Episode 383: A Study of Modern Wars and Government Inefficiency
On this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan and Corey welcome Jonathan Shaffner to the podcast. Jon is a retired U.S. Army colonel with 25 years of service who currently works as director of federal business development at MBO Partners. MBO specializes in delivering solutions that make it safer and easier for enterprise organizations and top independent professionals to work together.
Jon kicks off the show by discussing NATO's increased presence in Europe, through the lens of his own military experience. He posits that modern wars are more ideology-based than previous ones. This leads to Jon talking about his years in Afghanistan and Iraq. After, he shares what MBO does and how it helps companies (especially in defense and health care) build better workforces...
I did an enterprise IT integration of a very small organization – 600 people. I realized I needed about $16 million to do this, to do clean data integration. You know what I had to do to get that $16 million? I had to find it in unspent money. I said, "Hey, I want that $16 million recoded to me to do this."... And all of a sudden I had $16 million to spend.
Next, Jon puts government spending into an investing context. He notes that through all the inefficiency and bloat, there are definite winners and losers of government contracts. He also breaks down his and MBO's involvement in helping to create value for the companies that have been awarded these contracts. Jon cites data usage as the biggest need he's seeing right now. Companies have massive amounts of data but don't know what to do with it or how to implement it...
In the case of a lot of the things where we thought, "Well, this wouldn't work or this doesn't work," we found that we have the data on hand. We can go back and analyze it, fix it, clean the data, and come to some really good conclusions.
Finally, Jon talks about how MBO finds contractors, the possibility of it going public someday, and its research on the gig economy. He then explores what could happen with the two major ongoing wars affecting the U.S. today: Russia versus Ukraine and Israel versus Hamas. Jon predicts that the war in Ukraine will be over within 18 months, but he says the war in the Middle East is much more complicated thanks to the Houthis...
The wild card is the Houthis. The Houthis have been causing a lot of trouble for a lot of people. And what people don't realize is their attacks in the Red Sea have been very specific... They're not shooting at everybody. They're shooting at either Israeli-flag vessels [or] companies that do a lot of business with Israel... They've been very targeted... The Houthis may take the place of Hamas and Hezbollah at some point.
Click here or on the image below to watch the video interview with Jon right now. For the full audio episode, click here.
(Additional past episodes are located here.)
The transcript is coming soon.