer waiting for you. ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 260,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Stefan Rust. He's the founder of Trueflation. It's an alternative economic measurement platform that has all sorts of new data that is trying to get better at answering the question, what is inflation? And how should we be measuring it?

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  In this conversation, we talk about what are the problems with the current CPI measurement from the US government, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We also get into what Trueflation is doing differently. How are they collecting data? What is the methodology? And who is this going to help? Will it be investors, consumers, the government, or maybe someone else? I always enjoy talking to entrepreneurs who are willing to make big bets in areas that people seem to have left behind. And Stefan is the epitome of exactly that. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I learned a lot, and I think you will as well. Here is my conversation with Stefan Rust.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:41Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:54Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Stefan here. I thought a great place to start is inflation is obviously something that everyone debates. There's the kind of government statistics. They say inflation got high about 9% and then it came down a little bit. There's people on the internet who say, no, you liars. It went way higher than that. You guys are all lying to us and I'm not getting to keep up with inflation because it's rising too quickly. Why is it so heavily debated? Shouldn't this just be math? 1 plus 1 equals 2. Why can people not agree on what the actual inflation rate is?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Well, you'd think so, right? But yeah, thanks for having me back, by the way, and glad people are paying attention and interested in the topic inflation. Totally underestimated how big a topic it was going to be and is currently still. But that said, you know, if you think about it, it's there's a scorecard for an economy is generally viewed as one metric and that is inflation, right? People just look at how is the economy performing, performing, and that is inflation. And if you go back and look at who calculates inflation, how is it calculated? And what is the methodology? All of those elements are under the same house, right?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  So the same people that actually, you know, perform the economy or manage the economy are the same ones driving the scorecard are the same ones driving the actual methodology and how to score an economy and then going to collect the data that feeds into the score. So too many, you know, mixed and conflict of interests, I think, involved in that whole process. And so that's why we really felt that, number one, we need to automate that process. Number two is we need to provide transparency, immutability to it, and then ultimately get a independent source for inflation.

• 5:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, if the inflation number is wrong, the CPI number that the government is using, where does that have the biggest impact? Is that just like it poorly informs central bankers in terms of monetary policy decisions? Does it poorly inform consumers in terms of their purchasing decision? Does it poorly inform investors? Where do you see the biggest negative impact?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  So biggest impact is obviously inflation is a hidden tax, right? I mean, ultimately, the value of the money that you've saved gets debased. So we lose in terms of purchasing power and that has a significant impact. The other element, think about it, governments today around the world have some $4.4 trillion in inflationary linked bonds. These are loans that they give out and ask people to give them money and guarantee those loans against inflation plus interest on top of that. Ultimately, the interest is lower because they're guaranteeing inflation. So in real terms, which is an economic name for actually saying we are above inflation,

• 6:56Speaker 02

  we're outperforming inflation. And ultimately, they're calculating inflation and then giving you an interest right associated with that $4.4 trillion. That's quite a significant number and that has a significant impact that until trueflation, it has always been taken for granted. You know, the numbers again provided by the BLS and we can issue 4.4 trillion. And our view is, you know, we need to change that and have an independent source to accurately reflect how investors get rewarded.

• 7:28Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see them going into the stores, right? The Bureau of Labor Statistics sends people physically into a store with a tablet and they got to go and look for the exact soup with no salt, right? Make sure that they get it correct. You all are taking this automated approach. Explain like where are you finding the data? How are you making sure that the data you're using as an input is accurate? And then how often are you checking to see whether that data has changed or not?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  So there, we check every, every day, or I mean, in some cases, you don't really need to check every day. So we check every week. In some of the bigger cases, we check every month. So we come in all different time intervals. For groceries, I mean, we break down, contrast to the government that breaks it down into six categories. We have 12 subcategories that we track the data in. We have 18 million items versus 80,000 items. So ultimately, a significant, larger portfolio of items that we track. We have three price feeds per item. All of that, ultimately, we get updated through multiple different channels.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  They can come through, actually, the grocery stores, which are sharing their sort of receipts at the teller, you know, sort of point of sales. So we get that information. We get it through IOT devices. We get it through barcode readers. We get it through API feeds from the various outlets, from CarGurus, from BumZillow, from Trulia, you name it, sort of all the different sites. And more and more so, we're also getting it and including sort of synthetic assets associated with real world assets into the mix. So we get just a different perspective of how prices are changing. I mean, the reason why we got into this in the first place is we were being told that inflation is transitory. And actually, there's no way it was transitory.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  We were all experiencing, you know, toilet paper shooting up the roof in terms of how expensive toilet paper was getting and other items. We were seeing shrinkflation. All these other elements were coming into the mix that were not being reported. And we felt we needed to track that. And so, you know, it's, it's no longer, you know, shrinkflation, how do you track shrinkflation? You know, the different size packets, and you were alluding to it, it's salt or without salt, right? Ingredients get extracted, sizes get smaller, prices may stay the same, but the size is smaller. How do you take that into account in, in, in a whole mix? And so those are all elements that we challenge our analytics team day in, day out to sort of filter out and, and wait accordingly.

• 10:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you see that data coming in, the next thing is you've got to have a methodology of how you actually calculate it. One of the big controversies or highly debated components of CPI is that they created this basket and the basket has different weightings of the goods. And what is the basket? How does it work? They try to explain it, but I think people have a lot of questions. And then it also doesn't get at the point that like, maybe you have different inflation experience than I do, based on what I buy. And so how do you think about the methodology? Do you have a basket? How are you doing that? And then how do you also think about personalized inflation and maybe trying to measure that?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we have a, we take a census-based approach, number one. Number two, the government takes a panel-based approach. So the way the government does it is they take a thousand households, they rotate those households every month and see how those households are spending and extrapolate that across the market. We try to actually aggregate real spending power based on credit card data, based on consumer patterns. We've actually launched on trueflation.com/calulator, you can actually go and calculate your personal inflation. We have a couple of profiles, you can find a profile close to you to simplify the input process. And we will be launching very soon, an anonymous credit card integration,

• 11:18Speaker 02

  where you can just tie your credit card to the account and constantly be updated, based on your spending pattern. What are you seeing over a course, a period of time? What is inflation? And how is that impacting you on a personal level? And so those are things that we're trying to add and aggregate more and more real time data from the actual users themselves in terms of how they're spending it, and then be able to personalize it into types of individuals or different categories, urban, rural, you know, yeah, high, you know, tech worker, you know, a sort of factory worker, different ranges of suburban family, sort of, and things like that.

• 12:02Anthony Pompliano?

  When we look at suburbs versus urban areas, one of the things that is also happening is there seems to be government spending, which may be at odds with monetary policy. So the Fed is tightening, but politicians are stuffing liquidity into the market. And so even when you just look at the Fed's balance sheet, or you look at interest rates, like, oh, inflation should be coming down aggressively. If you actually go and you look at some of the month over month inflation numbers, it's telling a different story than the year over year numbers. And so how do you start to break out some of these nuances, suburban versus urban, you know, month over month versus year over year? And really try to get at like, what is likely happening with inflation today? And how will that affect my portfolio? Or how will that affect the goods that I'm going to buy?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Well, there are two elements. There's the structural side of things that, that, that we've seen and experienced through the whole COVID and, and now sort of the, the attempt to sort of become, bring, do more onshoring, right? As we bring more and more of the manufacturing onshore, et cetera. That's what we call sort of structural changes. And then there are the seasonal changes, right? Where you see sort of spending patterns around the Christmas timeframe, around the summer holidays. All of these things have an impact on pricing and inflation. You know, we just saw December numbers be announced in January. We're coming up next week to the January numbers. We see the January numbers come down over the December numbers significantly.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  But we're also going to see a catch up, right? So it takes time for businesses to adjust their pricing. So in some cases, and it's not necessarily gouging, you know, they've been, they've experienced inflation, they've had, you know, more salary increases, they've had cost of goods go up, supply chain costs go up, et cetera. Those take a time to filter through. And then actually before the pricing hits the shelves, it just takes time. And that might see coming back, inflation coming back in the next couple of months.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  And so that, that's sort of one aspect that we're sort of looking at and sort of how we sort of see trends happening, I'd say that's, yeah.

• 14:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, how can people use this alternative inflation measurement, right? One of the things is you got to get the data, right? The second thing is you got to get legitimacy in the eyes of certain people. And then the third thing is it can be implemented. Do you expect this to be a replacement? Do you expect this to be a complementary data source to CPI? How do you expect people to use it?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, CPI is so entrenched. We don't see that us really having a big dent at the moment. The advantage we've had is a mistrust in the numbers that are being reported by the CPI. We like to view ourselves as a complementary data to be able to hold accountable the people that are actually doing the B or the people at the BLS actually calculating government-related metrics. There is so entrenched, you have the whole federal system, statistical system that actually has some 13 different departments that are aggregating data across different categories. And they then all sort of report overlapping numbers to some extent. And what we're seeing is they don't actually even integrate with each other.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  How can they use modern systems to be able to help them be more efficient, have less headcount, operationally be super lean, report fast in real time, no more with stale data? All of those things, we're trying to sort of help and provide, you know, it's just an alternative source of truth for this. Ultimately, our goal is when will people want to issue? Or when will institutions want to issue a loan or bond tied to truflation? I mean, that would be sort of really a stamp of approval for what we're working on and what we've been, you know, sort of working the last three years on.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Our methodology, by the way, is super transparent. You can go to the website, download the methodology. Everybody that has reviewed our methodology has been super impressed by the accuracy, the breakdown, the level of professionalism that has gone into that as along with that transparency. And apparently our website doesn't reflect that that easily. But you have different types of users, people that just want to come and see and quickly see the metrics. And then you have people that really want to analyze the details and the data. So we had to accommodate for both constituents.

• 16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the response been from reporters? Like, I find that they have a big hand in pushing a narrative.

• 16:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Most of them do a great job. They are trying to kind of figure it out just along with everyone else. Are they starting to use truthflation more often or are they still stuck on CPI as the sale bill?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  No, I think we're seeing it grow more and more. I mean, we see different types of media, right? So the right, I mean, sort of Fox will then sort of always use truthflation as an alternative source of truth. NASDAQ, the financial services sector will use truthflation and always like to hear truthflation's opinion. But it's more just, let's get a different opinion. Let's have a different perspective. And we definitely provide a different perspective. And, and the people that want to take it serious and sort of front run the BLS numbers. They will use truthflation and the people that want to just wait and see what the outcome is of the BLS, they will have their alternative sources to try and front run it themselves.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  With whatever means that they possibly can. And when I say front run, I don't mean it in a negative sense. They're just trying to predict the outcome and what they try to do is then trade on the, you know, yield associated with a lot of these interest rates, inflation linked bonds.

• 17:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see the inflation in the United States take off and then come crashing back down.

• 18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  At the same time, we have tons of bank executives and others saying that a recession is incoming. But we also see the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on 60 Minutes the other night saying, basically, everyone chill out, you know, it's okay.

• 18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there other data points that you all think that you can start to get at that can help people be better informed outside of just the inflation numbers?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we're trying to get much more data. We actually bring in what we call leading economic indicators, which influence the future pricing of inflation. So that can be the price of commodities. The raw materials that go into, let's say, EV vehicles, right? So all of a sudden I have copper, I have nickel, I have palladium, I have platinum. All of these elements go into the battery that's required to power EV vehicles. If we believe that EV vehicles is the next element, how is that going to impact the pricing of EV vehicles? How do we do that in the housing market, the price of of of of wood in meat groceries? If we still want to eat meat on the table, how does that impact the price?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Supply chain, weather, all of these elements, how can we identify patterns? And then get into the more predictability associated with it. We're really comfortable today to go three months out into predicting predicting inflation. And and one month is is sort of automated now. And and three months, we still need a bit of human influence to identify some trends and be able to imply, you know, take in black swan events, potential black swan events, and then give that awaiting in the mix manually at the moment, but we're trying to automate a lot of that.

• 19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about personalized inflation and you guys have this new product that's coming out in terms of being able to essentially say, hey, here's what I spend money on, like, how much is inflation affecting me? What is that product really going to do and how does it work?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  So, I mean, it's it's it's basically you you go on, you go on to the site. You choose your demographic, are you an urban professional, a retired senior, a suburban family? And then it pre-populates based on the average spending, the income that you get in in that. And you can adjust each one of those elements. So if you find your spending is a bit more or a bit less, you can just adjust it. But everything's pre-populated. And then it just calculates what inflation is for your household. And then, you know, how does that impact your monthly spend? And what is the result of that? And so those are elements that we will just automate. One thing we are announcing is in the next couple of weeks, we will be bringing out a anonymous credit card integration.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  So you can just give us your credit card details and you'll earn for sharing some of that points, for sharing some of that insight. And you will then be able to then actually just continue to spend with that credit card. And that data will be updated anonymously on your account so that you can then actually go and see, without having to populate anything, how you're actually spending it? And where inflation is impacting you most? Is it in your rent, if you pay rent with credit card, though? But if you're spending in transportation, on your utilities, on healthcare, et cetera.

• 21:19Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see the spending on my credit card.

• 21:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Can I actually predict if I buy this now versus if I buy it in 90 days? And I'm assuming consumer goods may be easier than some of these other things. But food, I need the food now. I can't not eat for 90 days. But on some of these consumer goods, is that possible at some point?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  At some point, we'll be able to do that one month out. I don't think 90 days yet. We're not confident with that, but we'll be able to give you 30 days out in terms of what the price of these items will, how will they evolve over the next 30 days? That we'll be able to do. Food items, we update on a weekly basis. I mean, generally, the price of eggs don't go up every single day. They change maybe over a weekly basis and things like that. Clothing update, we update it sort of pretty much weekly as well. Clothing seems to have come down significantly for some reason or other. And I mean, largely due to oversupply from Christmas, the overhang of Christmas.

• 22:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the most surprising thing of working on this? Right? I think everyone, again, controversy over inflation and people think that the government data is inaccurate. You now have spent three years digging deep into what they're doing, how they're doing it, with the methodology, is the data sources, you know, kind of all of the different inputs that go into calculating CPI. You've now built a system that you think is at least on par, if not better, could serve as a complementary component. What's been the biggest surprise?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look at the level of interest. I mean, you know, we got immediate support from Balaji and yourself. I mean, you know, sort of really to really build a professional product around this. We sort of started this as a hobby, didn't believe it, let's go have a look. And the level of interest just hasn't died down. I thought about a year ago would die down, but it hasn't died down. And people are really beginning to trust the metrics that we're bringing. We're still here, three years in, you know, we're still delivering actually more and more relevant components to this. That's been a really big surprise on my side to see how this has grown. The other element is just, yeah, the trust, yeah, the lack of trust, the waning trust

• 23:33Speaker 02

  In institutions, providing, you know, information through closed rooms. I think that's been a real big surprise. And the growth, you know, the, the growth that we've experienced, 8,000 unique users every month, new users coming to the site every month. And that ultimately has allowed us to then scale up on the talent that we've got in the team, which has been really exciting to experience as well.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're building something like this, the aspect to me that I think is most interesting is like, there's economists, there are mathematicians, there are developers, there's business development. How do you balance building a team where really you have kind of a very hard, you know, kind of scientific problem to figure out? But then you also have to go build the business itself. And it seems a little bit different than maybe software where you're just, hey, we write a software program, something breaks. We can quickly, you know, issue a patch and keep going. This feels like it has more gravity to the actual product and accuracy and things like that. So how do you go about building that type of team to make sure this is successful?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, startup, as you know, is not easy, right? I mean, it's pretty tough. And, and then startup where you're balancing science, you're balancing tech, you're balancing marketing, you need distribution, you need awareness. Balancing all of those definitely not easy. We started, I mean, we're from a tech standpoint, we're now building out V4, right? So we've constantly had to scale, adjust, redevelop, redeploy, and all doing that in parallel to actually running and operating a business. Having a good design, having a good user experience, having advisors on that help us and the support from these advisors has been really, you know,

• 25:26Speaker 02

  paramount to our success, you know, from chain link to Coinbase to Balaji to yourself. And then other macro economists that have really just picked up on what we're providing and then pushing us hard in terms of how are we documenting this? Just described, are we doing, you know, you should be taking this data might be more accurate. And then trying to crowdsource the data. I mean, that balance. And then try to make money in parallel, right? A lot of people at the beginning questioned, how are you making money? How are you making money this? You know, this is already for free. Why do I need another alternative source? Um, and so that's been a big challenge. Um, and I think, yeah, you, you pointed us in the right direction, where to get money first and, and try to build this up.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And so we started getting some customers which helped fund the business, which helped us then scale. And, and, and raise another round of, of investment to really actually scale this even further.

• 26:19Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite thing.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  You're constantly chasing this, right? You just, it's a cycle where you're going small, you're starting trying to go bigger, bigger. And then you're just trying to just scale it, scale it each time. And you're hunting growth all the time. And how do you lead growth? How do you motivate a team? Persistently, tirelessly, you know? Yeah.

• 26:39Anthony Pompliano?

  My, my favorite thing that you guys were doing, I think, is, um, you're using the tools that are available today. Right? And, you know, I always said that housing is a great example. You can call people on the phone and say, hey, what, what did you pay for rent last month? Or, you know, what do you think your house is worth if you sold it? But man, is it much more valuable to just go on Zillow or, you know, Redfin or just name your platform? And see what did they actually sell for and do it across the country in an automated fashion with real time data. And constantly update over and over and over again, what is actually happening with housing prices nationally?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, that's really that. And it was, it was amazing that nobody had actually done it. And then we actually found universities. So in the housing sector, we work really closely with Penn State University, who have a whole team of students that are actually crunching the numbers with us and helping us optimize the metrics. So that we can stay up to nine months ahead of where, you know, the government reporting ends up, right? And so things like that, and I, you just don't, as you go in your startup journey, you stumble upon individuals and, and people that want to help out introductions, opportunities. And it's how you capture those opportunities and convert them in. To the product that you're building and have a win-win scenario with the people that you're working with.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  They love us because we're giving them real-time data and helping them on the development side. And we love them because they're bringing an economic aspect to how we calculate the housing index. You know, which which is helps us just strengthen the protocols that we have.

• 28:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Where is the biggest risk for this not working? Right? As you continue to build this out, everyone's excited. Everyone is looking forward to having an alternative measurement that's that's accurate. But most entrepreneurs are risk killers. So what do you see as the biggest risk that you've got to continue to mitigate over time?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  I mean, the risk, I mean, I definitely see a bit of a regulatory risk sort of coming in, you know, sort of censorship oriented, right? I mean, you're seeing in Europe, they're already censoring, you know, social media because it's a narrative that they don't like. Canada's been doing the same thing. Will they do that around something that's tying to the scorecard of the performance? Or even underlying a $4.4 trillion industry? That number one, I'm not too worried about it today, but maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. That might be an issue. Otherwise, sort of, it's getting into new markets. How do I scale? How do I get more regional? You know, that's a real challenge. There's a significant cost to going into more local.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  You know, the ability to then calculate inflation locally. How do I aggregate the data? How do I crowdsource maybe even at some point the data and the price feeds? Et cetera. So those are all challenges I see. Risk wise, I mean, yeah, you know, it's just running out of gas or steam or or energy to continue to drive this. But I think, you know, there's such an opportunity right now. Data is the new oil leveraging AI to to really use our and evolve our prediction capability. You know, those are all tools that we need to deploy. If we don't use them, I think that's another big risk and challenge that we have.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Trying to leverage the historical data and get smarter at what we're doing than, you know, any individual institution.

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  When I see the United States being slow on adopting this, is there an opportunity to go to other countries and get them to adopt this more into kind of the sophisticated professional world of economics, you know, monetary policy, maybe even some impact on fiscal policy?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, the United States, I mean, it's not slow. We're, you know, we're, it's, I mean, Australia only reports inflation on a quarterly basis, just as an example. And Canada's pretty advanced. The UK is pretty advanced in terms of systems that they've deployed to track inflation. You know, I mean, opportunities are huge when you go to emerging markets. I mean, look at Turkey. We've been really, there's a strong pull for us to go to Turkey, a strong pull to go to Argentina now with Milley in charge over there. What is the impact of his reign going to look like, right? Over the next two, three years, how is inflation going to come down? How is he going to control inflation? What are the impact of his policies and his,

• 31:11Speaker 02

  you know, cutting, you know, cutting of departments and regulations? How are they going to benefit the economy and what does that mean for inflation in Argentina? Those are all things that we're looking at and they have a significant impact. Largely, I mean, why we focused on the US and why the US, number one, the systems there are the most, are pretty advanced in terms of data access. Number two is the US dollar is still the currency reserve for everybody else. Everybody else experiencing inflation, they go to the US dollar, right? It's the de facto currency where everybody goes when they're suffering inflation. And so if the US has inflation, then there's no

• 31:53Speaker 02

  other currency to go to. Where do I go? Then the only other resort is really, I mean, it becomes Bitcoin, right? I mean, it's really very hard to balance that. And, and, yeah. And so we just feel it's our, you know, one of the tasks, how do we educate people? What is inflation and where is it in the US? In which sector is it hitting the most? And how are people spending money the most? I mean, 20% goes into the housing, right? So if the housing market goes up, that has the biggest impact in people's inflation, right?

• 32:23Anthony Pompliano?

  As we've seen, you build this out over three years. Has there been anyone who's just been outright, "This is not going to work. You're wasting your time," like a well-known investor, a well-known CEO, just someone that is like driving you to make sure it's successful?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, look, I mean, we started this off the first, we got a lot of support in the beginning. And, and, you know, I, we tried to raise money during a very tight market during COVID. I think I pitched some 1,300 investors and there were two or three that really, "Yeah, I just really wanted to show it to them and just we'll, we'll get out there. We'll make sure this is going to be successful and I'm just going to die trying." And, and yeah, we, I think we've just really cut a curve just the last four months. We really had some sort of breakthrough.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  As the narrative with BlackRock coming into Bitcoin, with RWA becoming a stronger narrative right now, the tokenization of everything, you know, blockchain actually being a credible source of technology. And so those are all elements that played in our favor and we're using the blockchain for making sure that the data is immutably locked on the blockchain and anybody can go and verify the calculations. We're just launching a decentralized solution, our definitive resource point where we're going to enable across a decentralized network, the ability to actually build your own indexes off the verified data that we've,

• 34:05Speaker 02

  that we actually store on the blockchain.

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And then my last question for you is, as this continues to get built, things like artificial intelligence have become more prominent. Are there ways to use those new technologies to reinforce even further kind of the work that you're doing?

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, predicting, right? Everybody wants predicting. Everybody wants to read into the future. So how can we leverage technology with the granular 10-year history or 12-year, 15-year history that we have? How can we actually leverage all of that across not only the pricing of items, but also of the leading economic indicators and identify patterns, trends, and then extrapolate that, excuse me, into the future? That's something we definitely are trying to work on and will be building out. Yeah, I mean, we're still in the early stages. I mean, we've just managed to sort of aggregate all the different data sets, the different formats, the different time intervals, and then make them composable.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  We're now adding third-party data aggregators to the mix so that their data becomes composable. And now, how do we enable the prediction associated with all of that data around specific characteristics? I don't need to know the whole CPI, but I may just be interested in what is influencing the housing market, and then how can I build prediction in the housing category? How can I do that in transportation? How can I do that in the clothing sector or the, you know, sort of other elements versus overall on the whole CPI itself?

• 35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or if they want to learn more about Trueflation, either check out the data, dashboards, or potentially become a customer?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Go to trueflation.com, follow us on Twitter, and those are the two main sources where we give you updates. We share a lot of our information on those two platforms, either on our website, you can read everything on our blog, and test out our calculator, and let us know how we can improve it and make it better.

• 36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Stefan, thank you so much for this. I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. Literally, I think since the first time I heard about it, I said, oh, man, if they could pull that off, that'd be incredibly valuable. So hopefully, you're well on your way to doing that, and we will definitely do this again in the future.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  No, thank you for having me again, and thank you for your support. I mean, yeah, it was really, right at the beginning, you were there in Miami. I remember we were on a call, and yeah, it was super good support. So thank you for everything you've been and while, you know, working with us on this journey, right? It's been an interesting journey. Fascinating.