Dave Collum: Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution

27:07Wiener's laptop had kill switches in it. I mean, it was filled with crap that wasn't supposed to be there. We never get to see it. Supposedly, nine cops watched the videos on Wiener's laptop. They had to keep leaving the room because they couldn't stand what they were seeing. And all nine are now dead. And there's names and faces and deadness, right? They're real people. Now you can say, well, maybe they died for other reasons. I go, but it's still nine cops. And, you know, it's like the five cops who died after January 6th, right? Four of them were suicides. Out of, according to AI, there were about 80 cops really in the thick of things.

27:53Four of them died from suicide. I don't need any more information to wonder what the hell is going on there. That's one of those standalone observations where I go, that's not right. the math of that doesn't work for me I've got pictures of Ukrainian see I'm going off topic I've got pictures of you known Ukrainian operatives with you're not going to believe this with the QAnon shaman guy I think I have the horns on January 6th at January 6th what is that all about? I've got videos that seems totally normal yeah yeah totally I've got videos with the National Guard 100 yards away not doing anything I've got videos of John Sullivan right The guy who was supposedly Antifa, but Antifa said, no, he's a Fed.

28:38Don't talk to him. Who then filmed Ashley Babbitt getting shot. This guy's getting around. What's your image of an Antifa person? Lost soul, tattoos everywhere, right? No meaning in life, right? Yeah, and no path forward, really. I mean, these are nihilists. These are society's trends. If they're real, that is. If they're legit. If they're real. But I mean, if you look at the mugshots of Antifa arrest or the people who came to my house, Antifa there, I mean, these are, you know, obviously I disagree. They threaten my family. I don't like them and all that. But you also feel like these are like one step above homeless.

29:13Like these are losers. Right. And so if he's Antifa, it's really odd that he was a nationally ranked cyclist. Are you serious? What I know about nationally ranked anythings is their lives have purpose. Now, there's a mugshot. You follow this Patriot Front story. I'm really this. Now the helmet's on. The leash to the jungle gym is on. The Patriot Front guys, those guys who'd stomp around looking like neo-Nazis who also were buff and had no pot bellies and covered their faces and get arrested. And they're handcuffed with their backpacks still on and their their their megaphone still over their shoulders.

29:53and then I saw mug shots of them. Not a single tattoo. Yeah. No tattoos. These are neo-Nazis. Not a single tattoo. They didn't have like Waffen-SS lighting bolts on their cheeks. No swastikas, you know. Right. So we are in this big Walter Kernish. We're in this made-for-the-internet plot. Walter is great. And his description of the, I've been tracking the Mangione story. It's not the right story. There's something wrong. And Walter laid it out. Now, what Walter didn't say is who's behind him. That's obviously the question. I mean, you can look at all of these different stories, particularly the acts of violence, which are because they are acts of violence, are examined much more closely than any other kind of act.

30:50And it doesn't make any sense. I mean, the shooting of Trump a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. Oh, I wrote about that too. Everything. Do you know what I just read the other day? The guy who shot Thomas Crooks, right? There were bullets flying all over that place. But it was a catastrophically poorly set up defense of Trump. But the guy who shot Thomas Crooks was the same guy who organized the protection of Trump. and they said oh you know he didn't get convicted of anything and other guys didn't i go well so the guy who was in charge of making sure that after the assassination was done he popped the assassin is somehow not getting prosecuted why am i not shocked so you're saying he was the jack ruby figure here he was the jack ruby figure yes so so what was odd about that story well first of all the news agencies were there.

31:47This was a totally irrelevant rally in an irrelevant place, Butler, Pennsylvania. And there's a stranger story there. And again, I just pick up these shards and sometimes they fit together into a story and sometimes it's just put it in your head, keep it there until you get more detail. There's a guy sitting behind Trump named Joseph Fusca? Fusca is his last name. I've seen him before many times. He was, by the QAnon guys, which are a bunch of whack jobs, said to be, you're not going to believe it, said to be John F. Kennedy Jr. waiting to come back and save the world. And I'm going, oh, you guys have lost your minds finally.

32:36You've really gone. It doesn't matter that that's a total crock. Fusca is this guy and they said, no, his name is Fusca and whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he's one who supposedly is JFK Jr. in disguise. Fusca was there sitting right behind Trump. I go off all the rallies. There he is. Who is he? I don't know. And what's really interesting, Trump gets shot. Everyone's reacting and Fusca's not. And then there's two pieces of footage. When you say you've seen him before, you've seen him in photographs before? Oh, he had been talked about. I've dug down some deep rabbit holes and find this guy.

33:15So one of the things you discover, you know this as well as anyone, you think you're going down a rabbit hole and you discover Gobekli Tepe. You get down the rabbit hole and you go, there's an entire ecosystem down here that people don't know exists. It's like once you ask, how did Kennedy get killed? And you go, oh boy, that's troubling, right? Right. And then building seven, which you talked with Ron Johnson, who, by the way, was in our Doc Zoom group. Right. When I'm talking, we had everyone. We had everyone. Once you go on one or two of these and you go, I can't trust anything. And I work in a field where you're supposed to be able to get the facts and say, now, here's an odd story.

34:00A friend of mine is binding all my annual reviews that I write. I write one blog a year. I've been thinking about why. Can you just pause and describe what that is? That's really the reason I wanted to talk to you was because your interview is well-known among people who are paying attention. What is it and why do you do it? So the people trying to wreck our civilization want you to be passive. They want you weak so they can control you. Weakness is their goal. No, thanks. Our friends at Beam, a proud American company, understand that our country can only be great if its people are strong. And that's why they've created a new creatine product to help listeners like you stay mentally sharp and physically fit.

34:46People like to mock creatine. CNN doesn't like creatine at all. But people buy it because it works. Beam's creatine can help you improve your strength, your brain health, your longevity. It's completely free of sugar and synthetic garbage that's in almost everything else that you eat. Of course, you don't hear about it too much because again, a population that is strong, clear-minded and physically capable is a threat to tyrants. That's why they want you playing video games. To celebrate American strength, actual American strength, Beam is offering up to 30 % off their best-selling creatine for the next 48 hours.

35:24Go to shopbeam.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker at checkout. That's shopbeam.com. Use the code Tucker for up to 30 % off. It's built on core values, integrity, results, no BS, beam. We strongly recommend it.

35:59Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crock store today. This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter and finds connections you might have missed. For problems worth solving, get started at Claude.ai slash Spotify.

36:43So I stopped paying 100 % attention to chemistry and started on the side looking at markets when I became a boomer with some wealth. And I became, it was a tech bull. And then by 98, I realized the markets were in trouble. I'd read enough books, read enough blogs, read enough articles. And so, and then that naturally led me to politics. Because if you don't understand politics, you don't understand economics. And around 07, I wrote a, I used to, on this chat board I was at, I'd write a summary at the end of the year. And part of it was to make sure that my fairly extreme views weren't costing me serious pain and suffering.

37:33And instead of getting 200 clicks, because this group is about 200 of us talking, it went to like 4 ,000. I go, what happened? I said, oh, I put it on my blog. Someone told me that. So in 09, I decided to do it seriously. 30 years of investing. So I wrote this thing. I said, 30 years of investing from the cheap seats was the title. And it went wild, actually. And part of it was because I'd been highly successful as a rank amateur through the 90s as a tech bull. I made 700 % on WorldCom and then got out. I made 700 % on Dell, Warner Lambert. I thought I was a genius. And so I had years where I made over 100 % without leverage.

38:25And then I got out. And I got out due to Y2K, which turns out to be a grift. It took me decades to figure that out. I thought I just blew it. But no, it was Silicon Valley selling software and hardware. And I can make that story if you want, but it's not worth it. and then so I started paying attention to politics and then I just went deeper and deeper down rabbit holes I know I'm reading about Putin in 2012 trying to understand what's going on there and stuff like that so I just kind of naturally got on rabbit holes now you can't market a blog worse than writing one a year right that's about as bad as you get and I don't charge for it so there's that and then I realized So the reason it works for me is if I wrote a blog once a week, most of them would be garbage.

39:22Because imagine how many blogs I would have written about how Trump and Elon are best friends. Right? And now it seems irrelevant. I'd be writing about how Trump and Elon are enemies. And then a month from now, it'll be irrelevant because they'll be best friends again. You're right. And so you could, I could not write a weekly blog. And so what I do is, by writing once a year, it gives me a long time to think about. So I get the idea, and then I sort of watch. I go, oh, look at that. That's a puzzle piece right there. So it essentially is book length, 250, 300 pages every fall. And you don't charge for it.

40:03And you also can't write it in March. That's not a year in review. So I usually end up with about 700 pages of links and notes. And if I see something, we talked before about using trite metaphors, you know, how we both hate it. But once in a while, I'll see a way to insult a person. I'll go, oh, I'm saving that. Right? Now, the other reason it's really great. Where do people find it? It's published at Peak Prosperity. And it's my pin tweet. So it stays up there all year until I publish the next one. And it gives me the chance to collect the information, to ponder what's going on that year. And then, and some things become irrelevant, so I don't write about them.

40:46Some things are not, some things become trite, right? But I think my analysis of the 2016 election, for example, is really good. The prophetic line. I was watching BET. Please don't get me to explain why I'm watching BET and Black Entertainment Today or something. whatever television and some burly black guys talking about trump and he says forget the messenger listen to the message listen i'm going holy moly right turns out he was the head of the end of of the uh uh new black panther party i go trump just got endorsed by the black panthers so i and then i saw jimmy brown the running back say he will be a president of the people and so I wrote it might just be a flicker but I think the black community is moving to the right and boy was that ahead of its time and so what I won't do is write about something that everyone's writing about why?

41:52the other problem I face is that I don't write about stuff I'm an expert I write about stuff that I know nothing and so when I wrote about I've been following Putin, but when the Ukraine war came, first thing I noticed, I bet you noticed it too, it wasn't a war. It was a police action. And they weren't killing people. They were moving troops across the border. They were talking to Ukrainians. And I kept saying to my wife, this is not a war. And you see some grandmother going, ah, this is just really terrible. And I'm going, that's not a war. You want to see a war? Look at Baghdad day one. That's a war.

42:31That's what a war looks like, right? You'd see an explosion from 20 miles away. You wouldn't know what blew up, right? Like my wife thought I was nuts. I go, it's not a war. It's not a war. Well, it became a war because as you and I both know, NATO wanted a war. And so it morphed from being a police action, which I think Putin was trying to throw a fastball past NATO's chin and saying back off on this whole NATO thing. That's correct. And so when I wrote about that, I found about 20 to 40 guys who were trying to get it right, which includes you. It includes guys like Max Abramson. Do I have that right?

43:09Glenn Greenwald. The guy who died. What's his name? The guy who got killed by the Ukrainians. Gonzalo Lira. Gonzalo Lira. The American who was murdered by the Ukrainian government. And we could have gotten him out with a phone call and we chose not to. 100%. Because the narrative was Putin's bad. Ukraine's a bunch of really nice guys, super nice guys. It's a democracy. What a crock of shit. That was a lie from head to toe. We wanted a war. We still want a war. I have intelligence friends too, not like you, but I have them. And I was talking to one the other day. I think he likes to talk to me because he can talk to me about these subjects.

43:45and in his universe, I'm the only guy he can talk to for which he doesn't have to worry because everyone else in his world is connected to everyone else in his world. So I think he likes to have real honest conversations. One day we're on the phone. He says, do you do signal? I go, yeah. So we went to signal. He said, someone was listening to us. Boy. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. Yeah, I know. So there's always a narrative. There's always one narrative and we're now in an era where you only get to talk about that narrative. You know that. I know that. You and I, we're just mutually.

44:19Yeah. And the penalties for straying from the story. You get fired. Are real. Yeah, totally. I mean, whatever. There's been no age in human history where telling the truth, the real truth is rewarded. So I don't think that we should be judged. So where you first really won me over. So you and I agree that when you were young, you were a punk. Yeah. The fact that you're so proud of the metamorphosis is great. It may have come before this, but where I noticed it was the Las Vegas shootings, where we kind of talked a little bit at breakfast. Here's the funny story. They interviewed that night a guy named Mike Kronk.

45:03And Mike Kronk tells me. The night of the shootings. The night of the shootings. That was 2017, maybe? I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah. And Mike Kronk told this story. He didn't look very emotional, which I found a little odd. I, by the way, think all the shootings within an error bar are not what they appear to be. I'll take it all the way back to Columbine if you want. But Mike Kronk talks about his friend getting shot three times in the chest from hundreds of yards away. and later a marksman said not possible, too much spray a sniper would be required to hit a guy three times and the guy was just doing this right and Mike says his friend stuck his fingers in the bullet his own bullet holes to stop the bleeding, I'm going now you're lying why is Mike lying?

45:57Right away red flag, why is Mike lying? And who is he, by the way? Well, that's a great question. So Mike then finishes how they put him on a cart and wheeled him out. May I just ask why? I'll tell you in a minute. Why did you know he was lying when he said his friend put his own fingers? Because you don't get shot three times in the chest and provide your own health care. Fair, fair. Right? We thought this through when we started this podcast a year ago, and we decided we're never advertising anything that we or people on our staff don't use. Period. We're only partnering with companies that we agree with and endorse actually in our personal lives.

46:35So we want to announce a new partnership with a survival company we trust most. Last Country Supply is the name of our collaboration. Last Country Supply. I have a big surplus of survival food from that great company. If you get a bucket of food with a 25-year shelf life, 2 ,000 calories a day, potatoes, rice, bread, drinks, you feel a lot better. Let's say there's an EMP attack or civil disturbance. You don't know what could happen in the future. You are prepared and you are protecting your family with Last Country Supply products. So head to lastcountrysupply.com to shop for our new collection, Bulk Up Now.

47:14There is no scenario where you will regret being prepared.

47:27find your new fave footwear. Step into a local croc store and step into your new look. Try it, style it, make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest croc store today. This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter and finds connections you might have missed.

48:13For problems worth solving, get started at claude.ai slash Spotify. So then, like YouTube, you see it rolls over 15 seconds and then it goes to the next YouTube. And we're watching Vegas like you watch 9-11, right? Right. It was really 500 people. It is the biggest shooting. It's probably Gettysburg. Yes. Right? When was the last time you heard a gun antagonist say, remember Vegas? We got to get rid of guns. Never. Never. Right. And you know why. So it rolls to the next interview and it's Mike Kronk, new network, same guy. He tells the same story. Now he's looking a little more emotional and his story changes just a little, just a little around the edges.

49:00And then it rolls to the next interview and there's Mike Kronk again. And I go, why? You got 22 ,000 people and why are you interviewing Mike Kronk? And then there were oddities that were always showing up like some lady walking through the crowd saying you're all going to die tonight. And they carted her away and things like that. Yeah, yeah, weird stuff. And so I tried to figure out who Mike Crank was. He's just some hick from Alaska, right? He's just some hick from Alaska. After the fact, I looked and just picture him holding an elk by the horns, you know, that he shot. The next day, the head of the police said, there's no way one guy did it.

49:39The following day, he said one guy did it. Takes a long time to show one guy did it, right? That's something you don't know. there's a lot of debris before you figure that out. There's now a documentary called Route 41. So I dug into this. What I noticed is you stayed with the story for about two weeks, maybe, and you were bringing up, and Coulter jumped in, you know, Paddock was making money, how? Playing video poker. That's the way he's making a living? That's like saying I'm a professional crackhead? and then what happens is there was shooting all over the place. There was shooting everywhere.

50:17In the city that day. In the city that night. And so now there's, if you don't believe me, there's this documentary called Route 41 and they got stuff I didn't know about, but they also got stuff that I, so it's kind of an answer key for me to use academic terms. And if you watch Route 41, you will see there were shooters everywhere. There are cop cameras showing shooters. And then remember the guy who got shot in the leg up on the floor where Paddock was? Yes. Some guy named Jesus or something, right? Some illegal with two social security numbers. Hello. And then afterwards, reporters tried to get to his house.

50:55His house was being protected by cars. They had no license plates. And then all of a sudden he goes to Mexico. And when asked, well, where'd he go? They said, well, he was planning a trip to Mexico. So when I wrote him, I said, oh, by the way, Jesus, when you get back, could you stop in? We've got some questions for you. Right. And then he comes back and he does one interview on Ellen DeGeneres. And Ellen introduced him saying, and he's there with a handler I had already seen. I'm going, wait a minute. That guy, I've been seeing that guy a lot, that other guy. So Jesus is looking at his feet. His name isn't Jesus, but it's something like that.

51:32But Alan introduced him, this is the only interview you're going to do, and you got to get it off your chest. I'm going, oh, shit, here we go. And then the handler's doing all the talking. Jesus is looking at his feet. And then we never hear about Jesus again. Probably he's in some shallow grave somewhere because he's too inconvenient. I tried to interview him at the time. Really? Yes. Couldn't get to him, could you? He drove to Mexico from Vegas. Right. Two of them. Yeah, probably with an escort. Yeah, then he came back and yeah, I tried my hardest. Now, Alan works for the company that owns Mandalay.

52:07His handler. Yeah. No, no, Alan DeGeneres. Oh, Alan DeGeneres. I'm so sorry. Yeah. And so they're buttoning it down. Now, what you see from Route 41 video is there was just an enormous amount of chaos. There's enormous numbers of shooters. Even that night, you were seeing videos from cab drivers saying they're shooting over here. They're shooting over there. And there would be some chaos, but there's way too much. There's guys who took audios and said, here, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. They hear that, that, that, that, that, that. So you could hear multiple guns, the whole thing. So then what happened?

52:44Mike Kronk, I start reading trauma surgeons saying there's something wrong with the story. You know, if you get hit with, you know, what was it, AR-15 or something? And a.308, a bigger rifle. You're going to die out there. You're going to bleed out right there. Even if it doesn't hit a major artery, you're just going to turn your leg to jello. Three chest wounds from a rifle? Yeah. Yeah. So what would he look like? And so then I saw an interview of a young woman and she's sitting there in a chair in the hospital and they're interviewing her. I'm going, you look pretty perky. And then Mike Kronk with a news crew goes in and interviews his friend.

53:20Now, first and foremost, we know HIPAA says, you ain't bringing a news crew into a hospital room. Second, we know three shots of the chest, he'd be in the ICU. The only way you'd know he's alive is that there'd be a beeping on the screen. And he'd have hoses coming out of every orifice and he would look dead. And so they take the news crew and they interview his friend. He's got a nasal cannula, a nasal cannula. So I'm sitting there thinking, oh, so you're talking with three holes in your chest. What are you sticking your fingers so the air doesn't come flying out of your chest holes? right and then i notice the screen's not even plugged in now what is mike cronk now he's a state senator from alaska in alaska i think he's a state level state senator what yeah who's the chief of police he became governor nevada or something Right?

54:17So again, so there's a guy named John Cullen who did an analysis of the shooting and his conclusion. A relative? A relative? Yeah. No, no, no. No, no. This felt different. John worked for Oracle. He's some on the spectrum code head. He also analyzed the Butler shooting, the audios of the Butler shooting. He's an on the spectrum code head. He's on the Spectrum Conehead. He sort of bears down and grabs on something a little too firmly, I think, but he brings his data. As on the Spectrum Coneheads. Yeah, I know. And he, there was pretty good evidence that a lot of the shooting was coming from helicopters behind the Mandalay, and he tracked the transponders turning on and off behind the Mandalay.

54:59The story was that Mohammed bin Salman was on the top floor. The crown prince of ruler of Saudi Arabia. Yes, yes. A guy who lots of people would like to kill. And his theory is that the Saudis tried to flush him out of there and on the way out, they would cap him. Now, they blew it. If that's the story, they blew it. I think the helicopter idea is not bad. But I did a couple of podcasts with John and I said, John, but what about all the shooting on the ground? And John was kind of dismissive. I go, you can't dismiss it. You can't let that stuff go. Your model's got to include that. But it occurred a year later.

55:42Muhammad, remember when Khashoggi got killed? What was his name? Jamal Khashoggi. Now, a non-Kashoggi is one of the most famous CIA guys on the planet. Jamal Khashoggi is the one who got diced up and fed to the camels. Now, he's a New York Times reporter. I think he was also CIA. Washington Post columnist. Yeah. And he was killed in. In the embassy. in Istanbul, I believe. Okay. Supposedly, on the anniversary of the Vegas shootings, supposedly Mohammed bin Salman had a party, locked the doors and showed a video of him getting sliced up and said to the royal sitting in the room, don't even think about it.

56:26Now, when I wrote about Khashoggi, everyone was having a cow over Khashoggi, right? When he got killed. I'm going, we're killing tens of thousands of Yemenis. We killed 5 million people in the Middle East directly and indirectly due to our post 9-11 responses. Yes. Right? And I called him ODK, one dead Khashoggi. I said, it is insane to worry about one dead guy in a region of the world where people die for no reason all the time. Who was at war with his own government, the Saudi government? I mean, I'm obviously not for vivisecting people, but I also think, yeah, there's a scale of evil and starving kids is worse than what happened in Khashoggi.

57:10I agree with you. Right. So you were the only mainstream guy who I watched steadily on the story, staying with the Vegas shootings, noting that there's something wrong. We got very hassled by law enforcement. I'm sure you did. Which was, you know, I worked at Fox News, obviously, at the time, and big supporters of law enforcement. I've always been a big supporter of law enforcement. We've never gotten hassled anywhere. Just the opposite. Oh, you work for Fox News. Oh, my gosh, of course. Slow down. The official law enforcement is what got you. Man. I mean, they blocked our camera position. Oh, yeah.

57:44They were totally opposed to us doing that. I've never had that experience. So let's stay on the shootings just briefly. Uvalde. There's problems all over that shooting. Remember that shooting in Texas where the guy got in? I knew the mayor. Yes. There's problems all over the place because first of all, there's something like 800 law enforcement guys within reach of the damn thing. And there's a ton of like 5 ,000 people. And then they didn't go in for 78 minutes or something. I remember. Excuse me. You show me 10 cops. Eight of them have kids. Right now I'm reading a book called The Moral Animal.

58:22It's about human behavior. Yep, yep. And out of those eight, eight would have gone into, I don't care what you say. I'm going in. Of course. You give me a soccer mom, she's going in, right? 100%. And then there was the mom who did go in and her story was incoherent. Her story, she came out and she said this and then she said this and it was not consistent. And I'm going, that's just a narrative thrown on top of it. So what are we looking at here? Kayfabe. What does that mean? Kayfabe is something Eric Weinstein wrote about. He was asked to write an essay with a bunch of other scholarly types. And he said that politics was kayfabe.

59:01It was professional wrestling. And there's all these layers. There's all these tricks. It's way more sophisticated than people think. The way you engage the audience and you have some reality and some non-reality and things change. And he talked about politics being kayfabe. I don't think anything you see can be interpreted literally and at face value. What would be the purpose, however? Well, as I was telling you, a friend's binding all my annual reviews, and I will probably make$1 ,000 off this. I mean, this is not getting rich. I'm paid probably 0.001 cent per hour pay for this task. I had to go back.

59:51I've been proofing the drafts from previous years. And what I noticed about 2013, 14, 15 is something's changed. And what's changed is... And you could get facts. And you felt like you were getting facts. And the stories would break and they would stay that way. And they wouldn't be shifting around. And you could say, okay, here's what happened. And this piece fits in here. And now you can't. Now it's like, and we talked about using trite metaphors. Here's one, but I really like it. It's like when your GPS starts randomly rerouting you. and our GPS just keeps ranting, rerouting, and I go, I'm not taking that right turn now.

1:00:39So you just boot the GPS, you break out your gazetteer and you figure out where you're going, right? And so our GPS is rerouting us constantly. And one of your guests, Mike Benz, who I occasionally chat with briefly, who's very impressive. And as I've said, I don't know everything about him And I don't mean just in a casual way. I think there's a complex story there. But right now he's saying the right stuff. He gave a talk one day where he talked about how around 2013, the so-called deep state, which is a term I've tried to figure out where it came from. And I think the guy who gets the most credit is kind of Peter Dale Scott, who wrote about drug trafficking, Berkeley professor, and he called it deep politics.

1:01:30But I think it predates that, but that's where I get it from. He said the deep state realized they were losing control of the narrative. They had underestimated the internet and social media. And as a consequence, they had to get a hold of it completely. And so then this is where we're at. Now, we thought Trump was going to save us. We thought Elon was going to save us. My Twitter feed is a dumpster fire. So instead of taking away data, they provide excess noise. So now instead of trying to suppress the signal, you just increase the noise. I think that's very deep, and I think it points to what's happening.

1:02:13I would think that's clearly true. So what is the fact? That was the title of last year's write-up. What is the fact? Yeah, it's impossible. You can't actually control, you can't restrict the flow of information across the internet. You throw debris out there. Yeah. It's like the pilots who throw the debris out the back of the plane so that the guided missiles don't know what to hit. Of course, exactly right. Right. And they also throw out debris so that then they can prove that it's not true so you feel like an idiot. QAnon was clearly that. QAnon. Yeah, QAnon. What was QAnon? I don't know. I don't either.

1:02:53I avoid, you know, I'd be listening to something and it would have useful information and all of a sudden then it would show the whole and here's Trump and his generals are going to save the world. No, I agree. For Christ's sake. But the interesting, I never knew anything about QAnon. I never paid any attention at all. I have a good friend who I really admire is much smarter than I am, who because he is smarter than I am, took like a year to look into QAnon. What did he get? I don't fully understand it, but here's what I understand is that some of the predictions at QAnon came true. I mean, it's a sophisticated thing.

1:03:26It's not just— Oh, I think it's a bunch of ex-spooks. For sure. It's not a bunch of college kids on 4chan or whatever they claim it was. These are guys who are probably pissed that the system went bad. The point of it, it's unclear who is behind it. I have some theories, but people I know actually, but I don't know if they're true. But what is obvious to me is that it's a control mechanism. Trying to siphon off some of that energy and move it in a less dangerous direction. Right. Focus on Wuhan, right? Focus on the lab in Wuhan. That's siphoning. It's all American politics. Have a race war. Leave us alone as we loot your country.

1:04:11That's right. That's right. There's a meme out there. There's a joke where the king and his right-hand man, his chief of staff, are looking at the angry townspeople. Some have pitchforks and some have torches. And the king says, don't you have to worry. You just convince the guys with the pitchforks or the enemies of the guys with the torches.

1:04:32So you said that a couple times. Focus on Wuhan. I've fallen for that squirrel. Squirrel. Wuhan thing. Squirrel. A blind nut finds the squirrel. That's funny. I'm stealing that. Making a note. That's an original. I never know if I heard it and forgot where I got it, but that's an original. A blind nut finds the squirrel. What is that distracting us from? I think it is great. You put me in an asylum overnight. An asylum overnight? Yeah, yeah. My hotel's a former asylum. Is it really? Yeah. You didn't ask? No. Oh, yeah. It's a former asylum. I said, you finally got it right. Well, I think there's wisdom here.

1:05:17There is wisdom here. What are they distracting us from by having us focus on Wuhan? Well, huge amounts of grift. You interviewed Catherine Austin Fitz. Yes. I've been blessed. Smart woman. So I come out of nowhere. I have no credentials beyond those that I can create, right? And I think one of the ways you created this is by being truthful. Yes. And I know truth is everything to you. I try to make it that. And actually in this book, The Moral Animal, they say the reason we self-delude is so that you can be truthful and deceive your opponent. That's what self-delusion is. Yes. I've practiced a lot of that.

1:06:01I've been adopted by some people who didn't have to adopt me. And so, for example, I'm tight with Steve Hanke, who's a famous economist. And Catherine has been very supportive. And there's several dozen who somehow have decided that I'm worth their time and helped me. And so they're useful to chat with. They're useful to. But Catherine's story, and a lot of people think Catherine's nuts, right? Right. But but she talks about the huge amount of resources that have been siphoned off in the tens of trillions of dollars of resources. I know Katharine Fitz, you can disagree with her. She's not nuts.

1:06:49That's not true. She's not what? Nuts. Oh, no, I don't think she is nuts. Right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. She's a grounded person. She could have things wrong, but that's totally different. And I had a friend, another friend who I think is phenomenal, tell me that she's nuts and don't get near her. And I said, no, I don't think so.

1:07:11But we all can get sucked down into the rabbit hole to the point you can't get out, too. There are days where I wish, why don't you just go play golf? Yeah. Or right now, my house is hanging off a 100-foot cliff looking west over Kuga Lake. I can literally throw rotten fruit off my deck and drop it down into the drink afterwards I'll show you photos. The view is such that if there are places in the country where the view would cost$20 million, not in Ithaca of course and

1:07:44if people come and visit they should. It's beautiful. I can't remember why I said that. You're saying that people dismiss you know, the few who are just committed to pursuing truth no matter what as crazy, and you gave Katharine Fitz as an example, but you said you can actually go crazy by looking too carefully into what actually happened. So the lake I'm on, turns out, broke the New York State smallmouth bass record about three years ago, broke the New York State largemouth bass record last year, and I used to fish all the time when I was a kid, and I haven't fished it. What's wrong with this picture?

1:08:23Well, if you've got smallmouth bass there, I think you need to fish it on a fly rod. I know. It'll totally change your life. It's not a fly rod. It's a deep lake. It's a... But you can catch them on the surface with a popper. And if you do, if you catch a sizable smallmouth on a popper on a fly rod, you know... I'm an 18-foot deep shoal guy. Sinking line. But so, you know, my wife thought that I had fish removed from my thumbs because she never saw a picture of me that didn't have a fish hanging off my hand. But I haven't fished it. because you're absorbed in trying to figure out what's happening.

1:08:54I'm absorbed in raising kids. I'm absorbed in other things. My wife has issues I got to help her with. And I have this fear of buying a boat. But you, as someone who has taken, you know, ample intellectual energy and intelligence and focused it on trying to figure out what are we watching, which I think is like a fair way to describe what you're doing. Like, what is this? what's the truth of it has that been worth doing that's the question that is the question and and there was a time where i thought if i could get to the truth then then that would help in some way but now it's not as clear tell me what well you know now first of all what is the truth right the truth is now becoming very ambiguous.

1:09:46Last year, I wrote about the history of World War II. I did a mini Daryl Cooper. Yes. And it started when I read a book by Diana West, who would be good if you interviewed her. And it's this revisionist history of World War II. And you go, well, why would you want to read that? Well, it turns out, I think the story we got about World War II is all wrong. I think that's right. And then I read about FDR, and FDR's right-hand man was a Soviet spy. Certainly was. Right. And therefore, we should have been one can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. Patton said that.

1:10:22So and maybe there wouldn't have been a Holocaust. Right. You know, there's but but but Stalin was awful by any metric. And we weren't his ally. The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War Two in Russian territory. No, 15 to 20 ,000 were missing. And we left them there. And then you read about Pearl Harbor. We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor story is not what we're told, but I dug into that and you find out the pro we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to get to Stalin who was going to be attacked. He wanted us to take the Japanese office flank.

1:10:58And FDR's right hand man was okay with that because he was a Soviet spy. Right. Then I read about FDR and the Great Depression. You find out that every single penny he spent trying to help the forgotten. Amity Schlaes, the forgotten man, was spent to buy votes every last penny. He was a sociopath. And the only thing he could do was lie. He was a compulsive liar. His inner circle had to constantly cover for his lying. And the only thing he's used for now is every time you want to grow government, you cite FDR. and so I read half a dozen books that sort of went at these different angles and wrote about it so I start out knowing nothing and then I write about it and I try to write to learn which is the most terrifying part of AI by the way if you take out the writing you take out the thought the other thing that scares me about it boy squirrel general,

1:11:59AI is going to make the system very unforgivingly brittle. I'm not worried as much about the authoritarian slant that Elon occasionally talks about, which might be just to fake us out, who knows. I am worried that we're going to reach a point where, you know, when everything, everything computer does is binary. So you go to the grocery store, you slip your credit card in, it says you're good to go or didn't work. Swipe it again. Didn't work. Sorry, you're out of here, right? They debank people. This is a big problem. What happens when everything is so AI'd up that there's no person anywhere with an earshot who can help you at all?

1:12:33No one who can say, okay, let me get this for you. Right. There's been a misunderstanding or there's some sort of human nuance required. Yeah, I had that the other day. I had that the other day on a credit card request talking to the lady and it kept sending me in these loops and she finally straightened out. But what happens when the code is being written by computer so there's no human who understands the code. So the system will be very brittle, be very unforgiving. Forget about whether it's used nefariously. Forget about whether someone uses it as an authoritarian tool, which is very real possibility.

1:13:02And I worry about that a lot. Just the fact that no one will know who's driving the cab ever on anything. And also now you're taking out the intellectual part. So when I write, when you write, when I write a scientific paper, the project's not done until I've written it, because that's where you lay it out. And if you can't put it on paper coherently with no internal contradictions, you're not done. You're not done understanding it. You're not done understanding it. So the writing is understanding. So I think people who don't write for a living or aren't forced to write regularly don't understand.

1:13:39This concept is a hard one. But it's through writing, or I would also say speaking, you know, public speaking, that putting concepts into words makes the concepts intelligible to the person who's articulating them. Like you don't really understand something until you've been forced to write about it. It's like a comedy shop. You go, you know, the great comedians will go down to the cheapo comedy shops to practice, to figure out what works and what doesn't work, right? And then they go on Johnny Carson. Exactly. And so you write your way to wisdom. So when there's no writing, there's no thinking.

1:14:16Right. So I read about Maui, the fires. I wrote about that. Very clearly a land grab. You may remember how many kids died. No. Do you remember? USA article said 750 kids are missing. Yep. Right? When a kid's missing after something like that, they're dead. But they're not missing. They're dead. Maybe a couple found their way. Someone drove them out of town, but they're dead. Try to find anywhere a statement about dead kids now. You can't find it. You go to Wikipedia, you search the word child, you search the word, you read it. There's no mention of dead children. There were 750 kids missing according to USA Today.

1:14:58Then all of a sudden the governor saying, well, you know, we're worried about land speculators. So we're going to buy the land up so that the speculators can't get it. And I go, so you can sell it to your friends, right? Is it possible maybe they mowed down Lahaina because they want to put up resorts and things? But what also was out there was this idea of directed energy weapons starting the fires. Now, I think that was a dead end. I don't think directed energy weapons were used. They're called DEWs. Even though there's a DEW facility on Maui, you don't need that. And there were videos. I go, I think those are fake.

1:15:37So I found nothing. But I used it as an excuse to read up on DEWs. And I was reading RAND reports from 40 years ago. What is a directed energy weapon? It's basically Star Wars. And so it's Reagan's Star Wars. And everyone said, oh, that's just science fiction. I go, well, Gorbachev seemed to want to get rid of him every chance he got. So Gorbachev took him very seriously. So it turns out what you do is you put something in space. and it shoots some sort of energy, guided energy down to the surface of the earth. And the different frequencies have different efficacies. And so some are really good at hitting a target.

1:16:17Some broaden out like microwaves are different than some sort of ultraviolet laser. I'm not very good at this stuff. And then I started reading about how what they do is they use a pulse of one laser to punch a hole through the atmosphere. And then the second pulse would go through that hole. I mean, it's really clever stuff. This is 40-year-old Rand reports. What do they have behind the paywall 40 years later? Now, the best, I think, evidence of a DEW being used, and I was reading about fires in different places where trees were burning that shouldn't have burned and cars. I wrote about it. If someone wants to go read it, that was a couple years ago.

1:17:00The best evidence of a DEW. So if you've got these, you've got to test them, right? It's like why you need, you know, bioweapons labs in Ukraine. You got to test them. You can't use lab rats. You look at the Quebec fires, satellite imagery of the Quebec fires, very mysterious. About 26-ish fires started simultaneously. How do you know? Well, if a fire starts and then another one starts, it'll be downwind. So you'll see, it'll look like the Hawaiian Islands, right? Right. Boom, all at once. 26 fires. In a crudely buckshot pattern, there was 350 miles in diameter.

1:17:51Boy, that's a determined arsonist. Or at least 26 of them. Yeah. In the middle of nowhere. Yeah, with helicopter, I mean, there are no roads, so. But a cell phone can't do it. You know, nothing, right? They're in the middle of nowhere. And all of a sudden, they all start simultaneously. And I'm going, okay, that probably was them testing out their weapons. And we have a lot of wars to test weapons, right? So your basic overarching theory is around 2014, 15, it became clear to the people running the world that you can't keep information under wraps anymore because the internet is impossible to control.

1:18:35And so you had to flood people's brains with extraneous and misleading information. And shut down people. They booted the president of the United States off Twitter. Yeah. How is that possible? Because he was a racist. Shut up, racist. That's what they told me. Shut up, racist. He was a racist. Right. You know, so many, so many 70 ,000 got booted off Twitter. My sister-in-law, she had a Twitter feed. She can't get it back. You know, somehow, I don't know how I survived that. What was her crime? She must have said something favorable about Trump or something. I don't know. So, but the control of information, the shaping of people's understandings of the world around them, that's the whole game right there.

1:19:24So I used to say the internet was democracy's greatest hope and worst enemy. And that it was a battle. I don't think we're going to win it. And the reason I don't is because it's too powerful. And so whoever has control of it will then have that power. So it's only a battle for who gets control of it. Control of information. Control of the digital world. Yeah. so if you see voices out there dissenting from i hear voices if you if you see if you see or hear voices that are dissenting from the official storyline they're going to have to be silenced or eliminated i mean well look at what happened look at the ambushes that occurred when thomas massey who i think is great ran paul who i think has matured immensely and uh who is the third Republican who stepped away from the narrative and all of a sudden the attacks were relentless.

1:20:29Now, that could just be Trump being Trump. It wasn't just Trump attacking them, though. I know. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, by the way, is nowhere near as stupid. I mean, she's not even stupid. Oh, I know. She ran a construction company. Oh, I know. And she just doesn't have whatever that normal, the fear that controls people in D.C. We're like, I can't. But how do you turn on Thomas Massey? Marjorie Taylor Greene at least played a role in kayfabe that you can imagine drawing fire. Massey's this guy, you know, who built his own house and fixes his own car. And he's an engineer.

1:21:12He's an archetype of who we ought to be. As a country. As a country. I so vehemently agree with that. They turned on him. Yeah, well, I haven't. We know why they turned on him. Texted with him this morning. No, I mean, you could say I disagree with Thomas Massey, but if you think Thomas Massey is the problem. You are the problem. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. Just because, first of all, he's a decent man, which always matters to me, and I think it should matter to all of us. You could give Thomas Massey a routing number, and he's not going to take a dollar. He's just not. He's the only one without a handler.

1:21:51That's true. And I think we should admire that, even if you think that all members of Congress should be required to have handlers. It's okay to live in a world where one doesn't. That's what I find so— It's not okay to live in a world where everyone else does. No, I agree with you, but I just find what's so interesting, and there's a religious quality to all of these conversations that I find so striking. It's like, it's okay if you have, you know, all this power, all this money, if you run the U.S. government or whoever you are with a lot of power, you know, you can afford to have some percentage of the population not play along.

1:22:26You don't need, it doesn't need to be an Albanian election in 1982. Like you can have some dissent. Unless you're an authoritarian state. I guess that's right. I mean, but even in an effective authoritarian state, in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates, these are, you know, basically theocracies. They don't agree with that. But, you know, these are Islamic states under Sharia law. You can kind of dissent. It's okay. You just can't do anything really threatening, of course. Right. But more dissent is allowed in Abu Dhabi than in D.C. I just find that just absolutely incredible. Like, what is this? Why can't they allow Thomas Massey to just, like, have his own Massey views?

1:23:05He has a vote. He's a vote, okay, but you've got hundreds of others. Like, I just think it's weird. There's this desire to make sure that nobody sings off the song sheet. Like, and that person must be killed. And I, wow, I just, I don't enforce that among my own children.

1:23:28So, do you know what I'm talking about? No, I absolutely know what you're talking about. It's bizarro. We used to allow opposing views. Yeah, I mean, look, if someone is really a threat to the system, well, I think that should be allowed personally because the people only don't. It depends on in what way. In what way. I have a very wide strike zone for that. But I get it if the system is like, I'm sorry, you're an actual threat. We have to kill you. Okay, systems exist to preserve themselves. I understand that. What I really can't even comprehend is someone out there in a place I've never been and never will go among 350 million people is making a noise that I disagree with.

1:24:02I must crush him. What is that? That's just weird to me. Why are you going to the effort to shut down all dissent? I don't know. But that's what's happening. Oh, I know. Not to swing the topic yet again, let me get back to the universities. People don't understand universities. There are people who do, obviously, but the average person doesn't. So people are going to say, I'm talking my book. Let me take this opportunity with your gargantuan following to explain how universities work. Well, let me just say before you begin that I'm amazed by the broadness of your thinking right or wrong. You're certainly thinking thoughts that most people don't allow themselves to think.

1:24:54And you are a tenured professor at an Ivy League college and you still have your job apparently. So that does say something. It would be hard to fire me. Apparently. I mean, part of the problem is one of the reasons I got canceled is because I twice fought unionizations. Yeah. And the first time was at the request of the dean of faculty. Second time was at the request of the provost of late night phone call. You got to fight this. You got to put together a team. And that's the now president. And so if they fired me, that group was sort of behind my cancellation. So firing me would have been hard because, you know, witness number one would be, did you ask Colm to fight the unions and did that lead to, you know, them canceling him and stuff like that?

1:25:39I really think Cornell is great. I think most universities are fine. We needed a fastball past our chin. Great example, Claudine Gay. Shouldn't be president of Harvard. Shouldn't be on the faculty. Shouldn't have a PhD, in my opinion. That is the sign of the rot that has gotten into the universities. But then it's still an exceptional rot. So I don't see people at Cornell that look like Claudine Gay to me. And if you actually look in the whole DEI thing, you say, well, universities are super duper DEI. And I go, you guys are forgetting that a year ago or two years ago, if you weren't DEI, you got destroyed.

1:26:19The whole system was geared up to make sure you paid dearly if you weren't DEI. So you had to have your deans of diversity and the world was demanding it. And don't forget, this is a world where biological men were competing in women's sports. They still kind of are, but at least it's now starting to dissipate. And that was considered totally normal and was considered rational. And if you fought it, you get fired and things like that. So the universities were simply responding. Now, they'd gotten way left wing. My colleagues were all hired, all hired based on their skills, guaranteed. I'd remember a case if it was a DEI hire.

1:27:01I remember a case because I would have fought it. I would have screamed, I don't shut up on things like that. We try to find the best person in the world to hire and we go for that person if we can. And we do pretty well. and so if you were on a campus you wouldn't see what we're hearing about i don't think you'd walk around the campus everything just looks pretty normal so you're in the hardest of the hard sciences though do you think that's the problem if i walked over the art squad i'd see some looney tunes right um and we're now destroyed the cost of an education is too high to waste it And so if you're going to spend$300 ,000, you can't go into a career that you make$40 ,000 or that you make$25 ,000 because you're a barista.

1:27:50It's just no longer even viable. So you have to. So colleges, if I were president of Cornell, I'd put together an elite committee of people I absolutely trusted and say, you guys are in charge of trying to figure out where we should be in 20 years and how to get there. Because we can't be here in 20 years. It's not going to work. Arts and sciences and this whole idea of this broadly based education was formed prior to the cost and was formed when wealthy people went to college. So you could be frivolous if you wanted. And getting a sheepskin could get you onto Wall Street and be the lead analyst for all the dot coms, Henry Blodgett style, right?

1:28:33Those days are gone. And so colleges are going to have to tighten up. But my colleagues are, I would say, on average, out of 30 colleagues, I'll say maybe, I think 27 of them are left of center. And I can't explain why. Now, when I talk to them, they're totally rational people, totally reasonable people. The way it works as a chemist is you are an entrepreneur. You get a job. They give you startup money to get started. You have to then go raise money. Funding rates are ballpark, maybe 15 % of the people who get funded. By the way, the ones who never get funded, they've dropped off. So that 15 % is people still trying.

1:29:15And I'm going to brag, I put 21 in a row successfully. Do the math on that. That's improbable. But my colleagues are constantly battling. They're putting together this program. They're running research groups of anywhere from five to 30. No one pays for that. They raised the money from the federal system. You say, well, the Fed shouldn't pay the money. Well, years and years ago, we decided the way to run a research program in the United States was through universities and federal grants. It was a Sputnik thing. There's other ways to do it, but we set up that system. And if you look at all the startup companies around the country and all the pharmaceutical agents, they all, you can trace their origins back to academic labs.

1:30:02Pfizer discovers far fewer drugs than they buy from some small startup that came out of some biochemistry department or some medical school or something. And so the academic research area is the foundation level starting point. I have a number of friends who are worth a fortune because they patented something. And that's actually good because it would be neutered and not even usable by the free market if it didn't have the patent coverage. And so it made sense. So it puts an incentive system in there, right? Cornell gets some, the investigator gets some, the department gets some, and the world gets a new drug.

1:30:41It's not a crazy system. Now, there's other ways to do it, but that's not how we do it. And we produce the best science. So it worked. Now, the problem is that Trump threw a fastball past our chin and we deserved it. We absolutely deserved it. So he's saying, look, get rid of the guys in sports, which Penn did with Leah Thomas. You know, get rid of the DEI, which a lot of schools are trying to and at the same time ducking, you know, naming them by different things. But the fastball was needed. The problem is, as you said at breakfast, it was the social stuff that Trump was going after. But you don't go after the social stuff with social stuff.

1:31:29by going after the money. Right. So Harvard's locked down for$9 billion of research funds. And my understanding is it's still locked down. Cornell's locked down for over a billion. Harvard was getting$9 billion from the feds for research of various kinds. And it's on hold. And it's on hold. And the word cancel versus frozen, I was trying to figure it out. Columbia, I thought it was a cancel. Columbia got crushed. And then Columbia put out a memo that said canceled. Now, I don't know if that's because it's been canceled, but my understanding is the money's not flowing. Now, the problem is, as a trustee said to me, you know, if this goes into 2026, we're in a world of trouble.

1:32:13I said, if this goes into August, we're in a world of trouble. I've got colleagues with 15-person research groups that are all funded by these federal grants, and they do good science. They do good science. There's probably some crap in the humanities, but they suck about$10 ,000 of grant money out of the system to do that stupid thing. I don't know. And I don't even know if it's stupid. And there's no – so now if you're getting your PhD, there's no one who can give you a postdoc. That's the next step. That step's broken. So the system right now is flatlined. And I really wish they'd gotten rid of USAID.

1:32:54And you told me they did. and they just moved it. Well, that's a problem. But I think the academic research system was working. I think part of the problem from a civilian perspective are the endowments. Now, let me explain the endowments. So let me just complete the thought by saying it's the no tax part that I think drives some of us to want to sort of storm the campus with guns because that's, you know, everyone's getting, I mean, the private equity guys are taking all their income as interest. So they're paying half the rate. But for a normal person, you know, you're paying over half of everything you make to the government and it's being spent on nonsense or given to Ukraine.

1:33:33And then there are these giant hedge funds called university endowments that aren't paying any taxes. And I think that can really drive people bonkers, including me. Well, I understand. There are some subtleties of endowments. Again, it's not to say that you're not 100 % correct, but I at least want to say to your listeners so they understand what they're complaining about. First and foremost, there are supposedly rules where the universities are not supposed to be competing with the private sector. And they get around those. But if Cornell builds housing as making money off the housing in town, that kind of breaks the rule, right?

1:34:17but they build dorms and things like that. So you're right about that. The endowments are a funny game. First and foremost, I looked this up last week. Approximately 50 % of all endowments spin off. So it spins off at revenue and Harvard's has been collecting since 1656. 50 % of the money spun off goes to financial aid. which means making college more affordable, admittedly not very affordable for a lot of people, but making it more affordable. So half of the money being spun off is going right back to education of the students. Another 20 % support is for academic programs, which means paying for things that would have have to be paid for or we'd have to do without.

1:35:10And I would argue we got bloated. So there's things we should have done without. If you looked at the dining program now compared to what they have now. It's really unbelievable. I'm not against good food. I'm against DEI administrators and administrators in general. College should be focused on the professors. I agree with that. And that's where we should have gotten the fastball pass. So do any of these schools have more tenured professors than they do administrators? I don't think so. The administrative bloat is a combination of all the problems that drive you nuts and the fact that the interactions between the university and the feds and the states has gotten more complicated.

1:35:49So, for example, you need way more bean counters. And grant writers and... Well, no, grant writers are me. They're us. The grants are being written by the faculty. And again, the DEI, Michigan's DEI payroll was 93 million last time I read about it. That's a lot of money, right? Right. But but but but just when you get a federal grant, there's so many things you have to do. You see, they ran it out of a shoebox. Here's your check. Spend it wisely. You know, that's what it's no longer like that. Now it reached the absurd point where you're supposed to make statements about how you're going to save the whales and donate organs to Guatemalan orphans and things like that.

1:36:31And I think Trump's going to successfully get a lot of that crap out of there. He would save Cornell a fortune if he could get rid of all of the I. Now, I do think the original idea of affirmative action makes sense. It basically said, go find people who are being missed. Look into the dusty corners where you normally don't look and see if you find talent, right? There's a famous chemist named Henry Gilman. I thought the SAT was designed to do that. No, it turns out the SAT has problems now. And the reason it has problems is because when Kaplan got a hold of it, they for profit coached kids on how to do well.

1:37:16And then they made it such that the SAT could be taking three times and you get to use only the one you like. All of a sudden, the cost of maximizing your score on the SAT became prohibitive. And so it's a legitimate argument that someone coming out of the hood cannot take the Kaplan course and take the SAT three times. But you shouldn't get rid of it. You should just be aware of what it's telling you. Would it be possible to design a corruption-free screen for intelligence and initiative? Shut up, racist. No, but I mean, no. So the idea was that the SAT was supposed to democratize education. We're just going to locate it.

1:38:02And discover kids who've got double 800s who you wouldn't have spotted. Exactly. Right. And actually have a child who got an 800, couldn't get into college. So clearly it's like the system has gotten so corrupt. But the idea in Kaplan, you said corrupted it as well. Well, it kind of corrupted the SAT. Right. That's what I'm saying. Now, the GRE, which is the next level, is nowhere near as corrupted because by then the students don't give a damn. They don't take the GRE. So it's more legit. But is there – I mean, but the idea of a colorblind, classblind, pure meritocracy test is – I mean, why give up on that?

1:38:45Here's what I think we should do. I was a director of graduate studies, which involved admission into our grad program for seven years, record. The only guy who held the four administrative positions in the chemistry department itself. That's pretty good for being the chemistry douchebag. And you learn about things. And I read undergraduate admissions on purpose for a number of years. and you read Regents, so I might read Manhattan, for example, and you learn about who's applying and stuff like that. And what I think you want to look for is a system where you see evidence that a kid overcame something.

1:39:27And it's not about color, although you could say non-statistically it's about color, right? But a kid from the Ozarks, you know, J.D. Vance, who I find his origin story a little suspicious, I must admit. but so we had a kid who applied and everything was sunshines and Skittles rainbows in his application and one of his letter writers said his mother died here his father died here he was raised by his neighbors you know and I'm going and he didn't mention it I hope you let him in oh my god yes you give me in graduate admissions I see some kid from Stanford with a I see some kid from Stanford with 3.0 I didn't take him because a 3.0 is a kid who accepted at a 3.0.

1:40:12You show me, I'll take a 4.0 from St. Mary's College of the Divinity. Because that kid said, here's the, they said, here's the highest you can get to. That kid got there, right? MIT kids with lousy GPAs are lousy grad students, even though they're smarter than hell, but they're cocky. Now, it turns out you show me a kid from Stanford with a 3.0 who played football. I take the kid in a heartbeat. You show me a kid from Stanford who is a 3.0, who is a brilliant violinist. I'll take that kid. Here's my son. My son applies to Cornell for reasons you know he was going to get in. But his resume, I had one son who was underachiever as a kid who's now phenomenal.

1:41:02And the one who was a superachiever. What's superachieving? And we didn't push him because it was a pain in the ass. We were driving all the time. All-state orchestra first violin. Gold medalist in the eight-state regional gymnastics championship. Fifth in the nation equestrian. Played lacrosse. Got a resume better than that. So here's what happened. My older son, who could care less about school, Just nothing. His teacher was like, sweet kid, no attention. At one point I said to a teacher, I said, the only kids he's beating are crack babies. And she kind of blew a snot bubble and said, yeah. He's now phenomenally successful.

1:41:49He's a super dad. I'm so proud of the level of dadness that he is. He's the director of event management at the Council on Foreign Relations. After being the most underwhelming kid in high school, he grew up. He climbed Mount Stupid a little bit late. Fortunately, he was in a family that could help him get over it when the time came. The thing that we get credit for is not breaking him. It's not forcing him into a mold that didn't fit. You know who he is? You know the book Ferdinand and the Bull? Of course. Child Story? Yeah, yeah. That book wasn't for kids. That was for the parents. That was telling the parents, your kid is Ferdinand maybe.

1:42:33my other one was Mike Mulligan's steam shovel yeah right faster the more people watched the faster he went ironically the overachiever got to Cornell and got lost the underachiever got just grew nicely in college now the younger one is now a professional after trying cubicle farming and all that crap that you get by being a business major at Cornell Hotel School He's a professional violinist in Boston. Better outcome. Better outcome. Bank of Dad's important because violinists in Boston don't make a lot of money. But I'm happy to support it because it's his soul. You know why he's a professional?

1:43:14You want neurobiology? My wife was flat on her back when she was pregnant. She put headphones against her stomach and played classical music when he was in the womb. I know prenatal development's important. And by the time he was three years old, his friends are singing B-I-N-G-O, and he's listening to orchestra pieces. And he'd say, I like this part right here. And you'd hear the second violins come in there, and you'd go, right there, I like that. And I'm going, holy shit, this kid's got an ear. He has an ear. Like he developed an ear in the womb. So don't do that to your womb. You'll have a musician in your family if you do that.

1:43:51So I want to ask you here, since you mentioned the struggle, you know, the triumph, but also the struggle to pay for it because the economy doesn't support young people very well. Since you did call the financial collapse of 2008, it sounds like. In 2002. In 2002. So you couldn't get rich shorting or anything. I shorted twice. Shorting's for fools and pros. and the Venn diagram of those two is almost that. That's exactly right. I know both. Yes. Where are we now? We're in a catastrophic situation. Catastrophe seems strong. Yeah. Well, I think you can make arguments the economy has a lot of problems.

1:44:38And there's a paradoxical problem with the economy. And that is you can go up to any 7-Eleven and they can't hire. There's help wanted ads. So it looks like an economy burning hot. But if you look at the high end, there's layoffs going everywhere. So there's foreshadowing of real trouble coming. So college graduates, even Ivy League graduates, humanities graduates, not engineers or chemists, but the business guy or whatever, they're having trouble getting jobs. The kind that they're trained for, certainly. Yeah, but there's just, I mean, I know a bunch of them, but you see it in the numbers. educated 22-year-olds are having trouble getting jobs, but 7-Eleven can't hire.

1:45:20Right. So what is that? Well, so this is a normal sort of, it's a distorted version of, I think, a recession coming or in. Now, where it gets complicated is if you don't believe the inflation numbers, which I don't. And you've got Chapwood Index and ShadowStats that give inflation numbers that are probably on average 6 % or 7 % higher than the official numbers. The official numbers are corrupted. And I don't want to go into it because it's technical, but... But the CPI is stupid. The CPI is crap, right? Yeah, I agree with that. Now, here's the problem. If the economy's been growing 2.5 % and the inflation numbers are underestimated by 4, it means we've been in a recession the whole way.

1:46:00Yeah, moving backwards. We're moving backwards. And you say, well, that can't happen. The recession's last, you know, two quarters or whatever. And I go, no, the British Empire was in a recession for a century, right? They just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. And so, no, you can be in a slow decline. But that's not the catastrophe. Recession means decline. Yeah. Actually, I think it's a stupid word because you play golf? No. Well, if you play golf and you go down into the sand trap, according to the definition of a recession, once you start climbing out, you're out. You ask a golfer if he's out of the sand trap because he's on the upslope of the trap.

1:46:41He's not. No. So the fact that your economy is now growing again, if it's coming out of a hole, as far as I'm concerned, you're not out until you've gotten past that previous period. So you're at par. Yeah, so you're at par, right. Now, that's not the catastrophe because they happen all the time. And we've been able to either cover them or fake them or prevent them through very bad monetary policy. And what's bad? And pumping the stock market is just stupid. But private equity buys, has bought up 80 % of the hospitals, the healthcare. And what they do is they go in and they buy some organization.

1:47:28They strip of its assets. They load it with debt. They pay themselves huge fees and bonuses. and then they sell the shell of a company, which is now effectively worthless, into the marketplace, like to pension funds, who are not smart enough to recognize that they just bought a piece of crap. And according to Gretchen Morgensen, a 47 % bankruptcy rate. Now - Post-sale. Post-sale. Now, as long as it's profitable to buy viable companies, destroy them, sell the shell and make money, money's too loose. Precious capital. If capital is of real value, it's a moat. So a good businessman can get capital, a bad businessman can't.

1:48:23The fact that BlackRock could buy single-family dwellings, which is a terrible business. You really can't make money unless you can, unless there's a housing boom and you leverage up to hell. The fact that they could get it for at an interest rate of 0.15 % is a highly flawed system. And that's where the inventory went after 07 to 09. They got bought up by these guys who could lever up and then charge rents to people. So they basically scoop up the housing market. With free money. With free money. Kind of free money. Unlike, you know, credit cards, which are 25%, right? And not just free. I mean, once you factor in inflation.

1:49:10It's a gift. Yeah, it's profitable money. Literally, just taking the loan is profitable. Yes. You don't have to do anything with it. Yes, yes. Right, yeah. So here's what happened. Somehow the market has ceased to respond. And the reason the market's important is because of the wealth effect. And that is that if you own equities, you own a house, and they're soaring in price, your spending habits change. I'm having a great year, for example. So when the bank of dad has to provide some liquidity to the children, I feel okay about it, right? the problem is is that it's a false wealth it's not real wealth it's a false wealth so what happened well I'm getting tired of seeing these I see four-year plots of the equity market and they make various comparisons I go don't go back four years don't go back 40 years go back 120 years so I follow about 25 metrics of valuation valuation is inherently a price of the market relative to something it ought to track, whether it's the earnings, the revenues, the book value, a thing called Tobin's Q, the GDP, which is a fictional number, as I've heard you recently say.

1:50:36But I follow about 25 of them. So you can kind of track whether the markets have gotten expensive relative to the thing it ought to track. Now, around 1981, the markets were at the cheapest valuation arguably in history. Inflation was scaring everyone, which is why they were cheap. It turns out that the boomers were just hitting the workforce. So demographics was a huge tailwind starting around then. And most economists agree demographics is huge. Now, I'm disingenuous in that I quote economists selectively in the next sentence, I'll probably say something horrible about them. And so I'm obviously cherry picking my data, but economists like demographics.

1:51:25So the boomers hit the workplace. So it was almost guaranteed. I think Reagan was not important. I think he did some very important things, but I think whoever got to be president was going to be at the beginning of a boom. It turns out that China was coming out of the dark ages. they started selling labor at slave wages. They were so desperate for capital when they sent their leader, don't make me pronounce his name, to the United Nations when he first started opening up. Was it Deng Xiaoping? Yes. And they had to scrounge to get the money to send him. I mean, they really didn't have any foreign capital.

1:52:07And so I remember when China said, we're going to let our workers keep some of their profits. And it's like, whoa. Russia had, the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, but they were in trouble. So they were obviously cranking a resource base as hard as they could. And we had our guys in there helping them and stuff like that. And interest rates were at all time highs. And if you read a 1999 article by Buffett, who I think is a hoser, I think he's much more of a stock job much more of a conniver than he is. He loves to be the mafia don walk around in a bathrobe saying, I'm harmless. He is not harmless.

1:52:49When we're in a bottom, he breaks all sorts of laws. They do all sorts of insider crap to bail the system out. But he pretends to just like Dairy Queen and Coca-Cola, whatever. He wrote an article in 99 that said, you want to understand secular, big, long, bull versus bear markets. It's all interest rates. He said, it's not GDP. He said, from 67 to 81, everything sucked. It treaded water, not accounting for inflation, and the markets dropped 75 % accounting for inflation. So it was a horrible period. He said the GDP grew faster during that period than from 81 to 99. But interest rates from 67 to 81 went up monotonically.

1:53:30From 81 to 99, they went down. So we started in 81 with interest rates in the high 18s. And over the next 40 years, they dropped to zero. That is absolutely the story. So when interest rates are dropping, risk assets go up because they're competing against it as they get cheaper. So bottom line is that we just enjoyed 40-year recency bias. Can you just explain that principle right there? You said as interest rates drop, risk assets go up. Or are you going to buy shares of a stock that, by the way, has treated you like crap over the previous 14 years or a bond that pays you 17 percent? Right. Right?

1:54:12So the bonds become less, the fixed income become less and less attractive steadily for 40 years. Now, take the Case-Shiller PE, which is just one of the metrics, but I happen to like it. It's a kind of an averaged earnings, price earnings ratio. It also doesn't allow you to cheat because it doesn't use the immediate. And forward PEs are stupid, but K-Shiller averages, so I like it. If you take the K-Shiller from 1880 to 1990, it just channels. It's a valuation metric, and it just goes up and down and up and down, and that's what it should do. It responds to things, but it stays in a channel. It's flat.

1:54:50Valuation metrics shouldn't trend. they should trend for a while, but then they should regress to the mean, unless you can, someone can give me an argument why they should trend. And I don't think there is one, and I've tried to find one. And then in 1990, they just kind of started to take off. And the Case-Shiller, so the Case-Shiller PE, the Case-Shiller PE averaged around 12, 13 % for 110 years. Then around 1990, oddly 1994 in every metric is when things left. I think it was because of a bond problem or something. I haven't been able to quite figure out why. But the valuations went up. Now, here's the problem with valuations going up.

1:55:31And now they're astronomical. So the KCOPE averaged 13, which meant it was priced to return about 8 % a year, right? If you think of it as a gas station and you're paying 13 to 1 earnings, you're getting about 8%. And it keeps pumping gas every year, you get about 13%.

1:55:54it is now 38 it's way above where it should be it's a factor of 3 200 % now if you assume it's never going to regress to the mean now you're accepting crudely speaking a 2.5 % return not an 8 now if you're okay with 2.5 % that's fine but by the way most pensioners most boomers are not planning on 2.5%. No, they're not. Right. Now, if it regresses to the mean, it's a 70 % correction, assuming, if it's fast, assuming nothing else changes, no damage to the economy, all the bad things that happen when you lose 70 % off the equity market, which is a questionable assumption. another way to think about it which i think is much clearer is if you say look we'll just grow our way i think i go up or down or up and down you don't worry about the path you say if we grow to an ampersand a year which i just questioned as being valid but let's assume it's valid if we grow to an ampersand a year to get back to historical average of 13 will take 45 years now here's the thing I made no assumptions about good news bad news I assume this can be like the 20th century two and a half percent a year it'll be 45 years from now I don't care what path you follow if we are at the average case shiller PE and the economy grew two and a half percent a year the equity markets will have returned capital gains zero trial.

1:57:34And it doesn't matter if we crash and spike. It doesn't matter if we get to a Dow 40 ,000, 50 ,000, 60 ,000. 45 years from now, if we're at the mean, we will have earned nothing. Now you say, well, that would never happen. You go, well, if you own the 06, the 1906 high, you were even after something like 40 years. I don't ask from if you own even after 40 years if you own the top people always say how long did it take to get back to the top that's a favorite question it took 22 years 15 years I like to ask the question not how long it took to get from the top back to even how long did it take to go from that top to the last time that that price was attained, adjusted for inflation.

1:58:35And those can go anywhere from 40 to 75 years. All you have to do is look at inflation adjusted S &P and draw a line from a top across the S &P. And you will find that most of them break even in the mid 80s, no matter what year they started. So you're just answering the question, what the hell is going on with land prices and asset prices? Everything. Everything's mispriced. But is it mispriced? I mean, if I've got excess money, you know, and I need to store it somewhere, and I'm listening to you, I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to buy something a little less volatile, a little more real. Like real estate.

1:59:17Exactly. Okay. The first time, and I know this drives you bananas, The first time home buyers, not too many decades ago, were on average about 30 years old. Yep. I just read, what's the fact? I don't know. 56 now. First time home buyers, 56. That's been a massive consequence. Do you want to buy into that market that somehow seems like it has to regress? Because you can't have people going 56 years without owning a house, right? You personally, I think it was in Turning Point USA, you went absolutely nonstop about how you can worry about Ukraine. But we've got young adults who can't raise families and houses.

2:00:08Yeah, and it creates a very scary political environment where people don't own anything and therefore have nothing to lose and no future. Right. Well, here's an interesting ADHD moment. monogamy versus polygamy. And this will sound random, but it'll get you to the same story. No, it's a core question, actually. These are the building blocks of the West. Turns out polygamy, monogamy is viewed as favoring women. That turns out to be backwards. And it's a simple math. Imagine there's 100 people ranked one to 100. Number 100 is Mr. Big Cheese. And on the women's side, hottest chick on the planet. Right?

2:00:51Right. Monogamy says number one would marry number one, number two would marry number two in the perfect system. So think of it as just a very simple model. And that what you can't do is if you're at the bottom of the chain, marry up. Right. If you do, then someone else gets pushed down. Of course. Right? So it would be of the interest of the girl working 7-Eleven to be Jeff Bezos' second wife. Yeah, I think that happened. So, in fact, you can upgrade your game. And, you know, Elon, right? I mean, the guy's a reproduction machine, right? Women are signing off on it because it's better to be with a guy worth that kind of money than broke, right?

2:01:39And so it turns out that you say, well, then why did cultural evolution lead to monogamy? And the answer is, is because it minimizes violence. Right. It's for the men. Of course. So they don't fight. Well, yeah, because in a polygamous system, all the high status males scoop up all the women. Well, now in a situation where men can't provide the home for their families and stuff like that. And so we're going to fight. I've noticed. I've noticed that too. And so now here's the deal. Let's say I'm right and we're at a market top. And if I'm not, I think we're close. One of the things that my peers who were paranoid as hell about this, some very smart guys, they tend not to put numbers on it.

2:02:28I'm one of the few who puts numbers on it. There's a couple others who do, but they just say all the valuations are ridiculous. But no one wants to be on record that we're going to be. To say it's catastrophically overpriced, whatever correction you get, you say, see, I told you. I'm saying 200 % overpriced. Now, how do you get out of overvaluation? You can't inflate your way out. No. Because the numerator, the price, and the denominator, the thing is supposed to track, both are influenced by inflation. So as your price goes up because of inflation, your revenues go up because of inflation. You're still 200 % over historical average valuation.

2:03:11And so you can't inflate away in overvaluation. So what, I mean, is this just a gravity scenario where ultimately it has to revert to its actual value? Best model I have, and they never work because it's always one of these, something will be creatively different. But the best model is in Nikkei. Japan hit a high in 89. It briefly got back to that 35 years later. It's actually below that, I think, if I remember correctly. Inflation adjusts for that, guaranteed. It's below it. Yes, that's right. I asked someone during a podcast, if you can do this spreadsheet for me, I'd love to get it. Someone did it.

2:03:49I said, what if you started buying the Nikkei at the top? Not own the Nikkei. If you own the Nikkei at the top, you're dead meat. You died broke. But what if you started buying? 22-year-old graduate of Tokyo University. You started putting yen into the Nikkei in 1989. How long, if you averaged in, did it take you to break even? It's around two decades. Starting with zero in the Nikkei. So I was on a podcast with George Noble, a Twitter space, actually. He was Peter Lynch's right-hand man. And he said, well, you could, I said, I think the markets will be uninvestable. He said, oh, you could do this and this.

2:04:28And I said, the Nikkei. And he said, oh, you could short. I said, no, you couldn't. You can't short a market that takes 20 years to find a bottom. Right. It's a long time. You can short a market like in 07 to 09. Right, right, right. A volatile market. Yes. You can't, a market in inexorable decline can't be short. So if we're in a top, aren't tops supposed to be euphoric? Remember the dot com? Oh, yes. Very well. The world was changing. The nifty 50, you know. Webvan and eToys and pets.com. You know, sustainable prosperity. We are supposed to be true believers that the world is wonderful. Do you sense much of the population thinks the world's wonderful?

2:05:08I don't. I don't sense that. And all around us are signs of... What's it going to look like when 70 % gets clipped off this market? So I'm immediately going to prepper survival mode. Where are the enduring safe stores of value? I don't. You can't answer that. I bought gold at around 270 an ounce. 270? 270. Hope you bought a lot of it. I did. But it's worth a lot more now. You think? Yeah. What spot price today, do you know? Ballpark$3 ,300. Yeah. I bought silver. I bought gold below$270. I'll tell you why. Because my first purchases were actually in a closed-end mutual fund that was trading 27 % below net asset valuation.

2:05:55Because people say, oh, it was easy to buy back then. It was cheap. I said, it was cheap because five of us wanted it. Right. Well, of course. Right? And by the way, the top, some Tuesday afternoon at 2.03 p.m., we will hit a top that will be decades later to be returned to potentially. The top is the point of maximum optimism, which paradoxically is the moment in time where your justification for optimism is zero. The bottom is the same thing in reverse. Of course. So we're not happy now. So you're saying the herd's not always right? Is that what you're saying? I'm told. So let's hold on. Let's just go back to gold for a second.

2:06:37So you buy. I bought gold net at around 210. Come on. Well, I bought it 28 % below nav when it was 270. Physical delivery? No, that was not physical. But then I started buying. Here's what I did. I bought gold from the local coin dealer. Yeah. And I'd say, when you get ounces, I'll pay cash. And he sold it to me at spot. And he'd call and say, I got three ounces in. I'd go to the bank. I'd get out$900, right? And I'd buy the gold from him, cash. I'd buy silver from him, cash. I could buy silver eagles at Spot. You go on eBay, holy shit, those things are like 10 bucks above Spot. And it was for ballpark$4 an ounce.

2:07:23And then I remember it was at$4.57, and I was buying from him. And he said, don't you think this is the top? He knew I was going to buy it. He said, don't you think there's a top? $457 an ounce for gold. There's like, oh, three or something. I don't know. And I said, how many people are buying gold from you? He said, oh, about four. And I said, and the other three are my friends, aren't they? He said, yeah. And I said, does that sound like a mania to you?

2:07:51And so, here's the thing I've been on. I'm a big fan of energy, but I think when the selling starts, everything sells. You'll be selling your children. You'll be selling, right? Everything sells. So I think the idea of trying to get into any risk assets is so dangerous. I'll take 4 % on a treasury, two-year treasury. Some people think, you know, I'll lock it up for two years. Oh, that'll save me. I won't dip by after six months. So at what price would you buy gold again? Well, I've got so much I don't need anymore. If I didn't own any, I'd buy it now. But the Bitcoin guys would say buy Bitcoin at$117 ,000.

2:08:28I turned it down at$10 ,000. I wish I'd bought it. I would have sold it at 50 and spent the proceeds on therapy. Why on therapy? Because I would have sold it at 50. Right. Good point. And I know I would have. I know I would have. You don't believe in crypto? I don't think so. The crypto community, I am their number one target. They say you are a hodler. And I won't buy it. The reason is because I believe that several layers. One is that I believe that the authorities are not going to let crypto take over. Of course not. And by the way, that means that - They're going to lose total control over society?

2:09:08That's right. Yeah, I don't think so. You think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Keiser and Michael Saylor? I don't think so. You don't? You don't think that's likely - Here's what I think it actually is. You know, the first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys. Yeah. That means I think if I were smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency, which is an authoritarian nightmare, I would do it the way they did. I'd release the crypto. I'd have guys pumping it. I'd have guys supporting it. I'd let them debug the networks and the kinks and acclimate people to it.

2:09:44And then I'd say, okay, it was fun. We'll take it from here.

2:09:50And in the process, of course, you acclimate people to this new kind of commerce. Yeah, exactly. No, and I get rid of the ATMs and I would make airport convenience stores credit card only. And I would do all that stuff to change people's habits. Cash is liberty. Of course. Oh, I couldn't agree more. So you just have too much gold. You just don't want any more gold. I just, no, no. What about real estate right now? I'm long. I own a nice house. I'm long real estate by owning that house. I wouldn't buy real estate as a speculation. If you put a gun to my head, I'd say maybe farmland. But that's been getting scooped up.

2:10:29That's a pretty trite narrative now. Big time. Well, I follow that because I'm interested. And I mean, it's turning for just crazy numbers in anchor. And that - Well, that's a problem. That's what I'm saying. So here's what I watched for years and then jumped in. And it's a problem. The modern market, I bought gold steadily from 99 through about 03. And then I bought some more when it was around 1200 in the teens. I said, okay, it's kind of flattened out. I'm going to get some more. So I bought it around 1200 hours in maybe 2016 or something. But the modern markets don't wait. If you get a good idea in social media, it will close up that gap so fast you won't know what hit you.

2:11:15So I'm bullish on energy long-term, energy equities and stuff, but I think they're going to sell before they become a good buy. And so I just can't commit a lot of money to the energy, even though I think I have some mutual funds on uranium-based investments, which I think we got to go to. And now it looks like we are. I actually think AI is not demanding nuclear energy. I think AI is being used as a Trojan horse to bring in nuclear energy, which I support. I think they're using the buzz of AI to say now let's get the nukes going people say yeah nukes we need it for the AI we've needed nukes it was the obvious next thing to go to platinum for years I watched platinum owned so little platinum that if it went to zero I wouldn't even notice I mean trivial trivial amount and I've been watching it's been flat I mean flat as in like a flat line not moving away from$900 an ounce by a few dollars flat for 10 years after dropping.

2:12:20And I go, what's the platinum story? Well, the platinum story is I don't trade. I don't trade at all. If I buy it, I'm buying it saying, look, I'm hanging on to it. If it goes down, I don't trade. The platinum story is I don't believe in the EV. I don't think it's a good technology. I think it'll be here, but I don't think it's going to take over the world. I think the hybrids are going to take over the world. Well, they make sense. They make inherent sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're more efficient. They use more platinum than internal combustion engines because their catalytic converters burn colder.

2:12:53So they need more platinum. Now, here's where it gets real interesting. The platinum miners are in Russia and South Africa.

2:13:05Russia will therefore have control. South Africa could become a failed state so fast you don't know what it you, right? More to the point, and again, trying to get real facts on this stuff, but the above-ground platinum supply, the available platinum supply is something like$3 billion, which is something a medium-sized hedge fund could buy at current prices. It's been in deficit production for at least four years. What does deficit production mean? Means that we're consuming more per year than the miners are producing. Based on the rate of deficit production, that the above ground supply will be gone within about a year.

2:13:48So there's no more platinum. Arguably. We could go to potentially palladium, but, you know, whatever. Platinum has not gone through a mean phase. So a little bit of trade in me says that mean phase could get spectacular. Platinum could go to 20 ,000. Because it has industrial uses. Right. You know, it seems kind of natural. So I decided I was, so I reached out to some technical analysts who draw the squiggles on the curves. And I make, I'm sarcastically occasionally commenting about technical analysis, but I can't do it or don't believe in it or whatever. But I asked a few, I said, look at this plot.

2:14:23Where would you start getting excited? Because it's been flat for 10 years. I don't need to put money in and have it sit there for 10 years more. And a few gave me opinions about what price. I kind of formulated an opinion where I had to start and then hit it. Now, instead of buying it, you know, slowly, I said in the modern era, you got to move quick. So I started hitting the buy button and I'm still not. I face a boomer dilemma. The boomer dilemma is the good news is my net worth is good enough. If I don't screw up, I'm fine. I mean, I could retire today, not earn another penny. Fine. I want to leave money to my kids.

2:15:03I will be able to. The paradox is that to commit to an asset requires committing a percentage that's not stupid. If you commit 0.01 % of your assets to it, it's not going to make a difference no matter what happens. So if you say, well, 5%. When I look at the quantity of money I have to spend to commit 5%, it seems huge. but it's only 5%. And so as a consequence, I go, look, if it went to zero tomorrow, I'd have a bad day. I'd lose 5 % of my assets, but it would be too much money. So I'm fighting this bias about how many dollars it takes to get to a... I get it. So let me ask you just a wrap-up question, which is given your description of where we are, and you haven't even mentioned what could be a debt crisis when people stop buying our debt or slow down.

2:16:07But there are all kinds of things to worry about that seem imminent. How does the average person respond? They don't have any money anyways. Fair. I mean, the average person has no money. So how does the five percentile boomer respond? Yeah. Well, years ago, I did an analysis on the five percentile boomer. This is how bad it is. This is years ago, actually. And it actually got vetted by Stephen Roach, who's executive director of Morgan Stanley. He looked at my numbers and said, actually, you've overestimated something. You should be more conservative. I invented five percentile guy. At that time, he was worth$1.1 million.

2:16:49He was earning$156 ,000 a year. You also know he's not 22 years old. He's probably a boomer. because it takes a while to get to 5 percentile. At a reasonable rate of withdrawal from a retirement account, Mr. 5 percentile guy who has to be living the American dream could take about$48 ,000 out. Annually? Annually. Without risking going broke. And you know what? They don't know how to live on$48 ,000. No. And they might have other assets. This is a complicated analysis. But that's a scary number. For a modern life, that's a... Yeah, well, but the other thing is, if he knew how to live on$48 ,000, he'd have more than 1.1 million.

2:17:37Good point. And so we've got a whole generation that has got expectations that are just off the chart distorted. And it's not because of a five-year or a 10-year recency bias. It's a 40-year recency bias. It's 1981. Let me finish that story. From 1981, the valuation, which should not trend, compounded annually 4 % a year. What happens over the next 40 years when it compounds negative 4 % a year to get to cheap again? Now you say, well, that'll never happen. I go, of course it'll happen. Show me an asset class that got overpriced. It didn't become cheap again. Well, if you believe in markets, that's just by definition going to happen.

2:18:25And if there's a way to fake it so it doesn't happen, then it means you're just deluding as to what actually happened. You're not getting a reality. Right, right. And so the bottom line is that the boomer demographic almost by definition was going to generate a bubble, a big mother bubble because of the demographics. Now, I was telling you about how I was reading my old write-ups from like 13, 14, 15. I make a compelling case that the markets were crazy. How do I do it? I use numbers, I use stats, and I use quotes from the most famous money guys in the world. You know, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, you name it.

2:19:03These are not lightweights. Saying these markets are insanely overvalued in 2015. What has happened since then? Straight up. Oh, for sure. Example. Apple, tenfold gain and a growth in revenues of 50%.

2:19:2895 % correction brings that back down. Microsoft, 150 % gain in revenues. Tenfold gain. Doesn't make mathematical sense. Let's go to NVIDIA. There is the winner. $4 trillion. of market cap being run by a guy who has a very sketchy past. 25-fold gain in revenues. You go, now we're talking 250-fold gain in market cap. Yeah, so that's the problem right there. 90 % correction takes you back to 2015. Do you remember 2015 being depressed? I don't. Stan Druckenmiller didn't think so. Howard Marks didn't think so. All these guys were considered legends, thought the markets were insanely overpriced in 15.

2:20:20And it's been nothing but up. And that will end. I don't know when. And you think that all asset classes are tied to that? I can't say all because that means 100%. But if I found something that I thought was dirt cheap, I'm glad I own the gold from as cheap as I did because when it goes down, I go, I'm still up 15 fold or something, right? So it makes it easier. Buying gold now from scratch would be harder. It would be that, you know, the number of dollars to get the percent position, that sort of thing.

2:21:04and I think the debt problem is global. If you actually look at the metrics for the growth in the global debt relative to global GDP, the entire world has become priced much more than 10 years ago relative to what the world produces. So what's a global debt crisis? That's the question. You say, well, you got lenders and borrowers. It's a zero sum game. No, it's not. I know. A global debt crisis is when the entire world thinks they're going to get shit that the world can't produce. And the way you think of how to create one, artificial, Gedanken experiment. Let's say the leaders of the world got together and said, look, let's just solve this problem.

2:21:43Let's guarantee healthcare to all our citizens. Let's guarantee their pension, all our citizens. Problem solved. They go, well, but you didn't in any way, shape or form increase the ability to produce wealth. So you now have obligations for which you haven't a clue. How are you going to pay for them? Who's going to do it? Are we going to have the Chinese delivering Chinese food to our doors still? I don't think so. We're going to be delivering food to the Chinese. So everything will regress. Four-year recency bias says it won't. It will. On that dark note, I'm just picturing myself showing up at a doorstep in Beijing with some Kung Pao chicken.

2:22:27Hoping for a tip. Hoping for a tip. I can see you now. You turn the scanner around and shove the 25 % tip in the guy's face. Professor, thank you. I hope this doesn't get you fired. I hope you'll come back. Anytime. You call. I'm in the car. Thank you.

2:22:47We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it. Good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter. Telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.