Lead-Lag Live

Faith vs Frenzy: Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson on Gold Mania, AI Hype, and the Morality of Markets

• Michael A. Gayed, CFA

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In this episode of Lead-Lag Live, I sit down with Father Emmanuel Lemelson, activist investor and Orthodox priest, to discuss the intersection of faith, finance, and speculation in an era of market excess.

From calling tops in gold and silver to exposing fraud on Wall Street, Fr. Emmanuel argues that modern markets have become spiritually and ethically unmoored — a “Wild West” driven by greed, memes, and misplaced faith in AI. He shares his candid views on what true stewardship means, why hoarding gold is spiritually toxic, and why investors need humility more than hype.

In this episode:
– Why “stacking” gold is spiritual hoarding, not investing
– How AI mania mirrors the dot-com bubble of the ’90s
– The moral hazard of speculation and market idolatry
– Where Fr. Emmanuel still finds real value in equities like Adobe and Flower Foods
– Why faith and finance don’t have to be at odds

Lead-Lag Live brings you inside conversations with the financial thinkers who shape markets. Subscribe for interviews that go deeper than the noise.

#LeadLagLive #FrEmmanuelLemelson #FaithAndFinance #Markets #Investing #Gold #AI #WallStreet #Economy

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SPEAKER_02:

NVIDIA is a great company, tremendous margins. A lot of these companies are like NVIDIA is truly great. But it's it's really quite, let's just say it's at least at a minimum fairly priced. So if you're a value investor and you're trying to find a price value dislocation, you're not going to find it in NVIDIA or any of these companies in that Halo. You know, if you saw a block of gold for all the gold that's been mined in history in the world, it's actually not that large, believe it or not. It's smaller than most people would think. And a very, very small amount of that's used in electronics. I believe what's driven that mania, if I can call it that, is uh a lack of trust in the government and in the fiat currencies.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Melanie Shaper. Welcome to Lead Lake Live. Now, sentiment in the market is turning decidedly cautious. Big tech is laying off tens of thousands of workers this week, sparking fresh worries about growth. Meanwhile, gold and silver are getting a bid, not just as hedges, but as outright plays. In other words, investors are bracing for the worst, even as stocks struggle to rally. My guest today is Father Emmanuel Lemelson, known for his work as an activist investor and his track record calling winners like Kohl's Big Five Sporting Goods, Nike, and Lululemon. He's also been publicly connected as an advisor to actors and high net worth investors, including Mark Walper. Father Emmanuel, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01:

Melanie, thank you so much for having me on the show. I absolutely love your show, and it was a privilege to get the invite.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Now, I wanted to start uh talking about its sentiment and how it seems to be bad. Uh the flight to gold and silver, fueled maybe by anxiety, is how you put it. What exactly are you seeing right now underneath the surface?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh widespread fraud. Uh, the markets seem to me to be uh just unhinged.

SPEAKER_02:

And um, you know, it's a very lax regulatory environment. In some ways, it's good. I mean, under the Trump administration and the new leadership at the SEC. Uh the SEC before this time had gone too far in the other direction. Uh, you know, it's a very ideologically driven um uh, you know, arm of the government, but now I'm afraid we have no oversight and it's just uh the wild west. And so we're seeing asset bubbles form everywhere, in my opinion, certainly precious metals recently, until they pulled back and aggregate about 15% off their highs. Uh you know, we started criticizing precious metals as an investment in mid-October, so that timing was really very timely. I think it was about one or two days before the peak for most metals, and then they just sort of came crashing down. Uh, but you know, uh, you know, we can't say that sentiment's totally negative because the indexes obviously are reaching new highs every day. So um, but there's a lot of fear, and I think people are wondering when is this gonna end? When is the cycle gonna end? The SB is very, very expensive by historical standards.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I mean you've also raised the question can value still be found right now as investors prepare, you know, maybe for the worst. Uh in your view, which pockets are still underpriced and and maybe being overlooked?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, the good news with all this volatility, Melanie, which is, you know, largely algorithmically uh driven, it's something like 75% of market value, is that uh the mistakes are made on the downside as well. Like we publish a Substack, for example, um, where you can read some of our articles and we will track some of our interviews, like interviews like yours, for example. We frequently will appear on other podcasts and we'll talk about what we're doing, with the idea being to uh give people an academic framework or a clear philosophical framework to allocate capital, uh, to be sort of good stewards, as it were. Um, it's not really about trading. Um, it's just about you know making wise decisions in a market that is often chaotic. And so you mentioned some of those names. You know, we if you were to go through our Subsack and read some of our other articles on appearances we've had on David Lynn uh report. I don't know if you know his show. We talk often about what we've done with Kohl's or Guess uh or Nike, and and a lot of those names are really pretty beat up after the tariffs were announced. So you can see even in an overall, in a market generally rising, you know, there were some value to be found and names that were unpopular. And that's really what value uh investors do is they look for uh an area where the price they're paying presumably is fair or better than fair, less than the intrinsic value of the stock market. So those deals can still be found. And we're still allocating capital to those names. So whether or not the market is high or expensive, it's gonna pull back. Nobody really knows. I don't have a crystal ball. I'm sure you don't either. Uh, but it doesn't mean you can't find value in certain sectors uh and be a good steward over that capital and allocate it wisely.

SPEAKER_00:

So getting a bit more into that, uh themes, memes, and dreams, you've used this phrase to contrast height with fundamentals. How do you distinguish between a short-lived meme and a lasting uh well?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, you can definitely recognize a meme. I mean, did you follow the Beyond Meat uh craziness? What was it, uh, last week? I went up, I think, 950%, I want to say in three days. Uh clearly a meme. There was no underlying buy. The company's, you know, its financial centers are just bleeding red everywhere. Uh, they had a slightly improved uh marketing arrangement with Walmart. Obviously, good news for the company, but it could be otherwise was uh on a trajectory for you know bankruptcy, it looks like. Um, so that's clearly a meme. And then it came crashing down again. Um, but but generally, you know, I would just say, Melanie, that so psychological or social, if everybody's doing it and it's all you're reading about on CNBC, like there's a good chance that there's a speculative fervor. And and just keep in mind that for the speculator, really what they're doing, right, is that they're saying they can see the future. And it's not the most humble approach. If you if you're gonna say, I can pay uh you know$3 for Beyond Meat today because tomorrow's gonna be worth four, you well, you don't really know that. It might happen. Your chance it might be$50-50. But the speculator always believes, whether it's housing or precious metals or common equities, bonds, whatever, they believe they can see the future. That's a very different activity uh intellectually than the value investor who says, I don't really know the price tomorrow, but if I can allocate this capital with a margin of safety, uh where, you know, but beyond me might be worth$3 a share, but I need to buy it for$1.50 because in case I'm wrong, I'll I'll be protected. Now, when you're a fiduciary and you're overseeing other people's assets, this is so much more important that you that you really think is a true investor because you shouldn't play games with other people's capital. And so if you're really a steward over other people's capital, if you're working in the industry as a professional, uh, I think it's really important to be forthright with your clients about what your your philosophical framework actually is. And my experience, Melanie, has been that like 95% of market participants are really speculators, maybe more. And it's not a choice, actually, is what I've learned. I've learned it's it's a personality type. And I, you know, I didn't really believe this. Um, but you know, I wrote some like 200 articles on security analysis over the last 15 years, and I was trying to prove myself wrong, but I found that speculators can't help themselves. They just want to speculate, and it it just the results are not good over the long run.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I want us to get into that next. Your style is very evidence-based, and uh your the track record uh in terms of the the companies that you've flagged that we've mentioned, Coles, uh Big Five Sporting Goods, Nike, etc. Give us one stock that you see doing well right now and and also walk us through why you like it.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm gonna give you a stock that's doing bad right now, Adobe. It's down today. It's actually the largest holding in our portfolio. I don't normally disclose this much. By the way, this is not investment advice, obviously. Do your own research, but I would bet 50 bucks it's gonna do better than the SP 500 over the next year. I mean, tremendous margins. It's not participating in the AI bubble. I think we can all agree that there's some real fishy business going on in the AI names with all the, it's really what you call round-trip transactions, where it's just, you know, there's all this exchange of equity and capital, but there's no real proper exchange of goods and services for pay. You know, it's it's becoming quite incestuous. And on a level, I'm not, I may not actually have a parallel, not in modern markets. Uh, and so a lot of companies are in that halo. And you can look at second and third tier players that are being brought along for the ride. You know, the rising tide lifts all ships, as um, John F. Kennedy once said. But if you can find companies that appear to be not participating in that, and Adobe is one of them, in my opinion, but has this long track track record of extraordinary earnings, uh, no losses, and uh has a legacy business that people are pretty much showing a walled garden. And they're they can easily transition into AI like any other company. They're just not writing the meme and and selling their company every day. I think it's gonna do extraordinarily well. And then, you know, we're buying some food stocks that are could not be more boring. I probably put most people to sleep. Like we own a steak in flower foods, they make Dave's killer bread. I don't know if you know that product. I happen to love that product. Uh, but it pays like an 8% dividend. And then um, you know, we have another big food name we've been buying up that we think is very, very attractive, pays a good, healthy dividend. And you we just discussed it on one of our recent Substacks. But, you know, even if the market comes down, like you do remember a few weeks ago the Dow went down like 900 points. On that day, Flower Foods was up. Now the stock has gone nowhere since then, but we're collecting an 8% dividend. And I'm pretty sure over the long run they're gonna be just fine. If the market goes down because people worry about the excitement coming out of the AI uh boom, do you really think that they're gonna sell off flower foods? And if Adobe's already beat up, it's near a 52-week low, and it's got this, it's like a money printing machine, forgive me for being such a crude example, but you know, they really are doing well by their shareholders because they're compounding their return on equity. Uh uh they might go down if the market crashes, but it can only go down so much before the price, uh before the metrics become insane. So yeah, that's a couple ideas right there.

SPEAKER_00:

So talking a bit more about the AI uh boom, how should investors be playing this boom? And is there a buff?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I would say first of all, don't play. It's not a game. Um I mean, if you want to play, you can go to Las Vegas and have a nice meal and see a show and then lose your money. Wall Street is more efficient. You don't get to do those things before you lose your money. Um, I would just stay away. I mean, uh NVIDIA is a great company, tremendous margins. A lot of these companies are like NVIDIA is truly great. Uh, but it's it's really quite, let's just say it's at least at a minimum fairly priced. So if you're a value investor and you're trying to find a price-value dislocation, you're not gonna find it in NVIDIA or any of these companies in that Halo. But there's insanity. I mean, if you listen to uh, you know, OpenAI's founder, um, you know, it just Sam Aldman's just craziness coming out of his mouth. He's saying things like, I don't care how much money we throw at it. I mean, you're talking about these hyperscale data centers, which they're they're gonna happen, but we don't really know the long-term economic characteristics of AI, how it's gonna be monetized. And I would wager that at some point people will ask those hard questions, it's it's bound to come down, I would think. And then over the long run, will be probably all these things that we think it's gonna be, which is this revolutionary technology. It already sort of is. Uh, but right now it's in this early stage and it's really, really hyped. And you know, again, there's a lot of secondary and tertiary players that are they're selling garbage, frankly, but they just have the word AI in it. It's like bringing dot com in the name, like in 1998, you know? And uh that creates a lot of excitement. So when no price is too high, when no amount of money to be thrown af a business is too high, that's you should ask yourself the question. I mean, if it's it's a capital-intensive business, first of all. It's not like Google during the dot com boom years, where you know, yes, there was capital put into the business, but not at the scale of these AI companies. And usually that's sort of a negative thing. And it has to be done, the upfront investment. But technology also changes very quickly. And in the news, which wasn't that long ago coming out of China, that you know, they were able to produce these uh LLMs, large language models at a pittance, a fraction of the cost, we forget that so quickly and easily. So, you know, it's I don't confuse, I wouldn't obfuscate the issue of is the technology going to be transformative? Yes. Do large, you know, hyper-skilled data science feeling, yes. Like all these things are true. But like if you're an investor, the purpose of a business is to get a return on the capital for its shareholders. That has yet to be seen on most of the players in the AI space, what that's gonna be.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and what what is the relation then to precious metals? And you said that you had called the top um right near when when gold started to drop. But there there is a connection between AI and metals, right? In terms of um the metals being needed to make the data centers run. Um with with the metals rally and gold you know being at record levels and silver you know, catching tons of bids, are these still safe haven? Uh is it still a safe haven sector or is it a contrarian value play at this point?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I I you know it's hard to speak for a large group of people what they're doing. I can't speak for all of them. But my impression, Melanie, is that the the utility that comes from gold or silver in electronics is a very, very small part of the amount of gold that is in existence. You know, if you saw a block of gold for all the gold that's been mined in history in the world, it's actually not that large, believe it or not. It's smaller than most people would think. And a very, very small amount of that's used in electronics. I believe what's driven that mania, if I can call it that, is uh a lack of trust in the government and in the fiat currencies, which is to some extent understandable that people are very concerned about where the government's going. It's the national debt, uh, which is out of control. Um but even if those underlying reasons are very meritorious, it doesn't change the fact that there's been a sort of madness of crowds taking place. And you have these people, I guess they call it stacking, that's their vernacular. Now, I would say it just let me speak as a priest for a moment, Melanie, if that's okay. I'm gonna turn off the investor side. I'm sorry. There's healthy work and there's unhealthy work spiritually. In my opinion, the healthiest work is physical work. You know, if you're outside doing something under the blue sky, building something with your hands, that's healthy work. Then you could move into work that is like security analysis, right? Like we've been talking about price value dislocations, reading financial statements, understanding margins. That's maybe has more risk spiritually because greed could sink in, right? And while it has an academic component, an intellectual component, and you could certainly think of it as stewardship. There's arguments to be made from the New Testament for being a good steward. I mean, Matthew, for example, parable of talents, it's very clear. But there's a lot of risk. We see that people succumb to the sort of their darker angels in Wall Street, right? But when you get to just hoarding precious metals, which is what stacking is, it's a euphemism for hoarding. You have to ask yourself, how healthy is that? I mean, you you the people dig it out of the ground, they melt it down, then they dig another hole in the ground and they lock it up there and they pay to store it and insure it. Why? There's not a single example in the New Testament where gold and silver are advocated as holding them. And, you know, you can see in the Old Testament sort of this idea that, you know, King Solomon had all this gold and silver, but it was usually used for sacred vessels. And then when the people get a hold of gold and so, what do they do? They build a false idol with it. That should tell you a lot. And then you move into the New Testament, and the very first thing that we learn, Christ is born in this manger, right? The very first thing they bring him is what? Frankincense, gold, and myrrh, right? The three wise men. So they're giving it away to the Lord. And so while we have examples of being a good steward over talents and getting a return on capital, there's no example of hoarding precious metals in the New Testament. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is there's this sort of third like area of work that becomes really spiritually unhealthy, which is you, you know, you'd almost have to be like a saint to do it and not have it negatively affect your soul. And that is stockpiling what you think is going to provide some security for you. You know, incidentally, I was on a at a funeral on Sunday. I was uh conducting the funeral services, this beautiful woman I knew. She was a foreign parishioner of mine in Boston. And I was right, I was reading the prayers, the Orthodox prayers of the funeral service, by the way, very, very beautiful, the Orthodox prayers. And right there in the prayers, it refers to you, you can't take your gold and silver with you. Like I have yet to see a hearse with luggage racks. So if you're gonna stack it, what are you gonna do with it at the end? And you don't even know how much time you've got. So I just find it kind of a worthless activity. I think it's very much a speculative mania. I said that on a couple podcasts, like three or four, in the middle of October. I thought people are gonna come after me with pitchforks because the people who do this activity, they're really, really have convinced themselves. They have a they have a confirmation bias that they're doing the right thing and the government's gonna collapse. And maybe that will happen. I don't know. But you know, governments do collapse and and empires end. But this this activity of just owning gold, which is totally unproductive. It's actually a it costs you money to own it, is ridiculous. And nobody can tell me the intrinsic value of gold. Yes, there probably is some calculation for its use on the shops, but it's just so de minimis, Melanie. You couldn't use it to justify ownership. Like if you were gonna buy Adobe or Flower Foods or some of these other stocks we've talked about in our our Substack, uh I could tell you, based on the financial statements, what the actual rate of return on the capital is gonna be, what their return on equity is, what their return on invested capital is, what their gross margin are, what their net margins are, and their growth and their shareholder uh earnings and their their owner earnings. How do you do that with gold? You can't. So math is an immutable science. It's perfect. But where's the math for gold and silver? It's really only worth what someone else is willing to pay, which has sometimes been referred to as the greater fool theory. I don't like saying that because I don't want to insult anybody, but it sort of is accurate.

SPEAKER_00:

And do you feel the same way about all uh metals, copper, graphite? I mean, there's a mess.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, some of them have more utility for sure. Copper is a little different because it's widespread use. And you probably could do a supply-demand equation, and and it it's a little bit different than gold and silver, these the precious metals. So copper, you know, obviously has widespread utility.

SPEAKER_00:

In terms of um portfolio allocation, is there a role for uh metals in uh an advisor's court or an investor's portfolio right now?

SPEAKER_02:

You know, you're probably subtly alluding, Melanie, to this idea of diversification. And I see this a lot where investors are like, you know, you gotta have some emerging markets and some bonds and some treasuries and precious money. I'm like, why? Why don't you just find the best deal you can where you have the biggest margin of safety, where there's the biggest price value dislocation, the biggest pricing error, and concentrate your capital there. I mean, I I I never understood diversity for diversity's sake. Like if I can't understand its value, how can I put a price on it? And if I can't do that analysis, I don't know that calculus, the price versus like price is what you pay and value is what you get, right? So like if I can't figure that out, what's diversity for diversity's sake? I don't get it. I mean, look what happened. I I criticized precious metals in mid-October. We're on all this podcast, we put out this substack, everyone wants to kill me, and then think they all crash across the board 15%. And everyone's like, oh, father's so dumb, he's finally gone off the rails, you know, whatever they were saying. I don't know what they were saying. But like, still, we don't know. It's come down 15%. Is it still a bubble? Who knows? It's only worth what the next guy's willing to pay for it. You know, the bottom line is, I'm sorry, Melanie Dangrew, but like the thing is this our currency clearly is based on trust in the government. In fact, the currency said, in God we trust. Obviously, I think we need to our security comes from God. That's my position. Needless to say, everything else is a footnote. But if the empire is going to collapse, maybe it's collapsing. Uh, I don't have a crystal ball. But at some point as a society, we have to have trust, right? I mean, the British Empire, which you you lived in the UK for a number of years, you know, it was at one time it was in the last hundred years, it was a great and sprawling empire, and then it wasn't, and now it's like a little island that's almost inconsequential. And uh but the b bottom line is we as people uh living in society, are we gonna distrust one another so greatly that we have to uh store these precious metals along with what, our guns, I guess? Uh I I don't understand. Like, what's it gonna look like? So the government's gonna collapse and we're gonna be out hunting, could be, I guess, and then we're gonna transact in gold and silver. We're gonna like some of these people you talk to who stack gold, they're like, that's how they think. They're survivalists and stuff, and they're like this is like a mania. And then when you turn on every podcast, and every podcast, there's an advertisement for gold and silver to own physical gold and silver. That should tell you something. That there's a lot of people making money off it. It's it's a gold rush, literally. But in the original gold rush, where people went out west to to uh prospect for gold, who was really consistently making all the money was the guy selling pickaxes and shovels. There's a lot of guys selling pickaxes and shovels right now in the form of advertisement on podcasts. So people are making money off it. I don't know if the the people buying it up and stacking it, I don't know how they're gonna do it in the long run, though. And if you look at the aggregate rates of return, forgive me for talking so much, but if you look at the last 50 years, the aggregate rate of return adjusted for inflation on on gold is 1.8%. During that time, the SP 500 returned 8%. Do you know the enormous difference over 50 years that made? Because the SP represents productive assets. They're dynamic, they're companies. So, I mean, if we were to go back to math, you'd say, okay, Father Emmanuel's lost his mind, but let's look at the math. Uh, history doesn't bear out an argument for owning precious metals, certainly not for the sake of diversification.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I I and it's really interesting. I I have it's a different um viewpoint than uh a lot of the podcasts or interviews that I do, but it's definitely something to think about. But I I just want to pivot a bit now and uh talk a little bit more about the advice that you have. Uh and that's for people who might be thinking of getting into finance. How do you think someone should build a career in this business today?

SPEAKER_01:

Don't.

SPEAKER_02:

Unless you really feel a calling. You know, I mean, and I would say that starts with a love of accounting. You're not really in the business unless you're doing accounting. You know, it's a it's a what is it,$13 trillion, channel with a$15 trillion has probably grown. My numbers are probably out of date. But the thing about this industry, Melanie, is that everybody can make money, regardless if they have talent in this area. And that makes it unique. Like great doctors, like they go into medical medicine, they feel a calling, they're they have talent, they're identified. So many people do so well in this industry, even though they don't have one bit of talent. They're good salespeople, essentially. And that doesn't end up working out very well for the owners of the capital. So um there's so many temptations. I mean, unless you really are sound spiritually and grounded and and you really feel a deep calling to stewardship, to account, and there are some managers out there, I think for sure. I'm not saying everyone on Wall Street's bad, they're not, just almost everybody, um, because of the temptations. Uh but otherwise, if if you're not really grounded in a fear of God, if you don't have a deep faith, you know, just do something else. It's the devil's lair, Wall Street, frankly, in my opinion, most of the time. Not always, but most of the time. Uh, you know, there's a saying in the gospel that uh the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. In my mind, that's the word of God. And prove me wrong. Every time you find evil in the world, there's a money trail. So why do people go to Wall Street? That's where the money's at. That's not a great calling. Like if that's why you're going, that's not a good reason. You can make money other ways that if you're great at what you do and you put your heart into it, you make money any way you want. That's what my father used to say. You know, you don't have to work in Wall Street. Uh, but unless you really feel a calling to that and you want to, like, in our case, most of our work has been about declining against fraud, exposing fraud, uh, which we paid a huge price for, teaching, you know, almost all of our work has been free. Uh that's where most of our work is at, because I'm aware of those temptations.

SPEAKER_00:

So I I I think our listeners will agree with me when I say that I want to uh know a little bit more about how you got involved in both uh the church and in finance. And then if you could just give us a little uh a bit of background on that and then to let us and the listeners know where they can find uh your your your thoughts, where they can read your Substack and where they can go to connect with you.

SPEAKER_02:

All right, wonderful, Melanie. Uh, if I talk too much, just cut me off. But I'll give you the really short version if you have questions or not today. So I grew up in the Seattle area. Uh, well, I was there for about 10 years. I didn't really grow up there, I grew up all over the world, but I wound up being in Seattle for about 10 years. And during that time, it was a very fertile area for businesses. There was Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, and the like many other companies. And I I saw wealth creation and I and I was sort of mystified by it. I didn't really understand capital markets, but I saw people growing very wealthy and creating amazing uh companies through stock ownership and stock options. And uh I kind of left a mark on me, and I was had a uh a peripheral interest in markets, but then my life took a religious turn around the age of 18. I was baptizing Orthodox Christian as a child, uh, but didn't really grow up going to church. Um, my mother was a uh is a deeply devout person, but my father was not, and so we didn't really go to church. But around the age of 18, I met my mentor who was a priest, and I just felt an overwhelming call to serve the church. Wound up studying theology for nine years, loved it, went to the seminary, but always had to work uh for financial reasons, uh, some of which I inherited, most of which I inherited. Uh and then when I graduated from the seminary, I didn't get ordained. I spent eight years actually being a businessman. I built some companies. Um, I didn't really feel worthy to be a priest. Um and uh during that time, I I actually stumbled during the Great Recession, I stumbled across the work of Benjamin Graham, the great um investment thinker who was a mentor to Warren Buffett. He wrote two some of the works, uh, The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis. And when I found those books, um I was just curious. I'd been watching an interview with Warren Buffett one day or something like that. The world was like collapsing, that seemed to be collapsing, banks were crashing. And I just remember Warren Buffett looked really calm. And I was like, you know, it's interesting, you know, he doesn't look stressed out. He doesn't look like he's working too hard either. So, I mean, how hard could it be to do what he does? So I went to the bookstore and I just, by God's grace, come across Ben Graham's book and like right on the cover of the Intelligent Investor is a quote by Warren Buffett that says, the greatest book on investing ever written, something to that effect. So I take him home, read like five pages and put it down. I'm like, oh, I know everything this book is about. I'm like, that is so arrogant. Like, I mean I knew I wasn't humble, but that was so arrogant to think I knew everything that Dina Wall Street, Warren Buffett's mentor, had said in like a 500-page tome after reading like 10 pages. I didn't touch it again for six months. Eventually I went back and read the whole thing cover to cover, like just a couple nights. I was blown away because everything he was talking about was already in my mind, but I just nobody put words to it. Like the framework wasn't clear. And eventually I went out to read all the essays of Warren Buffett. And then there's this great essay. I would encourage your listeners to read it. It's called The Super Investors of Graham in Doddsville. It's like a 10-minute read. You got to read it. It's published by Columbia University, which is Ben Graham's Aleman matter. And if you look at the results and you're intellectually honest, you got to tell yourself, like, where are the speculators on the Forbes 400? I mean, Buffett's returned 20% through Berkshire over 50 years. What speculators have done that? None. So, like, the math is there that like they've got a better mousetrap. The catch, Melanie, which I couldn't believe, is that you can't learn it. I'm like, that cannot be right. Buffett's like, it's like, and maybe it was Munger said it. Either Buffer might say, it's like an inoculation. Either you get it in the first few minutes or you never get it at all. So if you're in that category, that small percentage of people, like right away, it's like a Eureka moment, you're like, oh my gosh, that makes perfect sense. A dollar bill for 50 cents protects principal and gets better than average rates of return, which is the antithesis of what everyone on Wall Street is going to tell you. Like your wealth advisor or JP Morgan or wherever Credit Suisse is gonna be like, oh, do you want to get higher rates of return or can you take more risk? Nonsense. It's the inversion of that that's true. You take less risk to get higher rates of return. So the whole world's been sold on this lie, right? That's the key myth, the key lie of Wall Street, because the guy selling the products don't have the ability to do what Munger or Buffett do, and they didn't get it, learn it at school. Yes, Buffett had the benefit of being in a classroom with Ben Graham for many years and a swarm of years. But the fact of the matter is he was born that way. So is Munger. So if you're it sounds like a popular culture song, right? Uh born that way. But really, you have to have that personality type. You can't just be like, I'm going to Harvard, I'm getting a master's in business, and I'm going to be having all these acronyms after my name, and then I'll be able to do it. It just doesn't work that way. So you either think that way or you don't. Uh, and and you don't have to be Lady Gaga to think that way. Um, so you know, when when I realized that, again, it was like an epiphany, and again, not probably not being the most humble guy in the world. I turn over, I look at my wife. By the way, I'm Orthodox, we're all married. It's not like the Catholic priests. I looked at her, I said, you know, I think I'm gonna be one of the greatest investors of all time. Totally humble statement, obviously. So she laughs, and I'm like, look, let me put some of the essays out there. And if I'm wrong, then I'll be outed as just another arrogant guy working on Wall Street because Wall Street's not where you go to find the next mother Teresa, right? I mean, where nobody's there to be humble. And I certainly thought I'm just in that camp. So I'm like, I'll just publish my work. I kept publishing, publishing, publishing. And they just turned out not to be wrong, let's say. And so that's how I got into France. Now I'm a couple years into this, and the bishop calls me. He's like, Father Emmanuel, it's been eight years since you finished the seminary. Are you ever going to get ordained? Like, I mean, even Christ started earlier than you. I was like 33 at that point. He's like, you're getting kind of old, you know, like what is this? Like I wasn't the turtle in the hair, I was like a three-toed sloth. So I knew at that point, uh, if I had said no again, because I said no after I finished the seminary, I'm like, I'll probably never serve the church, which is really what my heart desires. And I told him, I said, look, I'm doing all this work now, like in security analysis, I'm publishing these articles, I'm helping people out with their portfolio. I'm like, what do you think? He's like, well, you know, you're what churches you serve? I told him the church, I said, Well, do they pay you? I'm like, no. They're the poorest churches around. He's like, well, just keep working, then you got a family. So I'm like, okay, I'm I'm gonna hold that to you. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna hold you to that. So he never bothered me again. But it got a little crazy after that because you know, people come along and say, well, what would a priest be doing working on Walsh? It's just terrible. And the first reason, the first thought that comes to mind, right, is it's gonna be like one of these televangelists with their huge mega churches, you know, living in their gigantic mansions. But if you read my work, you listen to my podcast, that's not what we're doing here. We're trying to get people to be a little bit more intelligent about what they're doing with their capital. And uh, I certainly think within the context of ecclesiastical circles, you know, we can't just put our hand out and tell the prisoners, like when we pass the basket, like put 20 bucks on their 50 or something. If we can't tell them they're gonna do something intelligent with it that builds up the kingdom of God. So whether or not Christians should be involved or not, you know what, I I can't answer that question. But the fact of the matter is, everyone already is. Look at all these Catholic universities and hospitals. You think they don't have investment committees? And you know, what is Father Emmanuel doing? You think they're on priests historically on those committees? Of course they are. But they just don't know what they're doing, frankly, which is why the returns are often poor or set bar. So really that was all I was trying to say. So that's sort of the long and the short of it. And in terms of where you can find our work, we've got this Substack now. I think the handle's just Lemelson, my last name. We've got a podcast we run. It's mostly religious content. You can find it on YouTube. It's a very visual podcast. Again, the handle's Lemelson. Same thing on X, Facebook, and so forth. Um, but if we do some episodes on business, some episodes on fraud, but mostly it's just cultural issues and religion. But you might enjoy it anyways, even if you're not a particularly religious person. So uh check it out if you can.

SPEAKER_00:

And just uh before um we say goodbye, can you just talk a little bit about how um you work with these high net worth uh individuals or Mark Walt Waltberg, etc.?

SPEAKER_02:

Uh well, you know, really, gosh, it it it's kind of started with Donald Trump, actually. He in in 2015, he had asked me for a blessing, and he had never asked a priest for a blessing. He he came to Keene where my parish was located. And uh there's a picture, kind of a a well known picture online of this. And uh that was before he'd won any primaries. Everyone thought he was just kind of a joke, he wasn't gonna win. And he asked me to give this talk at one of his rallies. And after that, a firestorm started. Um, the government just came after me. And I spent 10 years fighting the SEC because I had criticized the pharmaceutical industry. Uh, and two a company in particular called Ligen Pharmaceuticals, in my opinion, total fraud. And they had birthed this other company called Viking Therapeutics, in my opinion, also a total fraud. And uh I declaimed against, I put out 56 pages of reports and hundreds of allegations of fraud. And uh the company quietly had co-opted the SEC and certain players in the government. Actually, this guy, Brad Bondy, is the brother of the sitting attorney general Pam Bondy, is this sort of shadow operator. He's, in my opinion, the epitome of a deep state operator. Anyways, that's another story. You can read about it on the Muslim Capitol's history page. I don't want to talk too much about it, but getting back to Mark, um, that fight became more and more high profile because everybody settles with the SEC, like everybody. But I wasn't gonna settle with them. I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna settle with you because the same people I go to the hospital and minister to are the ones you're preying on, these pharmaceutical companies. You know, they're completely the exact example of corruption and greed and dehumanization. It's the worst of Wall Street. It's everything I've been declaiming against. So at this point, it's like the pharmaceutical industry and the Wall Street ganging up on me. And, you know, it was kind of an unfair fight, you know, for them because I was on the other side. So despite all of that, I think they blew through something like 14 million in taxpayer dollars to try to quote unquote silence me for good. That's actually what they said in an email they had to quote, silence Father Man for good. At any rate, Mark had seen a clip of me speaking. He invited me out to Hollywood to say, why don't you come out uh have dinner with me? We went out of dinner. Really good guy, Mark. You know, he gets a he gets some flacks sometimes for his early life, but he's a good person, very intelligent, uh, actually very humble, believe it or not. And um he he just asked me to help out on some things he was working on, and and that one up being part of an HBO Max uh docuseries called Wall Street. Uh that's W-A-H-L. You can watch it, season one, where it sort of goes into uh the work we do. Now, it's a little bit edited how we actually met. They changed things up a little bit, but um, in fact, I was just with Mark on Sunday and uh he's shooting a film in Boston. I think for Apple, it's gonna be a tremendous uh movie, uh a brilliant movie, and uh when it comes out, everyone should probably watch it. But he's uh a great person and it's been a privilege to uh be asked for help from people like Trump or from uh from Mark and so forth, and uh and hopefully to make some sort of a small positive contribution.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's great. Well, I hope that the visitors are gonna spend the next five, 10, 15 minutes even um adding themselves to all your social media looking up the movie on that Mark.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we'd be grateful for that, Moni. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, and and thank you, Father Emmanuel. Thank you so much for your time and for your insight, and thanks to everyone for watching. Be sure to like, share, and subscribe for more episodes of Weeklight Live.

SPEAKER_02:

And again, Melanie, we love your show and thank you so much for the invitation. I hope that people keep watching the show because I certainly do.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

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Michael A. Gayed, CFA

Host